Saturday, October 18, 2008
Himalayan Pride 100% Organic Brown Basmati Rice
I just finished cooking it up, and I do declare it indeed does tastes better!
Next I'll try it 'Radish Boys' way, it's very simplistic in comparison to how I did it this time:
1. Rinse 1 1/2 cups (or more if desired) brown rice several times until the water is clear.
2. Place the rice in a bowl and cover well with filtered water.
3. Let stand 12 hours or overnight.
4. Pour rice into a strainer and rinse well.
5. Set the strainer over a bowl to drain out of direct sunlight. Cover with a clean dishtowel.
6. Every 12 hours, rinse the rice well.
7. After 24 to 48 hours, small sprouts will appear. Use or refrigerate the rice until ready to use.
8. Cook as you would cook unsprouted brown rice, using slightly less water (for the 1 1/2 cups of rice in this recipe, use 2 cups water). The cooking time will also be shorter.
Wednesday, October 15, 2008
Living, GABA, Sprouted, Germinated, Rice
[Scientists say they have discovered why some elderly people have problems with speech, vision and mobility.
They say they happen because older people do not have enough of a certain chemical in their brain. The chemical, called GABA, helps the brain work efficiently, but the supply appears to diminish later in life.]
Other studies have found that PR can also act as an anti-diabetic. With bioactive compounds as ASGs, a diverse family of molecules that consists of a *glucose derivative, *fatty acids, and *sterols. The ASGs are concentrated in the rice bran (outer layer) and not the seed, so they would not be found in white rice. Living rice is considered an innovative and most nutritious rice for it preserves all the nutrients in the rice grain that replenishes us all the essentials help to strengthen our health. As it contains a plentiful of natural tranquilizer, 'GABA' (Gamma-aminobutyric acid) and also Vitamins B Complex, Manganese, Magnesium, Calcium and Zinc which helps us to fight diseases, delay aging process, calm nerves and also many other advantages, it makes us look young, pretty and energetic if we make it our daily consumption.
Here is the coolest "How To" I've found on the net.
I'm making my first batch now, I have it in my dehydrator, with a temp set of 90 Degrees. I'll keep changing the water and it should be ready in three days.
Cholesterol-lowering Mechanism of Germinated Brown Rice Confirmed - FANCL, Tokyo University of Agriculture and Technology
If you'd rather not spout your own, you can find germinated brown rice on-line, also Zojirushi, sells rice cookers that have a built in 'GABA' feature that sprouts the rice for you during the cooking process.
Sunday, October 12, 2008
Tuesday, October 7, 2008
Sweeteners Tied to Weight Gain
"Animals may use sweet taste to predict the caloric contents of food. Eating sweet noncaloric substances may degrade this predictive relationship, leading to positive energy balance through increased food intake and/or diminished energy expenditure. These experiments were designed to test the hypothesis that experiences that reduce the validity of sweet taste as a predictor of the caloric or nutritive consequences of eating may contribute to deficits in the regulation of energy by reducing the ability of sweet-tasting foods that contain calories to evoke physiological responses that underlie tight regulation. Adult male Sprague–Dawley rats were given differential experience with a sweet taste that either predicted increased caloric content (glucose) or did not predict increased calories (saccharin). We found that reducing the correlation between sweet taste and the caloric content of foods using artificial sweeteners in rats resulted in increased caloric intake, increased body weight, and increased adiposity, as well as diminished caloric
compensation and blunted thermic responses to sweet-tasting diets. These results suggest that consumption of products containing artificial sweeteners may lead to increased body weight and obesity by interfering with fundamental homeostatic, physiological processes."
Sunday, October 5, 2008
Why Low-Carb Diets Must Be High-Fat, Not High-Protein
Fat is the most valuable food known to Man
PROFESSOR JOHN YUDKIN
Introduction
We now know that we should eat a diet that is low in carbohydrates. But a plethora of books published in the last decade have been low-carb, high-protein, or low-carb, high-fat, or low-carb, high-'good'-fats, or all sorts of other mixtures. In other words, the real confusion lies in what we should replace the carbohydrates with: for example, should it be protein or fats? And if fats, what sort of fats? This article, I hope, will answer the question and put any doubts out of your mind. In a nutshell, carbs should be replaced with fats, and those fats should be mainly from animal sources.
There are only two choices: Protein or fat.
ATP: our bodies' fuel
The fuel that our body cells use for energy is actually neither glucose nor fat, it is a chemical called adenosine triphosphate (ATP). A typical human cell may contain nearly one billion molecules of ATP at any one moment, and those may be used and re-supplied every three minutes.[i] This huge demand for ATP, and our evolutionary history, has resulted in our bodies' developing several different pathways for its manufacture.
Oxygen and mitochondria
Living organisms have two means to produce the energy they need to live. The first is fermentation, a primitive process that doesn't require the presence of oxygen. This is the way that anaerobic (meaning 'without oxygen') bacteria break down glucose to produce energy. Our body cells can use this method. The second — aerobic (meaning 'using oxygen') — method began after the Earth began to cool down and its atmosphere became rich in oxygen. After this event, a new type of cell — a eukaryotic cell — evolved to use it. Today all organisms more complex than bacteria use this property and all animal life requires oxygen to function. When we breathe in, our lungs are used to extract the oxygen in air and pass it to the bloodstream for transport through the body. And in our bodies, it is our body cells' mitochondria — little power plants that produce most of the energy our bodies need — that use this oxygen. The process is called 'respiration'. This process takes the basic fuel source and oxidizes it to produce ATP. The numbers of mitochondria in each cell varies, but as much as half of the total cell volume can be mitochondria. The important point to note is that mitochondria are primarily designed to use fats.
Which source of base material is best?
The question now, in this era of dietary plenty, is: Which source is healthiest? There are three possible choices:
Not all cells in our bodies use the same fuel. This means that when we limit carb intake, the same energy sources must be used, but a greater amount of energy must be derived from fatty acids and the ketones derived from fatty acids, and less energy from glucose. Sources of glucoseTo understand how a low carb diet works, we need to look at how we eat. This process is one of eating, digestion, hunger and eating again. During our evolution, we also must have experienced long periods when food was in short supply and we starved. This is a pattern our bodies are adapted to. And they have developed mechanisms to cope with a wide range of circumstances. Firstly, the human body must contain adequate levels of energy to sustain the essential body parts that rely on glucose. The brain and central nervous system may be a particular case as, although the brain represents only a small percentage of body weight, it uses between twenty and fifty percent of all the resting energy used by the body. Fortunately the brain can also use ketone bodies derived from fats. During fasting in humans, and when we are short of food, blood glucose levels are maintained by the breakdown of glycogen in liver and muscle and by the production of glucose primarily from the breakdown of muscle proteins in a process called gluconeogenesis, which literally means 'glucose new birth'. The case for getting energy from fat and ketonesWhen most people think of eating a low-carb diet, they tend to think of it as being a protein-based one. This is false. All traditional carnivorous diets, whether eaten by animals or humans, are more fat than protein with a ratio of about eighty percent of calories from fat and twenty percent of calories from protein. Similarly, the main fuel produced by a modern low-carb diet should also be fatty acids derived from dietary fat and body fat. We find in practice that free fatty acids are higher in the bloodstream on a low-carb diet compared with a conventional diet. The case against getting energy from proteinWe know, then, that dietary fats can produce all the energy the body needs, either directly as fatty acids or as ketone bodies. But, as there is still some debate about the health implications of using fats, why not play safe and eat more protein? 'At our request he began eating lean meat only, although he had previously noted, in the North, that very lean meat sometimes produced digestive disturbances. On the third day nausea and diarrhea developed. When fat meat was added to the diet, a full recovery was made in two days.' This was a clinical study, but Stefansson had already lived for nearly twenty years on an all-meat diet with the Canadian Inuit. He and his team suffered no ill effects whatsoever. Low-carb, high-fat diet and weight lossThere is just one other consideration: If you want to lose weight, the actual material you want to rid your body of is fat. But to do that you have to change your body from using glucose as a fuel to using fat ? including your own body fat. This is another reason not to use protein as a substitute for carbs, as protein is also converted to glucose. So what levels of carbs, fats and proteins are required?Clinical experience and studies into low-carb diets over the last century suggest that everybody has a threshold level of dietary carbohydrate intake where the changeover from glucose-burning to fat and ketone burning takes place. This varies between about sixty-five and 180 grams of carbs per day. If your carb intake is below this threshold, then your body fat will be broken down to generate ketones to supply your brain and other cells that would normally use glucose. In the early trials for the treatment of obesity, carb levels were very much reduced to supply only about ten percent of calories. This works out at around fifty or sixty grams of carb for a 2,000 calorie daily intake.
Or put another way, as it is difficult to work out percentages in this way, fifty to seventy-five grams of carb and the rest from meat, fish, eggs, cheese, and their natural fats. Potential for other diseasesThe traditional Inuit (Eskimo) diet is a no-carb diet. It is notable that the Inuit diet described by Drs Vilhjalmur Stefansson and Hugh Sinclair in the 1950s is very similar in regard to percentages of fat/protein/carb intake to the experimental low-carb diets used in recent obesity studies. The Inuit diet was comprised of seal, whale, salmon, and a very limited amount of berries and the partially digested contents of animals' stomachs. On this diet, blood cholesterol levels were very high as were free fatty acids, but ? and this in much more important ? triglycerides were low. It is interesting to note that the Inuit were of great interest to research scientists because they had practically none of the diseases we suffer, including obesity, coronary heart disease and diabetes mellitus. |
Friday, October 3, 2008
Trick and Treat
"A great book that shatters so many of the nutritional fantasies and fads of the last twenty years. Read it and prolong your life."
This is why health costs are rising so rapidly, and why we seem to get little in the way of better services for the money — the health industry is one of the world's most corrupt industries. The health industry is ruled by the multinational pharmaceutical companies and big food companies. It is they who control what health professionals are taught, making doctors, nutritionists and dieticians into unwitting mouthpieces and drug pushers. But TRICK AND TREAT shows that there is a way out: while the 'health industry' tries to make everyone into 'patients', we don't have to comply, and we don't have to get ill. Live the right lifestyle and they cannot force us to take their drugs and unnatural 'foods' if we don't want to.
You may have noticed that, over the past few years, what we have been taught about 'healthy eating' has changed — subtly but significantly. This is because it is becoming all too obvious to consumers that what we have been told about 'healthy eating' is wrong, wrong, wrong.
In this controversial, evidence-based account of how and why the health-care establishment has got the concept of ‘healthy eating’ so wrong, Barry Groves shows us how to take charge of our own health and lives, in contravention of what the health-care industry would have us believe and do."
TABLE OF CONTENTS
| Foreword | | by Dr Howel Buckland Jones MB, BS (London) |
| Introduction | | |
PART ONE | THE MISAPPROPRIATION OF HEALTH | 11 | Part One shows that the 'health industry' has a vested — financial — interest in us being ill. Looking at evidence for 'healthy eating' it details the unhealthy misinformation we are given |
Chap. 1: | Trick to Treat | 19 | Medical care is one of the world's largest industries. This chapter sets the scene by detailing widespread corruption, fraud and mismanagement, largely for the benefit of the pharmaceutical industry. Heavily influenced by the drug companies, doctors' training is seriously biased towards prescribing; medical research and publications are rarely independent. There is more interest in wealth than health. |
Chap. 2: | What's behind the screens? | 37 | Screening for disease is promoted as a preventive measure. It is not: if a disease is found it hasn't been prevented. With considerable evidence of adverse effects, medical screening seems merely a pretext to increase the 'patient base' and identify a market for increased drug sales, with precious little evidence of benefit to the 'patients'. |
Chap. 3: | How we got to where we are | 56 | Since we were introduced to 'healthy eating' our health has deteriorated dramatically. How on earth did this sorry state of affairs come about? We look at how the battle against cholesterol and development of the 'diet/ heart' hypothesis radically changed dietary recommendations for the worse. The roles of cholesterol are explained. |
Chap. 4: | Learning from history | 77 | If we are to right the health of western societies, we could do worse than look at the way populations we call primitive manage to stay entirely healthy, despite (or because) they have none of our advanced scientific knowledge. The story of pemmican tells how nutritionists, even a century ago, consistently undermined traditional healthy dietary practices. |
Chap. 5: | Fats: from tonic to toxic | 89 | For the sake of our hearts, we are told to replace traditional 'saturated' fats with processed, polyunsaturated vegetable oils. There are three ways in which a substance can increase the risk of cancer: it can cause body cells to become cancerous; it can promote a cancer's growth; it can suppress the immune system. Polyunsaturated vegetable oils have been shown to do all three. |
Chap. 6: | The seeds of ill health | 108 | Base meals on starches, we are told. Eat bread, pasta, rice, breakfast cereals. Indeed we eat more cereals than any other foodstuff. But all cereal grains pose significant health risks to humans. Wheat, on which we depend the most, is probably the worst of them all. And legumes (beans) are almost as bad. |
Chap. 7: | Climb off the bran wagon | 118 | With cereals comes bran (cereal fibre). We have been urged for generations to eat fibre to prevent and cure many bowel and other health conditions. However, research shows that, while vegetable fibre may be relatively harmless, bran increases the risk of many of the conditions it is promoted to prevent and cure — and a lot more as well. |
Chap. 8: | Why '5 portions'? | 129 | The mantra that everyone will know is 'eat 5 portions of fruit and veg a day'. Yet it has no evidential basis; there is little evidence of benefit over about two portions a week; and eating as much as five a day could have serious adverse effects on health. Why growing them is also a wasteful use of land. |
Chap. 9: | The phoney war on salt | 144 | Salt was so valuable that Roman soldiers were paid with it. Today, salt is the subject of the latest health scare. However, if the evidence against the 'diet/heart' hypothesis is flimsy, the evidence against salt is practically non-existent. While salt has been shown to increase blood pressure in a small proportion of people, in others it lowers blood pressure and in most it makes not the slightest difference. Current strictures against salt are increasing health problems |
Chap. 10: | Soy, fluoride and the thyroid | 156 | The thyroid gland controls many functions within the body, including the rate at which we use energy. When its action is suppressed, weight gain is an inevitable result. Soya and fluoride, widely promoted as 'healthy', both have such an effect. |
Chap. 11: | Our irrational fear of sunlight | 167 | Keep out of the midday sun, cover up and wear a sunscreen, we are told. But the sun is nature's great healer. Sunlight is our only reliable source of vitamin D. It is increasingly recognised that people who sunbathe have less cancer. Sun creams increase the risk of cancer. |
Chap. 12: | Exercise care | 185 | Touted as a cure for obesity, heart disease and myriad other conditions, we are all told to exercise more. All that does is burn energy, necessitating increased consumption — of the wrong foods. While exercise may increase fitness, it seems to have little benefit for health. Types of exercise generally promoted can do harm. |
Chap. 13: | Homo carnivorous | 196 | Having shown that the health regimes we are exhorted to undertake have little or no evidential support, that leaves the question of what constitutes a truly healthy diet for us as a species. This chapter looks at our evolutionary history to show that we really should eat a very different diet from that advocated today. It also looks at the basis for our 'love affair with fat'. |
Chap. 14: | The metabolic syndrome and the glycaemic index | 211 | Since we began to eat 'healthy' carbohydrate-rich foods, a constellation of serious degenerative diseases emerged. Scientists defined the 'metabolic syndrome', or syndrome X. This chapter looks at the causes and symptoms of the metabolic syndrome and of insulin resistance, and at the development and limited usefulness of the Glycaemic Index (GI). |
Chap. 15: | Unhealthy dogma means unhealthy food | 228 | Food manufacturers jump on the lucrative 'healthy' bandwagon, making foods that are lacking in important nutrients such as the many 'low-fat' dairy products. These have been shown to raise the risk of some cancers. 'Improving' foods has not only made them more hazardous for us to eat, but has also compromised the health of food animals'. |
Chap. 16: | So what should we eat? | 236 | We have seen that the healthiest diet for us is one low in carbohydrates, but there is little agreement on what we should eat instead. This chapter looks at proteins, fats and carbohydrates, their uses in the body and the amounts we need to each. The overwhelming conclusion is we should eat real, fresh food and avoid what is processed and artificial. |
Chap. 17: | Why low-carb diets must be high-fat, not high-protein | 252 | If we reduce the carbohydrate content of our diet, we either go hungry or replace the carbs lost with something else. There is currently a great deal of debate about what this should be. This chapter explains why carbs should be replaced with fats — and which fats they should be. |
Chap. 18: | Prevention is better | 258 | Prevention is better than cure, but this means starting with a healthy baby. This chapter looks at how to prepare in advance for healthy children, including eating the right things before conception and through pregnancy. It also looks at what constitutes a truly healthy diet for children up to the age of about seven years. |
PART TWO | NEW DIET: NEW EPIDEMICS | 271 | Part Two looks at the wide range of diseases that are caused or exacerbated by our unhealthy 'healthy' diet |
Chap. 19: | 'Healthy eating' is fattening | 273 | Since the introduction in the 1980s of 'healthy eating', with its emphasis on low-fat, carbohydrate-rich foods, the number of overweight and obese people has risen exponentially. This chapter demonstrates that this is not a coincidence but a prime example of cause and effect and looks at why conventional advice on weight loss is totally at variance with both real life studies and clinical trials. |
Chap. 20: | Diabetes deceit | 288 | Because diabetics are more prone to heart disease, they too are advised to eat a low-fat, high-carbohydrate diet. But this is what caused their condition in the first place. This chapter looks at how conventional dietary treatment makes diabetes worse and suggests an alternative diet that both helps and prevents diabetes. |
Chap. 21: | Diseases of the heart and blood vessels | 302 | Most cardiovascular diseases are attributed to dietary fats and cholesterol. This chapter looks at alternative, evidence-based possibilities and finds the case for carbohydrates and consequent high blood insulin levels being to blame more persuasive. |
Chap. 22: | The dangers of low blood cholesterol | 314 | We are told incessantly that high cholesterol is bad for us. But low cho-lesterol is far more serious. Cholesterol is an essential compound in our bodies. Low levels of cholesterol are associated with increased total mor-tality, cancer, Alzheimer's and Parkinson's diseases, antisocial behaviour, depression, suicide, increased susceptibility to infections and other conditions. |
Chap. 23: | Cancer: disease of civilization | 330 | Populations eating traditional diets are remarkably free of cancer, but they soon succumb when they eat our diet. Numbers of cases of cancer have tripled since 'healthy eating' was introduced. This could be because cancers rely on a ready supply of glucose. And that comes from dietary carbohydrates. |
Chap. 24: | Gut reaction | 345 | Being in the front line, the gastrointestinal tract is exposed to the greatest danger if the diet we eat is not suited to us. This chapter looks at how our 'healthy diet' can be harmful and the health problems it can cause. |
Chap. 25: | Deficiency diseases | 362 | I have suggested that reducing our intake of carbs is advantageous. But might cutting out carbohydrate-rich foods like bread, pasta, breakfast cereals and rice and reducing our intake of other plant foods might put you at risk of deficiency diseases? The evidence suggests that the opposite could be true. |
Chap. 26: | Diet and the brain | 371 | The food we eat has a wide range of effects on our body systems. As the brain uses one fifth of all the energy used by the body, it seems logical to suppose that it could be affected by incorrect diet. This chapter looks at the deleterious effects of 'healthy eating' on many brain functions and at the mental health problems that can result. |
Chap. 27: | Multiple sclerosis | 388 | This chapter looks exclusively at one of the most distressing conditions to afflict us. Although the causes of MS are unknown, we discuss compelling evidence that our 'healthy' lifestyle may be a major contributory factor. |
Chap. 28: | The signs of 'healthy eating' | 399 | There are many other signs of 'healthy eating', including acne, bad teeth and short sight. This chapter looks at this wide range of conditions, many of which are clearly visible as they affect the face, and gives evidence for 'healthy eating' being the culprit. |
Chap. 29: | And, finally . . . | 416 | Changes have already been made within medical schools to break the shackles of the pharmaceutical industry on health. It is time we took a stand against the misinformation that is making us ill by taking responsibility for our own health. |
Tuesday, September 23, 2008
A Hundred Pounds of Clay
He took a hundred pounds of clay
And then He said, Hey listen
I'm gonna fix this world today
Because I know whats missing
Then He rolled his big sleeves up
And a brand-new world began
He created a woman and-a lots of lovin for a man
Whoa-oh-oh, yes he did
With just a hundred pounds of clay
He made my life worth livin
And I will thank Him every day
For every kiss you're givin
And I'll thank Him every night
For the arms that are holdin me tight
And He did it all with just a hundred pounds of clay
Yes he did, whoa-oh, yes He did
Now cantcha just see Him a-walkin round and round
Pickin the clay uppa off the ground?
Doin just what He should do
To make a livin dream like you
He rolled His big sleeves up
And a brand-new world began
He created a woman and-a lots of lovin for a man
Whoa-oh-oh, yes he did
With just a hundred pounds of clay
FADE
People, let me tall ya what He did
With just a hundred pounds of clay.
A HUNDRED POUNDS OF CLAY
Written by: Bob Elgin, Luther Dixon & Kay Roger
Performed by: Gene McDaniels -1961