FitnessQuests

Which brand of organic milk is the best?

Just how organic is your organic milk?

If you’ve been inside any grocery store in the US in the last 5-10 years you’ve surely noticed that buying milk is no longer the easy decision of whole vs skim. Today, our choices can include whole milk, 2%, 1%, skim, raw milk, goat milk, sheep milk, chocolate milk, soy milk, rice milk, almond milk, coconut milk, hemp milk, condensed milk, powdered milk, organic milk, hormone free milk, milk with cream on the top and more.

Now my recommendation in all this is to bypass all of that and simply go with raw, organic whole milk from a trusted farmer’s market or co-op if possible but between our busy lives and the FDA's meddling, it's not always possible for it to be that simple. So instead, if you want milk, you have to go to a grocery store where you will not only be met by all the options above but also several identical looking brands that all claim to be from the most humble, organic, and cow loving family farms in all the land...

But are they really identical? The answer is a resounding NO. Don't fret though, the Cornucopia Institute has you covered!

For years now, the Cornucopia Institute has been keeping tabs on the industry and rating them by their cow loving small farm organicness. As of today, they have about 100 organic milk and dairy companies rated by things like the health of the herd, how much grazing they do, who inspects the farm and products, how open the companies are with information, and whether they really are that family farm they say they are or a factory farm raising thousands of disease ridden cattle (like Horizon-the top organic dairy company in the US).

There is quite a bit of research that goes into this list and I recommend it become part of your decision making process the next time you are at the store buying organic milk or dairy. After all, going organic isn’t exactly cheap so why not make sure that those you give that extra money to really using it to go the extra mile for you and their animals.

The best and worst organic milk and dairy brands

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Chicken soup for that cold?

When I was younger I always wondered why Campbell's chicken noodle soup was supposed to be a cure all. While having mom make me that soup and grill cheese was always a highlight of being stuck home sick, I have to say that it never really made me feel any better physically.

Why, if chicken soup is supposed to be so magical, didn't it ever make me feel any better? Because, like most other "phudes" you buy in the grocery stores, Campbell's soup just isn't real.

Broth is something that if done right can take anywhere from 8-72 hours to make and that doesn't include any prep time. So it's easy to see why it's become so popular to just go pick some up off the shelf at your local grocery store. The problem with this approach however is that real broth is one of the most mineral dense foods in the world while store bought is often just water loaded with health damaging salt and MSG.

Many hours of boiling soup bones causes the valuable minerals and healthy fats to seep out of the bone and bone marrow and into the broth. Most of us are severely deficient in minerals and this can and does lead to a huge array of health problems. When you have a cold, your immune system requires heightened levels of minerals such a zinc and selenium and if it doesn't get them, it will take from your already depleted stores. Real broth helps you to become better by providing you with these and other much needed minerals while helping to rehydrate you.

Broth isn't only for when you're sick however. Most of us are chronically deficient in trace minerals and real broth is one of the best (and most delicious) ways of getting them into your diet.

If you're like many people and you've never made broth before, it can seem a little daunting. That's OK. Just check out the post I've linked to below to get started.

Oh, one more quick note... boiling a soup bone with some meat on it for an hour might give you good flavor, but if you want the true health benefits of the bone marrow, you need to keep it in much longer. That's where the 8-72 hours comes in.

I have learned that some people need to see how bone broth is made before they dive in and do it themselves. The “Making Bone Broth” videos on this blog will hopefully make it even easier for people to get started.

via movingstronglyforward.typepad.com

 

Until next time,

Kris

How to cure Type II Diabetes by Dr. Joseph Mercola

With one in four people in the US suffering from type II diabetes right now, I found this to be too valuable not to repost. The following is an exerpt from a recent article by Dr. Joseph Mercola. I encourage you to check out the complete article here if you or a loved one is suffering from this cureable disease.

 

You CAN Cure Diabetes!

As I said earlier, type 2 diabetes is virtually 100 percent avoidable and can be effectively treated without medications in about the same percentage of cases by recovering your leptin and insulin sensitivity. Leptin, a relatively recently discovered hormone produced by fat, tells your body and brain how much energy it has, whether it needs more (saying "be hungry"), whether it should get rid of some (and stop being hungry) and importantly what to do with the energy it has (reproduce, upregulate cellular repair, or not). In fact, the two most important organs that may determine whether you become (type 2, insulin resistant) diabetic or not are your liver and your brain, and it is their ability to listen to leptin that will determine this. And guess what... The only known way to reestablish proper leptin and insulin signaling is through a proper diet and exercise! There is NO drug that can accomplish this, but following the lifestyle strategies listed below can help you do at least three things that are essential for successfully treating diabetes: Recover your insulin/leptin sensitivity Help normalize your weight, and Naturally normalize your blood pressure.

None of these will drastically raise your risk of a heart attack the way Avandia will. Rather, they will benefit your heart and your entire body: Severely limit or eliminate sugar and grains in your diet, especially fructose, which is far more detrimental than any other type of sugar. Finding out your nutritional type will help you do this without much fuss. While nearly all type 2 diabetics need to swap out their grains for other foods, some people will benefit from using protein for the substitution, while others will benefit from using more vegetable-only carbohydrates. Therefore, along with reducing grains and sugars, determining your nutritional type will give you some insight into what foods you should use to replace the grains and sugars.

Exercise regularly -- a must for anyone with diabetes or pre-diabetes. Typically, you'll need large amounts of exercise, until you get your blood sugar levels under control. You may need up to an hour or two a day. Naturally, you'll want to gradually work your way up to that amount, based on your current level of fitness.

Avoid trans fats

Get plenty of omega-3 fats from a high quality, animal-based source.

Get enough high-quality sleep every night.

Optimize your vitamin D levels. Recent studies have revealed that getting enough vitamin D can have a powerful effect on normalizing your blood pressure and that low vitamin D levels may increase your risk of heart disease.

Optimizing your vitamin D levels may also eliminate the risk of type 1 diabetes in your children if you are pregnant. It’s also vital for infants to receive the appropriate amounts of vitamin D in their early years for these same reasons. Ideally, you’ll want to do this by exposing a large amount of your skin to appropriate amounts of sunshine (or a safe tanning bed) on a regular basis, year-round. Your body can safely create up to 20,000 units of vitamin D a day this way. However, if neither of these options are available, you may want to use an oral vitamin D3 supplement. But remember, if you choose to take an oral supplement it’s essential that you get your levels tested regularly by a proficient lab to make sure you’re not reaching toxic levels, and are within the therapeutic range. Maintaining your vitamin D levels around 60-80 ng/ml can significantly help control your blood sugar.

Address any underlying emotional issues and/or stress. Non-invasive tools like the Emotional Freedom Technique (EFT) can be extremely helpful and effective.

Monitor your fasting insulin level. This is every bit as important as your fasting blood sugar. You'll want your fasting insulin level to be between 2 to 4. The higher your level, the worse your insulin receptor sensitivity is. These are the top steps you should take, starting today, if you have type 2 diabetes. Doing so will virtually guarantee that your diabetes will disappear. And if you want to make sure you are not one of the millions impacted by the coming diabetes epidemic, these same steps will help you to stay healthy and diabetes-free.

Complete article is at http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2010/10/11/fda-curbs-avandia-diabetes-drug-use.aspx

Until next time,

Kris

 

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Campaign of FAKE Foods

We’re gonna start a movement!

From now on it’s all about the word FAKE. As in FAKE food. No, it
doesn’t stand for anything. It’s just what most food is.

Here’s a list of fake foods:

Anything processed

Anything grown with chemicals

Anything genetically altered

Any meat or animal food coming from an animal that was not fed its natural diet

Any animal food on antibiotics or hormones

Anything that is not organic.

**Organic processed foods are also fake.

Anything grown with herbicides or pesticides

Just about anything you can’t pronounce.

Anything that has to be extracted through the use of chemicals

Anything that is ripened with a gas instead of naturally on the plant such as tomatoes

Why FAKE?

This is a very important question.

For many years now, the majority of our supermarket selection has been
made up of fake food. Even in most health food stores, the majority of
the food falls under one or more of these categories. Therein lies the
problem:  we're conditioned to think certain things are natural and healthy, but
they're not. We’re conditioned to believe that Splenda is natural
because at one point there was sugar involved.

We are used to “foods” with chemicals. We think nothing of the process
by which soy protein was taken from the seed and instead just think,
“Oh it’s soy, and therefore natural”.

Conventionally grown fruits and vegetables now means they are
genetically altered, grown with herbicides, pesticides and
petroleum-based fertilizers, and are usually picked before ripened and
shipped across the world. Don’t think the phrase 'conventionally
grown' was an accident either--this is a marketing term. Same with
grain-fed, hormone and antibiotic pumped, factory farmed animals and
animal products. This is now 'conventionally grown' food, while
organic (ACTUAL conventionally grown food) is labeled like it’s some
holier than thou yuppie/hippie thing.

The problem though is that a conventionally grown vegetable vs. an
organic vegetable aren’t the same. It’s not just that one is saturated in bug spray and weed killer. It’s not just that they are now genetically completely different plants. It’s that due to
growing conditions the organic vegetable will have a much greater
amount of vitamins and minerals. Not to mention that many times the
pesticides and herbicides that are in the “conventionally grown” plant
actually block absorption of any of the nutrients that are left in the
vegetable before playing hell on your hormones.

Meat and animal products are scarier still. Talk about taking
something that has always been one of the greatest sources of health
on the planet and turning it into a killer! Factory farmed meat and
meat from a pasture raised or wild animal could not be more
different. Just like the conventionally grown fruits and vegetables,
factory farmed meat was never meant to be food and is loaded with poisons.

I’m encouraged that people seem to be seeing more that processed foods
are bad, but they don’t realize that McDonald’s '100% real beef'
really means 100% real frankenbeef. They also don’t realize that the
fast food salad they’re about to get may look like a salad, but the
truth is there is nothing in that bowl that is real food. Everything
from the lettuce to the carrots to the dressing is fake. None of it
has the nutrients they were meant to eat, but it is all loaded with
chemicals that they were NEVER meant to eat. Most of it has also been
genetically altered, the effects of which we've never studied. So
which do you want to order:  salad or nutritionally-void, chemical
filled cancer bowl?

Honestly I’m being too hard on the fast food companies; it’s the same
in most conventional restaurants as well. Actually, it’s the same in
most home cooking.

This is why I find the word FAKE so important. It’s not organic and
grass fed vs conventionally grown. It’s food you were never supposed
to eat (fake) vs food.

I believe if we started looking at food in that way, we might start
making a bit more progress in our fight to win our food back. Just
imagine walking down the produce aisle and seeing apples just beside
the FAKE apples. Now it’s not about price. There’s just no reason to
buy FAKE apples. Personally I’d rather eat a brownie than an apple if
I know they’re both going to kill me anyway.

So, I believe we should start a movement; a campaign to get rid of the mentality of conventionally grown vs. organic and replace it with fake food vs. food. I think with everyone working together, we can do this and make an even bigger difference in public consciousness. Change the consciousness, change what people buy. Corporations don’t make what we won’t buy.

Let me know what you think. Do you believe that the term FAKE in our
food labeling would help people to make the right decision? Do you think people would buy a FAKE burger from McDonalds or a FAKE salad? Do you think people would buy the FAKE carrots in the grocery store? How do you think these companies would react to this type of forced labeling? Would they change their ways? Do you think changing the collective consciousness could be done without the labeling? Buzz words in society do after all become marketing campaigns.

Until next time,

Kris

 

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Primal Gluten Free Pizza!

Today’s recipe is a guest article from Jill, a very good friend of mine that is doing great things with her own fitness and diet recently. Because she seems to be having such a great time with this and is seeing some amazing results, I asked her if she would write a guest post for you to show everyone the types of foods she’s eating. Jill also writes an awesome food blog but she’s a little shy and won’t let me give it out yet. I’ll keep working on her :-)

 

So thank you Jill for sharing and to the rest of you, enjoy Primal Pizza!

 

Recipe of the Week

 

I live a mostly Primal lifestyle and I'm always on the hunt for new food ideas.  I especially love finding new recipes for old favorites.  This pizza is made with Oopsie crust, a pizza-specific modification of the original Oopsie Roll, which astonishingly contains no flours of any kind.  The best part is you'd never know it!  This is also a fantastic homemade pizza for those who are Gluten Free.

Oopsie Pizza

What you'll need:

3 eggs, separated

3 ounces cream cheese (NOT softened)

1/4 cup grated Parmesan cheese

1/2 tsp cream of tartar

1/2 tsp garlic powder

1/2 tsp onion powder

1/2 tsp oregano
assorted pizza toppings and sauce of your choice

*note-all ingredients should be as natural, organic, and unprocessed as possible.

Preheat the oven to 300°.

In a mixing bowl, beat the three egg whites and the cream of tartar with a hand mixer, until stiff peaks are formed.  This may take 3-5 minutes.

In a second mixing bowl, combine the yolks, cream cheese, Parmesan cheese, garlic and onion powders and oregano and beat until combined.  Then gently fold the yolk mixture into the egg whites.  ***I found that putting the egg white mixture into the yolk mixture makes a better crust.  You gently stir a third of the peaked egg whites into the egg yolk mixture. Once combined, fold in the remaining portion of egg whites.  Be careful not to stir it in.  The goal is to keep the egg whites as fluffy as possible.***

Once combined, spread the mixture evenly on a greased pizza pan.  This step is really important!  Even if you have a nonstick pan, it will probably still stick.  If you don't want to grease it, I used parchment paper instead and it worked great.

Bake the pizza crust for 10-20 minutes until firm and golden brown.

Remove the crust from the oven and add your sauce and toppings.  Put the pizza back in the oven and set the oven to broil.  Take the pizza out when the cheese is melted.

A couple things to note:

I made a few mini pizzas instead of one big one because I like to experiment.  After the crusts baked, I chose to add only garlic powder and Parmesan cheese to one of them.  This would make perfect bread sticks or croutons.  The flavor was phenomenal!

The crust on the other two pizzas was light and airy.  It's an excellent substitution for regular bread.


Have a great Thursday!

Jill.

*Special thanks to Sarah at Simply Primal for posting the pizza suggestion!

 

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Power Smoothie Recipe... Kiwi Spinach

I’ve fallen in love… with a smoothie… and I have to tell you how to make it.

It’s actually extremely simple and I do hope you like it as much as I do.

You’ll need:

5 medium Strawberries

1 medium banana

1 medium kiwi with ends cut off (I didn’t peel mine)

One heaping handful of chopped spinach

Two tbl sp natural organic peanut butter

Half cup of almond milk

Scoop of your favorite flavorless protein

Ice

Directions

Place all above in something blender like and pulverize. It’s a great energy smoothie pre or post workout and it’s very green which just makes you feel even healthier. It's also great for the immune system. 

Enjoy,

Kris

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Stop Complicating Your Diet If You Want Results.

If you’ve been reading for any amount of time, you know that I’m all about diet. To me, a healthy diet is not only extremely important to maintain but it’s also truly fascinating to learn more about. This said though, I’m going to say something that might seem a little surprising.

Some of you are worrying about the details way too much.

I keep a pretty close ear to the chatter in the health and fitness community and I have to say that more than ever before, the details really detracting from the main message of nutrition.

I get questions from readers and potential clients all the time about the tiniest nuances of a healthy diet that they’ve heard debated ad nauseam. There’s nothing wrong with learning or implementing something that is good for you but the truth is, most people are paralyzed by all of these tiny questions. They can’t see the forest for the trees.

 I had a guy who eats McDonald’s 5 times per week ask me how he could manipulate his carb to fat ratio for better performance and weight loss. I had a woman that starts each week buying two 12 packs of Diet Coke ask me if blueberries would really help her lose belly fat. I have people on a regular basis come to me that have given up fruit because of the sugar but they see nothing wrong with living primarily on “Healthy Choice” meals.

This is nothing new. There’s always an attention sucking villain that detracts from a healthy society. For years it’s been fat, or carbs, or calories altogether. I guess what bothers me now is the fact that with the internet, it’s become more specialized and segmented. It seems everyone has their own crusade against some food or nutrient. If you don’t have a crusade against something, you probably have one food you think is the cure all.

There are millions of people that replace “evil milk” with soy in their 24oz venti cup of coffee they drink with their breakfast donuts.

Here’s the point. Most of the nutrition you hear discussed is very elitist and holds no value to your average person that eats a diet soaked in processed chemicals and hormones. The majority of it is merely driven by the fact that someone selling a book needs to have a new angle to come at you with.

 

 
Mistakes are easy when chasing details.  

If you’re diet consists of fast food and TV dinners (do they still call them that?) you really don’t need to obsess about the sugar in fruit or whether or not agave is a healthy sweetener. You don’t need to know which brand of fish oil is the best. If this is you, it shouldn’t matter if the latest study says milk helps to burn stomach fat. Just stop listening to all the chatter and get the basics down.

What are the basics? If I had to boil it all down to the only concept you need to know about diet it’s quite simply, get rid of what’s not natural. This means nothing processed, genetically altered, filled with hormones, or laced with manmade chemicals. Once you get that down you can start to look into whether or not grains are good for you, check out raw foods, see if you should be supplementing with vitamin D, or look into your metabolic type. However, if you can’t do that, paying any mind to the latest health study/trend is probably just holding you back.

Until next time,

Kris

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The Food Pyramid is Killing You! (Not what you think)

As most of you know, the Food Pyramid is the USDA's guide to healthy eating. It involves the classification of foods into groups while giving recommendations as to how many servings you need from each group for optimal health. What you probably don't know is that it's a top source of our obesity problem and it's killing you.

In 1978 the FDB (a consumer co-op in Denmark) created the food pyramid. In 1992 the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) adopted this system to replace the antiquated “food groups” system which had been in place in some form since its introduction in 1916.

In 2000, the food pyramid was altered and the MyPyramid program as established. This new pyramid did more to promote exercise and healthier options than its predecessor but also left its instruction more vague and complicated to follow.  In 2005 there was another alteration which brings us to the current version.

There have been several other forms of the pyramid created by other entities. For instance in 2009, Harvard School of Public Health created the Healthy Eating Pyramid which focused more on exercise and separating food groups into their healthiest forms.

Sounds pretty boring and straight forward right? How could this be anything but helpful? Here comes an awakening.

For many of us, the food pyramid represents our first understanding that something called nutrition actually exists other than your parents telling you to finish your vegetables. It also has much to do with the curriculum taught to nutritionists and dieticians. This makes it highly unfortunate that much of it is either very vague and misleading, or flat out wrong. So let’s take a look now at the pyramid.

For our example we’re going to use the one I grew up with which was introduced in 1992. Believe me, the new one might look better but it has its own unforgivable weaknesses.

I started school in 1985 in Florida. When in first grade, my school put it in the curriculum to begin learning about nutrition. This was all very simple stuff really. We learned things like Mr. Apple was a fruit and therefore he was in the fruits and vegetables group and is therefore, good for you. Anything that was in one of the four food groups was considered good for you.

The four food groups were breads & cereals, fruits & vegetables, meat, and the milk group. There was later a fifth group added called the fat and sweets group. In the next several years it was drilled into our heads to only eat from the four food groups and try to not eat too much food from the fifth food group.

Then in 6^th grade (1992) they introduced the Food Pyramid. Honestly this changed very little. It was really nothing more than a visual representation of what they’d been preaching for years. They split up fruits and vegetables and added more emphasis on number of servings but they were so vague that they only served to confuse.

How are you supposed to know what 6-11 servings of bread and cereal, 2-4 servings of fruit, 3-5 servings of vegetables, etc look like at the end of the day? Seriously, 2-4 isn’t a range, it’s a 100% shift. Also there were further complication is that 2-4 was to be a minimum while 2-3 in the meat group was a maximum although they didn’t print that on the pyramid.  So now 2-4 is not even a range but somehow a minimum? And what kind of OCD person could follow this?

If you’re scratching your head right now trying to figure out why they would make this so vague and confusing, the answer is simple. Anytime the regulatory agencies try to do anything good for the people they’re trying to protect, they are met with screaming lobbyists that don’t want their companies to look bad or be forced into expensive changes. Usually the end result of the lobbying is watered down guidelines and wordings in new laws that are easy to get around. There is a great example of this in my “What is Yellow #5 (tartrazine)” post.

You’ll also notice that most of the wordings make it seem like it’s good for you to eat more. Tell me you haven’t heard things like “It’s a great way to get in all of your recommended servings of vegetables”. It’s all worded to make you eat more because then the companies the lobbyists represent can sell you more food. When you hear something like, need to be getting in 6 to 11 servings of bread and cereal, the automatic association is the more you get in, the better. You’re working all day to get in your 11 servings of bread and cereal (which is the base of your recommended diet). An extra large bowl of Froot Loops is great because that’s like 4 servings of cereal out of the way in one swoop.

This leads us to another huge problem with the food groups and pyramid system most of us grew up with. They don’t differentiate between good and bad foods. Whole wheat vs. white, bologna vs. chicken, fruit vs. fruit juice; it’s all the same. Froot Loops are just as much part of the “healthy” bread and cereal group as steel cut oats and ketchup is in fact a vegetable (fruit?)

Here’s your Smart Choice reminder that you’re being healthy.

 

Checking out the USDA.gov website, you’ll notice that there is no mention of differentiation at all. If you look into breads by clicking on that section of the pyramid, you’ll see a single recommendation that says to make some of your selections products that are “made with” whole grains so you can get your fiber. That’s it. No emphasis at all and everything but fiber is ignored. They didn’t want you to know about all the other differences so you could make a wise choice. Also, "made with"? Look around the rest of it. They make no effort to give you almost any advice other than avoid fat like the plague. Choose skim milk and fat free yogurt. Eat lean meat and trim off any fat you see. Always choose low fat or fat free options. Here’s my favorite paragraph on the page…

“Be sure to eat at least the lowest number of servings from the five major food groups listed below. You need them for the vitamins, minerals, carbohydrates, and protein they provide. Just try to pick the lowest fat choices from the food groups. No specific serving size is given for the fats, oils, and sweets group because the message is USE SPARINGLY.”

A couple things I want you to notice there. First is the beginning wording “BE SURE (psychological authority) to eat AT LEAST THE LOWEST number of servings from the FIVE MAJOR FOOD GROUPS” Obviously written to make you feel like you’re not eating enough.

The next thing I want you to notice is the leaving out of fat in what you get from your food. We know that fat is a vital nutrient (even saturated fat). Without it, your body will not be able to perform many functions including cell creation. Also, your hormones will go completely out of whack. Dietary fat is incredibly important!

Then they go even further and flat out tell you that fat should be avoided. They even used cap locks in telling you to avoid it. Don’t you think they knew in 1992 that fat was important to you? After all, just 8 years later they added “oils” into the new version as a necessity. Believe me, the USDA did not learn this in those 8 years. Here’s proof. In 1942 the USDA came out with the 7 major food groups. This lasted until 1955 when they decided to make it less complex so they whittled it down to four.

The Seven Groups (1942)

• Milk
• Vegetables
• Fruits
• Eggs
• Meat (Fish, Poultry, Cheese)
• Cereal
• Butter ßBAM!! Butter was a food group!

Shocking? Wrong? Stupid? We were so naïve back then? No! Butter in many cultures used to be celebrated for its amazing health giving qualities. There were winter festivals surrounding the harvest of the rich orange butter created from the healthy mineral rich grass fed cows. The butter was given first to the children and pregnant women because they needed the nutrients the most.

In fact, you should take a look at Dr. Weston A. Price’s book, ‘Nutrition and Physical Degeneration’ for some shocking information on this topic. After reading that book you will want to scream, cry, or possibly kill someone over all the lies you’ve been told and all the damage it’s done to you and your family. Did you know human beings following a healthy diet that live active lifestyles should be able to weather temperatures just above the freezing point without bundling up and without severe discomfort? It’s not just about sick, sad, and stupid. It’s not even about breaking bones, needing braces, asthma, and ADHD. We can’t even comprehend just how weak we are anymore because there is no example of what real health even is in the modern day.

So yes, butter was a food group and it wasn’t changed due to new research. It was only removed as they decided to make the guidelines simpler. Notice eggs on there as well? In fact, if you pay attention you’ll notice that four of the food groups (milk, meat, eggs, and butter) are all loaded with fat and cholesterol. Now consider that the FIRST study on cardio vascular health and disease (heart disease anyone?) wasn’t published until 1958 (three years after this was changed) and the obesity rate was under 10% in the US. Today over 60% of us are overweight and heart disease is the #1 killer. What happened? More interesting data was that between 1960 and 1980 the obesity rate stayed stable. Then in the 80’s we went on an anti-fat crusade (see above) and our obesity rates skyrocketed all the way until today.

The point is, the USDA has always known that fat is healthy. In fact, the healthiest indigenous societies have diets up to 60% in saturated fats and cholesterol. It’s quite a flip then to go from that to NO FAT!! USE SPARINGLY!!

Folks, the FDA and the USDA don’t care about you. Grain is cheaper and more profitable than meat so you should ignore the meat eating teeth that god gave you to get to the nutrients in the meat we’re supposed to eat and go eat seeds and berries instead. Are we supposed to eat fruits and vegetables too? Of course we are but you may notice that many seeds, nuts, and other vegetation such as corn and lettuce ends up whole in your feces. It’s because your body isn’t optimized to digest it so you’re not absorbing the most of the nutrients. Think about it. If pieces of whole food are going through you without being broken down, how much of what looks broken down actually got completely broken down so you could truly absorb the nutrients? It may sound disgusting but when was the last time you pooped chicken?

Now that I’ve completely ranted I have one last topic. This was the topic I actually wanted to talk about in the beginning of this entire thing; the education factor and why it’s messing you up.

For millennia, human beings have been much like other animals. We scavenged around and we ate whatever it was that we found that was edible. We ate whatever we could kill or scavenge. We ate the big, the small, dangerous, the furry, and even the six-legged. When vegetation was in bloom and accessible we ate anything that was digestible and not poisonous. When it wasn’t, it was all about whatever we could store that wouldn’t go bad and the animals we could kill. The point is, we ate what we had and as long as we had enough we were quite healthy.

We didn’t have supermarkets and specialty stores with thousands of options. We didn’t have 6-11 grains, 2-4 fruits, 3-5 vegetables, 2-3 dairy, and 2-3 meat servings. Honestly, the natural world wasn’t set up for that to be possible as you never traveled more than a few miles away from your home. What were the chances that wild broccoli was growing next to some wild carrots and tomatoes? What were the odds that you had a super berry growing next to your cave over by the spinach? There aren’t many places in the world that you could naturally eat a large variety of foods before agriculture. The fact is we weren’t built to need all this variety. We CAN eat it but it’s not what we were designed for and if it’s not what we were designed for why are you being told now that you MUST do it to be healthy?

The point is not to stop eating a variety of foods but that the USDA has gone out of their way to create rules around something that nature never thought necessary. In fact, the only rules of nutrition are to eat the things that were designed to be food for you by god and the environment around you and not by man. Here are 2 rules. If it wasn’t a major food source for people 10,000 years ago, it still isn’t. Rule #2, don’t eat so much that if a lion were suddenly chasing you, you’d be too full to run and grab your spear.

See, in making all of these rules they have you in a state where you are now easily marketed to. I once had a guy tell me that he could eat all the cotton candy and Skittles he wanted and be healthy because they had no fat in them. Sad thing is, Skittles have been known to put “a fat free food” on their paikaging and they only do that because it sells! As a kid I once made a white bread, bologna, and American cheese sandwich that I added ketchup to in order to make it fit all four food groups. Based on USDA and school teaching, I truly was being healthy.

If there weren’t a bunch of rules like no fat, no one would ever look at Skittles as healthy and Froot Loops could never have a Smart Choice check box on it. They’d be laughed out. If you weren’t told to watch your calories no one would be fooled into buying 100 calorie paiks of Oreo’s and if you weren’t so concerned about being a good boy or girl that get’s in you recommended vegetable servings, you may have paid more attention to the fact that vegetables have become a genetic science experiment instead of a healthy food.

People ask me why I don’t write articles like “The top 10 super foods you must include in your diet” or “Feeling depressed? Try these five foods to beat those blues!” These articles get views. They get forwarded around. These are what the doctors and professional write that get published on MSN and in magazines. This is the stuff that is eaten up by your average Joe and Jane but it’s only because the average Joe and Jane is used to being confused. It started in school and it continues today.

We don’t need a food pyramid and we don’t need a super berry from the side of a remote Tibetan mountain. We need to stop eating genetically modified processed garbage and sick grain fed animals and get back to eating what we were created to eat. Do that and we will be healthier and we won’t be fat. Or, we can go grab ourselves some reduced sugar Smart Choice Toaster Strudels “now with real fruit” and wonder why we're fat, sick, stupid, ADHD, diabetic, depressed, impotent, sterile, and sleepless.

I have so much more to say but at 6 pages, this is by far my longest post and it needs to end. You know I’ll be back soon though with more.

Oh, if you didn’t see it, Food Inc is the #5 best selling DVD in 2010 so far on Amazon! People are waking up! So, as always, I’ll keep putting out the info if you keep bringing in the readers. Together we absolutely CAN change the direction of this ship and take our health back for good.

 

Until next time,

Kris

 

PS: If you like what you read please hit the “like” button below for Facebook. You can also go to www.facebook.com/fitnessquests to subscribe.  

Does eating meat make you fat?

"Does eating meat cause weight gain? Some say this hotly debated question holds the key to weight management success in our modern day. Well, after a five year European study, we finally have an answer for you. Read below to learn about the study, the findings, and what those findings mean for you." 

 

 

Lately it’s been all over the news that eating meat is a major cause of weight gain. In fact, I’ve been sent several articles like this from readers in the last few days asking my opinion.

These news reports are the result of a recently held 5 year, 360,000 participant European study. The study controlled for total energy intake, physical activity levels, education, dietary patterns, age, sex, and smoking habits. After all of these controls, the final outcome was that all calories are not created equally and in fact, eating meat does cause weight gain.

At the end of the five year study, the average meat eating subject gained 4.4lbs (2kg) in comparison to the person that ate little to no meat.

Based on these findings, various news outlets have taken to saying high protein diets are not conducive to weight loss. Some even say that high carb diets are best for fat loss.

While this has been all over the health newswires, the study (which allowed for red meat, poultry, and processed meat) may not be quite as cut and dry as the media has been portraying it to be. Let’s take a little closer look at some of the potential problems with this study.

Self reporting…

The study claimed that two people with the same habits and caloric intakes would differ in weight gain based on meat consumption. In order to keep track of 360,000 people for 5 years, the participants (that self reported their weight) also self reported their diets, caloric intake, and physical activity levels. It’s long been known that vegetarians typically over estimate their total caloric intake while your average omnivore typically under estimates their intake. Therefore, any study that does self reporting is flawed from the onset.

That said, meat has considerably more calories than say broccoli which has only 20 calories per cup. 

Body composition…

Being that weight was self reported, one thing that wasn’t required was body fat percentage. Typically, meat eaters will have considerably more muscle on their body than their vegetarian brethren. Since muscle is far more dense than fat, it would make sense that they would weigh more overall. In this case, added weight would not be a negative. However, since this widely quoted study didn’t take this into account, we’ll never really know.

Meat quality…

The last thing worth mentioning is something I harp on often. Was this meat even something you should consider food? Was it from a humanely raised healthy animal that spent it’s like out in the sun, happily grazing the fields or pecking the dirt for seed and insects or was this the fat, sick, genetically altered, hormone and drug filled “meat” they try to pass off on us that is unfit for human consumption? I guarantee you it’s the latter. It always is because that is what they make available. Once again, this one vital piece of information is skipped as they make their case that food is bad for you.

 

While the media touts this as the final answer we’ve all been waiting for, the truth is the study is heavily flawed and the determinations that have come from it have no basis in fact. Even if it weren't flawed, by leaving out such information as to whether the added weight is muscle or fat is enough to render it useless in terms of health. Unfortunately it is this style of testing and reporting that leads to so many of the myths regarding our food and health. Flawed study comes out and the media jumps on it and while adding their own twists. Then fitness and nutrition "experts" read it and repeat it enough times that it becomes the "truth". Then you hear it, try your best to follow it, and then get discouraged when you fail to reach your goals and damage your health. It should be a crime.

I want to thank the many of you that sent in these articles. There is a lot of amazingly inaccurate information out there and as always it is my intention to make sure the truth is just as easily accessible to you.

 

Until next time,

Kris

 

PS: If you found this article helpful, please click the “Like” button below for Facebook or subscribe at www.facebook.com/fitnessquests

Never thought I'd say this but hats off to McDonald's and their new smoothie

Fast food has gotten a terrible wrap over the years. Do they deserve it? Absolutely! Are they the sole purveyor of the fat western world? Not a chance. No matter how terrible their food is, you know it's terrible going in and they make no effort to tell you otherwise. Well, at least they didn't until recently...

Over the past few years (and after many lawsuits) many fast food establishments have made new attempts to appear cleaner and healthier. They work to give you options that you've never had before in most fast food places. Now you can get 1000+ calorie salads and grilled chicken sandwiches that clock in at over 800 calories. Some places even give you pre-cut and packaged fruit that has long since lost any nutrients it ever had. 

It seems the healthier sounding the food they put up, the worse it actually is for you. That's why when McDonald's put out their new smoothie, I immediately thought it was probably death in a cup. That's why I was shocked to find out that it really wasn’t. In fact, I’d venture to say that it’s only really a mere common cold in a cup. A mild fever really. Not even the flu!

I know I just lost serious credibility in the fitness world for saying what I just said but hey, I call them like I see them.

Let's take a look at the facts here. (We’ll be examining the middle 16 oz size.)

260 calories

5g fat

54g sugar

2g protein

0 fiber

(There's also some various vitamins and minerals from the fruit of course.)  

Now, is that wonderful? No but to be honest its only real weakness is the sugar and while it has more than it needs to, the truth is that if you mashed 16 ounces of pure banana in a cup it would have 56g of sugar. Of course it would also have 12 grams of fiber but that's not the point right now. The point is the weakness in this drink is the sugar and for what it is, the sugar isn't actually that high.

Much of what I've been reading has been saying that this is a major no-no to put with a meal due to its high sugar content but I wanted to challenge that statement. See, if you got a medium Coke instead, it would have 58g (4g more) of sugar and none of the vitamin content. On top of that, it wouldn't be very filling. Drinking a 16 ounce smoothie could potentially make it so you're unable to finish your large fries (greasy sugar yay!) It would also quell your need to finish that off with a McPopular candy bar McFlurry(saving you exactly four large truckfuls of sugar).  

Now let's take a look at the ingredients.

According to their website its strawberry banana fruit blend, low fat yogurt, and Ice. Sounds good right? Well not so fast. Hidden much further down on their ingredients PDF is the ingredients list for their strawberry banana blend (I have to take away some points for deceptive practices).

Those ingredients aren't quite as friendly...

Strawberry Banana Fruit Blend: Strawberry puree, banana puree, water, sugar, concentrated apple juice, contains less than 1% of the following: cellulose powder, natural (botanical source) and artificial flavors, xantham gum, citric acid, colored with fruit and vegetable juice, pectin, ascorbic acid (preservative).

On closer look you see the 4th ingredient is sugar. Notice though it’s not HFCS or an artificial sweetener which is a plus. Then they put in concentrated apple juice which is essentially also sugar. Then as you go down the list you find the artificial flavors (come on, you knew they'd be there), xantham gum (an emusifier not really all that evil and notice its only one), and then a really big surprise, no artificial colors! Who would have thought?

See, I know it’s not good for you and it’s certainly not health food so why is it that I say hats off to McDonalds? Because for the first time ever, they actually tried to have some integrity. This wasn’t made by the McDonald’s of old that would have used the word smoothie just to ease your conscience as you unknowingly gorged on 9000 calories of toxic sludge and science experiment. They actually seemed to have tried to stay with the idea of making the healthiest “health food” they could whilst keeping in their framework of taste, speed, and affordability.

 

So, do I recommend you consume this beverage or call it healthy? Absolutely not. Do I recommend you go to McDonald's and pay them to make you fat and unhealthy ever? Absolutely not. Do I support McDonald’s in what appears to be an effort to clean up their act as much as they can? Yes. Should you care also? Absolutely and here’s why.

McDonald’s is not just the leader in fast food. They are the trend setter. When they do something successfully, other’s follow. More importantly than that though is what many people fail to realize. If you ever saw the documentary “Food Inc” (which I recommend if you haven’t), you were introduced to the overall impact that a company like McDonald’s has on our overall food supply. Because McDonald’s is the largest purchaser of beef, chick, pork, potatoes, tomatoes, cucumbers, wheat, apples, etc, it is their wishes that are followed in the raising and growing phases. Simply put, the way your food is created is up to McDonald’s even if you never set foot in one. Suppliers don’t set up a system for McDonald’s and one for everyone else. That would cost more. Instead, they set the whole thing up the way McDonald’s wants it and everyone get’s that product. If tomorrow McDonald’s said that they wanted nothing but humanely raised grass fed beef, free range non-gmo chicken and vine ripened tomatoes, that would suddenly be all you found in grocery stores.

Will they ever do that? Will they ever decide to make that change? It’s hard to imagine they will but I wouldn’t have thought they’d have done this either. The reason this happened though was not because they want to be nice. No, the reason they did this was because we as a people are finally waking up. We are looking at the ingredients. We are learning what they are. We are avoiding the trash they try to give us and it’s affecting their bottom line. It may seem like its one person against all the big mean corporations but like I’ve said before, it doesn’t take much to change them. All it takes is for a few people to wake up and not follow along anymore. You don’t need to march and picket and rally and write letters, you just need to stop buying and get the word out! They will change before they will let their stock price go down I assure you.

How do you get the word out? Just talk to people! Don’t feel like talking? Send out articles like mine to your friends. Share them on Facebook, Tweet them, Digg them, Stumble them, etc. The more people read them, the more people wake up and the more change we can affect. When you find other reliable sources, share that stuff as well. Change can come but we all have to act. Please help me spread the word!

 

Until next time,

Kris

 

PS:If you like this article please hit the "like" button below for Facebook

Grocery Haul...First Video Blog!

That's right I'm making my debut appearance on YouTube. I'm not one for flash or glitz though. In fact, in my first exciting video adventures I've forgone the glamor and expense of a film crew and instead decided to record this on my new iPhone 4 (note-if anyone knows how to make the picture not the size of the phone itself when transferred to YouTube, please leave a comment below).

I chose spontaneity over a high paid writing team and I forewent the Hollywood explosions for a little taste of home. No make up artists or even a clean shave on this maiden voyage; that's genuine I'd just gotten home from the gym sweaty awesomeness shining off of me. Only authenticity here!

So what all this means is this. I left the gym and went to get groceries before coming home. I was still a mess and still in gym clothes but I decided to grab my phone and take a little video for you all so you can see what my grocery cart looks like right now. I had no idea I was going to do this before hand so this is as real as it gets. I realized also that this is my first time doing a video by myself. I wasn't sure what it would be like talking to a camera. It's not easy but definitely different than I expected. I think I can get used to it!

 

 

 

So that's my video debut! So very exciting! I actually made a few more videos as well that show me cooking but I haven't gotten around to trying to edit them together just yet. I may or may not do that but just so you can see, dinner turned out great and took 22 minutes to make!

 

 

OK, survey time. Do you guys like the video format for some stuff? Do you think I should do more? Is this a direction you'd like to see FitnessQuests go in? Is this something you have no interest in? Are there other things you'd like me to do with video such as exercise demos or showing full workouts? Let me know. Remember, I write this for you guys so anything that makes it more interesting and helpful for you I will consider.

 

Until next time,

Kris

 

PS:If you like this, please hit the like button below for Facebook. To subscribe go to www.facebook.com/fitnessquests and becomes a fan! Thanks for reading!

Are Whole Eggs or Egg Whites Better for You?

Today I have a guest article from well respected fitness author Mike Geary. Mike is a storehouse of knowledge and he practices everything he preaches. Personally I think everyone can learn from him-myself included. I you didn't pick up the free fitness ebook from last week, please go now and get it. It's free and it's definitely worth the read....

  

Are Whole Eggs or Egg Whites Better for You?

by Mike Geary, Certified Nutrition Specialist, Certified Personal Trainer
Author - The Truth About 6-Pack Abs 

I was on a weekend trip with some friends recently and one of my friends was cooking breakfast for the whole group. I went over to see what he was cooking and saw he was getting ready to make a big batch of eggs.

Well, to my shock and horror, I noticed that he was cracking the eggs open and screening the egg whites into a bowl and throwing out the egg yolks. I asked him why the heck he was throwing out the egg yolks, and he replied something like this...

"because I thought the egg yolks were terrible for you...that's where all the nasty fat and cholesterol is".

And I replied, "you mean that's where all of the nutrition is!"

This is a perfect example of how confused most people are about nutrition. In a world full of misinformation about nutrition, somehow most people now mistakenly think that the egg yolk is the worst part of the egg, when in fact, the YOLK IS THE HEALTHIEST PART OF THE EGG!

By throwing out the yolk and only eating egg whites, you're essentially throwing out the most nutrient dense, antioxidant-rich, vitamin and mineral loaded portion of the egg. The yolks contain so many B-vitamins, trace minerals, vitamin A, folate, choline, lutein, and other powerful nutrients... it's not even worth trying to list them all.

In fact, the egg whites are almost devoid of nutrition compared to the yolks.

Even the protein in egg whites isn't as powerful without the yolks to balance out the amino acid profile and make the protein more bio-available. Not to even mention that the egg yolks from free range chickens are loaded with healthy omega-3 fatty acids.

Yolks contain more than 90% of the calcium, iron, phosphorus, zinc, thiamin, B6, folate, and B12, and panthothenic acid of the egg. In addition, the yolks contain ALL of the fat soluble vitamins A, D, E, and K in the egg, as well as ALL of the essential fatty acids (EFAs).

And now the common objection I get all the time when I say that the yolks are the most nutritious part of the egg...

"But I heard that whole eggs will skyrocket my cholesterol through the roof"

No, this is FALSE!

First of all, when you eat a food that contains a high amount of dietary cholesterol such as eggs, your body down-regulates it's internal production of cholesterol to balance things out.

On the other hand, if you don't eat enough cholesterol, your body simply produces more since cholesterol has dozens of important vital functions in the body.

And here's where it gets even more interesting...

There have been plenty of studies lately that indicate that eating whole eggs actually raises your good HDL cholesterol to a higher degree than LDL cholesterol, thereby improving your overall cholesterol ratio and blood chemistry.

And 3rd... high cholesterol is NOT a disease!  Heart disease is a disease...but high cholesterol is NOT.  Cholesterol is actually a VERY important substance in your body and has vitally important functions... it is DEAD WRONG to try to "lower your cholesterol" just because of pharmaceutical companies propaganda that everyone on the planet should be on statin drugs.

 

In addition, the yolks contain the antioxidant lutein as well as other antioxidants which can help protect you from inflammation within your body (the REAL culprit in heart disease, not dietary cholesterol!), giving yet another reason why the yolks are actually GOOD for you, and not detrimental.

To help bring even more proof that whole eggs are better for you than egg whites, I recently read a University of Connecticut study that showed that a group of men in the study that ate 3 eggs per day for 12 weeks while on a reduced carb, higher fat diet increased their HDL good cholesterol by 20%, while their LDL bad cholesterol stayed the same during the study.  However, the group that ate egg substitutes (egg whites) saw no change in either and did not see the improvement in good cholesterol (remember that higher HDL levels are associated with lower risk of heart disease) that the whole egg eaters did. 

So I hope we've established that whole eggs are not some evil food that will wreck your body... instead whole eggs are FAR superior to egg whites.

But what about the extra calories in the yolks?

This is actually a non-issue and here's why... even though egg yolk contain more calories than just eating the egg whites, the yolks have such a high micro-nutrient density in those calories, that it increases your overall nutrient density per calorie you consume.  Essentially, what this does is help to regulate your appetite for the remainder of the day, so you end up eating less calories overall.  In addition, the healthy fats in the egg yolks help to maintain a good level of fat-burning hormones in your body.

Overall, this means that the extra fats (healthy fats) and calories from the yolk are so nutrient-dense that they actually HELP you to burn off body fat!

Also, your normal supermarket eggs coming from mass factory farming just don't compare nutritionally with organic free range eggs from healthy chickens that are allowed to roam freely and eat a more natural diet.  Your typical cheap grocery store eggs will have lower nutrient levels and a higher omega-6 level and lower omega-3 level.  On the other hand, the cage-free organic eggs from healthier chickens allowed to eat more natural feed and roam freely will have much higher vitamin and mineral levels and a more balanced healthier omega-3 to omega-6 fatty acid ratio.

I recently compared eggs I bought at the grocery store with a batch of eggs I got at a farm stand where the chickens were free roaming and healthy.

Most people don't realize that there's a major difference because they've never bought real eggs from healthy chickens... The eggs from the grocery store had pale yellow yolks and thin weak shells. On the other hand, the healthier free range eggs from the local farm had strong thick shells and deep orange colored yolks indicating much higher nutrition levels and carotenoids... and just a healthier egg in general.

This is due to the fact that a free-roaming hen allowed to roam on plenty of land will eat a variety of greens, insects, worms, etc transferring MUCH higher levels of nutrients to the eggs compared to an unhealthy hen that is trapped inside a dark factory farm hen house in horrible conditions and fed nothing but piles of corn and soy.  It's a DRASTIC difference in the nutrition that you get from the egg.

So next time a health or fitness professional tells you that egg whites are superior (because of their "fat-phobic" mentality towards dietary fats), you can quietly ignore their advice knowing that you now understand the REAL deal about egg yolks.

And can we all please STOP with this sillyness about eating an omelete with 4-5 egg whites and only 1 egg yolk... If you want real taste and real health benefits, we'd all be better off eating ALL of our eggs with the yolks.

After all, do you REALLY think that our ancestors thousands of years ago threw out the yolks and only ate the egg whites?  NOT A CHANCE!  They intuitively knew that all of the nutrition was found in the yolks.  But our modern society has been brainwashed with misinformation about fats and cholesterol.

Another interesting study about eggs...

I read a study recently that compared groups of people that ate egg breakfasts vs groups of people that ate cereal or bagel-based breakfasts.  The results of the study showed that the egg eaters lost or maintained a healthier bodyweight, while the cereal/bagel eaters gained weight. 

It was hypothesized that the egg eaters actually ate less calories during the remainder of the day because their appetite was more satisfied compared to the cereal/bagel eaters who would have been more prone to wild blood sugar swings and food cravings.

Enjoy your eggs and get a leaner body!

 

About the author-

Mike Geary is a Certified Nutrition Specialist and Certified Personal Trainer
He is also the Author of the best selling The Truth About 6-Pack Abs 

There is no such thing as health food.

What is health food? Is it rice cakes and sprouts? Is it fruits and nuts and vegetables? Is fish good for you or too fatty? How about eggs? Don’t they have too much cholesterol to be good for you? Milk? You should definitely be avoiding red meat right? Is it those Healthy Choice meals that are low fat and low sodium? What about trans-fat free crackers? The 100 calorie packs of Oreos? Sports drinks? Granola has to be healthy right? What about chocolate? I heard chocolate has antioxidants? Oh I know, the healthiest stuff is the exotic food. Like berries grown on the sides of distant mountains that no human has ever had access to!

What exactly is health food?

All most of us know about health food is that it’s boring, bland, expensive, and it’s confusing as all hell. There is a way to make it really simple though. Ready? Here it is…

There is no such thing as health food.

I know. It’s totally nutty right? After all, if there’s no such thing as health food then what are all those health food stores for? Well follow me in my craziness for a minute and think you’ll agree with me.  

Today, there seems to be a war against food. Calories are bad, fat is bad, carbs are bad, animal protein bad, plant protein isn’t complete, meat is bad, fruit is bad, beans mimic hormones, milk is the devil, eggs will kill you, sugar is bad, salt is bad, cholesterol is bad, vitamin toxicity!, too much iron in your diet, trans fats! Oh NO!

The list goes on and on and on but the truth is all of that is a bunch of BS. Is there some truth to some of it? Sure. I think we all know that anything to an extreme is a bad thing but that’s not where this comes from. Where it comes from is the very concept of health food vs. regular food.  Tell me if you’ve heard this question before?

“Is there really any advantage of eating organically grown food in comparison to conventionally grown food?” See the problem with that is the mere fact that conventionally grown no longer means organically grown and organically grown has become some hoity-toity yuppie phrase for I shop at Whole Foods so I’m better than you. Conventionally grown should be throwing a seed in the ground and putting some water on it. If you wanna get really fancy you can rotate crops and throw some shmancy cow dung on top of it. I’m not a farmer but I hear crops like BS and that’s good because it gives them somewhere to put it other than shoveling it out to us.

The reason there is a war on food is because mainstream food is no longer food and the stuff we call food is killing us instead of nourishing us. It’s not “conventional” vs. organic and it’s not health food vs. junk food;

It’s food vs. not food.

  

 

 

This is not Cookie Monster food.
 

 

For years now there has been talk about red meat being unhealthy. Let me explain this a little. Most people under about the age of 30 have never tasted red meat in their lives. Did you know that red meat is naturally lean? Red meat packed with vitamins and minerals and healthy fats. It has a very distinct flavor that doesn’t come just from the fat. Red meat comes from animals like cows that have natural diets and lifestyles. Their natural diets that they are meant to eat provide them nutrients and allow them to grow at the pace they were meant to grow. Their hormones are self regulated and they get exercise and have healthy immune systems. As their bodies are filled with nutrients, those nutrients are then passed onto us when we consume them.

What most of us consider red meat is that of an animal that is fed a diet that leaves it malnourished and sick, it’s given hormones to make it grow faster than it should (think steroids and what it does to the human body), it lives its entire life in a cage so small it can’t turn around, it gets no exercise, it stands knee-deep its own feces each day, and in order to keep it alive through all of this they load it up with manmade antibiotics. Most of today’s cattle farmers agree that if they didn’t slaughter the animals when they do, they would be dead in a few months anyway. As their bodies are filled with sickness and disease, that sickness will also be passed onto us when we consume them.

People think of grass fed vs. grain fed beef as both beef but one is a little healthier than the other. The truth is they are not the same product. Grain fed might as well be imitation meat. One is natural and nourishing food to us and the other is a synthetic manmade poison. Everything about it is damaged and mutated.

It’s the same way with everything. Eggs and meat from unhealthy chickens, farm fish raised on an unnatural grain diet, milk from unhealthy cows that are given hormones to produce far more milk than normal which is then pasteurized and homogenized. Even fruits and vegetables that are genetically modified, never allowed to ripen on the plant, and en route to you for weeks before you get a chance to eat them are very different from that grown naturally until ripe and eaten shortly after picked.

It’s not just that one is healthier either. It’s that one you were meant to eat and the other you weren’t. In other words one of them is food and the other isn’t.

So get the phrase health food out of your vocabulary. Stop asking yourself if this is healthy or not and start asking yourself a simpler question… Is what I’m about to eat even food? If it is, it’s healthy. If it’s processed, covered with chemicals, manmade, or genetically modified, it’s not.

I’m going to close this with a radical tip as to how you can make sure the food you’re eating at home is actual food. Follow it if you can as it’s worth trying out at the very least.

Stop shopping at the mega grocery stores and instead do your main shopping at your local farmer’s market. It’s more fun than shopping in stores, the food is healthier, you know where it comes from and are encouraged to ask questions about how it was grown and raised, and the money you spend doesn’t end up in Walmart’s coffers but instead your local community.  What’s that you say? You won’t be able to buy Pop Tarts and Twinkies and Healthy Choice meals? Well then, you’ve officially won the grocery shopping wars now haven’t you?

 

Until next time,

Kris

 

PS: If you found this helpful please hit the Facebook "like" button below! You can also subscribe to my updates by going to www.facebook.com/fitnessquests and becoming a fan of the page. I do stuff for my Facebook fans that never makes it to the blog so it's worth subscribing to. Thanks for reading!

Here's a free thank you gift to my readers.

Hey guys and gals!

I just wanted to take a second to thank all of you that have been reading my blog and spreading the word to others. Although the reading base is still low, it seems to grow a little everyday as you guys continue to pass the important information on to your friends and loved ones. For that and for being pretty much the coolest people ever, I thank you.

So, instead of a post today, I wanted to give you something a little better. I just picked up an ebook written by Mike Geary who is a fitness and nutrition author that I greatly respect. Mike, like me, is a big advocate of using better health to have a better body. He's used that formula to write what is now the best selling six-pack abs book on the internet called "Truth About Abs". You can pick up a copy here Fatlossessentials.com if you're interested. It really is everything it says it is.

A few minutes ago though I got my hands on another book of his called Training & Nutrition Insider Secrets for a Lean-Body. It's normally about $18 but Mike has decided to let a few of us give it away to our readers and I was lucky enough to get on board for you guys. It's pretty substantial too. Its about 65 pages and touches on a bunch of helpful topics. To grab a free copy just click the link below and it will open in your browser in PDF form. I recommend you save it to your hard drive cause you'll want to have a copy to look over later.

Download free ebook here!

If you know someone else that might be interested you can send them here or you can simply email them the book. I hope you enjoy it and get something great out of it! I'll be back with some new stuff in a couple days.

 

Until next time,

Kris

 

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Why all the health misinformation? Also milk revisited!

 

I read an article today on RealAge.com entitled “Not seeing workout results? Drink this.” It says that a 12 week study showed that drinking 8-16 ounces of non-fat milk after a strength training workout burns five times as much fat and builds twice as much muscle as drinking sports drinks.

The article goes on to say that apparently the perfect combination of calcium, vitamin D, and healthy proteins is just what your body needs after a workout. The problem with this study building a case for milk is that it didn’t compare milk to nothing or milk to water, it compared milk to sports drinks (or salty Kool-aid). It then says that because it worked better than sports drinks, it must be all of its wonderful features and benefits that make it so wonderful.

I’ve used this analogy before but it’s similar to calling Pepsi a healthy beverage because it killed 99% less people when consumed than heavily radioactive material.

After going on for a while about it they do throw in a quick sentence that I was surprised to see that said strength training with water may have the same effect but this is only after they’ve made their case for drinking milk after a workout.

Now, don’t get me wrong. This is not an anti-milk campaign I’m launching here. I just want to point out how these studies get twisted around to mean things that they don’t actually mean.

The really interesting thing to me though is not the article, but the comments. As of the time I’m writing this, the article has 3 comments. These are what I’m more interested in because it shows the state of the people that have to listen to this constant barrage of misinformation. I hope you’ll find it interesting as well.

First we have Alfalfa14394 who says:

Drink this… I agree with the docs. I am a 51 yr old woman and when I do any work out hard or not I find that when I drink a glass of 1% milk or a 8oz glass of kefir I feel better and the hunger pangs stay away. I live in the desert and all fluid is good, especially milk.

Next there’s Bayleaf15965 who says:

Drinking milk… Non fat or regular milk is not good for anyone except babies. I go along with Dr. Frank Lipman who gives many reasons why we SHOULD NOT DRINK MILK. For that matter dairy products are not healthy generally either. And for me there is an ethical reason. The way we are raising our cows today is very cruel and an abomination. Soy milk is fine for me as well as soy cream cheese and sour cream. Healthier and I don't cause any innocent animal suffering.

And Last we have Set2Go7238 who says:

I was told recently that you cant build muscle unless you are training like an elite athelete or a body builder? is this wrong? I was told that I can make my muscles stronger but not build them? I am a 45 year old women doing regular resistance excercise. Are you saying that it is possible for me to build muscle? I am a little confused :-)

OK, so why am I bringing your attention to the comments? Because I know that they are not alone. I know that many of you may be floundering in the same pools of misinformation that just leave you stuck. Now I’m going to go through them.

Notice the difference between the first and second one? One says, I agree with this and milk is great and the other says, no one but babies should drink milk for both health and moral reasons. So who’s right?

Well I have to tell you that if I had no other knowledge of milk than just this I would go with the first one. I don’t care that one of them got their information from someone that had a lot of schooling and can put some letters around his name. The reason I would go with the first one is because she says that it works for her. It makes her feel better. The other commenter has just jumped on someone else’s crusade and has no information to offer of her own based on her own experience.

If you need to know my take on it it’s this. Milk is an incredibly healthful food with an amazing amount of health benefits. I would go so far as to call milk one of the few real “super foods”. However, just like almost all other natural foods, once you start screwing with it, you can turn something from healthy into poison. Milk is no exception.

When you give animals a nutrient deficient and health damaging cheap diet, load them up with hormones and antibiotics so they produce several times as much milk as they should and don’t die from the conditions they’re left in, let them stand in their own feces, and keep tubes connected to their udders that cause sores to form that leak into the product, you’re going to have a bad product. Then when you pasteurize it cause you now have to kill the disease you’ve caused which destroys the once healthy proteins and then homogenize it so it’s nice and smooth thereby damaging the once healthy fats, the end product doesn’t even begin to resemble what it could have been.

So is milk bad? No, milk is fantastic! Is mass produced garbage milk from damaged animals that is then processed to get rid of all the diseases and germs healthy? Probably not so much. If you want good milk, get it raw from a farm that comes from pasture raised, grass fed, organic, healthy, social cows. One taste and you’ll know that the flavorless, watery crap you get at the grocery store is not really milk. Also, this takes out any moral dilemma as the animals are actually well taken care of. If you can’t get raw milk, the next best thing is something like this.

 

It doesn't have to be this brand but this is what's in my fridge right now. The important things are Non-homogenized (fat isn't damaged), grass fed, (healthy diet+free roaming happy cow) and organic (no hormones or excessing drugs) is what you’re looking for.

Now for the last commenter…  Notice she didn’t even mention milk? She just wants someone to be straight with her as to whether or not it’s possible to build muscle! This is simply a product of too many people spouting out too much nonsense in order to sell a product as well as people like this, making studies about things they’re not really about to get people to read their articles.

Remember the title of this article? “Not seeing workout results? Drink this.” Obviously it’s meant to get people curious enough to click on it and that’s fine. I have no problem with that. The problem I have is that they’re being dishonest in their selling of the story.

The title should have read, “Find out which beverage is 5 times more effective at burning fat than sports drinks.” Now people that don’t know how this works and skim through the article are duped into thinking that all they have to do is drink milk after a workout and they’ll build a bunch of muscle and burn a ton of fat. It’s not even what the article is about but you have poor, confused Set2Go7238 that just can’t make heads or tails of it and just wants a straight answer!

If you’re interested in reading the article btw, here’s the link below…

http://www.realage.com/blogs/doctor-oz-roizen/not-seeing-workout-results-drink-this?cbr=TWTTR01

In closing…

Many people ask me why I write this blog and I’d have to tell you, it certainly isn’t for the money. I write this blog for two reasons. First is my love for the topics, and second is because I feel an obligation. Health is a wonderful and important thing and it should be treated that way. I have a passion for being healthy and feeling better and I’m shocked daily by the amount of people that treat it solely as a source of income. Hey, it’s fine to make money in the health field, but if you’re going to take money for anything, provide a proper product or service to the people paying you. Today, the field that I love so much is tainted with mountains of bad information and snake oil. Half the people that think they’re giving out good information anymore have been so tainted by it all that they are inadvertently giving wrong advice themselves.

Because of this, I feel that it is my obligation to do what I can to set the record straight. Maybe I can’t stand up to the mountains of new fad diets coming out daily but I can get to a few people and they can maybe get to a few more until a difference is actually made. This is why I say, if you like the articles, share them on Facebook or Stumbleupon, retweet or Digg them, or even just send an “old fashion” email to a friend. You do something to get the word out and I’ll keep telling everyone the truth.

Until next time,

Kris

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What IS FD&C Yellow 5? Tartrazine?

When I was growing up in the 90’s there was a rumor going around that drinking PepsiCo’s Mountain Dew soft drink would lead to testicular atrophy. That’s a nice way of saying it will make your little guys littler. Since this was a less than popular thought, for many of us, “Doing The Dew” was now out. The reason this was said to happen was due to a high concentration of a dye known as FD&C Yellow 5.

I was never sure if that was true or not but it’s always kind of stuck out in my memory which has made the presence of “yellow 5” on the back of all those packages really stand out. Now I’d like to take a closer look at what exactly FD&C Yellow 5 is and what effects it can have on the human body.

So what is FD&C Yellow 5 or E102 as it’s known in Europe?

Yellow no.5 is a synthetic bright yellow azo chemical dye called tartrazine. Tartrazine has been used since 1916 in various foods, drugs, and cosmetics. Today, tartrazine is the most widely used artificial color in the world and it accounts for as much as 85% of all food coloring ingested in the US.   

  

Unnecessarily in your food. 

 

Tartrazine is found in many products including confectionery, cotton candy, soft drinks (Mountain Dew), energy drinks, instant puddings, flavored corn chips, cereals, cake mixes, pastries, custard powder, soups (particularly instant or "cube" soups), sauces, some rices, powdered drink mixes, sports drinks, ice cream, ice pops, candy, Peeps marshmallow treats, chewing gum, marzipan, jam, jelly, gelatins, marmalade, mustard, horseradish, yogurt, noodles such as egg noodles and Kraft Dinner, pickles and other pickled products, certain brands of fruit squash, fruit cordial, potato chips, biscuits, caviar, wine, beer, mixers, and many convenience foods together with glycerin, lemon and honey products. It’s even fed to chickens to make the yolks of their eggs appear more yellow and nutritious.

It’s also found in non-food products such as soaps, cosmetics, shampoos and other hair products, moisturizers, crayons, tattoo ink, hand sanitizer, stamp dyes, vitamins, antacids, medicinal capsules and certain prescription drugs.

It’s been VERY difficult to get any real information on what tartrazine really is or how it’s actually made due to the tight lipped nature of the industry, but fortunately I was able to find a truly fascinating book entitled, Twinkie Deconstructed by author Steve Ettinger. If you haven’t read it I highly recommend it. Essentially it’s all about the author’s journey to discover what exactly the 39 ingredients listed on the back of a Twinkie box really are. He visits the factories where these “ingredients” are made and traces everything back to its origins. I highly recommend the book even if you don’t eat sweets at all because most of those ingredients are the same ones found in most “health foods” today.

From his book I was able to gather some hard to come by information about tartrazine and how it’s made. Tartrazine comes from benzene which is a colorless runoff from crude oil (more below). It’s then mixed with nitric and sulfuric acids to make aniline which is modified to change the color saturation. The number 5 is just where it is in the color scale and the order in which it was created.

I’m not a chemist but here’s a little something about benzene. It’s a colorless, highly flammable chemical compound that is naturally found in, and synthesized from, petroleum. It’s a liquid. It used to be used as a gasoline additive but they’ve stopped using it now because it’s a carcinogen. It’s still used to make plastic, drugs, rubber, and your food dyes. That’s right, it can’t be used with gasoline because it’s too poisonous but the FDA will let you ingest it. (funny thing is they replaced amaranth with red 40 because they said amaranth might be a carcinogen.)

Warning, there are some rants coming up…

In 1979, the FDA mandated that all food and food stuff products containing tartrazine be labeled due to strong allergic reactions people were having. The USDA has similar rules when added to meat and poultry (yes, it’s even added to meat and poultry). It’s estimated that 360,000 people in the US have strong allergic reactions to tartrazine although it usually goes undiagnosed so the numbers could be considerably higher. People with aspirin intolerances, asthmatics, pregnant women, and children/teens usually have greater sensitivities to tartrazine. It’s important to keep in mind that these immunological reactions can come from either ingestion or cutaneous (skin) exposure.

A variety of immunologic responses have been attributed to tartrazine exposure, including anxiety, asthma, migraines, clinical depression, blurred vision, itching, general weakness, heat waves, hyperactivity (mimicking ADD), feeling of suffocation, lupus, purple skin patches, sleep disturbance, throat cancer, and more. Plus, they’re now also finding proof of its estrogenic effects on the body (this means it's making you fat, sterile, more susceptible to different types of cancers, girls are maturing faster and boys slower).

All of this pretty much ensures that it gets the FDA’s ‘generally regarded as safe’ (GRAS) stamp of approval! As long as there’s an unnecessary pill to combat its effects, it’s safe to the FDA!

This should give you an idea of who’s watching out for you. Tartrazine is a dye that serves no purpose and has no reason to be in your food other than to cover up just how grey and nutritionally void the food is and allow them to better market this nutritionally void food to you. The FDA and the USDA both know this and acknowledged the major health consequences of tartrazine when they demanded it's listing in the ingredients. Yet not only do they continue to allow food companies to keep using this deceptive, dangerous, and completely worthless dye with greater and greater frequency, they take the bite out of their own action by not educating the public to what this new ingredient we're seeing even is.

Then, each time the food companies are questioned about it, they just point to the FDA’s ruling of it being ‘generally regarded as safe’ to cover their ass. They have actually used this to file and win slander lawsuits against people for trying to alert the public of the documented and acknowledged dangers of the additives in the foods they are eating! UGH!

You see how messed up that is? The FDA discovered 31 years ago that tartrazine is bad for you. Then instead of banning it, they tell the food companies that they can leave it in but they have to mark it in the ingredients list. They don’t mention to the public to watch for it. It’s just a new ingredient we see now if you read labels. Next to 15 words I can’t pronounce, yellow 5 doesn’t even sound that bad. Because they’re still allowing it, they have to keep it on their big generic list of substances that are generally regarded as safe because there is no other list. So the food companies that just got the ‘huge regulatory smack down’ of having to put it on their packaging, can still say, “Well, sure it’s in there, but according the FDA (that just required its listing because it’s not safe), it’s safe!” And this is how our toothless government oversight organizations can do their job of ‘protecting’ the public while really allowing big money to do whatever they want.

Europe and Tartrazine

The use of tartrazine has long been banned in Norway. Austria and Germany also put a ban on its use before European Parliament and Council Directive 94/36/EC lifted the ban. I guess this was unfair to the food companies to not be able to dye their food before trying selling it to them.

More recently on September 6, 2007, the British Food Standards Agency revised advice on six artificial food additives, including tartrazine.

Professor Jim Stevenson from Southampton University, and author of the report, said: "This has been a major study investigating an important area of research. The results suggest that consumption of certain mixtures of artificial food colors and sodium benzoate preservative are associated with increases in hyperactive behavior in children."However, parents should not think that simply taking these additives out of food will prevent hyperactive disorders. We know that many other influences are at work but this at least is one a child can avoid."

On April 10, 2008, the Food Standards Agency called for a voluntary removal of the colors (but not sodium benzoate) by 2009. In addition, it recommended that there should be action to phase them out in food and drink in the European Union (EU) over a specified period. UK ministers took it a step further and called for their phase out by 2009.

In closing, while there always seems to be a battle over whether or not all the garbage that is put in our food and drink is harmful, I would have to argue that if it’s not absolutely needed, it should go. This should ring especially true when this thing that’s not needed serves to hide the lack of healthful nutrients and serves to trick our built in systems that are attracted to colorful foods for health reasons into eating garbage that mimics real food to our brains.

So next time you’re throwing some food in the cart, turn it around and if you see any of those yellow 5’s, red 40’s, etc, just put it back on the shelf. We may not be able to get the FDA to ban it, but that doesn’t mean we can’t protect ourselves. Remember, each dollar you spend is a vote to the food companies and it doesn’t take many votes to stir things up.

  

  

Until next time,

Kris

 

PS: If you got something useful out of this article, you can help others find it by hitting the Facebook "Like" button below and/or by Stumbling this post on Stumbleupon. If you would like to be notified of future articles, please hit the Facebook "Like" button at the top right side of the page or you can go to www.facebook.com/fitnessquests where I give free quick tips on how to reach your health and fitness goals. You can also follow me on Twitter @Easywhey. Thanks for reading!

What does naturally sweetened by dehydrated cane juice really mean?

Are products naturally sweetened by dehydrated cane juice really any healthier?

Have you ever wondered what all of those ingredients on the side of food containers actually are? Have you ever actually wondered what exactly yellow #5 or red #40 is? What does it look like? Does it have a flavor? How do they make it? Is it poisonous?

How about high fructose corn syrup? Sure, it’s in everything and you hear the arguments about its adverse health effects. But have you ever wondered what exactly it is? How do they make it? What does it look like? Why do they insist on using it? What’s the difference between high fructose and regular corn syrup? Etc…

If you’re like most people, even if you have had these questions, you simply haven’t had the time to actually sit down and do the research. For this reason I’ve decided to start a new intermittent series of posts to dissect just what exactly these ingredients are and how they affect your health and fitness goals.

For the first post in this series I’d like to address something I’ve been seeing more and more on health food packaging. The companies that have been rightfully moving away from HFCS and cancer causing artificial sweeteners seem to have found new healthy ways of sweetening their foods. In fact, you’ve probably seen some labels that say stuff like “naturally sweetened by dehydrated cane juice”. Have you stopped to think about what that means though?

This chinchilla has warm fuzzies about foods naturally sweetened by dehydrated cane juice.

 

  

Naturally sweetened by cane juice… It sounds so nice doesn’t it? It’s very natural and healthy sounding. Kind of gives me warm fuzzies and makes me want to type little emoticon smiley faces like this one J. The truth is, it should make you want to as well if for no other reason than it’s a million times better than foods sweetened with high fructose corn syrup or other artificial sweeteners.

Why not just use sugar though? Is dehydrated cane juice really superior to sweetening with regular old table sugar?

You may have figured out already that this is sort of a trick question. It would be impossible for dehydrated cane juice to be superior to regular table sugar because all table sugar is, is dehydrated cane juice.

When sugar cane was originally discovered in Southeast Asia it was mainly just chewed on by the natives for its sweetness. It had very few sweetening applications. However in about 350AD, the people of India discovered the secret of dehydrating the juice from the cane into crystal form which was easy to transport and cook with and allowed it to easily spread throughout the rest of the world. It quickly replaced honey as the number one sweetener used across the known world and the rest is history.

So next time you see “naturally sweetened by dehydrated cane juice”, you’ll know that this is just a feel good fancy way of saying, “We’ve added a bunch of sugar to your ‘health food’ but we’ve found that if we change the wording, you’ll still consider our junk food to be healthy and you’ll buy it!”

Nice huh?

 

Until next time,

Kris

 

PS: If you got something useful out of this article, you can help others find it by hitting the Facebook "Like" button below and/or by Stumbling this post on Stumbleupon. If you would like to be notified of future articles, please hit the Facebook "Like" button at the top right side of the page or you can go to www.facebook.com/fitnessquests where I give free quick tips on how to reach your health and fitness goals. You can also follow me on Twitter @Easywhey. Thanks for reading!

The importance of home for your diet

Out of all the insights that I’ve had over the years that have helped me to grow and to keep myself healthy, this has been one of the biggest. It has been a pillar of my strength and will power and has served as a constant reminder of what I should be doing at all times. Quite simply…

Respect your home.

The place in which you hang your hat is your territory.  It’s your environment you create for yourself. It’s your home. Home is a place to recharge and seek nourishment. This means nourishment of your body, your mind, and your soul. It’s where all can be exposed with no worry of being hurt or ridiculed; you can let your guard down. It’s where you can surround yourself of constant reminders of who you are as an individual. It’s the one place that you personally control and nothing should be allowed inside it that’s negative or can sabotage you in any way.

Your home is the only place in the world that you have this kind of control and that should absolutely be respected.

This means not allowing others to bring anything into your home that you don’t want there (including drama). Not allowing them to bring anything in that could hurt you in anyway. It even means being selective of what you allow from radio and television to come into your home. All that is in vain however, if you are not mindful of what you bring into your home.  Anything you bring in should be nourishing to you and nothing should be damaging. You have complete control of what’s there. No one else does. So if you allow yourself to be sabotaged in your own home, how do you plan on having success outside the home?

 

There is an obvious correlation here with food. If it’s important to you to be healthy, fit, and well nourished, you should be actively bringing in an abundance of nourishing foods into your home, while blocking access to damaging and harmful foods.

The one true place that you can have complete control of what goes into your body is in your home. Once again, if you sabotage yourself here, you have no chance of controlling it anywhere else in your life. This should be a constant thought when you are in the grocery store figuring out what you are going to be bringing back with you to your home. If it goes in your cart, it will end up not just in your home but in your body, so don’t put it in the cart in the first place.

A tip to make this easier while grocery shopping is to stay in the perimeter of the store as much as possible. The more you stay out of the aisles the better. It’s the aisles that are filled with the chips and cookies and frozen foods while the perimeter is loaded with fresh fruits, vegetables, meat, eggs, and dairy products. Granted not all of these are good for you but they are a lot better than most of the processed garbage found in the aisles.

On occasion, your cravings will get the best of you. There will be special occasions and get-togethers when some junk food will be part of the occasion. The purchase of this type of food, as a practice, should never be included in your regular grocery shopping though. If one night I get a craving for something that just won’t go away, my life is designed so that I have to go out of my way to fill that craving. I have to get up and physically leave my house to go get it. It’s not in my house already because my rules of grocery shopping prohibited me from buying it. This helps me to avoid the pitfalls of sabotaging my diet in my own home. I have to justify it to myself much more if I can’t just go to the freezer and grab the ice cream. 

 

If you practice looking at your home as a place of nourishment, it will have a great effect on your life and your health.

As a side note, I understand that some of you might be saying that this doesn’t work if you have a roommate or a significant other that has their own ideas of what they want to bring into the house. Clearly you can’t stop them from making their home their own as well?

Of course there will always be some truth to this. But if you’re in a situation where you have say a roommate or BF/GF living with you that stops you from having your own space and allowing yourself to have a spot to recharge and just be yourself, you should probably take that as a sign that its time to move on. It’s that important to have your own environment.

If you’re married and things just aren't that simple, I suggest you try to reconnect on the grounds you originally came together on and talk about it. Most people marry because they have commonalities and respect for one another. While people change over time, these things shouldn’t really change. Connect on this level and then explain yourself and what it is you need from your home that you’re not getting. Then find out what they need and make it a joint project to find ways to help each other obtain them. There’s always a way. You just may have to get creative.

Until next time,

Kris

  

  

PS: If you got something useful out of this article, you can help others find it by hitting the Facebook "Like" button below and/or by Stumbling this post on Stumbleupon. If you would like to be notified of future articles, please hit the Facebook "Like" button at the top right side of the page or you can follow me on Twitter @Easywhey. Thanks for reading!

Finally!! An inclusive breakdown of foods you should and shouldn't eat.

Food is expensive. Margins are extremely low and competition is extremely high. Because of this, most food companies have had to come up with the cheapest ways possible to put a product out on the market and get you to buy it. I’ve discussed this before in my post about flavor and how it’s probably killing you. The way they do this is to use processed and genetically altered products to help with their bottom line.

The problem is that these processes act as great detriments to our health. They know though that they can’t really let this out into the media as it would kill their sales so instead they do the exact opposite and actually market these “foods” as healthy! So how do they do it? How do they create something that is actively making people sick and then successfully manage to turn around and make people believe it’s a health food? Simple: they create a false villain. They take everyone’s eyes off the man behind the curtain. Just like an illusionist, they focus the attention of the crowd somewhere else, allowing them to pull off the trick right in front of your face. How? It’s simple…

They’ve created a false paradigm in which calories, fat, and carbs are seen as evil instead of the source of life-giving essential nutrients that they once were. Then to further complicate this, they do things like tell us one type of fat is worse than another. Then they conduct thousands of “scientific studies” and manipulate the results so we will sit here like idiots debating it instead of paying attention to what they’re actually doing. Instead of paying attention to the fact that they are the ones making it true that calories and carbs and fats are bad because their methods are poisonous to our bodies.

Once you make saturated fat evil, it’s easy to take the saturated fat out of the food and replace it with a bunch of artificial flavors, sodium, and emulsifiers. Then you can slap a ‘no saturated fat’ label on it and in many cases even get FDA approval to put things like “heart healthy” on your box of frozen pizza because you match the requirements of having no saturated fat. Never mind that there is nothing wrong with saturated fat and in fact you need a certain amount of it to keep your hormones regular in the same way you need cholesterol for many processes such as processing vitamin D from the sun. Never mind the fact that the stuff they added in its place actually is bad for you.

The point is, once you create your own book on what is and isn’t healthy, it’s very easy to call your products healthy simply because they fit your guidelines. Furthermore, when you have billions of dollars to grease the palms of the regulatory agencies, it’s not very hard to have them give your book their stamp of approval. Once it’s approved, it becomes school curriculum and you get to learn about things like the “bread group” being the base of a healthy diet.

 

Very confusing for a beaver

Understanding how frustrating and hard to follow all of this is, I’ve decided someone needs to make it all simpler. Since it took 30 years to determine whether or not eggs are healthy, I’m not going to make you wait for the food industry and the FDA and USDA come around to making it clear. I’ve decided to do it myself. I warn you, this list may be a little shocking to many of you and it may even be a little discouraging. Some of the foods I’m going to label will probably make you a bit disgusted when you see where they really rank health-wise. Yes, you have been lied to but today I’m going to make it extraordinarily clear what the truth is.

I also want to say that this list of foods is entirely off the top of my head. I believe it to be pretty inclusive but it’s possible I missed something and if I did, please comment to tell me what I missed and I’ll throw it in. Last caveat… this list also assumes that you are a healthy person with no allergies or other anomalies. It may not apply 100% to you.  

The rules…

This is going to be very simple. I'm going to tell you based on a rating system of 4 stars. One star shouldn't be eaten ever, and four stars should be eaten as much as possible. I'd consistently mix in some 3 star foods as well. You’ll also notice some redundancies in the one star category. This is done on purpose. Also I have nothing really more against one brand that another even though I mention a few by name.

1 Star... Junk food.

Hostess anything. Any candy bar that’s more than just high quality dark chocolate. Cookies, candy, cakes, doughnuts, deep fried anything. Chips, candy, soda, diet soda, most juice, Kool-aid, energy drinks, sports drinks, sweet tea, 80% of Starbucks menu, 90% of all other fast food menus, 75% of all sit down chain restaurants menus, 60% of mom and pop restaurant menus, just about anything from smoothie chains. Anything with white flour, white rice, anything sold in a bag or a box with more than 1 ingredient. Ice cream, most canned foods, bacon, salt, pork rinds, sugary cereals, anything made from unfermented soy, almost everything else made from soy that has been fermented, basically anything made with corn or corn byproducts (70% of everything is the grocery stores are made in some way from corn), anything with artificial sweeteners or high fructose corn syrup. Smuckers just about anything, breakfast style cereal/fruit bars, pop tarts, toaster strudels (this is all stuff in a box but throwing it in anyway), most meal replacement bars and shakes, anything unnaturally carb free or fat free. 99% of salad dressings. Any bread that's not whole grain. Commercial mayonnaise, Kellogg’s Special K, white flour pasta, american “cheese food”, most hotdogs and sandwich meat, Subway subs, flavored yogurt, corn chips, tortilla wraps, just about anything sold in a box or a bag with more than 1 ingredient, most things sold in a box or bag that only have one ingredient, hemp this, soy that, almost anything marketed as a health food, and finally, almost every damn food product you can find that comes from a major food conglomerate.

OK, that was fun! 

Two Stars!! Foods completely not needed in your diet that won't kill you but for optimum health should be avoided most of the time.

Whole grains and whole grain products (unless attempting to bulk up). Whole grain bread, whole grain pasta, brown rice, quinoa, etc. Fresh not from concentrate 100% fruit juices. Cheap chicken eggs, meat from primarily grain fed abused sick animals. Non-organic homogenized (fat damaged) pasteurized (proteins damaged) milk, non-sugary cereals and granola, commercial peanut butter, and those disgusting orangish green chalky things that grocers try to pass off as tomatoes these days. That's it.

3 Stars!! Stick with food of this caliber and above and it’s almost a ticket to stop paying attention to how much you’re eating.

Fruit of almost any kind, non-organic vegetables, steel milled oats, organic eggs, cottage cheese, non-organic plain yogurt, potatoes, natural peanut butter, organic whole milk and cheese from grass fed cows, and high quality dark chocolate.

4 Stars!! Live long, live strong.

Organic non-genetically-modified vegetables especially of the cruciferous, leafy green, and orange varieties; meat from healthy grass-fed cows and most other animals that are free to roam and eat their correct diet with no chemicals or other crap, fresh raw milk from healthy cows, eggs from truly free range chickens that peck at the ground and eat bugs and grass and only a tiny bit of healthy grains, nuts and seeds, organic plain yogurt and kefir, sweet potatoes, most organic berries, raw honey, most unsweetened teas, water, and that's it!

OK, how do you feel now? A little lied to? Did the whole grains shock you a little? If you live in the US, you’ve been told all your life that there is a “bread group” and that it was the basis for a healthy diet. It’s the bottom of the pyramid. Turns out, that was a lie and I’m happy to bust it out for you. Do I expect to have you give it up? Probably not. I personally love a good fresh baked loaf of bread and I even had whole wheat pasta for dinner tonight. You have to remember that I’m trying to gain weight right now though. If I was trying to lose weight or get more defined, my carbs would be cut down to mainly vegetables and LOTS of them.

The other thing is that of course I don’t expect you to give up all 1 star foods! I mean, there is some good stuff in those categories and let’s face it, a life in which we had to tell ourselves that we would never be able to have ice cream ever again would be a pretty crappy one. I just want you to be able to see through the lies so you can make a responsible decision for yourself without being duped into the wrong thing. If I’ve done that, I’ve accomplished my goal. Now it’s up to you to do for you. It’s up to you to hold yourself to a higher standard. You no longer have the excuse of not knowing as an alibi, so treat yourself right and remember that if it goes in your grocery cart, it’s probably going to go into your body—so choose carefully!

Until next time,

Kris

 

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The illusion of health and how its holding you back

I’m often asked why I think it is that with all the information and diets out there, people are more obese and out of shape than ever. My answer is always the same. It’s our mindset. Now stay with me, this isn’t some woo-woo article where I tell you to think about your fat melting away to make it happen. This is more than that. It’s about what people want vs what they need.

To illustrate this I’d like to talk about something I call the “illusion of health”. The illusion of health is what most diets and exercise gadgets promise us that we just can’t help but to chase. When you watch some late night commercial about an ab machine that promises to melt the fat away from your midsection and have you displaying a gorgeous set of chiseled abs in just minutes a day, what they are promising you is the illusion of health. There is no way doing some crazy crunches using the Ab Blaster 7000 is going to bring you to good health. It’s not going to reverse the damage of the processed foods you eat, it’s not going to help your body get the nutrition it’s been deprived of, it’s not going to clear your arteries of the garbage that’s caked in them, it’s not going to balance your hormones, it’s not going to heal your damaged organs or lower your risk of cancer, it’s not even going to burn fat! It’s really not going to do anything for you and that’s why you don’t see any of these things promised.

Instead they show you a bunch of fitness models that lead lifestyles that do all of these things and have the body to prove it and tries to convince you that some glorified crunches will give you a body like theirs. These things then sell like hotcakes because people want that body. They care more about the illusion of health (that body) than actual health. The problem is that if a body is not healthy in all regards, it will never look like that.

 

uh huh, yeah, I guess this belt works your biceps too huh? 

 

Diets are exactly the same way. Millions of people have decided that fat and carbs are enemy #1 to a lean body. Some people even avoid life giving fruits and vegetables because they contain carbs. This despite the libraries of studies that say that carbs and fat are essential to the body functioning as it should. Take them away and you cannot be at optimal health. That’s not cared about though because people are more interested in the illusion of health than health.

The illusion of health can be summed up as the characteristics that a healthy body displays: slim, muscular, athletic, shapely, clear skin with healthy glow and elasticity, healthy teeth and gums, etc. All the things the magazines accomplish so well with Photoshop for their covers.

The reason people are failing is simply because they are chasing the illusion instead of the real thing. You can’t eat crap or avoid major nutrients and expect to have a healthy body. It just doesn’t work that way. However, if people would concentrate on health instead of chasing some illusion, I think they would find that the illusion would no longer be an illusion at all. It would instead be the person staring back at them in the mirror day after day.

You may want to ask yourself which one you’re chasing right now. Chances are, if you’re following restrictive diets or doing an 8 minute abs DVD in the morning, you’re probably chasing the illusion. If instead of saying you want to be healthy you’re always concerned with weight loss, you’re probably chasing the illusion.

The illusion is the quick fix and if you chase it, you will end up with nothing. If you decide that becoming healthy is what you really want to do, your body will often take care of the rest.

Until next time,

Kris

 

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The difference between white and brown rice

Like many people, I grew up thinking that rice in general is a really healthy food. When I was much younger all I'd ever eaten was what we call white rice. It wasn't until my teen years that I was introduced to brown rice at all. Well into my twenties though I went on thinking that these were two separate types of food. Since all I'd ever heard about rice was that it was super healthy, I never stopped to question it.

Several years ago, when I first began my heavy interest in nutrition, I was pretty shocked to find out that what I had thought the whole time about rice was actually very wrong. Now I want to make sure that you weren't making the same mistake as I was.

So what's the difference between brown and white rice? Quite a bit really.

The fact is, there is no brown or white rice plant. There is only the rice plant (yes there are many types of rice grown but its not relevant here).

After the rice plant is harvested the seed is placed in a husker which removes the outer grain husks. What you're left with is what we refer to as brown rice. Its loaded with nutrients and fiber and its ready to be cooked and eaten.

White rice requires a few more steps though. These include removing the germ and the inner husk. Unfortunately, its in these two parts that the plant hold almost all of its fiber and nutrients. They then have to polish it in talc or glucose and then in some parts of the world, in order to sell it, it must be enriched. This is a process where they attempt to add back some of the vitamins and minerals that they remove through processing.

So what do you lose through this process of making enriched white rice out of health brown rice?

Well to start, about 3/4 of the dietary fiber is lost. Here's what else... Polished, enriched plain white rice has far less Vitamin E, Thiamine, Riboflavin, Niacin, Vitamin B6, Folic acid, Potassium, Magnesium, Iron, etc, etc, etc than brown rice offers you.

This is basically exactly the difference between wheat flour and white flour or white bread and whole wheat.

Before I go though I do want to say one more thing. Many of you know that I'm not a huge fan of grains myself. I'd rather people eat healthy meats and organic vegetables to get their nutrition but if you must eat grains like rice, make sure you at least make the healthier choice and get the whole grain. Everything else is just empty calories and carbs that do nothing but damage your body, spike your insulin, and make you fat.

Until next time,

Kris

The flavor monster-why the foods you think are healthy are actually killing you and how to fix it.

 There are many reasons why people get nutrition so wrong. In the next two installments I want to talk about some common problems that most people never think about. The reason is because many of the things that make a food bad, aren’t made obvious at first glance or through the education we're given about food.

Let me give you a quick example. I went down to FL last week to see some family and friends. I stayed with a friend of mine who, like me is a bachelor so I didn’t expect a lot of cooking to go on. I decided to run by an Applebee’s restaurant where I figured I could find a nice chicken, potato, and vegetable type of meal. How can you screw that up right? Well, leave it to the food scientists to figure out a way.

First, the chicken was like this pressed processed deal that I couldn’t quite figure out but it had so much flavor it couldn’t have been natural. Then their garlic mash potatoes were so creamy that they weren’t even potato consistency. Although they taste good, that was a lot more than garlic. I couldn’t believe when they asked me if I wanted butter and sour cream for these things. Last though was the broccoli. How can you screw up what looked to be steamed broccoli? Most people would eat the broccoli and think that they were doing something good for themselves because its broccoli. Not at Applebee’s though. I quickly noticed that there was something wrong. Sure they were delicious, but broccoli isn’t supposed to be creamy is it? I took the biggest piece and squished it down with the flat end of my fork… Like a Play-Doh factory, this butter jelly came pouring out of every crevice. There was more of this gelatinous mass than there was broccoli when it was all said and done. To their ‘credit’, it was only one big piece that it actually squeezed out of but that was enough for me to see what I was eating and be thoroughly grossed out.

I never looked at the calorie count of the meal but I can assure you that it was much higher than any chicken, potato, and vegetable meal I would have made at home and who the hell knows what kind of nasty chemicals I was putting in my body?

So why is it that I couldn’t just go into a restaurant and order a healthy meal when it was really all I was looking for? I’ll tell you why. It’s about flavor. Let’s face it, we all love flavor. I mean what is the joy of food that is bland or worse? There’s a reason people pick chocolate cake over broccoli even if you know that the broccoli is what you should be eating.

Flavor is the reason we go to one restaurant over another one. It’s what you tell your friends about when you get home. It’s why you drink your tea sweet and your coffee loaded with sweeteners and cream. In the food business, flavor is king.

Unfortunately, the king is killing you and sabotaging your weight loss goals.

See, the magic of that meal was that I was supposed to eat this “healthy” food and be none the wiser. I was supposed to feel good for eating (doing) the right thing and see that at Applebee’s, doing the right thing is actually pleasant. I was supposed to think, man, I’m gonna eat the broccoli here all the time. How do they make this good-for-me broccoli taste so damn good? This is so much better than at my house.

Problem is, most people will do just that because they haven't been taught any better. We've all grown up on the government recommendations which say that grain or rice should be the base of a healthy diet. They fail to tell you that you’re only told this because it’s cheap and abundant. Most people listened to the multibillion dollar ad campaigns designed to make you see the word “light” on a box of processed, genetically modified, chemical filled crap to mean a healthy option. We’ve grown up around the idea that soy is health food instead of the genetically modified Agent Orange…oops (sorry Monsanto)! I meant the patented Round-Up ready estrogen boosting, anti-nutrient filled, chemical covered #2 cash crop in the US that it really is. We’ve grown up thinking calories in natural sugar are far worse than calorie-free chemicals, that essential fat is deadly, and much needed cholesterol is heresy.

If you’re not paying attention, your food is killing you and you’re none-the-wiser. You're eating the broccoli and can’t figure out why your doctor keeps putting you on more medications. Your buying the fat free box of Hot Pockets and wondering why you keep gaining weight and your chest hurts. You’re eating foods that are iron rich and being told you have an iron deficiency and you can’t figure out why!

Well here’s why. Flavor. See, natural food has flavor. Its subtle but its there. Once upon a time, this flavor was enough for us but then someone discovered spices. These were healthy spices that could be used to add zest to our already delicious food. After a while though, competition started to spring up. Huge corporations got in the mix, populations boomed, farming practices got worse and began developing food that had less nutrition and less flavor, soil was depleted of nutrients, farm animals were taken off their natural diets and got sick, nutrient damaging pasteurization processes became necessary to ensure their sickness wasn’t passed to you, they found a way to process everything for better shelf life, and all the while the flavor of these foods was all but destroyed. That’s not all though, your health went right along with it.

The food companies now had a problem on their hands but with a little ingenuity they would turn it all around and create a monster of death and profit in their wake. People everywhere began getting fat and getting diseases that just a few years earlier weren’t very common at all. It wasn’t hard to see that changes needed to be made. What changes though? People don’t want to eat bland health food, plus it’s so expensive. In fact, with the population boom, it would be hard to even feed everyone on real healthy food. They needed a villain and they had it. Fat…

The new campaign would be that fat was bad, calories, are bad, cholesterol is bad. Problem is, fat free food sucks. It has no flavor and the texture is awful. The answer was to increase the sodium and sugar and to hire some lab guys known as “food scientists” to come in and fill the void. These scientists were able to develop artificial flavors and colors and emulsifiers that blew past anything found in nature and they put them in everything from our cereal to our juice. They fed chickens dye to put the yellow back in egg yolks and made new extremely flavorful candy such as Jolly Ranchers. After a while we caught on to the sugar so they started making artificial sweeteners proven from day one to give you cancer but they have no calories and they’re even sweeter than sugar. Now you can drink zero calorie Coca-Cola and because there’s no fat, sugar, or calories feel like it’s a great alternative to water. Forget about the cancer causing chemicals you’re loading your body up with.

Its gotten to the point now though that we are no longer entertained by our normal human diets. Our taste buds have been so assaulted with the artificial flavorings that we find real food to be bland and boring. We see that food as (yuck), health food. This stuff isn’t health food. It’s real food. Organic is synonymous with health food but it’s not. Organic just means no one fucked with it or injected it with anything that shouldn’t have been there or sprayed poison on it. Organic chicken and some organic vegetables without a bunch of sauce all over it is not health food, it’s just food. It’s what you would be eating if the big corporation’s scientists never came along.

The reason why Applebee’s can’t serve healthy broccoli is because you won’t eat it. It’s time to change all of this. If you’re sick of being sick, fat, medicated, and depressed then its time for you to make a few changes. First change you need to make is to begin eliminating artificial flavorings from your diet.

Some simple ways to do this are changing your artificial sweeteners to real sugar. If you go to Starbucks, stop using Splenda (sugar with chlorine injected into it) and start using Sugar in the Raw. The gradually take that down until you aren’t using sugar either. Trust me, once you get used to it, you prefer it that way.

Stop drinking soda. If you can’t stand water, try vitamin water or sports drinks. I’m not saying that these are healthy, just that it will notch you down on the flavor side until you can drink water again.

If you like milk chocolate, try to move to 70% dark chocolate. Its much healthier and has far less sugar.

If you salt your food at the table, stop it. If you’re cooking your own food and need more flavor, forget about salt. Go to your local grocery store and pick up some fresh herbs. Play with a few of them and then just add a pinch of salt. Its amazing how it will bring out the flavors in the food if done right.

As much as possible, stop eating fast food and boxed food. Do your grocery shopping at the perimeter of the store and go into the isles as little as possible. You’ll find that you’re shopping cart looks a lot better when you get to the end of the store.

Buy organic whenever possible. Organic food is often filled with minerals in balances that we need for our health. These mineral balances also effect the flavor of the food in some ways though.

There you have it. A lot of rant and some tips to help you get through the deadly food jungle that haunts our modern world. Once you break out of the land of artificial flavors, something interesting happens. You actually begin to notice new pleasant flavors in your food. Your pallet becomes more sophisticated and biting into the food you once couldn’t get enough of but you knew was killing you, will be a terrible experience that will not have you coming back for more.

Train hard,

Kris

Is soy healthy?

It seems that everywhere you turn nowadays people are touting the health benefits of soy products. Not only is soy thought of as healthy but the word soy now seems to carry connotations of pure and natural. I've even spoken to some people that equate the word soy with organic. So what can be made of it all? Well, first, people must realize that the soybean industry is tightly controlled and supported by a company called Monsanto. You may know Monsanto as the maker of the popular weed killer, Round Up. You may have also heard of them as the company that created such chemical warfare beauties as agent orange during the Vietnam War. So what do they have to do with soy?

Well, Monsanto is also a seed producer. After creating their Round Up formula, the then began genetically modifying their seeds to be what they call "Round Up Ready". What this means is they are modified so Round Up doesn't kill them. The reason this is important is because you can now spray an entire field with Round Up and it will kill everything but the seeds. No more weeding means less work and more profit.

Once they got this they got a nice little patent for their genetically modified seed that could be doused with poisonous chemicals without killing it, and as of 2005 they controlled over 90% of the soy market. If you've ever wondered why soy is known to have more chemical residue than any other plant based food, there's your answer.

Once they sufficiently controlled the market they began using gorilla tactics to ensure that everyone was using their product. Filing lawsuits on farmers that there was no way to win but fighting it would require more money than the poor farmers in the farming community typically had. They would continue pounding until the farmers either went under, or complied. Such is the world of corporate giants. Anyway, I'm off topic.

Soy is now found in virtually everything and billions of dollars are used to market it as the health food of the ages. The problem is, its not. In fact soy contains so many substances that are essentially poisons to the human body its hard to get a grasp on them all.

I started writing about them but luckily I've found an article that explains most of them even better than I'd be able to. So if you're interested in finally understanding the truth about the health benefits as well as the detriments, check out "Is Soy Healthy?"

I think you'll be a little shocked by what you find. Once you read it, if you're a comment reader, you'll notice quickly how angry people get when confronted with a truth that has been hidden from them. There are even a few of the anti-milk crowd such as "vegman" that decides to give his best anti-milk campaign statements. And I do agree with some of what he has to say but if you've been reading my stuff for any amount of time, you'll know that my feelings on the anti-milk campaign are not exactly grand. You can find my commentary on it in my Is Milk Healthy? post here.

What "vegman" clearly doesn't get though is that soy isn't just about soy milk. Its about everything. Just like corn (also majorly controlled by Monsanto) soy is now in everything.

Enjoy the reading folks. 

Train hard,

Kris 

Healthy Muscle Building Meals

Earlier today I posted my pb&j smoothie recipethat I came up with this morning and a couple hours later I got an email from a friend that basically told me that its all great and wonderful but he wanted to know what else I eat during the day to keep lean and muscular. So I decided what better way tell him than to post it here for everyone to see. After all, nutrition is very confusing and sometimes we just need someone to lay it all out for us. So, here it is, my meals for today. 

10am (woke up a it late today)-Smoothie (banana, blackberries, kefir, natural peanut butter, whey protein)

1pm Scrambled eggs-this consists of 2 whole organic eggs+six egg whites-one med/large red potato, one medium organic vine ripe tomato scrambled with fresh tarragon, a pinch of sea salt, and some fresh ground pepper. Hint (potato should be cut in thin slices and should go in the pan several minutes before anything else, I cook this in olive oil on low heat)

2pm workout (legs today with high volume, gonna hurt for a few days but feeling good)

Left the gym at 3:30pm with a high calorie protein shake in hand (yes my workouts are more than an hour, no I' not breaking my body down, if you think I am, you're either reading more than working, or your following the message boards and gurus more than you are your own body, either way, stop it)

5pm-Large baby spinach salad with chicken breast, broccoli, carrots, walnuts, organic cheese, and balsamic vinaigrette.

8pm 1 organic chicken breast with a cup of broccoli in cooked in a little teriyaki sauce. I'll add a little brown rice if I'm really hungry but usually I'm not.

Late night meal? A can of tuna with a little mayo and a small apple. Or if I'm not that hungry I'll have some almonds and some grapes or something like that.

That's pretty much it folks. You'll notice that I don't starve myself, I don't eat anything overly boring or exotic, I don't avoid meat or fat or cholesterol, I get plenty of vegetation, and I eat a good amount of food.

I think what may be more important than what I do eat is what I don't. You'll notice that I don't eat tofu and other garbage made from soy. I don't eat  packaged food made in laboratories labeled as healthy or low fat. And possibly the most important thing is that I don't base my diet on wheat and grains that I'm told are healthy because they are cheap for food manufacturers but I still get plenty of carbs through fruits and vegetables. As you can see bellow, my food choice works out quite well for me.

Also, nothing I eat is really all that time consuming. I'd say cooking up a chicken breast and broccoli is the most time intensive thing and honestly, I cook them in the same pan. Yes, I am such a bachelor :)

I simply wait until the chicken is about 90% done, I throw in the broccoli on the side, dump on a little teriyaki and throw a lid on it for about 3 minutes. Done. Viola! Steamed broccoli with flavor to set beside my chicken breast.

I guess the eggs take a bit of time because you have to cut up a few things. However what I will usually do is cut the potato up, throw it in the pan and let that cook while I scramble up the eggs in a bowl, cut up the tomato, and the tarragon. By the time I finish with that the potato is ready and it all goes in. Another five minutes is all it takes from there.

The point is, its not as hard or as daunting as it can seem. Its all about just getting your habits up to par. Its about eating for your health instead of your lesser goals such as fat loss or weight gain. Make your body healthy and the rest of the goals will come much easier (especially fat loss).

For some final pointers, I drink a lot of water. This is easy since I don't really drink anything else. Sometimes I'll have some orange juice and I do love myself some whole fat grass fed cow milk (raw if possible but at least un-homogenized). I also try to eat as much organic as possible. I like to know that the foods I'm eating are really what I think I'm eating and not full of poisons.

Well, I hope that helped you and I'd love to hear your meal ideas in the comments below. Also, if you think this could help anyone you know, please send them to this page. If I get a good response, I'll continue posting on the nutrition topic.

 

Train hard,

Kris

My New favorite Smoothie Recipe-PB&J

So a few months ago my roommate pulled out my old blender and started playing around with some smoothie ideas. I gotta say too that he's quite good with some of the recipes. For instance, he's been playing around a lot with green and black tea bases for his smoothies that give them a really interesting taste. If you've never tried anything like that before I definitely suggest giving it a shot. I'd take out the yogurt though.

A couple days ago I was at the farmers market and the had blackberries very cheap so I got a few containers. Normally I'm not a big fan of blackberries but they were like $1.50 per 6 ounce container and I knew I could find something to do with them.

The first container was used over a couple bowls of my famous cereal concoctions. For those who haven't seen my cereal recipes, it usually has two types of cereal, kefir as opposed to milk, and about 5 other ingredients like nuts, seeds, and random fruit. Its always a production. Lately I've been on an amaranth flake and granola base, almonds, pumpkin seed, flax seed, sliced apples, and blueberries kick. Oh and don't forget the organic plain kefir or yogurt instead of milk. It makes all the difference.

OK back to my story. So its been about 4 days now since I bought these blackberries and I have the second pack sitting in their completely untouched. I knew they had to be used quickly but I wasn't sure how. It seemed the obvious answer would be the blender. Problem was that I had almost no other fruit other than bananas and apples and I'm not a huge fan of apple peel in my smoothies, Yes I know I could peel it but I hate throwing away nutrients.

Anyway, I thought about it last night and wasn't sure about a banana blackberry smoothie but when I woke up this morning, it seemed like a great idea for some reason. Seemed to me that the banana would serve to mellow out the tart blackberries so I tried it. At first I put in the banana and then I dumped in the whole package of blackberries. Next for a liquid base I put in some kefir (if you don't know, kefir is like a liquid yogurt beverage which is extremely healthy and is a better pro-biotic source than yogurt. You can find it in specialty shops and health food stores).

Now if you've every used blackberries in a smoothie you know the amazing deep purple that comes from it. An entire package of blackberries was fun to watch. Once that was done I tried it and it was great but since it was breakfast, I knew I needed some fat and protein. Next I added 3 tbl sp natural peanut butter, 1 tbl sp of olive oil, and one scoop of whey protein.  

It was thick, but it taste kind of ;ie a peanut butter and jelly sandwich in a glass! I gotta say I really loved it. Tastes great, high calories, high protein, and very dense in vitamins and minerals.

 
Recipe

1 med banana

6 oz fresh blackberries

3 tbl sp natural peanut butter

1 tbl sp olive oil (optional with pb)

3 oz yogurt of kefir (I like kefir)

1 scoop (28g) whey protein.

Appx 725 calories, 40g healthy fat, 60 g carbs (15g of the fiber), 45g protein, super high vitamin and mineral content.

If you're trying to keep a lower calorie diet of you're concerned about the fat, you could by all means drop the olive oil and lower the amount of peanut butter to 2tbl sp. Personally I love peanut butter so I add more but its up to you. Feel free to play with the recipe anyway you'd like. If you have a better one or just a favorite of your own, please post it in the comments below. Oh and play with the tea thing. It really has some interesting potential.

For those of you that are into the smoothie game and looking for some new killer recipes, Craig Ballantyne (writes for fitness mags and authored the Turbulence Training series) just brought out a smoothie recipe book of his favorite ULTRA-HEALTHY mixes and I gotta tell you, of the five I've tried so far, they are freakin delicious. Before I say anymore, its not free. Its like $20 but the recipes are worth it.

I know you can get them for free online all over the place but honestly, I've seen people say that Dunkin' Donuts Coolatte or whatever it's called is healthy based on the nutrition facts on the website only to go look at it myself and be horrified by its over 100g of sugar and other ridiculousness. Therefore, I really don't trust what random internet people say is healthy. On the other hand, I know Craig actually knows what healthy is so I don't have to take ten minutes to verify each recipe.

Anyway, I picked it up for the recipes, but the rest of the book is pretty awesome also. Actually I was pretty surprised because here's this fitness and health guru that writes for the magazines that is handing you his exact weekly grocery list and telling you EXACTLY what he eats each day and why.

I mean honestly, seeing exactly what one of the top fitness guys on the planet does for himself each day to keep his year around six pack is really the Holy Grail of nutrition information. So I was pretty shocked to see it just be thrown in with a $20 ebook. There's some other stuff as well like information on staying naturally detoxed without crazy 11 day liquid diets, how to schedule in pizza and ice cream days so they don't sabotage you, how you can actually eat enough carbs to keep you more than satisfied and still actually keep your weight loss on track and some other stuff.

Anyway, I highly recommend you grab a copy. The information in there is well worth the $20 even if you're not trying to lose weight and the smoothie recipes are awesome. Oh and let me know if you make my PB&J smoothie or if you perfect it. I only did it this once so its certainly not perfect yet but it was good and I think I'm on to something.

 

Until next time,

Kris

 

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The energy balance-Muscle Vs. Fat

In our quest to lose or gain weight there are a lot of different things we hear that on the surface seem to make sense. These things seem to draw a line in the sand for us in what should work and what doesn't. The one of these I'd like to discuss today is the ~3500 calorie per pound myth.

If you haven't heard it it goes like this, roughly 3500 calories is the equivalent of one pound of body weight. Therefore if you want to lose one pound per week you's need to cut your diet by 500 calories per day or burn an additional 500 calories per day through exercise.

This makes sense right? Of course it does. But like all on paper diet science, it basically never works. The question is why not?

FIrst lets go into a few of the obvious reasons. The first is that we don't actually digest all of our food. This means there is unused energy that comes out in our feces. That means if you eat 500 calories less, you weren't absorbing all of those 500 calories anyway so its not really a full 500 calories deficit.

Next, digestion takes energy. Depending on the type of nutrient it can be more or less but its on average about 10% of our energy intake is used trying to digest the food. So once again, eliminating 500 calories would only really be like eliminating 450.

Next, different macro-nutrients (protein, fat, carbs, fiber, alcohol) absorb at different rates so depending on what you're eating, you may absorb more or less nutrients.

Water weight is another big one. The average body can shift weight easily by 10-15 pounds of just water weight and many times, changes in our diets will actually trigger water retention or gain. So even though we may have lost tissue, it will never show on the scale because its replaced by water. This is why some people can workout for weeks and lose no weight, then all at once they seem to lose 8 pounds. Its not magic, its water.

Changes In Output

Ok so many of you are now asking what happens if you were to burn an additional 500 calories instead of just changing the intake. Well, there's more to the energy equation than just intake and output. There are actually four different types of output.

Resting or basal output

Exercise output (thermic effect of action/TEA)

Non-Exercise Activity Thermogenesis/NEAT

Food output (the calories we burn to eat and digest/thermic effect of food/TEF)

The problem with simply increasing output in one area is that it can effect the output of another. For instance, if you were to go for a run to burn your 500 calories, you may find that you don't move as much as you would have when you get home because you're tired. Therefore you burn less NEAT calories which offset the 500 you burned.

There are many other things as well but my point is that no matter what you do, you'll never be able to get it down perfectly in the equation so you can't expect perfect results.

Fat Vs. Muscle

I would say the biggest flaw however is that its just wrong. Its not bodyweight that equals roughly 3500 calories' it's fat. Muscle and fat are not the same. Fat may be 3500 calories but muscle is only about 600 calories per pound. That means, that same 3500 calories could burn one pound of fat or 5.83 pounds of muscle! Of course no one is going to lose just muscle or just fat but following this logic, if you're losing more than 1 pound of weight per week with a 3500 calorie deficit, you are losing your muscle! The sad thing is that because of water weight issues, you may not even know it until its too late.

The moral of this story is that when you're dealing with the body, nothing is concrete. We are not static beings and not even the equations of life seem to stay the same for us.

 

Until next time,

Kris

PS: If you want more information on this topic, there is a great article called The Energy Balance Equation

 

 

 

  

  

 

 

 

is it possible to lose 20-30 lbs in 2 months?

is it possible to lose 20-30 lbs in 2 months?

I'm 18 years old and weighing 173lbs. I was wondering if is it possible to lose 20-30lbs in 2 months. Can u give me some workout advice on how to lose weight and belly fat.

 

Before I give my answer I just wanted to say a few things...

 

This is a question I get quite often. Change his numbers around a little and you pretty much have the worlds problem. This question actually came from Yahoo! Answers which I visit occasionally to try to help people sort out all the crap. I understand how daunting the situation of weight loss can be and its all due basically to the myriad of crap out there people are trying to tell you so you'll buy their product. Honestly folks, whether you are trying to lose fat, gain muscle, pack on the pounds, play football, learn to fly, or hibernate for the winter, the advice I give below is pretty universal. It is simply based on how the body works and what it needs. After that, the only difference in using this to pack on the muscle or lose a bunch of weight is your calorie intake. That's it. Comment below if you have any questions. Thanks.

Your Answer:

Its possible but its past what is considered healthy. This means you'll probably lose some muscle as well. To minimize that make sure you're strength training and taking in high protein. There aren't going to be any specific exercises that are proven to burn belly fat. If you have skinny-fat guy syndrome (skinny arms and legs with a gut) you're probably insulin resistant. There are things like lactic acid training with weights that can help with insulin resistance problems but its not completely proven. I don't want to go into what it entails here because in the space allotted I could really only give you enough information to get you hurt.

Bottom line though. Here's your game plan.

Eat as close to 6 meals per day as possible. try to keep it around 300 calories per meal. Try to do this with regular cadence. Your first meal should be within 20 minutes of waking up. You may have to cut this calorie intake if you aren't getting results but I wouldn't cut it much.

Eat a lot of RAW vegetables. This should be your main source of carbs.

Stay away from simple carbs outside of the occasional sugar in fruit.Fruit won't make you fat but for now, vegetables are just better options. This means don't eat most bread, pasta, white rice, etc.

Eat a source of protein with each meal. Might be tuna, chicken, nuts, cottage cheese, a glass of milk, etc.

No soda (including diet), no fruit juice, sports drinks, drink lots of water.

 

No fried food

Try not to eat anything packaged. More than one ingredient is bad. More than five is highly destructive to your goals. Can't pronounce it, it'll kill you.

Try to keep your diet organic (beef should be grass fed, chickens should be real free range.) A quick tip. You see out there a lot of chicken and eggs advertised as both free range and 100% vegetarian. When you see this, it means the "free range" part is BS. Chickens aren't vegetarians they have a wide ranging diet that consists of a lot more than the corn meal garbage they are fed.

 

Do a mix of weight training and cardio 4 days per week. You can throw in extra cardio days but I wouldn't increase the weight lifting days. On days you're doing both, do your cardio AFTER your resistance training.

Any simple sugars you eat, in other words, if you're dying for some pasta or something sweet, try to consume this around your workout time.

No carbs other than raw vegetables within four hours of sleeping.

If you aren't eating a lot of fish, take a fish oil supplement.

No alcohol

If you can follow this and adjust your calorie intake to your progress, You'll lose the weight. However, I know its a lot so take it all in and fit in what you can. Oh yeah, if you ever want to bulk up and get muscular, same formula but with more calories and more emphasis on protein intake.

Scientific health studies and why most of them are a bunch of garbage

Don't get me wrong, science can be a wonderful thing. Without it, we wouldn't have any of the modern conveniences we have today. However, I'm a little sick of reading these food studies that make bold claims that just aren't really proven.

I'm sitting here waiting for friends to head out to see the Us hockey team fight for gold against Canada and I decide to look up some stuff on whole wheat. I have my own feelings on the subject and have read about it pretty extensively but its always good to refresh yourself on the basics. So I do a quick search and find the following article.

http://www.whfoods.com/genpage.php?tname=foodspice&dbid=66

Hey, I'm impressed that they start out by telling us the importance of wheat in the US market. How it’s the biggest crop and whatnot. At least this gives us a basis for all this hoopla. So I start reading a little further.

What I come up with is all of these generalities based on these huge 12 your 80k person studies. Hey, its good to see its extensive. I'll give them that but what I won't give them is their conclusions. Basically they start telling you about the different nutrients in whole wheat and they tell you a little about how most wheat we consume is processed and is stripped of its most important nutrients. This is important information that we should know and look for.

Side note, wheat is processed for shelf life. The reason it has a greater shelf life is because it doesn't attract insects and bacteria nearly as much. The reason for that it because it has so little nutrients, insects can't survive on it so they leave it alone. Think about that next time you get yourself a nice white bread sandwich.

Anyway, they make statements such as, people that consumed more whole wheat were 19% less on average to have type II diabetes. OK, that's true enough. But the next thing they say is that this leads to the conclusion that whole wheat has qualities that fight diabetes. This is where they go too far. Look, diabetes is largely from the fact that we eat so much processed foods and simple sugars that we end up heavily insulin resistant. So it stands to reason that someone that eats less of those and more low-glycemic carbs would be less likely to be diabetic. However, to say that whole wheat therefore has some magic quality that fights diabetes is ridiculous based on these studies. It’s the equivalent of saying “People that drink Pepsi regularly live 100,000% longer than those that drink gasoline. Therefore the obvious conclusion is that Pepsi is a miracle beverage!”

Many of the other studies reported people that ate more whole wheat as opposed to more processed foods as weighing less. Once again this is probably true. However, maybe it’s not the magical qualities of wheat so much as the fact that these people are health conscious people. They probably exercise more and make better decisions all the way around. Also, we all know that its processed foods that have ruined the health of western civilizations so anything taking the number of processed foods down is a good thing that will result in better health. It doesn't mean that whole wheat is an amazing food!

Then they even go as far as to take the individual nutrients in whole wheat and based on the same studies, make conclusions that people that have more of these in their diets have x, y, and z health benefits. How in the hell do you measure that? You can't. There are nutrients in foods that we haven't even discovered yet. How do you determine the exact nutrient that causes a certain effect? Answer is that you can't and they know it. It’s all propaganda.

We in the western societies like to think of everything in its smallest part. We like to dissect everything and figure out what does what. We want to extract what we think the good parts are and get rid of the bad and the more we do that, the worse our health gets.

I'm not saying there aren't benefits to finding out what's in something and the effect it has on our bodies, just that we concentrate on it way too much. Now-a-days, walking down a vitamin isle in a Walgreens has become a very interesting thing. They have an extract from every plant, insect, jelly, fruit, bee hive, and space rock you can imagine. Reading the labels of some of these would make you think you're lucky to be alive without consuming at least a ton of this stuff by now. And once you consume it, your entire life will change on a dime. You will in fact get yourself some super powers. They are amazing. Well, I'll tell you, I've never consumed a bee hive and I'm probably in better shape than 90% of the people in the US. Why? Because I eat whole foods and I keep my body active. I try to keep away from processed and chemical laced garbage.

We have become so infatuated with what all this stuff does that we forget that its found in nature with a certain balance for a reason. Most nutrients need other nutrients to be effective. Just to be absorbed by the human body. For instance, did you know that the zinc in most multivitamins is worthless? The reason is because nutrients often compete with one another. So in this instance, the calcium from the multivitamin will be taken up first leaving most of the zinc to be wasted.

There are so many examples like this and there are also lots of cases where a deficiency or an overload of one mineral will stop the absorption of another. For instance, if you have a copper deficiency, you won't be able to properly absorb and utilize iron. If you have too much zinc, you won't be able to absorb copper and vice versa. Excess calcium will inhibit the uptake of manganese, zinc, and copper. It goes on and on.

There are healthy ratios of these vitamins and minerals to each other that the body needs to be effective. If not followed, each one will affect another. Now you can supplement all day trying to get it right but the truth is that most whole foods have the proper balance which leads me back to the idea that trying to supplement a vitamin or mineral can really cause huge chain like side effects. If your doctor tells you that you have an iron deficiency, don't go take an iron supplement, eat iron rich foods. For all you know, your iron deficiency may have something to do with a copper deficiency. Therefore no matter how much iron you take, you'll never absorb it.

If you want to learn more about his topic, please check the Joseph E. Mario book entitled, "Anti-Aging Manual: The Encyclopedia of Natural Health"

In conclusion, it’s easy to get caught up in all the hype out there. There are a million studies going on funded by all sorts of industries and they're results are interpreted in all different ways. This is why no one can figure out what’s healthy and what’s not. Then to make things worse, a marketer will get his hands on one of these studies and really blow it out of proportion making all sorts of wild claims that are "supported" by research. Folks, if you want real information, listen to your body. Have some common sense, and remember, most of the information out there is funded by the industries that profit from them.

Until next time,

Kris

 

But I don't want to be too bulky... and other weight training myths...

Hello Lads and Ladies,

Today I wanted to address the idea that if you lift weights you will become bulky and muscular because I personally think that its one of the biggest misconceptions out there and it is one that seems to stifle the progress of far too many people.

Most of us have read about the weight loss and health benefits of lifting weights. Different camps have their different opinions but I think we can agree that, while maybe not in extremes, the act of weight lifting is a generally healthy thing to do. A lot of people though that hear this and know this to be true, seem to feel as though they can't participate in this activity because it would be counter-productive to their ideal body image.

We've all seen the pictures of the massive body builders and whether its "for you" or it isn't, I think we can agree that its really not everyones taste to blow up like these guys. Hey, I understand. I want to be big and strong and have big bulging muscles but I definitely don't want to be sharing the Mr. Olympia stage. I'd still like to look somewhat natural and approachable. Fitting into normal clothing would also be kind of nice.

That's kind of what brings me to todays topic though. Today when I was at the gym, I was flattered by the approach of two guys that looked like they were really just getting started in the gym. They were young and pretty tall and really very skinny. Not much muscle tone going. I had noticed one of them earlier because of some form issues he was having with his curling. I really wanted to go help the kid out but I make a strict rule during my workouts to not converse with anyone unnecessarily. It KILLS the intensity of the workout.

Anyway, I had just finished up my workout and was filling up my water bottle for the walk home and one of the guys walked up behind me. My headphones were on and the music was pretty loud so I didn't hear him at first but I could tell there was someone behind me so I turned around and removed my headphones in anticipation of his question. I was pretty flattered when his question turned out to be asking how he could get arms like mine. Problem was that the question didn't end there. The actual questions was, "How can I get arms like yours by the end of next week?" Turns out the kid had a modeling gig the next week with a NYC high fashion clothing line and he had really just made the cut. Ideally they wanted him to stay the same weight but get really toned.

I understand his desperate want but the truth is that there wasn't really any helping him. I gave him some water control tips and a couple exercises anddiet tips. It was hard to give him more than that in a five minute window. I thought about having him meet me in the gym the next day but the truth is I could tell that as much as he "wanted it", all he wanted from me was to be able to show him a really easy thing he could do that would require no real work but allow him to have what its taken me years to build, in about two weeks. If I could have said, "Hey, just do some dumbbell curls for five minutes a day and take this Hydroxycut whenever you feel like it and you'll be golden", he would have loved me. I'm starting to understand why there are so many ridiculous diets out there that people just keep buying into. 

What I found funny though, wasn't really any of this. What I found really funny was that anything I would recommend that involved weights, we would shun off and say, "oh but I can't get big muscles". This is such a common thing. I hear this most with girls of course which is actually extra humorous.

Why is it so funny? How many guys do you see in the gym that are lifting heavy weights day in and day out trying to put on that ever elusive muscle mass? They're reading their magazines, scouring the message boards, taking 25 different types of supplements, and really just about killing themselves and if you look really close, you'll notice that they almost never get any bigger. SOme of these are younger guys that are filled with testosterone. These guys will change some but for all the grunting and groaning and effort, they certainly don't change very much.

So why is it then that when a girlfriend of mine comes up and says, "Hey, I'm looking to tone up and lose some weight, what should I do?" and I suggest a light weight program that they all do the same thing... They freak out as if they're going to turn into Arnold in they touch a dumbbell. There are so many misconceptions out there that its a little scary. I understand where they come from but we really need to do more to get the important messages across.

Let's try this...

  ********************Urgent bulletin********************

If I can spend five days a week in the gym lifting weights that are multiples of myself for while strategically eating to gain as much muscle as possible and I struggle to gain muscle, I promise you that doing a light weight routine is not going to turn you into Hercules. If I happen to be wrong and you wake up and look like Hercules, I promise,losing those results is much easier and quicker than gaining them.

    **********This has been a special announcement**********

No matter what routine you're on, the only real determination in whether you gain muscle or just tone is your diet. If you're not interested in getting bigger, that should e no excuse for you not to be lifting weights. And honestly, in many cases, to be lifting very heavy weights. You just have to make sure you're eating no more than your maintenance calories each day. If you are eating that amount or less, your body won't have anything to use to build those muscles. Can't build a house with no materials. You will get stronger though and more toned though. You will burn fat, boost your metabolism and find many other incredible health benefits. 

Likewise, if you want to build muscle, almost any program will do it also as long as you are eating and resting properly. I mean it, even a garbage program will do SOMETHING for you if you're eating and resting sufficiently. Of course, a great program mixed with proper diet and rest will take things to an entirely new level for you.

Just one note before I end this post that I think is very important. Obviously I truly believe in the benefits of weight training but I don't recommend lifting even light weights if you don't know what you are doing. If you're completely new to this, or if you haven't done it in a while, I recommend getting with a friend that knows what they are doing to be with you for several workouts, or get a trainer. I would go no less than ten workouts with the trainer to really get a feel for it. The more the better.

I talk about some of the programs I use here a lot that are great replacements for trainers but honestly, there is no book or program or even video that can teach you proper technique if you're a complete beginner. You need someone there that can be there to watch and correct you and show you how it is supposed to feel so you train your body. I can't tell you how many times in the gym I'm just cringing waiting for someone to get seriously injured. Watching someone that knows what they are doing can make it seem easy but many of these moves are not what they seem. They aren't very natural for most of our bodies that have spent years sunken into couches and desk chairs and they will find shortcuts for any movement. Unfortunately though, these shortcuts aren't meant to be repeated over and over again and if you do, you will eventually get injured.

Until next time,

Kris

 

Is milk healthy and other propaganda

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A few days ago I recieved an email from someone in the web fitness industry that basically said that I signed up for his newsletter and then told me his credentials of his website being online for many years and a bunch of other stuff. Then he went on to tell me all about how I could unsubscribe if I wanted to and put extra emphasis on the fact that he really would remove me if I wanted him to but that if I wanted to keep getting his newsletter, just do nothing and he'd keep sending it. The reason for all this emphasis was that I really hadn't signed up for his newsletter and it was really SPAM. I was going to unsubscribe out of principle but I decided it would be better just to mark it as SPAM every time I recieved a newsletter.

Well today I got a newsletter entitled "Is Milk Healthy?"

Now I've seen all the debates and I know both sides of the story so I decided to read it. Like I figured, the article was blasting milk and the propaganda machine that tries to get us to think we need it. First, this does disagree with my research which says that unpasteurized fresh milk from a healthy animal is great for you. Problem is more the fact that we desstroy our milk with the way we handle it and the animals we get it from. The other problem was, his argument was pretty much textbook milk conspiracy garbage that throws the baby out with the bathwater.

So I properly represent this person, I'm going to paste his email and my response to it.

Is Milk Healthy?

The Truth about Milk and Fitness

I get e-mails all the time from people saying they are eating a
healthy diet, and then when I ask them to list out what they
eat in a day it is not healthy at all.

But, I have to say it's not their fault, as we have all been
and still are being fed a pack of lies about food.

This is the first in a series of articles, exposing the truth.

Got Propaganda?

We have all heard "milk does a body good",  "milk is the perfect
health Food", "milk builds strong bones", "milk will help weight
loss", etc.

These just like "Got Milk?" are nothing more then advertising
slogans trying to get you to buy a product.

They are no more true then some of the past and present ads
done by cigarette companies, d rug companies, etc.

For example did you know that Camel Cigarettes, actually used
the following slogans "more doctors smoke Camels than any
other cigarette" and "for digestion's sake - smoke Camels".

Milk Truths

Besides man, no other species drinks milk beyond infancy or
drinks the milk of another species.

Cow's milk is intended for the nutritional needs of calves,
who actually have four-part stomachs.

Milk is high in sodium, fat and cholesterol.

Milk, ice cream, cheese,  yogurt, casein, whey, etc. are a
very likely cause for obesity and many health problems.

Cow's milk has been connected to food allergies, digestive
problems, bloating, gas, cramps, vomiting, headaches, rashes,
asthma, irregular heartbeats, high cholesterol, headaches,
fatigue, etc.  

Cow's milk has been tested to include high levels of toxic
chemicals including hormones, antibiotics, allergens,
herbicides, pesticides, dioxins, etc.
 
Some medical studies indicate that milk may actually increase
women's risk of getting osteoporosis. T. Colin Campbell,
professor of nutritional biochemistry at Cornell University,
said, "The association between the intake of animal protein
and fracture rates appears to be as strong as that between
cigarette smoking and lung cancer."

Where do the cows get calcium from? From plants. So eat a
big green salad next time you are concerned about getting
enough calcium.

Just Say No to Milk

If you want to lose fat, feel better and be healthy cut out
all dairy products.

END

Now some of you may have seen all the very convincing anti milk campaigns out there and be thinking to yourself that its great to see someone using his platform to spread the truth. You may also be thinking that I'm just an idiot for endorsing milk. So, I'll present to you my response which I warn you is kind of a rant and you can take your side.

My reply...

 

I'm a little disgusted by the inaccuracies and blanket statements in this "article".

 

Here's the top two stand out things in this that are ridiculous.

 

(Some medical studies indicate that milk may actually increase
women's risk of getting osteoporosis. T. Colin Campbell,
professor of nutritional biochemistry at Cornell University,
said, "The association between the intake of animal protein
and fracture rates appears to be as strong as that between
cigarette smoking and lung cancer." )

Are you kidding me? He doesn't say a damn thing about milk. He says animal proteins. So either you don't know what an animal protein is, you pulled the wrong quote, or you are grasping at straws to prove a point. With the exception of it being the second one which is a ridiculous mistake, you have no business writing a health newsletter. This is a ridiculous blanket statement.

 

Next is two parts and this is where I can tell that you are riding a propaganda train of your own.

 

In one area you mention that cows have four stomachs which seemed to be a reference to their ability to properly digest milk. Obviously stating that we don't have four stomachs. Then though, after your ridiculous comment about milk increasing the risk of osteoporosis, you say that cows get their calcium from plants so next time we want calcium, just eat what they eat. Eat a salad.

 

I'm hoping you already see the correlation I'm trying to make here. Cows have four stomachs. That means they can get nutrients out of food that we can't get. Did you bother to check the calcium content of lettuce before you threw out your recommendation there? Here, I'll make it easy for you. Here's romaine lettuce.

 

http://www.nutritiondata.com/facts/vegetables-and-vegetable-products/2475/2

 

 

That's right. 2mg or effectively 0% of our daily needs is all that's possible for our human digestion tract to obtain from lettuce. Here I'll help you out, Blackberries are a common enough fruit that is considered "rich" in calcium. Don't worry, you don't have to search, here's another link for you.

 

http://www.nutritiondata.com/facts/fruits-and-fruit-juices/1848/2

 

There. Wait what's this? 1 cup of blackberries is a serving. I doubt most people eat a cup of blackberries in a sitting really. Lets look at its rich calcium numbers. Wow, 41.8mgs. That's 20 times your salad. Oh but look, 41.8mgs is only 4% of our average needs. Since you run a body building site, I'm guessing your readers might need a little bit more too. Hmmmm. Guess that's all shot to hell.  In case you're wondering. Milk...Calcium 276mg or about 28% of our needs in an 8oz glass. Now I can see someone drinking an 8 oz glass of milk, can't you? 

 

 

The truth is that your entire argument about milk being bad for us is just as ridiculous and easily taken apart. No other species drinks milk past infancy or the milk of another species? Who the hell cares? I'm not even sure the second part of that is factually true as many animals survive as parasites to other species but I can't site the example so I won't. I can tell you cats like milk just fine. In fact, I bet if cats had opposable thumbs, they would get them some of that milk too. I bet a dog would down some milk if you put it in front of it. Truth is they can't get to because its in another animals body. I would be interested to see if predators would drink the milk out of a kill. Hmmmm. 

 

Did you know that poison dart frogs are only poisonous because of their diet? You know the frogs I'm talking about. The ones that are so poisonous, one drop would kill hundreds of men? In captivity most of them lose their poison because they aren't eating the certain insect that gives them their poison skin. If most other animals ate what they eat and thrive off of, they would die. In other words, what another species does has nothing to do with us.

 

We test stuff on rats and monkeys and then ease in to human testing because we know that just because it works on a monkey doesn't mean it will work the same in a human body. You don't think if there was an animal that was closer to a human they wouldn't be using it for testing right now? The point is, it doesn't matter what another species does. They aren't human!

 

The fact is that milk in its most commercial form is not anywhere near as healthy as portrayed and it does have certain aspects of it that are just outright poisonous. I'll give you all that, But if that's your reasoning then you have to throw out just about every piece of fruit, every vegetable, every nut and grain, every piece of meat, and lets not even get into the "healthy" packaged processed crap. We damage, almost every "food" we have by loading it up with poisons, processing it, or mistreating or misusing its source. Milk is just another food that started out healthy but we've destroyed. We've destroyed it through the mistreatment of the animals and through the pasteurization process which damages the proteins.

 

I can't wait to see what the next nutrition myth you bust for us will be. Please though, do a little research before you send it.

 

END

 

Now yes, I'll admit it was a little harsh but the fact of the matter is that this guy is out there recklessly throwing out information to probably thousands of people that he has done almost no real research on. Sure, there is some truth to it, but without the full story, its just more propaganda.

 

So what are your thoughts? Post you comments below and let me know where you stand on the issue. Oh, and as far as who this guy is, I found it best not to publicize it since my words really aren't that kind but if you want to know, leave a comment in the bottom or email me and I'll send you a link to his website.

 

Until next time,

Kris