Tag: foods

  • Adding Herbs Daily for the Culinary and Medicinal Benefits

    The importance of food in our holiday gatherings can not be over emphasized. In a day in age when more than 80% of adults are taking medications for health issues and 50% of our children are diagnosed with chronic diseases we need to modify our thinking about our food. Nature provided us with all the nourishing foods to eat in order to keep us healthy. Medicinal and Culinary Herbs are plants, and all plants have vitamins and minerals. They were meant to be consumed as food, not only to be used for their medicinal benefits.

    When most people think about food they romanticize it. We think about it in terms of  Grandma and Thanksgiving and First Dates, Family Gatherings going out for Pizza and Ice-cream! Picnics and campfire means s’mores and hot dogs; Christmas -cookies; Easter – chocolate eggs & candy; Halloween – more candy!  All that is fun and lovely, but it lets us forget that “we are what we eat” – and that is not a metaphor!  

    The Sad Health Damages of the Average American Diet 

    The average American consumes about 1 gallon of soda per week, which equates to more than 18 fluid ounces, or 1.5 sodas per day. These sodas are loaded with sugar, with a 12oz can containing 35-45 grams – an amount that exceeds the recommended daily intake of ~15 grams. What’s more, these sugars are typically in the form of high-fructose corn syrup, one of the cheapest, and most health-hazardous forms of sugar that can be used. 

    Even More Alarming Statistics on the Average Yearly Consumption of Food Like Products for the typical American includes:

    • 29 pounds of french fries
    • 23 pounds of pizza
    • 24 pounds of ice cream
    • 24 pounds of chemical artificial sweeteners

    But it’s crazy for us to think that if we keep do what we do and expect the outcome to be different somehow…

    There are so many ways you can weave the medicinal and culinary herbs, into your everyday cooking! 

    Such as drinking them in teas, adding them to your meals as spices, to your smoothies and sweet treats, bake with it! The point is this – nutrition comes from food and not lab made supplements, so for me and my family, we start there and we just keep on going that direction.
    Our body has countless safety mechanisms, so when we put it through the wear and tear and one or more systems fail, the others are there to pick it up and keep working. 

    Milla, mother of 3 children who have suffered with chronic disease and diagnosis such as Lyme and Autism explains how she incorporates herbs into everyday life. 

    I use fresh herbs, dried & frozen, fermented, medicinal and culinary anywhere I can! in smoothies, soups, stews, salads, baking, tea/decoctions… I even stuff dates with ground milk thistle seeds. It has become a second nature now, when I prepare food,  I think: “what herb will fly here?”

    Milla shares a plethora of Tasty, Easy and healthy, toxin-free recipes. Gluten-Dairy-MSG-Soy-Corn-Dye-Artificial anything- FREE. Organic only, unprocessed, mostly plant-based, low on fat-grain-seed-legume-nuts. Be sure to visit her website at https://www.siberiancedarland.com/

    SOURCES: 

    http://naturalsociety.com/average-american-diet-infographic/

    RECOMMENDED Reading:

    https://nourishedblessings.com/what-is-reid/

  • Are Gum Additive Safe?

    What are Gum additives and Why are they in our food?

    Gum additives are everywhere in our food supply today. Xanthan and guar gum are by far the most common. But there are many others too, such as locust bean gum (carob gum), gellen gum, cellulose gum, and relative newcomer tara gum. The savvy shopper is clued into which gum additives to avoid and which are no big deal.

    Gums are mostly comprised of indigestible polysaccharides. Some are produced from plants and some from bacterial fermentation. Others are produced from edible plants and even a few from ornamentals.

    Food manufacturers love gums because they have unique properties that add desirable texture and/or shelf life to processed foods. Typical use is for thickening, stabilizing or emulsifying. Some are more heat and cold resistant than others. Others are more acid and pH resistant. Most are utilized as powders.

    Are Gum Additives Safe?

    Examination of the most common gum additives in food today indicates that in general they are safe for occasional consumption by healthy persons with normal gut function. The exceptions to this are xanthan gum, which infants should not consume. The worst of the lot is cellulose gum. It is best avoided by everyone as it is a chemically treated, ultra cheap, industrialized product.

    Guar gum, tara gum, gellen gum, and locust bean (carob) gum are all safe in small amounts. Tara gum has a perfect safety record in the research so far, although these results are only in animal studies.

    Locust bean gum is currently under investigation for pharmaceutical use and is well tolerated even by full term infants with reflux.

    All of the gums listed in this article must be temporarily avoided for those on the GAPS or SCD diets. This is due to to unknown long term effects on gut flora and the potential for inflaming a healing gut.

    Learn more about specific gums at 

  • Buyer Beware: You HAVE To Read Labels

    HFI: Research your foods and learn to read labels. Healthy doesn’t necessarily mean free of harmful ingredients. 

    Food labeled “healthy” should be nutritious, low in added sugar, and free of trans fat and other harmful ingredients, right? Not according to the Food and Drug Administration’s current labeling guidelines.

    The rules for health claims on food products hasn’t been significantly updated since 1994, despite big advances in nutrition science.

    EWG Food Scores database has nutrition facts, ingredients and processing ratings on more than 80,000 products, and our Dietary Guidelines can help you create a healthy and nutritious diet for yourself and your family. 

    It’s clear the FDA needs to modernize its criteria for “healthy.” When we look for “healthy” foods in a grocery store, we are looking for foods that nourish our bodies and are not known to have harmful effects.

     By Dawn Undurraga, Nutritionist and Violet Batcha, Digital Media Manager
    This article originally appeared at: http://www.ewg.org/enviroblog/2017/05/buyer-beware-what-s-really-healthy-cereal.
  • The 2017 Dirty Dozen: Strawberries, Spinach Top EWG’s List of Pesticides in Produce

    The 2017 Dirty Dozen: Strawberries, Spinach Top EWG’s List of Pesticides in Produce

    Julie: My canary child can tell you if the strawberries are contaminated. Even if the label says ORGANIC – doesn’t mean it isn’t sprayed prior to planting. Driscolls causes almost instant reaction for his little body. We have to get to know our farmer before letting my littlest try the strawberries. 

    EWG’s analysis of tests by the U.S. Department of Agriculture found that nearly 70 percent of samples of 48 types of conventional produce were contaminated with residues of one or more pesticides. USDA researchers found a total of 178 different pesticides and pesticide breakdown products on the thousands of produce samples they analyzed. The pesticide residues remained on fruits and vegetables even after they were washed and, in some cases, peeled.

    “If you don’t want to feed your family food contaminated with pesticides, the EWG Shopper’s Guide helps you make smart choices, whether you’re buying conventional or organic produce,” said Sonya Lunder, an EWG senior analyst. “Eating plenty of fruits and vegetables is essential no matter how they’re grown, but for the items with the heaviest pesticide loads, we urge shoppers to buy organic. If you can’t buy organic, the Shopper’s Guide will steer you to conventionally grown produce that is the lowest in pesticides.”

    Landrigan, Dean of Global Health and Director of the Children’s Environmental Health Center at Mt. Sinai, was the principal author of a landmark 1993 National Academy of Sciences study, Pesticides in the Diets of Infants and Children. The study led to enactment of the 1996 Food Quality Protection Act that set safety standards for pesticides on foods.

    For the Dirty Dozen list, EWG singled out produce with the highest loads of pesticide residues. In addition to strawberries and spinach, this year’s list includes nectarines, apples, peaches, celery, grapes, pears, cherries, tomatoes, sweet bell peppers and potatoes.

    Key findings:

    • Nearly all samples of strawberries, spinach, peaches, nectarines, cherries and apples tested positive for residue of at least one pesticide.
    • The most contaminated sample of strawberries had 20 different pesticides.
    • Spinach samples had an average of twice as much pesticide residue by weight than any other crop. Three-fourths of spinach samples had residues of a neurotoxic pesticide banned in Europe for use on food crops – it’s part of a class of pesticides that recent studies link to behavioral disorders in young children.

    “From the surge in sales of organic food year after year, it’s clear that that consumers would rather eat fruits and vegetables grown without synthetic pesticides,” said Lunder. “But sometimes an all-organic diet is not an option, so they can use the Shopper’s Guide to choose a mix of conventional and organic produce.”

    This article originally appeared at: http://www.ewg.org/release/2017-dirty-dozen-strawberries-spinach-top-ewgs-list-pesticides-produce.
  • What Is Added To Our Foods Is Making Us Sick

    What Is Added To Our Foods Is Making Us Sick

    HFI Comment: It is SO VERY IMPORTANT to the health and well being of ourselves and our children to understand the additives in our foods. The rise of chronic disease is directly related to the increase of artificial foods, additives to our food and water and even to the amount of pesticides and herbicides we breathe and consume as residue on our foods.

    Thursday, December 01, 2016 by: Ethan A. Huff, staff writer

    They’re a staple ingredient in many processed foods, helping to maintain a food product’s texture and consistency while extending its shelf life. But chemical emulsifiers like polysorbate 80 and carboxymethylcellulose appear to be major driving factors in what many experts now admit are escalating rates of gastrointestinal disease and bowel cancer all around the world, a shocking new study has found.

    For their study, researchers from Georgia State University evaluated the metabolization of some of the more popular emulsifiers used in processed foods to see how they affect mammalian gut microflora. They tested these chemicals on mice at appropriate levels similar to what a human would encounter in common foods like baked bread, margarine, and dessert pastries.

    What they found is that the mice fed the chemicals experienced major changes to their internal microbial terrain, which resulted in a low-grade inflammation that precipitated the formation of cancer cells. A corresponding increase in “bad” bacteria offsetting the proper balance of “good” bacteria further created conditions hospitable to cancer cell growth and proliferation.

    With Crohn’s disease, ulcerative colitis, and other forms of inflammatory bowel disease on the rise, these findings have strong implications for the role that diet plays in exacerbating the colorectal cancer epidemic. The fourth most commonly diagnosed type of cancer after breast, prostate, and lung, colon cancer is a serious problem, and emulsifiers are at least partially to blame.

    “The incidence of colorectal cancer has been markedly increasing since the mid-20th century,” stated Dr. Emilie Viennois, lead author of the study, in conjunction with its publishing in the peer-reviewed journal Cancer Research. “A key feature of this disease is the presence of an altered intestinal microbiota that creates a favourable niche for tumorigenesis.”

    Vaccines often loaded with cancer-causing emulsifiersWhile food is probably the most significant source of exposure to chemical emulsifiers, vaccines are a close second. Polysorbate 80, for instance, is a common vaccine ingredient that’s used as a surfactant to reduce the surface tension between two or more liquid substances while increasing their solubility – in other words, like with food, it’s used to create a unified homogenous substance out of otherwise non-homogenous components.

    As explained by Health Impact News, polysorbate 80 is a key ingredient found in popular vaccines like those for DtaP (Infanrix), Influenza (Fluarix), Tdap (Boostrix), and Meningococcal (MenB-Trumenba). It poses many of the same risks as it does in food, and possibly even more due to the nature of its injection rather than ingestion.

    “Polysorbate 80 is used in pharmacology to assist in the delivery of certain drugs or chemotherapeutic agents across the blood-brain barrier,” explains pediatrician Dr. Lawrence Palevsky, M.D.

    “What viral, bacterial, yeast, heavy metal or other vaccine containing ingredient needs to pass into the brains of our children? Do they belong in the brain? Is that part of the needed immune response to protect our children from disease? Do vaccine materials pass across the blood-brain barrier with the help of Polysorbate 80? If so, are there complications from being in the brains of our children?” he asks.

    So while oral intake of emulsifiers like polysorbate 80 pose a direct threat to gut microbiota, intramuscular and/or intravenous intake of polysorbate 80 via vaccines poses a direct threat to the brain. In both cases, avoidance of this and other similar chemical emulsifiers seems prudent and necessary to mitigate potentially permanent damage to the body.

    The importance of maintaining a healthy ecological terrain in the gut for cancer prevention is now more evident than ever. And avoiding emulsifiers is clearly an important part of doing this, as is avoiding vaccines.

    Sources for this article include:

    DailyMail.co.uk

    MedicalXpress.com

    HealthImpactNews.com