Canned Love

Posted on July 6, 2014 by dcarmack
It is so easy to think that the way things were when you were born, or at least before you were old enouh to form your own memories, is the way that things have always been. My own early memories, spent in one of the first suburbs in Kansas City, Kansas, had one little grocer within walking distance and and A&P store not a mile from that.
My family, with our little plot of land, mostly consumed by house and terraces between the houses, never had a garden. All of our food had to fit in either the cabinet with the canned goods, the cabinet with the food boxes, or the refrigerator. I don't recall spending a minute of my formative years storing food for the winter. I remember the first time I saw canned food at my grandmother's house in rural Missouri. Her canned bread and butter pickles were a real treat that I looked forward to, her canned meats were delicious in stews. As a kid I never wondered why food was in those jars.
I remember dinners at home. We ate well, we never went hungry that I knew of. My father had to endure some lean times as a member of the UAW in the sixties and seventies as the union and company learned to share through strikes, some of them quite long. I am sure that the foods we ate in the plainly lableled cans and boxes was during those times. Even when our source of income was that insecure we never produced any of our own food, we never went to a farmer's market during the seasons of plenty to buy a lot of food and lay it up for later. Once a week I would go with Mom to the A&P, walk the aisles or set in the car while she shopped.
I myself only lately discovered saving food for later. I read Pollan's book “The Ominvore's Dilemma” and after that I put a tiny garden in my side yard. Planning on a bunker crop, I got a bath canner and a couple of dozen mason jars. The bunker crop never showed up so I kicked around looking for something else to do with all that glass. Turns out there is plenty you can do with mason jars.
Mason jars are way better to have in your cabinets than Tupperware, Glasslocks, or any other food storage option for leftovers. For one thing they are taller than they are wide, so they store more with a smaller footprint. Being glass, they never leach hormones into the hot foods you put in them. The little lids are reuseable, although you can only use them one time for canning, you can use them over and over for storage. I only throw one away if the lining gets damaged and I see a littel rust. I never throw a jar away. Now I have half pint, pint, quart and half gallon mason jars, a couple dozen each.
You can also make your mason jars into quart or half gallon fermenters. Fermenting is when you take a pure food like cabbage, and turn it magically into a pure food like sauerkraut. Nothing on earth is easier to do, which is why people have been doing it since the pottery jar was invented. It happens naturally, and I am sure it happens by accident, which is probably how it was discovered.
Yesterday we went to the farmer's market downtown. We got as big a head of cabbage as nature creates, and made that into a half gallon of kimchi and another half gallon of sauerkraut. I guess we didn't actually make either one of those yesterday, really, because both take days or weeks of fermenting to actually become those things. What I did yesterday was mix my sliced cabbage up in salt. Over about an hour, the water in the cabbage comes out and mixes with the salt, making a brine. The crisp cabbage wilts and takes up less room. I packed it into a half gallon mason jar as soon as it would fit and poured the brine over it to cover all the cabbage with liquid. Then I put a special mason jar lid on it with a tiny hole in the top, fitted with a rubber grommet that will allow me to put a plastic airlock on top. In this way my jar will be airtight, but it will allow the carbon dioxide that forms during fermentation to escape, but it will keep mold spores from getting in and spoiling my sauerkraut. I can now litteraly set back and allow the minions of rot create new vitamins in my cabbage, new flavors. If you think you don't like sauerkraut, it is because you have never made your own. This product is WAY better than the same thing in a can or jar from the store. Mine won't have any vinegar in it. Mine will be delicious and not sour. When I cook it I will rinse the brine off, drain it, cook it with a shredded potato and a shredded onion. The perfect side dish.
This summer I will repeat this process over and over while local cabbage is pleniful and priced to sell. It will last all winter long, until the cabbages come out of the field next year. I already have a flat of beets in the basement that I am going to try making kvass and fermented beets with, it's part of the same process.
I am serious enough about this that I have turned a room in the basement into a storage room with lots of shelf space. I imagine those shelves crammed with freshly packed foods from fields in my neighborhood, everything created with love and the passion for doing the job right, not doing the job cheap. No one in my food chain will be thinking about getting rich feeding me.

 

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Independence Day

Posted on July 4, 2014 by dcarmack

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On July 4 every year since 1776 this nation has taken time to celebrate Independence Day. On that day, thirteen colonies joined in common cause to sever it’s long-standing dependence on England, it’s government of Kings and violently protestant religions, and fractious political turmoils with it’s fellow royal neighbors.

On that day we did not declare our freedom, but our desire to rule ourselves. On that day we did not declare our individualism, our desire to be left alone to fend for ourselves in the world. We declared our intention to bond together in community, to defend one another from the world and from our neighbors. We declared the government of another people had less right to speak for us than a government formed by us. Since that day many other nations have followed our lead and given themselves the power that they had given to England.

Our government is not a separate thing that we can safely loathe. We may loathe it, but only with the intention of repairing it. We must not hate the government and do everything that we can to dismantle what has taken thousands of years for civil society to get to. Men and women who are elected to conduct our social affairs and then use their station to intentionally damage the great machinery of democracy are not friends of us, but our mortal enemies. Intentionally divorcing our institutions from the money they need to conduct their functions is a cowardly act. Taxes are not a burden that should be shirked off. We pay into the society that we live in as a common duty, we gladly accept the parts we agree with, and must therefore accept as necessary the parts that we do not.

To swear at the president and defy him because he is not of your tribe is destructive. It teaches your children the wrong thing. To nullify the constitutionally enacted law of the land because the state you live in does not agree with it is to invite other states to do the same to the laws that you do agree with but they do not. To hold as sacred parts of the Constitution and to despise and defy other parts of it is schizophrenic and doomed to result in a schizophrenic public policy.

Our nation contains within it’s structure the tools and levers to remake it again more in our image. If you don’t think that an imaginary creation of man is a man, but five men have interpreted the Constitution to say that it is, you don’t ignore it, you change it to explicitly say that only a human is a person. Changing the constitution is a power given to us in the constitution. If you think that our constitution give the government the power to control who may own the tools of deadly force, but five men have interpreted the constitution otherwise, then change the constitution to say explicitly what you think it says. If the Constitution does not agree with you you must obey our common law, or change the law.

We must live our lives in awe of what we have inherited. No man ever swore an oath in the US military to defend the flag, or our freedom, or any other thing but the Constitution. The oath binds us to defend the law against all of it’s enemies, foreign and DOMESTiC. If called upon, our military would defend the law against people in this nation who would defy it, as they have in times past. I took this oath four times in my life. Every federal employee and elected official in federal service have also taken this oath at the beginning of every term. If taken seriously, they must all do their utmost to defend the Constitution, and to follow the laws and orders of the people who are in places of power above them. To do so is to defy your oath, and perhaps even break the law.

Sometimes laws must be broken so that they may be successfully be repaired, and we can all cite instances where this is true. Heroes of our history are guilty of this ‘sin.’ All of the founders, Lincoln, King, Ellsberg, Snowden…we are a nation of lovers of the Constitution who have lived the oath, not just mouthed it. To understand the US you must understand these people, and what they are struggling to protect. We are a nation of laws, not men. No man is above it, not the rancher who would not buy the grass he is taking from us for free, not the Governor who would sign a law requiring his police to defy the federal government, not the Judge who would enforce a law already deemed outside the bounds of the Constitution.

I wish you all a joyous Independence Day. Love your family, love your home, love your day off. I will love my nation, and my Constitution. I will love the men and women who have come before me that passed this universal treasure to me in it’s current form. I swear I will continue to defend it, even against it’s domestic enemies.

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There’s a Pill for That

Posted on July 3, 2014 by dcarmack

Hand me that Prilosec! If you ever wondered what causes your heartburn, here is the WebMD description of the common wisdom on the subject:

The basic cause of heartburn is a lower esophageal sphincter, or LES, that doesn’t tighten as it should. Two excesses often contribute to this problem: too much food in the stomach (overeating) or too much pressure on the stomach (frequently from obesity, pregnancy, or constipation). Certain foods commonly relax the LES, including tomatoes, citrus fruits, garlic, onions, chocolate, coffee, alcohol, caffeinated products, and peppermint. Meals high in fats and oils (animal or vegetable) often lead to heartburn, as do certain medications. Stress and lack of sleep can increase acid production and can cause heartburn. And smoking, which relaxes the LES and stimulates stomach acid, is a major contributor.

Yes, the old ‘lower esophageal sphincter.’ Let me explain this to you in layman’s terms. There is a valve at the top of your stomach whose main job is to keep the flow of material in the downward direction. This valve is made of the same stuff your other sphincter is, it’s built the same way, the flow control is the same direction. Thinking about the sphincter that your are more familiar with, it is possible to make something go the other way, if you push hard enough, but it doesn’t really take that much pressure to do it. Increasing the pressure on the material in your stomach makes the flow go the other way all of the time on your LES, too. When you drink a carbonated beverage, you immediately get reverse flow of gasses. You burp. So we know what burping is, it’s gas pressure being relieved and it’s usually not a problem.

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What if the source of the pressure was not only something that made gasses in your stomach, but also made the material in your stomach foam? Then when you burped, or the pressure got high enough to make the valve leak, some of the foam would escape and it would not just be gas, but liquid. If the liquid contained an oil, say peppermint, then you would taste this oil. That might lead you to think that the peppermint was the culprit. However, peppermint is not something that would cause gas to be created in your stomach. Whatever is creating the gas is the real culprit, and the peppermint taste is just a symptom of the problem. What could be causing the foaming?

There was a time when I couldn’t eat Pizza without getting the worst heartburn. Spaghetti was something I loved to eat but I would be tasting it for many hours afterwards in my belching and the burning wanted me to swear off the stuff. I always thought the problem was the spices that I could taste when I burped. Taking an antacid medicine would help right away, but it seemed to have the side effect of causing everything else I ate after using it to give me the same symptoms. It was like taking antacid made me keep taking antacid indefinitely. I could only break the cycle by ‘living with’ the heartburn instead of treating the symptom.

A few years back I went on the Atkin’s Diet with a religious fervor. I quit all sugars from any source, and all carbs. I bought the keto-sticks, so that I could see from my urine that my body was metabolizing fats instead of sugars for energy. I did this for six weeks. During the six weeks there were a few times that we had catered lunches at work of Pizza Hut Pizza. What a temptation! Can’t have the pizza, but just because of the bread. Instead of eating pizza like I normally would, I just ate the cheese, meat and vegetable toppings. I just peeled the top off the crust and ate that. Wonder of wonders, no heartburn! After that experience I tried spaghetti sauce with big spicy meatballs and found the same thing, no stomach upset or gas. No need for antacid. I had discovered that the bread was causing the gas!

At work we have a boiler (I work at a power plant) and one of the things about boilers is that they produce steam which bubbles to the top of the liquid it is formed in. It is vitally important when operating a steam power plant that only steam gets to the turbine. If water gets to the turbine, even in the form of tiny droplets, it can damage the delicate steam turbine blades. We call this carryover. Here is a video I found of it. It can happen if your boiler chemistry becomes abnormal, increasing the surface tension of the water, so that the steam coming out of the water forms bubbles that don’t burst, thus ‘carrying over’ in the steam to the turbine. Anything that causes your stomach chemistry to similarly be disrupted can also cause gas formation, foaming and carryover, if the valve at the top of your stomach can’t contain the pressure. Even a small leak will make you uncomfortable, and if it contains something fragrant, like peppermint, you will know where the ‘source’ of the problem is.

Taking an antacid will help because it will stop the formation of the bubbles, change your stomach chemistry, and stop the creation of the gas (for a bit). Taking an antacid does not change the source of the gas. Bacteria in your stomach are consuming the easy sugars in the starches you are eating, making gas as a byproduct of their work. Just like in the rumen of a cow, if it eats corn it will have EXACTLY the same problems, except that the valve at the top of the cow’s stomach is much tighter, and this problem in cattle can actually kill them due to the increased pressure.

Taking antacids has other problems and side effects. I quote at length from this article…

A sodium-based antacid uses sodium bicarbonate to neutralize stomach acid. The sodium used in this type of antacid neutralizes acid quickly but increases blood pressure and should be avoided by people with high blood pressure or a heart condition….

…Calcium-based antacids are safe for use by people with high blood pressure but can have adverse affects for people prone to kidney stones or people that suffer with constipation issues…In large doses or with frequent use, the calcium in the antacids will cause kidney stones or constipation when used regularly over a shorter time span. In extreme cases, the calcium in the antacids will clog the kidneys to the point that blood cannot circulate correctly, which may cause the kidneys to shut down…
…Aluminum-based antacids also cause kidney stones and constipation but have additional side effects that can weaken bones and cause vital nutrients to leave the taker’s body. Unlike antacid types, aluminum-based antacids have shown to be safe for individuals with normal kidney function unless the aluminum-based antacid contains magnesium salts. This combination can cause blood pressure to drop, so people with low blood pressure should avoid this combination in an antacid. All antacid types containing aluminum should be avoided by people suffering from osteoporosis, as the aluminum removes calcium from their bodies.

Side effects from taking a pill, that is itself a reaction to the side effect of eating breads and sugars. There is a pill for the side effects of whatever antacid you are taking, as well, and the cost to you is minimal, if you are on a good insurance plan. Or, you can quit eating sugar and white bread. Perhaps you could just stop eating anything out of a box, bag or bottle. One small change at a time, I suppose.

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Train, Eat, Rest, Repeat. – Benefits of Foam Rolling

Posted on July 3, 2014 by dcarmack
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Words…To Live By

Posted on July 2, 2014 by dcarmack

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If you let up your effort for a day, you will pay. There are just things you have to do every day for yourself, so that you are always doing the work you need to do to move forward. It is so easy to slip back into bad habits–after all they are habits.

It began on Monday, when we ate a wonderful meal, planned days in advance. We entertained guests for dinner and we all watched a movie until past bedtime. After our company left the sky opened up and our weather featured trees breaking, fourth of july lightning and thunder, torrential rain and the tornado sirens going off for about a half hour. Pretty exciting sendoff to bed, and it totally got us off our game. By that I mean that we never considered what we should be planning for Tuesday’s main meal of the day.

Tuesday morning came and there is all of the excitement of the weather the night before on the news, breakfast to make, get ready for work and start the day. You see, Tuesday was a day that neither one of us would be home and able to do anything about getting ready for mealtime. Tuesday we both got home AT mealtime. Now we are at the mercy of the local eateries.

We picked Cheddar’s, a restaurant chain out of Texas that we first visited last week (in similar circumstances). Ordering at a new place is always a bit of a crap shoot, since you don’t really know what you will be getting until it shows up at the table. Last week I got catfish, and I was really happy with it and yesterday I decided on baby back ribs. I felt like I had to get the ribs, because I was thinking about having leftovers available to me for lunch today. You see how far not thinking on Monday is taking me now? I am affecting meals for the next several days. The ribs were fall off the bone done, but they were also covered in a thick red syrup of sauce. I ate two bones last night and it was as sweet as ice cream.

Now it is Wednesday and I have enough ribs here to last me today and tomorrow for lunch, but they have enough sugar in them to last me through the holiday weekend! This would never have happened to me if I had thought about Tuesday’s meal on Monday like I am trying to do from now on.

Last night we thought about dinner tonight. We now have a plan that involves real food cooked by us. We did the work necessary to keep us out of the weeds for another day. We will once again get back into the track that we are trying to make a good new habit to replace the bad old habit of thinking about dinner at dinner time.

This is what Admiral McRaven said in his famous commencement speech that I linked to above:

If you make your bed every morning you will have accomplished the first task of the day. It will give you a small sense of pride and it will encourage you to do another task and another and another.

By the end of the day, that one task completed will have turned into many tasks completed. Making your bed will also reinforce the fact that little things in life matter.

If you can’t do the little things right, you will never do the big things right.

And, if by chance you have a miserable day, you will come home to a bed that is made—that you made—and a made bed gives you encouragement that tomorrow will be better.

If you want to change the world, start off by making your bed.

Like I have been saying these past several weeks, if you want to change your life, you have to make one small change at a time. The little things really do matter, they have all the influence of a vital moment in your future. If I want good habits, I have to think about it all the time until they ARE habits.

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Healthy Words

Posted on July 1, 2014 by dcarmack

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What is in a name? A rose is still a rose… However, there really is something in a name. Our brains have well-worn patterns available to us to use for things we run into over and over, so that we don’t spend any extra moments processing things that we already understand. It is how you can walk down your own stairs in the dark, but can’t do so easily in a new place. It is how you can read a word like organic on a label and it will send your mind down a different path when you are choosing a new kind of food than the same box would if it’s label did not contain the word ‘organic’. You might be tempted to say ‘so what’, but read this article first.

“Words like organic, antioxidant, natural and gluten-free imply some sort of healthy benefit,” Northup said. “When people stop to think about it, there’s nothing healthy about Antioxidant Cherry 7-Up — it’s mostly filled with high fructose syrup or sugar. But its name is giving you this clue that there is some sort of health benefit to something that is not healthy at all.”

You can help yourself, of course, by ‘stopping to think about it.’ That is what I am trying to get across, that doing that actually requires the shopper to be mindful about every thing they pick up. Why are you picking this one over that one? If there were nothing different at all between the six inch lollipop and the six inch lollipop that is labeled ‘fat free’, would you pick the fat free one? They both are fat free, but you know there is nothing healthful about a lollipop, it is still candy.

There is another option for you of course. You can break the habit of buying anything in a box, bag or bottle. If you create a new habit of only going down the middle aisles of your grocery store when you need a specific item, then it is pretty easy to not be tempted by the clever marketing labels you are going to find in the grocery aisles. It is actually easier for me, personally, to avoid seeing them than it is to ignore them if they are in my sight. Marketing only works if you are paying attention to it. Finding a way to avoid TV commercials works pretty well, also, but not as effectively as just staying at the outside walls of your store.

Yesterday we ate real food. Whole pork loin is a lot of meat, but if you cut one into four pieces and roast them one at a time, it makes the best roast you can eat. I brine pork before I cook it which keeps it very moist, makes it almost impossible to overcook. Yesterday I rubbed it with a ‘pumpkin pie’ spice, which makes it really tasty. I am definitely doing that again. Cooking a pork roast takes about two hours, and brining takes about two hours. This meal, like many real meals takes some forethought. There is no substitute for preparation, and habitually being prepared is, well, a habit. I am now in the habit of thinking about tomorrow’s dinner today. If you constantly find yourself wondering what is for dinner at dinner time, then you will be eating boxed or frozen meals. That is your habit, and getting control of the chemicals you are accepting in your foods is just one small change away for you. Just stay on the outside of the store and soon you will run out of boxed or frozen meals. You will be forcing yourself to ‘stop and consider’ what you will be eating when your choice of habitual meals is no longer easily available to you. There will be discomfort and the occasional run to fast foods, but you won’t do this long before you build a new habit of thinking about meals just a little bit in advance.

The label on my pork loin doesn’t have a single health claim, even though it is gluten-free, and sugar-free. The salad we had with it was all natural, I couldn’t tell you how many calories it was, or what the nutrition breakdown was, but the nice thing is that I can tell you with confidence that it was health food and that there was not a single bad or artificial ingredient in it. We didn’t buy organic veggies, we didn’t buy GMO free veggies, but we bought veggies, and I know for certain that what I ate was good for me, much better than anything out of a bag, box or bottle.

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Blowout!

Posted on June 30, 2014 by dcarmack

This is a re-run of a previous article, found as I mine the archives for links to put into a recap post. I am going to be recapping monthly from now on on the last post of the month.

dcarmack's avatarOne Small Change at a Time

Last meal of the 21 day sugar detox had zero sugar calories. That’s the good news. The bad news is that it was a 1200 calorie meal, all by itself. We went to Rancho Grande Cantina for dinner and I got 3 deep fried beef tacos, at 427 calories each (according to MyFitnessPal’s database). I enjoyed every calorie, and my body is thanking me this morning for breaking the drought. We ate a few chips and some of their guacamole before the tacos came out, too. We earned it!

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Re Capping or Learning to Love the Link

Posted on June 29, 2014 by dcarmack

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Today I am going to mine the archives and provide you, dear reader with links to the books, documentaries, videos and articles that I have found over the last several months that inspired me to write to you. I know that you don’t read back through the backlog of my work like I do, so to provide you with the information contained in there, I must do it for you. Read on, and be sure you click the links so that you can see where I get all of my liberal eating ideas.

Back at the beginning of April this year, we started our Detox from sugar. The weekend before we binged on all things sweet, which was a little bit sickening, but it got us in the mood to quit the sweets. Articles like this one from Berkeley University got us on the path.

Soft drinks, sports drinks, fruit drinks, energy drinks, coffee drinks, cupcakes, cookies, muffins, doughnuts, granola bars, chocolate, ice cream, sweetened yogurt, cereal, candy. The list of sweet temptations is endless.

The average American now consumes 22 to 28 teaspoons of added sugars a day—mostly high-fructose corn syrup and or- dinary table sugar (sucrose). That’s 350 to 440 empty calories that few of us can afford.

How much added sugar is too much? Cutting back to 100 calories (61⁄2 teaspoons) a day for women and 150 calories (91⁄2 teaspoons) a day for men might mean slimmer waist- lines and a lower risk of disease.

By April 3 we were mining the internet for great recipes and found this site, where great recipes for the sugar averse are found neatly arranged and rated. We loved the pizza soup recipe because the leftover made a great meat-rich marinara for our spaghetti (squash) the next day. Find that recipe here….

On April 4th we found this video explaining how you get addicted to sugar, just like people get addicted to anything else…

Never skip a meal if you are not eating sugars and carbs. Not only will you feel lousy, the deficit in energy will send you into a starvation mode of body chemistry. This actually makes losing weight harder. It also makes it much more difficult to kick the sugar habit.

On April 14 I discovered the HBO Documentary ‘Weight of the Nation’. Watch at least the first episode, and then try the second one. If it does not motivate you to get on the bandwagon of sugar eradication then I don’t know what will…a heart attack maybe. This documentary is available free of charge wherever you go to watch internet video. Each episode is an hour long and PACKED with facts and recent science reporting.

On April 15 I listed lots of links to good meal ideas. Recapping my first two weeks of sugar-free life. By this time I was pretty sure that I could stay off of sugar from now on.

On April 16 I finally was clear of the demon. My mind was then alive and I could really write. It was the first post where the writer in me started to really emerge. Rereading this post makes me smile, as I can see how I will write from now on in that post.

The NIH (National Institute of Health) really does care about your health. This is their site, and there is good advice on how to keep weight off. I have some for you too, don’t drink any sugar, of any kind.

On April 21 we ended the formal ‘Sugar Detox’ of 21 days. Of course, our new lives had just begun, and my best writing and linking were in the future still. Writing every day is the second best thing to come of this experience. During the last three months I have found something that I can be truly excited, even evangelistic about. I have learned much and taught much since then.

Tomorrow I will go thru May’s posts and recap those for you too. I really think I need to create a page of just Links, that you could get to very easily, instead of having to wade backwards through over 100 posts. It’s a great deal of trouble, but it’s trouble that I don’t mind taking for you, dear reader.

Until Tomorrow!

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Taking Stock

Posted on June 27, 2014 by dcarmack

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I was setting by the pool yesterday with my com padre Jose, and we were enjoying the mild night and a really great cigar. We talked about how great we feel. He is 59 and I am 53, and we both are eating a new way, conscious of the sweets we eat these days. Jose has lost a lot of weight, and looks very slender for a six foot tall man. I have lost quite a few inches from my waist, too.

Looking around at the other men my age and even younger, I notice the weight that they carry. Faces are inflamed and bloated, gait is uneven and heavy. When I climb the stairs at work now, I am no longer winded by the top of the second flight. I still sweat easily, but then I would sweat in the summer when I was a healthy seventh grader, too.

Just last summer things were different for both of us. Eating like everyone else, lots of potatoes, sugar, rice, pasta, and bread we had the normal complaints of our peers. I would tire easily with a little bit of exertion. I would wake at night sweating and have to kick of the covers. My pants and belts would get tighter every year. Jose says he would get stomach gas after every meal and belch for hours, causing distress, both physical and mental. Getting up and down from the floor when exercising was a chore.

An older female family member, at 73 looks pretty good. She carries some weight at her abdomen, and she has had some robotic joints installed, but overall her health would have to be considered above average. Still, though, she is taking medicine for blood pressure. She is taking it because doctors can’t make her quit eating sugar. It is a proven fact that cutting the sweeteners from her life would take that weight from her midsection, it would cut the liver fat growing invisibly within her, it would make her life easier. Why doesn’t the doctor tell her that? Why give her a pill that will encourage her to go on living and eating in a way that is guaranteed to cause her distress, more and more as the years go by?

In Europe they don’t have nearly the problem with weight and weight related diseases as we do in the US. As an amateur sociologist, I would like to point out that they also have social health care systems over there. When people get sick in great numbers the costs are borne by the government and passed on to everyone. Here in the US, when great numbers of people get sick, the costs are borne by the individual, and the doctors and pharmacists get rich. There is an incentive to keep you healthy and cure you in Europe, but here the incentive is to keep you sick and on medication. Perhaps my conclusions are hasty. Perhaps.

In the US, we can’t count on the government to do the right thing for the society. Despite our being a democracy, there are those in government that believe in it and it’s power do to good, and there are those that hate it and anything that is working well. They try to take it apart. In the case of health care and health it is the same. Someone wants to test and verify the products sold as dietary health supplements. They want you to be sure when you buy a bottle of Ginseng it contains what it says, and is not contaminated with heavy metals. Someone else wants the government to stay out of the way. No need for the government to get in between the buyer and seller, they say, “Let us have our supplements.” I could go through case after case of this to prove that we can’t rely on our government to protect us from the market.

There is only one person who can help my relative, and that is her. I have to help her find the best way to get back to top shape, and that is to quit eating sugar first, then to change more things as she goes on. I will do my part. It is up to her to make the habit changes. In her lifetime there will be no government restrictions on sugar use in food. There will be no testing food additives for safety or side effects. There will be no guidance for how to get good Omega fats and limit the improper. There will be no prohibition on feeding cattle grain instead of grass to limit disease and promote health. No good idea that might make the government look good, or cost a penny of profit to a producer, processor or seller will be adopted.

It is up to us to help each other, if you want to be social. We can change the country and the future, if we just change one thing today. It can be a small thing. No sugar in your tea, for instance. We have to make one small change at a time to make a difference.

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On Abundance

Posted on June 26, 2014 by dcarmack

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Abundance is a noun whose first definition is “an extremely plentiful or over-sufficient quantity or supply: an abundance of grain.” Abundance is a blessing, of course. Not being required to work very hard for sustenance is of course a blessing. Having your requirements met without even thinking about it must be a blessing, how could it not be? Except that in the definition there is that ‘over-sufficient’ adjective, and ‘extremely’, to give us pause.

True abundance tends to make items less expensive to purchase and makes them easier to obtain. A result of this being that foods that are abundant bring in less revenue per unit of delivery for the farmer, which forces them to produce even more in order to obtain their living wage for the year. A farmer who earns less per bushel for his crop must produce ever more bushels to maintain his income, which drives the price per bushel even lower. This is a downward spiral.

Owing to the law of supply and demand, when there is an ‘over-sufficient quantity’ of something like corn, the price to the buyer drops, making it a more attractive compared to other options. Because corn is so inexpensive, it’s use spreads to just about every processed food in the grocery store. Because corn is so inexpensive, it is the primary food supply for commercially produced chicken, pork and beef. So the vast majority of calories the average American consumes are linked to corn. This keeps our food prices very low, but also keeps the biodiversity of our diet very low. It ties our health and energy to the soil that the corn grows in, for better or for worse. You are what you eat, and what your food ate. It turns out that science can determine now how much corn you have been eating by the percentage of Carbon 13 present in you.

Karen Kaplan referred to a 2007 CNN story about UC Berkeley plant biologist Todd Dawson. Dawson can test a strand of hair to determine how much corn is in a person’s diet by looking for a form of carbon found in corn.

“We are what we eat with respect to carbon, for sure. So if we eat a particular kind of food, and it has a particular kind of carbon in it, that’s recorded in us, in our tissues, in our hair, in our fingernails, in the muscles,” Dawson was quoted.

Dawson tested a strand of CNN reporter Sanjay Gupta’s hair. Sixty-nine percent of the carbon came from corn, an amount typical for Americans.

Having an abundant food supply also gives us the freedom to not think about our food, even as we consume it. A moment at the drive through to make a snap decision, then eat it as we are focused on driving to work, home, the game… What we eat becomes nothing more than a habitual pathway in our brains. “Number 2 please.” What to drink? The only decision is how big the cup will be. “Super Size.”

The abundant calories from our careless decisions creates an crisis of over-abundance in our bodies. Over time our livers become fat, they become resistant to the insulin we create to deal with the constant onslaught of fructose, sucrose and dextrose that we drink, eat and create from carbohydrate. Insulin resistance leads to diabetes 2 and 3, and high blood pressure.

There is a growing consensus on what to do about our over-sufficient quantity of calorie choices. Government agencies that are involved are now beginning to recommend real animal fats (specifically fats that contain Omega 3 oils) for cooking to replace the ‘new and improved’ partially hydrogenated vegetable oils of last century. They are warning against fruit juices and fruit sweeteners added to foods for sweetness, as these don’t change the fact that you are eating added sugar in your diet. Cutting sweets, both added and natural is the new bullet point in fixing your weight gain.

The necessary work to stop allowing the abundant sweets in processed foods to hurt you is not conducted in the gym, but in the store. Stop buying foods in boxes and bags and you will have cut out the bulk of the added ingredients in your family’s meals. Stop buying drinks in cans and bottles and you will have cut out the added sugars and sweeteners in your family’s lives. It is much easier to decide to eat and drink right if the bad actors are not in your fridge or pantry.

Don’t continue to allow the abundance that blesses us to be a curse to your family. Two out of three people in the US are overweight or obese, and the vast majority of them are this way because of the way foods are produced, marketed and consumed. It is possible to tie the relative cheapness of our foods to subsidies for corn and soy. Our true food expenses are not really as low as the appear in the store. The true cost cannot be measured in just dollars. The true costs of these foods is all in our future.

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