Lesson
One
Good Food Bad Food
There
is good food and there is bad food.
There is food that when consumed will nourish our bodies, make our hair
and skin glow, our fingernails and teeth strong, our bones straight and our
eyes bright. Good food makes us think
quicker, see better, run faster, grow taller, move with grace and live longer
with a high degree of wellness.
What,
then, does bad food do? When we consume bad
food, our bodies are not nourished, our cells are deprived and our organs pay
the price. Consuming bad food results
in inflammation, fat building, malnutrition, bad skin, bones, teeth, hair and
nails, slow thinking, aching joints and eventual age related chronic disease. All of which is preventable. You could say that healthcare reform begins
in your kitchen.
If
you are reading this book, I assume that you have the same interest as I have
in the benefits of preparing and eating foods that keep us young, foods that
slow the aging process. The aging
process to which I refer is cellular aging, a complicated process of cell
replication that takes place in our bodies as new cells replace old. But, simply put, cellular aging was once
described to me in this way. Think of
your favorite photograph, a self portrait of you at your best. Now make a photocopy. You can see that it is not exactly as perfect
as the original. Now take the copy and
make another copy. You can see this one
is even less perfect than the second one.
The sharpness dulls, the contrasts lessen. Now take that copy and make another copy and
so forth and so on. That is what happens
to our cells as they replicate.
So,
you can see that if we cause our cells to become damaged or imperfect, as they
replicate, the damage and imperfections are magnified time and again. That is why at fourteen years old we feel
well and physically fit eating a diet of hamburgers and fries, but at forty-four
years old, our arteries are lined with plaque, our joints ache and our fasting
glucose has risen from 85 to 115, a mere one point per year. Who would notice?
I
noticed, first, in my forties when I began to experience osteoarthritis, then
in my fifties when I began to experience swelling in my ankles and pain in my
back, and finally nearing sixty, when my medical history described me as pre
obese, pre diabetic, pre hypertensive, pre high cholesterol, and pre
hypothyroid. I was suffering from
symptoms of non specific origin (although my physicians were quick to assign
labels such as adult onset diabetes, hypercholesterolemia, hypothyroidism,
adult onset asthma, psoriatic arthritis, rheumatoid arthritis, and pseudo gout
), symptoms
that included swelling in knees, fingers and ankles, muscle pain, extreme
fatigue, chronic sinusitis, hair loss, dry skin, occasional short term memory
loss as I searched for forgotten words. I was prone to skin infections and my weight
had ballooned out of control. I had none
of these problems in my past history.
Always
the skeptic, I rejected my physician’s offer of pharmaceuticals, one for each
of the symptoms, his glib assessment that my symptoms were part of the
inevitable aging process and his advice to accept it as a natural part of
life. Instead, I took the advice of my
wise and learned chiropractor who gently but persistently advocated for
nutrition as a remedy. Her advice
started me on a path to wellness.
As
a chef educator I have had the experience of teaching in our public schools,
teaching young adults how to cook. We
are all aware of the obesity epidemic and the rapid increase of adult onset
diabetes and assume it is the result of fast food giants and soda pop. It is,
but not that alone. It is also the fault of the parent who prepares quick fix
foods, the pop tarts, hamburger helper and pizza, sandwiches with 12 oz of meat
and 6 oz of cheese, refined flour products, and all the over salted over
sweetened foods from quick service restaurants.
These are the foods my students dined on every day.
Even
the weight conscious teens, the young women especially, who strive to be model thin and are told to
eat less meat, more pasta, salad and cheese, even they are at risk. Alfredo anyone? Do you know what a fig is, or what tortilla
chips are made from or have you ever roasted a red beet? "What's a beet", one of my students
asked.
It didn’t take much research for me to
discover the connection between my years of feasting on the western diet of
meat and bread, meat and pasta, pasta and cheese and cheese and bread and my
burgeoning weight. I was convinced that
my adult onset symptoms were also, in fact, the result of years of consuming
inflammatory foods even when I thought I was dieting.
Diets
like Atkins, the Zone, South Beach, and the Mediterranean diets successfully led
to weight loss, but you talk about yoyo diet.
That was me, down ten, up five, down five up ten. Never once did it occur to me that the whole
time that I was feeding my body food to lose weight, what I was really losing
was my health. Yes, most of these diets
encourage fewer carbohydrates, but they recommend replacing them with excess
meat and dairy. Or, they discourage fat,
eliminating meats and replacing them with grains. In either case, these inflammatory foods accelerate
cellular aging.
The only publicized diet that I know
of that resembles the anti aging diet is one followed by my older sister,
Michael’s mother, who like her son, at age eight was diagnosed with juvenile
diabetes. After 60 years of eating good
food, she now looks 10 years younger than me, is far more physically fit and is
never bothered by the nagging aches and pains that I battled for decades.
The
diabetic diet may not be referred to as anti aging or anti inflammatory, but
that is exactly what it is. The same
foods that are considered to be inflammatory are the foods that also cause
havoc with how our body processes sugars which in turn causes more inflammation
and symptoms of disease. So, whether it
is called the diabetic diet, the anti inflammatory diet, the anti aging diet,
or even the alkaline acid diet, it is one in the same.
Based
on the principle that foods which are alkaline producing are also anti inflammatory (good foods that
promote wellness and therefore are anti –aging) and those that are acid
producing are inflammatory (bad foods
which promote cellular aging), I embarked on a dietary change that lead to my
recovery. Alkalinity and acidity, the ph
to which I am referring is not the ph of the food itself, but the ph of the
food after it is metabolized by the body.
So, for example, a lemon has an acidic ph, but when processed in the
body it is alkaline forming. Don’t
confuse the two. There are dozens of
websites that explain in detail the science behind the acid or alkaline diet
including lists of foods with their corresponding ph as the result of the
metabolic process in the body. Do your
own research, and you will find that they correlate with lists of anti
inflammatory vs inflammatory foods as well.
Eating
a diet that consisted of at least 70% alkaline producing foods had a dramatic
effect. My blood glucose returned to 85 and
my hypothyroidism disappeared along with all of the other age related symptoms. And although it was not the goal of my new anti-aging
dietary habits, my weight dropped considerably as well.
Most
of the time, my plate was 75% to 80% alkaline producing and the rest slightly
acidic producing. It was not a matter of
counting calories or weighing out portions, but rather, how much of my plate
was covered with what type of food. As
long as more than half of my plate was filled with alkaline producing food,
three quarters was better, I was good to go.
Here’s
an example. The dinner plate of a
typical western diet is a center of the plate meat such as steak, pork or ham
(takes up ½ of the plate), a heap of starch like mashed potatoes (1/4 to ½ of
the plate) and a spoonful of peas (or none at all). The dinner plate of a typical anti aging diet
is a portion of protein such as chicken, equal to about 4 oz. (1/4 or less of
the plate), an even smaller portion of starch, if at all, such as brown rice or
whole grain ziti (1/8 of the plate), and the rest of the plate filled with steamed
fresh green beans, and garden fresh tomatoes and cucumbers with oil and fresh
squeezed lemon. Our wellness requires a
change of mindset from the current concept of center of the plate protein to center
of the plate fresh vegetable.
In
addition, it was not a matter of either or, but how alkaline or acidic
producing as well. For example, lemon
and watercress are extremely high alkaline producing, while blueberries are
alkaline producing but not as high as lemons or watercress. So, knowing that, there are little tricks to
having your cake and eating it too, so to speak. If I want to indulge myself by having a glass
of red wine which is slightly acid producing, I add a big squeeze of fresh
lemon juice and throw in the lemon rind as well. Or if I am craving beef which is highly acid
producing, I accompany it with a gigantic watercress salad.
The
difficult part at first, was creating interesting, flavorful, and feel good
meals without the use of many of our favorites from our western diet. A hamburger patty and bun is 100% highly acid
producing. Spaghetti and meatballs is
100% highly acid producing as is pizza with pepperoni. I was raised in an Italian/Scottish
household where pasta of some kind was served almost every day unless we were
eating beef and barley soup. What is the
food group with the highest acid producing rating? Grains! What is the meat with the highest acid
producing rating? Beef! This created a challenge for me.
We
love our companion pets, primarily our
cats and dogs and
wouldn’t think of deliberately feeding them food that causes inflammation or
leads to chronic disease. No, we feed them
only the best---the foods that are especially prepared for them to promote
shiny coats and bright eyes. Why, then,
do we not do as much for ourselves?
I
can’t go back and redo my youth, undo the harm that has been done, but I can go
forward and continue reaping the benefits of eating an anti-aging diet, one
that is rich in good foods---foods that are anti-inflammatory, promote wellness
and reduce my risks for age related chronic disease like heart disease,
arthritis and diabetes. And, I can teach others to do the same.
So,
it is for all of you who believe as I do, that bad food leads to cellular aging
and chronic disease, and that good food leads to wellness and longevity, that I
have written this book, a compilation of information, cooking methods and
recipes, the basis for anti-aging gastronomy.
In the words of the father of western medicine---Let food be thy medicine…Hippocrates.
Lesson
Two
Sugar is Sugar
First,
I would like to give some discussion to three foods that are a huge part of
most American diets, but which should be completely eliminated for the
devastating effect that they have on our health. These are common ingredients found in almost
all store bought prepared packaged foods.
They are ingredients for which there are no recipes or cooking methods
to discuss, for they are additives which for all purposes of nutrition, have no
value. The first is sugar.
Sugar
is sugar. A true statement, one that is
used as a marketing tool to convince the viewer of the television advertisement
that corn sugar, the new moniker for what was previously known consumer wide as
high fructose corn syrup, is simply nature’s sugar in another form. Whether
it is corn sugar or cane sugar, the body doesn’t know the difference, says
the concerned parent as he strolls through the corn fields while his school age
daughter holds onto his hand and skips alongside. Using a clever framing
technique, the producers get the viewer to make the decision that if corn sugar
is the same as cane sugar, then it follows that high fructose corn syrup is
okay for our kids.
Well,
they are right about one thing. Sugar is sugar. Whether it is high fructose corn syrup, corn
sugar, natural sugar in the raw, brown
sugar, beet or cane sugar, or the refined white sugar in just about every cake
and cookie in the world, they are all equally bad.
