Category — Articles - Diet and Nutrition

Blood Pressure

The key to understanding the blood pressure issue is that blood pressure is a biological marker, a non-specific indicator, not a disease or an entity to treat. But what we have is the treatment of abstractions, numbers that mean very little by themselves. It’s similar to the way that the public education system “teaches to the test” — we have medicine treating to the test, by the numbers.

The reference range for what’s considered “normal” is arbitrarily defined and keeps narrowing so that just about every adult can fit into some category of hypertension or pre-hypertension and given drugs. The “diagnosis” of hypertension rarely even includes any understanding of causative factors which might indicate different treatments for each individual, but the drugs are usually given in a rather hit-or-miss fashion.

There are so many factors that can cause false high readings, so the measurement itself isn’t reliable even if we were to assume that the test might be meaningful. We’re not cookie-cutter people, and blood pressure naturally fluctuates throughout the day under normal circumstances, and is supposed to rise under stress. But the one snapshot reading while under the influence of white-coat syndrome doesn’t represent anything that can be interpreted meaningfully.

Killing the messenger by lowering blood pressure usually doesn’t accomplish anything, and creates iatrogenic disease. Although sometimes the messenger itself can become dangerous and needs to be dealt with while the source of the problem is also being addressed. When blood pressure drugs are used judiciously in this way, they can be useful, but the majority of blood pressure lowering drugs are given irrationally.

Cholesterol

“The diet-heart idea (the idea that saturated fats and cholesterol cause heart disease) is the greatest scientific deception of our times.” –George Mann, MD, former Professor of Medicine and Biochemistry at Vanderbilt University, Tennessee; heart disease researcher

The cholesterol deception is politically driven like the blood pressure issue, and the cholesterol-lowering statin drugs are among the most expensive drugs on the market. No wonder it’s so important to get everyone on them! The studies that the medical establishment have used to connect high cholesterol to heart disease were flawed, and there’s really no evidence that high cholesterol is a medical problem.

Cholesterol is actually needed for hormone production, brain and nervous system function, and low cholesterol is much more of a problem than high. Cholesterol is protective of the artery walls, and the notion that the buildup of plaque causes atherosclerosis is unfounded. There’s never been any correlation seen between high cholesterol levels, even the dreaded LDL, and athersclerosis.

There’s a hypothesis that atherosclerosis is infectious in origin and that LDL cholesterol helps to inhibit dangerous bacteria. I would look to the reason why the bacteria are there in the first place and not blame the bacteria necessarily, but it’s clear that LDL is no culprit.

So when blood pressure or cholesterol are thought to be high, first we need to look at whether it really is high enough to be a meaningful indication, or whether what we’re looking at is normal fluctuation. When blood pressure and cholesterol are elevated beyond normal fluctuations, this is really an indication of the body’s effort to maintain homeostasis in the face of certain underlying disturbances. So neither “hypertension” nor “hypercholesterolemia” are actual diseases, but rather they should be seen as signs of some underlying disease(s) or imbalance that need to be addressed. Bringing the numbers down without addressing the underlying cause is often unwarranted.

The problem with statin drugs

The cholesterol-lowering statin drugs, besides depleting needed cholesterol, deplete many other important nutrients. The main nutrient depletions are COQ10, essential fatty acids, folic acid and vit B12.

CoQ10 depletion weakens the heart muscle, and can lead to congestive heart failure, angina or myocardial infarction. CoQ10 improves the efficiency of the heart and reduces hypertension, so CoQ10 depletion could have a range of adverse cardiac effects, as well as weakness of other muscles.

CoQ10 deficiency can also lead to gum problems (and gum health can improve amazingly with CoQ10 supplementation!)

In addition to the CoQ10 depletion, the bile acids are also reduced, so that the fat soluble vitamins (A, D, E, F, K) may not be able to function properly. Lowering of cholesterol could lead to deficiency symptoms of those vitamins as well.

The bottom line here is that statin drugs interfere with the metabolism of ALL fats. The essential fatty acids are necessary for so many hormonal functions, bone health, the nervous system, etc.. And fats in general are necessary for brain function - no wonder that so many people on statin drugs are declining in cognitive function.

If you’re on these drugs and you want to come off them, work with a skilled naturopathic or nutritional physician to do this safely and assess your individual needs. Professional support is advisable, but you can be part of the decision making process and ultimately make your own choices. There’s more to the issue than “The number is high; we need to put you on a drug!”

For more information:
Cholesterol and Health
The Benefits of Cholesterol
Cholesterol Myths
Why the Treatment of Hypertension Has Become Such a Deplorable Fiasco

Many people try eliminating wheat/gluten and grains from their diet, to find that the gluten-free breads are pretty awful. Here are some really tasty alternatives!

First some quick-bread recipes using almond flour, that are easy to make. They’re all grain-free, although some contain ingredients that are somewhat of a compromise– heated dairy products and honey, for example (which are terrific raw).

But for some people, getting off wheat or grains is an important step, and these can help fill in the gap. Usually you can make some substitutions if you don’t like certain ingredients. These recipes are rather forgiving, not like yeasted breads that can fail miserably if you deviate from the recipe.

See below the recipes for mail-order sources for ingredients.

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Parmesan-Herb Bread
From Lucy’s Specific Carbohydrate Diet Cookbook (posted with permission)

2 1/2 cups almond flour
1 cup grated parmesan cheese
1 1/2 teaspoon mixed herbs (oregano, basil, thyme, etc.)
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon salt
2 eggs
3 tablespoons butter, melted
3/4 cup dry curd cottage cheese or Farmer cheese
1/2 cup water
1-2 cloves garlic, optional

Preheat oven to 325F.

Combine dry ingredients (first 5). In blender or food processor, blend all other ingredients until smooth. Stir everything together.

Scoop dough into 3 small buttered loaf pans, or two larger. Bake 50-55 minutes or until done. Cool loaves before removing from pans.

To make crackers, chill the baked loaf (easier to slice when cold), slice baked loaf into 1/4 inch slices, bake at 200 degrees until very crispy.

This bread keeps well in the fridge or freezer.

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Cinnamon-Ginger Cookes

4 tablespoons butter, melted
1/3 cup honey
1/2 tsp cinnamon
1 tsp ginger
1/8 tsp salt
1/4 tsp baking soda
2 cups almond flour
1/2 cup grated coconut (optional)

Preheat oven to 300F.
Place butter in mixing bowl. Add all other ingredients, stirring flour in last. Form dough into 1-inch diameter balls and place on a buttered cookie sheet. Bake 10-15 minutes, or until done. Watch that they don’t burn around the edges.
You can adjust the spices to taste, or add others like nutmeg, cloves, etc.

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Almond Spice Cake
From Lucy’s Specific Carbohydrate Diet Cookbook

4 tbsp butter, melted
1/3 cup honey + a little more
1/2 cup homemade yogurt
2 eggs, beaten
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
Spices: 1 tsp cinnamon, 1 tsp allspice, 1/2 tsp nutmeg, 1/4 tsp ground cloves
1/2 tsp baking soda
1/4 tsp salt
2 1/2 cups almond flour
1/2 cup walnuts, chopped
1/3 cup raisins (optional)

Preheat oven to 310F
In mixing bowl, stir together butter, honey, yogurt, eggs. Stir in all other ingredients. Spread batter into a buttered 8 inch x 8 inch baking pan, or loaf pan. Bake 30 min or until done.
Optional frosting:
1 cup cream cheese or dripped yogurt (let yogurt drain through colander)
6 tbsp butter, room temperature
3 tbsp honey
1 teaspoon vanila extract
Combine all ingredients, chill.
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Banana Bread or muffins
From Lucy’s Specific Carbohydrate Diet Cookbook

3 tbsp butter, melted
1/4 cup honey
2 eggs, beaten
2 ripe bananas, mashed
3/4 tsp baking soda
1/4 tsp salt
3 cups almond flour
1 cup walnuts, chopped (optional)

Preheat oven 310F
In mixing bowl, stir together all ingredients, adding flour and walnuts last. Scoop batter into 3 buttered loaf pans or two large ones, filling 3/4 full. Batter can also go into muffin pans.

Bake loaves 45-50 min; muffins 20-25 min
Cool before slicing.

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ALMOND FLOUR:

Almond flour can be mail ordered through:
Lucy’s Kitchen Shop, 1-888-484-2126 (In WA)
or email Lucy Rosset
Lucy’s Kitchen Shop

Information about the Specific Carbohydrate diet:

The SCD diet is mainly for people with intestinal disorders such as colitis or Crohn’s disease, but is also helpful for all kinds of immune problems and those who don’t tolerate wheat or gluten. It is completely free of sugar and all grain.

See:
Book: Breaking the Vicious Cycle by Elaine Gottschall

Cookbook: Lucy’s Specific Carbohydrate Diet Cookbook (order directly from Lucy)
Lucy’s Kitchen Shop

CHEBE BREAD is a delicious gluten-free Brazilian bread made from manioc (tapioca).

Here are some preliminary thoughts just to introduce the topic of nutrition from a “dynamic” view, which opens up a whole new vista which I’m currently exploring.

Let’s start with something our inner wisdom already knows - there’s a real difference between a “living” food and its overcooked, pasteurized, microwaved, or industrially processed counterpart. The difference is chi; prana; orgone energy. But what needs to be examined is how that energy actually works to nourish us.

What we’re really extracting from foods is not the biochemical constituents, not chemistry but energy. At the cellular level, we can see that process as hydrogen transfer - that’s why pH (hydrogen potential) is so fundamental.

Foods that sustain life are like little packages of condensed energy. What we’re doing when we eat food is essentially breaking down and appropriating the energy of the food. These forces within the food are foreign until we take them in and overcome the foreign forces and make them our own. That process is mediated through heat, and that’s what digestion is really about.

Plants contain etheric forces which are easy to assimilate, whereas animals contain more astral forces which require more energy to break down. This doesn’t mean that we should always go the easier route - but that’s another topic! And depending on how the animal was raised, the quality of the astral forces will be different, hence animals raised on pasture and killed properly will yield more digestible food than factory farmed animal foods.

The problem we run into in understanding how nutrition works is that we have the language of chemistry and the concepts of energy, and we use whichever one is convenient, or try to mix them together randomly rather unconsciously. We might be comfortable talking about chi or life energy in a certain context, but when it comes to nutrition we seem to want to stick to the material view and explain things in terms of chemistry, because that’s the realm of sense perception and perhaps easier to look at.

It’s the same story about looking for the lost keys under the street lamp because you can see better there, rather than looking for where they really are. Our organs of sense perception and our ordinary cognition is more developed than the more etheric, supersensible knowing, so we use what comes easier. But to be able to grasp the meaning of the flux and flow of function, we need to develop a more etheric thinking that can see the living properties of things beyond the material level. This is what has been called the Dynamic view.

The entities and substances we’re looking at aren’t static and fixed in time and space - in this view, eating a fresh raw vegetable might be functionally identical to a practice that generates chi. The intellect looking at the material chemistry would see a big difference! But functional thinking sees a distinction rather than a separation. It sees the continuity, the same underlying phenomenon.

So how do we formulate a rational understanding of nutrition? We need a deeper physiological basis for bridging the gap between chemistry and energy. Otherwise we have a sort of schizophrenic split between on the one hand the mystical realm of energy, and on the other hand the materialistic realm of only what we can perceive with the senses.

So we have to look at energy in a way that can be grounded in the cellular structure. The way that nourishment functions, there’s an etheric process going on whereby we use radiant energy from the sun, indirectly through food, air and water, and generate internal light. There’s actually a physiology of this inner light metabolism.

This is a true physiology that’s about the deeper functioning of forces and energies which drive the biochemistry. (Rudolf Steiner laid out this understanding clearly, although extracting it from his writing is quite a workout!)

So getting back to nutrition, there’s a critical difference between “living” foods and processed foods. “Living” water such as artesian well water could be assayed biochemically and found similar to other forms of purified or spring water. But looking at it biophysically, it’s been seen that the living water will enhance the function of cellular hydration, because of its crystalline structure, whereas processed water doesn’t. The materialistic view will just see all water as functionally equal, and focus on the presence of material toxins as making the difference.

We can sense the difference in food and water that has a lot of life energy - they feel better and taste better. That sensing is through supersensible organs, not sense organs, and isn’t measurable in the same way, but it’s no less real. Even if we’re not yet conscious of how we’re using those supersensible organs, we still know that there is something more behind the outer structure of things. No matter how microscopically we might analyze it, there’s some living quality apart from that, which we resonate with.

We can see on the biophysical level what happens when we remove the life energy from food and water. Industrial processing destroys the inherent crystalline structure which is the key to the life-giving property of food. Crystals transfer information, so at that level it’s really the information - consciousness - that we’re internalizing by taking in nutrients. Generate your own inner light, and live in truth, and you may not need to be concerned about ingesting living foods!

Although, then we’d be guided by the higher spiritual function of Reason, and resonance which is based in love would solve the problem of what to eat.
Most of us are still in the process of transforming our relationships based on attraction (potato chips, yum!) to those based on resonance. When we eat heavily processed food which is attractive but doesn’t resonate, it becomes like a dead weight, an energy drain. Animals fed on microwaved food for a month starved, although they had access to as much quantity of food as they wanted.

Some processes like culturing foods or natural fermentation or sprouting actually enhance the crystalline structure and bring out life energy especially when it’s dormant in seeds, and that’s why traditional cultures have always used those methods - they knew the benefits instinctively if not consciously.

Seen from this perspective, living foods like raw milk from healthy animals have little in common with their commercial counterparts. When we hear about the problem with milk, it’s about the commercial, pasteurized dead material that’s sold as milk, not the live food that it was to begin with.

Those live foods are suited to us, because the biophysical function of those foods promotes inner light and life. Then we need to determine whether a particular food is resonant with our particular typology - according to various typology systems like ayurveda, metabolic typing, glandular typing, etc., and take various other factors into account to put together a proper diet.

But aside from individual needs, we need to understand the functional reality behind nutrition. Let’s look at the way that carbs are stored as fat when we don’t need any more for biological function. We assume that we’ve simply eaten too much or the wrong proprortions of macronutrients. Or we look at smaller and smaller units of biochemical substances and relationships to try to explain what’s going on.

But digestion and metabolism has a supersensible function in the astral body, which is prior to all that. The breakdown of food is a function of the astral body. When the astral isn’t proprely engaged, even a diet that looks perfectly suitable to the person in theory, won’t be handled properly. (the Kidney is involved in this astral function of properly transforming food and generating inner light).

The astral takes us to the soul level, so this is how we can begin to bridge the gap between body and soul - they are really a functional polarity, which is not just an abstract concept but something that we can ground in actual physiology.

And so ends this brief introduction to a profound and vast field of study. I find it fascinating and challenging as it exercises the etheric thinking function which is not an easy task!

Recommended reading:

Water and Salt: The Essence of Life, by Dr. Barbara Hendel
anything by Rudolf Steiner on nutrition (good luck

Soy: Myths and Truths

What we have heard about benefits of soy has come largely from the soy industry. Exploring the problems with soy that we’re not generally hearing, is the Weston A. Price Foundation. And the word is, consumer beware!:

To summarize, there may be some beneficial factors in soy foods prepared according to traditional fermentation methods. In the Orient these are eaten in small amounts as condiments, and not as a replacement for animal foods.

Highly processed soy protein isolates and textured vegetable protein have little in common with traditional soy products. They might be compared to plastic processed cheese slices, which have nothing in common with traditionally processed whole milk natural cheeses.

Promotion of modern, industrially processed soy products should be viewed with skepticism. This is a huge and powerful industry. Archer Daniel Midlands, the world’s major soy processor, spends heavily on advertising, especially for news programs on major networks. The company spent $4.7 million for advertising on “Meet the Press” and $4.3 million on “Face the Nation” during the course of a year.

ADM also has holdings in major newspapers. Naturally, the press presents soy in a favorable light. ADM lobbies heavily in Washington, and supports university research programs. Consumer beware. There is no joy in soy–it’s a ploy.

Myths and Truths about Soy (Reposted from the Weston Price Foundation with permission).

Myth: Use of soy as a food dates back many thousands of years.
Truth: Soy was first used as a food during the late Chou dynasty (1134-246 BC), only after the Chinese learned to ferment soy beans to make foods like tempeh, natto and tamari. [Read more →]