First of all, I claim no expertise on the dangers of eating too much fruit, or in the ways of hunter-gatherers, but let me play Devil’s advocate for a moment.

The way we Americans eat fruit, and the fruit we eat, seems to me has to be quite different from the the manner and fruit that was eaten by our ancestors.

Hunter-gatherers, more recent ancestors as well as indigenous people around the world, all would have eaten, or still do eat, what was local and what was in season. That means no blueberries in January and no kiwis if you lived in Northern Europe. Our ability to eat practically any fruit we desire, at any point in the year is what is wholly “unnatural.”

Secondly, wild fruit is very different from its cultivated counterpart in that the fruit you find in the market is much larger than wild fruit, in general. Think Granny Smith apples vs. crabapples. Wild strawberries vs. those honkin’ tasteless things they sell at stores. Bigger fruit = more money:

Peter Hirst, a Purdue University associate professor of horticulture, found that an anomaly in some Gala apple trees causes some apples to grow much larger than others because cells aren’t splitting. The findings, reported in the current issue of the Journal of Experimental Botany, showed that the new variety, called Grand Gala, is about 38 percent heavier and has a diameter 15 percent larger than regular Galas.

And then . . .

Hirst is trying to understand what causes the difference in the size of apples – for instance, why Gala apples are so much larger than crabapples.

“There is real incentive for fruit growers to increase the size of their apples,” Hirst said. “At 125 apples per bushel, a grower gets 8 cents per apple. But if they have larger apples – 88 per bushel – the price more than doubles.”

Click here for the rest.

Also, fruit sold in the markets tend to be the sweeter fruits. We love bing cherries and Rainier cherries but what about chokecherries and sandcherries? Currants are easy to grow, and quite beautiful but we seldom eat them unless they have been dried so as to concentrate the fructose in them. And what about gooseberries? I’m not an anthropologist, but I find it hard to believe that hunter-gatherers, or even peasants in the 17th century, snubbed their noses at Guelder Rose berries because they were not sweet or big enough.

In the D.C. area, you can see Mulberry trees bursting with fruit in the spring. Locals walk by and drive by this free source of delicious fruit every day, even going so far as to call the trees an annoyance since they drop their juicy bounty onto the ground, where it can get smushed underfoot, or onto cars. But not everyone snubs the generous Mulberry. This story in the Washington Post describes how immigrants from Mulberry-lovin’ countries harvest the Capitol’s bounty. But they’re weird, aren’t they? Normal people buy their fruit, duh.

And finally, our ancestors labored for their fruit. They gathered it. Picking berries is hard, there are often thorns, there are always bugs, there’s heat and bees and bears if you’re picking salmonberries in the PNW (a personal experience). And no, while driving into a parking lot, fighting over a good spot and then dealing with the crowds at an air-conditioned Whole Foods can be annoying, it’s not really physical labor.

Case in point, tonight we ate dinner out en famille. This is something we rarely so because a) eating dinner out is expensive and b) can be stressful with small children. We were running errands and found ourselves out at around dinner, poor-planning perhaps, but we decided to eat out at a well-known local restaurant in the D.C. area whose chef is something of a mini-celebrity in this town.

My hubs had the Salade Niçoise, which for some reason waiters always pronounce Nee-swah even when we say Nee-swahz, and I had a nice juicy burgers without a bun.

But for our kids? The options were either pizza or penne pasta. The only meat on the kids menu was sliced pepperoni. Really? I mean, really? Option one is white flour baked into a disk and coated in tomato sauce and cheese and option two is white flour shaped into tubes (penne) and coated with tomato sauce and cheese.

No meat. No vegetable.

Is it any wonder there is an obesity/type 2 diabetes epidemic? We ordered a side of steamed carrots, asked them to slather them in butter and then fed those to the kids along with bits of burger, tuna and anchovies.

But I am back and here to tell you that sugar causes cancer. Not really news. We all suspected it, right? I mean, my parents used to tell me this when I was a kid in an effort to curb my sweet tooth. In fact, they once told me that “everything causes cancer” and I took them at face value for years.

Well, anyone whose read up on sugar (“Sugar Blues” is a good place to start) knows the stuff is crap. It’s worse than crap, it’s crack. No amount is a good amount. Moderation is NOT key. Avoid it at ALL costs. Do I? Heck no. But I have cut way, way, way back. Still I have a sweet tooth, which I try to satisfy with fruit. Turns out that’s not such a good idea.

Fructose, the sugar found in fruit, helps grow cancer. Read all about it in this Reuters piece “Cancer Cells Slurp up Fructose.” Of course the real danger is the massive amount of high fructose corn-syrup that Americans ingest in massive quantities, but I don’t think we can ignore the implication for fruit. Especially since today’s mass-marketed fruit is so much sweeter than its ancestors.

This also flies in the face of the argument that sugar is sugar and is treated the same by your body, an argument espoused by the corn industry.

Essentially, avoiding sugar will do much more for American health than say, switching to low-fat yogurt.

That means cutting as far back as possible on sucrose — table sugar, on glucose — pasta, rice and bread and now fructose — high fructose corn syrup and yes, possibly fruit.

Now who will tell the fruitarians?

It also happens to be a delicious, easy meal that anyone can include in their repertoire. The brisket is a wide, flat cut of beef from the breast or chest.

Ingredients:

One brisket (get a big one so you’ll have leftovers — it just gets more and more tender)
Onion or two
Garlic clove
Tomato paste
Beef stock or water
Spoonful of cinnamon and salt and pepper to taste
Butter and olive oil
Your choice of veg: carrots, peas, string beans, potatoes, parsnips

Now I recommend starting your brisket at least the day if not two or three days before. This is a cut of meat that just gets more and more tender the longer it stews.

First, trim any major fat off the brisket. In a large Dutch oven, heat some olive oil and brown both sides of the beef. If the oil is hot enough this should take about 8 minutes each side.

Take brisket out, put it on a plate and let Dutch oven cool a bit. Add butter or whatever fat you want and add the chopped onions. Stir scraping up all the meat bits and saute for about 10 minutes. Add the minced garlic and spices. Add about 2 Tb tomato paste (you can use ketchup in a pinch). Add the water or broth and the brisket with all its juices. Bring to a boil, cover and then simmer on very low heat on the stove or in the oven at a temp between 250-300. The idea is a low simmer, not a boil!

Turn the brisket every hour or two.

If you have to run to the store, or pick up the kids, just turn off the heat and leave the Dutch oven where it is. When you get back, just bring the whole thing to a boil again and then turn it down to simmer again. Make sure to turn it off to cool several hours before bed so you can put it in the fridge, although I admit I have left stews out overnight. The next day just resume the process. If you are trying to save energy you can “hot pot” it by bringing it to a boil and then popping it in the oven with no heat, and then in few hours, repeating the process as need be.

After a day or two, your brisket will be ready. When you cut it, it will want to fall apart into loverly strings of meat or what my daughter calls “sticks” as in “Can I have sticks for dinner?”

Now is the time to add julienned carrots or string beans. Simmer the veggies about 20 minutes until tender. In my past life, I served this with wide egg noodles. No more. I now serve it with either polenta, or if I’m going grain-free then I use mashed swede or potatoes.

If you want to add peas, toss a handful of frozen green ones in each individual serving. If you add them to the pot they will overcook too quickly and become that awful green color.

This will just get better and better throughout the week.

In this post I will go even further by saying that grains are actually bad for you. As in poison, albeit a slow-acting and often super-delicious poison.

I was originally going to write about various negative aspects of grains, but instead I decided to focus today on one issue: gluten.

It’s the sticky stuff in pasta and bread. It’s found in wheat and other grains such as barley, rye, spelt and kamut. It is not in rice. It is not in oats, if they have been processed in a separate facility from gluten-grains.

Gluten has gotten a lot of attention lately. It seems lots of people are eliminating it from their diet these days. Grocery stores have aisles of gluten-free pasta, cookies, cereals. Even Betty Crocker is offering a gluten-free cake mix, replete with all the nasty chemicals you can get with ordinary cake mix! Elizabeth Hasselbeck on The View has a cookbook out on the subject called The G-Free Diet. Whatever you think of her political views, read her story here. Like many celiacs and those with gluten-sensitivities, she was told she had Irritable Bowel Syndrome her whole life. It turns out no.

The spotlight on gluten reflects an awareness that a certain percentage of our population has Celiac Sprue, an actual allergy to the protein found in gluten grains such as wheat, barley, rye and spelt. I first heard about this about 20 years ago when I lived in a tiny studio on 11th St. in NYC and my neighbor in the next apartment over told me she had a rare disorder where if she ate wheat she would break out in hives and get diarrhea. She was so meticulous about this that she would ask at restaurants if the fries were cooked in separate oil from the chicken strips and whether they had any batter on them.

What a strange allergy, I thought. But now I know it is an autoimmune disorder caused by a common food ingredient. Celiac is the only auto-immune disease that is directly caused by what you eat.

The reason that gluten is so damaging is that is can literally poke holes in your gut, flattening the villi in your intestines, allowing both bacteria and gluten proteins to enter your bloodstream. Once loose in your blood they can wreak havoc, binding with your own body’s tissue and triggering your immune system to attack your own body. This is the auto-immune reaction. Those with celiac can suffer from all kinds of digestive disorders such as cramping and diarrhea, malabsorption of nutrients, muscle weakness, epilepsy, dementia, infertility, osteoporosis, wasting, migraines, psoriasis and other skin problems . . . the list goes on.

There is a strong genetic component, meaning if your parents or grandparents had celiac, your chances of having it are greater. To get a diagnosis, you can have a celiac blood panel done but the gold standard is a tissue sample from your intestine. However, it is important to note that many people test negatively for celiac but suffer from gluten sensitivity. Gluten sensitivity is a non-allergic, non-auto-immune disease that produces symptoms similar or the same as celiac. Here in the greater DC area, we are lucky to have one of the foremost experts on celiac and gluten-sensitivity in the world. His name is Alessio Fasano, MD and he runs the University of Maryland’s Center for Celiac Research in Baltimore. Click here to visit their website. In this interview, he explained how a celiac’s immune system differs from one who has a gluten-sensitivity:

The innate immune system is the most ancestral form of defense we have against “invaders,” while the adaptive immune system is a more recent branch of our immune system. Once our body comes in contact with a substance from the environment that may represent a signal of danger, the innate immune system reacts immediately to try to eliminate the “attacker.”

At the same time, the adaptive immune system will intervene with a more sophisticated, long process, during which the attacker is studied, its conformation evaluated, and a “customized response” to that particular molecule is engineered (i.e. specific antibodies). Further, the adaptive immune system will save this information as immune response memory, so that at the next encounter there is no need to re-do the job.

In autoimmune diseases, like celiac disease, there is a coordinate response between innate and adaptive immune system, a response that ends up in the wrong direction (i.e.; attacking its own body rather than the “invader”). In gluten sensitivity, there is only an innate immune response, since the adaptive immune system seems not involved.

That is why a positive blood test for Celiac is one that shows the presence of anti-gluten antibodies. There is no question that if you suffer from full blown celiac or are gluten sensitive, you are better off without gluten. But I would argue that everyone should avoid gluten and that those who suffer are the “canaries in the coalmine.” None of us should be eating such a damaging food.

It is especially important that those who suffer from other auto-immune diseases eliminate gluten. First of all, having one auto-immune disorder makes you more susceptible to having more. Believe me when I say, one is enough. But there are undeniable links between gluten and auto-immune disease besides celiac.

I was diagnosed with Hashimoto’s thyroiditis as a child, an auto-immune disorder in which your thyroid attacks itself.  Though I have drifted in and out of remission since then, I was recently diagnosed with post-partum thyroiditis. This is when the body’s immune system, which has been suppressed during pregnancy, surges wildly after the birth and your thyroid level fluctuates between hyper- (too much) and hypo- (not enough) thyroidism. For those who follow these things — my TSH went from 0 (that’s zero) to 5 in one month. Normal range fro TSH is .3 – 3.

This is the conclusion of a paper published in the Endocrine Reviews that links gluten sensitivity to auto-immune disorders.

There is no doubt that many patients with celiac disease primarily contact specialists other than gastroenterologists. The majority of cases thus remain undetected. A close association between various autoimmune endocrinological disorders and celiac disease has been shown in numerous studies. The diagnosis of celiac disease requires a small-bowel biopsy, usually taken by endoscopy. However, sensitive and specific antibody assays, the antiendomysial and antitissue transglutaminase tests, are helpful in preliminaryscreening for gluten intolerance in cases where symptoms are atypical, appear outside the gastrointestinal tract, or are totally absent. The need to prevent osteoporosis advocates the early diagnosis and treatment of even asymptomatic celiac disease. The benefits of screening for celiac disease in autoimmune disease remain to be proved by prospective follow-up studies. However, there seems to be a good case for extensive screening.

Other, bloggers write about the connection between celiac and auto-immune disorders, I recommend this post, this one, this one and this one.

So much research is being done today showing the link between gluten and auto-immune disorders such as: Hashimoto’s thyroiditis, Type I Diabetes, Rheumatoid Arthritis, Lupus, Psoriasis, and Multiple Sclerosis to name just several.

There is a lot of talk these days about how we did not evolve eating grains, and how for optimal health we ought to return to a diet that more closely resembles that of our hunter-gatherer ancestors. This is interesting stuff, I enjoy reading about it, but to me it is academic. I care about practical applications in the real world. So, if grains are making us sick, let’s stop eating them.

Basically, if you have any health problems that don’t seem to resolve even after medical treatment, cut out gluten. You have NOTHING to lose. It’s a pain in the tuchus at first but you will suffer no ill-health by not eating gluten. There are loads of great blogs with gluten-free recipes out there such as these: Gluten-Free Girl and Ginger Lemon Girl. Of course, I wold recommend cutting back on all grains, not just gluten-containing ones. Against the Grain is a great website to check out if you decide you want to cut back.

Finally, you will lose weight, especially around your belly. Some call this the “wheat belly.” It looks like a beer belly, but it’s from cereal, pasta, bagels, donuts, crackers and the like. If you’re a guy, this is a good way to lose your man-boobs.

Every time researchers discover (through the scientific method) a truth contrary to the bunk peddled by large agri-business, quacks who sell dieting books and programs and the regulators and legislators who are bought and paid for, they call it a “paradox” or a “conundrum.”

Take the “cholesterol conundrum” for example. High cholesterol is linked to higher serotonin and low cholesterol is linked to low serotonin. To put it simplistically, lack of serotonin leads to mental illness — depression, suicide, violence etc. This is a “conundrum” because we all supposedly know that cholesterol is evil, and yet we NEED it to not go insane. What a conundrum!

I wrote before about this article in Psychology Today, which asks: “Why do people on low-cholesterol diets die somewhat less often of heart disease, yet a lot more often of suicide, accidents, and homicide than the rest of the population?” Here’s an excerpt:

Jay Kaplan, Ph.D., looked at monkeys who were eating diets high in fat, but either low or high in cholesterol. After eight months, he found that the low-cholesterol monkeys, who had cholesterol readings of about 220, had no heart disease but were more hostile than the monkeys on a cheeseburger-like diet, whose levels hit 600.

These monkeys went at it hammer and tong,” says Kaplan, a professor of comparative medicine. “They engaged in more contact aggression–highly charged impulsive fighting–than the other monkeys.”

Impulsivity, an increasingly scrutinized category of behavior, plays out in violence, suicide, and risk taking. And, impulsive people are likely to have a deficit of serotonin. “People in cholesterol-lowering trials might have been experiencing impulsivity, which led to the higher rates of suicide and accidents,” suggests Kaplan.
He then measured serotonin levels in the monkeys’ cerebrospinal fluid. Sure enough, the low-cholesterol, aggressive monkeys had less serotonin than the high-cholesterol monkeys.

So now we have the “low-fat paradox” or to put it in language that will lull you to sleep: “Apparent Paradox of Low-Fat “Healthy” Diets Increasing Plasma Levels of Oxidized Low-Density Lipoprotein and Lipoprotein(a).” Click here for the paper.

Plasma oxidized whoosy-whatsit?

Well, in layman’s terms, Lipoprotein(a) or Lp(a) is a type of cholesterol that has recently been discovered as a strong link to disease. When found in blood at high levels there is increased risk for coronary heart disease, cerebrovascular disease, atherosclerosis, thrombosis and stroke. Oxidized low-density lipoproteins, or OxLDL, is the “bad” cholesterol — LDL — that has been oxidized, which makes it even worse. By oxidized, they mean it has been bombarded with oxygen to yield those nasty free radicals so that when it enters into the wall of an artery, it promotes atherosclerosis (hardening) by attracting other cells and chemicals to the site, causing inflammation, and allowing cholesterol and other fats to build up within the artery.

So back to the “paradox.” The researchers were obviously befuddled to learn that eating the Whole Foods way — low fat, loads of veggies and fruits, no nasty saturated fats — actually led to heart disease. From the paper’s abstract:

There is a wealth of evidence to suggest that low-fat diets, particularly those rich in fruits and vegetables, are “healthy.” In this issue of Arteriosclerosis, Thrombosis, and Vascular Biology, Silaste et al¹report what appears to be a paradox. Feeding a diet low in total fat and saturated fat to 37 healthy women volunteers, even when supplemented with vegetables, berries, and fruit, caused an increase in the plasma levels of oxidized low-density lipoproteins (OxLDL) and lipoprotein(a) [Lp(a)].

Emphasis theirs.

They go on to try and explain this away. As Upton Sinclair so famously said, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.”

If you have a science back ground, or just enjoy reading blogs with lots of big words, click here and here. This guy knows a hecka lot more about this than I do and goes into great depth on the subject.

In the meantime, have some butter.

To sum up the video, much of the food available at Whole Foods, especially under their own 365 brand, is from China. I just went and checked on a bag of frozen spinach in the freezer. Yup, in small type on the back, made in China. Ugh.

All I can say is, wow. Whole Foods may have started as a terrific company with integrity but they have really lost their way.

The U.S. government cannot guarantee that these products are organic. Whole Foods depends on a third-party to verify that, and they depend on the Chinese government. You know, the same food oversight regulatory system that brought you melamine in your toothpaste and pet food and lead in your kids’s toys. If this sits well with you, no worries. I, however, have little faith the Chinese government is inspecting and regulating farms in China to make sure the spinach they grow meets USDA organic standards.

Next time you’re at Whole Foods, check the country of origin.

Here’s Whole Foods rebuttal to what they describe as a” very misleading” piece.

On another note, I would like to point out the sheer hypocrisy of buying organic food from China. It’s not like we can’t grow spinach here in the USA. And I don’t mean this in a jingo-istic, America-first way, but one aspect of the organic movement is to protect the environment. How does it protect the environment to ship a product around the world to a store in Maryland when that product could be, and is, grown within 100 miles? It doesn’t. It helps with said store’s bottom line.

Yes, Whole Foods is a green company — green as in dollar bills.

This from a company that pushed vegetarianism as as solution to the world’s ills, and advocates going vegan as a way to save the environment.

Here’s an idea, eat locally-sourced meat and skip the spinach that’s been shipped in from China. That stuff doesn’t move across the globe powered by moonbeams and soy-milk. It takes fossil fuels, fools.

Eating healthy can be really expensive — here’s a deal that will only last until noon today, March 4. 2010.

For $45, get a $125 voucher for dry-aged, grass-fed, hand-trimmed, free-range, organic meat from Greensbury Market. They are in Gaithersburg, Md, but THEY DELIVER.

The more people who sign up, the lower the cost is. If we get enough people it may go down to $31!

Click here for mote details. This will take you to Jasmere, the site that is offering this deal.

Would you call this stuff poison? Would you demand that it be removed from grocery shelves and school cafeterias? Or would you take it home and cook your dinner in it? You may have eaten it today when you had cookies or crackers or dried fruit or any number of prepared or processed foods. You may have it in your cupboard now. In fact, you may be cooking dinner with it. Because that liquid, my dear readers, is corn oil.

This is according to a recently published paper entitled “High fat diet-induced animal model of age-associated obesity and osteoporosis” but the title is misleading. It’s not a high-fat diet that causes the problems, it’s corn oil. No such experiment was done with, say, butter. What’s special about this highly-processed cooking oil? Well, for one thing, it is extremely high in Omega-6 fats, which while they are necessary to the body must be in a healthy (preferably 1:1) ratio with Omega-3 fats. Corn oil has virtually no Omega-3 fats.

The study was done at the University of Texas and the paper was published in the Journal of Nutritional Biochemistry. Below is an excerpt:

CO [corn oil] is known to promote bone loss, obesity, impaired glucose tolerance, insulin resistance and thus represents a useful model for studying the early stages in the development of obesity, hyperglycemia, Type 2 diabetes and osteoporosis. We have used omega-6 fatty acids enriched diet as a fat source which is commonly observed in today’s Western diets basically responsible for the pathogenesis of many diseases.

Emphasis mine. (NB: I read about this over at Whole Health Source, an excellent blog that is written by a real scientist.)

The absolute sickest part of this, for me, is that we the taxpayers are subsidizing this crap, to the tune of billions of dollars. This is the oil that you are most likely eating should you grab a bite on the go. A recent University of Hawaii study showed that 70 percent of Oahu’s national fast food chains used corn oil to fry their foods. We are literally paying for the privilege to kill ourselves. And at the risk of sounding like I stockpile Reynold’s wrap to fashion into headwear, the government is in on it too. The FDA tells us to replace “bad” fast such as butter with “good” fats such as corn oil.

A few years ago, the FDA approved a petition for a “qualified health claim” for corn oil by ACH Food Companies, makers of Mazola corn oil, Karo corn syrup and Argo corn starch. The claim is that corn oil might reduce the risk of heart disease. That’s why you see a big, red heart sticker on Mazola bottles, and written on it in bright white letters “Heart Healthy.” So why is the claim qualified? Because there is scant scientific evidence of it. That’s why in teeny, tiny letters, somewhere on a Mazola bottle, you will also find these words:

“Very limited and preliminary scientific evidence suggests that eating about 1 tbsp (16 grams) of corn oil daily may reduce the risk of heart disease due to the unsaturated fat content in corn oil. FDA concludes there is little scientific evidence supporting this claim.”

Oh, yeah, how much did we the people subsidize the corn industry in 2006 (most recent available data)? $4,920,813,719.

The FDA, the finest regulatory agency money can buy.

BPA is a synthetic estrogen linked to reproductive and neurological disorders and other serious conditions.

Contact your senator if you support this bill. And while you are doing so, tell him or her that this is a great start, but government needs to, ahem, encourage the food industry to find a substitute for BPA liners in canned food, including infant formula. The danger is much greater in canned goods because of the prolonged contact — months, even years — of the food with the BPA.

john.astle@senate.state.md.us
thomas.mclain.middleton@senate.state.md.us
george.della@senate.state.md.us
nathaniel.exum@senate.state.md.us
rob.garagiola@senate.state.md.us
barry.glassman@senate.state.md.us
delores.kelley@senate.state.md.us
allan.kittleman@senate.state.md.us
katherine.klausmeier@senate.state.md.us
ej.pipkin@senate.state.md.us
catherine.pugh@senate.state.md.us