Naturopathyworks.com
Choose your foods like your life depends on them.
May 2004 newsletter

---Fast Tip---

The Blissfully Innocent Chocolate Snack

Did you know that you could enjoy chocolate without any refined sweeteners at all? The following recipe works because of its simplicity, its healthfulness and its reliance on whole food. (You read it here first!)

In the baking section of the supermarket you'll find unsweetened chocolate for baking. Ghirardelli is the most convenient for this, but any kind of unsweetened "baking chocolate" will do. Simply alternate bites of the chocolate with bites of banana, pear or another not-too-acidic fruit. That's it; just alternate bites to balance flavors.

The 100% chocolate, without sweeteners or chemicals, is about as close as we in temperate climes can get to the cacao plant. The banana, being a whole fruit, does not elicit an insulin spike as do concentrated fruit and fruit juice, because it has all the fiber of the whole food to parse the entry of natural sugars to the bloodstream.

Nature knew what she was doing when she made whole plants. If you put them together right, they can be quite yummy, and not upset your chemistry!

Break Out of Drug Jail
Choose Naturopathic Medicine!

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Film Review:

"What the Bleep Do We Know?"

Have you ever seen a movie that really makes you think about: religion, spirituality, quantum physics, nutrition, homeopathy, psychology, biochemistry, addiction and pharmacology? Oh, yes, and that has a plot as well?

"What the Bleep Do We Know" is such a thought-provoking film that many audiences are comprised of second-time viewers. Enthusiasts in Oregon convinced their local theaters into holding it over an additional six and seven weeks.

Filmmakers Arntz, Chasse and Vicente dare to bring not only high-tech visual effects, but also abstract discussion, in the manner of a classical Greek chorus, to their very entertaining feature-length movie. Throughout the film, no fewer than fourteen interviewed experts - PhD's, theologians, a chiropractor, and medical doctors, weigh in - believe it or not - as a coherent whole on the weighty subjects listed above.

Meanwhile, our intrepid heroine, played by Marlee Matlin, pursues the various events in her daily routine as a professional photographer, all the while discovering the previously unseen aspects of her (and our) very bizarre macroscopic and subatomic reality, and how the various levels of reality have great impact on each other.

As an upstart film made on a low budget, "What the Bleep" may not be around very long, but will be available, we are promised, in text form and DVD form within the next year.

For more information visit www.whatthebleep.com or contact the Harkins Valley Art Theater in Tempe, where it sold out four times during its opening week!

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Did you ever wish for a physician who learned in medical school:

• Nutrition
• Botanical Medicine
• The many other time-honored natural therapies

Look no further: The American Association of aturopathic Physicians

How to have a whole organic foods diet on a small budget... and keep your day job!

Naturopathic physicians often advise patients to try to incorporate whole plant foods into their diet. Whole plants do two things: they provide all the nutrients that nature put into the food, rather than just a few refined parts. But they also substitute, by their sheer bulk, the chemicals and denatured food derivatives that we might otherwise eat.

But you work non-stop and when you get home there is no time or energy to do anything but nuke half-synthetic, processed food in the microwave. How do we get into that trap?

According to Dr. Kenneth Proefrock, NMD, a huge part of the problem is not knowing what you're going to eat on Thursday night until... Thursday night. By that time, you're lucky if you even make it home for dinner because your tummy rang the dinner bell back around Exit 128, and there just happen to be about four fast food outlets off that exit, as well as at the next exit. (Funny how those fast food places are right there when the stomach growls.)

Here's a big key, says Dr. Proefrock, to getting out of that trap. Plan on the weekend what you will eat for every meal that week. Sure, you will be able to juggle for spontaneity throughout the week, but at least provide for enough of your own homemade food to eat each time you get hungry through the week.

So how the heck do you do that?

One busy mom on a very small budget invested in extra freezer space, a trunk-size floor freezer. She does all her cooking on Sunday, and divides it up into easily defrostable portions. The trick, especially if you live alone, is: cook big, in a crockpot, dutch oven, etc., but freeze in smaller containers. If you cook three huge main dishes on the weekend, you will have more than enough to have portions of each for lunches and dinners throughout the week. At this point, you don't have to spend any more time throughout the week than you would on TV dinners.

A crockpot really lends itself well to a whole foods diet. Chop vegetables very coarsely, in much larger chunks than you can get away with in a stovetop meal - this step alone saves the most time. Put a beef round or two turkey legs or a whole chicken on top of the vegetables, add a few cups of water and/or tomato sauce, perhaps with balsamic vinegar or sesame oil or tamari, etc. for marinade, whole leaf herbs as you like, and you're done. After practicing once or twice, you will have a huge crockpot meal thrown together in 5-10 minutes. Set it on "low" in the morning, and you're done till dinnertime. In cool weather, you could do the same in the regular oven, with a "Dutch oven" type covered pot, in fewer hours.

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The Quest for Cheap Organic Food

Did you know that organic food in the Phoenix area may be had for about $1.00 per pound? For several years now, Tamara Berenberg of Ahwatukee Produce has been providing straight-off-the-farm, fresh in-season and year-round variety organic produce to her customers. Each week's basket contains about 20 different kinds of fruits and vegetables. Tamara can be reached at organics@amerion.com.

On the other hand, fast food may cost quite a bit more than you think. We conducted a little experiment last summer: At a McDonald's drive-in, we ordered four sandwiches and four regular fries. We got less than 3 pounds (after tossing all the packaging) of food for our $17. Hmmm.... that's about $6.00 per pound. And people think organic food is expensive!

But our bad experience was nothing compared to filmmaker Morgan Spurlock, who ate only McDonald's for a month. His cardiac and liver nightmare is documented in his forthcoming film "Supersize Me."

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EDITOR'S COLUMN

The Medicare bill passed by Congress last year is getting more interesting all the time. Now it turns out to have become a lavish $136 billion dollar gift to the pharmaceutical industry, making a nice return on that industry's investment of having six lobbyists for every member of Congress. For seniors, however, it is quite another matter. Computer-savvy seniors can choose among 73 different prescription cards that they may try to sort through on a complicated website. Non-web-savvy seniors should, well, try to find web-savvy friends. And all of this enormously costly program for the taxpayers is to save our senior citizens money on prescriptions that are such highly synthetic chemical compounds that they have little in common with the molecules of living creatures.

Yet many, many Americans are still demanding effective medical remedies, whatever they may be, and the ability to pay for them as well as their other ongoing expenses, without going broke in the process.

Against this background, we have the happy news of licensure for naturopathic physicians in Washington, D.C., giving residents of that city a choice of natural healthcare among their existing options.

In April also the Florida legislature considered licensing naturopathic physicians in that state. Although it did not pass, at least the bill was heard, debated and then postponed. Opponents to the bill included the strange bedfellows of the Florida Medical Association as well as the mail-order degree / correspondence school customers who also use the name "naturopath." Both parties argued that naturopathic doctors, graduated from four-year naturopathic medical colleges (who were to be the subjects of the licensing law) were inadequately trained for the practice of medicine. Those of us who have some familiarity with both conventional and naturopathic medical training must strongly disagree.

I have a little direct experience with the training of MD's. However, having transferred from osteopathic school to naturopathic school, I can assure anyone who cares to know that naturopathic medical school training is far more rigorous and lengthy than osteopathic medical school training in many essential respects. Whereas osteopathic students have six pre-clinical terms of study, naturopathic students have eight. Generally, osteopathic students have 5 to 7 courses per term. Naturopathic students have anywhere from 6 to 12 courses per term. Naturopathic students continue medical coursework throughout their 3rd and 4th years along with clinical training, while osteopathic students are getting on-the-job clinical training and almost no coursework at all.

When I transferred to naturopathic school, I did not have enough credits in any subject to directly transfer, except in pharmacology. Naturopaths study about twice as much physiology and physical diagnosis, and far more biochemistry - three subjects which are essential to good naturopathic practice. Most other essential medical sciences, anatomy, neuroscience, histology, etc., are taught more thoroughly in naturopathic school.

Beyond the common basic sciences, naturopathic medical students spend years learning the basic naturopathic modalities that conventional physicians do not study at all during medical school: nutrition, botanical medicine, homeopathy, physical medicine, hydrotherapy. If the Florida legislature wants physicians to be thoroughly trained in the medicine that they practice, the legislators should license naturopathic physicians to practice naturopathic medicine, in order to allow the public to benefit from the range of wonderful and effective therapies that naturopathic physicians learn in medical school.

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