I wanted to share with you a little field trip Ellen and I took recently to Soil Born Farms down in Rancho Cordova. This was a "get acquainted" tour for local health providers set up by Soil Born to let us know about their program and resources. Soil Born is an organic urban agriculture project that is trying to bring our food supply back to us as a personal and local level of experience. They have a variety of community outreach and education programs, which includes bringing kids who have never had a clue about where their food actually comes from and letting them plant, grow, and harvest food themselves. They have set up fruit and vegetable stands at head start centers in many low-income areas of town to bring affordable fresh organic food to families that otherwise would have no access to such good quality produce.
I was encouraged to see a number of medical doctors and nurse practitioners there to check out the farm. We watched a short video presentation in the packing shed surrounded by freshly harvested garlic. After this we all trekked out into the fields for some dirt time checking out all the different vegetables growing and the chickens and sheep contained in the fallow fields. One obvious difference with organic gardening is that the vegetables get to live in harmony with the weeds. Volunteers were working in the fields under the guidance of the Soil Born staff. If you are feeling an inner drive to get back to the earth, they have a volunteer program that will allow you to get your hands into the dirt and working with real plants.
After our intimate participation with the growing fields we wandered over to the fruit and vegetable stand to load up on some of the morning's harvest. They have an amazing variety of fruits and vegetables for a farm that is only growing on 6 acres at a time. They keep three quarters of the fields fallow to allow crop rotation and rebuilding of the soil nutrients (the chickens and sheep help with that). I was quite impressed with both their growing techniques and their community outreach. If you would like to visit Soil Born yourself to check it out and get some truly fresh vegetables, they are right next to Hagen Park in Rancho Cordova. Here is a link to their website
It has been a busy summer for me this year. Last month was the graduation of my younger son Mason from Temple University Tokyo, and this last weekend was the marriage of my older son Devon to his long time girlfriend Halbe. Although they have been living in Los Angeles for some time now, they decided to return to Seattle where they met to tie the knot. Halbe's folks live on Vashon Island south of Seattle, and the two of them met while Devon was a student at University of Washington. Halbe's family has showbiz roots which matches my son's career goals of becoming a Hollywood writer/producer. Halbe's father was a television writer specializing in made-for-television movies and her mother was an actress. Naturally this Hollywood attention to detail and production played out prominently in this wedding production. Devon's design degree showed up immediately in their amazing and unique wedding invitation which open up to form a map of the building of their relationship in the first weeks with locations and experiences. This theme was followed out at the wedding reception with each table named for one of the locations and each guest place card having a unique quote or description of related to the table they were to sit at.
The weekend began for us with their rehearsal dinner, which took place outside at a lavender farm on Vashon Island. Since almost everyone was from out of town, the rehearsal dinner involved quite a number of people. We spent the night at an absolutely fabulous B&B. It was gorgeous. The owner built it himself and furnished it with tapestries, art, and curios from Spain and Italy. The craftsmanship was amazing, and the gardens around it also wonderful.
Sunday we checked into an old classic hotel in the center of Seattle and prepared for the wedding itself. The wedding site was an old art deco style restaurant converted to use for such things as weddings called the Lake Union Café. We were set up on the dance floor with overflow guests filling up the tables and booths around the dance floor. The wedding was lovely followed immediately by dinner and dancing. Just for fun they omitted the traditional wedding cake because my son likes pies better. So come time for the cake cutting they instead cut up cheesecake and apple pie. Ellen and I finally took off around 10 pm, but my son told me the next morning that he didn't get in till 4 am.
Ellen and I got a little sightseeing in Monday morning at the famous Pike's Place Public Market and even stopped in at the original Starbucks. The newly wedded couple had to contend with 8 leftover pies and a couple other family/friend get togethers before the headed off to Costa Rica for their honeymoon. All in all a very well done wedding.
Wedding Pictures
Good Journey,
David
Health Challenge #13
Use healthy cooking methods
Many of the cooking methods we use create toxic byproducts in the food we eat. We might be buying the best locally grown food available, but if we cook it wrong we lose its value. What are the healthiest cooking methods? Steaming, stewing, low temperature crock pot cooking, and lightly stir-frying are the best methods for cooking foods. The idea is to cook the food just enough to achieve the desired effect without destroying vital nutrients. With certain precautions baking and broiling are also good methods for cooking certain foods as long as you don't cook the food until it browns. If the browning process is at too high a temperature, it creates toxic chemicals (heterocyclic amines) that mess with your brain functioning. Deep fat frying is probably the worst thing you can do to food. The hot oil chemically binds with carbohydrates, proteins, and sugars to form toxic cancer causing compounds like acrylamide and heterocyclic amines. These compounds are also formed in meats that are barbequed, fried, or if any other high temperature cooking method is used.
Many times patients ask me if they should eat just raw foods. There are many health benefits for some people in eating only raw foods, but not most people. There is so much health misinformation floating around because everyone wants to reduce life down to one simple answer. Well you can't - life is very complex. The answer for one person can kill the next person. We need answers to know what to do, but human answers are individual. Many people can not digest raw foods. You need healthy enzyme levels to digest many raw foods and a really good set of teeth. The natural enzymes present in raw foods are much too slow acting to help much with human digestion - they are for the slow process of ripening and rotting foods. Yes I know all about the miracle of enzymes in food - it sells a lot of books, but it doesn't create digestion.
On the other hand over-cooking our foods also makes them indigestable. Once a food is heated beyond a certain fairly low point it chemically alters into a form that we just don't have the enzymes or ability to break that new "food" down into usable parts. Plus, many of the parts that were usable get changed into things that are toxic and unusable. My preferred method for cooking meats is in a crock pot set on warm. This heats the meat to only 130 degrees which keeps it fully digestable and usable. Someone out there is probably saying "but I thought you had to heat meats to 165 degrees to kill bacteria!" Not true. If you are only heating meat to a given temperature for a couple minutes then 165 is a safe temperature... but you can achieve the same level of safety at 130 degrees if you keep the meat at that internal temperature for an hour or more. Low temperature for a longer time gives you the same result. I will low temperature cook a meat roast for 8 hours in the crock pot. It is our hurry up lifestyle that is killing us. In order to do things fast we end up making them toxic. Slow down and live a little.
If you missed any of the previous health challenges -
