Micronutrients: Carotenoids, Recipes: Vegetables, Whole Food

Why eat the beets, cabbage, red colors

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Summary:  This post nails the need for increased variety of vegetables for chronic disease prevention and management and addresses quantities.  It includes a delicious, phytonutrient rich, and quick recipe for eating the beets, cabbage, red colors; this subcategory of vegetables can be a hard sale to your family but you’ll learn in this post why you want to include such.  It is especially timely given the fall seasonal foods now available and your requests for more vegetable recipes.

This recipe is PALEO, SCD, GAPS, AIP, and NIGHTSHADE friendly fare, but not FODMAP friendly unless within your unique re-intro tolerance limits.  Cabbage, beets and onions are fructans, one food compound eliminated on FODMAP unless you’ve reintroduced these vegetables and you know your tolerance quantities.  Keep in mind that FODMAP loads are cumulative, and this recipe contains three fructan foods which bumps up it’s fructan total load.  One family’s tip for integrating cabbage back into their low FODMAP   lifestyle is detailed immediately below the recipe, and perhaps this preparation technique can work for you too.

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Blog: Cancer, Whole Food-Fats

Type of fat consumed and breast cancer diagnosis for Mediterranean Diet

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SUMMARY:   Women  (eating the Mediterranean diet) consuming certain healthy fats were  less likely to have a breast cancer diagnosis while other fats increased the likelihood of a breast cancer diagnosis.  Seventeen women on the low-fat diet developed breast cancer, compared with 10 on the Mediterranean diet with nuts and eight on the Mediterranean diet with olive oil.

In particular, women consuming a Mediterranean diet supplemented with extra virgin olive oil (EVOO) were less likely to be diagnosed with breast cancer.  The women in the extra virgin olive oil-heavy Mediterranean diet group got 22% of their total calories from the oil, on average. However, the researchers wrote that getting at least 15% of total calories in the form of extra virgin olive oil “seems to be instrumental for obtaining this significant protection.”  If you use EVOO, please make sure you use unadulterated EVOO… scroll down to the lightbulb here for those details.

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Blog: IBD, Blog: Microbiome, Blog: Rheumatoid Arthritis, Whole Food

SCD thoughts given DrOz 3 Day Cleanse, Microbiome

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SUMMARY:  Finally! A peek into our trillions of innards on a 3 day fruit and vegetable blitz!  Spoiler alert:  There is NOT much impact 10 days after stopping that 3 day cleanse, microbiome resulting from healing diet tenets persist!  

And that, I think, is the lesson to be learned for the healing diets such as SCD, GAPS, PALEO, AIP, WAHLs, to name a few.  Realize, the tenets of these healing diets are for everyone if you want to prevent chronic disease, not just those with chronic disease.  These protocols increase vegetables and fruits beyond what the normal Standard American Diet (SAD) yokel is consuming and adds in healthy fats so fat soluble vitamins are actually absorbed.  This is done concomitant with ditching processed foods,  including processed sugars, and other inflammatory foods.  How powerful are these tenets?  They are healing and inducing remission in messed up impoverished gut microbiomes, and some of those folks are only 80% compliant with the diet!  Nuff said.  Shouldn’t you know what these tenets are?

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Blog: Clinical Trials-Diet/Environment/Disease, Blog: IBD

50 IBD SCD remission patients: RUSH paper

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SUMMARY:  In August, 2015, RUSH University published  their study of 50 IBD Specific Carbohydrate Diet (SCD) remission patients: The Specific Carbohydrate Diet for Inflammatory Bowel Disease: A Case Series. This is the largest report on a series of patients with IBD following the SCD to date and describes their clinical characteristics.  50 patients in remission eating SCD case series are reported which comprise: 36 subjects had Crohn’s Disease, 9 subjects had Ulcerative Colitis, and 5 subjects had in-determinant IBD.  

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Recipes: Desserts, Whole Food

school lunch bag chocolate chip cookies

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SUMMARY:  I hear you… school lunch bags and dessert.  Well… here is what I pack; it is the very same chocolate chip cookie recipe that you sampled.  Actually, I always double this recipe making it in bulk using a very large stainless steel mixing bowl that I happened upon at Marshall’s.  I freeze all these cookies, and we just eat them straight out of the freezer!  They make great packable school lunch bag chocolate chip cookies! Substitutions for healing diets SCD, GAPS, and UMass IBD-AID are noted.

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Whole Food

Two week Sugar Elimination: Mind and Body physiological changes

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Summary:  A Two week Sugar Elimination challenge results in Mind and Body Physiological  Changes that are so true, vast, deep, and amazing — why anyone would not try a two week challenge, I’m clueless on.  This post provides some insightand How-To’s for doing a two week elimination of only refined sugar.   This post also includes excerpts from HOW GIVING UP REFINED SUGAR CHANGED MY BRAIN, which shares a dieter’s experiences doing this challenge.  That article is such a great read!  I wish every one would do a two week sugar elimination diet. You’d experience a revelation in Mind and Body Physiological Changes in how you feel including energy and mental clarity that are truly impossible to ignore!   Heck, even Dr. Oz’s three day vegetable, fruit, multivitamin and VSL#3 probiotic cleanse caused massive microbiome changes and you can read about that here too!

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Recipes: Salad Dressings, Condiments, Whole Food, Whole Food-Fats

Soybean oil, corn oil, diabetes, metabolic syndrome & P-450

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Summary:  Learn the association between Soybean oil, Corn oil, Diabetes, Metabolic Syndrome & P-450 inhibition, the main liver detox enzyme, having significant effects on expression of genes that metabolize drugs & toxicants.  Now is the time to be wary of and consider eliminating polyunsaturated fatty acids soybean oil and corn oil (as well as vegetable oil —since this typically contains soybean oil) as they were found to:

  1. Link to diabetes and metabolic syndrome. In the US, metabolic syndrome is estimated to be present in 20–30% of adults and 3–10% of children [100,101]. 
  2. Significantly affect the expression of many genes that metabolize drugs and other foreign compounds that enter the body, suggesting that a soybean oil-enriched diet could affect one’s response to drugs and environmental toxicants. The single most highly represented family of dysregulated genes was that of the [key liver detox] cytochrome P450 (Cyp) genes (30 genes total).

Also worth noting: the soybean plus fructose diet had less severe metabolic effects compared to the soybean oil diet, but it did cause more negative effects in the kidney and a marked increase in prolapsed rectums, a symptom of inflammatory bowel disease (IBD), which like obesity is on the rise.

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Blog: Clinical Trials-Diet/Environment/Disease, Blog: IBD

Home test finds gut inflammation before relapse (3 months prior)

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SUMMARY:  Imagine a home test differentiating between Irritable Bowel Syndrome (IBS) and autoimmune Inflammatory Bowel Disease (IBD)! The time is nearing…  IBdoc is a cheap easy to use home test that measures gut inflammation and presently is used in Europe.  It is still 2 to 3 years away from FDA approval in the US, but clinical trial recruitment has begun; make the call and participate (see below for details.) The device finds gut inflammation before relapse or flare: actually 3 months ahead of IBD relapse giving you (and your physician) time to address such.  The device hopefully too will be found capable of differentiating between IBD versus IBS.  Update: tweeted from 11th Congress of ECCO March 16-19, 2016 presentation: fecal calprotectin rises 4 months before flares. 

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Micronutrients: Carotenoids, Pillar: Toxins, Recipes: Salad Dressings, Condiments, Whole Food-Fats, Whole Foods-Fats_Brands of Unadulterated EVOO, UC Davis PDF

Meet the FATS & Best Salad Dressing Oil, Part1

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SUMMARY: The focus of this post is to better your understanding of vegetable oils and unsaturated fats.  Raw vegetable salads are chock-full of important vitamins and nutrients, but the latest science says you won’t get much benefit without eating them along with both the right type & amount of fat. In fact, essentially no or very low absorption of carotenoids was observed when salads with fat-free salad dressing were consumed (see this study or this study, Table 3.) 

In this post learn: the preferred fat/oil for best carotenoid absorption (spoiler alert: that would be unadulterated, organic, and cold pressed EVOO brands which are listed in the  UC Davis pdf report here — scroll down to the lightbulb for more details), that you can actually ditch dressing and instead add half an avocado, or you can add cooked eggs to an incredibly small amount of dressing to even further boost carotenoid absorption. Make certain you consider the sections entitled What inhibits Carotenoid Absorption for possible impact due to your particular health status, and the tips for Decoding Labels.

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Recipes: Desserts, Recipes: Meat, Whole Food

4th of July Fruit Roundup & Burger Thoughts

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Sharing an EASY 4th of July Fruit Roundup, and a Grassfed Burger recipe, for party & picnic ideas, although honestly, these are fun & fabulous anytime!

And the best part… absolutely NO artificial colorings, artificial flavorings, or additives!  Nature is providing all!

Tip:   Just dip banana slices in lemon juice to prevent discoloration.

Berries… please buy organic as they are on EWG’s Dirty List:

EWG 2015 Dirty and Clean List
Source: http://ecowatch.com/2015/02/26/shopper-guide-pesticides-produce/

For the pie recipe…  please don’t use canola oil… just use coconut oil!!!  You will soon see the post detailing transfat (and other) problems with canola oil — all industrial seed oils for that matter!

Burger thoughts

For mouthwatering burgers:Grassfed meat has fatty acids that differ from grainfed meats. Unique taste results and non-conventional cooking is required to bring out the tastefulness. The reference links in the Notes section are great for understanding fatty acid differences. Source: biomeonboardawareness.com

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