I just moved to Salt Lake City, Utah. It is a big change for me and my family, but it will be an adventure.
We have only been here 1 week, but I am already enjoying the fresh summer corn and the juicy watermelons I have found at the farm stands. The peaches here are certainly juicier than the ones that I found in San Clemente.
I am very excited to be living next to Whole Foods and I am looking forward to exploring the city’s healthy hot spots. But, I am hoping you will share your favorite places with me. Anything I need to know?
I have been reading Eating For Beauty
, by David Wolfe. I have really enjoyed reading it and learning more about raw food. I want to share this passage from the book about refined sugar:
Heroin is produced by taking the juice of certain poppy varieties and refining it into opium, then morphine, and finally into heroin. Similarly, refined sugar is produced from taking the juice of sugar cane or beet and refining it into molasses, then brown sugar, and finally white sugar….
Refined sugar is a drug that causes artificial highs, mood swings, depression, and energy crashes. In the sixteenth century, refined sugar was considered to be a recreational drug in the royal courts of Europe.
It takes 1.1 kilograms of sugar beets to create a mere 0.14 kilograms of refined sugar. Refined sugar is essentially a concentrated, crystallized sugar. - page 38
I love the analogy between sugar and heroin because sugar is absolutely addicting and destructive, yet Americans continue to eat more and more eat year- esp in the form of the more processed and likely more dangerous- high fructose corn syrup.
If you eat a lot of sugar, it can be very difficult to quit, you can absolutely expect cravings and withdrawals. Hopefully being armed with understanding and knowledge will give you the strength you need to free yourself from sugar’s nasty grasp.
A new Chick-Fil-A just opened up near my house and so I broke down and went and got their chicken sandwich (I did opt for the wheat bun). I must confess- they make some good chicken. A few hours later, to my disgust, it seemed my breath started to smell, well, bad. And, it kept smelling bad- I think I chewed a whole pack of gum that day. It has been so long since I have really had meat that I forgot how bad it can turn your breath. Have any of you noticed meat turns your breath bad?
I want to share a quote on exactly why I have a hard time calling myself a vegan, vegetarian, raw foodist, or any other ist:
“I think that people have framed this conversation in absolutes. Either you are or you aren’t. The word vegetarian, I think, does a disservice because there are a lot of people who care but maybe don’t care, or can’t care in an ultimate way. If you think about environmentalism, nobody would ask, “Are you an environmentalist or not?” The question doesn’t make any sense. And the notion that the first time you drive in a car or fly in a plane that you should throw your hands up in the air and say, “Okay, well I give up. I’m not going to try at all anymore,” is crazy. If people thought about food more like how we think about the environment, a lot of people would be eating differently and the whole system would look a lot different.”
- Jonathan Safran Foer, from an interview about his book Eating Animals, with Kiera Butler for motherjones.com.
To see the whole interview click here, for the book, click here
.
I get asked all the time if I am vegan or a vegetarian or if I never eat sugar. I have a hard time answering because I eat Green almost all of time, but just not 100% of the time. Some people are absolutist about food which is actually admirable, but it’s not what works for me, at least not yet. And I don’t think pushing absolutism onto others is what will change the world.
I like to tell people, “Take that next step for you,” “Just lean into it,” ”Find out where you are and where you want to go and just start.”
Reason #5 to eat Green: Get a golden tan without the sun.
Start eating more cantaloupe, apricots, carrots, peppers and spinach, which can give a golden glow to the skin, according to new findings.
Carotenoids – organic pigments found in many plants – are what impart the look of a perfect tan, according to Bristol University experimental psychologist Ian Stephen.
Two specific pigments affect the yellowness of fair skin: melanin (associated with UV exposure) and carotenoids. Stephen looked at whether the carotenoid called betacarotene – found in produce that’s naturally green and orange – can actually change skin tone. It appears that switching to a produce-rich diet can make the skin look more attractive in just a month.
When he asked volunteers to look at “before and after” photos of Caucasians who consumed a diet rich in orange and green fruits and vegetables, he found that the volunteers liked the golden glow that the skin took on when a produce-rich diet was eaten.
“We found people always preferred the golden effect from diet to the darker effect from the sun,” Stephen told the Sunday Times.
There might also be an evolutionary reason why the gentle yellow tone linked to carotenoids is preferable to the darker effect associated with melanin.
Carotenoids are “powerful antioxidants that soak up dangerous compounds produced when the body combats diseases,” according to the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council
Read more: http://www.nydailynews.com/lifestyle/health/2010/05/25/2010-05-25_safest_way_to_tan_eat_more_fruits_and_vegetables.html#ixzz0pcyC58Ub
