Nutrition and Autoimmunity: The Diet Connection

December 3, 2014

Have you or someone you know been diagnosed with an autoimmune disease?

Have you been told that no one knows why people develop autoimmune issues and that the only treatments are with heavy-duty toxic drugs or, as with Crohn’s Disease, extractive surgeries to remove the offending body parts?

Have you been following your doctor’s orders yet still feeling worse and worse?

wapf-redglobe — The Weston A. Price Foundation for Wise Traditions in Food, Farming and the Healing Arts.

Then this new approach to dealing with autoimmunity is something you need to hear.

I will be giving a talk about Nutrition and Autoimmunity this Saturday for the Weston A. Price Foundation, Boulder chapter. New research is showing how simple dietary changes can reduce the rogue T-cell activity that leads to autoimmune disorders. Multiple Sclerosis, Rheumatoid Arthritis, Lupus, and other inflammatory conditions can improve from eating the right foods and avoiding the wrong ones.

If you want to take back control over your health, you should plan to attend this transformative talk.

Of course, all are always welcome to contact me directly for a free phone consultation to learn all I know about how to manage autoimmune diseases through dietary changes.

Here is the information for the event on Saturday: Hope to see you there!

Nutrition and Autoimmunity: The Diet Connection

Weston A. Price Foundation: Boulder Chapter Meeting

Saturday, December 6 10am – 1pm
St. Ambrose Episcopal Church
7520 S. Boulder Rd, Boulder, CO 80303
Entrance on Barcelona Drive

SCHEDULE:

9:45am Volunteers needed to set up
10-10:45am WAPF friendly vendors
10:45am Announcements, Green Pasture product raffle, and giveaways! Must be present to win.
Potluck & social time to follow.
11:45am-1:00pm Elizabeth Yarnell’s Presentation
1:00pm Please stay to help clean up if you can!

Potluck info:

Please bring a dish to share with everyone made from whole, natural foods. This is a great place to showcase your favorite organ meat dish, fermented veggies/beverages, and soaked grain dishes. Please, no unfermented soy (when in doubt, leave it out), and no artificial flavorings, colorings, or preservatives. Avoid modern oils. Traditional oils including animal fats, butter/ghee, extra virgin olive oil, expeller expressed sesame and flax oil, and coconut and palm oil are all ok. See Nourishing Traditions by Sally Fallon for recipe ideas. If you are new, bring a salad of organic fruits or veggies (with olive oil as a dressing). Please label your dish to indicate ingredients, allergens, grains, dairy, organic, etc.

Vendors:

High Altitude Organics – organic pork, chicken, turkey, goat, lamb – please visit the web site for product list. Pre-orders with Pat are preferred.

Children are welcome! There is a playground just outside our meeting for them.

Please forward this information to anyone you know who might be interested!

Wheat-free Swedish Pancakes

November 21, 2014May 13, 2026

My son went to a friend’s slumber party and came home raving about the Swedish Pancakes his friend’s mom made for breakfast the morning after. He begged me to make them when it came time to host his own slumber party, and my friend and author of a really fun new book series about a fiesty eleven-year old girl who gets into roller derby, Meghan Doherty graciously obliged with her grandmother’s recipe for this family favorite.

Swedish Pancakes -- Wheat-free, Dairy-free — Swedish Pancakes — Wheat-free, Dairy-free These are prefect circles because I cooked them in an itty bitty cast iron Le Creuset skillet. The ones cooked on my larger griddle were amorphous but every bit as tasty.

Swedish Pancakes, I learned, are kind of like crepes, but perhaps a little more eggy. The version I made were thin and spongey, slightly reminiscent of the Ethiopian crepe-like flatbread called injera in texture though not in flavor. The flavor was tantalizingly of butter.

A light texture with the taste of butter. Like a croissant tastes like butter. Decadent and delicious and addictive.

I altered the recipe a little to make my version of the pancakes wheat-free and dairy free. I also tripled the recipe to make enough for the eleven pre-teen boys and myself and my husband. I cooked them on my cast iron pizza pan and in my itty-bitty one-egg cast iron skillet, and I was at the stove for well over an hour flipping pancakes.

I love substituting spelt flour for wheat flour in recipes. Spelt is an ancient cousin of wheat but has not been as adulterated as our wheat has been. Although spelt is a gluten grain, the gluten protein is different from that of wheat. Many people who cannot tolerate the wheat in our country without uncomfortable symptoms can handle spelt just fine. If you try spelt flour you’ll find love it for its reliability in recipes that call for wheat. I use a one-to-one ratio of spelt flour to wheat flour.

My reward was hearing Meghan’s son declare that my Swedish Pancakes were as good as his mom’s were. While I don’t know about that, I will say that it made for a fun morning.

Good thing that the evils of butter have been debunked and we can recognize that real butter can be a part of a nourishing whole foods diet. I always choose organic butter that is rGbh-free and made with milk from cows that were fed a non-GMO diet.

Here, in Meghan’s own words (with my alterations in parentheses) is the easy recipe for these breakfast treats. Thanks, Meghan!

Swedish Pancakes

Makes enough for 4-5 people.

1 ½ cups flour (spelt flour)

1 tsp salt (sea salt)

2 tsp sugar (organic cane sugar, maple sugar, coconut sugar, maple syrup, or honey)

3 well beaten eggs (organic)

3 cups milk (organic milk substitute of choice: soy, almond, coconut, etc.)

3 tbs butter (organic butter or coconut oil)

Fry at 380 degrees, super hot (medium-high on a gas stovetop). I use pam on the griddle before I pour batter (I used butter to grease the griddle). I usually combine the flour, salt, sugar, and then I melt the butter in the microwave before mixing it into the rest or it gets too lumpy. Wisk or use the hand blender to get smooth batter and all the lumps out or they don’t taste quite right. I do these on the griddle. Just know that they are super runny and will never be round, but firm up in a few seconds. Just cook them a couple minutes or so on each side, or until light brown flecks show up. Super crepe like consistency.

Glorious One-Pot Meals and Cooking Tender Meat

November 11, 2014November 11, 2014

Reader message: At an event you came to in Boulder I bought your book. Sometimes when I use this method (esp. with pork or beef) the meat is tough. Like it is either cooked too long or then not long enough. One recipe the Adobo Pork, for example. So I just added extra broth and then put in oven at 325 for another hour or so to see if it gets tender. What do you suggest to fix this? ~Annie W., Boulder, CO

Honey and Spice Pork recipe — Honey and Spice Pork Glorious One-Pot Meal

Hi Annie, Thanks for writing!

From the sound of it, you could be having one of two issues:

1) You could be using too large of a piece of meat.

Try making the recipe with thawed meat cut into cubes or chunks instead of one large piece. You might find that you prefer a saucier recipe for these meats, like the Honey and Spice Pork, or you could make any recipe a little saucier by adding 1/4 cup of water or broth to the original recipe;

or 2) Your oven temperature is off.

If your oven temperature is off by even a little bit, or your oven is not fully pre-heated to 450 F before you put the full pot inside, the method will not work perfectly. There’s more about oven temp and Glorious One-Pot Meals here.

Thanks for writing and Happy cooking!

Get all your Glorious One-Pot Meal questions answered and more at a Glorious One-Pot Meals cooking class! I don’t teach as frequently as I once did, but the next class will be at Compleat Lifestyles in Centennial, Colorado, on November 13, 2014. Contact them directly for information and to register.

Trans-Fats in Our Favorite Candy Bars

October 30, 2014

Halloween is tomorrow and before we all binge on commercial candies, we should have some idea what we’re eating.

Here’s an ingredient list from a popular candy. Can you identify the brand?

High fructose corn syrup (GMO)
Artificial color (petroleum-based)
Artificial flavor (a compendium of chemicals)

If you guessed Jolly Ranchers, you’d be right on.

Trans-Fats in Candy Bars

Many of our familiar candy bars contain trans-fats. Check out this quick video to see exactly which ones use this unhealthy ingredient.

Are There Safety Risks to MRIs?

October 29, 2014October 29, 2014

I recently received a question asking about the risks of getting an MRI scan. In my opinion, while an MRI scan seems safer than medical scans that use radiation, but there may still be some risks associated.

An MRI, or Magnetic Resonance Imaging scan, is done by creating a strong, oscillating magnetic field around the body. This excites hydrogen atoms (present in water in the body) which emit radio waves at a frequency that can be measured.

The most obvious risk from an MRI comes if you have a piece of metal implanted in your body that could become magnetized and try to leave your body during the magnetic scan. The MRI technician will ask about this before putting you inside the machine.

Sometimes, gadolinium is injected into the patient to increase the contrast of the images. Gadolinium is a rare metal with paramagnetic properties, which means that it is susceptible to externally applied magnetic fields but don’t retain magnetic properties. While generally well-tolerated, it has been linked to rare renal issues. If you are injected with gladolinium, consider doing some actions afterward to help your body get rid of the metal such as an ionic foot bath or an infrared sauna.

Generally, an MRI scan is thought to be safer than a CT scan or even a regular x-ray because it does not expose the body to radiation. Radiation exposure has been linked to cancer, as is well known (rest in peace, Madam Curie), and MRIs use magnets rather than radiation to scan the body.

Magnets and the Human Body

Learn more about the effects of electro magnetic fields in Elizabeth Plourde's book, EMF Freedom. — Learn more about the effects of electro magnetic fields in Elizabeth Plourde’s book, EMF Freedom.

The human body is an electrical system and our cells have electrical charges, that is, they have positive or negative charges, and the atomic bonds inside our cells vibrate at a frequency. Natural therapies such as homeopathy, acupuncture, and Reiki recognize that health is dictated by this vibrational energy in our bodies. Magnets can affect our health in many ways by affecting both the polarity and frequency of our cells.

Magnets can be used to heal or manage skeletal conditions such as posture or back pain.

Some people are very susceptible to the plethora of electromagnetic fields that perforate our daily lives from the wi-fi in our houses, cellular networks permeating the air waves, cordless phones, and even the remote control for our televisions. These people may be unexplainably debilitated until they find ways to minimize their exposure to EMFs, and there are products that can help accomplish this.

Some studies have found genotoxic effects from magnetic fields, which means that they may disrupt the genetic information in a cell in susceptible people, but the risk of this from the EMFs all around us every day is likely greater than the risk from the rare occasions of getting an MRI scan.

Most people walk around every day not noticing all of the electromagnetic waves surrounding them in our modern urban world. And most people would not have any negative effects from an MRI. But those who are sensitive to electromagnetic waves might also want to avoid MRIs when possible.

There are ways to re-align the polarity and frequency of your cells following an MRI scan or even at anytime when you might want to experience a sense of peace and well-being. Sound healing is one of the most enjoyable and imparts an overall sense of wellbeing. Look for opportunities to experience a Richard Rudis’ Gong Baths, a Tibetan crystal bowl concert, or a local ohm circle.

Please leave a comment below if you have any information to add!