More hawthorn berries, because I love these red on blue pics!

Klara put me on some of her health lists, and someone pointed to this web page:
Traditional Chinese Medicine
It has all sorts of suggestions on how one can boost one’s immune system, from acupuncture to herbal therapy. I have an herbal preparation downstairs that includes elderberry, astralagus, echinacea, and other herbs, and I take it if I feel even a hint of a cold coming on.

But I really get a lot less sick now than I used to in my teens and twenties; it could be that I much more aware of my diet (I eat more vegetables and whole grains than I used to and less white flour/sugar products). It also could be that my life is more stable and less stressed (even though I am taking care of three kids and a father, I am less stressed than I was back then).

Here are some ideas of what one could eliminate for health reasons:
1) Trans fats (margarine, Crisco, many baked goods that say partially hydrogenated): nutrition-oriented people disagree on many things, but no one thinks trans fats are healthy.
2) Sugar, white flour and dairy, at least for the duration of your illness
3) Eat less fried or baked food and concentrate on soup and steamed food until you feel better

I’ve mentioned garlic and ginger in past posts. Now one can add astralagus, shiitake mushrooms and ginseng to immune boosters. If you are sick, make sure that everything that enters your body has nutrients. Eat berries instead of cookies.

Feel free to add your own immune boosting ideas. Having friends and sharing ideas can only help one’s immune system!

Dr. David Williams Natural Immunity List (received via a Tweet from primetimeparent)
(though I question whether shark cartilage actually works…)

I decided to click on nutrition, my favorite first-try route for dealing with ailments. I end up on the American Cancer Society’s links on nutrition.

Here are some excerpts. On broccoli, one of my favorite vegetables that my kids will actually eat if freshly-steamed:

Some research has suggested that sulforaphane, which is present at much higher levels in broccoli sprouts than in the mature vegetable, may be a powerful cancer-preventing agent. The compound is thought to prompt the body to make higher levels of enzymes that protect against cancer-causing chemicals. One study showed that breast tumor development was significantly reduced in lab animals that were fed sulforaphane.

On garlic:

While some research on garlic is promising, it is very hard to determine the exact role a particular food may have against cancer. It is even more difficult when the food in question is often used in small amounts, as is garlic.

On Macrobiotic Diet:

The National Institutes of Health, Office of Alternative Medicine has funded a pilot study to determine if a macrobiotic diet may prevent cancer.

If someone is to try the macrobiotic diet, I would suggest a modified one, one that includes at least some animal products such as fish. And I question avoiding the tropical fruits.

From the ACS site, I found this article on Macrobiotics on a Univ. of Texas site. He mentions a book by Dr. Anthony Sattilaro called Recalled from Life. Another related book by Elaine Nussbaum: Recovery from Cancer.

On seaweed:

Despite claims that dried seaweed supplements, also called sea vegetables, are super nutrients that can prevent cancer and help numerous diseases, there is no reliable clinical evidence that this is true…Early studies of seaweed extracts, in the lab and on animals, suggest that certain compounds may one day be used in medicine.

A past post on a book about cancer, including a quote about waiting for clinical trial proof before trying an alternative therapy

Past post: What is a Colonoscopy? (thank you, Michelle, I should include this, too)

My mother died of colon cancer ten years ago. There is nothing I can do about that, but I can seek information that might help family and friends.

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.

Healthy Blog Discussions

• Our Children: Nosh, (Lack of) Exercise
• Potatoes: Good or Bad or Depends on You?

Good For You

• Want to Avoid Breast Cancer? Try Sunbathing
• Broccoli Juice Better than Sunscreen
• Apple Peel A Day Could Keep Cancer at Bay
• Salad Even Healthier Than You Thought
• Coffee May Protect Against Breast Cancer

Bad For You

• JunK FooD JunkieS
• Can Hair Dyes Give You Cancer?
• Cola: Bad to the Bones

- Peel one garlic clove.
- Cut off one piece of ginger from fresh ginger root.
  Slice off the skin of the root.
- Optional: a leaf of dark greens, such as collards or kale
- Optional: a dash of hot pepper sauce or a bit of a hot pepper
- Optional: fresh lemon (thanks for the reminder, Robin)

Place all ingredients in a mug. Boil some water, and pour it into the mug. Let it steep for about two minutes. Sip, and enjoy.

For my kids, who refuse the garlic, I put in a slice of ginger and a large spoonful of honey.

I am going to restate the obvious: make sure to get enough sleep. And may I add that if the cough or sore throat persists, please see your doctor.

In another post, I’ll write up my garlic spread recipe. Coming soon.

• Health Benefits of Honey and Ginger
• Top Five Health Benefits of Garlic

Another tip: try giving up sugar and dairy products for the duration of your cold; that may help the healing process along.

This post is dedicated to a friend that I hope is feeling better than when she asked me for a home remedy.

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.

In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto

The book starts like this:
Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.

I’m not going to critique the book; I don’t have a degree in nutrition. Instead, I’ll do the snippet-style review, with quotes to give a flavor of the book:

From the first chapter, from Foods to Nutrients:

“…in the 1980s…traditional supermarket foods were steadily being replaced by “nutrients,” which are not the same thing. Where once the familiar names of recognizable comestibles–things like eggs or breakfast cereals or snack foods–claimed pride of place on brightly colored packages…new, scientific-sounding terms like “cholesterol” and “fiber” and “saturated fat” began rising to prominence…the implicit message was foods, by comparison, were coarse, old-fashioned and decidely unscientific things…”

He then gives a history of the science of nutrition and talks about a term called “Nutritionism”. Nutritionism is an ideology, not a science. The term was defined by Gyorgy Scrinis in 2002:

“…namely, that we should understand and engage with food and our bodies in terms of their nutritional and chemical constituents and requirements – the assumption being that is all we need to understand.”

Pollan clarifies:

In the case of nutritionism, the widely shared but unexamined assumption is that the key to understanding food is indeed the nutrient. Put another way: Foods are essentially the sum of their nutrient parts.

Food is defined in the book as what’s around the edges of the supermarket (fruits, vegetables, eggs, milk, meat) as opposed to what comes in a box in the middle.

He has a great little history of the making of refined grains.

Because for many years only the wealthy could afford refined grains, they acquired a certain glamour. Refining grains extends their shelf life (precisely because they are less nutritious to the pests that compete with us for their calories) and make them easier to digest by removing the fiber that ordinarily slows the release of their sugars. Also, the finer that flour is ground, the more surface area is exposed to digestive enzymes, so the quicker the starches turn to glucose.

Toward the back of the book he has more of his pithy sayings, like this one:

GET OUT OF THE SUPERMARKET WHENEVER POSSIBLE.
‘You won’t find any high-fructose corn syrup at the farmer’s market’, he says. Too bad our farmer’s market is only open in the summer. I hope to write about the Highland Park Farmer’s Market when it comes back to greet us.

Another:
EAT WELL-GROWN FOOD FROM HEALTHY SOILS

It would have been much simpler to say “eat organic” because it is true that food certified organic is usually well grown in relatively healthy soils–soils that have been nourished by organic matter rather than synthetic fertilizers. Yet there are exceptional farmers and ranchers in American who for one reason or another are not certified organic and the food they grow should not be overlooked…ideally you want to look for food that is both organic and local.

Here’s a much more in-depth review of Pollan’s book.

Study says Black Death did not kill indiscriminately
(Reuters)
The Black Death that decimated populations in Europe and elsewhere during the middle of the 14th century may not have been a blindly indiscriminate killer, as some experts have believed.

An analysis of 490 skeletons from a London cemetery for Black Death victims demonstrated that the infection did not affect everyone equally, two U.S. scientists said on Monday.

While many perfectly healthy people certainly were cut down, those already in poor health prior to the arrival of the plague were more likely to have perished, they found.

Guess what? This is another “Eat your veggies” post. Health is in your control, up to a point. Take care of yourself, and you may be able to ward off even the Black Death!

Sharon DeWitte analyzed skeletons unearthed from the East Smithfield cemetery in London, dug especially for plague victims and excavated in the 1980s, for bone and teeth abnormalities that would show that people had health problems before they died of plague.

She found such abnormalities in many skeletons, suggesting these people had experienced malnutrition, iron deficiencies and infections well before succumbing to the Black Death.

More on nutrition in a future post. Or maybe a recipe soon… Jill cooked up a soup, and I photographed some homemade croutons and an apple pie.