Grain, dairy and legumes, oh my!

What’s the big deal about soaking grains and legumes and fermenting dairy and generally spending a lot more time in the kitchen, You ask?!

WELL. I can understand your skepticism… after all, you’ve been eating all these foods without soaking and fermenting them and and you feel just fine.

Now here’s where I’m a bit of a skeptic myself. Do you really feel fine? Or have you just gotten used to feeling any of these things after you eat “normal” grains (bread, cereal, etc.), dairy, nuts and/or beans? Maybe they are just an annoyance, but perhaps they do exist for you (one or several) and you barely even notice it when it happens. The side effects I am talking about are:

• bloating
• gaseousness (you know what I’m talking about!)
• nausea or unsettled stomach
• “Stuffed” to the point of feeling kind of sick even if you did not eat that much
• cramps
• gas pains
• heartburn
• diarrhea

Do you really think this is the way you should feel after eating? I know I did for … um… let’s say, the past thirteen years. But a healthy digestive system should not have any of these symptoms after eating grains, dairy and legumes! (unless you REALLY overeat!)

Now, one thing to point out is that, of course, other ingredients that you eat with these things could also be bothering you. We won’t get into that. For now, we’ll just focus on these three things and why preparing them traditionally is actually important for you.

(And if none of this is clicking with you at all, let me ask you another question: do you know anyone who is allergic to corn, soy, wheat/gluten, dairy and/or nuts???)

Grains and Legumes

In many indigenous cultures, these items are prepared first by soaking them in an acidic solution. The food may then be cooked and eaten. These processes were “invented” LOOOOONG ago. These peoples (Fallon cites examples coming from all around the world where people soaked their grains: Africans soaked millet, North American Indians soaked nuts and ground them into a “milk”, Central American Indians and people who still live in Mexico and surrounding areas soak their corn in a lime solution, in Asia soybeans are always prepared through fermentation before eating, Fallon also said as recently as a few generations ago, there were directions on the back of the quaker oat can with instructions to soak the oats overnight before cooking. These are just a few examples from memory. Please read the book, Nourishing Traditions for many more examples from history.

So, why did they do this and why should we care? The process of soaking foods in an acidic solution helps to break down the grain so that it sprouts or begins to sprout. Doing this releases enzymes that neutralizes phytic acid in grains. This acid inhibits absorption of important minerals into the body such as calcium, magnesium, iron and zinc. Fallon writes “…sprouting also neutralizes enzyme inhibitors present in all seeds. These inhibitors can neutralize our own precious enzymes in the digestive tract. Complex sugars responsible for intestinal gas are broken down during sprouting…” (p. 112, Natural Traditions)

Wheat is one of the healthiest grains, but the gluten in the wheat is very hard for us to digest. Soaking or sprouting the wheat breaks down this protein so that all the components can be assimilated.

Not only these things, but other important changes take place: your grains actually undergo a process that renders them healthier, increasing available vitamins such as the B vitamins and sometimes vitamin C.

The above description goes for nuts and seeds and now you know why so many processed grain products are fortified with many other vitamins and minerals. Some seeds cannot be sprouted due to how they have been processed, but they still benefit from soaking because the sprout inhibitors will be neutralized.

Read my personal account (under “Coping with the Implications”) of digestive troubles cured by transitioning from raw almonds to soaked and roasted ones. And check out this article on how to “Be Kind to Your Grains.“

Now on to dairy

You are already familiar with many cultured dairy products: yogurt, buttermilk, cheese, sour cream. Well. Here’s the rub (And really, the content more suited for another blog entry) — it really depends on what KINDS of these products you’re eating as to whether or not you’re getting the full benefit. But let me back up a bit more. Yes, cultured dairy is good (we have seen all those probiotic yogurt commercials). But, more importantly, why is uncultured dairy bad? Or at least not so good?

Well, again, I will skirt the larger issues and the politics and just lay it out there: because our milk is pasteurized and because of the harsh methods used to “produce” milk from cows. For now, let’s only talk about pasteurization. This process heats the milk at high temperatures, making many proteins less available; the fats in the milk are more likely to go rancid after this process; vitamin C loss usually exceeds 50% and loss of other vitamins may be as high as %80. Some vitamins, such as B12 are entirely destroyed; Fallon claims there is some evidence that pasteurized milk strains the pancreas and may be the reason behind the linkage between drinking milk and diabetes. Oh, yes, and again, this is the reason your milk is fortified!

The relevant fact for this posting is that pasteurization destroys the enzymes in the milk. These just so happen to be the enzymes required to assimilate certain ingredients found in milk, such as calcium. (Ever wondered why so many milk drinking people are getting osteoporosis??)

Other compositional changes take place during pasteurization, making it even more difficult to digest. Without the important enzyme component found naturally in milk, what you now buy at the grocery store is a product that is essentially indigestible! (and I have given you the tame, cliffnotes version of the milk saga!)

YES, and yes, all of these problems with digesting improperly prepared grains and dairy can and are related to allergies. It is no wonder so many people now have gluten and lactose intolerance. So — here is the case for cultured dairy — many of these products are tolerable to those with dairy allergies. WebMD states “A food allergy is an immune system response. It occurs when the body mistakes an ingredient in food — usually a protein — as harmful and creates a defense system (antibodies) to fight it. Food allergy symptoms develop when the antibodies are battling the “invading” food.”

What is cultured dairy? This is a milk product that has begun to separate (the lactic-acid producing bacteria consumes the sugar (lactose) in the dairy) and it begins to ferment, hence the word “lacto-fermentation.” These foods include yogurt, buttermilk, kefir, sour cream and others. However, there are several different versions of fermented milk products found around the world and each are soured, cultured, or inoculated in slightly different ways. Suffice to say, the process of fermentation helps to break down the difficult to digest protein, casein, in the milk as well as increasing the beneficial enzymes (for example the enzyme lactase, which helps digest lactose) and vitamins in the milk product, even after it has been pasteurized. Consuming these products will also help you maintain a good balance of beneficial bacteria, helping you stay healthy and resist illness.

Please refer to pages 33-35 and 80-81 in Nourishing Traditions by Sally Fallon to read more and see where I liberally “stole” all this information. I also encourage you to check out the Real Milk website to really dig deeper about the milk “conspiracy” and read “The Raw Truth About Milk.“

So if you want to learn how to prepare these foods, I encourage you to explore the links to the right to learn more. And the best source I know of to really learn is the book, Nourishing Traditions. Good luck…!

Back to reality, oops, there goes gravity

As I am working on this blog a little here and there, I wondered if I should hit on some of the highlights of
what it is this is really all about rather than just diving into specifics as I have been. You can also read about some of the basics in the “About” page. I would also like to discuss some our psychological “issues” surrounding this admittedly unusual lifestyle/diet and how we may struggle to accept the myriad implications.

What’s the Main Idea?

So, as you can see, I don’t think there is any real consensus as to what to actually call this diet. We call it “The Diet”, but others call it the WAP (Weston A. Price diet) and I think I have seen NT (for Nourishing Traditions). Perhaps the most sensible one I’ve seen is calling it the “Traditional Foods Diet. ” And first things first: by “diet”, we mean… the way we eat on a regular basis, not a “diet” you go on and then get off of. We are not “going” on this diet. We are simply eating/living this diet!

So, here are just a few of the key principles, but by all means, check out the sources on the right hand side to read up on your own about some of this stuff from other people’s perspectives. Especially check out the Cheeseslave blog which is very comprehensive and is already doing exactly what I’d like to do here. It would be worth your while to spend some quality time perusing her site for recipes, info on vitamins, health and parenting on this diet.

The key point that we believe in is that food should be traditionally prepared in a way that renders it most nourishing. Food that is not prepared in this way harms us in one or both of the below ways:

1. It over-taxes our bodies as it works to metabolize improperly prepared food (ie, food that is not in its most digestible state)
2. It literally poisons us if it is not close enough to a nutrient to actually nourish us (in the instance of a huge variety of preservatives, heavily processed foods, chemicals, etc. that we consume regularly but that are not actually food products or so far from the original product, that our bodies cannot recognize them as food) causing all sorts of health problems (usually those that manifest over a long period of time.)

Coping with the Implications

There is a lot of baggage wrapped up in really embracing this type of lifestyle and diet. The implications of doing so are numerous and can easily turn people away from the ideas that are discussed here. In my opinion, these hard-to-cope-with implications are:

• Feeling supremely overwhelmed, dismayed and confused by an overload of new information that contradicts what you thought you knew… and what it could mean if you ignore this new information as well as if you don’t!
• The idea that we have been essentially deceived for our entire lives by the media, the government, our health care practitioners and others (resulting in feelings of frustration and anger)
• The idea that we may NOT have been eating (or feeding others in our families) healthfully (like we thought we were) and feelings that might accompany this (frustration, guilt, anger)
• Frustration at the financial cost of eating truly healthfully (compared to what we may be used to)
• Frustration and anxiety about how to manage a new lifestyle that requires more food preparation, more experimentation and learning, more research, more shopping around, etc.
• Disbelief in general — why should we believe any of this bunk!? After all, if it’s so true, why haven’t we heard about it before

I know it took us a couple months to mostly recover from our shellshock — that everything we thought we knew was wrong. How could we have been lied to (essentially) all along? I will not get into the layers of politics here, but suffice to say, you most definitely cannot believe everything you hear or read. And yes, you should test these ideas for yourself as well. As for us, the more we read, researched, pieced information, health patterns and so forth together, the more it all made so much sense. There really is no part of this diet that doesn’t fit into a sensible framework for us.

For just one example: it may not seem like you really need to soak and roast your nuts before consuming them. Many people really look at us strangely when we mention this idea. However, I knew that after eating LOTS of almonds during my ravenous afternoon and evening lapses between meals while I was going straight from work to school and not getting home until 9pm, I eventually began to suffer extreme digestive problems when eating my almonds. Once they seemed to “save the day” when I could not eat a proper dinner … now, they were causing embarrassing digestive problems and unbelievable cramping. I could no longer enjoy them. After reading about the traditional way of preparing nuts, I was excited to give it a try. Sure enough, my GI complications vanished after I began to eat soaked and roasted nuts. Not only this, but I only needed to eat perhaps half of what I used to eat in order to feel just as satisfied. Wow! There was really something to the idea after all. Our bodies are just not equipped to digest certain parts of certain foods. Sure, you can put up with it for a while, but eventually, it’s going to cause problems of one kind or another. Now I also knew why eating peanut butter would cause similar problems. Perhaps this was also why I would occasionally suffer an allergic reaction when I ate cashews.

At any rate, I am saying all this to 1. encourage the skeptics and 2. encourage you to make it “make sense” to you in a personal way. If it seems too outrageous to believe that you’ve been deceived, that you may need to re-juggle your finances so you can increase your food budget (and hopefully eventually decrease your medical budget!); that you may need to invest in some decent cookware, go to the weekly farmer’s market, etc…. check out other resources on the subject for yourself. But try to look at it from all angles. You cannot safely make a judgment if you only read literature from one side of the issue (ie. Only the government, only the packaging/processing companies or only pharmaceutical companies.) Look at unbiased information and research.

This is why I do recommend reading Nourishing Traditions. The authors incorporate a wide range of literature including historical accounts of how food was once prepared before we became so darn civilized (refrigeration no longer mandated that food stay fresh through various fermentation processes) and so darn greedy (cutting nutritional corners to save on production costs not to mention the advent of hundreds and hundreds of processed “fake” food like soda and pre-packaged foods that we have become so addicted to and regularly spend money on.)

See if anything adds up and most of all, ask yourself “Why have the media, the medical professionals (most, although, I am sure not all), the drug companies, the agricultural corporations, food packaging/processing companies and the government been sending the messages that they have been?” Only until you can believe they sadly do not really care about your well-being, but rather your influences as a consumer, will it begin to make some sense.

We encourage you to give yourself time to process any and all of this new information. It is not something anyone can change overnight. I think after doing this for nearly a year, that a safe amount of time to expect on transitioning to the WAP diet would be 1-3 years depending on the size of your family and their willingness to try new things and alter lifestyles. Good luck… leave a comment!

today: mayo and biscuits

FINALLY! I have been meaning to give homemade mayo a try for ages. I finally made it happen today. It took me 10 minutes. Seriously. Why don’t we do this? After discovering the badness of soybean oils which are in EVERY kind of mayo on in standards grocery stores, i found a safflower mayo but it really cost me. I just made homemade stuff with olive oil, eggs, whey from yogurt, mustard, lemon juice and salt. Yup. that’s it. No, it does not by any means taste like Helleman’s, but as with everything else we’ve changed in our diets in the past months, I know I won’t even notice the difference in about 2 weeks. Want to try?

food process 1 egg plus one yolk, 1 tsp. dijon mustard, 1 1/2 T. FRESH lemon juice, 1 T. whey (the liquid poured off of plain yogurt) for about 30 seconds. Use the drizzle attachment to add 3/4 c.-1 c. olive oil. I do not have a food processor, so I made a mess trying to do with with a blender and it still worked. Season with additional salt or lemon juice to taste. Pour it into a jar, cover, leave out for 7 hours while the whey does its work. This will allow the mayo to stay fresher longer in the fridge and will supposedly thicken slowly — I will let you know how long it keeps! If you don’t use whey, it will keep in the fridge about 2 weeks according to the recipe.

PS – oh yeah, i made buttermilk biscuits as well! True to form, they were not as good as Chris’ – the real baker in the family. Oh well, they are good enough to eat with strawberries and whipped cream!