Roofing Problems

I finally had enough money saved to replace the leaky flat roof over the back porch with a pitched roof, and I hired a roofer who started last Monday. I really thought I had made a good choice of someone who would do the job correctly, and for a reasonable price.

The 3-man crew worked just one short day before I fired them, partly for shoddy workmanship (the new framing is very out-of-square), and partly for the bossman being a liar and a cheat. I tolerate things many people wouldn't, but lying to me isn't on the list. (I've even shed long-time friends, and Lovers, for lying to me. I may not like the truth, but I can accept it far better than a lie.)

Now I'll be looking for another roofer, and the overall job price will be higher because they will have to remove and repair what this guy did. (I'm out over $475 to this guy.) If we were just going to re-roof the whole house with new shingles, it wouldn't have been so bad, but he knew we plan on a metal roof, and he even gave me a quote on that job. Metal roofing does NOT allow for a roof to be out of square!

The thing that bothers me the most (besides the aggravation and money) is that I'm no longer able to do the roofing job myself. I was a licensed contractor for many years, and even had a house I built published in the magazine Fine Homebuilding. (Actually I was the first woman builder to be published in that magazine.)

I will be out of town until the middle of next week for some time with friends and then appointments at Wake Forest Hospital in NC to follow up on my medical problems. 

Then the search for a new roofer begins...

GMO Valentine Kisses

Did your honey give you Hershey's chocolate kisses for Valentine's Day? If so, and you are in the USA, you received GMO kisses. Valentine's Day is also the day where once again giant corporations try to enrich themselves by encouraging Americans to consume endless amounts of sugary sweets.

All Hershey's chocolate products sold in the US contain GMO's, but they source organic and non-GMO ingredients in their chocolates sold in foreign countries. That’s right, Hershey’s went GMO free in Europe in 2010, but keeps peddling GMOs in America.

Hershey’s Top Chocolate Products: Hershey’s chocolate bars, Reese’s, Hershey Kisses, Nutrageous, 5th Avenue, Almond Joy, Caramello, Heath, Kit Kat, Mounds, Mr. Goodbar, Rolo, Symphony, Take5, Whatchamacallit, York and Dagoba.

While California voters were trying to support their basic right to label genetically engineered foods, the Hershey Company, the nation’s largest chocolate-maker, contributed $519,000 to defeat Prop 37 and your Right to Know what’s in your food, alongside Monsanto, the world's largest biotech seed company, who dumped in $8.1 million to stifle democracy and transparency.

In the past, many large U.S. food producers have argued that reformulating their products to exclude GMOs is not cost effective. But why it was worthwhile for Hershey's to change its product formulas for the European market, but not for the U.S. market, so far remains a question without an answer.

Hyperpalatable Industrial Foods

They really do a good job, don't they, those scientists who create the taste and smell of adulterated food to seem real and delicious? As another blogger says, we are "Seduced by Foods".

Research and Development teams have done studies and conducted taste panels that have found "sweet" sells. The more they sell sweet stuff, the more people come to expect it. Sweet is found in loads of savory items too, not just sweet items. Tomato sauces, crackers, salad dressings, mustards, coated chicken products, sausages, and more. Many of our fresh products are also enhanced with sugar, like Butterball turkey, pumped brined pork loins, stewing hens. Our palates are being distorted by sweet.

As much as I am aware of the "deceptions" the food scientists have created, and as much as I am aware of the nutritive value in real foods, there are still times when I am lured by barely detectable smells and/or my mental images into thinking a fast food meal like a Big Mac, a taco supreme, or a take-out pizza* would hit the spot! Taste-wise I'm sure it would, thanks to those scientists who work hard to manufacture chemicals that tease our taste buds, and addict us to their pseudo foods. It is a very difficult temptation to resist! 

The tongue can detect five tastes: sweet, salty, sour, bitter and umami (savory). While you are probably familiar with the first four, umami is a taste that is relatively new to the Western palate, although the Japanese have known about it for decades. Umami is based on the detection of glutamate, and many foods naturally contain glutamate, although it is often added as well. You have probably heard of MSG: monosodium glutamate is the lab-derived chemical that enhances tastes. It makes things taste more like what they are (or should be). While umami is a taste that is hard to define, it is sometimes described as “meaty.”

The sense of small is probably the oldest and the least understood of our five senses. During evolution it has kept its connections with the parts of the brain, which grew to be the sorting house for our emotional responses, intimately linking the odors of things to our emotions. Think of the smell of BBQ coming from a grill at the BBQ joint down the street. Do you notice they have the grill/smoker outside or even vented outside, all the better to send those lovely smells in the air and capture us for a sale? It's an emotional response, our involuntary response to those smells wafting in the air. Researchers say 80 percent of the flavors we taste come from what we smell.

Our sense of taste is also triggered by sight. Ever notice the ads for foods on TV look SO juicy and tempting? Enough so that we have an emotional response that even overrides the reality of the supposedly same thing we are actually served. We salivate and feel the taste of a preferred food before even touching it. In the end, we believe more in what we see than in our other senses.

I have to constantly remind myself that those "almost foods" or "food-like products" come packaged with "micronutritional" malnutrition, and they can bring on (among other things) thyroid dysfunction, insulin resistance, and poor gut flora... all of which can lead to obesity. So many processed foods aren't really food, but nutritionally lacking "food-like products" engineered to stimulate us to eat more, buy more, and ensure that big food conglomerates turn a profit.

When most Americans eat a "hamburger", it isn't really meat they are eating. It's a "flavorless, factory-formed protein matrix for sugar and soy oils engineered to induce higher consumption".  Source

* I do eat pizza... but home-made, with real aged raw-milk cheese rather than pseudo "processed" cheese... tomato sauce from my garden without any artificial ingredients; true pepperoni that even real Italians would recognize rather than that imitation stuff made just for pizzas; fresh organic vegetables (onion, peppers) and mushrooms for toppings, and NO GMO soy or canola anywhere in sight.

My hamburgers are local grass-fed beef, and the condiments are lacto-fermented, home-made without all that sugar, although I think you can now buy good quality condiments with a dedicated search. I did look in the natural foods store yesterday for a mayonnaise without GMO soy or canola oil. None to be found.

2012... and Beyond

NASA Goddard Photo

The year 2012 should be interesting.

Many folks have an underlying (or at least partial) belief running through their subconscious mind that Nostradamus' and the Mayan "end of the World" scenarios might happen. However, most of our overt behavior indicates total disbelief not only in Doomsday predictions, but also in accepting the critical food/water/health situation worldwide. (Isn't the media wonderful?) Our changing weather patterns continue to impose hardships on many of our lives and gardens, giving credence to possible violent environmental changes that could be coming to this lovely blue planet we occupy.

Personally, I do not believe the "end of the world" will happen in December 2012. However, the environmental, economical and political changes are not only continuing, but increasing... and it could get right nasty down the road.

There is another prediction out there, proclaimed by many, that the "changes" will usher in a "thousand-year era of Peace". IMO, there is much that needs to be significantly altered before real Peace can happen.

On our food and health aspects for change, it is time for us to increase our awareness and ethical/moral responsibility beyond what the for-profit television and advertising media tell us... because ultimately our health/future Is NOT Up to Someone Else.

GMO's have proliferated simply because we didn't raise any flags in the beginning. It is our own fault. For too many years we have allowed ourselves to believe that others ("medical professionals and government officials?") know best, or at least know what they are doing. We are bombarded hundreds of times a day by subtle advertising messages indicating "they" are more educated and/or informed than we are, so the vast majority have given up individual responsibility for our own health and well-fare. Our self-inflicted ignorance has let the government (and us) buy into corporate hype of all kinds (which interestingly also put money in many, many pockets). 

Thus the many corporate tribes and alphabet government agencies motivated by... (power? greed? or something else??) have given us obesity and disease by catering to and building on a human weakness for convenience, sugar and other junk foods. We have become a nation of addicts... and we are addicted to all kinds of substances. For far too many people [including children], it is sugary beverages and junk foods, while for others it might be an escape into alcohol or drugs. But as with any addiction, we never think with 100% clarity under the influence... and will do almost anything to keep getting our "fix" in spite of what our minds know. 

As a nation, we eat more so called "food" and gain less energy (nutrition) from it all the time. The working mother eating the SAD diet (Standard American Diet) has NO energy left to prepare real food meals when she comes home from work, even if she could buy real food anymore in most places. (She says she doesn't have "time" but in reality, she also doesn't have the "energy".) So instead of having enough energy to prepare a real food meal, she barely has the energy to pick up junk fast food on the way home, or frozen boxed junk food to nuke for dinner for the family. Eating this way, she never gains a storehouse of energy for the next day, and simply repeats the process over and over, becoming more frazzled every day from lack of good nutrition. 

Adele Davis always said a food without nutrients would not support life, and her example was a loaf of factory bread left on the counter (unwrapped) for weeks. It might dry out, but it would not support any bacterial life to decompose it. If it won't even support bacterial life, how could it support life for us?? Recently someone left a McD's cheeseburger on the counter for a whole year, and nothing grew there either. It sustained no bacterial life. (Source)

Change is never easy, but for the most part it can be started in small steps. Two years ago when I changed my food intake drastically to eliminate adulterated foods all at once (including foods with added sweeteners), I thought I would starve to death during the first 2-3 weeks. It took a long time for me to learn to think outside the box and change from what I had been accustomed to eating for years, to finding real foods to eat. Then as I started feeling the increased energy every day from eating real food (and probably eliminating some built-up toxins during that time), I began to understand what sugar and chemical-laden foods do to my body.

Unfortunately over the last year, I have slowly added some adulterated foods back to my diet, and I really see the poor consequences, both in my energy levels... and my weight. The good news is that I never deviated from my commitment to eating only grass-fed meats. I'm doing much better now in avoiding chemical-laden packaged foods (thus no GMO's) but where I am still struggling is to get sugars out of my diet again. The traditional and accepted flush of sweet goodies over the holidays put me right back into sugar addiction, and I really cannot totally blame the food industry... They only make the stuff; it's my hand that lifts the cookie to my mouth. 

Then there are the sweets in other foods... "research and development teams have done studies and conducted taste panels that have found sweet sells. The more we sell sweet stuff the more people come to expect it. Sweet is found in loads of savory items. Sweet tomato sauces, crackers, salad dressings, mustards, coated chicken products, sausages, and more. Many of our fresh products are enhanced with sugar also. Butterball turkey, pumped brined pork loins, stewing hens. Our palates are being distorted by sweet." (Source)
 

Some small but positive steps:

Make a commitment to one family meal every week or two that contains only real foods. Nothing from a chemical-laden package (cookie/cake mix, packaged salad dressings, sweetened yogurt, BBQ sauce, yada, yada), no GMO's. You probably cannot escape the GMO's in the meats from factory meat animals, including chickens and their eggs, unless you can afford pastured meats... but start somewhere. No fake butters, no canola or soy oils (both GMO's), no sugar substitutes, nothing fake. I know many of the regular readers of this blog eat real foods almost exclusively... but perhaps just as many readers do not.

Make the time for a friendly email or telephone call to your local congressional representative saying you'd like to see food labels that state GMO or not, and hopefully even whether routine animal antibiotics in healthy animals were used. Tell them politely that you'd like to know what's actually in your food.

It may take years of persistence, but remember the soil in our yards is the result of eons of weathering effects on rocks that turned them into soil.

Health Care vs Illness Care

We should start naming things as they really are, not what someone would like us to believe. What we really have is Illness Care, NOT Health Care. Very little money is ever spent to promote "Health Care" because Health is NOT profitable.

The human body is extremely complex, and we have hundreds of thousands of internal interactions going on at any given moment from our 400 hundred trillion cells. Those interactions are also interdependent, and although our bodies have the ability to fabricate some of the components, we still need some raw materials for manufacturing them.

Jump rope, Photo from tedkerwin

For a different picture for understanding, think about the group children's game we call jump rope; when typically done by 3 or more children it's called long rope jumping. If you have 3 children and a rope, you can play. Remove any one component, and there's no game. 2 children and a rope but no jumper... no game. 3 children and no rope, no game.

Micronutrients (meaning we don't need much of them) like the fat-soluble vitamins have a 'game' (interaction) going on in our bodies too, and if any one of them is MIA, the 'game' suffers. Please note that these essential fat-soluble vitamins can only be dissolved in saturated fats in the body (hence their name). A healthy liver will store any excess, unlike the water-soluble vitamins which we rapidly excrete in urine. 

Photo by Public Domain Photos

Photo by julesjulesjules m

Vitamin A (egg yolks, liver, whole milk, cheese) is needed for eyesight, in other words "essential for the neural transmission of light into vision". All the fat-soluble vitamins (A, D, E, K) need a bit of all the others to function (play the game) properly.

I find it interesting that the amount of Vitamin A in egg yolks in the Netherlands is more than twice the amount in the US. I wonder why? What they are fed (non-GMO?) and how they are raised? Curious. source

Photo by Peber the Swede

Photo by andrewmalone

Vitamin D (from sunlight, or oily fish like herring, salmon and sardines) helps the body absorb and use calcium, but you also need to ingest enough of the right kind of calcium for it to work... and then it takes Vitamin A to make the interaction work, too. (Vitamin A binds the Vitamin D receptors). Likewise if you take calcium supplements but don't get enough A or D, the calcium is useless.

Gluten-free (coconut flour) Fried Oysters, by NourishingCook

Oysters Rockefeller, photo by Argyleist

For Vitamin D to work, it also needs the minerals magnesium (green vegetables, nuts, whole grains), zinc (oysters, wheat germ, liver) and boron (green vegetables, fruit, nuts). The other catch is you also need enough Vitamin K (green leafy vegetables) to regulate the entire fat-soluble system.

The fat-soluble vitamins (except E) come from the very animal foods the "health care" industry tells us to reduce or avoid altogether: eggs, butter, and organ meats like liver. (BTW, coconut oil is considered a good saturated fat but contains almost zero vitamins and minerals. The main benefit in coconut oil is the Lauric Acid content, which promotes the "good" cholesterol, HDL.) 

There are many, many other nutrients which are equally essential for good health, and our bodies can utilize them all much better in the form of real food rather than supplements. However, just like the fat-soluble vitamins, most are interdependent on a host of others for maximum nutritional function. Who tells or teaches us that??

It seems the best way to have real health care is in our own hands. If we don't take responsibility for ourselves and our health, who will??

Try this: On your own, research some foods for their nutritional amounts. Research your own nutritional needs for the foods that supply them. If the information comes from research, find out who paid for the research; it is too often biased. Look for the sin of omission, where they tell us the part they want us to know rather than the whole picture.

The spin on many industrialized foods now being promoted as "healthy" is just that: spin. I have to be vigilant about reading labels on foods. A package of crackers I picked up in the natural foods market last weekend had huge advertising all over the front of the box exclaiming "Now made with whole grains!". When I read the label, sure enough there were whole grains... but last on the list just before the chemicals (labels are required by law to list ingredients in descending order of the quantity). The first ingredient was "enriched white flour"... I put it back on the shelf. Deceptive advertising, in my opinion.

Getting and staying healthier is much harder when the truth is so hard to find amongst all the hype. In my opinion, food labels should also list ALL the vitamin amounts, as well as all the herbicides, pesticides, irradiation and chemical washes the food has endured.

I repeat: It seems the best way to have real health care is in our own hands. If we don't take responsibility for ourselves and our health, who will??

Food Packaging Deceptions

This REALLY annoys me! I bought a 4-pack of grahams at Sam's to have on hand for a couple of cheesecakes I want to make with homemade real cream cheese. As you can see in the photo above, the contents are well below the top of the box, whereas they used to fill the box completely.

I know these are "sold by weight" but WHO remembers how much a box of grahams used to weigh???

Not only are the contents lower in the box, they are also several crackers shy of filling the width of the box. I'd much rather knowingly pay more (I actually did pay more anyway, considering the contents!) than to have this deception practiced on me.