America prefers to have a nincompoop as president than a true but contentious leader.
Cronometer
Start using Cronometer.com to document your every meal and you will find out what your deficiencies are.
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?
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?
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.
How To Cook
Cook with either vegetable broth or water, not oil.
Weight Control
On a plant-based, whole foods diet, you can eat as much as you want and not gain weight. Such food is nutritional dense but calorie lean. No calorie counting, no fretting about weight, no worries. What’s not to like?
Fruit
I think my enjoyment and pleasure in eating fruit stems from a mild deprivation from my childhood. For some reason, we never seemed to have much variety in my home when I was a child. Oranges, bananas, and apples and that was about it. So now, all the other types of fruit available seem to me a kind of pleasant luxury that I can partake in, even though these other types are actually quite ordinary. Such is one of the gentle ironies in my life.
The thing about fruit is that, while it is comparatively high in sugar, it is also high in fiber, which mitigates the sugar issue to an extent. So a moderate amount of fruit in one’s diet, if one is a typical, non-diabetic individual, is excellent despite the high sugar content.
Whole Foods
Having fun exploring the newly opened Whole Foods store in my town. Yesterday, discovered Cauliflower Gluten Free Gnocchi. They describe it as “rustic Italian style gnocchi made with cauliflower puree, potato and rice flour”. Also picked up their 365 Organic Tomato Sauce as well as their 365 Organic Tomato Paste. Seems that every time I go into this store there are discoveries.
Ancient Civilizations Out There?
They think the known universe is just shy of 15 billion years old. That’s a long time. Compare that to how long humans have been around — approximately 2 million years at the most. That’s not even 1 second on the time dimension of the universe.
But if you were to look at the night sky without any light pollution, you would see just gads — that is countless — stars near us. And then again, we now know there are countless whole galaxies out there. Given the time dimension of the known universe, it raises the very likely scenario that there are civilizations on other planets, somewhere, that have been around not for merely millions of years, but perhaps even over a billion years.
Just think how far a civilization might actually advance in knowledge/technology in over a billion years…when you look at how far we have come in merely a couple million years? A civilization that has advanced in over a billion years would probably see our civilization as comparable to the way we view ants…not even ants.
Henry's Views 