Blind Blake: Ragtime Guitar’s Foremost Fingerpicker

http://lala.com/z8rw

Ragtime Guitar’s Foremost Fingerpicker

Amazon Link

 

Clean Eating Magazine

Clean Eating Magazine

You may not be able to spa in Ojai, California, this winter, but take advantage of the next best thing with an exclusive recipe from the Oaks at Ojai health resort.

 

7 Days Without Plastic…

http://epicfu.com/7days/about the project

Our interview with Sustainable Dave made us start thinking about how much plastic we use and throw away each day. We wanted to know exactly how hard it would be to change our habits. So starting Thursday, August 14th, I’m attempting to go seven full days without using any new plastic at all.

I won’t try to avoid plastic I already have, I’ll just try to stop bringing in NEW plastic. When you think of all the plastic containers, wrappers, liners, cups, bags, etc. in our daily lives, it’ll be tough! It’s very probable that I’ll acquire some new plastic over seven days, so I will make sure to log and keep track of it all.

I’ll be posting daily behind-the-scenes videoblog updates on the EPIC FU blog to let you know how it’s going. But this page will be the place where all the blog posts, videos, photos, and updates will be kept to make it easier to track my progress.

If you want to join in on the project, that would be great too — there’s nothing better than a support team! Start getting mentally prepared and on August 14th start posting your videos, photos, and updates to MIX, your blog, or any place you can. Then send us links or tag it “7dayswithoutplastic” on Flickr or YouTube, so we can include it here and in the show. You don’t have to do it for seven days like me — post information or tips about anything you’re doing to help limit your use of plastic. Every little bit helps!

 

Building a Local Food Buying Club

Written by John Moody

2009-Mar-27

Real Food from Real Farms The time for locally oriented food distribution systems has never been better. With dramatically rising food costs threatening to break old inflation records, deadly tomatoes and other contaminant-ridden produce filling the shelves of conventional mega-stores, and inhumane animal practices resulting in pollution, disease and consumer danger all garnering more and more mainstream media attention, the average person is finally waking up to the reality of our impoverished, impersonal, imbecilic and unsustainable food system. More important, many are now searching for alternatives. Weston A. Price Foundation chapter leaders, members, supporters and friends, with their accurate knowledge regarding nutrition, farming and other issues, are in a perfect position to help build these alternatives in their communities. We just need to think about how. In the following few pages, we will offer a brief summary of how our local foods buying club started, has grown and changed, and how we handle finding members, farmers and companies to work with, how we manage distribution, share the workload, cover the expenses and structure the leadership. This article is by no means exhaustive, but we hope it will be instructive and encouraging as to what can happen when average individuals band together to bring about community change on many levels. Small Beginnings with a Large Animal Read More

 

How To Burn Stored Body Fat — A Ketosis Primer

How To Burn Stored Body Fat — A Ketosis Primer

So, how do you tell your body to start burning stored body fat?” my friend and fellow mother asked.
“Cut the carbs,” answered another mom. “I go into ketosis just about every afternoon.”

“Ketosis? Isn’t that bad for you?”

The short answer? No.

I talk to a lot of people who want to lose weight. They try all sorts of things — exercise, calorie restriction, you name it. Sometimes, they lose the weight. Inevitably, they gain it back. That’s because what they’re doing is going on a diet — a temporary fix at best. What they need is a lifestyle change, a perspective shift, a new paradigm. Of course, you all know the paradigm I espouse — a conversion to eating real, traditional foods.

Yet even a conversion to eating real food won’t necessarily help the pounds melt away. If you’re still eating 200 grams of carbohydrates a day — even if they’re “traditional” carbohydrates like sprouted or soaked grains, unrefined sweeteners, etc, you’re not going to lose weight without making some serious changes.

If your body is regularly storing body fat (you gain a little bit of weight each year), then something is wrong with how your body metabolizes food. Let me introduce you to a new concept: the body fat setpoint.

The body fat setpoint is the mass of body fat that your body attempts to defend against changes in either direction. It’s your body’s attempt to maintain homeostasis. This is why if you exercise more, you eat more. It’s also why if you restrict calories, your metabolism slows down to compensate.

Why should you care about the body fat setpoint? From Stephan at Whole Health Source:

We care because this has some very important implications for human obesity. With such a powerful system in place to keep body fat mass in a narrow range, a major departure from that range implies that the system isn’t functioning correctly. In other words, obesity has to result from a defect in the system that regulates body fat, because a properly functioning system would not have allowed that degree of fat gain in the first place.

So yes, we are gaining weight because we eat too many calories relative to energy expended. But why are we eating too many calories? Because the system that should be defending a low fat mass is now defending a high fat mass. Therefore, the solution is not simply to restrict calories, or burn more calories through exercise, but to try to “reset” the system that decides what fat mass to defend. Restricting calories isn’t necessarily a good solution because the body will attempt to defend its setpoint, whether high or low, by increasing hunger and decreasing its metabolic rate. That’s why low-calorie diets, and most diets in general, typically fail in the long term. It’s miserable to fight hunger every day.

So, how do you “reset” the system? How do you train your body to start burning stored body fat?

One word: ketosis.

Ketosis is the state that your body enters into when it starts converting stored fat into ketones to use as fuel for your cells. If you eat plenty of carbohydrates, you will never enter into ketosis. Instead, your body will simply use all that glucose as a fuel.

Is Ketosis Dangerous?

Ketosis has earned a bad name, though. For one thing, your body enters a ketogenic state when it starts starving itself. But if you’re eating plenty of calories and sticking to a nutrient-dense diet, you need not fear starvation. Ketogenesis doesn’t destroy muscle tissue, but is rather the process by which stored fat is turned into ketones — a perfectly usable energy source for every major body system. Others object to ketosis because it gets confused with ketoacidosis, a dangerous state in which the body not only becomes ketogenic, but also causes the blood to become too acidic. If you’re still getting your limited carbohydrates from vegetables and fruits, you need not fear ketoacidosis.

From Mark’s Daily Apple:

Finally, ketogenic diets, which are generally lumped together by critics, have gotten a lot of bad press. While experts have generally recognized their effectiveness for weight loss, very low carb diets that result in ketosis (like the Atkins) have been criticized on health grounds. The problem with these criticisms? They’re based on diets that allow for 20 grams or less of carbohydrates a day. While I believe we are not meant to run primarily on carbohydrate energy, I do believe we depend on the nutrients offered by low carb vegetables and even some low glycemic fruits. A diet of 20 carbohydrate grams simply can’t allow for the plentiful intake of nutrient-rich vegetables.

When your carb intake is low enough, say 50-80 grams a day, ketosis kicks in when it needs to. Over time, this process becomes efficient as the body “unfolds” in its genetic expression. Yet this carb intake is high enough that you can freely include copious amounts of nutrient- (including potassium) rich vegetables to offer the body sufficient nutrition, fiber, and alkalizing minerals.

In other words, when you cut your carbohydrate intake to 50-80 grams per day and still include plenty of vegetables and fruits in your diet, then your body can safely enter into ketosis when it needs to.

Once you’re at your desired weight and you don’t hope to lose anymore body fat, then sticking to anywhere between 100-150 grams of carbohydrates per day will help you maintain your new body fat setpoint.

The glory of thinking this way is that you absolutely never have to count calories! In fact, you probably don’t even have to count grams of carbohydrates. Just avoid grains, sugars, and sweet fruits. If you start craving those foods, eat more saturated fat from traditional sources like ghee, coconut oil, tallow, and lard. (I swear this works!) When you reach your desired weight, give yourself more grace to eat sweeter fruits and the occasional properly treated grain, tuber, or legume.

When you’re in your “maintenance” mode, what you’ll discover is that you’re eating a diet much more in line with traditional cultures around the world — a diet devoid of artificial and processed foods, a diet full of healthy fats from quality sources, a diet rich in fermented and living foods, a diet absent sugar, you get the picture. The exact quantities of meats, vegetables, and fats you eat can vary greatly depending on your cravings and preferences, but one thing will be sure: you won’t ever want to go back to how you ate before.

Liked what you read? You may find these other posts interesting:

Glycemic Index vs. Glycemic Load

Fat Is Where It’s At

Eat Fat to Lose Fat: A Real-Life Example

Good Fat, Bad Fat — A Video Tutorial

Health Benefits of Raw & Fermented Foods

 

22 Reasons Not To Go Vegetarian…

http://www.westonaprice.org/Twenty-Two-Reasons-Not-to-Go-Vegetarian.html

2. You’ll save your heart

“Cardiovascular disease is still the number one killer in the United States, and the standard American diet (SAD) that’s laden with saturated fat and cholesterol from meat and dairy is largely to blame. Plus, produce contains no saturated fat or cholesterol. Incidentally, cholesterol levels for vegetarians are 14 percent lower than meat eaters”

“Stacks of evidence” now exist to refute the notion that cholesterol levels and consumption of saturated fat have anything to do with heart disease, but this is a convenient theory for promoting vegetable oil consumption at the expense of animal fats. The International Atherosclerosis Project found that vegetarians had just as much atherosclerosis as meat eaters.¹² Vegetarians also have higher levels of homocysteine, a risk marker for heart disease.¹³

The standard American diet is not, unfortunately, “laden with saturated fat and cholesterol.” It is, however, laden with trans fats and refined vegetable oils, both derived from plants, and it is these processed fats and oils that are associated with the increase in heart disease, not saturated animal fats.

 

In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto

In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto (paperback)

Customer Review

This review is from: In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto (Hardcover)

What’s better for you — whole milk, 2% milk or skim?

Is a chicken labeled “free range” good enough to reassure you of its purity? How about “grass fed” beef?

What form of soy is best for you — soy milk or tofu?

About milk: I’ll bet most of you voted for reduced or non-fat. But if you’ll turn to page 153 of “In Defense of Food,” you’ll read that processors don’t make low-fat dairy products just by removing the fat. To restore the texture — to make the drink “milky” — they must add stuff, usually powdered milk. Did you know powdered milk contains oxidized cholesterol, said to be worse for your arteries than plain old cholesterol? And that removing the fat makes it harder for your body to absorb the fat-soluble vitamins that make milk a valuable food in the first place?

About chicken and beef: Readers of Pollan’s previous book, “The Omnivore’s Dilemma”, know that “free range” refers to the chicken’s access to grass, not whether it actually ventures out of its coop. And all cattle are “grass fed” until they get to the feedlot. The magic words for delightful beef are “grass finished” or “100% grass fed”.

And about soy…but I dare to hope I have your attention by now. And that you don’t want to be among the two-thirds of Americans who are overweight and the third of our citizens who are likely to develop type 2 diabetes before 2050. And maybe, while I have your eyes, you might be mightily agitated to learn that America spends $250 billion — that’s a quarter of the costs of the Iraq war — each year in diet-related health care costs. And that our health care professionals seem far more interested in building an industry to treat diet-related diseases than they do in preventing them. And that the punch line of this story is as sick as it is simple: preventing diet-related disease is easy.

In just 200 pages (and 22 pages of notes and sources), “In Defense of Food” gives you a guided tour of 20th century food science, a history of “nutritionism” in America and a snapshot of the marriage of government and the food industry. And then it steps up to the reason most readers will buy it — and if you care for your health and the health of your loved ones, this is a no-brainer one-click — and presents a commonsense shopping-and-eating guide.

If you are up on your Pollan and your Nina Planck and your Barbara Kingsolver, you know the major points of the “real food” movement. But if you’re new to this information or are disinclined to buy or read this book, let me lay Pollan’s argument out for you:

— High-fructose corn syrup is the devil’s brew. Do yourself a favor and remove it from your diet. (If you have kids, here’s a place to start: Heinz smartly offers an “organic” ketchup, made with sugar.)

— Avoid any food product that makes health claims — they mean it’s probably not really food.

— In a supermarket, don’t shop in the center aisles. Avoid anything that can’t rot, anything with an ingredient you can’t pronounce.

— “Don’t get your fuel from the same place your car does.”

— “You are what you eat eats too.” Most cows end their days on a diet of corn, unsold candy, their pulverized brothers and sisters — yeah, you read that right — and a pharmacy’s worth of antibiotics. And they bestow that to you. Consider that the next time there’s a sale on sirloin.

— “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.” By which Pollan means: Eat natural food, the kind your grandmother served (and not because she was so wise, but because the food industry had not yet learned that the big money was in processing, not harvesting). Use meat sparingly. Eat your greens, the leafier and more varied the better.

In short: Kiss the Western diet as we know it goodbye. Look to the cultures where people eat well and live long. Ignore the faddists and experts. Trust your gut. Literally.

In all this, Pollan insists that you have to save yourself. And he makes a good case why. Our government, he says, is so overwhelmed by the lobbying and marketing power of our processed food industry that the American diet is now 50% sugar in one form or another — calories that provide “virtually nothing but energy.” Our representatives are almost uniformly terrified to take on the food industry. And as for the medical profession, the key moment, Pollan writes, is when “doctors kick the fast-food franchises out of the hospital” — don’t hold your breath.

“You want to live, follow me.” I loved it when Schwarzenegger said that in “Terminator.” It matters much more when, in so many words, Michael Pollan delivers that same message in “In Defense of Food.”

 

Lowering Blood Sugar Naturally

As a Diabetic myself this video has helped me realize there are natural ways to help keep Diabetes under control…

 

Preserving Food with Fermentation

Thanks to my facebook friend Tim Hamilton for the link to this site http://www.foodrenegade.com/the-basics/fermented-raw/

Tim, this is such an amazingly data rich site. It’s native living at its best. Fermentation of food is something to try to add more valuable nutrition back into our eating habits. I’m 57 so I caught the tale end of home cooked meals as Great Grandma Irene and Grandma Hazel used to spend their days cooking breakfast, then preparing lunch and finally Dinner.

It took all day of preparation and clean up as every food and every dish was prepared from scotch by hand. No mixes, no dish washers, and no processed store bought except for the store bought natural ingredient which we then prepared at home.

If meat was bought at the store, the store butcher was part of your life as he was selling your family food needed to keep the family strong and healthy so local grocery stores had followers not just customers but regulars. Switching grocery stores was a heavy decision back then, unlike today where we shop different groceries for their special sale items.

Sorry to start on about the old days…

Anyway, here part of the data from Tim’s website link:
Every culture has a long tradition of fermented and raw foods — foods that provide for healthy intestinal flora and decrease the load on your pancreas and liver.

Sadly, because of today’s industrial food model, these traditional foods have morphed into something unrecognizable. Corned beef is no longer raw and preserved with salt and spices. Cheese is made from devitalized pasteurized milk. Bread makers rarely use real fermented sourdough starters in their so-called sourdough loafs. And homemakers hardly ever soak their freshly ground whole wheat flour overnight in buttermilk to create the light and fluffy pancakes and biscuits we love to love.

The modern equivalents of age-old fermented foods are nutritionally empty when compared to their historical counterparts.
Take grains, for example. Did you know that traditional societies either soaked, sprouted, or fermented their grains prior to consuming them? While the reasons our ancestors practiced this level of grain preparation are debatable, we do know that sprouting, fermenting, and soaking grains can increase vitamin and mineral content availability by 300-500%
.
That’s quite the nutritional kick!

Books on subject:

Wild Fermentation: The Flavor, Nutrition, and Craft of Live-Culture Foods http://bit.ly/1BhkoX

==========–===============–==========

Amazon.com: Nourishing Traditions: The Cookbook that Challenges Politically Correct Nutrition and the Diet Dictocrats (9780967089737): Sally Fallon: Books http://bit.ly/4jfqs4

 

Kunstfest – Traditional German Festival honoring the founding fathers of New Harmony with music, food, arts & crafts and family fun. Come enjoy New Harmony’s annual celebration of German Heritage with hand made arts & crafts, live musi…c and food. Located throughout the town of New Harmony, ride a horse drawn wagon through New Harmony’s historic streets. Enjoy live music and you enjoy traditional German food and desserts. If you have never experienced Kunstfest, you will want to make sure this year you do.

Photos of Kunstfest in New Harmony Indiana. I’m also going back to take more photos and perhaps video of the events.

My public photo album HERE