Wizard Recipes

The soy controversy is alive and well in the West nowadays. The debate revolves around the phytoestrogens in soybeans.

When you eat a normal amount of these foods, it should have no affect on your health.

Soy has come under heat about their phytoestrogens since 2006, when an American Heart Association review of a 10-year study found that soy protein may not reduce post-menopause hot flashes, may not be good for the heart, and may not prevent breast cancer, uteran cancer, or prostate cancer.

It is interesting to note that soy foods and beans don’t have the highest levels of phytoestrogens. In fact, the order goes like this… nuts and oil seeds, soy products, cereals and breads, legumes, meat products, and processed foods (from highest to lowest).

Basically, the soy controversy comes down to a general lack of solid data on the risks of soybeans. Some say that it is not good for the body, and others say that the data cannot be substantiated with solid evidence.

Also, many of the studies are using extremely high dosages in their treatments and are using concentrated phytoestrogens that are taken from soybeans. The studies are not done with actual soybeans, where the concentration is much lower.

Concentrated amounts of virtually any substance are likely to be bad for your health.

Estrogen is no different.

Again, to go back to the study down in 2006 by the American Heart Association, soy supplements and pills are not good for you. We know this about supplements already.

You cannot expect to extract all the good stuff from real food, eat that, and still be healthy.

You must instead eat the good stuff to be healthy.

So, the soy controversy lives on.

What would happen if we begin to consider food is less a thing and more a relationship? In nature, things have always been like this: eating meant in fact interacting whit species in the systems that we call food chains or tropic networks, which include everything up to the soils. Species co-evolved with the other species that eat them and very often, among them develops a relationship of interdependence: I’ll feed you, if you spread my genes.

Following an evolutionary process of mutual adaptation, the apple or the pumpkin turns into a nutritious and delicious food product for certain animals. Over time and through processes of trial and failure, the plant becomes tastier (and often more visible) to answer the needs and desires of the animal, and so that the animal can develop various digestive tools (eg, enzymes) needed to exploit the plant as good as possible.

Thus, at first, the cow milk was not a nutritious product for people: in fact, it even harms them that until the people who lived around cows developed in adulthood the ability to digest milk. The gene responsible for producing lactase, the enzyme that make the digestion of milk possible, was disabled by humans shortly after medical ablation, but now five thousand years, people have suffered from a mutation where the gene which remains active throughout life, the mutation that quickly spread through a population of pastors in north-central Europe. Why? Because people which suffered this mutation have access to a new extreme nutritious food source and therefore they could multiply more easily than those who had not undergone the mutation that we are talking about. This adaptation was good for those who consume milk but also for cows that have multiplied and expanded their habitat (and have improved their health status) all because of this new symbiotic relationships.

Among other things, health status is determined by the type of relationships within a food chain extreme varied relation in the human case which is an omnivorous. So, when a link from the food chain health is affected, this can be passed on to all other living creatures that make up that food chain. If the soil is sick or suffering from certain deficiencies so will be the gras growing on it and the cows grazing grass and the people who drink their milk. This is what Weston Price and Sir Howard was thinking when they were trying to establish a connection between these apparent distant spheres: soil and human health. We can not separate our own health from the entire health chain.

Price didn’t found a singular ideal food, but met diverse population whose regime was based on fish and seafood, dairy, meat or fruit, vegetables and grains. The Masaya population from Africa consumed almost no plant, feeding meat, blood and milk. Sailors of the Hebrides did not consume milk at all; their diet was mostly based on fish, seafood and oat from which they were preparing porridge and cakes. Eskimos with whom he talked ate raw fish, hunted animals fish eggs, fat and rarely ate green plants. Along the Nile, near Ethiopia, Price met the healthiest population, according to their assessment: the tribes who ate milk, meat and blood from animals that were raised on pastures and animals from the Nile.

Price found out that the groups that were eating flesh from wild animals were generally healthier than populations of farmers who were eating mainly cereals and other plants, the farmer populations, caries and teeth problems were more frequent (but compared to us this problems remained rare). Price noted that many of the encountered populations, consumed especially animal organs which were rich in fat soluble vitamins, minerals and “active X”, a term made up by him and probably designating vitamin K2.

Price also found out that almost all studied populations valued fish and seafood, that have been eaten even by highlander groups which were crossing the mountain for long distances to obtain them, buying from the tribes on the coast, dried fish eggs and other foods. But the common denominator of a sound health, as he was saying, is a food based on fresh foods of animal origin and plants grown in soils that are rich in nutrients.

Price examined with very much attention the relationship between the quality of the foods with an animal origin and the nourishment of these animals. Comparing the vitamin content of butter come from cows that were eating fresh grass, with the butter prepared from milk of animals fed with forage, Price found out that, besides the fact that the levels of vitamins A and D were significantly higher in the butter that was yellow from the animals which were grazing pastures, the people who ate the animals were much healthier. He was convinced that the key for health was the soil quality. In 1932 Price published a book entitled New Light on Some Relationships between Soil Mineral Deficiencies, Low Vitamin food, and some degenerative Diseases.

By establishing these relationships between the quality of soil and the  of people which are on top of the food chain, Price promotes a critic against the industrialized agriculture that was just at the beginning in 1930. And was not alone: in the same period, Sir Albert Howard, an English agronomist, philosophical father of organic agriculture movement, he also claimed that the industrialization of the agriculture-especially the introduction of nitrogen synthetics as a fertilizer, which simplify the soil chemistry- will affect us eventually our health. Howard insists that “the health problems of soil, plants, animals and human must be treated together, being one and the same complex subject”. By the time as Howard’s note the above observations, they were merely a working assumption, Weston Price offered an empirical basis.

Eventually, even the largest, most ambitious and most cited study on nutrition and health like Nurses’ Health Study, Women’s Health Initiative and almost all the other, leave the main features of Western food unaffected: many food products and processed meats, many added sugars and fats, except fruit, vegetables and whole grains. According to the nutritionist paradigm and the limits of reductionist science, most researchers are playing with various nutrients individually analyzed, but the subjects with whom they are working are ordinary Americans which are behaving like any ordinary American:          tries to eat smaller amounts of X nutrient and greater quantities of the Y nutrient according to the latest points of view from the nutrition field. But the global nourishment pattern is regarded as a “but” more or less invariable. Therefore probably it should not surprise us the fact that the results of these researches are so modest, equivocal and confuse.

But what about the obvious truth which nobody wants to talk about and what is the food model called Western diet? In the middle of all the nutritional confusion which is getting bigger and bigger, maybe it would be useful to take one step back and fix our eyes on this model, to review all that we know about the Western nutrition and its effects on health. We know that populations that eat like us, Westerners, register much higher rates of cancer, cardiovascular disease, diabetes and obesity than those whit a traditionally diet. We also know that those who come to the Occident and behave and adopt our behavior food are quickly affected by these diseases and very often these diseases occur in an extremely virulent form, as happens in case of aboriginal and other indigenous peoples.

The story so-called Western diseases and their links with Western diet starts in the first decades of the twentieth century. At that time, some brave doctors, Europeans and Americans, working with various indigenous populations around the world have started to notice the virtual absence of chronic disease among these individuals, diseases that in fact had become current in the West. Albert Schweitzer in Africa and Denis P. Burkitt, Robert McCarrison in India, Samuel Hutton among Eskimos of Labrador, anthropologist Ales Hrdlicka among Native Americans and dentist Weston A Price in the middle of 12 different groups from all around the world (among the Peruvian Indians, aborigines from Australia and highlander from Switzerland) are drawn, all similar reports.

Researchers have developed lists, most published in medical journals, whit diseases which haven’t  been discovered on  indigenous populations that have been treated or studied: very few cases or no cases of heart disease, diabetes, cancer, obesity, hypertension or heart attack: no case of appendicitis , diverticulitis, deformed dental arches or tooth decay, no case of varicose veins, ulcers or hemorrhoids.

Suddenly, the researchers began to look all these conditions in a new light, just as it is shown by the name of “Western diseases” proposed for the affections by the British doctor Denis Burkitt, who worked in Africa during the Second World War. The formula suggested that these different diseases were somehow related and that probably had a common cause.

If you have enough space, buy a freezer.

If you find a good supplier of meat, produced in a traditional way, on a pasture, buy a big amount of meat- a quarter of veal, or a whole pig. This is a great method to eat healthy without spending a lot of money. Freezers are a much cheaper than you expect because of the fact that you don’t open them as often as refrigerators. Besides, if you have a freezer you will buy larger quantities of season goods, then they are plenty and therefore cheaper. And (unlike conservation) freezing doesn’t significantly diminish the nutritional value of fresh products.

Nourish yourself like an omnivorous

No matter if you eat or not animal products, try to enrich your nourishment with some new food species, not just with new products. The confusing diversity of foods in supermarkets is misleading because many products are made of the same plants- especially from seeds- like soybean or grain. The higher your diet is more varied in terms of consumed products species, the more you will answer several nutritional needs.

This is an argument assumed from nutritionists, but there is a better one which involves a larger vision on health.

The biodiversity of food means greater biodiversity of cultivated lands. If we don’t reduce the mono-crops that are nourishing us in the present, farmers no longer would have to spread so many chemical fertilizers, and soils, plants animals and hence the people would be much healthier. Health is not restricted only to your own body and probably what is good for the soil is good for you as well. This brings us to the following rule: Eat products grown and cultivated on healthy soils

Meat illustrates the idea that the health of food product can not be separated from the health of the food chain. This means that the health of the soil, of the plants, of the animals and of the consumers depend on each other.

This leads us to a special rule for those who consume products of an animal origin: You are not only what you eat, you are also the consumed food of the animal that you eat.

This means that the animal nutrition whereby we eat is influencing the nutrition quality and the consequences that food has over our health, no matter if it is meat, milk or eggs.

This is supposed to be evidence, but unfortunately it is a systematic ignored truth of the industrial food chain, in his endeavor to produce huge quantities of cheap animal proteins. This effort changed the nourishment of the majority animals bred for consumption; they went from green plants to seeds and cereals over, because of the fact that animals grow faster and produce more milk and eggs if they are fed grains rich in calories. Some of these animals are ruminants which are evolved to feed on grass; if they eat too many seeds they get sick, therefore grain fed cattle should receive antibiotics.

Even those animals that tolerate cereals, like chickens or pigs, are much healthier if fed with fresh green plants, therefore their meat and eggs are healthier. Generally if the animals raised for consumption are fed with grass, their meat, milk and eggs contain much healthier natural fats (more fat acids omega 3 and conjugated linoleic acid or ALC, less fat acids omega 6 and less saturated fat) and higher amounts of vitamins and antioxidants.

Sometimes is the difference visible, for example the yellow butter or the orange yolk is because of the beta-carotene content in fresh grass. So it is worth spending more money looking for products from animals raised in a traditional way on pasture. And even if, seen from the outside, an industrial egg looks exactly like the one coming from hens fed on grass; the industrial egg is several times more expensive than the first one and the two are completely different. So the rule to eat more leaves and less seeds are applied not only for humans but also for animals that are part of our tropic chain

But what about the meat? Unlike plants that we can not take out from our nourishment, we are not allowed to eat meat- with the exception of the vitamin B 12- all the meat nourishes can be achieved from other sources. (The little amount of B 12 that is necessary for our body is not hard to achieve, it is in all the products of animal origin and it’s produced by bacteria. Therefore you can get the B 12 vitamin consuming dirty food, altered or fermented products).

But meat, whose procurement people have made enormous efforts and from which people feed many years, is a nutritious nourishment which contains all the essential amino acids and many vitamins and minerals, and I haven’t found any convincing reason to exclude it from my nutrition. (I do not mean by this that we don’t have good ethical or ecological reasons)

Probably it is not such a good idea to eat large amounts of meat, as we do it now (each American consumes an average of 90 kg of meat per year) especially if that meat comes from an extreme industrialized food chain. According to studies, the more consumed meat- especially red meat- the bigger is the risk of heart disease or cancer. But studies on “flexitarieni” show that, in small quantities- less then a portion per day- meat increases the risk of illness. Probably Thomas Jefferson was right when he recommended meat only for flavor like a” spice for vegetables” than as a main meal. I didn’t know which of the component elements of the meat are supposed to concern us (saturated fat? The type of iron? Carcinogenic substances produced by cooking and conserving?)

It is possible that the problem consist in the fact that by eating a big amount of meat, we cut out the vegetables from our plate.

But excessive consumption of industrial meat exposes us to bigger quantities of saturated fat, fat acids omega-6, human growth hormones and carcinogenic substances than recommended.

Meat illustrates the idea that the health of food product can not be separated from the health of the food chain. This means that the health of the soil, of the plants, of the animals and of the consumers depend on each other.