Eat Good
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Some of My Best Friends Are Germs My wife and I have been talking a lot lately about why people aren’t focusing more attention on the living organisms in our guts—the so-called microbiome. It seems there’s much to be learned about these hundreds of microbial species that inhabit our bodies that modern Western medicine has all but ignored.
Here to lend some credence to that idea, and explain in wonderful detail the role some of these creatures play, is Michael Pollan’s latest piece in The New York Times Magazine. I’m glad to know this is becoming a more popular area of research. There still so much we don’t understand about how out gut health factors into our overall health.
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Selene River Press Historical Archives These archives are the “home of the most remarkable research and commentary from the earliest days of nutrition science.” In 1963, the Deputy Director of the FDA’s Bureau of Enforcement, Kenneth Milstead, stated, “The FDA has evaluated the literature presented by the Lee Foundation for Nutritional Research and publicly described it as ‘probably the largest publisher of unreliable and false nutritional information in the world.’”
The “false information” disseminated by the Lee Foundation includes articles republished from medical journals, textbooks, health societies, newspapers, and books and other clinical accounts by doctors and dentists who emphasized nutrition in their practice at a time when the FDA believed “it is wholly unscientific to state that a well-fed body is more able to resist disease than a less well-fed body.”
SRP offers the Lee Foundation reprints as part of our Historical Archives so that readers themselves can determine the merit of their content. The FDA’s opinion notwithstanding, we believe the information in these pages—much of it as germane today as when it was first published—to be essential for a true understanding of the relationship between food and health.
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Experiments in Fermentation
The time has come to begin to incorporate more lacto-fermented foods into our diet. Melissa has started up the yogurt making again, and I’m embarking on three projects of my own this weekend.
Sourdough Starter
Melissa does most of the baking around here, and has promised that if I take care of the starter side of things, she’ll make some beautiful breads from it. I’m also interested to see how it fares in other recipes like pancakes and waffles.Kombucha
Since moving to the Portland, OR area, I’ve been exposed to the wonders of the lacto-fermented beverage known as kombucha. I’ll be attempting to make my first batch (and culture a SCOBY in the process).Carrot Ginger Slaw
Rounding things out on the vegetable end of the spectrum, I’ll be making my foray into living foods with a lacto-fermented carrot ginger slaw. After all, we’ll need to find something to do with all the organic carrots Melissa’s bringing home from Costco today.
I’ll keep you posted as each of these projects progresses.
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No, these aren’t leftover Easter eggs. These are what real eggs look like. Eggs that come from chickens who roam in open pastures, eating what they like. They’re different sizes and different colors, just like the chickens they came from. Where did we get this expectation that our eggs should all be white (or brown, for that matter)?
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7 Dodgy Food Practices Banned in Europe But Just Fine Here From the reproductive problems caused by herbicide Atrazine to the poultry litter we’re feeding our cows, the EPA and the FDA here in the States need to get their act together to clean up our food supply.
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In recent years, the “paleo diet,” a diet based on the perceived eating habits of prehistoric people has become wildly popular. But, says paleontologist Christina Warinner, this diet is based on an incorrect view of how early humans lived. Using modern day research, Warinner traces the roots of the human diet to discover what we can really learn from the food of our ancestors.
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Cook Your Own Food. Eat What You Want. Think for Yourself. Me, if I have a really good meal, al fresco, say, followed by an espresso and an eau de vie and someone offers me a cigarette? I’m going to have it. I love a cigarette.
