I had a similar experience.  This picture was taken 3/2/06.  I covered up my strawberry plants for the winter.  When I uncovered them, I found a couple of heads of green leaf lettuce.  I had grown lettuce in this bed the year before and it obviously reseeded!  It was the best tasting lettuce, not bitter and it lasted for 3 family salads.  I can’t seem to grow it as well when I try.  J   This is just one head.

Nancy in Texas

After DH built me some winter garden boxes (removable, on top of my square foot boxes), I planted them with onions and chard and spinach last fall.  I meant to go out and water them, but, well . . . it’s been a bitter winter here in Utah.  I’m kind of lazy and don’t like to be cold.  I just never even looked in there since about November.  Yesterday, March 28, I opened up the box and look what I found:

Onions and chard are growing away!  I still have a few weeks’ worth of frozen chard and beet greens in my freezer from my garden last fall–I’d better use them, because I’ve actually got a harvest waiting for me already, in March!  And now, this morning, this is (again) what the growboxes look like:

You can read how to make these grow boxes in Eliot Coleman’s Four Season Harvest.

Today I made my weekly produce pilgrimage to Costco.   I don’t even really like sweet potato, generally, but I LOVE the healthy sweet potato fries that we’ve come up with, gsg.com readers and I, served on a bed of cooked quinoa.  It’s a 10-minute dinner.   I’d ordered 50 lbs. of quinoa from Azure Standard and finally gotten it, and I made the seasoning mixture Steff puts on her sweet potato fries.  So I was going to load up at Costco with 2-3 bags of the stuff this week.

I was so disappointed when . . . they were out!  I found the produce manager and asked him what was up.  He said, “It’s the weirdest thing.  They weren’t selling, and we were throwing them away–I was thinking we’d have to discontinue them.  And then all of a sudden the past couple of weeks, I just can’t keep them in stock!  I don’t know what happened!”

Well, I do.  Have a heart, local readers!  Stick a bag or two behind, say, the broccoli, for me!  Hopefully they’ll increase the supply to meet the demand.  :-)

I went to give blood today, hoping that my always-borderline hematocrit was high enough.  It was.  Though one point lower and I’d have been rejected—again.  Like most other things the RDA does, those hematocrit averages aren’t based on the ideal, but rather the average.  The averages are, of course, of a heavily meat-eating population with (IMO) a too-high iron concentration in the blood.  By USRDA standards, though, a 120-lb. woman needs 44 grams of protein daily, and a 150-lb. man needs 55 grams.  The average American gets 100 grams daily!  A higher hematocrit is just one result of the tragic false education of the American public that has led to a lethal diet.

As usual, the Red Cross worker took my resting heart rate, and then took it again.  Do you exercise a LOT, she asked?  Well, six days a week, I answered.  Then she called the supervisor over to do an override, since the computer does not believe them when they input my resting heart rate of 45.  The supervised asked: are you a runner?  I answered in the affirmative.

 Sure, good heredity plays a part.  It’s nice to have blood that moves languidly through clean blood vessels, not straining inflamed heart muscle.

But according to the literature, environmental influences play a much bigger role in heart disease than genetic ones do, and fortunately, you can control that with five things.  Don’t drink or smoke, and bring your weight into the healthy range.  Get the blood pumping and muscles and heart toned with exercise: ideally, three things:

 (1)     cardio (walking, running, Stairmaster, aerobics)

(2)     weight-bearing (Nautilus and free weights)

(3)     lengthening and toning (yoga or Pilates).

And of course, eat more unrefined plant foods and fewer animal and refined foods.

Thing is, I didn’t have good cardiovascular measurements at ALL when I was 26 years old.  I got pregnant after 5 years of trying, lost one of my twin babies in the first trimester, and was afraid to so much as sneeze thereafter.  I didn’t exercise, the whole pregnancy.  I indulged all my demonic cravings—for stuff I’d never eaten in my life.  Burgers/fries and 7-11 nachos were my two favorites.  (Haven’t eaten either one before or since—go figure!)  Sometimes at night I’d eat half a pint of Ben & Jerry’s.   

You guessed it: I gained 65 lbs. during the pregnancy, had horrible edema (swelling) and drastically increased blood pressure.  I basically sat around like Jabba the Hut, watching TV and bossing the poor guy who got me pregnant (I figured he owed me), and my sister (who was entirely innocent), to get me stuff.  People don’t believe me, so I haul out the photos of the day that sweet little 9-lb. baby was born.  They shriek with horror. 

That’s right.  I was my very own version of Supersize Me, my blood sugar was out of control, and my blood pressure was higher than the national average (120/80), even though I’m usually 95/55).  All that in a few short months.

And DH?  At the time of our wedding, he was 22 years old, a 6’4” tall, 257-lb. college offensive lineman.  He had high blood pressure and a family history of heart disease (aunt, father, grandparents).  Eating what I fed him (whole plant foods for all but the aforementioned one year), he’s had low cholesterol and very healthy blood pressure for 20 years.

My point? Obviously heredity is not the most predictive factor for heart disease. 

I leveraged some of this from a blog by Jason Ferruggia, one of the few bodybuilders who actually knows better than to drink whey protein shakes:Many of you know that dairy is not good for getting lean, and that consumption of dairy products has been linked to a decreased immune response.  Most of us can handle lactose as babies but lose this ability as adults. Adults just don’t need milk anymore.

 If you’re a Caucasian person, don’t congratulate yourself that cow milk is somehow good for you just because you’re not lactose intolerant.  The literature doesn’t show that high animal protein consumption leads to cancer, heart disease, and autoimmune diseases in just SOME cultures.  Just because most white folks have developed a tolerance to casein in milk doesn’t inoculate us against the damage done by that food.

Human beings are the only species that actually drinks the milk of another species. Think about that for a second: If I poured you a glass of milk fresh squeezed from a nursing mother’s breast, you would freak out and not even consider drinking it. But if I poured you a glass of milk laced with 80 different FDA-allowed antibiotics, pus, and hormones that I just got out of a smelly, diseased cow, you wouldn’t think twice about slugging it right down.

High milk consumption has been shown in studies to increase the risk for osteoporosis instead of decrease it. In fact, the calcium absorption rate of milk is quite low. These are calcium absorption rates for a few different foods:

Brussel sprouts 63.8%
Mustard greens 57.8%
Broccoli 52.6%
Turnip greens 51.6%
Kale 50%
Cow’s milk 32%Drink water instead of cow milk.  In your cereal, use rice milk or almond milk.

Dear GreenSmoothieGirl, how long can you keep your green smoothie in the fridge?  I’m single and don’t want to make it every day.  Does it lose nutrition and therefore is it pointless to store it?

Answer: You can keep in in the fridge, at the most, for 48 hours.  After that it tastes a little funky.  Just shake it up well before you drink it.  My cute cousin Quinn made her dad, a truck driver, enough for five days.  I didn’t want to be a naysayer because she so enthusiastically wanted to improve his nutrition on the road, but, well, as compliant as Alan is, he just couldn’t drink what she made after two days.

Yeah, it loses nutrition, but you have to value your time, so I’m a fan of your making it every two days.  Even if it oxidizes somewhat in the jar in your fridge, the fiber is going nowhere and lots of the vitamins, minerals, and nutrients ARE still available a day or so later.  It’s still a million times better than whatever else you might choose to eat.

Dear GreenSmoothieGirl: Why should I be a vegetarian? I know some who are in terrible health.

Answer: It’s a logical fallacy to say A is true, and B seems somehow related and is true; therefore, A causes B.  I know junk-food vegetarians, too.  Just because you don’t eat meat doesn’t mean you don’t eat a whole lotta Coke, white bread, and Ding Dongs.  ;-)

I’m back from a fun trip down south for a baseball tournament in the sun.  I tried a tip from a woman who attended my nutrition class the night before I left–to use coconut oil instead of sunscreen.  She says it works.  (It seems rather counterintuitive—isn’t coconut oil in tanning lotions used to accelerate tanning?  But I’d read that same advice somewhere else, so it seemed worth a try.)

Well, I got a little burned anyway.  Maybe I shouldn’t have sat out with my coconut-oiled face, for THREE HOURS from 11:00 to 2:00?!  But it’s been a long winter, and I was looking forward to some sun.

So I can’t tell you coconut oil is a miracle sunscreen.  But I was so busy, I had to fly out the door with my two sons, without doing any food prep like I usually do for a trip.  We grabbed a bag of sprouted teriyaki almonds I’d made for the nutrition class, a bag of those sweet-potato spears from Costco, and that’s ALL.  It was an adventure in finding decent nutrition on the road without the advantage of advance planning.

I found a place called Jimmy John’s (a sandwich franchise) down there.  They have a 7-grain bread and a veggie sandwich featuring alfalfa sprouts, lettuce, tomato, and a homemade avocado sauce. Not too bad, and pretty filling.

Subway is our standby as “fast food” on trips. Here’s what you do: get the “wheat” bread and order a Veggie Delite.  Tell the teenaged employee to put on LOTS of cucumbers, bell peppers, tomatoes, alfalfa sprouts, and shredded carrots.  If you’re lucky, they’ll have spinach, though I didn’t see any at the Subways we visited on this trip.  Skip the iceburg and load up on the nutrient-dense veggies.  For a sauce, we just do brown mustard.

Then, your sandwich lies there, open, looking a little skimpy.  The “sandwich artist” awaits further orders.  Do not, in the interest of being polite, leave with that skimpy sandwich.  You say, can I have a bunch more tomatoes?  Thanks!  And how about a lot more cucumbers?  (Go through the whole vegetable lineup again if necessary.  Smile and use ALL your chatty charisma so as to not completely annoy them.)  When your sandwich is piled high with veggies, they manage to squeeze it shut and package it up for you, and you get a rather nutritious meal—though I recommend the 12-inch to make it filling enough!

 I stopped at a grocery store and got Grape Nuts (actually the store brand, because it was cheaper and didn’t contain soy lecithin).  We also got a couple boxes of Rice Dream, some bananas to put on top, and plastic bowls and spoons.  That was breakfast for four days.  I got a bag of apples for snacks.

I still wish I’d made two blenderfuls of GS and put it in a cooler like I’d planned (you can always use the hotel’s ice if your room doesn’t have a mini-fridge).  But we did okay!

Next up, I’m off to fill plastic Easter eggs with carob raisins, and hide them, for the kids.  Happy Easter to y’all!

So I just wrecked the pedestal underneath the Fat Diet Docs and celebs, the personal trainers, the network marketers’ pills, potions, and juices, and the blood type and metabolic typing docs.

I hope you’re not feeling without answers.  Moms write me and tell me they read about nutrition and go to bed in tears because of all the complexity and confusion, and that’s heartbreaking.  Who can blame them?  There is no subject wherein the most educated among us are more confused than the field of WHAT TO EAT.

But answers are usually easy and pure.  Remember the Biblical story of the man Jesus told to go and wash his eyes in the river?  The man cost himself a cure because it was too simple. In an age of technology, complexity, and an excess of information and opinion, we expect the answers to be hard.  But the answers, when it comes to what fuel to put in our body, are so simple that they’re (ironically) hard for a modern mind to comprehend!

It’s hard, I know, to let go of the idea that you have to eat a bunch of pills every day. The calcium! The fish oil! The hair-growth formula! It’s endless, and it’s just a variation on the drug approach to health, really. Here’s the secret:  

Eat simple food that grows in the dirt.  Wash it first.  Cook it as little as possible.  Drink lots of clean water.

An orange is better than a two-ounce drink of magic juice (pasteurized, in a really sweet-lookin’ bottle that costs $30) from the tip-top of a mountain range some peasants climbed barefoot to harvest, in a remote part of a country you’ve never heard of.  If you are going to pay for foods not quite in their original form, as much as possible, make sure they’re

not heated above 100 degrees

not changed, concentrated, or adulterated in any way

devoid of chemicals, sweeteners, and fillers

That makes a rather short list of things that are worth your hard-earned money.

Joe Mercola’s been hyping his metabolic typing program to his 1.5 million readers.  You, too, can pay big bucks for it, as soon as he’s done creating it.  He continues to tell people to eat lots of whey protein powder (which he sells) and avoid eating grains, despite a massive body of evidence telling us otherwise.  (Mercola’s a great watchdog and right on so many other things, though.)  Peter D’Adamo has already sold millions of copies of his book Eat Right for Your Blood Type.  He prescribes a certain diet to follow for A, B, AB, and O blood types.

People following the plan quit eating wheat and dairy and think that it’s the blood type diet that helped them feel better.  In fact, it’s eliminating foods that many people are sensitive to that makes a difference, because no scientific evidence underpins D’Adamo’s recommendations.   Those recommendations have just made us all more anxious and confused.  And they’ve led more people down a path of eating a death-promoting diet rich in animal products like the Diet Docs recommend.  (Unless you’re Blood Type A—D’Adamo says you folks are supposed to be vegetarian!)

Joel Fuhrman, M.D., methodically took D’Adamo’s entire theory apart, using the body of scientific literature easily accessed in medical databases.  D’Adamo says Type A people should eat vegetables since they’re more prone to heart disease and cancer.  Problem is, they’re not, when all types of heart disease are examined.  Any slight differences in a few studies don’t warrant radically different nutritional recommendations.  Type O, B, and AB folks get PLENTY of heart disease and cancer, and sending them down the track toward more disease is a travesty.

All the other blood types are supposed to follow D’Adamo’s specific recommendations for lots of cheese, or lots of meat, or both.  It’s all underpinned by terribly flawed logic and gross misunderstandings of human physiology and nutrition.

We do have some variations in our genetic makeup and needs (especially as more and more people develop sensitivities and allergies to good foods).  But many genetic factors affect your risk for various diseases, blood type playing only a small role at best.  Please don’t trouble yourself to buy/read/follow this misguided program, yet another of the false gods of nutrition at whose altar we worship.

Tomorrow I end this “false gods” series and sum it all up, just before leaving town for the rest of the week to collect some Vitamin D watching my son play baseball in a sunny place.  Yesssssss!