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

---Fast Tip---

How to cut, store and eat organic beef without breaking your budget

Just trying to imagine the price of organic beef can inspire sticker shock in consumers. However, there is a way to have your beef and not pay a fortune.

If you have a nearby health food supermarket that sells organic beef, you may be able to find eye round, bottom round or London broil for about $4.00 to $6.00 per pound. New Zealand organic grass fed beef, is one such option.

Ask the butcher to slice the round in 3/4" to 1" thick slices. When you get home, put each slice in a separate zip-type plastic bag and freeze them. This way, you can defrost one steak at a time, per person, for sautéing or grilling. Then each steak ends up costing just a little over a dollar.

If on the other hand you don't have a local source of organic beef, there are two other options. As of late June, Grasslands Beef sells a bottom round roast for about $7.00 per lb. including delivery.

Another option is beef from heirloom breeds of cattle, such as Hereford, Devon, Highlander and Galloway. You may find a farmer near you raising this cattle, but if not, you can have huge cuts of this beef shipped from Lobels in New York. Heirloom cattle are grass-fed and raised on small family farms using traditional methods. Raised without hormones, pesticides or subtherapeutic antibiotics, this kind of beef is comparable to organic beef. Furthermore, because it is grass-fed it is high in omega-3 fatty acids which are so necessary for good brain, skin, immune and heart health.

Immigrants outlive Americans

A recent study shows people who migrate to the United States live three years longer on average than people born here. A growing body of evidence shows that immigrants are less eager than native-born Americans to have a drive-thru, drive-everywhere lifestyle. Immigrants also tend to smoke less.

What is really telling is that immigrants outlive U.S. born Americans even though they are more likely to be poor, and are less likely to see a doctor. Poverty is often correlated with shortened lifespan. It is also interesting that not seeing a doctor correlates with immigrants' improved lifespan.

Studies like Dr. Barbara Starfield's in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), 7/26/2000, show that doctors are the third leading cause of death in the U.S., right after heart disease and cancer.

Despite most doctors' best efforts and intentions, but due to ignorance about nutrition and safe natural treatments, body healing mechanisms and the immune system, as well as errors from overwork and overwhelming pressure from the pharmaceutical industry, iatrogenic ("doctor-caused") disease accounts for 225,000 deaths per year in this country, the equivalent of a jumbo jet crashing every day with no survivors.

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EDITOR'S COLUMN

Children's food demands: Do you have to give in?

Which choice should a parent make at a child's birthday party?

1. forbid your child to have cake and ice cream
2. not take your child to any birthday parties
3. take healthy food to the party for your child
4. take enough healthy food for everyone
5. let your child eat what everybody else is eating

Growing up in a family where sugar was not eaten, I actually have strong opinions on this matter. My father was the strict disciplinarian who never allowed any sugar, and either kept us away from other kids' birthday parties in order to avoid the aggravation, or let us go, but made us sit out the cake and ice cream festivities. My mother, on the other hand, pitied us deprived children and urged that we be allowed some treats, if only for social mingling.

Actually, as long as I can remember, I have always been thankful that my father's view prevailed, and that I have avoided any sugar cravings, sugar illness or withdrawal to this day. It may seem odd to read a term such as sugar illness, but I suspect the reason that I have never had headaches, PMS, depression, hypertension or weight gain, despite eating like a horse my whole life, has everything to do with not having sugar in my diet.

Children's food demands: Do you have to give in?

But sugar illness goes far beyond the above-symptoms. Diabetes and obesity are epidemic in this country, and quickly increasing around the world. They, as well as cancer, feed directly on sugar. Hypertension due to arterial smooth muscle overgrowth as well as atherosclerosis have been tied in numerous studies to insulin in the bloodstream. The Masai people of Tanzania have the cleanest arteries in the world on their traditional diet of only meat, blood and milk (no sugar, no insulin). However, Masai who migrate to cities with more westernized cuisine both in and out of Africa develop Western-type cardiovascular diseases.

In fact, insulin, rather than sugar itself may be the most serious problem. Studies of centenarians show almost nothing in common; some smoke, some don't; some are active, some aren't; some are serene, some are excitable. However, what they did have in common was low blood sugar and low insulin.

Now that I am a parent myself, I desperately want my child to have all the health advantages I have had over the years. My first inclination then is to body-tackle anybody offering candy and the like. However, as a parent, I also try to find or create situations in which my child does not have to feel unpleasantly isolated. So my choice on the multiple choice question above is d) to provide enough alternative food for everybody at the party.

First, when I call to accept the invitation, I let the mom or dad know that we don't eat any sugar at all. If they are completely uncomprehending, I describe the problem as an allergy, which given all the pathology, it is. Then I offer to bring whole fruit, nuts, carrot, cuke and celery sticks, cheese, watermelon-only popsicles, etc. for everyone. Then while the cake is being cut, I distract my child with any interesting baby, pet or object handy. After the cake has been distributed, we then go get plates of whole food for ourselves and mingle freely. Older children, of course, may not appreciate their parents' presence at a party, but are then old enough to be challenged with choosing only whole food for themselves, just as we expect them to refuse cigarettes.

If your children demand poor quality food, it is because it has previously found its way into their school or your house. Start shopping just the periphery of the supermarket where the whole foods are. Skip the aisles of processed and sugared foods and drinks. Naturopathic physicians find that on creating a whole food household, your children may at first balk, but within 1-2 days, they will 1) learn to accept the food that you are providing them, and 2) will then let you know that they are feeling better. Let them grow to be as grateful to you as I am to my strict father.