I have been meaning to sit down and write about this stuff for awhile, what better excuse than for a Real Food Wednesdays Carnival? So I’m getting real, right here: Buckle up, it’s gonna be a long’un.

I wanted to write, most specifically, because I have recently read Nina Planck’s book Real Food: What to Eat and Why which I finally bought around the end of May and devoured – no pun intended – within a few days. And I figured it might provide some good catharsis to write about some of what I am learning about omnivorousness and myths and cholesterol and where-in-the-heck do I fit in?

I was never a low-fat fadder or calorie counter. I sort of thought, well however G!d made it was how we were supposed to eat it. So whole milk, whole fat yogurt, eating both the yolk and the white, etc.

I was also raised 100% lacto-ovo vegetarian until about the age of fourteen. So when talk came to be of cholesterol, I knew where that came from: it was meat of course; I didn’t eat any so I didn’t really worry about it. I was lucky, my mother stayed at home, cooked each meal fresh, we were always eating organic and seasonally (not too hard to do in places like Iowa in the 80’s & 90’s if you knew the right folks) and there was never any processed food in the house except for the occasional box of cheerios. To this day, I still lean heavily on vegetables more comfortably than on any other thing. Then again, moving to Wyoming after middle school could dent any lifer-vegetairan’s pride. And since the age of 17 (the age I was when I  cracked and had my first steak) I have vascillated between eating whatever looked good (I mean wholly good, I never ever got a taste for fast food or junk food — my friends all thought I was a “food snob” but eating  beef, chicken, fish, etc.) to stringent vegetarianism. Even though I had read Adele Davis by the age of 12 and had heard of Weston Price, I also discovered the Zone diet by the time I was in college, and by 2004 I had also had my heart smashed to pieces by PeTA’s “Meet your Meat” video and went vegan for almost an entire year, consuming huge amounts of soy (and I have the banged up thyroid disorder to prove it).

I have always been a spiritual person, and I’m also not exactly hard-skinned when it comes to cruelty of any kind, I saw no reason why I had any right to kill anything so that I may eat, plus, there is such a thing as karma and I knew killing was a no-no in general. Eating meat made no sense. I had Genesis 1:29 memorized and brandished it like  the flaming sword of a seraphim for years.  I lost weight for sure but I also realized I was tired all the time. Never mind that, of course: for most importantly – I felt virtuous for my food choices. I  rightly became even more so about Raw Living Foods after college; enzymes,  nutrient density, the importance of re-mineralization, non-cooking techniques, etc. and to be very frank: you absolutely do feel amazing eating raw even at 70% — so much more abundant energy and clarity, it feels like a gift of something divine.  I became an absolute nutrition research junkie: I’m sure I was borderline orthorexic, and probably still am. But when it came to raw, it seemed that full-on health, especially for reproductive purposes, could be somewhat short lived.

When I reread Nutrition & Physcial Degeneration and bought Nourishing Traditions last fall, I began to realize how many raw kids and how many vegan or vegetarian kids had crooked or undevelopped teeth, let alone bone structure. I always had a good set of chompers, but I did have a narrow jaw structure and high palate and both me and my brother were cursed with braces for 2-3 years in highschool. So when I finally sat down to read about Nina’s experience with pure vegetarianism, the reliance on grains, the moodiness, the fatigue, the weight gain, and her own attachment to virtue, I felt immediately that I could trust this woman. She knows how much attachment one places on these “holy” things. See, I still get a major ego boost even from the idea of vegetarianism. Even the word tastes light and pure in my mouth, clean and unsullied. I continue to be very attached to that part of myself. But I am also very aware of the fact that I may very well have been wrong about everything; it’s hard to imagine that if I had been born in Tibet or Siberia or as an Alaskan Inuit even, that vegetarianism would have had the same appeal or even reality. I have become very aware of the vegetarian myths (I am currently building a seperate post about this) so I am learning, and thanks to Dr. Price, beginning to really coming to grips with the fact that everyone has different nutritional needs. And I also need to follow my own. Eating traditionally in my book also means having a more intimate relationship with the body and intuiting craving and aversions for what they are.

Now (sorry for the looong diatribe) Real Food should firstly be considered as a great book for beginners, it’s a wonderful entry into real food ideologies. The chapters are laid out nicely, she is a fine enough and easy writer that the text is easy to absorb and follows a nice trajectory. I would recommend it to anyone who is new to the concept of removing industrialized food (meats, hydrolyzed oils and sugars and other processed crap) from the diet and she does a good job to explain why this is a very very good decision to make, however: if this is information you are already familiar with, then Plank’s book, while full of wonderful & helpful information may seem like you’re retreading on previously covered topics. I know why corn syrup, high-fructose whats-its and vegetable oils are bad. I know why factory farming is bad. I know its’ not a sin to eat butter (In India, the reason why cows and cow’s milk is considered sacred (well one of the reasons) is because milk is the only food 100% freely given in order to nourish. Honey, eggs, etc. affects the animal that provides it. The bees store and eat their honey, if you find a nesting hen — that egg may hatch, but milk is of the mother and it gives without detracting). I was raised on raw milk till I was almost 10 and have become the proud owner of a cow-share for a year now. When I do buy meat, I make sure it is grass-fed. I have read  Michael Pollan, I know that “organic” has become likewise industrial. Just like allopathic medicine. I’ve always known that most of these people have absolutely no clue what they’re talking about.

OH! Side-note — any of you been watching the new drama on Fox called “Mental” ? It’s very intriguing on multiple levels, but what caught my ear in last night’s episode was the relationship between pharamceutical companies and hospitals. Seems that the prior almost always (in large chunks) funds the latter. So the reasons hospitals can afford to be what they are, is because they’re in a financial stalemate with phara-medicine. period. Now this show is fiction, but this is a real-world truth. It’s 100% un-ethical and HUGE conflict of interests. Case and point — that woman in MN who was threatened with prison if she didn’t bring her cancer-ridden child back to undergo chemotherapy, though no one mentions that chemo on this type of cancer gaurantees maybe 5 more years if the kid survives treatment, when there ARE alternatives for chissakes — fume, fume!!

… regaining composure (quaint smile) :

Chapter 9 of Real Food is called “Beyond Cholesterol,” She writes: What is it exactly? And proceeds through the history of blood serum cholesterol and our medical industries baffling heart attack theorems.

(Want to know what causes disease and how to prevent it? )

David Wolfe (premier raw food guru) on Calcification

**another thing that separates us from traditional cultures
is our lack of knowledge about how to cleanse and detox the body.**

See, as good educated American eaters, everyone knows about LDL and HDL cholesterol. We hear about it even in commercial: “this food helps to raise HDL — the good cholesterol…” This is what I’ve learned about cholesterol, and frankly, I don’t remember where I read this, (it could be Nina, it could be Fallon/Enig or whoever, my apologies) but here goes:

There are two types of cholesterol. LDL and HDL (i.e. Low-density lipoprotein and High-density lipoprotein, respectively) and neither one is bad, or damaging: they are instead ear-markers for what is going on in the body. Your liver manufactures cholesterol of a certain quantity, but it is much easier on the body to get some from food sources, in the same way that your body produces all its own enzymes until about the age of 27-29 years (by year 30 most people begin to notice some sign of aging, be it wrinkles or indigestion, etc.) and then quits: it’s a good idea to get your nutrients from food and be as easy on your body as possible. Now, again, your body manufactures cholesterol. Now why would it do this? Cholesterol is required for cellular structure, for hormone construction and brain function. Without cholesterol your body cannot produce hormones or grow cells properly. Because of this fact, if there IS cellular damage somewhere in he body, you will also find cholesterol. But as they say: when one sees firefighters at the scene of a burning house, it would be unwise to accuse said firefighters of arsony. So statins? Very very bad idea.

Here’s the deal (from what I understand): HDL and LDL are like buoy-rafts, and they travel in different streams. Just like veins and arteries, one flows toward and one flows away; HDL is a measurment for the amount and kind of cholesterol that returns to the liver from the bloodstream and LDL is the kind that leaves the liver to “patrol” and “repair” the body. Got that? I’ll say it again: LDL is sent out to REPAIR the body. The more LDL there is in the bloodstream, chances are you are experiencing some kind of cellular damage in the body, either from calcification, inflammation, parasites or other toxicities. In Ayurvedic medicine these pre-diseased states are called ama and often (if not in all cases) stem from poorly digested/assimilated nutrients. Get it? LDL is an indicator that there’s a fire — you don’t just turn off the smoke alarm and forget about it, you get out of the house: you change your approach to the situation. Compromising the body’s natural defense and warning sytems (i.e. with statins) is ludicrous and down-right dangerous.

So if it’s not cholesterol that causes the problem, what is it? Well. read Nina’s book. Read Weston A. Price, read  Gabriel Cousens. The burden and joy of being educated means you can’t just go insane and eat whatever you want or what feels virtuous. What I am learning to do is to listen; to let go and let love and let G!d. I still go off and on in wanting to eat beef, I don’t particularly like pork, I don’t love eggs. What’s amazing about this planet is the variety. If one thing isn’t working, try another. Even David Wolfe, raw-guru-extraordinnaire talks about people coming up to him to confess their sins, i.e. “I hate spirulina, it makes me gag” and they are woeful to admit it. His answer? Try something else! Even Price on his round-the-world nutrition excurions saw that no one culture ate exactly the same. The traditional Inuits eat all fat and meat with no fruit really to speak of and meager vegetables without disease but — and this is perhaps my one critique of WAPF — not everyone needs 9 T of butter or seal blubber for that matter. Or needs to eat bacon, though I do really like it . Price said that the most healthy people that he saw (overall) had raw milk products and fish along with fruit and vegetables in the diet. Again what I am learning to do is to listen, even if others perceive me as walking the plank (or planck) we above all need to listen to our bodies, to be educated, to know the science and remembering quality is always worth the cost (especially for grass fed meats and pastured milk and eggs, and organic fruits and vegetables). The truth is, you pay now or you pay later. You pay at the grocer or you pay your dentist-oncologist-cardiologist, etc. later on. What’s the point?

Eat Real Foods. Whether they be lacto-ovo or primal or primarilly carnivorous: do it for real. Live it for real. and Listen and be kind.

Happy Eating from the Dish.