tribute to my “grama”
I am in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho and Spokane, Washington for the Thanksgiving weekend. The three of us here are 40, 60, and 80 year old women–me running my five miles each morning, my aunt walking, and my grama lying on the couch recovering from knee replacement. It’s her third joint replacement, with a [...]
6 Comments • Continue Reading →foods that help digestion . . . part 5
Dear GreenSmoothieGirl: What are foods that help digestion? Some raw foodists eat raw meat. Raw meat and milk have enzymes, so aren’t they good foods? Answer: We’ll leave the Oxford/Cornell China Project out of this discussion, which shows that animal protein causes many diseases. (The primary author of that pivotal [...]
12 Comments • Continue Reading →what enzymes do to make food digestible . . . part 4
Dear GreenSmoothieGirl: How can enzymes and eating raw food be so important when stomach acid would kill any enzymes that came with the food anyway? Good one. Some people think that the low pH of the stomach stops salivary and any other food or supplemental enzymes from working. A number of [...]
Leave a comment • Continue Reading →what enzymes do to make food digestible . . . part 3
We don’t think of our stomach as being two-chambered, but Howell goes to lengths to document all the experts and studies (including Gray’s Anatomy) saying that it does, in fact, have two distinct parts. And in the upper stomach, or “food enzyme stomach,” gastric juices are not released, and peristalsis is not yet churning [...]
5 Comments • Continue Reading →what enzymes do to make food digestible . . . part 2
Howell outlines three types of enzymes we need: digestive enzymes, which digest food, metabolic enzymes, which run every function of our bodies, and food enzymes from raw foods, which start the digestive process. So what enzymes are involved in digestion? Amylase is the enzyme used to digest carbohydrate, and it is concentrated in [...]
Leave a comment • Continue Reading →What enzymes do to make food digestible . . . part 1
I’m going to write about the work of Dr. Edward Howell, who spent 20 years writing Enzyme Nutrition: The Food Enzyme Concept. I confess to reading the 170-page abridgement rather than the 700-page original work with 700 sources. I’m abridging that book and other sources I’ve read on enzymes so in reading a [...]
2 Comments • Continue Reading →Vitamin B12
You have probably read that the average person eats 10 lbs. of bugs per year. That’s not a fact you like to think about much, I’ll bet. When our culture began to fear micro-organisms, we started to fear bugs, too. John the Baptist would be so disappointed in us. J Virtually [...]
15 Comments • Continue Reading →is agave good food?
Dear GreenSmoothieGirl: What about the controversy surrounding agave? Answer: I have seen a couple of people with clout on the internet say that one should be careful with agave. They make a decent point that since much of the product imported into the U.S. is from Mexico, we don’t always know what we’re getting. [...]
12 Comments • Continue Reading →high-fructose corn syrup is a health food
I don’t know if you all noticed this comment to a blog entry a couple of weeks ago. Please inform us all of your opinon! –Robyn Hi my name is Liz and I work with the Corn Refiner’s Association. I wanted to share some infromation about High Fructose Corn Syrup. Both sugar and high [...]
37 Comments • Continue Reading →should I buy designer foods?
Thinking about the questions lately about acai and maca, I was checking out today at The Good Earth. The woman and her daughter in front of me had clearly never been in the health food store. It was also clear that they were from the very lower middle class and of extremely limited means. [...]
28 Comments • Continue Reading →