And she’s no longer a vegan.

I love this interview because I love her laugh, but also because she is honest. She had health problems as a vegan, added humanely raised animal products to her diet and loves bacon!

One up front, and one in the back by Ed Yourdon, on Flickr

I was researching the answer to a question I received on a previous post and came across this case study:

 A recent patient of mine was a 67-year-old retired white male who gave a history of diabetes for about 4 years. He suffered from the typical symptoms including high blood pressure in the 160/95 range, diminishing eyesight and the recent onset of protein in his urine. This patient was about 35-40 pounds overweight, and he complained of increasing fatigue and lethargy.

Increasing fatigue and lethargy. Aren’t those hallmark symptoms of depression?

In The Schwarzbein Principle, Diana Schwarzbein MD links high insulin levels, primarily caused by high-carbohydrate, low-fat diets to heart disease, cancer, diabetes, oxidative stress, depression, eating disorders and obesity. Again, high insulin levels are associated with depression.

The American Diabetes Association, Mayo Clinic and WebMD all agree that people with diabetes are at risk for depression, although no consensus has been reached at all as to which comes first: the depression or the diabetes.

In a very unscientific and informal poll of my friends, family and Twitter followers, every one of those who responded as having been diagnosed as diabetic or pre-diabetic had been medicated for depression during the decade prior the diabetes diagnosis. And of those who were prescribed SSRIs before their diabetes diagnosis, not one of the prescribing physicians recommended checking their blood sugar status.

So which came first: the insulin resistance or the SSRI and depression?

The NIMH says:

Some antidepressants may cause weight gain as a side effect and may not be the best depression treatment if you have diabetes. These include:

tricyclics
monoamine oxidase inhibitors (MAOI drugs)
paroxetine (paxil), an SSRI
mirtazapine (remeron)

Healthier Talk.com puts it this way:

Depression causes diabetes and diabetes causes depression. The latest study to confirm this relationship was out of the Harvard School of Public Health in Boston and involved over 65,000 female participants between the ages of 50 and 75. The researchers found that the clinically depressed women in the sample group had a 17 percent higher incidence of diabetes than non-depressed subjects, even after adjusting for other risk factors such as obesity. Interestingly, those women taking antidepressants had an even higher rate of diabetes, at 25 percent.

Conversely, for those women who already had diabetes, the risk of developing depression was alarmingly high — 29 percent greater than in the population at large. And for those women taking insulin to control their diabetes, that percentage of depression jumped to a 53 percent increase over non-diabetic women.

A study in the European Journal of Pharmacology puts a pretty fine point on it:

Selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors fluoxetine and fluvoxamine induce hyperglycemia.

So, again, which came first, the depression or the diabetes? It doesn’t matter. The causes and remedies are so similar that treating one will treat the other as long as the treatment includes the natural steps of increased activity, fresh air and sunshine and real food in appropriate proportions.

For my friends and family, I recommend the following steps:

1. Cut back on the carbs. Carbohydrate intake from all sources is positively correlated to insulin resistance. Focus on clean, real food and traditional methods of preparation.
2. Get exercise in the sunshine and fresh air every day. By all means, if it’s dangerously cold or hot or otherwise a bad idea to go outside, exercise indoors. Find something you enjoy and do it!
3. Stay off prescription medicines if you can and manage your own symptoms. If you truly need them, they are a blessing, but they can create more problems than they solve. Your first steps should be toward self-management, not the pharmacy.
4. Develop a lifestyle of thankfulness and service to others.

This post is part of Real Food Wednesday and Fight Back Friday.

Here is the post: Dude, That Isn’t Wax On Your Apple!

You might not be up to reading the entire thing, it is long and contains numerous links, especially to FDA articles which can be a real nightmare to decipher.

But the upshot is this: If you don’t grow it yourself, and you can’t get face-to-face with the farmer who grew it, you don’t know what is being applied to “protect you.” It might or might not wash off in veggie wash and it might or might not prove to be safe and health-supporting.

The number one goal of Local Nourishment is to encourage you to grow what you can, to source your food as close to your front door as possible, and to personally acquaint yourself with your food producers for what you purchase. I challenge you to take a list of the names of the films listed in realityblogger’s outstanding post to the produce manager of the stores you frequent and try to find out what is applied to your food. It may be he or she has no idea and has to do some research for him or herself. Take the same list to your farmers market (and by that I mean enforced producers market) and ask your farmer. I’ll bet he knows what he applies to your food, and I’ll double down that he or she will be happy to discuss it with you!

This post is part of Real Food Wednesday and Fight Back Friday.

Back pain (joint pain, pain in general)
Body odor
Cravings for chocolate (beyond the normal “yum”, the “give me chocolate or die” variety)
Exhaustion from exercise (a thirty minute walk requiring a full day of rest for recovery)
Insulin resistance
PMS  (in a house full of girls, not good)
Tics

And at one point or another, many of us have suffered from:
Arthritis – Rheumatoid and Osteoarthritis
Auto immune disorders – all types
Cavities
Chronic Fatigue Syndrome
Depression
Gut disorders (food allergies)
Headaches (no, it isn’t normal for a kid to have to take aspirin on a regular basis)
High cholesterol, high triglycerides, high blood pressure
Hypoglycemia
Insomnia
Migraines and Cluster headaches
Obesity
Restless Legs Syndrome
Syndrome X (insulin resistance)

If it would just help my hubby sleep at night, that would be worth the investment even if it never touched the rest of our issues. We eat plenty of magnesium-rich foods in the form of leafy greens, but have stopped eating grains for the time being and have never eaten large quantities of sea vegetables. Also, the magnesium in magnesium-rich foods depends entirely on the health of the soil in which they are grown, something I can’t quantify, even when choosing the local small farm organically grown varieties I love.

We started out taking a calcium magnesium blend tablet in September of last year. I added a few drops of trace ionic minerals to my kombucha, both to supplement my diet and to “feed” the scoby, as I had done with my water kefir, but didn’t see any improvement at all with any of my issues. After reading this article, I realized I needed to be supplementing transdermally because gut issues will prevent absorption of magnesium taken internally.

The first experience was not awful, but also not entirely pleasant. I used one ounce of magnesium chloride flakes dissolved in one ounce of water, put it in a spray bottle and applied about ten pumps to my upper body. The itching and stinging reminded me very much of a niacin flush. My skin turned red, but both the stinging and the redness went away after about half an hour. Tests on my lower body went better, but less magnesium is absorbed from the lower body. I tried a bath, which didn’t sting at all, and a foot bath which was wonderful. My reading told me that the mucous membranes absorb the most, so I tried swishing some in my mouth. It didn’t sting or itch and didn’t cause any problems but the taste was truly awful. It took many rinses to get the metallic taste out of my mouth. I also put some magnesium oil* in my neti pot one morning. No stinging or itching at all! Nice!

The results were very pleasing. Even the first day my overall pain level dropped to a greater degree than taking NSAIDS. Within a week my emotions were smoothing out and I could take more of the ups and downs of life without overreacting. I wasn’t doing anything else during this time to help, as a matter of fact, life continued on its turbulent way. After a couple weeks I noticed I smelled different, and stopped using my homemade deodorant entirely.

At this point I started the whole family on magnesium supplementation. Everyone took to it well except my youngest who has the extremely sensitive skin and severe food allergies. I kept diluting the oil down 1:2, 1:3, 1:5, even at a 1:10 dilution it’s painfully strong for her. She will itch and sting, her skin turns red, but then it breaks out in a rash that lasts much longer than a half hour. She can take magnesium baths and foot baths, and I can rub it into her feet as long as I don’t go above the ankles and she washes it off after 20-30 minutes. I think if the rest of the family notices improvement they will be willing to put up with the stinging and itching for a short time each day rather than just the weekly foot baths we are doing now.

I also know that rotating locations of transdermal application are important because the receptors in skin don’t work as well after several applications at the same site. So, two days a week I swish mag oil in my mouth for as long as I can bear it (easier than oil pulling, in my book), two days a week I add mag oil to my neti pot, two days a week I spray the oil on my upper body about half an hour before my shower and the seventh day I participate in the “family foot bath.”

I’ll update here any additional improvements we experience, or any problems we run into.

I must remember to mention this all to my mother-in-law who suffers terribly from Reynaud’s syndrome. The lack of interest in the medical community for finding causes and solutions for this circulatory problem is truly shocking, but there are reports that magnesium supplementation can help.

*Note: Magnesium chloride dissolved in water is called magnesium oil even though it contains no oil. This is due to its slippery texture.

mouse by Brian_Kellett, on Flickr

Ah, bless CNN Health. They published a blog post today about a recent study done and reported in the Journal of Clinical Investigation which states, quite frighteningly that “in both humans and rodent models, obesity is associated with injury to a key brain area for energy homeostasis.” In other words, a high fat diet is implicated in making and keeping you fat.

Whew! I’m not at risk because I’m sure no model! (Ha, little joke there.)

But seriously. First of all, I don’t know about you, but I am not a rodent. Secondly, I have read the entire study and at no point do the authors discuss what constitutes a high fat diet for humans. My guess is that like most other scientific studies examining “fat”, the major constituent of the diet was actually vegetable oil, not animal fat.

The rodents were provided “either standard laboratory chow (3.34 kcal/g; PMI Nutrition International) or a diet containing 60% kcal fat (HFD, 5.24 kcal/g, D12492; Research Diets) for periods ranging from 1 day to 8 months.”

High fat D12492 chow consists of:

Protein 26.2%
Carbohydrate 26.3%
Fat 34.9%

The major source of fat is lard, but soybean oil (an oil, not a fat) is a major portion of the calories as well. Protein is provided almost exclusively by casein, the protein in milk; carbohydrates come almost totally from cellulose; it is sweetened with maltodextrose and sucrose.

We don’t know exactly what the “standard laboratory chow” is because that specific product is not listed among their offerings, but PMI’s “mouse chow” is listed with this breakdown:

Protein 19.8%
Fat 25.3%
Carbohydrates 54.8%

The main sources of protein are soybean meal, brewer’s yeast, whey and casein. Fat comes from “porcine animal fat preserved with BHA” (aka lard) and soybean oil. Carbohydrates are from ground wheat and corn and wheat germ. I’m seeing some pretty significant differences in the source of protein and carbs there, are you? Wheat and corn, for example, are (ahem) FOOD, and cellulose is…well, it’s hard to say what the source of this particular cellulose is. It could be from algae, or wood, or cotton, we aren’t told.

The Mayo Clinic calls a diet that high (55-60%) in carbohydrates carb-loading and warns that it may lead to weight gain and blood sugar regulation issues. But it’s apparently the “standard” of mouse chow.

If mice really do well 55% carbs, then I can see where bumping their fat intake 10% might give them an issue. The USDA food pyramid numbers work out to about 63% carbs, and we all know the road that has led us down.

The brain is made of fat. It runs on fat. Restricting healthy saturated dietary fat causes memory loss, depression, anxiety and a whole host of other issues. Vegetable oils don’t work the same way.

But my main gripes are the same as it always is in studies of this kind:

1. Humans are not rodents.
2. Oil is not fat.
3. If we were to restrict our diet the way these animals have been restricted, it would not surprise me to find all kinds of odd problems popping up.

Our bodies are fearfully and wonderfully made. We have an entire planet of food to enjoy which, when grown organically and biodynamically, prepared traditionally and lovingly, and eaten joyfully and thankfully, provide us the nutrition we require for properly functioning brains, kidneys, livers, hearts, lungs, and everything else. So, let me ask you: are you a man or a mouse?

This post is part of Fight Back Friday, hosted by Food Renegade.

Liver Muffins?

My mother’s diet is nearly bereft of organ meat and healthy fat thanks to her doctor who has scared her into believing dietary cholesterol is a big, bad meanie waiting in every bite of butter to stop her heart. It didn’t used to be that way. When I was a teen, we had liver and onions at least once a month, and liverwurst sandwiches once a week. I was never thrilled with the liver and onions, but loved liverwurst with mustard and pickles! My friends thought I was nuts.

I’ve been able to convince Mom of some new facts about organ meats…old facts, really, that the medical mainstream has ignored. But she still has an obstacle: a roommate who only eats a handful of food items and is unwilling to expand her horizons beyond them. My Christmas gift to mom this year was a year’s worth of liver pâté in single-servings to stock her freezer. Her roommate doesn’t have to smell the liver cooking, and Mom doesn’t have to go without. I started with a super recipe from Nourished Kitchen, but changed it up a little based on what was available.

Liver Pâté for One

1 lb Livers from Pasture-fed Turkeys
1 Quart Cultured Buttermilk
14 oz Ghee from Grass-fed Cows
2 Large Shallots
2 Tablespoons Fresh Thyme
½ Cup Sherry

Rinse livers gently, pat dry and put in a bowl with buttermilk. Allow livers to soak in buttermilk at least 4 hours, preferably overnight. Drain livers and rinse again.

Heat 4 oz. ghee in a skillet until melted. Slice shallots thinly then add to ghee and brown. Pat livers dry then add to the onions and ghee. Simmer gently until cooked through and until the liquid they release has evaporated. Add the thyme and sherry, scraping up any browned bits from the skillet. Allow to cook down until the sound changes from bubbling to sizzling. Let skillet cool to room temperature.

Add liver mixture and 8 oz. of softened ghee to blender or food processor and process until smooth. Melt the remaining 2 oz. of ghee. Put paper cupcake liners into a cupcake pan with 12 holes. Spoon pâté into paper liners and pour melted ghee on top. Allow to set in the fridge for a few hours or overnight, then stack the pate cups, roll the stack in parchment paper and store in an airtight plastic container or bag in the freezer. Let the pâté come to room temperature before enjoying.

This post is part of Fat Tuesday, Real Food Wednesday and Fight Back Friday.

Warm, creamy, rich, vanilla-y, filling and very nourishing. What more could you want from a breakfast? I have to admit, I am not hungry most mornings until I’ve been up for a couple hours. But I’ve been reading some suggestions that you should eat within 30 minutes of your feet hitting the floor.  Instead of just saying “Ain’t gonna happen” and writing off that principle as an impossibility, I decided to try to find something that I could enjoy.

I like eggs, but most days even the thought of eggs that soon after rising makes my stomach do back flips. But I love cream. I’ve been making this custard to start my day, and it is something I could eat every day.

Mama’s Breakfast Custard
2 1/2 cups cream
6 egg yolks
1/4 cup (or less) maple syrup
pinch salt
1 teaspoon vanilla

Preheat oven to 300°, put a teakettle of water on to boil. Warm the cream gently in a saucepan just until it steams. Beat the egg yolks with the syrup, salt and vanilla in a mixing bowl. Add the steaming cream to the eggs and beat well. Pour into six custard cups (I use the one-cup size) and place cups in a casserole dish. Carefully pour boiling water around the cups until the water on the outside is almost as high as the custard on the inside. Bake for about 30 minutes, or until the custard is set all but right in the middle. Tip: Use a canning jar lifter to get the custard cups out of the hot water without burning your fingers!

You can enjoy them right away (my favorite) or store them in the fridge after letting them cool. This version has half as much sweetener as the recommended amount for a dessert custard, and I generally use much less than 1/4 cup. I’m not a big fan of sweets, especially in the morning, but find that a little sweetener brings out the flavors of the egg and vanilla nicely. This recipe has also worked well substituting honey or coconut sugar for the syrup.

This post is part of Real Food Wednesday, Fat Tuesday and Fight Back Friday.

Look at the grass!

Pastured butter is an amazing food. Plain old, regular store bought butter is okay, but along with it comes all the baggage of mass-produced dairy: the inadequate diet of the animal, the inhumane living conditions, the illness and antibiotic use. If you are blessed enough to have a farmer locally who makes butter from his grassfed cows milk, you have a tremendous advantage.

I buy butter in large quantities when the grass is growing quickly. That May through September butter has more conjugated linoleic acid, more vitamin K2, a better Omega 3/6 ratio, more antioxidants and just crazy good flavor. It’s dark yellow to light orange in color, unlike grocery store butter which is so white it requires “natural or artificial coloring” to make it even a little yellow.

Vitamin K2 is not something we hear about in the media, unlike vitamins B, C and D, but it is extremely important because it allows other vitamins to be absorbed and properly used in the body. There’s a certain synergy at work in nutrients. You may have heard that you should include a food high in vitamin C when you serve food high in iron because the C allows better uptake of the iron. Or that Calcium and Magnesium should be taken together because the Magnesium encourages Calcium uptake. Vitamin K2 works that way for vitamins A and D, two essential vitamins that support the immune system, brain, heart and bone health.

We love the flavor of pasture butter, but storing it was a challenge. Once the freezer is full, what to do? Make ghee!

Being basically lazy, I use the oven method of clarifying the butter. In other words, I put it in a pan in a 350° oven and come back in 2 hours. All the milk proteins either rise to the top to be skimmed off or sink to the bottom where they don’t budge as the oil is poured off. I carefully skim the top and pour the oil through cheesecloth into clean, warm and dry canning jars.

Ghee, or butter oil, is the fat of the butter without any of the milk proteins that can make it go bad. Ghee is shelf stable for up to a year, so your May to September butter can last through the winter! In the picture above you see my good, grassfed ghee next to storebought ghee. You can see the grass!

What to do with ghee? It’s a good saute oil because it has a high smoke point. The dairy allergic can use carefully prepared ghee because the milk proteins are filtered out. One of the really cool things I do with my ghee is to dropper it into capsules (not as hard as it sounds) to take with our fermented cod liver oil. The difference in price between the butter oil and cod liver oil blend and just the cod liver oil makes it worthwhile, and means I can order more CLO for what I would have paid for fewer capsules. Taking butter oil with CLO is essential in my book, you can ready why here.

One drop by 'Ian Humes, on Flickr

After hearing so much press about diabetes and how deadly it is, the great percentage of the population who is afflicted with it and what the symptoms are, I decided it was time to test. I know my doctor could run an HbA1c test, which would tell me the range of my blood sugar over a longer period of time. But I wanted a more direct association between what I ate and how my numbers were affected.

I spent nine days testing eight times a day (yes, overkill) and recording my numbers. The first three days I ate the Standard American Diet of prepared and junk food. The next three days I ate straight out of the old Food Pyramid with its 9-11 servings of grain a day. The final three days I ate my traditional diet of fermented foods and full fat. The results?

Diabetes Testing Results (PDF)

You can click on the above link to see the specifics, but in short, I am very mildly hypoglycemic. My 2AM testing ranged from 80 to 116; immediately before breakfast I ranged from 70 to 85; 2 hours after breakfast I tested at between 114 and 174; immediately before lunch my numbers went from 71 to 86; 2 hours after lunch I ranged from 116 to 168; immediately before dinner I tested at between 71 and 86; 2 hours after dinner my numbers went from 116 to 176; and at bedtime I was between 80 and 105.

All this averages out to:
2AM: 99
Immediately before breakfast: 77
2 hours after breakfast: 133
Immediately before lunch: 80
2 hours after lunch: 135
Immediately before dinner: 80
2 hours after dinner: 143
Before bed: 90

The recommended “numbers” are 70-130 before meals and less than 180 after meals.

There was one test I didn’t include: on day three I had a 12 ounce cola in mid-afternoon. One hour after drinking it, I decided to test, just for giggles and found that my blood sugar had risen to 140, a pretty high number for me in mid-afternoon, but nothing dangerous. By dinner, my sugar was back down to 83.

Curiously, what made the biggest difference in my numbers was a traditional diet. Suddenly, instead of hitting 114-123, I was reaching the 170′s after breakfast, and my other meals showed similar increases as well. I was eating far less sugar, no refined grains and generous servings of healthy fat, but my blood sugar went up. All I can conclude is that my body functioned more efficiently on a traditional diet, and that the 170′s are closer to where my sugar level needs to be. I do not subscribe to the “less is better” theory, having suffered bouts of hypoglycemia as a teen.

I’ve passed my glucose meter down to my oldest girl and encouraged her to test. She has dizzy spells, nausea, fainting, mood swings and crazy food cravings, much like I did as a teen. I have her on a traditional diet at home (but she works in fast food) and she takes Maca (an herbal remedy) to help maintain her blood sugar. I’ve bought her a bottle of Gymnema (an herb) to carry and told her she should consider taking one before each meal to help level her blood sugar as well.

I hope you’ll consider doing this experiment as well. I was pleasantly surprised. But more than anything, I learned that you can’t assume that because someone is overweight that they are a “ticking time bomb” of diabetes, ready to explode at any moment. Later this year I want to test my pulse and blood pressure numbers as well. The mad scientist in me wishes there were a convenient home test for coagulation, white blood cell count and inflammation factors!

This post is part of Fight Back Friday, hosted by the never-testy Food Renegade.

I loved the dish we had for dinner last night. It was fast because I used my grass farmer’s tenderized turkey breast cutlets. It was chop-and-drop easy and included some of my favorite nutrient dense foods. It’s a seasonal autumn dish, perfect for right now. Round out the meal with a coconut pumpkin muffin and a glass of cold, raw milk.

Turkey Cutlets on Kale with Mushroom Sauce

6 tenderized turkey breast cutlets
1/4 cup sprouted wheat flour
1 bunch of kale, stemmed and chopped
2 cups homemade chicken stock, divided
1 pound mixed mushrooms, chopped
1/4 cup dried porcini mushrooms
3 tablespoons pasture butter, divided
1 small onion, chopped
2 cloves garlic, minced
sea salt and pepper to taste

In a large pot, bring 1 cup chicken stock to boil. Pour half a cup of hot stock into a bowl and add dried mushrooms. Add chopped kale into remaining stock in the pot, set on medium low and cover. Give the kale a stir when you flip the turkey cutlets later.

Heat 1 tablespoon pasture butter in skillet. Add chopped onion and mixed mushrooms. Squeeze porcini mushrooms dry (reserve soaking water) and chop, adding to skillet. Stir around over medium high heat until mushrooms give off their liquid and onion begins to brown. Remove onion mixture from skillet.

Melt 1 tablespoon pasture butter in skillet. Dredge turkey cutlets in sprouted wheat flour and add to skillet. Brown on one side over medium heat, then flip over and cover the pan to brown the second side. The cutlets will be done in about 5 to 7 minutes total cooking time. Remove cutlets to a plate and keep warm.

Deglaze the skillet with remaining cup of chicken broth and mushroom soaking liquid. Scrape up all the good bits off the bottom of the skillet and allow liquid to reduce by half. Add mushroom mixture back into sauce, melt remaining 1 tablespoon pasture butter into sauce. Serve cutlets over a bed of kale, and topped with mushroom sauce. Serves 6

If you don’t have access to pastured turkey breast cutlets, you could use a couple chicken breasts that you’ve pounded thin. I used curly kale, but any variety would work well. The mushroom sauce mixes with the kale so deliciously! I had this dish on the table in less than 30 minutes.

This post is part of Real Food Wednesday, hosted by Kelly the Kitchen Kop.