Be An Informed Consumer

PediaSure supposedly can help fill nutritional gaps in children who are picky eaters.  The  website claims "#1 Pediatrician Recommended Brand" and "complete balanced nutrition."  The first 3 ingredients?  Water, sugar, corn maltodextrin.  Give me a break.  Go here for the rest of the ingredients, which also include health-detrimental, omega-6 heavy, inflammation-inducing, oxidative stress-raising safflower and corn oil.  The minerals and vitamins that are supposed to supplement your child's health are all in there, too.  How is this different than giving them the industrially processed food picky eaters love (which is also loaded with sugar, corn, and seed oils) and supplementing with a gummy one-a-day vitamin?

Have you seen the commercial where a mother says, "you are what you eat" as her friends' kids appear on the soccer field as french fries and doughnuts?  Why isn't her child shaped as sugar and vegetable oil?  What pediatricians are recommending this drink?


Reading nutrition labels can be tricky business, and many items on the ingredients list are unrecognizable.  As everyone probably knows, ingredients are listed in ascending order of weight. But one example of a tricky situation is when there are multiple kinds of sugar in a single product - corn syrup, sucrose, etc, etc.  Sugar might be far down in the ingredients list, but when there are multiple kinds, they can add up to a significant portion of what's in the food.  I've heard some rumors about new nutrition labels that will put ingredients into categories, so that you know how much of a product is actually "sugar" by lumping them all together.  For now, here is a great list of other names for sugar of which you might not be aware.  

Genetic Susceptibility to Disease

In the early days of DNA research, it was believed that your DNA sequence determined everything about you, from your eye color, to your personality, to your susceptibility to disease, etc.  From one angle, this is true.  You cannot change an adenine nucleotide to a guanine in an adult's entire genome (at least not yet), but genetic science has led us to the realization that how genes are expressed can be altered throughout a person's life and have effects on subsequent generations (1).

Now, I do not claim to be an expert on this at all.  I only know the basics - your DNA has specific nucleotide sequence sections called genes, which, when activated or "expressed" result in protein products that direct other cellular activities. (Disclaimer: This is a gross simplification. I am just learning this all myself.)    What I have been quite interested in lately and wanted to bring up in this post, however, is epigenetics: the study of how gene expression can be altered in ways that do not involve changes in the DNA sequence.

There are some interesting examples of this phenomenon.

Decreased birthweights in infants after maternal in utero exposure to the Dutch famine of 1944-1945 (2).  This study looked at females who were in utero during the Dutch famine from Nov 1944 to May 1945.  The babies who were exposed to famine during 1st and 2nd trimesters had lower birthweights than their non-famine controls.  This is not too surprising.  What is more interesting is that the children of these females who were exposed to famine in utero also had decreased birthweight, compared to the children of the controls.

Maternal and grandmaternal smoking patterns are associated with early childhood asthma (3). This study shows that children whose mothers smoked while pregnant were 1.6 times more likely to develop asthma than those who had non-smoking mothers.  Again, not too surprising.  But, this effect is magnified - grandchildren of the smoking, pregnant moms were 2.1 times more likely to develop asthma.  Clearly, something else is going on.

Today, it seems that every disease has some sort of genetic component: heart disease, obesity, cancer, you name it.  And the occurrences of these diseases are only on the rise.  Some statistics..... If they do indeed have such a strong genetic disposition, and gene expression can be changed by diet and lifestyle, then I would have to conclude that we are all screwing up our genes and it is only going to get worse with our children and grandchildren.

This is why I urge everyone to really think about his/her daily life, the acts that we do that may be influencing our gene expression.  Lifestyle, stress, exercise, and food all play an important role on how we feel, and probably how our bodies respond.  I would argue that food is of the utmost importance.  After all (I'll say it again!), you are what you eat.  A species can withstand famine or a crappy diet for quite some time, as human bodies are adept, efficient, and resourceful.  However, subsequent generations will suffer if the diet isn't fixed.

Take care of your genes.  I know that my food and health endeavors can seem crazy, but all I think is that people should make an effort to learn about what they are actually ingesting, and then make their own decisions.  I welcome debate - together maybe we can dig deeper and really discover the secret to a health that we can proudly pass down to our children and grandchildren.

References:
1. Cummings JA, Clemens LG, Nunez AA. Mother counts: how effects of environmental contaminants on maternal care could affect the offspring and future generations. Front Neuroendocrinol. 2010 Oct;31(4):440-51.
2. Lumey LH. Decreased birthweights in infants after maternal in utero exposure to the Dutch famine of 1944-1945. Paediatr Perinat Epidemiol. 1992 Apr;6(2):240-53.
3. Li YF, Langholz B, Salam MT, Gilliland FD. Maternal and grandmaternal smoking patterns are associated with early childhood asthma. Chest. 2005 Apr;127(4):1232-41.

Homemade Yogurt from Raw Milk

My apologies for the recent lack of posts.  I was in NYC for research-related things, then in Sydney, Australia for a couple weeks for more research, then I went on vacation with my family in NC, and then I attended 3 weddings in 7 days.  Needless to say, I've been quite busy, but I will try to get back on track.
  
Ever since buying raw milk, we have been researching about using it to make other products, such as butter, yogurt, and whey.  We eat yogurt basically every day for breakfast, with almonds (my favorite are the Emerald cocoa roast almonds) and other nuts and berries, but we never really thought about making our own.  When we visited Scheffler Farm to buy our first gallon of raw milk, Eileen urged us to try making our own yogurt, claiming it was ridiculously easy.  She referred us to Get Foodie! (http://getfoodieshow.com/) and told us to watch Episode 11 to learn. 

To make yogurt, all you need is to warm up some milk, then cool it a bit, add a tad of yogurt to start the culture growing, and keep it warm for an extended period of time.  Since we already had the milk, next we had to choose our yogurt.  It’s depressing to me to see first-hand how afraid America is of fat, especially nutritional, satiating fat found in whole milk and yogurt.  Most of the yogurts we could find in the store were 0% fat, low-fat, fat-free... it was difficult to find any made from whole milk.  In addition, we couldn’t find organic, plain, Greek yogurt that wasn’t 0% fat.  Considering that many of the nutritional benefits from milk are contained in the fat portions (1), this boggles my mind.

Anyway, the idea of creating our own yogurt from raw milk was extremely appealing.  Turns out, the actual process is also extremely easy.

Supplies:
- 1 qt raw milk
- thermometer (must measure 100F-180F range at least)
- quart-sized mason jar
- 2 Tbsp already made yogurt (we used organic greek yogurt)
- large bowl that will fit mason jar
- water
- oven

Directions:
1. Preheat oven to 250F
2. Pour milk in pan on stove
3. Heat to 180F, stirring constantly, then remove from heat and cool to 110F
4. Pour into mason jar
5. Add yogurt and stir
6. Fill bowl with warm/hot water
7. Seal mason jar and place in bowl with water
8. Put in oven
9. Turn off oven
10. Wait 8-18 hr

Here is us heating the yogurt:

Here is the jar in the bowl with water:

It turned out fantastic!  Its consistency was on the thin side, but it tasted delicious.  We might try letting it sit longer in the warmed oven next time.  Also, we are going to use this yogurt as the base for the next batch, so the results might turn out even better.

The best part about this?  A quart of organic, whole milk yogurt from Stonyfield is around $3.50, which comes out to $14.00 per gallon.  This yogurt was produced from raw milk, at $6.00 per gallon.  Not too shabby.

Tapping the Potential of Whole Grains, Beans, and Other Seeds

If your grandparents have been around awhile, they might remember when the instructions for making oatmeal from whole oats used to include soaking the oats overnight before eating (1).  In traditional cultures, soaking, fermenting, and sprouting seeds, grains, and beans were common practice, but these are rarely done in the average American diet today.  The nutritional reasons for these methods seem to have been lost over the past couple hundred years.  Now, you can cook oatmeal from whole oats in mere minutes, but you won't be getting nearly as much nutritional potential from them as your great grandparents did.

Grains, beans, and other seeds are tiny but powerful.  Provided with some soil, water, and sunlight, a seed can grow into an enormous plant – that’s some awesome potential.  As a result, grains and beans contain a ton of nutrients, including protein, iron, fiber, calcium, magnesium, antioxidants and more.  If you’re in the swing of things, you have probably heard about the proposed health benefits of “whole grains” based on this information, but there is more to the story.  If these foods are not soaked and sprouted, their nutritional value is severely diminished.

Because a seed contains so many nutrients to help it transform into a large plant, it keeps them strategically and chemically locked inside the seed to protect them until they are needed (2).  When are they needed?  When the seeds are exposed to moisture in the soil and told to sprout, which can be replicated at home during food preparation, as it was done for thousands of years.  If seeds are not soaked and preferably sprouted, a chemical compound called phytic acid (present in many foods but overflowing in grains, seeds, and bean) holds the nutrients hostage AND prevents the absorption of nutrients in the body.  Therefore, even if you are eating whole grains and can break the seeds down enough somehow to extract nutrients, they will not be absorbed.  Amazingly, when seeds are first sprouted, phytase is released, which breaks down the phytic acid, allowing nutrients to be set free and absorbed into our bodies instead of being passed through untouched.

So, soaking and sprouting serve two beautiful purposes: releasing chemically trapped nutrients, and producing phytase to break down phytic acid so that these nutrients can be properly absorbed. Phytic acid is common in many foods, but beans, grains, and other seeds have it in spades, which is why these preparation techniques are so nutritionally vital (3,4).  Phytic acid protects calcium, magnesium, iron, and zinc from being absorbed by the digestive system by acting as a chelating agent, trapping them in non-soluble forms (5,6).  Sprouting and soaking grains, seeds, and beans are ancient practices, and were not abandoned until recently (7).  I guess the benefit of less prep time outweighed the benefit of available and absorbable nutrients?  I think that the reasons behind the soaking and sprouting have been lost, with detrimental effects.  Soaking beans and seeds does take more time and planning (the process can be multiple days in some cases), but the benefits are worth it.

Looking into the literature, there is plenty about phytic acid and how removing it dramatically increases the absorption of minerals.  In one study from 2003, it was found that removing the phytic acid increased the absorption of iron from rice by over 300%, from oat by at least 800%, and from wheat by a whopping 1100% (8)!  I have been wondering lately about how vegetarians tend to have low iron and vitamin B, despite vitamin supplementation and increased grain and vegetable consumption due to the lack of animal sources for these.  I think this may be part of the answer – whole grains do contain a lot of iron, but it’s impossible to absorb it when the grains haven’t been soaked or sprouted.  This mantra holds true for soybeans, as well, a staple in many vegetarians' diets.  A study by Hurrell, et. al. shows that soybeans contain tons of phytic acid that prevents the absorption of minerals.  However, even when they removed the phytic acid, the iron still wasn’t being properly absorbed, which points to other possible causes (9). 

I know - it is depressing and difficult to accept the fact that "9 whole grain bread" you pay extra for is basically useless, nutrition-wise.  Through all my new food research thus far, I'm still not entirely convinced that grains, beans, and other seeds are crucial to a balanced, high nutrient diet, but I understand how difficult it is to give up grains, especially everday bread.  To start, replace your white or whole wheat bread with bread made from sprouted grains, found in the frozen section of grocery stores.  My brother introduced me to Ezekiel bread made from multiple sprouted grains, and it is quite delicious.  You can have your bread and eat it, too.

Next, I'll post about our first oat soaking adventure.

References:
1. Fallon S.  Nourishing Traditions.  Newtrends Publishing, Inc. 1999
2. Shanahan C and Shanahan L.  Deep Nutrition: Why your genes need traditional food. Big Box Books, 2008.
3. Harland BF, Oberleas D. Phytate in foods. World Rev Nutr Diet. 1987;52:235-59.
4. Makover RU. Extraction and determination of phytic acid in beans. Cereal Chem 1970;47:288–95
5. Rackis J. J Amer Oil Chem. SOC. 31,161A (1974)
6. Oberleas D. Phytates, in Toxicants Occurring Naturally in Foods. National Academy of Science, Washington, D.C. 1973.
7. Whole Health Source.  http://wholehealthsource.blogspot.com/2010/05/traditional-preparation-methods-improve.html
8. Hurrell RF, Reddy MB, Juillerat MA, Cook JD. Degradation of phytic acid in cereal porridges improves iron absorption by human subjects. Am J Clin Nutr. 2003 May;77(5):1213-9.
9. Hurrell RF, Juillerat MA, Reddy MB, Lynch SR, Dassenko SA, Cook JD. Soy protein, phytate, and iron absorption in humans. Am J Clin Nutr. 1992 Sep;56(3):573-8.

For more info:  great website and another

Advertisement Tricks

I am leaving for NYC today to help my best friend pick out a wedding dress at Kleinfeld's with the rest of her bridesmaids, and then I will be staying next week for work.  But I thought I'd at least write a post before leaving even though things with me have been beyond busy.

Shopping for fresh, healthy food in a grocery store can be challenging.  I am disgusted by all the advertisement tricks companies use, and probably more upset by the fact that people fall for them.  For example, "free-range" could easily mean that the chickens are allowed a short exposure to sun everyday, or that there is a small window in the coop hardly allowing any sunshine.  "Omega-3" could just mean that there is a trace amount naturally occurring or added, but it might not be the proven beneficial types, DHA and EPA.  "USDA Organic" is almost meaningless to me, too.  It seems that, to be organic, certain pesticides are forbidden (among other criteria), but the producer can use other pesticides that aren't on the forbidden list.  What makes matters worse is that these pesticides may be in even higher concentrations than the forbidden ones because they are less effective, and less is known about their toxicity and health effects.  One of my favorite tricks is when companies write on a package "30% Less Fat!"  Consumers think that this means they have re-vamped the formula to have less fat, when sometimes they are just comparing their product to a competitor's.  This is true with York Peppermint Patties.  They have "70% Less Fat" than your average candy bar.  Sometimes, it is true that the product was reformulated to have less fat, but this is often at the expense of added sugar, which could be way worse.

Anyway, I came across this label at Tops the other day, and I had to snap an image:

It may be difficult to read, but the label is trying to convince you that grape seed oil (high polyunsaturated fat, bad oil) is healthier than olive oil (high monounsaturated fat, good oil).  They show that grape seed oil has way more polyunsaturated fats (the purple bar), way more Omega 6 fatty acids (the yellow bar), and even way more vitamin E (the green bar).  Ick!!  If you were an uninformed consumer, this would probably convince you, and you should refer to my previous post on seed oils.  But I will give a re-cap here of why seed oils, such as this grape seed one, are one of your worst enemies.  Polyunsaturated fats are absolutely terrible for you to cook with.  The heat oxidizes the polyunsaturated fats with ease, creating free radicals that then in turn create more free radicals that damage any tissue it comes into contact with, especially including your arteries.  Omega 6 fatty acids are superfluous in seed oils, as this label shows, but that is a huge problem in the US today.  The average American omega 6 to omega 3 ratio has increased dramatically in the past 100 years due to these seed oils, and the consequences aren't good.  High omega-6 increases inflammation, which can start entire cascades of inflammation.  The last thing the label claims is higher vitamin E, which I can't say here is a bad thing, and so at least you have that.  Your arteries may become inflamed and damaged by disrupting the endothelial layer, which in turn will trigger factors to clot the damage.  Then, down the line, a clot may fall off and be released into your circulation and stop blood flow to an area of your brain or heart... but at least you will have higher vitamin E.


Become an informed shopper!

Stealth Compost

Recently I’ve thought up this experiment that I think would be interesting.  If all of us were required to carry around all the trash we created throughout the day in trash bags, would we produce less garbage?  I think most people aren’t even aware of how much they throw away in a day.  Ever since leaving undergrad, I have been more conscious of the hideous volume of trash I create.  It was kind of hard to fathom actually; last year I was living alone and still taking out full trash bags to the dumpster way more often than I’d like to admit.

At the University of Pittsburgh, the options for recycling were quite limited as far as I could tell.  Sure, there was a nice bin on each floor of the engineering building with different slots for paper, plastic, and trash, but I will never forget the time I saw a janitor emptying all of the contents into the same dumpster.  Ugh.  I mostly gave up on bothering to recycle on campus after that.

Now, living in Ithaca, I can recycle my cardboard boxes, magazines, newspapers, glass, plastics...  Also, NY state has a great incentive for recycling.  When you buy beer bottles they actually charge you per bottle, but you can get the cash back when you take them to the grocery store to recycle.  People respond to incentives - that’s the Freaknomics authors’ catch phrase.

As Alex and I eat more and more fresh foods, the amount of waste we produce in the forms of vegetable peelings and egg shells has increased dramatically.  Every time I threw out vegetable scraps, I just kept thinking about them decaying in a landfill, probably taking 100 times longer than it would if I just buried it in a hole in the ground, especially if there were no access to air and moisture.  (Over-exaggeration? I think not! Wikipedia says it could be forever) My parents never composted, but I vaguely remember my grandparents collecting scraps for their compost, and so I at least knew the basics.  It seemed like the logical next step in my “Operation: Less Garbage” phase, but there was a problem: don’t you need a yard to keep the compost?  Thanks to the 7th Annual Compost Fair held by Cornell University Cooperative Extension, I now know that the answer to that is NO!  I wasn’t ready to handle the worm bin, common among the green city folk, but I learned about a beautiful thing called a Stealth Compost, which is possible to do in an apartment with a porch area (and some “access” to dried leaves, hay, branches, etc).

Basically, it’s a regular layered compost bin with a bunch of holes for aeration, set inside a larger bin lined with wet newspaper, saw dust, branches, etc, with the lid ajar.

Here is the smaller one with Swiss cheese holes, courtesy of Alex and his Awesome Wedding Registry Tools:

Here is how I prepped the bin with moist newspaper:

Here is the whole contraption:

 
I am very, very new to composting and am still learning.  Any tips would be greatly appreciated.  Most of what I know I found from some helpful websites (1, 2).  The basic idea for this type of composting is layering greens and browns and letting the microbes take care of the rest.  Greens are food scraps chopped up small (vegetable peelings, fruit cores, egg shells, coffee grounds, etc - NOT any meat scraps) and browns are the dry stuff (sawdust, moist newspaper strips, dried leaves, hay, etc).  You need to alternate layers, making sure that each brown layer completely covers the green layer, which will help control any smells.  I have also been reading about troubleshooting, where you can learn if it needs more moisture, thicker brown layers, etc.

I haven’t quite figured out what I do about not being able to sift or stir the compost as one normally would in a yard.  The neat handout I got at the fair didn’t indicate that it was necessary.  Perhaps it will just take longer for the microbes to do their magic?  Also, I haven’t quite figured out what to do with the finished product - right now we are planning to dump it in the woods.  If anyone knows someone in the area who wants some awesome, nutrient rich soil, let me know!  I cannot wait until I have a garden to use it myself.

Raw Milk from a Local Farm, Part II

The second step in our journey from pasteurized, homogenized skim milk to organic, raw milk from a local farm was the transition from generic brand whole milk found in the grocery store to unpasteurized raw milk.  Yes, this was quite a leap.  I was violently skeptical at first (ask Alex).  The thing is, people drank unpasteurized, non-homogenized milk for centuries, and so we wanted to dig deeper to find out when and why the switch happened.  The story I knew involved a clever Louis Pastuer who basically saved humanity by zapping out all the horrible crap present in milk that was making everyone sick.

From our research, we found there was more to the story.  It turns out, the war of 1812 blocked off America’s access to British whiskey, and so grain distilleries started popping up all over.  Cows were fed the slop grain leftover from fermentation, a struggle in itself since the cows didn’t want to eat it.  Combined with crowded, unsanitary conditions, the slop did not provide the proper nutrients for the cows to fight and prevent disease, which was inevitably spread to their milk (a,b).  “Swill milk,” as it was called, increased infant mortality and sickness from milk in general as it became common practice.  Cow owners found two separate solutions: pasteurize the milk, or feed the cows better food in more sanitary environments.  These two separate methods competed for years, until eventually pasteurization won out.  Another instance of treating the symptoms instead of solving the root of the problem... There are some great articles from The New York Times that show the back and forth banter between the two schools of thought (4,5,6).  I understand how, the way most cows are housed and fed today, that pasteurization is completely needed for your average jug of milk at Wegman's.  However, if cows are given the proper diet and kept in clean conditions, pasteurization to me seems completely unnecessary and may compromise many of the good qualities of milk, including probiotics, nutrients, etc.  This truly makes me wonder how healthy the grain-based diets milking cows are overwhelmingly fed across this nation… but more on that in a later post. 

Performing a literature search on the benefits of raw milk is extremely difficult.  As with many controversial and anti-mainstream research topics, I think the sorts of studies that want to show that raw milk is better than pasteurized milk are either not funded, or prevented from being published.  After all, the milk industry has a huge presence and probably a gigantic influence over this sort of thing.  I’m seeing more and more how many research groups and funding sources have a strict “agenda.”  From a logics standpoint, it’s quite easy for me to believe that raw milk is inherently healthier.  After all, that is what we raise our newborns on, although its source is human.  But, the data *are* out there.  Raw milk in history has been used as a medicine to treat a variety of disease (7).  For example, children fed raw milk showed increased resistance to tuberculosis and less tooth decay (8,9).  There is concern that raw milk may be a lovely incubator for bacteria to grow, but it appears both cow and human milk can inhibit the growth of certain bacteria, including B. diphtheria, B. coli, and streptococci.  But, when heated, as is done in pasteurization, the milk grew the bacteria like wildfire, as the pro-biotics were destroyed (10).  Pretty ironically, the "pro-biotic" yogurt you may buy has added back into it the same pro-biotics that are first zapped out out during pastuerization, although the additions are probably more homogeneous.  In terms of nutritional benefit, raw milk from grass-fed, outdoor cows yields higher calcium and vitamin A levels (8).  Pasteurized milk compared to raw milk had a 38% reduction in vitamin B complex and up to a 50% reduction in vitamin C (11, 12).  Heat disrupts the micelle systems present in the fatty parts of milk that house vitamins, enzymes, etc, making them extremely difficult to be absorbed.  Also, if you know something about protein structure (primary structure, secondary structure, etc), you will easily believe that heat denatures proteins in milk, screwing with their structure and therefore interfering with their function (13).  If you want to read websites that discuss in depth the nutritional benefits of raw milk in non-journal-article-technical form, try here, here, or here.

If you took a glance at the references, you will see most are very old, which is truly depressing.  In contrast, I am sure it’s simple to find recent articles addressing the health problems associated with consuming raw milk.  Here is one, for instance (14).  I do understand the value of pasteurizing milk from a treat-the-symptoms point of view.  If bacteria and viruses are found in milk, it’s easy and effective to zap it out.  However, I believe we are truly missing out on the amazing nutritional properties of milk by doing so.  And I agree, it would be very difficult to trust a label that claimed to have raw milk procured under sanitary conditions from healthy cows.  There is a delicate balance here.  Do we treat the symptoms by pasteurizing the milk, removing much of its nutrition, to mass produce a cheap, safe product?  Or, do we treat the disease, and start taking care of the facilities and animals to provide us a quality, nourishing product that may have a higher price tag?

References:

4) Brewery stock farms: too much like the swill milk dairies.  The New York Times. Oct 25, 1884.

5) Swill milk destroyed. The New York Times.  May 1, 1887.

6) Bad Milk.  The New York Times. April 30, 1874.

7) Crewe, J., 1929. Raw milk cures many diseases. Certified Milk Magazine, January:3-6.

8) Krauss, W. E., Erb, J.H. and Washburn, R. G., Studies on the nutritive value of milk II. "The effect of pasteurization on some of the nutritive properties of milk," Ohio Agricultural Experiment Station Bulletin 518, page 11, January, 1933.

9) The Lancet, page 1142, May 8, 1937

10) Dold, H., Wizaman, E., and Kleiner, C., Z. Hyt. Inf., "Antiseptic in milk," The Drug and Cosmetic Industry, 43,1:109, July, 1938.

11) Lewis, L.R., The relation of the vitamins to obstetrics, American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology, 29.5:759. May, 1935.

12) Jordan, E.O., A Textbook of General Bacteriology, Twelfth Edition, Revised, page 691, W. B. Saunders Co., 1938.

13) Shanahan C and Shanahan L.  Deep Nutrition: Why your genes need traditional food. Big Box Books, 2008.

14) Oliver SP, Boor KJ, Murphy SC, Murinda SE. Food safety hazards associated with consumption of raw milk. Foodborne Pathog Dis. 2009 Sep;6(7):793-806.