Last weekend, a friend came to visit. It was wonderful to see her, and a few of us did the usual thing you do when a friend comes to stay: we went out one night to a fun bar, spent a day and night with drinks & movies & chatting into the wee hours, and spent another day at the beach & ate at a fabulous Greek restaurant at the end of the day.

In other words, fantastic time, but not much concern for real food (or moderation).

Well, ok, that’s not entirely correct. I talked real food with my friend quite a bit. She’s very interested in it, and she has inspired me to create a couple of things for this site (more on that to come later this month!). And she was perfectly ok with me making eggs & bacon for breakfast each morning, of course. So the days started with good food. But as the days went on, all bets were off.

And now I must recover.

Since everyone’s body chemistry is different, everyone will have different reactions to various food additives. Things that bother me won’t bother you, and vice versa. What I do know, what has become clear over time, is that MSG is one of the toughest additives for my body to deal with. It isn’t even the bloating or swollen fingers, which I don’t get very often anymore…it’s the cravings!

We’d ordered Chinese food not once, but a couple of times from our favorite local place (which means 3-4 actual meals from it!). It was incredibly tasty, as ever. So good, in fact, that I keep wanting more, even though I know it’s the chemical making me crave it. While my friend was here, we had Greek food, and it was fantastic, but I’m not craving more of it. We had a 3 a.m. Denny’s jaunt—I think their food tastes best at 3 a.m.—but I’m not craving more of it. All the other non-real things I ate were good, but they left me with the “wow it was yummy to enjoy those things, but I’m eager to get back to real food.” All except the Chinese food. Just writing this has me thinking how good it would be tonight for dinner…

You may not react to MSG the way I do, but I bet there are a few “trigger” foods that set off intense, hard-to-deny-cravings for you. Try to make a list and narrow it down:

1. What foods do you regularly crave? What are your top 3 “indulge” foods/dishes? For me, it was always Chinese food, salsa con queso, and potato chips (especially Doritos).
2. Do any of these foods have anything in common? For example, are they fried or cooked a certain way or contain chocolate or come from a certain restaurant? For my list, I know it’s MSG. I’ve tried natural salsa con queso, and while good, I don’t crave it like I do the Frito-Lay stuff or the stuff in restaurants. As for chips, I used to eat entire bags in one sitting…not because I was ravenously hungry, but because they were so good that I wanted the high I was getting off of them. The brands that affected me the worst all had MSG in them.
3. How do you feel after eating these foods? For me, I began to slowly realize that I felt horrible after eating any of this stuff. Everything from vicious mood swings to headaches to swollen joints to general bloating. It took awhile to recognize various symptoms as being related to what I’d eaten, but once I started to wonder at it, I could experiment: Eat some, note how I feel. Don’t eat it for awhile, see how I feel. Eat it again, note reaction. That’s how I became sure of the culprit.

I think the lesson here is twofold: one, it drives home the lesson that chemicals in food do indeed affect our brain (if that was ever in doubt!), and two, identifying your trigger food(s) is is key to figuring out how best to deal with them when you inevitably eat them again.

I’d never say to completely eliminate your trigger foods from your life, because as soon as I feel like I can “never” have something, I want it all the more.  Thankfully, most things I liked that contained MSG are available without it, so it was easy to phase almost all of it out and not feel like I was losing anything. But Chinese food is Chinese food…I have to accept that I’m going to eat some MSG when I indulge in Chinese*.

As for this recent indulgence, I’d gone long enough without eating additives and had been eating so much nutrient-dense food that I didn’t have the really bad reactions I used to have (no mood swings or headaches, for example). What affects me now is the cravings.

Knowing this, I can make a plan to deal with it. This is the real-food equivalent of a hangover remedy. It’s similar to knowing you will feel horrible after a night of heavy drinking, but you want to go nuts for [insert crazy celebratory occasion here], and you learned years ago how to best recover from a hangover. You get your remedy ready, and go enjoy the party.

Here’s a general approach to recovering from an indulgence in your trigger food(s). This has worked wonders for me so far, although the longer I continue on my real food journey, the more this list will grow and develop:

• Get back to eating real right away. Lots of good fat, butter, eggs, veggies with butter, pastured meats, raw milk, etc. Get the nutrients flowing back into your body.
• Have bone broth every day. I swear, bone broth is so wonderful and so healing that I call it my “magical elixir” or “pot of gold.” (A post coming soon on all the wonders of bone broth—promise!).
• Get moving. Daily exercise will help your body flush things out faster.
• Don’t beat yourself up. I talked about this in my last post, but it bears repeating. Don’t be hard on yourself for eating “bad food.” It was good, at least at the time you ate it, and you enjoyed eating it. Maybe you enjoyed it with friends. It’s ok that you enjoyed it! Remember, the body is an amazing healing organism. Eat real most of the time, and you’ll equip your body to be able to deal with the times that you don’t eat real.
• Other ideas: You’ll undoubtedly come up with other ways to recover. Maybe long, hot baths or getting a massage. Anything that helps circulation & relaxes you will be beneficial. I like to take liver-supporting herbs, both in tea and tincture form. You’ll learn as you go what things best support your body.

Was the food good enough to be worth all this? I’m not sure. But I am sure that after a few months go by, I’ll forget how irritated I was to have had these cravings and will be up for some Chinese food again. I am thankful that my reactions to MSG are not as severe as they used to be, and I attribute that to eating real 99% of the time. My body is better able to deal with the additives when it’s been getting lots of nutrients and has shored up its defenses.

Do you do anything specific to recover from eating your favorite “bad” foods? Please feel free to share!

* I could find a Chinese place that claims not to use MSG…but I’m pretty sure they all use it, just in other forms. I’m going to look into this and do a post on all the hidden ways MSG is still used in food, even when it’s supposed to be “MSG-free.”

You don’t want to end up like this, but if you do, it’s ok.

There is a lot of information on the web (and on this site) about how to switch to real food, how to make better choices, and the like. For a different take, here are some things not to do if you’re newly on the real food bandwagon:

• Don’t change everything at once: Do it in baby steps or you’ll get overwhelmed and end up like Alfred Molina’s character, the Comte de Reynaud, in the movie Chocolat—passed out amid the remains of your binge after eating an entire display of candy (see screencap, above).
• Don’t expect too many obvious physical changes right away: While you’ll undoubtedly start feeling better fairly soon, and have more stable moods, it’ll take time for your body to get used to all the good stuff going into it and to change itself accordingly. Don’t think of real food as a magic pill; think of it as a long-term investment. You’re doing this to have a healthy and vibrant 100th birthday, not to look good in your bikini next month.
• Don’t talk about your switch to everyone within hearing distance: Chances are, they don’t care about what they’re putting in their mouths, so they really don’t care about what you’re putting in yours. Think about it, did you care six months ago? A year ago? Don’t be a that annoying person who tells people (who aren’t asking) that eating Twinkies is a personal subsidization of big pharma (even though it is). Better to lead by example and explain only when asked.
• Don’t worry about it when you indulge: Not “if,” but “when.” No matter how strong your real food convictions are, at some point, you’ll eat something that couldn’t qualify as real food even if it had a passel of Hollywood spin doctors working for it and making it commercials claiming it’s natural & healthy because it’s “made from corn.” That’s ok; chill & enjoy. Sometimes you just need to indulge (says the girl who sometimes can’t resist a big order of Chinese food, or wings from Hooters, or a local-made Cuban sandwich). I sincerely believe that if you’re eating real food pretty much all the time, some junk food here & there won’t hurt. Well, you’re gonna feel crappy after eating it, which will limit how often you indulge. But the more you’re feeding yourself lots of nutrients, the more your body heals, and the better it can deal with future inputs of less-than-quality food.
• Don’t be hard on yourself if you find it hard to make the switch: If your head is fully on board with wanting real food but your body is fighting tooth and nail to keep you feeding it bad stuff—you suffer from monstrous cravings, vicious mood swings, headaches, and the like—please, no matter what, don’t criticize yourself! It’s not your fault; the bad foods are created to be addicting. All those chemicals and additives react in our bodies in such a way as to create the feeling of insatiable need, and that can be very hard to resist. It’s easier for some people to switch than others, but that has to do with individual body chemistry and is not a judgment of personal worth. If it’s hard for you to change, don’t tell yourself you’re a failure; instead, make teensy changes and praise yourself for every effort you take to eat better, even if all you do is to not eat Twinkies on Monday even though you eat them Tuesday through Sunday. Be happy with every good food choice you make. Take it in super-duper-tiny-micro-baby steps, and remember that this is a lifelong journey.

This post is part of Fight Back Friday for June 25, 2010.

Continuing from my last post about the 7 steps to switching to real food, here is a more detailed look at one way to switch: this is the basics of how I did it. Please take my ideas as just one way among many; doing these steps in this order may or may not work for you, and you might need to switch things around to find what works best. I hope that this list gives you a few ideas of how to go about switching if you are thinking of doing it.

1. Start reading all labels. All of them. Every time. No matter what. This was the “straw that broke the camel’s back” for me, because seeing just how much crap is put into food became the burr under my skin.
2. Identify what you see listed often. Look them up, read about them, and decide what you want to cut out first. Take it one (or a few) things at a time. It might take time to find alternatives to your favorite foods.
   1. As an example: One of my first cuts was high fructose corn syrup (HFCS). I used to like Oreos as a treat; one look at an Oreo ingredient list stopped that habit cold. But I found a great alternative: the brand Back to Nature, found in my grocery’s organic section, makes an oreo-type sandwich cookie that uses no HFCS and much better ingredients overall. It was the perfect alternative at the time.
3. Cut out the worst offenders. This will probably happen in stages. Pick one at a time (I think HFCS and MSG are the ones to start with), although you can cut them all at once if you’re ready. Here’s what I cut out and in what order, cuts that took a couple of years all together: peanuts (due to allergy), high fructose corn syrup, MSG in all its guises & names, partially hydrogenated oils, artificial colors/additives, excess sodium, refined sugar, fake sweeteners, soy in all forms,  prepackaged & processed food.
4. Make a list of nutrient-dense foods you like; this is key. It doesn’t matter how good liver is for you if you don’t like eating it. Find a list here on the Weston A Price site. Having a list gives you a starting place to work from when you’re wondering, “What should I eat?”
5. Examine your food budget, and decide which nutrient-dense foods you can add in (ideally, use them to replace junk foods). For example, grass-fed butter is extremely nutrient-dense, but it’s going to cost more than factory-farmed butter or margarine/fake spreads. But butter is really doggone good, lol, so adding it into your diet isn’t difficult. Try buying just enough to add onto veggies/breads daily as you get used to eating it, and see how much you consume. I find that I eat a lot more of it now than I used to eat, but I can balance out the additional cost by not buying something else:
   1. I go through about two blocks of Kerrygold butter each week; that costs $7 where I live. I used to only use about 1 stick of butter/margarine a week, if that; a big pack of four sticks at my local store was about $4, and would last me about a month. So I figure ok, I’m spending $6 more per week just for butter, but I also cut out soda around the same time, and that was costing me about $4 per week. So I ended up adding only $2 per week to my food bill, which is less than a magazine. Find a way to make switches in your budget to lessen the impact, but also remind yourself that money spent on food is a form of health insurance. More money on good food now is meant to equal less money for health issues later.
      1. A note on Kerrygold: Kerrygold is Irish butter, i.e. is imported from Ireland. The reason so many real foodies love it is that Kerrygold cows are allowed to graze on good grass, resulting in much more nutrient-dense (and delicious) butter. While I am a staunch proponent of local sources of food and eating as close to home as possible, I have yet to find a local source for butter that I can afford. Right now my main concern is healing myself and providing my body as many nutrients as I can; I am deeply grateful that Kerrygold butter is available here. My ideal is to nourish myself and support local economies at the same time, but if that’s not possible, I nourish myself first. I can support my local economy in other ways in the meantime.
6. Don’t worry if you can’t consume all the nutrient-dense foods on your list; do as many as you can, knowing that incorporating just a couple of them into your diet will make a difference. Most of us have been so nutrient-starved for so long that just adding pastured eggs and grass-fed butter daily will make a significant positive impact over time.
7. Unless you plan to be in full sun for an entire day, stop using daily sunscreen so that you can up your Vitamin D production. Don’t burn, obviously, but regular exposure allows our bodies to make vitamin D. We need the D! And it is better to get as much as possible naturally. Also, if you get enough during the summer, then you should be fine with getting less during winter; our bodies are used to this rhythm. See this recent post by Dr. Lipman about the value of letting your body make its D.
8. Add nourishing herbal infusions to your regular weekly diet to boost mineral intake.
9. Switch to real Celtic sea salt to boost minerals.
10. If you aren’t yet, get into the habit of cooking once a day. Pick an easy recipe that you can learn to make fairly easily/quickly, and incorporate it into your regular eating habits. An easy one for this is making eggs every morning; try different preparation methods, different herbs, etc. The idea is to get used to cooking every day, really cooking, in that it involves using a pan or pot, the stove/oven, and washing up afterwards. So many of us are so out of this habit that it will take time to develop it. It certainly took me a couple of years to really get in the habit of cooking just breakfast!
11. Find out which local restaurants use real food ingredients. This is handy information for times when you can’t cook or haven’t yet expanded your recipe repertoire enough or are caught off-guard and need to eat.
12. Pick another nutrient-dense recipe/food preparation method and make it often. The best thing at this point is to learn to make bone broth. It’s really pretty simple but it yields incredible rewards. You want this recipe/method to be one of your staples that you can make without looking it up and without a second thought.
13. Start getting in the habit of buying staple foods instead of recipe ingredients or pre-made individual meals. As you budget, think more about “I can afford 1/2 lb meat per person per week, and only 1 lb of potatoes for everyone, and 1 lb of onions” and then learn to cook from those limits. Some butter, 1/2 lb of meat, a pound of cooked beans, a potato, onion, carrot, and spices can be combined in all sorts of ways to make a delicious meal. Don’t cook with ingredients you don’t use often unless your budget can stand it (mine can’t, except on special occasions/holidays).
14. Start learning how to make extra food each time you cook so that you have an extra meal or two already made for the next day. This gives you “breathing room” in your cooking schedule.
15. Start budgeting more money for the most nutrient-dense foods and less money for empty calories. As an example, I am willing to spend more for grass-fed butter, raw milk cheese, raw milk (when available), pastured eggs, and good meats.
16. Pick another recipe to master, and another, and so on. Keep building your cooking skill base and your recipe base, figuring out what is easiest for you, which ingredients are affordable, what you like best, etc. Lots of experimentation here. You want to build your familiarity with cooking enough so that you can provide food whenever needed without “needing” convenience or fast foods.
    1. If you aren’t already, start replacing “fake food” recipe ingredients with real food as necessary. For example, if you’ve got a favorite recipe from your mom that includes things like vegetable oil or Crisco or refined sugar or whatever, go online and find out what to switch those out with and how much. Pretty much any recipe is adaptable. My challenge later this year? Adapting the ubiquitous Thanksgiving green bean casserole!
17. Cook all your meals using real food and refuse to waste money on industrial fake foods. At this point, you are able to either make whatever you want to eat or you are confident enough to try making it. I jumped to this stage with a very limited cooking skill base, but I was willing to wing it and learn as I go. It helps if the food situation makes you angry enough to spit nails…
18. Reduce sugar consumption drastically. I did a very low-carb/ketogenic diet once that helped me lose weight, and while on it I realized I felt really good eating less sugar. The diet was insanely tough, but after the worst was over I realized that I wanted to keep out sugars. I feel better, my moods are stable, and I’m much happier. I do eat natural carbs like potatoes, yams, carrots, and homemade breads, but I eat them all with lots of fat, and I believe that’s the best way. I very rarely eat any sugar or natural sweetener. The more I read, the more I’m becoming convinced that sugar is one of the worst diet offenders out there, and I’ll write more about this soon.
19. Eat seasonally and locally. This one I’m working on this year. I’m currently figuring out my local options for meat & dairy, preparing to grow hopefully all of my produce & herb needs, and I’m only buying what is in season. I’ve only just begun to learn what my local options are, so I know this will take time.

Last but certainly not least, know that you are making the best food choices possible no matter how small your movements forward. Know that every change you make is a step in the right direction that can stave off a lot of possible future health concerns. Of course we can’t predict the future, and even if we ate “perfectly” (if there is such a thing) we could still end up with who-knows-what disease. But doing the best we can right now with what we know is the most positive, proactive way to take charge of our health and well-being and invest in a better future.

This post is part of Real Food Wednesdays for June 23, 2010.

With all the talk about real food these days, I thought I would offer my version of making the switch. Of course, eating more eggs, raw cheese, grass-fed beef, nitrate-free bacon, and grass-fed butter is easy, right? Well, sure, eating the good stuff isn’t a problem; it’s eating the good stuff all the time and not eating the bad stuff is the more challenging part.

The basic idea

Generally speaking, I conceive of “the switch” as going in 7 steps, like this:

• STEP 1: Read labels and stop eating additives. These are things like MSG, high fructose corn syrup, artificial anything, preservatives, added color, lab-created soy ingredients. Essentially, ingredients that you couldn’t go out and hunt/pick for yourself. These are the things that can damage organs and have been shown to cause all manner of disruptions in proper body metabolism, digestion, and maintenance (see a list here). This means reading labels all the time…seems like a pain in the arse, and it will be, at first. But the more you do it, the more you’ll see just how much crap is in processed food, and you’ll get better at recognizing good food from bad. By reading labels you’ll also be able to find foods that don’t use additives, and you can eat them with confidence. As an example, if you love Oreos, try this. First, read the label. Then see if a store near you carries the brand “Back to Nature” (Publix carries it); pick up a box of their oreo-like cookies and read the label. Then buy ‘em and try ‘em. Delicious! Eliminating additives does not mean eliminating flavor.
• STEP 2: Eat more nutrient-dense foods. This is the easy part (unless you’re a vegetarian, but that’s a whole other ballgame). Eat more grass-fed butter, high-quality eggs, nitrite-free bacon, grass-fed meats, organic & local veggies, raw milk cheeses, raw milk if you can, coconut oil, etc. These are the foods that Weston Price identified in his work as the ones creating vibrant health, and subsequent research has confirmed that they give us the most bang for our nutritional buck (see a full list here).
• STEP 3: Learn to cook. Hopefully, the more good foods you eat and the less additives you eat will make you want to do more of both. This will mean learning to cook—it isn’t that hard, no matter how busy you are!—and learning to plan ahead a bit. But the payoff, in the form of darn good meals, will be worth it. The payoff in improved health is even more worth it! The more you cook, the more it becomes a habit. Stop eating fast food, and start getting into the habit of making your own food to have on the go (once you get used to eating real food, which is so incredibly full of flavor, you won’t want to eat the flat, tasteless garbage that is sold as “fast food”). You won’t even want “snack foods” anymore, or rarely, because once you add good fats into your diet via real food, you won’t want extra food in between your delicious meals!
• STEP 4: Eliminate most sugar. Sugar, even natural sweeteners, can wreck havoc with your blood sugar and the ripple effect in the body is toxic. Especially if you’ve been eating the “standard American diet” for a long time, you’ve been ingesting way too much sugar. It’ll take time to wean yourself off of it, but as you do, you’ll feel so good you won’t find it difficult. Happily, as you eat more good fat, you’ll find that the carbs you take in from natural sources (potatoes, yams, carrots, etc) will be filling enough. Just be sure that when you do eat natural carbs, you eat them with plenty of fat. Whenever you need a sweet fix, try something like a slice of homemade, long-fermented bread slathered in butter and with honey on top. One of my favorite ways to feed the craving!
• STEP 5: Eat seasonally & locally by supporting small farms. This requires getting to know your area and what grows when, meeting farmers and growers, and questioning food stores so that you know exactly where all of your food came from. Your local supermarket probably carries a few local fruits & veggies, but local farmer’s markets are better places to buy from. Support the family directly! Also, when you’re ready to switch to only grass-fed beef, you’ll have to get to know local farms, as that will probably be the only way to find grass-fed meat. Grass-fed isn’t a farming method that is used in mass-produced meat, so forget buying national brands. You might think there isn’t anyone near you offering grass-fed meat, but you’d be surprised. I recently discovered a farm in southern Georgia that delivers all the way down here to west central Florida! I do have closer options, but it’s good to know that there are more people than I’d thought doing it all the right way. Also, by patronizing local farmers and growers, I feel that I can be more assured of a quality product; big national companies can, and do, put out inferior products and/or sicken people with alarming regularity. A small local farm? If they do that just once, they’re out of business. Small operations are much more committed to giving you a quality product, earning your trust, and hopefully earning your repeat business.
• STEP 6: When eating out, learn what’s an acceptable compromise and what isn’t. At some point, you’ll need to (or want to) eat out. If you’re like me, you’ll do the “eating crap just this once won’t matter” routine, eat the crap, feel like crap for days after, and swear not to do it again. After I did that the first three times, I decided to figure out what I should & shouldn’t eat when I eat out, and now I can go out with friends and have a good time without being “that girl” who won’t eat & drinks only water. I’ll post more about this topic in the future, since I think it’s something people struggle with, as I did.
• STEP 7: All real food, all the time. This is the ideal to work toward, and obviously requires a complete commitment to your health and a shift in thinking about food and our relationship to it. It forces us to slow down and plan ahead, two things we’ve been trained out of doing. (Warning: this stage might start to alter your perspective on more than food.)

So that’s it in a nutshell. I’ll write next about a more detailed switch plan, but for now I hear some bacon & eggs calling my name.

I love this Cornishware lard jar! I gotta get one for my kitchen. Pic from this site (but sadly I cannot find one for sale, anywhere! Must keep searching…).

One of the first things I learned on my real food journey is that far from being the cardiac danger that the mainstream health experts would have you believe, saturated fat is a vital ingredient of vibrant health. I’d like to share what I’ve learned so far.

The background as to how and why saturated fat has been villified has been covered very well on many sites, so I won’t go into detail about that. The basics are this: In the 1950s, a researcher named Ancel Keys discovered what he considered to be a link between saturated fat, cholesterol, and heart disease. His theory came to be known as the “lipid hypothesis.” Since then, many more studies have been carried out, and despite years of health headlines to the contrary, no link has been found between saturated fat and heart disease. Indeed, when traditional populations are studied, such as what Weston A. Price did for his landmark study Nutrition and Physical Degeneration, their diets are found to contain an abundance of saturated fat, and the people are hale, hearty, and healthy. The fact that the lipid hypothesis continues to be promoted today can be attributed to the fact that sales of many drugs and fake foods are quite dependent upon it.

The “French Paradox,” the observation that the French eat all the stuff Americans think is “bad” yet have very low occurrences of heart disease, is no paradox at all; it is merely proof that saturated fat is our friend, not our foe.

What is saturated fat?

To sum it up crudely (apologies to any real science people who read this!), “fat” is one of the macronutrients of our diets (along with protein and carbohydrates). Fat is made up of “fatty acids,” which are chains of carbon atoms attached to each other with hydrogen atoms attached to each of the carbons.  ”Saturated” fatty acids are those whose carbon atoms are attached to each other via single “bonds” and then all the rest of the available space on each carbon has hydrogen atoms attached to it. The carbons are “saturated” with the hydrogens, making them very stable. “Monounsaturated” fatty acids have one pair of carbons that are bonded twice and thus each lack a hydrogen (they’re attached to each other a second time instead of picking up another hydrogen atom). “Polyunsaturated” fatty acids have two or more pairs of carbons doing the double-up game. Confused? Understandable. Check out this page for a better explanation and diagrams.

All edible fats are made up of combinations saturated, monounsaturated, and polyunsaturated fatty acids. Our bodies use them all for various functions. However, getting too much of one and not enough of others causes all sorts of problems. So how do we know how much to eat of each? Simple: eat real whole foods as they come to us from good ‘ole Mother Nature (in other words, not industrial vegetable oils or fake butter-like concoctions or Crisco). She knows how to balance it all out.

What does saturated fat do in the body?

Saturated fat is vital for so many processes in the body. Here’s a brief list:

• Saturated fat is needed to absorb nutrients; they act as carriers for fat-soluble vitamins. This is why getting vitamins via food instead of taking them in pills results in your body actually being able to use them. This is also why you get much more nutrition from vegetables if you put butter on them—the saturated fat in butter allows your body to absorb most of the nutrients. As an example, fat is needed for the body to convert the carotenes in carrots into Vitamin A; without the fat, the carotenes are unusable. You do not get nearly as much nutrition from plain vegetables as you do from those eaten with saturated fat.
• Saturated fat makes up at half or more of all cell membranes, allowing them to maintain the interrelations of the cell to its surroundings. The role of saturated fat in cell biology is incredibly complex, and for a short explanation of some of it, see this post on the Weston A Price site.
• Saturated fat helps control potential problems from other types of fat. Nora Gedgaudas, author of Primal Body, Primal Mind, says this: “Saturated fats, by virtue of their saturation are inherently resistant to oxidation and serve to protect delicate polyunsaturated fats from oxidation and help both to transport them and utilize them more effectively… 80% of what clogs arteries isn’t saturated fat or cholesterol at all, but, rather, rancid unsaturated/polyunsaturated fats that then stick to the arterial lining (like shellac) and generate irritation and inflammation.” She goes into a lot of detail about saturated fats in this post.
• Saturated fat is necessary for calcium to be absorbed into bones; take all the supplemental calcium you want or drink lots of milk, but if you’re not getting enough saturated fat in your diet, your bones won’t get the calcium.
• Saturated fat has been shown to protect the liver by reducing the buildup of fat in the liver. Non-alcoholic fatty liver disease is on the rise, and while it is a result of too much fructose in the diet, the link between saturated fat and less liver fat is telling. A liver stressed by too much fructose is even more stressed when it lacks saturated fat, thus paving the way for disease. From what I’ve seen of people around me, those who over-consume fructose usually under-consume saturated fat.
• Saturated fat feeds the brain; the brain is made up of fat and cholesterol, and skimping on saturated fat can slowly rob your brain of nutrients it needs to function properly. Think of all the problems people have today that are related to brain issues, from Alzheimer’s to depression. Coincidence? I don’t think so.
• Saturated fat lowers Lp(a), a substance that has been found to contribute to heart disease.
• Saturated fat supports metabolism. Saturated fat is used as a source of energy and slows down nutrient absorption, which keeps you feeling fuller longer.
• Saturated fat nourishes skin. Fat is what keeps skin & hair healthy throughout life, and while putting on oils and creams can have short-term benefits, nothing creates lovelier skin like feeding it from within.

…and there are plenty more. What all of this means is that saturated fat plays a crucial role in maintaining every part of health.

What happens if we don’t get enough saturated fat?

While the body can and does make saturated fat from carbohydrates, that is not the same kind of saturated fat that it gets from dietary sources. A lack of dietary saturated fat has been linked to almost every modern lifestyle disease we have. Look at the above list of what saturated fat does in the body…and then imagine what happens when those processes are interrupted due to lack of saturated fat. Even if you have only a basic understanding of body systems, you can see that problems are inevitable without saturated fat.

What are good sources of saturated fat?

Happily, eating enough saturated fat is easy and delicious. Fat gives food flavor and makes us want to eat it, thus giving us all the nutrients our bodies need. This is why food flavoring companies have spent billions upon billions in their secret labs trying to recreate the full flavor of fat-laden foods. Of course, most of us know that the fake stuff can’t even remotely compare to the real deal. There is a reason for that…your body knows when you’re trying to fool it. It knows when you’re trying to give it stuff it can’t use. Feed it actual fat, though, and you’ll feel that amazingly satiated and satisfied feeling you can’t get with anything but real fat.

So what are the best sources of saturated fat? You could probably guess most of these:

• Butter from pastured, non-treated cows and preferably a deep yellow color
• Real cheeses, cream, whey, raw milk
• Egg yolks, preferably from wandering, free-pecking hens
• Coconut oil
• Duck fat
• Ghee
• Lard
• Olive oil
• Chicken fat
• Other fatty cuts of meat such as bacon

If saturated fat information was wrong in the past, what makes it correct now?

All the science behind this can be confusing and frustrating. Back in the 50s, they thought they knew what was going on in the body, and gave out recommendations. Years go by, new illnesses appear, more research is done, new recommendations come out. The new stuff naturally contradicts the older. Why believe any of it? Who’s to say who is correct now?

For me, the best way to deal with such thoughts—and oh I’ve had them—is to look back at how people have eaten, and thrived, for millinia. Look at the above list of saturated-fat foods; these have been diet staples to all peoples throughout history. Many people subsisted on more fat than anything else, because it makes you feel full, and when food is scarce, you want to feel full. Whether you think of remote tribal peoples or Native Americans or the pioneers or even a couple centuries back in Europe, people subsisted by eating entire animals—including fat & organ meats—and added variety with a few grains and vegetables as they could, sometimes going entire winters living off of fat and meat. If saturated fat led to heart disease and death, humans would not have made it this far; a child brought up on such fare would not have lived too much past his/her teens, let alone thrived long enough to carry on the species so abundantly. Also, consider that the incidence of heart disease began to rise with the decline of saturated fats in American diets; before the early 20th century, heart disease was rare enough to be considered an anomaly. The 20th century saw a massive increase in the study of how food affects us and gave us all sorts of “eat this not that” recommendations. These caused us to stop eating all sorts of things our ancestors ate and to start eating all the newfangled fake foods meant to be “healthier” than what nature provides. A multi-billion dollar industry was born…and look around. The consequences of all that is painfully clear. The more we tinker with food, the worse off we get.

While the 20th century might have given us cures for the diseases that killed our forefathers & mothers, it also took out of our diets too many necessary nutrients and has given us new diseases to take the place of the ones we cured—plus a few new ones to boot. One step forward, two steps back. But I think of it this way: as we come to understand and respect the wisdom of the past, we can combine it with our current knowledge to create a vibrant future of truly better health.

Starting with a daily helping of saturated fat.

Sources & Links:

• Nourishing Traditions by Sally Fallon and Mary Enig
• Full Moon Feast by Jessica Prentice
• Nutrition and Physical Degeneration by Weston A Price (full text here)
• “7 Reasons to Eat Saturated Fat,” excerpted from the wonderful book The 6-Week Cure for the Middle-Aged Middle by the Drs. Eades (posted on Tim Ferris’s blog)
• “Saturated fat and heart disease: Studies old and new” by Dr. Eades
• “Two major studies conclude that saturated fat does not cause heart disease” by Dr. Briffa

Continuing on from Friday’s post about my five favorite immunity boosters (apparently when I write “tomorrow” regarding the next post, I mean “two days later”…lol!), I can’t talk about improving immune response without also talking about what to do when even the strongest immune system comes under attack.

For years I did what most people these days probably do: I would pop cold pills to mask my symptoms so I could “keep going.” However, the more I learn and study real food and herbalism, the more I have come to reject this approach. First of all, cold pills only mask symptoms, they don’t make your body kick the virus any faster. Symptoms are your body doing what it’s supposed to do, fight. And since it is fighting off invaders, the last thing it needs is to “keep going” with whatever your usual routine is. It needs rest so that it can kick virus butt.

When I decided to start foregoing cold pills, I needed to find other ways to naturally ease symptoms that also help my body fight invaders. Here are my five favorite ways to do that:

1. LOTS of rest. Yep, right at the top of the list. When I know I’ve caught a bug, or even when I suspect it, I start trying to rest as much as possible. I’ve had experiences where I feel something coming on in an afternoon, so I get into bed super early—even if I’m watching a movie, or reading, or knitting, or even still blog-reading—I just get myself more horizontal than not, try to relax, and go to sleep early. If I don’t feel better by the next morning, I repeat the resting the next day, and by the following morning, I feel back to normal. The key here is not just more sleep, but more rest. Sleeping more doesn’t help if, when you are awake, you’re pushing your body. To let it fight well, it needs a lot of rest.
2. Raw garlic: Garlic has antiviral and antibacterial properties (as well as antifungal), and since bacterial infections can often accompany colds/flu (which are viral infections), garlic is a great tool for helping kick all of it. But these properties are only active when garlic is raw and chopped/exposed to air; cooking destroys them and garlic pills are useless for fighting active infections. So to use garlic as a medicine, you gotta eat it raw. I’ve read that swallowing it with honey can mask the taste, but I don’t advise this since sugar suppresses the immune system. Best to cut a clove into a few chunks and swallow with water like you would a pill. I will eat one clove of raw garlic 3-4 times per day when I have an active cold. I do it on an empty stomach before breakfast, then with lunch and dinner, and then once more later on. I’ve never had any issues with smelling too garlicy, but even if I did, too bad, lol! I’m trying to get better, not appease others. However, the raw garlic is only a temporary measure. I must also mention that I have recently started hearing that there is apparently a campaign going on to discredit garlic by saying it “disrupts brain waves” or some such nonsense. Considering garlic’s long use throughout history, and my own personal successes using it, I’m not worried. Garlic is a wonderful ally.
3. Elderberry tincture: This one I learned about from Kiva Rose, my other favorite herbalist (along with Susun Weed, mentioned in the last post). To quote Kiva:
   

   “Elderberry does not simply stimulate the immune system, instead, it modulates the immune system to more appropriately respond to environs and circumstance. It also disarms the some cold and flu viruses and helps them flush through body quicker, while strengthening the mucus membranes, supporting the body’s natural fever mechanism without overheating, improves energy and stress handling AND last but certainly not least, it tastes great too.” From the post Elder Mother Immune Elixir

   If you don’t have any elderberry shrubs near you for harvesting your own berries, you can get them or a wonderful ready-made tincture from Mountain Rose Herbs. The tincture is especially nice since the one they offer is not only from organic elderberries (if ever you did not want pesticides in something, you don’t want them in your medicine), its alcohol base is made from organic grapes.  A “tincture” is an herb steeped in high-proof alcohol for many weeks; the alcohol is what pulls the good stuff out of the plant matter. You take only a few drops or dropperfuls of tincture at a time, no more, so you don’t have to worry about getting a buzz off the stuff. But regular alcohol, like the 100-proof vodka many herbalists use to make tinctures, is made from grains; if you are avoiding grains, you can use this particular tincture without concern regarding the alcohol used to make it.

4. Avoid all sugar. Depending on where you are on your real food journey, this one may or may not be difficult. But sugar is a known immune suppressor. While avoiding most sugar all the time is a goal to strive for, avoiding it when you have an active infection is important. The body can kick out a cold more quickly if blocks to healing are removed.
5. More bone broth: As I mentioned in my post about immune boosters, bone broth is a major player. When I get a cold, I eat more of it than normal, up to 2-3 times per day, either just warmed and in a mug or made into a soup for a full meal.

So those are my five favorites at this point in my journey. I know that some of these are easier to do than others. The most difficult things will be rest and avoiding sugar, but I believe that both are really important for fighting colds and for general well-being. The fact that we balk at these ideas says a lot about our culture and our health. I truly believe that incorporating more rest into our lives and consuming much less sugar daily are significant first steps toward reclaiming full health.

It seems I can’t go a day without hearing about someone “catching a cold” or about someone who knows someone who has the flu (or swine flu, or H1N1, or whatever strain the media are scaring us into believing are out to get us). Sure, it’s winter, so it’s “that time of year.” But what if it didn’t have to be that way? What if winter just meant cold weather, and not an inevitable cold?

This has been my goal for awhile now, and I’ve gotten pretty good at it. While lots of factors play into whether or not I (or anyone) catches a cold, I realized that the most basic thing I could do to significantly lessen my chances of catching anything was to build up my immune system via nutrients & rest. So I started reading up on my options, and as of this winter, I’ve got five favorites that seem to pack the most punch: bone broth, butter, minerals, sauerkraut, and rest.

I am a firm believer that the main “medicine” we should ingest, and spend money on, is real food. So much can be healed by food that if the knowledge really spread, the pharmaceutical industry would be done for. They’ve taken certain elements of real foods, extracted them, and put them into pills (with 45 seconds of listed side effects—my favorite that most commercials mention: “risk of death.” Oh gee, now I really wanting to try that pill). And then they spend billions to convince us that we need those pills to be healthy. Well, in a sense they are right; whatever substance they’ve extracted and put into the pill probably is a substance we need…but we don’t need it from a pill. We can get it “for free” from food. Ok, yes, food isn’t free. But if we spend just a little bit more on good, real food—food that is full of so much good stuff that not only our bodies need but that our bodies can actually break down and use without side effects—we would not need to spend twice as much on pills. As we keep hearing in the health care debate, health care is a right. Indeed it is, but I think of it as a right to just say no to “health” that requires piles of money to acquire and instead a right to embrace health I create on my own with simple foods.

So in a bit more detail, my five favorite immunity boosters to help keep the pills away…

1. Eat bone broth regularly. “Good broth resurrects the dead.” –South American proverb, as quoted in Nourishing Traditions. When you hear old tales about how chicken soup helps fight colds, the “chicken soup” they mean is NOT the vapid, tasteless muck sold in cans in stores (Cambell’s chicken soup…ugh, how did I ever think that was actual chicken soup?). They’re talking about real chicken soup made from bone broth. Bone broth does require cooking, so someone could argue that it’s not a “simple” remedy. It’s not as easy as popping a cold pill, obviously. But it is simple enough that the rewards to be had from consuming bone broth on a regular basis so completely outweigh any “trouble” you go through to make it that I consider it my main line of defense against a list of ailments, colds/flu being just one. I plan to write in detail about the benefits of bone broth, but for now check out this WAPF article.
2. Eat grass-fed butter. More specifically, increase your intake of fat-soluble vitamins. Fat-soluble vitamins are vitamin A, vitamin D, vitamin K, and vitamin E. But here’s the catch: you can’t just pop these as pills and get the full benefit. To be properly used by the body, they need all their cofactors, which you get when you eat them in food. Happily, getting more of these vitamins & their helpers into your diet is not only easy, but delicious. You will find the most fat-soluble vitamins in quality animal fats (fat-soluble vitamins need to be eaten in/with fat to be properly absorbed): grass-fed butter, pastured whole eggs, yogurt, raw milk cheese, raw milk, and meats from pastured animals. If you can’t do all of these, I’d suggest going with grass-fed butter. An excellent source, and one that I think is fairly widely available, is Kerrygold Irish butter; it might seem expensive compared to what you usually buy, but try buying just one a week and working it into your diet; as an example, veggies have a lot of fat-soluble vitamins in them, but they need to be eaten with fat for your body to get those vitamins…so adding butter to veggies is an easy way to up your vitamin intake. Remember, small additions are better than none, and the extra fat-soluble vitamins to be had from adding in just a small amount of grass-fed butter are worth it. As for the other sources, add them in as you can. Of course, replacing your current dairy & meat consumption with grass-fed is the ideal, but if you can’t do that yet, just buy some when you can, here and there. Think of them as vitamin shots: instead of spending money on vitamin pills, which are rarely absorbed well, can cause reactions due to their coating, and cost too much compared to the return they give, spend the money on good food. You can also budget to buy more of them in the fall and through the winter to boost your immune system when the bad bugs are more likely to be looking for hosts.
3. Ingest more minerals. If you’re eating bone broths and grass-fed butter, you’re already getting a lot more minerals. But I know I’ve been nutrient-starved for so long—and so much in modern life/diet leeches minerals from our bodies—that I’ll say again, every little bit helps. One simple thing I did is that I switched to using real sea salt (“Celtic Sea Salt” brand is my favorite) instead of refined table salt. It’s full of minerals as well as flavor. My other favorite way to get more minerals is to drink nourishing herbal infusions on a regular basis. I learned about herbal infusions a few years ago from Susun Weed, and they are a very, very simple way to boost mineral intake. Happily, Susun is now making videos, and here’s a video of her explaining infusions:
   
   Growing your own herbs is best, but if you can’t, or if you’re like me, you just don’t have them growing yet (I’ve got my seeds–can’t wait for a huge nettle patch!), you can buy all the herbs you need, affordably, at Mountain Rose Herbs (1 pound of dried organic nettle is only $8.50; I use 1 oz of dry herb per quart of infusion weekly (drink it over 2-3 days), so 1 lb of herb lasts me 4 months!).
4. Eat homemade sauerkraut daily. Did you know that sauerkraut is one of the best sources of vitamin C? Sauerkraut contains something like 10-20 times more vitamin C than cabbage, thanks to fermentation. But here’s the catch: you’ve got to make your own, because pretty much every brand of sauerkraut on the market is pasteurized, even the organics, and heat kills not only the good enzymes of sauerkraut but also destroys the vitamin C created during the fermentation. Lucky for us, it’s easy & cheap to make, since you need only three ingredients: cabbage, salt, jar. A head of organic cabbage doesn’t cost much, maybe $1-2, and will yield about a pint of sauerkraut (give or take). Of course, if you love kraut, you’ll want to keep more on hand. Happily, it gets better with age, so if you plan to buy a few heads of cabbage and have a marathon kraut-making session, you’ll be in kraut for months. The best book on the subject is Wild Fermentation, and its author has generously provided the how-to for sauerkraut on this page (I’ll post soon on how I’ve been experimenting with making it in small batches).
5. Sleep, sleep, rest, sleep. And more rest. Nothing attracts sickness like unending stress and being on-the-go (which I learned the hard way, especially when I was teaching). No matter what, every single person needs downtime, rest, relaxation, and enough sleep. Everyone. No excuses.

So there they are, my five favorite things to do to help keep my immune system humming along. I hope the information helps someone out there! Tomorrow I’ll post about five simple things I do to fight an active cold/infection if I get one, things I’ve tried and that have worked for me.

This post is part of Fight Back Friday for February 26, 2010.

Image from this Treehugger article; I love that this pic shows a healthy cow, raw milk, and lush grass…all vitally important for real food and real health!

I decided to do a series of posts on the subject of real food and what it means to me, including what I’ve learned and am learning as I go along, and also giving as many suggestions, ideas, resources, links, and recipes as I could. This way, if you’re just starting on this path, you can see what worked for me, take what I say as one of many approaches to the topic, and hopefully find what works for you.

So to start off, what is “real food?”

To me, real food is…

• Fully natural, unprocessed, and whole
• Lots of animal fat that feeds our bodies & brains
• Cooked at home, often using traditional methods/recipes
• Often referred to as “staple” foods
• Healthy animal products such as unpasteurized milk (cow or goat), raw milk cheese/cream/yogurt, pastured butter, grass-fed meats (including organ mats)—the key is finding products from animals that have been very well-cared for; my ideal is to find a source where the animals are respected from birth to death, even in how they are killed, as the Native Americans did (more soon on how an animal lover like me “deals with” eating animals)
• Fermented foods made at home so that they are not pasteurized, such as sauerkraut, sourdough, yogurt, kiefer, and the like (results of my efforts to come! I’m just starting to learn how to make all this)
• Food that retains as much of its complete nutrient profile as possible (now more important than ever because our soils are so depleted that even our most nutritious food isn’t as nutritious as it was fifty years ago)—better, oh so much better, to get our nutrients from foods where they exist with a whole host of other substances that help them work properly in the body
• To quote Michael Pollan, real food is “food that your grandmother would have recognized as food”

And real food is NOT…

• processed or packaged in the way we usually think of processed food, i.e. cheap boxed or canned “food” that makes up 90% of supermarkets; exceptions would be frozen organic veggies, organic/non-GMO flours, certain real butters, those sorts of things
• combined with any derivative of corn, soy, or wheat (high fructose corn syrup, soy lecithin, etc); these are the most GMO’d crops in the U.S. and the most heavily subsidized, hence their addition to almost every processed food in this country (more on all this at a later date)
• sprayed with chemicals
• injected with drugs
• pasteurized
• irradiated
• has had any of its genes modified

As I write out these lists, I realize that there is much to say about all of these things! So I’ll just go one step at a time over the next few weeks.

Let me admit right now that it might seem that I made a lot of my real food changes pretty quickly; some of the changes were fast, but actually all this started for me several years ago. When I made quick changes, it was because I would get mad at some particular part of the industrial food system, my rebellious streak would kick in, lol, and I would refuse to eat things on principle. But I know that that is NOT how most people go about making changes. I know it can be hard. So if you’re just starting to think about food issues, I can suggest starting like I did:

• Start reading labels. EVERY SINGLE ONE. I didn’t have a choice in this one, as I’d developed a peanut allergy and so had to know if there was any chance of a trace of peanuts getting into my food. This is what got the ball rolling for me. READ EVERY LABEL! I can’t stress this enough. Even my roommate, who tries to eat real food most of the time, still tries to “get away with” not reading all labels. She assumes that certain things are ok. But that leads to her buying something, such as a new flavor of tea she was excited about, and when she brings it home, what do I do? I grab the box to read the ingredients. Sadly, I see that this tea had a soy-based ingredient, something we both are trying to avoid at all costs. She was really angry, at needing to read ingredients all the time, at how hard it is to avoid soy, and at me for pointing out the soy, lol. But you know what? If you really want to take control of your health, you MUST read ingredients and KNOW what you’re putting your body. It sucks that we have to be so diligent. It sucks that industrial food systems make it this tough. Of course, they make it tough because they want you to give up and eat the crap anyway…but I won’t go off on that soapbox here. And getting mad is a good thing, since it helps you make changes. You SHOULD be mad that soy is in everything. You SHOULD vote with your dollars by not buying things that have ingredients in them that you don’t want in your body. So if you do nothing else…start reading labels. It’s the thin edge of the wedge, as the saying goes.
• Sort of part & parcel with reading labels is reading some food issues books & watching a movie or two on the subject. If you haven’t yet, please at least skim through Fast Food Nation by Eric Schlosser or The Omnivore’s Dilemma by Michael Pollan; both are chock-full of information. It might even take awhile to read through them, since you might want time think and process as you go through. I know I did. I’d sometimes stop reading for months because I’d be so disgusted and angry at the whole food mess that I’d just prefer to pretend none of it mattered. But the seeds were planted, and the seedling of food discontent was growing (yep, I just had to use a plant metaphor…heh).  As for movies, try Supersize Me or Food, Inc (recently nominated for an Oscar!).

And that’s enough to begin. The idea is to start really thinking about what’s in your food, what it can do to you, and about all the interconnections between soil and plate. That’s where I started…and while it didn’t happen overnight, here I am, a few years later, a committed real foodie (or is that just committed? ).

I’ll talk more in future posts about how cholesterol is good for you, why I’m convinced real food can significantly heal most modern degenerative diseases, lots of ways to incorporate real food into your life, and recipes that I like to make. Yep, all this means learning to cook and plan, and I used to loathe the idea of both. But now I love cooking, probably because the power I feel over my own health and well-being is so utterly, completely worth the extra time and effort.

This post is part of Fight Back Friday for February 5, 2010!

This post originally appeared on my other blog, Avidly Dreaming.

Seems lately that I’m learning something new every day, and I love it. It’s also funny how, after a few years of reading & absorbing health info, I can easily think I understand stuff. Then I read some more, little nuggets of wisdom start popping up, and light bulbs—ok, make those compact fluorescent light blubs—come on over my head. I love it when that happens.

It happened today.

I’ve been reading all sorts of wonderful real food & health blogs for the past few weeks (links coming soon!), and have been getting loads of information from them. Today I learned that agave nectar is not a natural sweetener, and reading a wonderful post by Food Renegade made even more lights come on when she got to talking about fructose.

BTW, agave nectar is a highly processed sweetener and contains MORE fructose than high fructose corn syrup! I’d been thinking of trying it, but not now.

I know that fructose, and any excess sugars for that matter, are the real evils in the food supply. Too much sugar (actual sugar as well as the kind from carbs) is behind so many of our health problems (and political food issues). But I’d never really gotten my head around the nitty-gritty specifics of why fructose is bad; I mean I understand in a general sense, but I did not know this:

“The sugar that occurs in nature is called “levulose,” sometimes called “L-fructose.” Fructose, on the other hand, is a man-made sugar created by the refining process.

‘…Refined fructose is processed in the body through the liver, rather than digested in the intestine. Levulose [fructose from fruit] is digested in the intestine. (source)’

I want you to pay special attention to those last two sentences, for they are a huge key that will help unlock the mystery of why fructose is bad for you.

Because fructose is digested in your liver, it is immediately turned into triglycerides or stored body fat. Since it doesn’t get converted to blood glucose like other sugars, it doesn’t raise or crash your blood sugar levels. Hence the claim that it is safe for diabetics.

But it isn’t.

That’s because fructose inhibits leptin levels — the hormone your body uses to tell you that you’re full. In other words, fructose makes you want to eat more. Besides contributing to weight gain, it also makes you gain the most dangerous kind of fat.” (Read the entire post at Food Renegade here)

This clicked in so many ways, such as why processed foods rarely fill you up and make you want more (I’d always joked that they put crack cocaine in it) and why there are so many problems with eating it in general. Mess with how your body regulates its sugar, and you mess with fire. This also clicked with something else I read yesterday about how a regular body with normal blood sugars only contains a tablespoon of sugar…and most people consume something like 1.5-2 cups of sugar a day.

All this also jelled with yet another article I’d read recently* about non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD) and that it’s becoming a new problem. This is when excess fat accumulates in your liver, and if it gets bad enough, can cause liver failure. According to mayoclinic.com, it is “thought to be very common.” Hrm. I kept reading at that site…they list the following as risk factors: “certain medications, gastric bypass surgery, high cholesterol, high levels of triglycerides in the blood, malnutrition, metabolic syndrome, obesity, rapid weight loss, toxins and chemicals, such as pesticides, type 2 diabetes, Wilson’s disease.” Now, I obviously do not have a medical degree, but what I see listed here are many conditions that are caused or exacerbated by eating the Standard American Diet, which means mostly processed food loaded with HFCS and other sugars. Such a diet will obviously overload your liver with fructose, and hence the “common” development of at least a mild form of NAFLD. And then the Mayo Clinic site says, “Nonalcoholic fatty liver disease occurs when your liver has trouble breaking down fats, causing fat to build up in your liver tissue. Doctors aren’t sure what causes this. The wide range of diseases and conditions linked to nonalcoholic fatty liver disease is so diverse that it’s difficult to pinpoint any one cause.”

Uh. Hello? I see a fairly obvious cause, myself.

Ok, ok, I’ll let them off the hook. There are lots of reasons why that website has to toe the line of medical-political-correctness. And once I started searching for NAFLD and fructose, lots and lots of sites came up. So many, in fact, that I am sitting here feeling sheepish, as if I should have know all this already, but yet happy that I’m getting enough facts straight in my head to start making sense of all the food info I’m taking in. Here are a few of them:

• “How to fatten your liver” – Whole Health Source
• “Foie gras, c’est moi?” – Dr. Eades (from 2005! I’m sooo late to the party)
• “Missing link between fructose, insulin resistance found” – sciencedaily.com
• “Consuming fructose-sweetened, not glucose-sweetened, beverages increases visceral adiposity and lipids and decreases insulin sensitivity in overweight/obese humans” – Journal of Clinical Investigation

There is lots more out there. I love the internet.

The good news is that the liver can heal itself, and once we stop force-feeding it fructose, it can repair the damage done. The body really is amazing.

*Yes, I’ve been doing a LOT of reading lately in & among my other things to do. This means I tend to stay up way too late at night. I think the crack is in the internet…

This post originally appeared on my other blog, Avidly Dreaming.

A good side effect of changing to a real food way of eating is that I end up wanting to change a lot more than just switching to eating grass-fed meat & dairy and getting in tons more probiotics and bone broths and not eating any fake food. I want to stop drinking fake liquids, too. A few days ago I decided I was sick of spending a chunk of money each week on Diet Coke, money that could go to buying more real food goodies, and decided it was time to quit.

Like it would let me off that easily. Hmph.

I hadn’t been drinking a lot of it, compared to some people I know. And every glass I poured, I drank maybe half of it. So overall, I didn’t drink that much. But apparently, the actual amount consumed doesn’t really matter much. The crap is still going to fight dirty when you decide to oust it from your body.

Two nights ago, I had a really bad headache set in that I just considered a random event triggered by who knows what. I rarely, very rarely, get headaches, so when the stray one does comes along, I’m a total baby about it. The “Owwwww it huuuuuurts!!!” kind of baby. And since I don’t like taking pills if I don’t really need them, I don’t consider a “mere” headache a “need” for pills, so I just deal with the pain (whining helps). So the other night, I just massaged my head and tried to remember that pulse point on my hand where, if you pinch it just right, it kills a headache. My headache only got a flesh wound, but that was better than nothing. By morning, I was ok.

Yesterday, early evening, I had some actual cravings for Diet Coke. Enough that prodded me out of my chair and into the kitchen to roam, knowing I wasn’t going to have any soda, but laughing to my roommate about how I’d love to have one. I felt almost ashamed; if I didn’t want the stuff, then just don’t drink it. It’s not hard!

But it is, apparently.

Then a bit later on, another bad headache set in. This time I realized it must be tied to the lack of soda, given the cravings earlier in the night. I usually had more soda at night than early in the day. The headache was bad enough that I gave in an popped some generic ibuprofen. I also ate some sugar (leftover holiday fudge), because I was still having a bit of a craving for something sweet. It made a twisted sort of sense; I wasn’t craving sugar per se, since Diet Coke doesn’t have any real sugar in it, but my body was used to getting a pretend-sugar kick in the evening. So I gave it a couple of hits of real sugar, and that did seem to help the craving.

These headaches came on in the evenings, but right now is early afternoon and I think I feel the beginnings of one. They seem to be getting worse, and I’m afraid before the full detox is over I’m going to end up in the fetal position and whimpering (part of the whole “big baby” thing). Please, oh please, let this not drag on for a long time!

I titled this post “Aspartame withdrawal” because I know that’s what’s causing this. The caffeine might be contributing, but I get more caffeine each day from coffee, and I’ve not changed my coffee consumption at all. But I will say this: no matter how bad this detox becomes, I will never touch diet soda (or any soda) again. When I think of what it has been doing to my body for so many years…oh man. I’m not mad at myself (and you shouldn’t be, either, if you’re going through this or will go through it), because I just didn’t know any better before. Oh sure, I’ve heard for a long time that sodas are bad for me, but lots of things are bad for me but I wasn’t ready to change. Now I am.

And knowing how our bodies are such amazing healing machines, I know that once the poison is gone from my system (well, this one, anyway), which according to different sources can take awhile, my body can heal from it. And from now on, no more of that crap is passing my lips. Bleah.

Tonight the headache will get Reiki’d (I always forget to Reiki myself!), and I’ve still got some fudge if cravings hit. I’m gonna go whine to Bast (my kitty) now…at least she can’t roll her eyes at me.