I haven’t done a post on health topics for a while, so here are some recent internet picks:

• Allergies: why are they on the rise? Lots of theories, such as a possible link to vaccines. Feel free to argue with any theory. I’m going to highlight this idea:
  

  Allergies And Ubiquitous Presence Of Some Foods

  Before the advent of freezers and airfreight most people ate local foods in season. Now most fruit and vegetables are available all year round, so that our systems are exposed to the same foods continually without respite.

  There has been a dramatic increase in people experiencing soya allergy, since soya has become a common ingredient in many processed foods. In Europe and North America rice allergy is relatively uncommon, whereas in Asia where it is consumed more frequently it is much more common.

  Note: In Israel one still eats local foods in season. It is difficult, for example, to obtain strawberries in the summer.

• Why Tofu Wrecks Your Brain
  Always a good idea to read comments on Dr. Mercola’s posts
• Can a good B vitamin help reduce susceptibility to sunburn? I’ve heard that B vitamin supplementation can ease the mosquito bites. However, my son claims he eats a lot of cereal, so he doesn’t think this is true. He gets very itchy mosquito bites.
• Resveratrol in red wine prevents cancer

As I am married to a red wine lover, I’ll conclude with a photo from our trip to the Galil winery:

The wine is stored in these oak barrels (oak is either from France or the US) for a few years before being bottled and sold. We bought some Galil Pinot Noir and enjoyed it with our friends in Hashmonaim.

Tanks for fermentation and storage of wine are the answers to my quiz on this post.

Turns out there is also a term Food Nazi. I did not coin this term. I read it in The Secret History of the War on Cancer, by Devra Davis. Urban Dictionary defines Food Nazi here.

When I was visiting my friend in Newton this weekend, we spent a fair amount of time discussing food and nutrition. She is on a special diet (no grains, no chickpeas, no potatoes, no sugar, no kale, no spaghetti, no chocolate). This is because she had terrible ulcerative colitis, and the diet has basically saved her life. Soon after she got on this diet, about three years ago, she decided she would have just one bowl of spaghetti, previously one of her favorite foods. Well, she told me, she was sick for a day and half after that. So she hasn’t gone off it since. It is a bit like eating a Passover diet all year round, except without the matza. She eats a lot of nuts, fruits and vegetables, and animal proteins (chicken, eggs, fish, cheese, meat). Incidentally, she related to me that she has a friend with a similar ailment who decided to try this diet. Unfortunately, that friend ended up in the hospital after the attempt. It will not work for everyone with colitis or other digestive ailments. At some point it has been recommended to her that she slowly introduce some foods back into her diet, as by now her colon may have healed; she said she would love to eat chocolate again, but being sensible, she will probably try some whole grains.

Like me, she had a parent who died of colon cancer. Unlike my mother, however, who was basically healthy all her life until her diagnosis, her father suffered from ulcerative colitis most of his adult life. His doctor put him on a diet which she feels is the exact opposite of her current diet. The desire to go back and redo how one’s loved one was treated is strong and powerful.

Getting back to the term Food Nazi: I was talking to my friend and her mother shortly before I left. Her mother was complimenting how healthfully I eat, and I remarked about the term food nazi and how I don’t consider myself to be one. My friend and her mother were both a bit shocked by the very term; I suppose if I had said food fascist, it would mean the same thing, but without the strong effect. I don’t want to force everyone to stop eating any food with margarine, for example, but I would like everyone to know that if you want to spend time with your grandchildren, unless you have the genes of George Burns, you might want to cut out the margarine. Also, I ate three delicious oatmeal cookies at the bar-mitzvah (not all at once). If I were a food fascist, I probably wouldn’t do that. Well, at least, I wouldn’t tell you that in a blog post. We are all human; we all struggle in our own ways.

Finally, did you know that cold cuts have sugar? I know they have nitrates and other preservatives that have been implicated in stomach cancer, but I wasn’t aware of the sugar content.

Later, I go visit my neighbor, arguably one of the best cooks in Highland Park. Last erev Yom Kippur she gave some of her Gondi, a Persian specialty of ground chicken, chickpea flour and spices rolled into balls and cooked in a sauce. Wish I had a photo of that! Are you making anything special for Purim, I ask. She said always makes something different for the Purim seudah (feast). I could tell her mind wasn’t yet on Purim.

On Friday night my husband came home from shul and said our rabbi spoke about the times one can have the Purim seudah (feast) this year. Purim falls on a Friday, not my favorite timing. Batya doesn’t have this problem. We can have the seudah at a choice of three times: in the morning, after noon, or at the end of the day, right before Shabbat starts. One then says Friday night kiddush in the middle and continues one’s meal. The latter sounds like an interesting idea, but then my husband would need to find a minyan for ma’ariv of men doing similar. We ended up agreeing on a brunch for the seudah this year. Eggs, bagels, fruit, veggies and salmon sound like a plan…

Years ago I made a Persian Purim feast… I can’t for the life of me remember what I served, but rice was certainly on the menu.

So, in the spirit of Nutrition Nerd, I’ll teach you how to make brown rice in a crockpot. It’s SUPER easy. Put in a cup of brown rice and 2 cups water. Cook for 2 – 2.5 hours. If, for some reason (you have nothing else going on in your life, right?) you forget the rice, don’t worry, you’ve just got brown rice with crispy edges. The middle is still edible.

Hope you’ve enjoyed my strung together food photo, exotic Persian dish, halachic (Jewish law) note, and recipe all in one post.

Which brings me to the topic of kids and food. You know, you can preach all you want, you can teach all you want, but they have their own little minds, these kids. For example, I taught my eldest son to read nutrition tags on cereal boxes at a young age. So what did he do? Look around for boxes of cereal with higher sugar content. ‘Cuz the higher the sugar content, the better it tastes, right? Hmmm.

What works best for me is fresh, steamed broccoli. I own three strainers (the kind you insert into a pot), so I don’t have to go searching for one, and I often cut up the broccoli an hour or two before supper and leave it to soak. So at dinner time I can put fresh, steamed broccoli on the table. Which my kids eat. Though they don’t eat it the next day, when it’s a leftover. But that’s OK, because I eat it leftover. For breakfast or lunch.

Now, here’s another topic: we all live in a community of some sort. My family and I are part of the Orthodox Jewish community, which has some wonderful benefits, such as being able to give (shaloch manot on Purim, Bikur Holim–visiting the sick, paying shiva calls, cooking for families with new babies) and receive (similar list). However, providing healthy food for young children is not one the stronger points of the Orthodox Jewish community. I don’t remember the amount of candy that my kids get in school or shul being so abundant when I was a child. And did her teacher really need to send home the chocolate fudge cake when my daughter was sick last year and needed good nutrition to recover? I gave the cake to my boys. Then there was the kiddush for a simcha in a more right wing community than ours…I remember seeing bright red on the table, and thinking, great, fruit! No, my eyes were playing tricks on me. That was just food coloring on the cake. And I’m not even bringing the bug issue (for those who don’t know about kashrut and bugs…that would be a whole ‘nother post).

I hate when Nutrition Nerd becomes Nutrition Nag. But I feel like a nag when I bring up the topic of healthy food for children.

You can read the whole thing yourself. Or let me share with you some tidbits:

the American Cancer Society takes donations for “cancer research.” Whatever is left over after paying salaries and overhead is funneled to organizations like Planned Parenthood. Their financial statements for the past 3 years are available on their website (they are required to make that information public because of their nonprofit status). For example, in 2005, out of millions and millions of dollars they received, only 3 percent went to actual cancer research – and that was a research grant for a medication for only one type of cancer (http://tinyurl.com/yr278x) .

That’s not very encouraging.

Then she has a list of ways to prevent cancer, which she says, are not ones you haven’t heard before. This one struck me:

Eliminate sugar from your diet. Cancer cells thrive on sugar.

I’ve mentioned giving up sugar to some people, for some health ailments. They look at me, like, how in the world can I do that. I’m pretty fortunate that I don’t have a sweet tooth. I like salty foods and fatty meats, though. Yum.

Increase fresh fruits and vegetables. The more brightly colored (blueberries, cantaloupe, broccoli), the more anti-cancer qualities.

Sounds good in theory. People rush rush around these days. Often kale gets bought, only to wither in the fridge because I don’t get around to making it. My kids only eat certain vegetables. Kale is not one of them.

Drink at least 8 glasses of water a day.

The latest I heard is drink when you’re thirsty. Not sure about this magical number 8.

Feel free to agree or disagree with article or anything I say. My main point is, nutrition is hard. Most of us don’t live on farms or in a vacuum.

Flashback to early 1990′s. I am newly married. I am supposed to be getting used to living in this environment of Highland Park, New Jersey. But a few weeks after my wedding I find out my mother has terminal colon cancer. So my thoughts are really in the Boston area, where my mother has been told she has less than two years to live. And sometimes I am driving five hours up to see her.

My father, after discussing much with medical doctors, contacts the Kushi Institute in Cambridge. My mother is in St. Elizabeth’s hospital in Brighton, and my father and are in our kitchen in Newton. A cook from the Kushi Institute arrives to teach us about macrobiotic cooking. It is all new to me. Before this, I don’t know if I knew what whole grain was. I don’t believe I had ever eaten brown rice (now I eat it almost every day). I remember the cook telling us that he had been to several kosher homes, and why could we not spread some of these macrobiotic cooking ideas to other Orthodox Jewish families? I now know how far apart macrobiotic cooking is from what is standardly cooked in an Orthodox Jewish kitchen. It’s like “chocolate chip cookies with sugar, white flour, Crisco and margarine, please meet steamed kale and seaweed.” They just are not going to click so well, you know what I mean?

Anyway, it turns out my mother has her own opinions. She comes home from the hospital, and her reaction to our attempts to try the macrobiotic diet: “if I don’t believe in it, it’s not going to work.” Which was painful for me to hear, but true. She wasn’t buying into this alternative stuff. She was going to spend her last years on this planet as she needed. And indeed she did.

Getting back to the macrobiotic diet, I had a cousin who went macrobiotic for about two years. Which could be how my father got started with calling the Kushi Institute. My cousin, however, eventually gave up being strictly macrobiotic, because, as she said, “one religion is enough.” She is pretty careful about how she eats (a mostly fish vegetarian diet with lots of pareve food).

I read many books about anti-cancer diets. One of the better ones was by Elaine Nussbaum, Recovery: From Cancer to Health Through Macrobiotics. Read the comments on Amazon. I believe she may live in New Jersey.

Eventually, I incorporated parts of the diet into my own daily routine. One of my favorites:
Eat something green for breakfast.
Today I had cold broccoli for breakfast, leftover from last night.

And I’ve expanded my knowledge way beyond the macrobiotic diet. For example, macrobiotics tend not to eat citrus fruits, which are powerhouses of vitamin C and other nutrients. I will have to go into the “meat is good for you” diets vs. the “vegan or vegan-leaning” diets in another post, if at all.

So I will conclude today’s post by saying I miss my mom, z”l, may her memory be a blessing, terribly. And I apologize to my kids for being Nutrition Nag.