Author: Henry Barnard

I am a voracious reader and also enjoy writing. I often have a very different point of view than the popular one. I do see value in debate, and thought it might add to the public debate on controversial issues if I were to express my contrarian opinions. I also started keeping my poems recently (I've written little pieces my whole adult life but never kept any); and I've been a photographer now for over 25 years. So I will be adding an occasional poem and hopefully interesting photograph to the blog along the way, just to spice things up.

Favorite Recipes

Veggie-intense casserole with vegan cheese — vegan cheese basically cashews and nutritional yeast. Baked Stokes purple sweet potato (keep the skin on for its nutrition) with cinnamon that sticks because of a coating of Tahini (tastes like cake, not potato, and can sweeten even more by adding a little Stevia). Veggie stew with a garlic/curry blend for predominant taste. Overnight oatmeal with vanilla flavoring (vanilla extract and vanilla powder) and blueberries and walnuts — almost like eating blueberry flavored vanilla ice cream.

You want to bake the Stokes sweet potato just long enough so that the skin on the outside is dry and crisp, but the inside is moist. 400 degrees for 55 minutes with large, buy-sized pieces.

The healthy fat in Tahini is perfect for potatoes because potatoes are naturally extremely low in fat.

After you bake the potato, put it in the refrigerator because this will cause the starch in the potato to turn into resistant starch. This resistant starch will feed your microbiome but reduce the calories you actually ingest.

When you want to eat a serving of the baked sweet potato, take it out of the frig and warm it up first at room temperature to eat it later. The resistant starch will remain resistant starch.

The two purple sweet potatoes that you MUST absolutely try are the Stokes purple sweet potato or the Okinawan purple sweet potato. Whole Foods has the former; you can order the latter from a Hawaiian company.

Purple sweet potatoes have amazing nutritional value, in part due to that color.

None of the other sweet potatoes compare favorably to the purple sweet potato, but always buy organic, as potato is always one of the Dirty Dozen.

Favorite Stew Flavoring

Never Forget

Never forget that all modern “medicine” — pills — are to some degree toxins, foreign to the body, with the potential for a litany of unhealthy outcomes.

Always ask yourself whether this miracle pill is actually a modern version of medieval medicine where they bled people with leeches as the principal “cure”. Yeah, right.

The main cause for all disease — including heart disease and cancer and all the modern autoimmune diseases — is a poor diet; and the only real cure for disease is a healthy, nutritious diet. Food causes the problem but can also fix it.

When you turn to medicine as the cure, you are turning toward voodoo. For instance, look at what they are now saying about the consequences of taking statin drugs or the use of stents in blocked arteries. Both are now thought to be equivalent to the medieval bleed with leeches — AGAIN!

Don’t trust “miracle” medicine; trust healthy whole food. Hippocrates understood this 2400 years ago.

Weight Loss Tricks

Weight Loss Tricks

Having a very low-fat diet helps because it generally translates into a lower-calorie diet.

Bumping up the amount of protein in your diet helps because the body burns much more calories in digesting protein than it does digesting carbohydrates or fats.

Eating a whole-foods, plant-based diet helps because the body requires a certain level of nutrition, and so if your diet is highly nutritious, the body will be satisfied with fewer calories.

All these are subtle strategies to facilitate losing weight.

Ageless