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

To Eat Living Food or Dead Food, That Is The Question

Breakfast time!

Here's a picture of a typical Veggie Daddy Breakfast:

I juice the carrots, the lemon, two oranges and voila!

I drink it up! YUM. (No animals were inhumanely slaughtered or treated in the making of this breakfast.) Took all of of 5 minutes to make. Meanwhile, my girls nibbled on grapes, cucumber slices, orange pieces, watermelon, and they each split a home-made, vegan peanut-butter and chocolate muffin.

Now I have to make the school lunch. Here it is:

My girl's lunch. The braised-cauliflower and Basmati rice pilaf from last night, carrots, cucumbers, and grapes, and a juice box, not that she needs it, but you pick your battles. I would prefer her to just drink water, but I'm not an extremist (shrug.)

Veggie Daddy Food for Thought:

They say you are what you eat, so you have two choices: 1) Eat food that is alive, which has color, vibrancy, and essential nutrients; 2) Eat food that is dead.

Let's not forget what we know from the first law of thermodynamics: Energy can neither be created nor destroyed; it can only be transformed from one state to another.

So it stands to reason that eating food that is alive with energy will keep us vital and healthy. I don't know about you, but I'm pretty sure that CAFO-related dead cows and chickens don't move too much. Perhaps it's because they lack vital energy.

Rudolf Steiner says some very interesting things about what happens when we consume dead flesh. He was pretty much what we know today as a vegetarian. That guy was way ahead of his time. But there were good reasons he didn't eat any meat. Hindus and Buddhists neither. Look it up sometime!

But even if you do eat meat as I did for most of my life, the more raw food you eat the better. Try to find a balance if you can. If it's only 10% right now, try to bump it up to 20% raw a day. As you can see above, I eat raw for breakfast and in between lunch and dinner. And the last time I ate meat was this past X-mas, so I know how good meat tastes. But we really should go easier on it, best to take it out altogether, which I'll discuss all the reasons for some other time. And remember, when you start to introduce more of the REAL FOOD into your lifestyle, you will notice incredible changes in what your body wants to eat. Trust me.

Finally, here's the picture of what I ate an hour ago. That's my girl reaching into the bag:

We ate Tamari-roasted almonds and pistachios. My little one ate the pistachios and honey pitted dates. YUM!

One last tip: I try to eat only raw food until lunch time. Raw food has the most vital (alive) energy of any food. When we eat it, that energy gets transferred to us. If the food is dead, then there's no vital energy there. Not a good match for us, I don't think.

And remember, when you eat fruits and veggies, it's a general fact that the darker (or more colorful) the berry, the sweeter the juice, but it's also the most nutritious. Beets, carrots, oranges, sweet potato--packed to the gills with nutrients.

Eat B(right),

Veggie Daddy

The More Real Food You Eat, The Less Food You Will Eat

FOOD DIARY

Dinner time! I made this dish here, an Indian-style braised-cauliflower with a Basmati rice pilaf and toasted slivered almonds on the side. It was soooo good, all four of us ate it, and I had two helpings.

So right now, I am so sated by all the nutrient-dense foods I've had today that I don't even have room for the carrot cake that my wife somehow dropped out of her ass when I wasn't looking. I don't even know when she made it, I didn't see her do it. She's quick and sneaky like that. And she's not even supposed to make anything on Mother's Day, but there you go (shrug.)

Here's the cake which I am too full to eat right now:

And now for another Veggie Daddy Fun Fact:

The more nutrient-dense foods you eat, the more sated, full, you will actually feel, so much so, that you can't even eat a piece of carrot cake even though you only had a few pieces of apple and peanut butter for lunch, as in my case today. (I also had another peanut-butter and chocolate muffin on the way to Cost-co. Yes, we shop at Cost-Co. The horror, I know.)

But it's the truth. When your body gets the nutrients it needs, as opposed to many of the empty calories I used to eat with all of the processed non-foods that I see so many people throw in their grocery carts, that I used to throw in our grocery cart for years, your body will send a signal to your brain that you are done, finito. And you will eat LESS.

Tonight, I enjoyed the dinner so much that I think I ate to 90-95% of my capacity, most likely because I skipped lunch and thought it'd be fine to eat a bit more for dinner. Though, when it comes to eating, I know I shouldn't listen to my brain on an intellectual level but on a physical one. Nevertheless, eat more I did, and now I'm done. Totally sated. So stuffed I can't eat home-made carrot cake. Even though I hardly ate any lunch. Which leads me to my...

Veggie Daddy Conclusion:

If you want to lose weight, eat more real food, and thus you will automatically eat less.

This is true for me anyway because I have been (mostly) a vegetarian for the past ten years and ate loads of processed food for all those years. I couldn't gain any weight, no matter how many cookies I ate, but I also never seemed to feel full. I was always hungry, constantly. And now I know why: I was eating empty calories, my body wasn't getting what it needed, just what it thought it wanted, er, craved.

I craved cookies, ice-cream, butter, cheese, I ate eggs, drank milk with my cookies, and I always complained to my wife how the vegetarian dinners never seemed to be substantial enough for a growing boy like me. (I weigh 140 lbs. and I'm 6 feet tall.) I was always hungry. And whenever we went to the grocery store, I'd throw in lots of shit in the cart, and our grocery bills were always more when I went shopping with her. Lots more. That's rarely the case now. On both counts. I eat way less and we spend way less, and I feel more sated than I ever have in my whole life.

This is why I am writing this blog, to just share what I have/am discovering. I think it is amazing and I would like to pass it on.

So, the more real food you eat, the less of it you will eat, and so you have no choice but to lose weight. You don't even have a choice on the matter because your body, once sated, will not let you go past the mark. Perhaps this is what Buddhists mean by enlightenment. Once we become conscious/enlightened to the essential Buddha-nature that surrounds us everywhere, it becomes almost impossible not to see what lies down in the murky depths, what has always laid down under the murky depths of what we call reality, which is really just The Matrix, you know. I digress...

At Cost-Co, here is what we bought:

Canola Oil

Soy Sauce

Dempster's Ancient Grains Bread (processed)

Carrots

Red Grapes

Fry's Cocoa (processed)

Larabars (processed)

Gala Apples

Raisins

Dried Mangoes (processed)

Pistachios (the label of which says allergy warning: contains pistachio nuts)

Butter Lettuce (not to be confused with butterface)

Pineapple (Grill 'em and top with ginger ice-cream)

Avocados

Bagels (processed)

Dried bluberries (processed)

Bill total: $130

We also went to Dominion, bill total: $81.

So we're spending $210 this week on food. We have spent an average of $700 on food for the past three months for a family of four. This average also includes anything else you care to buy at Dominion that is non food-related, like cleaning supplies, toiletries and the like. (We don't every buy cleaning supplies, though, highly toxic and a big waste of moulah.)

So, $700 a month for a family of four, shopping at Dominion, Cost-Co, and sometimes Sobey's.

The only reason I mention this is because I want to dispel any myths right now about how it costs so much to eat real food. As you can see, this is clearly not the case. By the way, do you know how much you're paying for food each month? If not, I strongly encourage you to try it out. It was pretty revealing for me.

Eat B(right),

Veggie Daddy

Welcome to Vegg On the Rock

Welcome to the first ever (that I know of) vegetarian diary/blog here in St. John's.

For those of you who have no idea who the hell I am, I am Veggie Daddy, vegging out here on the rock of Newfoundland. The reason for this blog? You can't buy tempeh anywhere in this entire city of St. John's.

"What the hell is tempeh? I have never heard of such a thing!" you might say. That's a good question.

"Why the hell would I want to eat tempeh?" Another great question.

Hence this blog. I am a thirty-something unemployed skinny ("Chicken-Legs" I used to be called) dad and I want my tempeh! And I am shocked, not really, that the world is going forward, at least the people in it are (some of the people anyway) that with all the info out there, the Dominion here in St. John's tells me that there is not enough demand here for tempeh. Let's get this under-rated/valued commodity here on the rock.

So that's mainly what this blog is for. It will also be a food diary about what I am eating each day, and what goes on in that crazy head of mine when I make a choice about what to eat and why I choose to eat it. Most of this info is already out there, of course. But for some strange reason, no one here on the rock wants tempeh. I am determined to get to the bottom of this, even if it's my last bite on earth. Huh?

More posts to come, hopefully of the educational/informative kind. Feel free to vent/comment.

Question of the day: Why the hell don't you want to buy any tempeh?

Eat Bright,

Veggie Daddy