My dog has it easy. He doesn't think about what he should eat. Anything that doesn't contain things like metal, toxic chemicals, glass, or rocks is considered fair game for consumption. In fact, he spends a majority of his waking hours sniffing around, in search of anything at all with even a tiny shred of edibility. His standards are low and he is not picky. The booger on my son's finger? Sure - if held out in an inviting manner. The cat turds partially buried under the rhododendron next door? Yes, those are, for some reason, choked down with gusto. He is a little more skeptical about something like lettuce - perhaps that doesn't seem worth the effort. And carrots? Well, those will do in a pinch if there aren't any refined carbs or meat available ...

These days, refined carbs seem to be the one thing that most of the latest diet and nutrition books agree is not good for us. Funny, this used to be the largest category on the USDA Food Pyramid. Ten years ago I was a vegetarian. This first started when I read Fit For Life, the book by Harvey and Marilyn Diamond that advocated fruit before noon, no meat or dairy, and lots of fresh juicing. Admittedly, my choice was also influenced by the fact that I lived in rural New Mexico at the time, in a small town surrounded by feedlots for cows that were about to be butchered. The site of dirt mounds full of cows all piled up on the high plains made an impact on me, especially when the wind was just right and the smell of excrement literally blanketed the town. My vegetarianism was full of soy and heavily processed "fake" foods - "Oh Yum! Here are some Tofu dogs."

The juicing turned out to take a lot of effort, and the obscene amounts of produce we purchased was definitely frowned upon in that small town in the Midwest. On the plus side, we frequently got discounted meals at restaurants as our servers looked at us incredulously: "You don't want any meat in your Frito Pie?" The vegetarian experiment ended several years later when my husband and I both seemed to lack energy, had several nagging health complaints, and I was bordering on anemia. The "boundless energy" that the Diamond's had promised would "annoy our friends" no longer seemed to be there.

The next step in my food research came in the form of food sensitivity testing. Both my husband and I had this done several years ago. I sought out this testing while searching for remedies for what seemed like chronic immune system issues - even as a child I always seemed to get a lot of illnesses, and I was frustrated by the nasty colds I would get all year round. If I avoided my "bad foods" would I become healthier? Was it just that I was not breastfed as a baby or had a poor combination of genes and would have been left behind by natural selection in more primal times?

I went on a mission to find out.

The way the food sensitivities are diagnosed will be somewhat bizarre to the skeptical conventional medical believer - an electrode thingy is put on your finger on a specific acupressure point and the other end of the wire is dipped in vials containing extracts of various foods. A meter that looks like a voltage meter is noted during the dipping and anything that your body has a hard time with interrupts the electrical circuit and the needle on the meter swings to indicate this. I actually remember giggling uncontrollably during the testing - it just seemed so unscientific at the time. But, nevertheless, I am now a believer. I don't know why it works, but it does.

The results of my food testing showed a really long list of things that I should avoid - caffeine, alcohol, wheat, dairy, eggs, sugar, plus about 14 others. I have to admit though, that if I was really honest, most of the foods on this list really did seem to make cold symptoms worse, or at least "set me up" to get a cold if any other stressors (lack of sleep, stress, etc.) were present.

Traveling further along my path to nutritional wisdom, I waded through several other dietary guides. I was always primarily interested in nutrition, since I am hopelessly underweight (people used to ask me if I was anorexic in my youth!). I vowed to never set foot in a fast food restaurant again after the influence of such things as Fast Food Nation (Eric Schlosser) and the movie SuperSize Me. This vow was good for a couple years until I had wiggly toddlers and we discovered a huge Burger King play structure that has been a lifesaver during rainy days in the Northwest.

So when considering food sensitivities and unhealthy fast food, my nutrition guide became more about what not to eat rather than what to fill my plate with. Sometimes, when I thought too much about it, food seemed more like a chore than a joy. And I was reminded of Gabriel Garcia Marquez's character in One Hundred Years of Solitude who would stir discontent into the cooking. There is no hiding the emotional contribution to food. It is either prepared with abundance and health in mind or it is not. For me, too much focus on nutrition or avoidance of "bad food" makes me much too mental about what I eat.

It is confusing and frustrating that truly, there is no consensus about what is good and what is not so good for us in this regard. I know lots of people who do the Atkins diet or South Beach diet - and they seem to be okay. Apparently many of them lose weight and appear much healthier after minimizing carbohydrates. But it seems that few people can live carb-free in our carb-addicted culture without going off and on the diet several times a year.

And by the way, have you looked at the ingredient list in some of the "low-carb" food products being offered these days? Along with all the artificial sweeteners, there is a scary list of mysterious things. If you saw a pile of guar gum or malted yeast extract sitting in a bowl, would you recognize it? What is all this stuff? Even soy, which has been touted for years as a health miracle, now seems to be on the avoid list according to many nutritionists. Apparently it is heavily processed, sometimes using toxic chemicals. Yummy.

Diabetes is skyrocketing in the United States. Cancer and heart disease are all too common, and the well-publicized issue of obesity is proposed to be an epidemic in years to come if eating and exercise habits are not changed. This is not to mention hay fever, asthma, and food allergies. I have a lot of exposure to small children, so some of this is to be expected, but when I look around me at the health of my friends, it is depressing to see how frequently everyone gets sick with viruses. And I don't mean the children; I mean the adults!

Recent readings and consultations with my medical practitioners have left me with shocking new ideas about food. These days, I try to avoid sugar, refined grains, and dairy, which is almost the exact opposite of my vegetarian days when I consumed copious quantities of these particular foods. All of these things, apparently, besides being highly addictive (see the Sugar Addict's Total Recovery Program or Potatoes Not Prozac, both by Kathleen DesMaisons, Ph.D.) cause blood sugar spiking and recovery cycles and are among the most common food allergies. They also have low actual nutritional value. From what I hear, if you are lucky enough (or brave enough) to have access to raw dairy, then you can remove dairy from that list. And if you soak or ferment your whole grains, then grains are fine too. What, you say? Ferment grains? Drink unpasteurized milk?

More research into food theories has left my head spinning with possibilities. Paleolithic Diet? Raw foods? Macrobiotic? Instincto? Fruitarian? Okinawa? The last few years I have read with interest books and articles about fringe diets. Many of these are explored when a young, otherwise healthy person is diagnosed with a terminal disease. They switch their diet to whole foods or raw foods and magically their cancer disappears. (If you don't believe this is possible, try reading - prepared to be shocked! - about Pottenger's Cats.)

The problem is that when you eat very differently from the culture around you, it is a frustrating venture. I have a couple of friends who don't eat sugar, primarily to control depression. This program works for them but is a real challenge socially. It reminds me of my early vegetarian days - sometimes eating at a friend's house was a dicey proposition. If you were starving and they were serving a huge meat-laden stew, it made for awkward moments. And most people just look at you like you are a nutcase if you explain that you eat a Paleolithic diet (no grains, no sugar) when you turn down their rice or bread or birthday cake - especially when you describe eating raw eggs or drinking raw, unpasteurized milk. I don't have it in me to tell my kids they can't indulge in a treat at a party when everyone else is diving right in.

The Weston A. Price Foundation is the diet that makes the most sense to me at the moment. (Made more accessible by the Nourishing Traditions cookbook by Sally Fallon.) Price was a dentist and anthropologist who studied the health and diets of several indigenous cultures many years ago. He published a book entitled Nutrition and Physical Degeneration, which detailed several noteworthy findings from his research - namely that people who ate raw foods had little if any disease. They had near perfect dental health, were strong, healthy, and full of energy. The cultures studied lived in various climates all over the world, but had several similarities in dietary intake. They all ate meat products, fermented foods, raw dairy, raw meat in some form, and little or no sugar. True, they didn't have smog, television, stress, or the 60-hour workweek. Yet Price suggests that most of us are affected by the prenatal diets of our mothers in ways that are much more profound that what we normally believe possible (tooth crowding, for example, is associated with poor prenatal nutrient intake).

Though I am still a rookie at the Price diet. I am still intimidated by raw dairy, haven't ventured at all in the raw meat game (except for sushi), and can't seem to remember to soak my grains to dissolve the phytates the night before I plan to consume them. This dietary philosophy is also somewhat at odds with my natural inclination to be vegetarian. And when I consider the anti-meat sentiments of Conscious Eating, a massive volume by Gabriel Cousens, there is a direct conflict between these philosophies. After all, some of the most spiritually enlightened people on the planet are vegetarian, as were many of the mystics of the past (Jesus, it is suggested, for example).

Have you read the article about the little boy who recovered from autism when put on a wheat-free gluten free diet? (www.tacanow.com/pdf/autism2.pdf) This is amazing, especially when you consider what life is like with an autistic child. It opens the question though, if the diet of a neurotypical individual were optimized, how would that affect our ability to think critically and concentrate? Our tolerance for stress and our immune system? Or ultimately, our sense of well being?

I don't think most of us realize how much garbage we are putting into our bodies in the name of food. Even among those who are somewhat enlightened about diet, there are other issues that get in the way of consuming healthy fuel. For example, what percentage of your food is organic? True, the organic butter is sometimes $8 a box, but an organic farmer once told me that it is futile to switch to organic produce if you don't start with dairy products. Being higher on the food chain concentrates the pollutants so you get much more than you would in produce. In my family, we buy mostly organic everything, but our grocery bills are frequently obscene at best. And in some places, organic food is not available or is simply too expensive.

There are several medical and naturopathic doctors that have books, web sites and discussion groups on the topic of nutrition and health. Dr. Weil is perhaps the most moderate of the bunch. He recommends lots of salmon, green tea, veggies, and mushrooms in a primarily vegetarian diet. Dr. Mercola is another interesting voice in the nutrition debate. He is anti-soy, anti-grain, and anti-sugar. He encourages consumption of meat, raw foods, and raw eggs and has an interesting web site with lots of articles that may be of interest. He actually lists the top five worst foods you can eat (doughnuts, soda, French fries, fried non-fish seafood, and chips). Dr. Stoll is another doctor that is vehemently anti-sugar. His research finds that candida (yeast) problems cause a majority of common health concerns, and this can be controlled by severely restricting sugar in the diet.

So what to do? What to eat? Feeding your family is a big project, all things considered. Especially when they crave the addictive, endorphin-releasing things like sugar, refined carbs, and caffeine.

Well, here are some suggestions that I have compiled over the years from a wide array of sources. I still feel much confusion about diet, but these are the things that it seems like everyone agrees on:

• Eat organic when possible

• Eat a wide variety of foods (that includes things like beets, kohlrabi and greens)

• Eliminate sugar (including artificial sweeteners), and additives (MSG, colors, etc.)

• Eliminate alcohol and caffeine

• Switch refined grains to whole grains

• Eat as much raw food as you can

• Switch to fats that are cold-pressed, unrefined (nut, seed, olive and coconut oils)

• Eliminate fried foods

The question of meat, grains, dairy, and soy ... I don't know, the jury is still out on this. And even in my house, we are divided. My kids adore grains (okay, they are addicted to them, along with sugar), none of us likes raw dairy, and my husband prefers not to eat meat. But we keep plugging away, trying to strike a balance between eating good food and still enjoying treats that we see others eating every day around us.

My dietary recommendations for the year 2005? Hmmmm ... I will have to get back to you on that, since I need to stop typing right now to finish my chocolate Haagen Dazs ice cream bar.

Recommended Reading: Fit For Life by Harvey and Marilyn Diamond; Fast Food Nation by Eric Schlosser; The Sugar Addict's Total Recovery Program by Kathleen DesMaisons, Ph.D.; Nutrition and Physical Degeneration by Weston A. Price; Conscious Eating by Gabriel Cousens

Websites: beyondveg.com; www.price-pottenger.org; westonaprice.org; askwaltstollmd.com; drweilselfhealing.com; radiantrecovery.com; www.panix.com; rawtimes.com; vegfamily.com; notmilk.com; realmilk.com; goddessdiet.com

Comments (0)

Subscribe to this comment's feed

Name

Email

Website

Comment

smaller | bigger

I have read and agree to the Terms of Usage.

Add Comment