I’m still laughing since I read that most excellent quote–thanks, Katie!

When I’m teaching my college students elemental data analysis and research, I tell them my two pet peeves about research in general, but particularly in the field of health and nutrition.

I say that I am completely frustrated with medicine.  The vast majority of research inside modern medicine is bought and paid for, motive tainting it to the point of near uselessness.  A profit motive is often counter to the interests of the public health (a flaw in the capitalist economic system, not that I’m advocating for any other system).  Nowhere is this more evident than in the field of prescription drugs.  The problem is highlighted by the 2007 release of a study of the world’s 20 largest pharmaceutical companies (often referred to as Big Pharma): they spend 2:1 on marketing (drug pushing) versus research and development!

On the other end, as Katie’s quote alludes to, “alternative health” doesn’t have big bucks backing it, so those who market natural remedies often rely on case studies.  One person, or even ten, saying their constipation improved taking X or Y herb?  That’s not compelling research.  Worst of all is the fact that many health/nutrition products are marketed by people with little knowledge base (in direct sales and network marketing models).  Those selling many products these days rely on nothing more than anecdotes, or “testimonials.”   

Their selling sometimes looks a lot like a revivalist religious meeting, and that turns me cold because it’s emotion based rather than logic based.  Look at the folks claiming their gout or their psoriasis or their athsma is better because of Product X, at those meetings, and tell me: do they look truly healthy?  Can you really believe that a diet of hot dogs and potato chips, with a little pasteurized miracle mangosteen juice or a pill of some kind, is the answer to all health problems?  Do a product’s claims fit with what you already know, or is it just wishful thinking and preying on the desperation of so many people in poor health?

I see the problems with common reasoning flaws on a micro level, constantly.  Three examples tomorrow.

My teenaged daughter Emma came home from camp today.  After giving me a hug and saying hello, the first thing she said was, “MOM! Did you make green smoothies yet?  I neeeeeeed one! I missed them so much!”

Just now, at dinner, she sat down to a big plate of veggies and said this (I ran in to write it down so I could get it word for word):

“I am so happy to be home.  Every single meal at camp, I felt disgusting afterward.  I didn’t eat the meat, but you just couldn’t avoid all the junk.  It’s just not what I am used to.”  To support each other, Emma ate meals with a 12 Stepper mom/leader at the camp, another girl who is a veg, and one of Emma’s friends who loves animals and is kind of a “veg wannabe.”

I have always been amazed that some people eat toxic sludge, three meals a day, and they seem to be okay.  They’re not, of course—they’re ticking time bombs, and many of them, when you get to know them, suffer from multiple chronic conditions and a lack of energy.  But I once read that Heather Locklear (a size 1 who looks 10 years younger than she is and gets paid to show her skin and hair close up) never eats ANYTHING green and hates vegetables.  Some people don’t look, on the outside, like they’re unhealthy.

What gives?  Why do Emma and I feel so terrible the minute we eat bad food?

I think the human body, being fed the S.A.D. long-term, goes into coping mode.  It isn’t able to repair, regenerate, cleanse, or fight infection or cancer cells well.  It just has to survive, put all its energy into just completing required tasks.  Some people seem to be getting by, drinking lots of caffeine and eating lots of fried, processed, sugary foods and animal proteins.  But if you think about it, it’s SCARY that some people’s radar or response to bad food is stunted or damaged.   We NEED our bodies to tell us what’s good and what’s not.  It’s nothing to be jealous of.

On the other hand, a body fed a regularly pure diet of plant foods is more finely tuned.  All body systems are functioning at a higher level and the instruments register more sensitively.  If I were to eat a Krispy Kreme donut or two for breakfast, instead of my daily 100% raw-food breakfast, I’d be ill for hours, and it would zap my energy all day.  I might even have to just go to bed!  I haven’t eaten a donut in many years, just because the consequences aren’t worth it.  Donuts don’t even look good to me.

Sometimes it doesn’t seem fair, what other people are “getting away with.”  It might seem like a drag that the whole police dept. appears to feel fine eating daily coffee and donuts for breakfast, while one donut would put me into a tailspin.  But I believe being sensitive to bad food is a blessing in disguise.  People who feel horrible when eating horribly learn NOT TO! 

How about you? Are you sensitive, or can you eat just anything and feel no different?

I’m a little ashamed to admit that parts of my garden have been sadly neglected this year, due to my being gone a lot and not being able to use it as quickly as it has grown.

I try not to post many no-makeup photos so that people don’t write GSG off as a tree-huggin’, bark-eatin’ granola chick.  (I’d prefer that you know that “health nuts” can look normal, blend in, even shave!) 

But as I got home from two hours of tennis today—in which my friend and I soundly crushed our teen sons, BTW—I went out and whacked down a couple of my 4’ tall spinach and chard plants that are totally gone to seed.

I used a knife to “saw” since I didn’t have a machete!  When I saw I could barely lift these spinach plants (only two, and some overgrown chard leaves), I asked my son to take a photo, even though I was all sweaty and vanity suggested I should not.

And I then made a green smoothie with a bunch of it—woody stalks and all.  It tastes fine!  I washed the  

rest and crammed it into three gallon freezer bags, and put them in the freezer. (I still have loads of it to hack down out there.)  The vitamin concentration surely isn’t as high as baby spinach, but the fiber has got to be through the roof!  The parts that had gone “to seed?”  They and the woody stalks are in the tummies of the five of us (me and my four kids).  I didn’t even throw those parts away.

Days and days worth of free food–no excuses to say that green smoothies are expensive!  I haven’t even gone out and picked purslane and dandelion weeds for my smoothies yet this year.  (Oh, but I WILL!)

In my local paper June 11, local dentist Michelle Jorgenson, who quit using amalgam fillings 10 years ago, is “vindicated.”  That’s because, due to the settlement of a class action lawsuit, the FDA’s site now says,

“Dental amalgams contain mercury, which may have nerotoxic effects on the nervous systems of developing children and fetuses.”

Of course, the FDA and the ADA (American Dental Association) are some of the most lawyered-up organization on the planet, so you think they’re going to admit their practices for the past 150 years have caused mercury poisoning in millions of people?  Hardly.  As Dr. Jorgenson points out (very courageous of her, I think!), that would invite loads of lawsuits against dentists and the ADA itself.  Nope, this is the ADA’s stance:

Amalgam is “a safe, affordable and durable material that has been used in the teeth of more than 100 million Americans.”

Speaking of dentistry politics, after a 150-year fight over mercury in our teeth, how long do you think it will take to win the war against the poison fluoride in our water supply?  And by the way, the mercury war is far from won.  The article ends saying that little change will take place in dental offices since the ADA refuses to admit the material is dangerous.  My own dentist gave me the party line recently, but then removed my amalgam fillings a few years ago.  Find a competent dentist who will use dental dams, if you choose to have your metal fillings removed, because you don’t want a single speck of that stuff swallowed or inhaled.

The Parker Jensen case made international news five years ago when the State of Utah filed charges against Parker’s parents and tried to take custody and force chemotherapy on Parker.  (My published op-ed writings on that case were posted by others on the internet.)  One thing the papers didn’t say was that his parents believe his cancer diagnosis can be blamed on a cracked metal filling leaching metals into his body.

http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/263

This is a great speech worth your time, by New York Times food writer Mark Bittman.  Did you know that our massive meat consumption (which has increased per capita 250 percent globally in the past 50 years) contributes to global warming?

Bittman discusses the history of food since 1900, and he talks about while the mission of “kindness to animals” is good, it’s a red herring and by no means the biggest issue, since we’re killing 10 billion animals annually, thus leading not only to heart disease, but a serious threat to global survival.  Thirty percent of the earth’s surface is devoted to animal production, and this is expected to double in the next 40 years or fewer, if our dietary habits continue.  And 18 percent of greenhouse gases are directly attributable to livestock production.

Processed foods also consume lots of the earth’s resources, with 1 billion cans of Coke consumed DAILY.

He says “locavore” is Webster’s word of the year: it refers to people who eat only food grown locally.  (If you live in Alaska, obviously this won’t be as easy as for people in California!)

Conservatives, beware: while this speaker/journalist is dead-on with his facts (reads the same sources GreenSmoothieGirl quotes constantly), he’s the usual “liberal media.”  Of more concern is that he doesn’t practice what he preaches.  He doesn’t dare call for people to eat lower on the food chain, since he states multiple times that he eats plenty of meat and plans to continue, but he waters down his message saying that we need to be more “aware.”  Huh?  Aware that we are personally contributing to the profligacy of our generation, but do nothing about it?  If you’re aware meat and dairy is bad for you and consumes far more than your share of the Earth’s resources, why not change?

“You eat more plants, you eat less other stuff, you live longer.”

–Mark Bittman (a speaker/writer who needs to lead by example)

The interesting controversy over my nutrition quiz prompts this post.  (http://www.greensmoothiegirl.com/nutrition-quiz.html)

I supported myself in high school and college teaching piano lessons, and I taught again for about 10 years when my kids were small.  When I quit, I had 33 students and a two-year waiting list.  My big frustration, teaching piano, was that while people brought their kids to me because I had high standards, the parents themselves, ironically, often wanted to pull standards downward.  Practicing six days a week, or three recitals a year, or a requirement to play memorized without mistakes—it’s just too much, they’d complain!

Teachers face constant pressure to lower standards.  I constantly face the exact same thing teaching at a nationally renowned business school (recently ranked #1 with recruiters by Business Week).  If you don’t believe me, I submit Exhibit A, my ratings on the no-holds-barred ratemyprofessors.com that every professor learns to dread because it’s so anonymous and every student reads it:

http://ratemyprofessors.com/ShowRatings.jsp?tid=386862

If you read that, you get the sense that I’m super intense, right?  Well, I am ranked against my colleagues once a year, and I am smack in the middle of the GPAs handed out in my department—dead average! 

Consider that my nutrition quiz—while some say it’s not fair and some say people eating a good diet get a D on it—would be considered WAY TOO LENIENT by many nutrition experts.  My bar is lower than Robert O. Young’s, Alyssa Cohen’s, Victoria Boutenko’s, Gabriel Cousins’, and Joel Furhman’s.  The raw foodists, the locavores, the alkalarians?  They’d all say I’ve sold out.

That quiz is by no means the end-all, be-all, and I will revise it based on feedback.  But imagine if I’d put points in there for whether or not you’re eating organic (that would take nearly everyone down).  I have quite a few friends (every one of them incredibly healthy and energetic raw foodists, some of whom beat cancer that way) who call the standards of GreenSmoothieGirl “transitional eating”—in other words, not basic and pure enough, just steps on that path.

So, friends, what I’m saying is that we cannot compare ourselves to averages (or even government standards) when those averages and standards have fallen so low.   I’ve been unpopular before, for holding the bar high (but my students thank me later when they’re in the work force and they realized they actually know how to write).  I’d lower the bar if I believed a lower bar was right and good or would help anybody.  If you want to feel good about your diet, the feel-good folks are the dieticians.  Look up their websites, read their recipes full of cheese and meat and processed ingredients (all they do is count calories and fat/carb grams), and see if that’s what you want to guide your growth and progress.

You’ll read more about why and how the USRDA standards are biased and false very shortly, if you’ve been subscribed to gsg.com’s free e-letter for a while.  The average diet of Americans is an F, not a C.

Guess what happens to teachers when they respond by lowering standards?  You just have a whole new set of people who think your standards are too high.  

I’m listening.  So don’t hold back on what you think.  Controversy is good, and it causes what Aristotle called the “dialectic”: a process of change and improvement through pressure and conflict and discussion.  I value it.

But know that the mission of GSG.com, and 12 Steps to Whole Foods, is about doing something that might seem hard at the outset, one step at a time so that truly anyone can do it.

I came home and was putting a green smoothie together.  While I did that, I quickly sauteed some of the boy choy, baby carrots, and the garlic from last week (some interesting variety that looks/is like an onion but tastes/smells like garlic).  I sprinkled it with sea salt and fresh pepper, tossed in some Bragg’s Liquid Aminos, and a couple teaspoons of agave.  Yum, dinner in five minutes!  It would have been good with brown rice, if I’d thought ahead to make some.  Or tossed with quinoa, which takes only 10 minutes to make. 

Last week one of the items were these little baby turnips.  My 12-year old daughter said, “This is the best thing that has ever been in my mouth, EVER.”

Bell Organic (bellorganic.com) is in Draper, Utah, and although they sold out for the full season, they’re selling mid-season shares for August-October.  They are so adventurous with what they grow, and we’re consequently getting amazing variety in our green smoothies.

I highly recommend getting involved with a local CSA for 12 Steppers and anyone interested in increasing plant-food nutrition in your home.   You’ll not only get amazingly flavorful, organic produce at a fraction of the cost, but you’ll make your family’s “footprint” on this earth smaller.  Every bite of food you eat grown locally is a bite of food you DIDN’T eat that had to be shipped from somewhere else in the world that consumes packaging and nonrenewable fossil fuels.

This Aussie lady named Mary we ate dinner with every night on our two-week cruise to Asia . . . she was so funny.  The third night in a row she held court, telling everyone that diet and lifestyle have NOTHING to do with how long you live (a big study she saw on the “telly” said it’s all the people doing the exercising who are dropping dead of heart attacks), I finally said something.  It was pretty innocuous, I thought.

“Weeeeelllllll, Mary,” I said, smiling, “thousands of studies say otherwise.”  Up until then, she’d told me affectionately how I remind her of her rather ambitious, health-nut oldest daughter.  But just then, she snapped:  “Oh, you remind me of my daughter–just SHUT UP!”  (It reads worse than it sounded, since of course she has that cute Australian accent.)  My friend and my daughter—and my new friends, too—laughed and repeated that line for the rest of the vacation.

You know that argument well, that because Grandma never ate a vegetable in her life and outlived all the healthy eaters in the family . . . well, therefore, we should all throw common sense out the window.  A convenient if ridiculous argument!  This is the logical fallacy known as the non sequitir.  It goes like this, and people use this kind of reasoning all the time (it would get thrown out in court by even semi-competent lawyers, though):

“Eating hot dogs is supposed to be bad for you.  Grandma ate hot dogs for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.  Grandma lived 30 years longer than the average American.  Therefore, eating hot dogs isn’t bad.”  (You can track where the logic goes wrong, I’m sure.)

Fact is, you always have outliers in any study of any variable.  Fact is, anomalies like Grandma are always going to happen.  But don’t bet the farm on them.  They’re still outliers and anomalies.

A dentist in the ‘40’s named Francis Pottenger studied genetics, through the effects of processed food on hundreds of cats.  Half the cats were fed natural foods and half were fed processed foods.  What was interesting was that those fed junk developed health problems in later life, but their CHILDREN developed degenerative diseases in MID-life and their GRANDCHILDREN developed severe issues EARLY in life.

We’re seeing identical patterns in human beings, now that we’re on the third generation of people eating lots of processed food.  Sure, our grandparents look okay, some of them, but our children aren’t doing so hot.  For evidence, review the statistics on the childhood obesity epidemic from the Associated Press multi-part story I blogged about a few weeks ago.  Even if your kid isn’t overweight, he’s got significant risk of other problems if he’d eating the S.A.D. (Standard American Diet).  (Atherosclerosis is now prevalent in 8-yr. olds, and this discovery is so new that most don’t even know about it.  What will be the consequences to the economy, to families, of this trend, 20 years from now?)

 Incidentally, those cats?  Pottenger put the sick cats on whole foods, and they gradually got better, but it also took three generations to return to excellent health.  Just like it took three generations for processed food to DESTROY their health.  Let’s treat our kids like that third generation, which they are.  They need us.  We’re the ones providing their food and we have such an important responsibility to them. 

Another important implication of this very old piece of research is that genetic markers are less important than diet.  If people don’t eat the S.A.D., they don’t develop arthritis, or diabetes, or cancer.  Your genetic weaknesses show themselves ONLY when your lifestyle brings them out.

Let’s see what grade you get for a healthy lifestyle with the GreenSmoothieGirl.com Nutrition Quiz!  Add up your points, and if you’re not getting an A, well, get on board 12 Steps to Whole Foods, and we’ll get you to an A at the end of one year!  This is just the first part of the quiz: see the whole thing at

http://www.greensmoothiegirl.com/nutrition-quiz.html

Feel free to come back to this blog after taking the quiz, and let us know your score and what your goals are to increase it, if you didn’t ace it!

How many daily servings of vegetables (including greens) do you eat?

(serving = ½ cup cooked or 1 cup loose greens)

8   8 or more

7   6-7

6   5-6

5   4

4   3    

3   2

2   1

1   0

0   I don’t much like vegetables, don’t eat any on most days

-1   I hate vegetables and never eat them (except potatoes and fries)

How many daily servings of fresh fruits do you eat?

5   4 or more

4   2-3

3   1

2   0

1   I might eat a piece of fruit every couple of days

0   I rarely or never eat fruit

For the rest of this quiz, go to

http://www.greensmoothiegirl.com/nutrition-quiz.html.

What’s YOUR SCORE?

My good friend Michelle loves the Atkins Diet (has adopted it as an apparently permanent lifestyle, in fact).  She in no way embraces (or even acknowledges the benefits of) my lifestyle.  But I did convince her that she needs a dehydrator so she can soak/germinate her raw almonds that she just got in my local group buy.  I thought you’d be entertained and hopefully educated by this email from her today (especially if you want a dehydrator—alert: needed for upcoming step in 12 Steps!):

 “You know how I’m a compulsive over-researcher when it comes to buying toys? Well I realized that I wanted a dehydrator and wondered which one I should get. After quite a bit of looking, I decided that IF I believed that there were health benefits to eating raw foods, I would definitely want this one:

 http://www.spoilthecook.com/bosch/L-Equip-Food-Dehydrator.html

because it has a special 60x/second thermometer which makes sure the temp throughout the entire machine stays exactly where it is set. For people who want to keep the nutrients in their raw/sprouted foods, that’s really important. By way of contrast, this machine

 http://www.spoilthecook.com/bosch/Air-Preserve-II-Gardenmaster-Deluxe-Food-Dehydrator.html

was widely reported to have a thermometer which was off by up to 25 degrees, and Excalibur brand machines (like this one:  http://www.spoilthecook.com/bosch/Excalibur-Food-Dehydrator-Model-2500.html)  had “hot spots” and “cold spots” so the temp at the thermometer was even, but different trays could have very different temps. (Goodbye raw; hello cooked!)  Of course all the “cheapie” models (like at Walmart.com, here:

http://www.walmart.com/search/search-ng.do?search_constraint=0&search_query=dehydrator&ic=48_0&Find.x=32&Find.y=5)  

had the same or even more serious problems in the reviews,  like catching on fire, or motors that broke quickly, or fans that didn’t work, or no fans, or no thermostat at all . . . So, why am I telling you all this? As an FYI to your readers, the Bosch

Kitchen Center in Orem just put the L’Equip dehydrator on sale today for $99. That’s a great deal, and I think they only had 5 or 6 in stock, so I don’t expect them to last very long. The best price I found on the internet was $139, and most places had it at $159. 

So anyone who 1) cares about preserving the nutrition in raw foods and 2) wants a good price on what is, IMO, the best dehydrator on the market . . . there it is.

Of course, I’m not necessarily ready to concede that there’s any benefit to eating raw/sprouted foods. I ate Cheetos and Sweet Tarts for lunch, and I’m not yet dead . . . ”

–Michelle