These are notes I started while listening to Harvard anthropologist Richard Wrangham talks with host Jacki Lyden about his new book, Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human on NPR http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=104755975.

In the talk Wrangham mentioned, 800,000 years ago is the first time period for which archeaologists have hard evidence of our using fire. Wrangham thinks we may have been using fire for cooking as far as 2 million years ago when our jaw and stomach size shrank. It was an evolutionary advantage for us to be able to also eat cooked food, partly because of time saved in gaining nutrients. Similarly some humans developed a mutant gene in order to be able to digest dairy as an adult.

When people ask what did our ancestors eat, I say it depends on where they lived and what they were able to get their hands on. And by the way plants don’t run or swim away from you. Today humans still of course, eat what they can find, which I understand is not always vegetables for many inner big city dwellers. Those among us who have access to fresh veggies can be extremely grateful for that. I am very grateful to all the people who grow and pick and deliver and sell these.

Wrangham notes that each day for chimpanzees involves an average of 6 hours of chewing. We can see how the chimps could easily be obtaining less nutrients than someone taking in both cooked and raw greens. If it takes you half an hour to thoroughly chew 5 ounces of raw spinach you could see by the end of that same half-hour a human could have easily eaten a couple pounds of steamed spinach. For example, I just steamed 5 ounces of spinach and topped it with marinated portabello mushrooms. The 5 ounces of leaves were gently steamed into a few tiny bites. I turned the heat off after about one minute. I think it took less than 5 minutes to eat this little bowl of spinach. A huge bowl of salad takes a much longer time to eat. While it is fun to eat a big salad because you get lots of bites and enjoy the view of a huge bowl of garden, I can see how in less time anyone could consume exponentially more greens by including steamed greens, greens in soups, smoothies and juices.
Obviously this is a huge advantage over animals with fewer options.

Someone recently asked me what is the advantage of juicing carrots, why not just eat them? Of course it is great to eat them, still you can drink 5 carrots in a minute. It is an option to increase the volume of nutrients. Ani Phyo once said she pours out the carrot juice and uses the fiber produced from the juicing. She has a great new desert recipe out by the way and you can always find her great recipe videos for free online – thanks Ani!

It is important to know some nutrients may not be digested if eaten sans processing of any kind. This is sometimes due to the work of chewing raw food thoroughly (humans lack the enzymes to break down the cell walls, the nutrients literally have to be chewed out). Still you lose some nutrients by cooking depending on the length of cook time, degree of heat, moisture in the heat, and the food being heated. More moisture, less cook time, lower heat, and containing the cooked fluids in a soup all reduce loss of nutrients. Apparently we are still discovering phytonutrients and therefore we are still discovering how particular nutrients get affected by varying degrees/methods of heating.

For me, the interest is about the effects of eating over half of my calories from raw veggies and fruits and as much as possible the rest from steamed veggies. For example think of having a goal of eating a pound of dark green leafy veggies a day.

A rawfood focus helps us discover new ways to increase the amount of raw greens in the diet (exquisitely delicious salads, marinades, smoothies, pates, cold soups, dressings, desserts, etc.). Using fruits as sweeteners and nuts and seeds as fats raw recipes transform your palate away from the American diet with ease. It really is true that your tastes change and you start to crave these foods.

What I want to say is go for the greens, however that works for you, if it means steamed or in a warm soup than go for it. If you can also drink a green smoothie – perfect! The point is developing a taste and habit of eating greens will transform your palate and feed your body which is craving these nutrients.

Hoorah! At last my long hoped for green smoothie breakthrough. For years now I have been in search for the very best tasting, best for you, easiest to make smoothie in the world. After lots of experimentation I narrowed it down to kale and pineapple. Problem: one of my key ingredients was intermittently failing. When I pick a fresh pineapple, the first thing I look for is the typical evidence of whitish mold on the bottom (yes, I am not one of the lucky ones with fresh fresh pineapple available, ie Hawaiians, etc.). Sometimes there just is no juicy sweet pineapple available and alas! I have moved to pineapple in a can! It is consistently sweet and comes with pineapple juice all of which gets dumped into the blender. One of the other very nice things: I don’t have to eat the pineapples within a few days, for fear of they’re going bad.
So here are the delicious ingredients to toss into your high-speed blender (I prefer k-tech’s blender, b/c it’s height fits under the cabinets):
20 oz. pineapple
1-2 tbl. flax seed
1 banana (optional)
1 bunch of lacinato kale, de-stemmed (or other kale, I find lacinato stores the longest)
water as needed to get it to whirl and come out as thick or watery as you like

It is Delicious!! Enjoy! This is the first green smoothie we’ve made that our 3 and a half year old will drink (that was part of my goal : )).

“Heart disease is the leading cause of death in the United States and is a major cause of disability. The most common heart disease in the United States is coronary heart disease, which often appears as a heart attack. In 2009, an estimated 785,000 Americans will have a new coronary attack, and about 470,000 will have a recurrent attack. About every 25 seconds, an American will have a coronary event, and about one every minute will die from one. [1] “(CDC, Feb. 2009, http://www.cdc.gov/features/heartmonth/)

“The general public must learn how to challenge heart disease as the nation’s number one killer” (Fuhrman, p.112, Fasting and Eating for Health).

How is it possible that it is common to ignore and choose not to even learn about, our great nation’s number one killer, when we live in a country with such a strong will to stop enemies. After 911 many strong people were willing to risk their lives, leave their families and travel to another country. It can’t be that the idea of changing ones diet and/or starting exercising can seem even scarier. Maybe we think we have the cure. Unfortunately, it is not so simple to have a pill or an operation to cure heart disease.

Pills and outcomes of heart surgeries do not keep the problem from continuing to get worst the way changing your diet is proven to do. Also the surgery involves many risks. Being put to sleep in an operating room, having one’s sternum split and chest pried apart, while a heart-lung machine pumps your blood is a procedure that can and has ended in death or decline in mental ability. “…in-hospital death rate for bypass surgery is 4.45 percent for women and 3.33 percent for men.(11) Bypass surgery is also associated with a 13 percent rate of post-operative compilcations, including heart attacks, strokes, bleeding, kidney failure, and infections. In almost every heart bypass patient, some brain injury occurs from the time spent on the heart-lung machine.(12) It is believed that 15 to 44 percent of those who survive such surgery suffer permanent brain damage, detectable as minor degrees of intellectual impairment, memory loss, sleep disturbance, and personality change.(13,14,15)” (Fuhrman, p.104, Fasting and Eating for Health)

Why is it so difficult for many of us to eat vegetables? Well it is obvious they are not addictive in the way sugar is and the process of losing this addiction can be incredibly uncomfortable, although that feeling is temporary. In the face of so much junk food, a plant-based diet requires a conscious development of tastes. It can be very hard even to slowly develop this change after so many years of habits. In my opinion, slight changes to your diet is a great way to start. For example, plan to eat one large salad a day. Also in my opinion, it is best to start by focusing on adding great foods (especially greens) rather than demonizing any foods. See what you are doing that is ultimately working best for you or has worked best for you and plan ways to do more of that; find books/people/ideas/journal articles/etc. that inspire.

It is easy to demonize “that” industry. It is much more difficult to see clearly what happened. This was a culmination of U.S. policy (for example, subsidizing farmers to grow crops that result in corn syrup), scientific discoveries (for example, synthetic nitrate fertilizer), business opportunities (resulting from the mass production of cheap calories), and the vulnerability of the human condition. This is not about evil being evil or some mysterious force. This is about policy decisions that of course did not predict our current status. It is about people wanting to earn a buck and people just reacting to their natural urge to eat. Of course it is a difficult pickle for the country to get out of and one of the main problems is the cheap availability of the addictive synthetic foods.

I was watching a documentary on potato chip production. I realized many of the same industrial equipment inventions can be applied to producing healthier foods en masse. Apparently it takes four pounds of potatoes to make one pound of potato chips. The documentary didn’t specify if the weight of the oil and salt is included in said pound of potato chips. The rest of the potato goes largely to cattle feed. (An aside: It was interesting to me how they proudly noted this instead of saying, my god, can you believe that? That 3 pounds of “waste” potato (plus multiple other resources) will help put an ounce of dead cow on a heart attack’s plate, instead of feeding a family 3 pounds of mashed potatoes.)

One of the interesting processing inventions was using a sort of log ride for the potatoes to move from one process to another. This saves energy and baths the potatoes at the same time. Afterward another clever machine peels them in bulk (using centrifical force to push them to a blade). The potatoes also had starch removed from them and this went to the boxing industry. The starch is used as a part of the glue that holds boxes together. They also had a system where a camera detected which potato chip was brown and this set off a system of air jets to blow the chip off the belt. It is really interesting to watch these synthetic food manufacturing shows on Modern Marvels. However unbiased these shows may try to be, they lean towards promotional and still end up making the “food” seem repulsive to me.

The talk I am citing here was very interesting and the first speaker bases some of his information from the book Fast Food Nation.
http://forum.wgbh.org/lecture/fast-foodfat-nation-americas-growing-obesity-epidemic
Alan Meyers, pediatrician, Boston Medical Center
Location:
Cambridge Forum
April 11, 2007
Pediatrician Dr. Alan Meyers and a panel of experts discuss the link between the nation’s eating habits and obesity. What impact will obesity-related diseases have on the quality of life of the next generation? What stresses will our fast food lifestyle place on our health care system and health care costs?

I got a question about this topic recently. You are welcome to read the article for yourself it is open access via BioMed:
http://www.nutritionj.com/content/3/1/19

Here is the abstract for the article (titled: Nutrition and cancer: A review of the evidence for an anti-cancer diet):

“It has been estimated that 30–40 percent of all cancers can be prevented by lifestyle and dietary measures alone. Obesity, nutrient sparse foods such as concentrated sugars and refined flour products that contribute to impaired glucose metabolism (which leads to diabetes), low fiber intake, consumption of red meat, and imbalance of omega 3 and omega 6 fats all contribute to excess cancer risk. Intake of flax seed, especially its lignan fraction, and abundant portions of fruits and vegetables will lower cancer risk. Allium and cruciferous vegetables are especially beneficial, with broccoli sprouts being the densest source of sulforophane. Protective elements in a cancer prevention diet include selenium, folic acid, vitamin B-12, vitamin D, chlorophyll, and antioxidants such as the carotenoids (α-carotene, β-carotene, lycopene, lutein, cryptoxanthin). Ascorbic acid has limited benefits orally, but could be very beneficial intravenously. Supplementary use of oral digestive enzymes and probiotics also has merit as anticancer dietary measures. When a diet is compiled according to the guidelines here it is likely that there would be at least a 60–70 percent decrease in breast, colorectal, and prostate cancers, and even a 40–50 percent decrease in lung cancer, along with similar reductions in cancers at other sites. Such a diet would be conducive to preventing cancer and would favor recovery from cancer as well.”

The 238 citations for this article each have their own link to abstract in Pubmed.

BioMed has a huge list of medical journals that are open access. You could find many more articles pertaining to this topic via BioMed:
http://www.biomedcentral.com/

Best wishes and happy searching!!

Reference:
Nutrition and cancer: A review of the evidence for an anti-cancer diet
Michael S Donaldson
Nutrition Journal 2004, 3:19doi:10.1186/1475-2891-3-19

The electronic version of this article is the complete one and can be found online at: http://www.nutritionj.com/content/3/1/19

Received: 28 September 2004
Accepted: 20 October 2004
Published: 20 October 2004
© 2004 Donaldson; licensee BioMed Central Ltd.
This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

I wanted to quote from the American Dietetics Association’s 2003 statement on what they call functional foods (vegetables, fruits, nuts, seeds) with respect to biologically-active phytochemicals, however I need to first make sure I am not running into any copyright issues with quoting from an academic journal which is not open access. So instead here is a great quote from Eat for Health, “We overeat because we are unknowingly seeking nutrients. In addition, these [portion-control] diets reinforce the low-nutrient eating that we now know causes most medical problems in modern countries. They are founded on weak science and perpetuate nutritional myths. To become healthy, disease-proof, and permanently thin, you can’t escape the necessity of eating large amounts of nutrient-rich, healthy food” (Joel Fuhrman, 2008, p.86).

Another really interesting (and new for me) concept he mentions is that eating frequently apparently causes problems. The body cleans out the cells of gunk in between meals so when you snack all day it is just not enough time for your body to empty out. So that, ” in scientific studies, reduced meal frequency increases the lifespan of both rodents and monkeys, even when the calories consumed each week were the same in the group fed more frequently and the group fed less frequently” (Fuhrman, 2008, p.85). There he cites: Mattson MP, Wan R. Beneficial effects of intermittent fasting and caloric restriction on the cardiovascular and cerbrovascular systems. J Nutr Biochem. 2005;16(3):129-137.

Thank you Joel Furhman for bringing the research to our table. By the way I have been pouring through his new 2 book-set, Eat for Health. The first book includes 16 pages of journal article reference citations from standard medical journals you can read via PubMed or by contacting a local or medical librarian for help accessing these primary resources. Academic medical libraries frequently do include a mission to serve the public and are of course online. Please enjoy this video of an excellent talk given by Joel Fuhrman.

Joel Fuhrman’s new book, Eat for Health, actually it is a book set of 2 vol., has recently been published in 2008. His (2005) Eat to Live book, is my favorite how-to-eat book. He is convinced, the way I am, that increasing nutrient rich food does have the effect of decreasing hunger. It makes sense your body would hunger for specific nutrients and then in a moment of unconsciousness if you inhale a low-nutrient habitual food you can experience you are still hungry. Or worse you just eat without thinking sans hunger.

Pema Chodron mentioned there have been many studies showing that when you are trying to move out of an old habit you can say I won’t do that and then experience a moment of going unconscious and just do it anyway. Her idea is essentially if it is your mind that is driving you to the fridge, work with your mind; train your mind using mindfulness techniques. Pema’s work is brilliant.

Last plug for Joel, I just reopened Eat to Live to the page where he recommends a six-week plan. I still find this book very helpful, even after a few years it is my fav.

That said, in my opinion, this field has a real need for writers and writing can be a helpful tool for your progress. I strongly encourage you to get writing your blog, your book, your journal, your website, your emails, vlogs, audio, etc. It seems likely this field will ride a large and long wave of popularity and we all need a variety of good material to inspire us. We all have to start somewhere and be willing to fail in order to get started. Mom, I really want you to write a book and tell your experience – please write this book!

A note about Joel Fuhrman’s new book, Eat for Health, I understand it is about to be republished in paper back, it can be tricky to get a copy at the moment. I just had to reorder a second copy through a different online vendor, hopefully this one will actually have a copy.

Monthly posts to this blog may be on temporary hold due to a case of: extremely busy life. Have a great day!

Thanks Jane for the great question.
In fact when you eat fruit whole, eating the fiber slows down the absorption of the sugar. Drinking fruit juice (even freshly squeezed or juiced in a juicer) does cause a fast absorption of the sugar and many times I have read advice against drinking too much juice for this reason. A smoothie is different because in a smoothie you keep the fiber in the drink, it is not extracted the way it is in a juicer. For smoothies, I suggest a K-Tech blender for its strong/dependable motor and fitting under kitchen cabninets.

A couple studies I found will say juice still finds its place at the table, helping prevent cancer: “Double strength orange juice given to the rats in place of drinking water inhibited mammary tumorigenesis induced in female Sprague-Dawley rats by DMBA more effectively than double strength grapefruit juice.” (Inhibition of mammary cancer by citrus flavonoids. Adv Exp Med Biol. 1998;439:227-36)
And:
“The results with naringin and naringenin show that both of these flavonoids significantly lowered tumor number [5.00 (control group), 2.53 (naringin group), and 3.25 (naringenin group)]. Naringin also significantly reduced tumor burden [269 mm(3)(control group) and 77.1 mm(3)(naringin group)]. The data suggest that naringin and naringenin, 2 flavonoids found in high concentrations in grapefruit, may be able to inhibit the development of cancer.” (Inhibition of oral carcinogenesis by citrus flavonoids. Miller EG, Peacock JJ, Bourland TC, Taylor SE, Wright JM, Patil BS, Miller EG. Nutr Cancer. 2008;60(1):69-74).

Overall, eating more fruit fills your body’s craving for sweetness and can reduce your interest in gaining it in other ways (i.e. processed sugar which is dumped into many packaged foods-it is an effective marketing strategy to get users hooked). Fruit keeps you regular (how do I say that nicely?, it is important to know, if you are having trouble there try increasing your daily fruit intake).

Developing a hankering for fruit can turn into a craving for bitter flavors in fruit like the white of a grapefruit. This can open you up to a whole new realm of tastebud extravaganza. This happened to me and now I have cravings for nibbling on a head of raddichio.

On the go, fruit is the ultimate packable “water bottle”.

I am taking the liberty to go off topic for this historic moment. I am so proud of our country, really the most proud I have ever been. Today we saw how many ways people have to yell it, sing it, scream it before long wished for change happens. Thankfully, for the moment the media was able to embrace the real problems of racism. I hope when a woman gets elected they will talk in the same length about the real problems of sexism. It was 50 years after black men were allowed to vote that women were allowed to vote.
“* 15th Amendment (1870): ‘The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.’
* 19th Amendment (1920): ‘The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex.’” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suffrage
To accomplish three more dreams at once, we could vote in a woman of color who is openly gay to be our next president. Yes we can. Really inclusion is the best way to get the most creative solutions arriving at the table and the ones most likely to work for the most people.