Less Meat!

[Wonderboy]

If anyone is looking to increase his/her nut intake on the cheap, sunflower seeds and pumpkin seeds are a fantastic and cheap way to do it - just throw them in a salad or rice raw or like this. I love walnuts and almonds, but I sure as hell can't grow almonds around here and I don't have access to a cache of walnut trees. The soy issue is a sticky one, as I know a certain someone who did first hand soy research for her master's degree in food and ag. policy. I'm not willing to rule out some caveats of soy, but my girlfriend is one smart cookie, and she's got no reason to worry about soy. Then again we don't eat soy every day.

To stay on topic a little, here's a recipe that I tried out recently and it is AWESOME. The recipe for the barbecue sauce calls for liquid smoke...I don't know any non-foodies that happen to have a bottle of it lying around including myself, so I used adobo sauce from a can of chipotles and smoked paprika instead, and also replaced the brown sugar with maple syrup. Agave nectar would work as well. If you end up trying this, go for at least two cans of hearts of palm. I easily ate all of what the recipe calls for by myself and was only hungry for more.

If anyone's interested, my girlfriend compiled a really nice kosher vegan cookbook for a co-op she started at a local university.

[Bicycle Bob]

Somewhere I saw a study which pointed out that asians don't eat whole soy beans, usually soy sauce or tofu. I'm not sure if there was a problem with tofu, but I stopped shopping for it. Here's the other hazard:

Researchers fed female rats soy flour made from Roundup Ready soybeans, a
type of GM soybean engineered to resist applications of the Monsanto company
's toxic Roundup weed killer. Two weeks after starting their GM diet, the
rats were permitted to conceive. They continued to eat GM soy flour until
these pregnancies were brought to term and they had finished nursing their
newborns.

Scientists report that 55.6% of the rats born to mothers eating the Roundup
Ready flour died within three weeks compared to just 9% in the control
group. In addition, the offspring in the GM-fed group suffered from low
weights and were significantly smaller than those in the control group. Some
36% weighed less than 20 grams two weeks after birth while only 6.7% of the
control mice were similarly stunted.

In presenting the study at a recent conference of the American Academy of
Environmental Medicine in Tucson, Arizona, that organization's board noted
that the study had not yet been peer reviewed and that the Russian
scientists had not described their methodology in sufficient detail,
important factors that mean the results remain open to scientific question.
Still, they said, the findings were sufficiently alarming to compel the
board to urge the National Institutes of Health to immediately replicate the
research. One reason for the Academy's concern is the increasing prevalence
of Roundup Ready soybeans in the marketplace. Since being introduced in
1996, acreage planted with Roundup Ready soybeans has grown from one million
acres to over 78 million.

[basjoos]

Another reason to grow and prepare all your own food. You have no idea what you are getting or how it has been processed when you buy grocery store or restaurant food.

When I eat a cucumber from my garden that was plucked from a self-sown plant that is the descendent of several generations of open-pollenated semi-wild cucumber plants growing in my garden, I know I am not getting any GM contamination in my food (there are no farms growing GM vegetables anywhere near here to contaminate my crops with GM pollen). Then when I prepare the cucumber in my kitchen I know I am not is danger of contracting hepatitus, salmonella, or any other diseases related to the poor sanitation or hygene in the commercial kitchen preparing the food.

[SVOboy]

I was going to ask how you could be sure about GM contamination. It sounds like you're one of the lucky ones to be living far enough away from all that.

[Bicycle Bob]

The soy debate: Independent news on natural health, nutrition and more