Ian Blair Hamilton's HealtheMail
Alkaline Ionized water, its benefits and science and its stories
As my readers know I’m not one to pass up a chance to mention how very bad sodas are for us and our kids.
Like carbs, bread, sugar and all grains, it’s seriously addictive, but now a Swedish report is telling us that one can a day (nothing for the average American teen) up the chance for aman to get prostate cancer by a massive 40%.
Here’s the link.
When I was growing up my parents – having lived through the Great Depression – always reminded me not to waste food. As I grew older and away from their influence I kept their admonition in my mind. I hated wasting food.. BUT I ate anything on the table. I was a real ‘hungry ghost as the Buddhists say. Of course, who was I to know that my eating habits came from a state of food addiction firmly in control of my psyche and behaviour, fed by two staples of my diet – bread and sugar; now both proven narcotics. Yes, you heard me, narcotics.
So it is with no small degree of self-satisfaction that I can report my turnaround. After a year on Cassie’s Alkaline Paleo Diet, my hungry ghost has gone. I can skip a meal easily, whereas in the past I’d turn nasty if I was hungry. I eat far less and don’t even bother scanning the table for more. I have NO craving for sugary treats, and after trying out our new Ketosis test meter yesterday I can report the reason. My body is now officially in a ketonic state. It feeds on ketones rather than glucose. Hallelujah!
That’s not all. Cassie and I attended our regular skin clinic yesterday. As an old surfer and fisherman I did a lot of damage to my skin in my wild days. Recent years prior to my new diet have witnesssed regular eruptions of precancerous keratosis all over me. Well, my rate of eruptions has slowed to a trickle! Tim Hawkins, our skin doc was surprised at the difference in both Cassie and my skin health. I’ve done nothing different except the diet, and Cassie puts it down to a complete ban on bad oils, and a changeover to good oils. WE eat no oils with trans fats or hydrogenated oils like Canola… and there is mounting evidence that these oils remain in the body – especially subcutaneously.
So.. good news!
Satiety is being ‘un-hungry’.
I’m talking about it because with the help of my life partner Cassie, it seems I’ve licked hunger pangs.
Travelling around Europe we have both been in situations where we missed the supermarket, didn’t travel with enough food, or had to keep on driving to make a schedule. And over and over again we’ve done it, easily, without hanger pangs.
I have to confess that over my whole adult life I’ve been the original ‘hungry ghost’ about food. Nice guy but don’t get between him and a plate of food at mealtime. Anger, shortness, insensitivity, bloodymindedness.. you name it, I could demonstrate it if I was hungry enough. And I was that hungry at least three times a day. At least.
I’ve been a healthy eater for at least 15 years. I was a vegetarian for almost that long. I have followed the alkaline diet for 12 years. But the change in my attitude to food is just one year old. And I firmly believe that it’s due to our change of diet from alkaline to alkaline-paleo. Instead of avoiding fats, especially saturated fats, we’ve done our research and make good saturated fats a large part of our diet. Instead of loading up on insulin-bouncing fructose laden fruit we regularly ensure adequate greens on a daily basis. Instead of that organic sourdough bread that used to play havoc with our gluten-intolerances, we eat NO GRAINS.
Weird? Only in an already weird world.
You know that feeling you get when you stand behind someone at the checkout and watch them spending hundreds of dollars on processed junk food? Go on, admit it, you feel smug. Well, I feel smug because my diet of adequate red meat, saturated healthy fats, vegetables, nuts, the occasional red or white has changed my life. And like you watching at the checkout I can now see that the whole world is as addicted to food in the form of grains and carbs as that person we smugly judged in the checkout. Just take a look around. This world is an eatathon. We get up, we eat our empty carb organic muesli. We grab our coffees and by ten we are ‘unsatiated’ so we snack to kill the hunger. At midday we get our hit of bread in the form of a salad roll, bread with a restaurant meal, bread wrapped around a burger.. By 2 we’re at it again and probably ease the tension with another ‘Joe’, or we go to our bottom desk drawer for a ‘healthy snack bar’ with dried fruits loaded with concentrated fructose. Before dinner it’s a beer or a wine, then we are at it again in our ‘main event’; dinner.
And the whole dang routine is determined by our lack of satiety.. and we think it’s NORMAL!
It goes further. There’s often an unwritten code between partners about food. The man of the family believes he needs more food that the woman. He complains if there’s ‘not enough food’ on his plate. The woman eats guiltily out of sight of the man. The kids just eat because the corporations – the men who made us fat, have learned that feeding people bigger serves make s more money, so they have trained kids to gorge on their offerings of empty carbs. Forget about vitamins and minerals; don’t waste your time arguing the relative merits of stone ground and sour dough. They are both addicting you, opening up your gut walls and flooding your body with undigested toxins. Vitamins and minerals don’t even figure in this equation because your digestion is probably so inefficient they’d never get digested anyway!
Here’s a few thought provokers for you in the form of a poll that you can see how you compare and whether I’m just off on my own trip..
Loading ... Loading ... Loading ... Loading ... Loading ... Loading ... Loading ... Loading ... Loading ... Loading ... Loading ... Loading ... Loading ...How many ‘Yeses’ did you score? Anything over five and I recommend you begin by reading ‘Wheat Belly‘
And if you’d like to learn more about what we eat, have a look at Cassie’s blog here
Can’t we ever eat like a ‘normal person’ again and be healthy?
“Why can’t I just eat like a normal person?” is a frequent cry I hear from my fellow sufferers.
Eating like a ‘normal person’ in this era of such a high carbohydrate and processed diet cannot be sustained by most people without they also sooner or later succumbing to disease. Perhaps to want to eat ‘normally’ is like saying why can’t I smoke and stay healthy?
It has become quite obvious to me that when I mention that wheat should be taken out of every person’s diet as it is actually poisonous that people just go blank. I think this is because wheat has such a hold on us that it is incomprehensible to our wheat addicted minds that we could ever take it out of our diet. It’s just part of everything we eat. We can’t go anywhere without being confronted with food made from wheat.
It doesn’t matter what nationality people I talk to. Wheat is ubiquitously found it’s way to all cultures in a big way, even Asia, home of rice.
Cheap but nasty
The lovely Heidi, a women in Italy I am staying with is getting a bit wider every year I see her. She is a very aware and loving person but mention that wheat might be a good thing to give up and she has up to now ignored me. Her new American partner, Mark, is diabetic. Diabetes can be reversed by taking high carb food out of the diet but they eat carbs…. breakfast muesli with chocolate bits and fresh cherries, lunch always has large quantities of pasta, rice or potatoes and dinner is mostly the same. They eat some lettuce and other veges everyday which we grow in the garden but vegetables don’t play a large part in her diet. Neither does meat. She isn’t vegetarian but she is a frugal buyer and meat it’s true is more expensive than pasta. They also snack on dark chocolate.
The trouble with skimping on good food is that you pay and you pay in the way your body works.
The other problem is you will eat a hell of lot more empty carbohydrate fillers, firstly because wheat does make us more hungry, and secondly because our bodies are trying to get more nutrients from these foods which just can’t supply it.
So food may be cheaper but nutrient density wise are they really so cheap?
What Ian and I are eating in Italy
Here in Italy Ian and I each eat a bacon rasher, 2 eggs, 1 medium mushroom and 4 tiny tomatoes cooked in coconut oil with some rocket for breakfast. We are totally satisfied with this. For lunch we have a large salad with home grown lettuce, tomatoes, celery, cucumber, olives, rocket and a small amount of salted anchovies and sometimes some prosciutto. This is covered with a dressing of olive oil, salt and lemon juice. Yummy. Again totally satisfying. For dinner a medium sized bit of meat and above ground vegetables cooked in different ways. Sometimes we might feel like a snack and we eat some nuts, not a lot but it’s a good snack. Totally filling, nutrient dense and not a lot of food when you look at it compared to a large nutrient empty pasta dish.
Oh yes, that’s right Heidi has fruit trees with the most unbelievable tasting cherries, peaches and apricots. They are nothing like the fruit at home. We have eaten some of this fruit (blush). The good thing about these trees though is that they bear for about two weeks and then they are over. No more fruit till next year! This is how it is in nature, no year long supply and this is how it should be for us, just a short window of fruit eating opportunity.
Heidi says she could never be full on what we eat. She told me last year she had tried the low carbohydrate diet and it wasn’t right for her. It’s obviously not going to be right for anyone who sees wheat as a staple that cannot be given up. This is the addictive nature of wheat.
So wheat, even though our guts might complain bitterly we will still ingest a food not only nutritionally pretty empty, addictive, makes us more hungry, feeds bad bacteria in our guts, brings our glucose levels up like sugar does (see Dr William Davis “Wheat Belly”) actually causes the gut wall to become leaky because of the Zonulin hormone it releases in the gut and can damage the gut villi due to the gluten contained within it.
Hmm..what else? Oh yes there is a high concentration of phytates in wheat, actually in all grains, which are called antinutrients because they actually stop the absorption of minerals into the body.
Wheat out does us humans in intelligence
Am I still a victim because I can’t eat like a ‘normal person? I have great respect for the power of wheat, after all it’s managed to make it’s way all over the world into everyone’s food and people can’t stop eating it. Perhaps it’s the most intelligent species on earth, not us?
Oh and yes, is whole wheat different to refined wheat? That is an absolute no, whole wheat or not it’s still doing all those nasty things to the body.
The multitudes of health defects from wheat eating
Study on zonulin: www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21248165
