Category Archives: Lifestyle

Not just how to keep your life afloat, but how to get to smooth sailing

Lifestyle

Diet Coke Drama

3 Comments
Sweet but sad and mostly corn syrup.
Sweet but sad and mostly corn syrup.

We are being frivolous to refer to this issue as just “drama”. For years, we have been warning you about the risks related to aspartame and other artificial sweeteners. Now there is data from years of tracking women in a very large study and here’s what’s been found: Increased blood pressure, increased cholestral, increased belly fat and increased risks of diabetes. In addition, daily diet soda drinking is thought to cause an increase of 30% in your risk of heart attack and an increase of 50% in your risk of dying from heart attack.

So will you switch back to regular soda with its’ corn syrup sweetener? Not so fast! Corn syrup is associated with causing dementia and Alzheimer’s. Well what should you drink? WATER! Okay, some of you want something a little sweeter.  That is, the bacteria that live in your gut are in there poking your intestines and begging for a sweetener, which is what they need to procreate and thrive. How about an all natural drink? Iced herbal tea with honey or a natural sweetener like the herb, stevia. Some tasty brands are NuNevia and Sweet Leaf. We like them because of their natural taste. They are available in powder as well as non-alcohol liquid. Some other brands have troubling fillers

Kids, Lifestyle

Chicken Nugget recall & Cereal Questions

Do your kids eat chicken nuggets? This first week in April, 2014, Tyson Foods has issued a recall of 5 pound bags of chicken nuggets sold at Sam’s Clubs. They reportedly received calls from customers reporting plastic particles mixed into some of their packaged nuggets.  And while we’re looking at chicken nuggets, there have been a number of reports about how other manufacturers make chicken nuggets and the sources and types of meat used to make them. While Tyson, in the current press release notes that their chicken nuggets are made from white meat, reports of questionable nugget content associated some brands with a form of chicken “pink slime”.

PinkCknSlimeMomonaSpiritualJourney

Some clinicians have noted that children presenting with ADHD and other neurological problems reported daily or weekly consumption of chicken nuggets and some higher sugar-content breakfast cereals.

Many pure food advocates feel that ALL cereals are poor nutrition for children and expose them to a number of additives & chemicals used in the processing of grains into cereal.  In addition, many children may be missing important minerals and vitamins because they consume these processed foods instead.

High quality protein to start the day is associated with better behavior, longer attention spans and better memory. Sources of protein are lean meats, eggs, fish and various beans.  Morning smoothies made with frozen organic fruit, a few kale leaves, nut milks,  hemp protein powder and no added sugars, juices or syrups provide a quick, healthy start.

What?! No waffles, pancakes, pop tarts, granola bars, biscuits, donuts and other forms of the same stuff the cereals are made of on the recommended list? Certainly not.

Lifestyle

A vegan staple for your new way of eating

2 Comments

You are what you eat, so eat pretty!
Above: Coconut Squash soup. Find the recipe in Karyn’s Conscious Comfort Foods.

Who says vegetarian fare isn’t better than the everyday processed gunk that your body can’t process away?  Can you imagine eating rich, creamy and incredibly delicious food and not gaining weight, not feeling like you’re going into a coma afterward and actually building your immunity to colds & illness at the same time? Well, start imagining it because that’s what we’ll be bringing to the website – news and recipes on how to eat well and stay happy and slim.

Start with some basic searching.

Search out the closest and best sources of fresh, organic produce. If you eat meat, find organic and preferably local butchers or farms. People are surprised to find that many of these are right under your nose or right down the road from you. Fresh, cold water fish is a major source of essential fatty acids – excellent fuel for the brain. Find the best sources near you. Some major grocery chains have been caught using bleach to kill the bacteria and smell of past prime meat and fish in black communities.
It’s essential to know where your food really comes from.

Look up http://www.csa.org for Community Supported Agriculture which will show local farms, farm stores, food drop off points and farmers markets. Find one that delivers near you or is located near you and buy a “farm share”. A full share usually provides you with fresh picked produce for a family of 4 weekly from May to November. A half share for the same 24 to 28 weeks will cost you around $300 or about $12 per week.  A pretty good deal! And a great alternative to half-dead produce that has excess pesticides, might be a genetically modified crop and may have been shipped thousands of miles. Some pesticides are outlawed in this country but are used in others. We buy that produce and the chemicals affect our brains. Often cheap processed food has many more chemicals in it, so if you’re going to save on something, maybe you don’t want it to be at the risk of your health.

Lifestyle

Losing Ties to the Old Neighborhood

1 Comment
Dr. Mindy Fullilove, Social Psychiatrist. Picture:YouTube
Dr. Mindy Fullilove, Social Psychiatrist. Picture:YouTube

 

 

 

Dr. Mindy Fullilove, renowned scholar and social psychiatrist, provides us with an understanding of what has seemed to be a mystery. Why are blacks getting eased out of projects, low and middle income housing, formerly stable neighborhoods where we thrived, educated our children, formed generational relationships and established our identities? And how?  Fullilove illuminates the present and the past. Through that light we can perhaps see into the future. Her books are instructive: ” Root Shock: How Tearing Up City Neighborhoods Hurts America and What We Can Do About It”  is one of her six books and many articles on this phenomenon. The most recent, “Urban Alchemy: Restoring Joy  In America’s Sorted-Out Cities” goes further to provide simple steps that we can take to repair the psychological damage that uprooting causes.

The psychological impact of displacement trauma is identifield in Root Shock with a pattern of “sorting out” shown to be the result of moving people into tighter, more finely discriminated groups – much akin to segregation – but determined by race, class, income, education and perhaps violence. In Urban Alchemy, this sorting out is examined through the lens of what to do about it:a solutions that each of us can employ to help protect those places we care about or ease the effects of displacement so that in addition to losing our more immediate heritage, we are able to repair broken ties and create new ones. In doing this we can enrich our communities despite the clear patterns of disruption of urban areas.

Previous post on this topic

Toxins in our communities

Lifestyle

“Diabetes is a disease of nutritional ignorance”

Leave a comment

“Diabetes is a disease of nutritional ignorance”. That’s the first thing  I heard this morning when I turned on the TV.  Joel Fuhrman, M.D. seemed to be calling out my relatives with that line. Hearing it said that way, I thought, maybe they would listen.

For years now, I’ve been banging the same drum about how many of the problems clients present with: diabetes, bipolar disorder, MS, depression, anxiety, panic attacks, low blood sugar, stroke, arthritis and even Parkinson’s – these problems are caused primarily by what we eat.

We are poisoning ourselves, voluntarily, because it tastes good. We are committing mass suicide while making food manufacturers wealthy and making our families miserable. But Dr. Furhman was so convincing this morning that I couldn’t help sharing his message with you and here’s a story he told:

He had a patient whose 80+ year old mother was diabetic, had a stroke and was suffering in the hospital.  He had gotten her daughter to change her diet and lose, I think he said, 100 lbs. Even though the mother had watched her daughter’s gradual success, she felt that she couldn’t do it. So she had continued eating the bread, cereal, potatoes, fried foods and all the other addictive foods that we’re told we can’t walk away from. Now, finally, there she was incapacitated, stuck in her bed and just waiting to die – from her decision. How many of us have relatives like that? So what happened with her?…………

Lo and behold, she wasn’t ready to die. She adopted a new way of eating – went back to the real old way – you know, real food – fresh veggies, nicely seasoned, peas, beans & greens with a little meat and fish, sugar no more than once a week AND SHE LOST THE WEIGHT,  IS NO LONGER DIABETIC, IS NO LONGER SICK, IS OUT AND ABOUT AND ENJOYING HER 80+ YEARS!!!! What about the people you love? What about you?