In the city. The inner city. The ghetto. Prostitutes. Pimps. Drug dealers. Pot growers. Mostly liquor stores. But she found a way. Own garden. Own food. Raised animals for food. In touch with her food supply. Inspiring. Amazing story. In the middle of the 'hood.
Enjoy!
A reader writes in response to my comment about following the Kitavan diet for 40 days:
Hi,
I've recently become more inclined to think that good quality tobacco, minus all the disgusting chemicals put in it by the tobacco companies may actually be very healthy. Google the health benefits of tobacco to see what I mean. If I am correct, then this would be one other thing that the Kitava have going for them as a health benefit.
Have you any idea of the type and quality of tobacco the Kitava smoke? That is, is it harvested by them, for example, with no chemical additives etc?
Thanks.
Regards,
Eric
______
Eric,
Thanks for writing.
If you haven't read my posts dealing with soil fertility and food quality, you should check them out now (otherwise you won't understand some of what is written below) and then come back and read this post.
Okay. All done? Good. 
Below is a little ditty I plucked awhile ago from one of the yahoo groups of which I am a member. In many ways organic is seen today as the holy grail of nutrition, but in many ways, as I will detail in an upcoming post, it is greatly lacking. Organic tells you much about what is not in a given food, but it tells you little about what is in a given food in terms of nutrition.
Back in May of 1989, after Tom Valentine first moved to St Paul, Minnesota, he heard on the car radio a short announcement that bolted him upright in the driver's seat. The announcement was sponsored by Young Families, the Minnesota Extension Service of the University of Minnesota: "Although microwaves heat food quickly, they are not recommended for heating a baby's bottle," the announcement said.
The bottle may seem cool to the touch, but the liquid inside may become extremely hot and could burn the baby's mouth and throat. Also, the buildup of steam in a closed container such as a baby's bottle could cause it to explode. "Heating the bottle in a microwave can cause slight changes in the milk. In infant formulas, there may be a loss of some vitamins. In expressed breast milk, some protective properties may be destroyed."
The report went on. "Warming a bottle by holding it under tap water or by setting it in a bowl of warm water, then testing it on your wrist before feeding, may take a few minutes longer, but it is much safer." Valentine asked himself: If an established institution like the University of Minnesota can warn about the loss of particular nutrient qualities in microwaved baby formula or mother's milk, then somebody must know something about microwaving they are not telling everybody.
I’m not the only one who finds nixing the mind-altering substances the hardest part of healthy living. And for the most part I have nixed them. But if the icons of fitness can’t always resist a drink, how can a weak-willed mortal like me?
Paleo purists who have achieved more success than I have may scoff, but the rest of you know exactly where I’m coming from. And our guru Loren Cordain knows no one will stick with a diet that has absolute no-nos, so we are encouraged to occasionally enjoy a glass of wine with dinner if we must. Still, in The Paleo Diet for Athletes, Dr. Cordain reminds us, “Obviously, alcohol was not part of any hunter-gatherer diet.”
Obviously? Certainly moderation is sound advice, but nonetheless the good doctor is wrong.
Lorette C. Luzajic – A Matter of Life or Myth: The Drunken Monkey – Why Humans Love Getting High
Time to air out a pet peeve here. Without getting into the whole of disgusting American eating habits, I am going to bring up two of the most juvenile eating habits I can think of, at the moment, that are shared by millions of Americans. Number one: the infantile (adult) infatuation with McDonald’s. Adults hovering over McDonald’s like it is gourmet dining. Not only is it a proletariat compulsion, but we are talking about some of the most garbage-y shit food on the planet.
Every time I ever pass a McDonald’s, the smell is disgusting, even in the winter when my windows are rolled up: phony, processed meat, and greasy, deep-fired everything. Yet all McDonald’s are always busy, from morning ’til night. Nowhere are they more crowded than in the hood that I drive through each day to and from work. Cars pouring in and out all day long. At breakfast time, these places are crowded with seniors galore, and at dinner time it is whole families going out for McDonald’s, as if it is a special treat.
Well it's over six months, now, and I really don't want to do this post.
Why? Cause it's too weird, I fear. We don't live in caves without modern convenience, I'd not want to, and I loath the possibility of Paleo becoming a Luddite-esque religion. I blogged about that (The Paleo Principle is Neither Authoritative nor Dogmatic)…
So, I guess, take this with a grain of salt. I'm merely reporting on my own experience.
I haven't used soap or shampoo anyplace on my body for six months, save hand washing in advance of food prep. That's it. Let me just report my observations and leave you to judge.
Richard Nikoley – Paleo I Don’t Care: I Like No Soap; No Shampoo
100 year old man from Kitava
To find the path to long life and health, Dan Buettner and team study the world's "Blue Zones," communities whose elders live with vim and vigor to record-setting age. At TEDxTC, he shares the 9 common diet and lifestyle habits that keep them spry past age 100.
After holding off for nearly two years, I’m posting this because too many people have asked for it. The lasses should read it, too, as the same principles can be applied to bodyfat loss.
I weighed 152 lbs. for four years of high school, and after training in tango in Buenos Aires in 2005, that had withered to 146 lbs. Upon returning to the US, I performed an exhaustive analysis of muscular hypertrophy (growth) research and exercise protocols, ignoring what was popular to examine the hard science. The end result? I gained 34 lbs. of muscle, while losing 3 lbs. of fat, in 28 days.
Tim Ferriss -
From Geek to Freak: How I Gained 34 lbs. of Muscle in 4 WeeksBestselling author of The 4-Hour Workweek
How To Cook Your Like Your Grandmother on making a waldorf salad. The picture above doesn't do this particular recipe justice, so make sure you go to the site and see how it should look. Oh, and by the way, skip the sugar (or substitute a healthy sweetener). It will still taste just fine.
Suze Fisher, Weston A. Price Foundation Chapter Leader, and the editor of Swine Flu Shots, asks in a recent chapter leader group post:
Uh oh, now we have to worry about GM alfalfa and grassfed milk products?
So of course I sauntered over to the link to see what was going on, and this is what I found:
CFS has begun analyzing the EIS and it is clear that the USDA has not taken the concerns of non-GE alfalfa farmers, organic dairies, or consumers seriously.
What bothers me about the above quote is the organization writes as if this is a surprise of some sort. When has the USDA or any other alphabet soup agency ever taken non-GE farmers, organic dairies, or consumers seriously? When?
Got a nice response to my 10 notable blogs from 2009 post, and thought I would share some updates, notes, and other happenings around Nutrition and Physical Regeneration.
One blog I noted in my notable blogs piece was Dr. Stephan Guyenet's Whole Health Source. In my brief review I mentioned that Stephan self-identifies as a paleo. He has since corrected me via private email and so I will let him speak for himself:
When it comes to our health, one would assume that the government is there to protect us through reasonable and sensible regulations. This is, however, far from the truth. The FDA in particular has been the cause of misery for those who have been unable to legally seek cures and treatment, the result of which ranges anywhere from health complications to death.
Millions Hurt, Billions Wasted
Imagine that you are critically ill, terminally perhaps, and a new experimental treatment has just been discovered. The doctors say that it's still very new, barely tested, but it shows early signs of promise. You have tried every mainstream treatment available. None of them have worked. In a fit of complete desperation, you decide that, since you're going to die anyway, you might as well go out swinging. You ask for the new treatment. Your doctor is aghast! Not only will he not be "party to someone preying on you," he knows the new treatment is expensive and your insurance won't cover it anyway. Even if you can pay, the answer is a resounding, "No." You're stuck. But hey, at least they're looking out for you.
I can't even begin to tell you the number of blogs I have in my RSS reader (actually I can, it is 249 and counting). That doesn't include the numerous email groups and various forums to which I belong. Just opening up my reader is enough to cause the lights to dim. While I enjoy many of them time and again there are a few that rarely fail to be both informative and engaging.
Most of the time that means no technical blogs (while often informative, very few writers have the ability to be technical and engaging) or blogs that rarely post (it is amazing the number of inactive blogs in cyberspace). So here, in no particular order, is my list of some rather interesting blogs from last year which should provide some good reading in the new year.
Enjoy!
[Editor's note: The following post should go a long way in helping the reader understand why ancient truth, be it nutritional or otherwise, often has a difficult time getting a modern hearing. It also helps explain why one generation with the truth, would seem to yield that truth for an untruth in succeeding generations].
Unquestionably the most significant and challenging development in the historiography of science in the last decade is the theory of Thomas S. Kuhn. Without defending Kuhn's questionable subjectivist and relativistic philosophy, his contribution is a brilliant sociological insight into the ways in which scientific theories change and develop.1
Essentially, Kuhn's theory is a critical challenge to what might be called the "Whig theory of the history of science." This "Whig" theory, which until Kuhn was the unchallenged orthodoxy in the field, sees the progress of science as a gradual, continuous, ever-upward process; year by year, decade by decade, century by century, the body of scientific knowledge gradually grows and accretes through the process of framing hypotheses, testing them empirically, and discarding the invalid and keeping the valid theories. Every age stands on the shoulders of and sees further and more clearly than every preceding age.
In the Whig approach, furthermore, there is no substantive knowledge to be gained from reading, say, 19th-century physicists or 17th-century astronomers. We may be interested in reading Priestley or Newton or Maxwell to see how creative minds work or solve problems, or for insight into the history of the period; but we can never read them to learn something about science which we didn't know already. After all, their contributions are, almost by definition, incorporated into the latest textbooks or treatises in their disciplines.
Many of us, in our daily experience, know enough to be unhappy with this idealized version of the development of science.
