PHYTOCHEMICALS: Your Word of the Day--or of Your Life

Just watched this PBS pledge video with Joel Fuhrman M.D., who says that the average American's diet contains a mere 10% of fruit and vegetables. What is even more disturbing is that 5% of these fruits and vegetables are actually white potatoes in the form of french fries, mashed potatoes, etc. And this is exactly why so many of us are prone to disease: because we are not consuming a diet rich in micronutrients and phytochemicals.

So it's time to get to know a new formula and commit it to memory:

H = N/C

Health is defined by the amount of nutrients we consume divided by how many calories we eat. So someone can be eating the same amount of calories every day, but one is healthy and the other isn't. It doesn't take long to realize that the healthy person is the one who is eating food with actual nutrients in them vs. the sick person who is not eating any nutrient-dense food or very little of it. This is a simple problem that can be easily corrected. How to do this?

He says to eat foods with an abundance of micronutrients and phytochemicals. Or put simply, eat unrefined plant-based foods, which are whole grains, beans/legumes, fruits, nuts and seeds (not too many nuts if you're trying to lose weight) but most importantly, eat vegetables. As he says, "Salad is the main dish." Every other food should be considered a side to complement your main meal: a big-ass salad, loaded to the brim with fresh fruits and vegetables. 

Why should we do this? Because it is only recently being discovered that these foods actually contain disease-fighting nutrients that are not in animal-based foods, and you certainly aren't going to find them in processed foods. So let's stay in the produce section of the grocery store, shall we? 

Meat, eggs, milk, butter, cheese, refined white flour, and sugar all lack these non-essential disease-fighting, cancer-fighting, diabetes-preventing agents, and yet these are the foods that most of us eat. In fact, we make them 95% of our diet! I say "non-essential" because these nutrients are not necessary for our survival as opposed to the essential amino acids, but these "non-essential" nutrients are essential to fight many if not all of the diseases caused by the SAD diet. That is right: if you are not aware of it, what we eat can kill us. It's high-time we made this connection--thankfully, with all the info on the internet these days, many of us are beginning to see this relationship: 

Good food = HEALTH. Bad food = DISEASE. 

But if the equation is so simple, why do we continue to ignore it, even though millions of us are now dying each year because we don't honor this simple rule? Heart disease, Cancer, and Health care are killing us, and they are all related, but when are we going to start paying attention to the causal relationship?

Emma Mustich's fascinating article on salon.com might help answer this question. It is worth a read.

Eat B(right),

Veggie Daddy

The Kerfuffle of the GMO Food Industry: We are Mostly to Blame

If 2/3 of processed food on the shelves is genetically engineered and most of the grains our livestock eats is also genetically modified as Organic Connections Magazine points out, then it seems our modern-day society is in a bit of a kerfuffle. When I think of the size of the problem, I pretty much just throw up my hands. What is to be done about it?

Apparently, GMO food is far better labelled in Europe than over here, so it's clearly possible to fix or at least improve the situation. And yet, we are in the dark ages when it comes to our food labels. Why is this?

The only answer I can come up with besides the fact that our regulators and politicians are in cahoots with the big food giants is that we are to blame for buying food that is not properly labelled. Put simply, it's our fault. We still shop at the grocery stores and we do not demand of the grocery stores that they start selling food that is properly labelled. We just buy it anyway, even though statistics say the majority of us do not want to eat genetically-engineered food. So what should we do?

Buy organic foods as much as possible, and look for foods that are labelled Non-GMO. Grocery stores know what's up. If they know that the consumers are buying organic non-GMO foods as their fancy little computers tell them every second an item is swiped at the check-out, they will start stocking more of those foods. The reason they are not stocking more non-GMO foods is because we still keep buying them. And so nothing changes.

I'd love to say it's all the fault of the politicians and the food giants and the farmers, but this is a cop-out. As global consumers, we really lack personal responsibility. It's really our own stubborn laziness. As long as we continue buying the GMO food at our local grocery stores, they'll keep selling it. It's the basic law of supply and demand. Demand for product rises, supply of product then rises, as do prices. And from what I see every time we go shopping at Dominion or Sobey's, nothing is going to change anytime soon. It's one hell of a kerfuffle, and one in which the majority of us could clearly care less about or we'd change our ways. And until we do, that sign my wife took a picture of in Oakland last year is just that: a meaningless sign.

It would seem that 99% of us do indeed consent to what is going on. And that is our modern-day comedy of errors of which 99% of us are willing players.

Eat B(right),
Veggie Daddy

Making Pizza? Hold the Cheese, Please.

If you take a quick glance at this picture of your atypical pizza, you might notice something missing. Yep, that's right. It's cheese! Now at first, it might look odd to see a pizza without any cheese on it, and if this seems strange to you, at this point, you're probably in one of two camps. Right now, you're either saying to yourself, "How disgusting!" or "How delicious!" I would have been in the former category about a year ago. I didn't care what you put on the pizza, but my attitude was, "It better have some goddamned cheese on it or I ain't eating it!"

It's probably been about a year or so since I've stopped eating pizza with cheese. The reason is because my wife started to put all these crazy vegetable combinations on the pizzas, and the plain fact of the matter was, a whole bunch of processed pasteurized mozarella cheese melted all over the veggies made it taste like a gooey, disgusting mess. Another thing I learned once I stopped the cheese craze was that once the cheese was gone, something magical happened: I could actually taste the taste of all the veggies, the herbs, the spices. It all tasted so much better. The cheese actually masked the flavor and I would just taste the cheese.

This pizza here is butternut squash, red onion, and kale. Can you see how cheese would just ruin this pizza? These kinds of pizzas, and by that I mean vegan, taste way better without the cheese. Don't take my word for it, try it yourself. And if you've got a bread machine like we do, I'd substitute a half cup of the white flour for whole wheat.

Eat B(right),
Veggie Daddy