Dear GreenSmoothieGirl: The Oxford-Cornell China Project is irrelevant to us, because Campbell studied rats and mice, and then Chinese people.  Not Americans.

Answer:  I’m not going to comment much on the notion that Chinese and American people aren’t alike enough to compare.  Either we all descended from apes, or we were all created from Adam’s rib, whichever belief you subscribe to, and we have the same essential biology, body systems, and health challenges.  That’s like saying that if Big Macs aren’t good for women, they still might be good for men.  Or that if Kool-Aid is toxic for children, it still might be good food for adults.

As for the animal studies that Campbell’s team conducted (which were duplicated by researchers around the world with consistent results), even they have profound implications for humans for four reasons.

First, humans and rats have virtually identical needs for protein.  Second, protein operates in humans the same way it does in rats.  Third, the percentage of protein consumption (20%) consumed by rats in the studies is the level of consumption in the typical American diet.  And fourth, in both humans and rats, the stage where cancer is initiated is far less important that the stage where cancer is promoted.  We all are exposed to carcinogens, but whether we end up with life-threatening cancerous tumors depends on whether or not those cancer cells are “promoted” with excesses of animal proteins.

Unless you’re new here, you probably already know my opinion that Dr. Robert Atkins, before dying with massive heart disease, did terrible damage to Americans’ health, and confused an already struggling nation regarding nutrition.

Dr. Nathan Pritikin, on the other hand, was a prominent voice for precisely the type of lifestyle I advocate for here at GreenSmoothieGirl.com.  He lived what he preached, reversing his own heart disease with years of eating a plant-based diet.  Pritikin said in his will that he wanted to be autopsied at his death, and he wanted the results published, regardless of the outcome.

The outcome of the autopsy, published in the New England Journal of Medicine in 1985, was that he had the healthy arteries and heart of a very young person, with no sign of heart disease or atherosclerosis.

As you may have observed, on the other hand, the Atkins camp did everything in their power to conceal Dr. Atkins’ weight and health before and after his hospitalizations and death, although his doctor later leaked some of the details, which aren’t pretty.  How could they publicize the findings of his autopsy, after he’d built a megamillion dollar empire telling people their hearts would be healthy eating bacon and eggs?  Among many other studies, I’ll quote just one: a study published in Angiology in 2000 shows that the Atkins diet reduces blood flow to the heart by 40 percent in one year.

If you’re a reader of scriptures, you know that people throughout history want to follow feel-good prophets.  No one wants to listen to a true prophet who foretells calamity if the people don’t change their ways.  I am not going to tell you things on this site to make you feel good about eating salami on white bread, with a Coke and Fritos.  To be reassured that your crappy diet will make you healthy (like Robert Atkins offered), you’ll have to look elsewhere.  (He “updated” his lousy advice with slight improvements, which I call “philosophies of men mingled with scripture.”)  And the experts I quote and refer you to are those who will tell you the truth, regardless of whether it sounds pretty or not.

Interesting facts:

Raw vegetables contain 100 calories per pound

Fresh fruit contain 300 calories per pound

Animal flesh contains 1,200 calories per pound

Green vegetables are so massively nutrient rich and calorie minimal, you could literally eat them all day and never get fat.  The more you eat, the more you lose!  By working towards a diet that includes 2 lbs. of vegetables a day, you feel full and get tons of perfect nutrition.  You also bump out the high-calorie stuff that not only causes disease, but also makes us fat.  When you eat 2 lbs. of veggies a day (or as close as you can), your digestive system works easily, as it was designed to do.

Lisle and Goldhamer, in The Pleasure Trap, write about how to handle when people in our lives get upset because of our plant-based dietary habits.  Their claim that people get angry with us only because they are embarrassed (about their own eating habits) rings true to me based on my own experience.

If you choose to make good choices at a church or neighborhood barbecue, for instance, they know that you’re observing THEM make poor choices.  They fear losing status with you.  Lisle and Goldhamer suggest two ways of dealing with this issue.  I believe these suggestions are sound, and they additionally will strengthen your bond with those who would otherwise be upset by your choices.  These things are what I already do, and so I add to the authors’ suggestions a bit:

One, “bolster their status” by referring to the things you love about them, unrelated to their dietary choices.  This is easy to do and takes the awkwardness out of the situation of your drinking a green smoothie at the baseball game while they’re munching on beef jerky and Goldfish crackers.  I also make jokes about it: today at my son’s double header, when a mom asked her son if wanted some snack-stand nachos and Skittles, I said, “Or I’ve got a green smoothie here—you KNOW you want one, so don’t even deny it!”  (I’ve made lots of new friends at the ball fields and gotten them to try my green smoothies, only by being funny and casual about it, never by being dogmatic or pushy.)

Two, reassure them that you’re not “perfect” and don’t think you’re better than them because of your “superior discipline.”  Just show a little humility.

These authors claim this will ease the awkwardness of social situations that have the potential to make friends feel uncomfortable.  I would add, however, since I’ve been doing this for a very long time, that if you utilize these two principles, those same people may also come to you someday for help when they want to change their own lifestyle.  That can happen only if you’re loving and gentle.

Sometimes I wonder if my teenaged son is absorbing what I teach him about health, or if he’s just too annoyed with me and absorbed with “fitting in” to care.  Yesterday after double header baseball games, one of the coaches ranted at the boys about the huge mess they’d made in the dugout, with all their candy wrappers and trash from snack-bar nachos, hot dogs, and sodas.  Cade had, at the game, a green smoothie and two whole-grain sandwiches (as usual).

On the way home, Cade was telling me about the dressing down the team had received.  I said, “What they SHOULD have gotten is a dressing down about what effect their eating habits are having on their game.”  That would never happen, of course, because adults don’t want to lecture kids when their own health habits are terrible.  And of course, it’s a taboo subject.  But some boys on the team have recently had surgery for rampant, years-long infection, some have seriously stunted growth, and several keep breaking bones including growth plates.

The week before, I had talked to Cade about the sunflower seeds he’d been eating, week after week, for several years.  You’re thinking, but sunflower seeds are good, right?  Not the kind the baseball players eat.  And I hadn’t said anything much because my son already feels like a bit of a sore thumb in the dugout, eating the stuff I bring him.

But my son has recently developed some seasonal allergies, and he has a bit of acne.  I told him that his massive refined-salt consumption eating those salted seeds every week is contributing to these two problems that are making him miserable.  Furthermore, I explained that MSG is in those packages of Dill Pickle and BBQ flavored seeds.  No wonder all the kids and coaches are addicted!  I explained that MSG is a neurotoxin, that your body can’t digest, assimilate, or eliminate it.  I told him that no refined salt, flour, sugar, or meat product is as bad as MSG is.

I never buy the seeds for him, but he’s always eaten handfuls of the ones in the dugout, purchased by others.  He stands out in right field spitting seed shells.  But yesterday, my son told me he didn’t eat ANY.  I’m really happy that he listens to and values what I say, since my other kids “get it,” but I sometimes wonder about him. 

Keep talking, and do it away from the situation (I didn’t march up to him in the dugout and lecture him).  A great man named Joseph Smith said, “Teach children correct principles and let them govern themselves.”  They make mistakes, but they come around if you keep teaching.

People in my community are dedicated to storing a year’s supply of food (myself included), and we are blessed to have many preparedness experts around us.  I struggled for years to achieve a food supply that we would actually eat, that wouldn’t go to waste because it’s so nutritionally inferior or has such a short shelf life.  (I threw out a lot of stuff over the years.)  I feel that I now have a solid food storage I can rotate into our diet.  So I’m including here a list of what’s in The Hatch.  That’s what we call our cold-storage room in the basement, in honor of our favorite ABC TV show, Lost.  I hope it helps you, and if you’re a preparedness guru, please share any ideas on what YOU store.

I know some of you will have to get creative, space-wise, to achieve any kind of storage, and perhaps you will want to consider starting with a three-month supply of food.)  Tons of natural disasters in the last couple of weeks, along with an international food shortage and skyrocketing fuel costs, have put food storage at the forefront of many of our minds.

I’ve put at the top of this list the things I feel are most nutritionally valuable in my list (the least important things are at the end).  For length, I’ve left off the list all the non-food items and dog food.

VitaMineral Green (for enzymes, greens nutrition, probiotics, 5-yr. shelf life)

The Ultimate Meal (#10 cans, sprouted, 3-yr. shelf life, get it on Amazon)

Raw sauerkraut (from my garden cabbage)

Organic, extra virgin coconut oil

Extra virgin olive oil

Raw legumes: small red, black turtle, small white, pinto, garbanzo, and 11-bean mix, plus lentils and split peas

Grains: popcorn, wheat, Kamut, quinoa, rye, oat groats, rolled oats, brown rice

Shredded coconut

Raisins

Nuts and seeds: raw almonds, walnuts, pumpkin seeds, sesame seeds, cashews (many of these are in my upright full-size freezer)

Coconut juice (canned)

Raw apple cider vinegar (gallons are on sale right now at Good Earth, locals!)

Sweeteners: raw honey, raw agave, real maple syrup, blackstrap molasses, stevia

Spices: sea salt, kelp, cinnamon, cocoa powder, baking powder, basil, oregano, cayenne

Natural peanut butter

Whole-grain pasta

Canned:

Powdered milk (to make kefir/yogurt)

Whole eggs

No-sugar-added spaghetti sauce

Canned diced tomatoes, and tomato sauce

Dehydrated fruits and vegs (bell peppers, onions, apples, bananas, mixed fruit)

Beans: black, vegetarian refried, garbanzos (for convenience)

Corn

Vegetarian chili

No-sugar-added applesauce

No-sugar-added peaches, mandarin oranges

Some other random items like canned black olives and liquid chlorophyll

More from Levine and Stein of the Washington Post.  Read it and tell me if I’m crazy for saying in my last post that raising an obese child (by apathetically feeding him nonstop junk food) doesn’t qualify as abuse.  I realize that my words are strong, but I stand by them.

At least one study suggests obese children might tend toward lower IQs and be more likely to have brain lesions similar to Alzheimer’s patients.  Fat deposits in the chest wall push against the lungs and diaphragm, making it harder for the lungs to expand and bring in oxygen.  An obese child can feel out of breath while standing still, and obese children are twice as likely to develop asthma.

Excessive weight on children’s bone growth plates cause syndromes like Blount’s Disease and slipped capital femoral epiphysis, because bone and cartilage are not designed to support abnormal weight.  Legs bow and weak bones fracture and disintegrate.

Obese girls menstruate early, causing growth to stop early.  Obese teen girls have two to three times the risk of dying by middle age compared to normal-weight teens.  Liver disease now occurs in a third of obese children, causing abdominal pain, infection, and fatigue.  These kids are at high risk for cirrhosis of the liver, liver failure, and liver cancer.

Obese people’s gallbladders don’t function normally, and hospitalizations for gallbladder disease have tripled in children 6 to 17, in just 20 years.  The pancreas doesn’t work normally in obese children, either, and the massive insulin swings eventually cause diabetes.  Pediatric endocrinologist says, “Once you get Type 2 diabetes, figure you have 20 more years of life and then you are dead.  So if you get it at 15, you’ll be dead at 35.”

One pound of fat is about the size of a coffee mug.  Imagine that an obese child who is 50 lbs. overweight has 50 coffee mugs of greasy fat he has to carry around every day.  Go pick up a 50 lb. bag of rice or wheat and carry it around a while.  That’s what an obese child deals with 24/7.  The number of fat cells you have is determined by late adolescence, and although the child can shrink fat cells, they never go away.

Obese children are 37 times as likely to have high blood pressure, and more and more of them are being prescribed drugs to prevent heart attack and stroke.  Many will be on the drugs FOR LIFE.

[I'm out of the country until June 7, but my blogs will still magically appear here!] 

Levine and Stein of the Washington Post pulled no punches on the front page of my local newspaper May 18, the first in a five-part series.  The pictures, sidebars, and article took up more than a full news page: 

Being overweight at a young age appears to be far more destructive to well-being than adding excess pounds later in life.  Virtually every major organ is at risk.  The greater damage is probably irreversible.

 “Doctors are seeing confirmation of this daily: boys and girls in elementary school suffering from high blood pressure, high cholesterol and painful joint conditions; a soaring incidence of type 2 diabetes, once a rarity in pediatricians’ offices; even a spike in child gallstones, also once a singularly adult affliction.  Minority youth are most severely affected, because so many are pushing the scales into the most dangerous territory.  

“With one in three children in this country overweight or worse, the future health and productivity of an entire generation—and a nation—could be in jeopardy.”

The article points out that while obesity has doubled with parents and grandparents nowadays, it has TRIPLED in children.  These children will be disabled in their most productive years, since almost all obese children become obese adults.  Our surgeon general is calling child obesity nothing less than “a national catastrophe.”

Robyn’s comment: our government takes children from families whose homes are filthy, who are accused by someone of physical or emotional abuse of children, or even who refuse to submit their child to chemotherapy because they prefer an alternative.  (I’m not condoning government intervention in all of these cases, not by a long shot.  You can google “Parker Jensen” and my name, Robyn Openshaw-Pay, to find my writings on that Utah case regarding parents’ choice in mandatory chemotherapy that made international headlines.)

But we turn a blind eye to parents abusing their children by feeding them nothing but processed food, even while the kids are clearly gaining weight and unhealthy.  Feeding children daily sodas, hot dogs (“cancer in a bun”), fried fast food, ice cream, and dozens of chemicals and dyes we can’t pronounce, is abuse, even if it has become commonplace and its root is in ignorance or apathy rather than malice.  The parents of one of my children’s friends, good and nice people who love their kids, feed their daughter nothing but processed foods and then call her fat (which she is), grabbing her rolls of flab and belittling her. (Both parents are themselves overweight.)  I know this only because she cries to my daughter about it, who is appalled and heartbroken for her friend.

Murder I or manslaughter, somebody innocent still dies, right?  Intentional abuse or abuse from ignorance/apathy, a child still suffers.  This has to stop.  If a parent doesn’t care about the physical health effects reviewed in tomorrow’ post, surely he or she cares that the child is tormented by peers and ends up with a self-loathing problem.

 You can’t walk up to people and verbally assault their parenting, but you can refer people who genuinely want to learn and change to GreenSmoothieGirl.com or a great book on nutrition.  See who you can influence TODAY, because YOU can change this in your sphere of influence.  Obese children start in utero, with an overweight pregnant mother who doesn’t know better.  These women are the key to our future.  I have dedicated GreenSmoothieGirl.com to them and the people willing to influence them.  More eye-opening stats from this series by the Washington Post tomorrow.

So I came in from running and started to make a blenderful of GS.  Sometimes if my BlendTec is full of something else, or my kids put the container somewhere that I can’t find, I use the VitaMix instead of the BlendTec.

This photo shows another reason why I promote BlendTec over VitaMix.  This is the third time this has happened to me in the past few years with my VitaMix: while blending, for no good reason, the entire base and blade assembly comes apart from the container.  I had to pull the container off the base and quickly dump it into my other container (losing some all over the counter in the process).  I had to stick my hand into the container of green goo and fish out the blade assembly.

So I told my son to grab the camera so you could at least be entertained by it.  Don’t get me wrong–VM is a good machine, makes awesome smoothies, and they honor their warranty well (I’ve burned up a couple of their machines).  But you can read my 6 reasons (besides this design flaw) why I choose to promote BlendTec, by clicking on Best Blender on my homepage.

Covey’s Habit #3 is to Put First Things First.  Maslow’s hierarchy of needs reminds us of this, if you’ve ever studied psychology.  At the bottom of the pyramid is water, air, and food.  If we don’t have these things, we can’t go higher up the hierarchy towards more refined, complex things that make us happy: meaningful relationships with others, for instance, or the ideal of self-actualization.  Good food is foundational to health, positive mood, good relationships with nature, God, and others, and finding meaning and purpose in life.

Covey makes a quadrant, a square divided into four parts.

Most people spend too much time in Square 1 (things urgent and important) and Square 3 (things urgent and unimportant).  We have to plan and focus in order to spend more time on Square 2, things nonurgent and important.  Eating right is Square 2 material!

Habit #7 is to Sharpen the Saw.  A lumberjack is furiously sawing wood in the forest with a dull saw, and another man comes by and says, “You could do that a lot more efficiently if you’d sharpen your saw.”  The lumberjack says, “I don’t have time—I have all this wood to saw!”

Isn’t this just like life?  We’re killing ourselves by not renewing.  Low-calorie, high-nutrition, whole plant foods like vegetables, fruits, and legumes regenerate every cell in your body so you have more energy and enthusiasm when you wake up to “saw” tomorrow.