Dharma Feast Cookbook (49 page)
Read Dharma Feast Cookbook Online
Authors: Theresa Rodgers
Several small appliances that are useful:
| • | A good juicer—The type that is best for you will depend on what you will be juicing. Get a good-quality machine that will last a lifetime. See Choose a Juicer in How To, Chapter 6 . |
| • | A powerful blender such as a VitaMix—It can be used for pureeing or juicing whole vegetables and fruits, making smoothies, grinding grains, and making nut butter. A VitaMix is expensive so if you can’t afford one, you can get a good-quality blender for much less. Or you can buy a VitaMix for less on any used-goods lists like craigslist.org and ebay.com. |
| • | An immersion or stick blender—This is used for blending or pureeing soups in the pot to thicken them. Immersion blenders are easier and safer to use than a regular blender. Hot foods have to be blended with care in small batches in a regular blender so that steam does not force the lid off and explode the hot liquid upward. Stick blenders also save time because we don’t have to transfer the food from pot to blender. |
| • | A small electric coffee grinder for grinding spices and grains. You won’t want to use the same grinder for coffee, if you drink it, and spices unless you clean it thoroughly. |
| • | A Cuisinart or other brand food processor. |
| • | A handheld mixer, if you will have need for one. |
| • | Some of the tasks done by these appliances can be done by hand as well. Spices can be ground in a mortar and pestle, batter and dough can be mixed with a spoon, and nuts and other foods that need to be ground can be processed with a hand-grinder. |
| R ESOURCES AND R ECOMMENDATIONS | 8 |
Let me emphasize something; life is entirely positive. It is the manner in which life is expressed that takes on the form of creation or destruction.
–A
RNAUD
D
ESJARDINS
For Making Informed Decisions
We are, as they say, what we eat.
We know what’s in
our
homemade soup, salad dressing and dip, but processed foods contain sometimes dozens of ingredients we can’t even pronounce. Even the healthiest canned, frozen, and packaged choices usually contain extra ingredients, including additives, preservatives, and chemicals. The purest ones still lose nutritional value over time as they sit on the shelves.
To make life positive changes in our diet we can educate ourselves as much as possible regarding how to do that in a very practical way. In this section we offer you background and some of the latest research on these topics so you can make the best choices possible.
Water
No healthy lifestyle can succeed without the bedrock of hydration. Every biological system uses water to function. Water is the “river” of the body—it carries hormones, amino acids, oxygen, and neurotransmitters where they need to go. Water is what fills every cell, regulates its pressure from the inside, and allows the system of the cell to function. It carries the enzymatic messages in the brain from neuron to neuron. It keeps the blood flowing and maintains the correct pressure within the veins. And much more. Sources differ as to what percentage of a human body is water, but there is agreement that it is more than 50 percent.
When we are not getting enough water the body prioritizes how the water we do have is used. Life-sustaining organs, such as the brain and the heart, receive water first, while many other organs, systems, and functions receive less or none. As we become more and more dehydrated, we develop acute and chronic disease.
The following bullet points are synthesized from the book
Your Body’s Many Cries For Water,
by F. Batmanghelidj, M.D., and are a short list of water’s health attributes, as well as symptoms that may result from dehydration. There are other causes of illness but Dr. Batmanghelidj makes such a strong case for adequate hydration being able to heal disease that it makes sense to us to follow his recommendations and pass them along to you. We recommend reading this engaging book.
| • | Water fills the discs in our spines. If we are dehydrated, the water in our discs is low priority, and we may have back and neck pain. |
| • | Water is essential in the digestive process. If there isn’t enough water the acid in the stomach become too concentrated, leading to pain in the digestive tract as this acid irritates the delicate lining. |
| • | Heartburn can be another result of the body’s attempt to protect the intestine from insufficiently-diluted stomach acid. Stomach acid is pushed back up into the stomach to protect the intestines, but it is also pushed through the stomach into the esophagus, resulting in heartburn. |
| • | The mucus layer formed during digestion to protect the lining of the stomach is 98 percent water. If there isn’t enough water to form that layer, the stomach lining is compromised, which can lead to ulcers. |
| • | A lack of water leads to constipation because water is essential to moving fecal waste through the intestines. With the additional strain of elimination without hydration the intestinal lining is pushed out, resulting in hemorrhoids. |
| • | Dehydration can also cause or exacerbate allergies. Histamine, the hormone responsible for fighting bacteria, viruses, and foreign bodies, also regulates water distribution. If there is a shortage of water, the body produces an over-abundance of histamine to help regulate what little water there is. It then becomes much more responsive to the foreign bodies that cause allergies. |
| • | Skin problems are another symptom of dehydration. Tremendous amounts of water are lost through the skin as it, like the lungs, has a huge surface area. Because of this, when water is scarce, getting it to the skin is a low priority. Pimples and eczema can form when there is not enough water to wash away impurities. Wrinkles can form when there is not enough water to hydrate the skin (that will get some of us drinking). Waking up with puffy eyes may be caused by the lymph, the fluid in the lymphatic system, not being sufficiently liquid, making it stagnate in the face as we sleep. |
| • | Because we lose a lot of water during the night through breathing, it’s an excellent idea to drink a glass of water when we wake up. |
| • | Lack of hydration affects more than the physical body. If it is not getting enough water, the body sends a message to the brain that our life is in danger and we can live in a state of alarm without knowing why. This can have a profound effect on our mind and emotions. Receiving this message and not understanding where it is coming from, we project inappropriate reactivity on our partners, our children, our friends, or the jar of olives we can’t open. |
Our recommendation, based on our experience and what we have read and researched, is to drink three to four liters of water a day. This may sound like a lot but when we consider everything in us that relies on water, it makes sense. It only takes about two weeks to form a habit and to make drinking this much water a part of our routine. It takes about six months of this practice to completely hydrate oneself.
It’s not effective to drink large quantities of water at one time, however, because it is too much to absorb at once. Eight to twelve ounces every hour or so is appropriate. Each of us can regulate the timing of our water intake differently based upon our daily activities. For example, if we are riding in the car for eight hours we may not want to drink a lot of water unless we don’t mind stopping a lot. The point is to give the body an ongoing supply of water to meet its needs.
It’s best not to drink liquids a half-hour or less before eating and for at least forty-five minutes after eating. A few sips during a meal are fine, but drinking liquid before, during, or after a meal disrupts digestion by diluting saliva and gastric juices. If we follow this schedule for a while we will no longer feel thirsty or have the need to drink during meals, but it will continue to astonish our waiter or waitress when we say we don’t want anything to drink with our meal.
Water is the only liquid that does not require digestion. Tea, soda, juice, electrolyte drinks, coffee, or anything else must go through the process of digestion like any other food, so we don’t include other beverages as a part of our three-or-four liters a day.
When we really start drinking water, for the first week or two we might find ourselves feeling a little bit sick, or at least sick and tired of going to the bathroom as our body adjusts. What happens when we begin drinking water consistently is that our cells and intestines begin to dump toxins they had not been able to flush for a long time. After this stage we might have the experience of being thirsty all the time. Keep drinking; this will pass.
One way to gauge whether or not we are beginning to drink enough water is the color of our urine. It should consistently be either colorless or very, very light yellow—anything darker means we need to drink more.
As we hydrate more and more, we need to consider what we’re drinking out of. All plastic water bottles and cups, including Nalgene or other brands that use thick and hard plastic, leak chemicals and plastic into the water. This may not seem like such a big deal, but if we’re drinking a lot of water every day those minute particles add up, and they have been linked to degenerative disease. Stainless steel or glass water bottles and glasses have been tested and proven to leach nothing.
Water is expensive to buy, and most of it comes in plastic bottles. We recommend having a good water filter in your home. The most basic kind is an activated carbon filter, which removes bad tastes and odors as well as reducing (but not eliminating) heavy metals, parasites, and chemicals. The most popular of this variety is the countertop pitcher, like the Brita. There are also cation-exchange systems. A “cation” is a positively-charged ion, which exchanges calcium and magnesium ions, responsible for “hard water,” with sodium ions. This softens hard water and removes some minerals and ions. Ultraviolet disinfectors remove bacteria and parasites. The two best filters are distillers, which work by boiling and condensing the water; and reverse osmosis, which remove the widest range of contaminants including bacteria and viruses, chlorine, and heavy metals. The more a filter removes, the more expensive it is. Consider what you need and the quality of water where you live when deciding on the filter that will work best for you.
Supplementation
The body is designed to absorb and assimilate vitamins and minerals from whole foods. The large-scale industries that grow food in the United States and countries around the world use petroleum-based fertilizers that strip soil of these nutrients, so foods grown in this soil lack them. It is wise to replace these missing nutrients through food supplements.
One way of looking at supplementation is by thinking of it as horses pulling a wagon up a hill. In order to do the job, a specific number of horses are needed. Supplementation is like making sure we have enough horses.
Whole food supplements (i.e., herbs, green powders, liquid minerals) and “food-grown” supplements, which are grown on plants or derived from dehydrated fruit, vegetable, and grass juices, as well as homeopathics, are easily absorbed and assimilated. “Food-based” supplements are the next best choice. These use synthetic nutrients but with food-based binders— such as green powders or herbs, which prime vitamins and minerals for absorption. These are less expensive than “food-grown” supplements.
Most commercial vitamins and minerals that are sold in pharmacies, supermarkets, and health food stores in the United States and Europe are made from isolated, synthetic nutrients. For example, a vitamin B-complex is made by producing all the different B vitamins (i.e., B-1, B-6, B-12, etc.) from synthetic sources and then combining these
in one capsule, tablet, or liquid and selling it as a B-complex supplement. In the United States these supplements are often labeled as “natural.” The problem is our bodies absorb only a tiny percentage of a synthetic nutrient.
The best course of action is to have a natural health practitioner design a supplement program specifically for you. Another way is to visit a reputable natural foods store and talk to the person in charge of the supplement department.
In general herbs should be taken without food, and vitamins and minerals should be taken with food, but read the labels.
The following is a partial list of absorbable supplements. We have researched each one and feel confident in our recommendation.