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.

My Brown, Not Green, Smoothie

I consider the smoothie I make in a large Vita-Mix that lasts up to 3 days one of my most nutritious meals.  That smoothie and a huge salad that also lasts days are the basic infrastructure of my overall diet, as they are both done virtually every week.

The ingredients that go into this smoothie have been added incrementally over the years so that now making one is quite a complex operation where I have to keep many things in store and ready to add.   The same is true of the salad, but with the salad there is much more variability, as I like to eat at least a slightly different version each time.  Here using different dressings helps that variability.

I think most people should do the same, that is, develop a complex and super nutritious smoothie as well as a complex and super nutritious salad, and make these two staples the mainstay of your diet.

My Story

Terrible At Governing

Democrats are almost a year in office, with control of both houses, and still haven’t passed the infrastructure bill that everyone, including all Republicans, wanted.

The bonanza bill to spend money on “clean energy” boondoggles will require huge increases in taxes and result in vast government waste on projects with little chance of actually affecting climate change or energy production — a case of government deluding itself into thinking that it can change our use of fossil fuels, for they haven’t admitted to themselves that the alternative sources of clean energy like solar and wind will never really amount to much percentage-wise. That’s the hard reality. Currently, all the renewable energy sources produce a mere 12% of total US energy consumption. I suppose that could eventually get to a whopping (sarcastic here) 15%.

Has anyone asked the question whether we really need to send our 3 and 4 year-olds to school? Whether this is really in our and their best interest? It smacks me of robbing toddlers of their carefree childhood.

The one idea that the Democrats have put forward that has real merit is the required 15% percent minimum tax on corporations. Long overdue that the government put a stop to corporations that make billions paying no taxes because they have an army of tax attorneys who can game the system.

So what have been the real downsides. We have a government that incentivizes illegal immigration. Our border with Mexico is chaos. We have witnessed a terrible exit from Afghanistan that encourages all our adversaries to see the US as a paper tiger. We now have a government that offers Europe no barrier to dumping steel and aluminum into the US — back to Democratic policies that lead to a rust belt in the US and loss of jobs, all for the sake of “free” trade that ultimately corrodes our economy. In other words, relative to trade policies, the Democrats have learned nothing.

US Energy Consumption by Type of Energy

Iodine

If you were using Cronometer and really understood what your nutritional profile looked like, chances are pretty good that it would turn up an iodine deficiency. I’ve been using Kelp as a way to address this issue. Do you know if you have an iodine deficiency, and if you do, what you would use to correct it?

Carbs Not The Devil

Rice/Bean Recipe for Nutrition

Packet of Organic Seven Whole Grains from Seeds of Change cooked in 365 Tomato Sauce. Can of Organic Black Beans by Westbrae cooked with 1 onion. Boil mixed vegetables (peas, green beans, carot) and lima beans. Layer all the foods with the grains on the bottom, followed by the black beans, then the vegetables on top. Dice up Olivia’s Organic Spring Mix leafy greens into very small pieces, and place this mound of leafy greens on top. Spring the leafy greens with real lemon juice. (All my meals have this same look with a mound of finely diced leafy greens covering what’s underneath — because those leafy greens are the most nutritious food on the planet.)

I just love that blend of the taste of tomato with lemon. But this is a very hearty meal that’s actually very low in fat but very high in nutrition and fiber — ideal.

Recommend that instead of blindly following other people’s recipes (including this one), you come up with your own where nutrition density is just as important as — perhaps even more important than — taste. As opposed to most recipes out there where taste is the principal goal and nutrition is hardly even considered.

I think the way most people come up with recipes is all wrong. People find them and then do them exactly as stated. Instead, I think people should use a bottom-up approach. First begin by identifying the particular tastes that you personally enjoy. Let’s say you identify 10 different tastes in your initial list. This is where you should begin putting together a particular recipe — by selecting foods that align with these particular tastes. As per the above example, I particularly like the taste of cooked tomato, and I also like the taste of lemon juice. So it becomes almost inevitable that the above recipe will work very well for me because it emphasizes this tomato/lemon combination.

What are your 10 favorite tastes? Do you even know self-consciously — and so constructively — what they are?

Fruit

Saturated Fat

The great dividing line in nutrition is over the issue of saturated fat. There are those who think it is causal and highly correlated to heart disease, and should be avoided or minimized to the extent possible in order to keep one’s ticker going along smoothly. And there are those on the other side of that dividing line who think this assertion is nonsense, and saturated fat is no more harmful than any other fat. Where you align yourself on this critical issue has a major impact on the type of diet you carve out as prudent relative to your health.

There is no question that I align myself with the former point of view, and go to great length to see that I consume as little of this dreaded substance as possible. So far, I haven’t had any heart issues at all, and think my dietary choices may be responsible.

It is interesting to me and perfectly understandable that Beyond Meat goes out of its way to emphasize their products have seriously less saturated fat than actual meat, and that their goal is to minimize saturated fat to the extent possible, which tells you which side of the dividing line they are on.

Fruit