Not Sick Yet

Not sick yet, but it will be amazing if I'm not by the end of the week. My boss who was sick all last week and today has been working half days.  A still-sick faculty member just handed me a folder full of germ laden receipts she organized and labeled while home sick, and the crazy and / or really drugged out guy in front of me on the train this morning was ranting like a Shakespearean actor and I definitely felt spittle spray land on my hands and phone.  Here's to building up tolerance.

Crickets, Passive Pain, Collogen and Whole 30

1) Last night we had a cricket* in our bedroom. Or perhaps in the wall of our room. The sound the cricket makes is just short of shrill, and the word "chirping" does not seem to do it justice**. And this one was incredibly loud. When crickets are loud outside in the trees, I think I generally attribute the volume to multiple crickets, but this, barring the improbable possibility of a highly synchronized family of crickets in our wall, was just one cricket. He chirped for hours, was still chirping when I went to sleep, but this morning he is silent. I think he is a night-cricket. Or he is dead.
The sound of the night cricket, if you stand in the middle of our room, seems to come from several directions at once. But once you have narrowed it down to a wall, you can stand right next to the wall, facing it, with your nose almost touching it, and definitely the sound is louder in your right ear. You can work your way along the wall to the sconce, which contains a light bulb, and it seems you have reached the apex of the sound. And if you touch and turn the flower-shaped glass shade the cricket stops for just long enough that you think maybe he was inside the shade, and now as sizzled, moth-like against the bulb. But then he starts again, and the wall theory comes to the fore yet again.

2) Today in yoga, after reading a book about kids who have cancer, I thought about pain. I was thinking about pain because of the pain depicted in the book about kids with cancer, and also because I was in pain. In yoga, the strength exercises bring one kind of pain, and the stretching exercises bring another. As I get older, the pain manifests with ever smaller increments of effort or extension, but also over the years, I have learned to play with the pain a little more--or play with the surrendering part of the pain. Which is what brought me to my exact thought--or the new thought--about pain, which is that I am better at passive pain. In moderate amounts of course. I can withstand pain, and even willing increase my own pain (in moderate amounts of course), when I am relieved of the responsibility of having to do anything else--like run, or pick up a kid and feed him, etc. And by "better," I guess I mean I can do it for longer. Because I run sometimes until it hurt and then I keep running...just not for very long. I guess I could increase my endurance with necessity. I now swim for longer that I did at the beginning of the summer, and sometimes the tedium and mild discomfort of the rhythmic breathing fades away. The activity becomes second nature, and so then it feels almost passive. Like downward dog. A little.

3) Tangentially related to the increasing difficulty of stretching, I've started taking a collagen supplement. Three days so far, so I can't say if it's having much effect, although I imagine in certain light that the backs of my hands look a little plumper and smoother. The supplement is a powder, so must be mixed with a liquid. For best results, one should drink it on an empty stomach and not eat for a half an hour afterward. I've just drunk it while writing this post. In a little while, I'll make breakfast--which I've decided will be a kind of fried-rice concoction, except with no rice, because of the whole thirty. I will saute shredded cabbage, and then add scrambled eggs and little pieces of duck meat left over from dinner last night. Yeah, I know. But it sounds good to me. Whole 30 is going okay. This is like day ten I think. Sometimes I resent the lack of options and bread and chocolate, but I enjoy seeing the incremental change to the shape of my body. I've lost between four and six pound, depending on the time of day. So there is discipline involved, with denying myself the pleasure of eating certain things, but often there is not that much discipline, more distracting myself with the other pleasure--that little rush that comes with accomplishing something. Also, there are not restrictions on quantity of allowed things, so I find I eat quite a lot of almond butter. I don't know exactly how that relates to anything, but I'm just saying.

* Or it could be a cicada. I don't quite understand the difference, and I'm feeling too lazy to look it up right now. Maybe if you come back to this post later, I'll have added something informative.

** As I write this, I really want you to hear the cricket chirp, so I make the effort to listen to some cricket sound effects online, but none of them really sound like our cricket. If he is still alive and lively tonight, I WILL make a short recording and add it here.

Related articles

• The Cricket as a Thermometer (alexanderszewczak.wordpress.com)

Chris Beat Cancer with Nutrition

There's a blog I've been following intermittently for a while, called Chris Beat Cancer.  I don't know Chris and he doesn't know me, but from reading his blog I can determine we are kind of "cancer twins."  We were both diagnosed with Stage 3 colon cancer in 2003 (both at a rather young age).  We both had surgery but declined the recommended chemotherapy.  We both embraced nutrition rich diets that included lots of vegetables and juiced vegetables.  And we are both alive to tell the tale (with no recurrence of the colon cancer).

Chris has devoted the entirety of his blog to a cause I believe in deeply, educating people about their options in fighting cancer.  His most recent post on cancer fighting vegetables is an excellent reminder to some things you may (or may not) already know, and contains one of my favorite things--a link to the original study in Food Chemistry journal. 

The day is coming, slowly, slowly, when there will be separate tabs on this blog for cancer and health related posts and resources, but until that day, I'm going to add Chris Beat Cancer to the sidebar here.

Lately

I'm sick--just a cold, or maybe the flu.  Everybody talks about the awfulness of the flu, but when I look up the symptoms of flu vs cold online, every cold / flu I've ever had seems to fall right on the line between two.  Are muscle aches and fatigue really just the purview of the flu? Well, maybe it's the flu..

Whatever the diagnosis, I stayed home for two work days, and now I'm staying home through the long weekend.  I have very little will to do...anything.  You know how they say the "mind is a good servant, but a bad master"?  It's a kinda buddhist thing to say, about how you have to restrain your mind and not just let it run rampant as it likes.  This restraint requires a certain kind of determination that at various times in my life I have had, and at present do not have.  My mind has no desire to do disciplined things like stay still for meditation, apply itself to writing or even pay pay attention to a conversation.  If you call me, there's a good chance I won't pick up the phone, because holding a conversation, even with you, seems like too monumental an effort.  My mind doesn't want to do anything on its own steam, it wants to have its hand held and to be entertained.

And in my current state, my mind wins:

I let it watch two seasons of Downton Abbey in two days until I was bleary-eyed and my brain was sodden and saturated with the stream of soapy input. (Everything in italics is a spoiler, avert your eyes.) She's pregnant with the new heir of Downton. She's slipped on a bar of soap left by the wicked servant and miscarried! The heir of Downton is lost at war.  He's miraculously returned! He'll never walk again, or bear children.  Oh my god, he's walking! But he's about to marry the wrong woman. No, wait--she has Spanish Influenza...she's dead! The Season Two finale provides some beautiful closure with a proposal on a snowy night.  It was a good and convenient place to stop for what I hope is a long while.
On the third day, I let my mind read seven scripts for the Good Wife.
Because it is not related to writing, it will sometime accept forty minutes of Illustrator CS5 instructional videos, so there's that.
And of course there is sleeping.

August 25, 2012

August 25, 2012

Things I am already doing to help my case:

Meditating again...  I once had a practice.  I had a tendency to act like I still had a practice, but I didn't.  I do now. Twenty-five to thirty minutes in the morning and the evening, ten or fifteen minutes mid-day at work, and whenever I wake up in the wee hours of the morning buzzing with adrenaline--for however long it takes to calm myself down.

Ix-nay on the sugar-say... I did this the first time around for about a year after my surgery.  Everything I read supports that sugars and cancer do not play well together (or, more specifically, that they play too well.  The first time around there were days when this was really difficult and emotional.  Thus far (i.e. for the last five days) it has not been difficult at all to cut out recognizable refined sugars. Rice and bread are a little harder, I think because it's harder for me to believe they are "as bad," but I have pared them way down.

Juicing:  All veggies, all the time.  I haven't actually been manning the juicer, as life is, per usual, a little crazy right now--but I've been hitting the Robek's at every chance, cutting the juice with water at home when I can (to decrease the sugars) and keeping half in an air-tight container for later.

Pulling remedies off the shelf:  I guess I can say I'm "lucky" that the last time I had cancer, I was not employed, and I spend several months doing very little but researching supplements, various diets, etc.  I had a pared down "maintainence" vitamin regime that I was never going to quit.  I did.  just got busy and didn't reach for the containers on the shelf.  But conveniently, they are all still there.  The enzymes, the IP6 /maitake mushroom extract, the Pau D' Arco tea, the Chlorella (alkalizing)/Tumeric (anti-inflammatory) tablets.  Hot lemon-juice to flush the liver (and other stuff) in the morning.

I have scans happening this week, and an appointment with a gynecologic oncologist.  I don't know what I will find out, and especially when I'm tired I get anxious.  But then I remind myself that no matter how dire the case may seem, I have met real people who have overcome worse, and I believe I can do as well.

My Husband's Diet is Making Me Hungry

My husband is doing the Master Cleanse and it's making me hungry.

For those of you who don't know Paul, his philosophy might be summed up as something like "Life is the stuff you do to pass the time between meals." He likes to eat meals, preferably at a restaurant. He likes to plan where he will eat his next meal, the one after that, and maybe a special one sometime next week. He likes to look forward to his plans to eat meals.

For those of you who don't know the Master Cleanse, it is a dietary program consisting of NO MEALS. Unless you consider water mixed with lemon juice (cleansing part), sweetened with a tablespoon of maple syrup (to keep your blood sugar up so you don't faint), and a dash of cayenne pepper (to stimulate your metabolism) to be a meal.

Paul's intention is to do this for ten days.

Fasts are an age old tradition, so I'm sure he will be fine.

The question is: Will I?

Normally, I like to consider Paul to be the one with "food issues." Because of, well--all the eating, and planning, and the way any time you get in a car with him, you run an 85% risk of being "Paul-jacked" and taken to some kind of food or dessert purveyor.

I consider myself to be the person with a healthy relationship to food, because I sometimes eat vegetables, or take my lunch to work, or make frozen ravioli and broccoli at home instead of driving to to the Inland Empire in search of the only local branch of a chain restaurant that makes the kind of mac n' cheese that I'm in the mood for.

Long story short, when it comes to food, I'm reasonable--he's crazy. I'm moderate--he's extreme.

Except now that he's not eating, something is happening to me.

I think it might be like a sympathy pregnancy--except it's sympathy starvation. All the sudden I'm hungry all the time. I'm constantly ruminating about what kind of food I'll eat next. And when I start eating, I keep eating, because the idea of being hungry again is panic-inducing. Since I've begun writing this post, I've eaten two halves of a particular sandwich--a large bacon, lettuce, tomato and avocado sandwich with garlic aioli on oversize toasted sourdough bread. The last time I ordered this sandwich, the shop that sells it was still on summer hours. The last time I ordered this sandwich I ate half for lunch, and the other half for dinner. But today I thought about the sandwich non-stop for five hours at work, while staving off hunger by eating a candy bar from a vending machine! And then I ate both halves in under twenty minutes.

And now, despite the whole earlier candy-from-a-vending-machine debaucle, I'm wondering if I need dessert. Do I need ice cream? Do I need a snack to get me through class?

And what about when class is over?

It is typical for me to be hungry when I get out of my night class at 9:30, but I don't worry because I have an unofficial arrangement where Paul picks me up something wherever he happens to dine. Now, however, Paul won't be dining. Alarm Bells! I am already mentally searching the shelves of the refrigerator for something quick and easy to prepare--in my imagination (and likely reality) they are frighteningly bare.

Oh no! I'm so hungry!

No, wait, you're not hungry. You just had a huge sandwich.

Oh. Right. ... But I'm going to be hungry!

I'm going to be happier when Paul is done with the Master Cleanse.

If We Are What We Eat, I Will Be a Zuccini

Another project I have going at the moment, since I am having a "normal life" with a job and such, is ordering a Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) box every couple of weeks. Each week the South Central Farmers--an organic cooperative--delivers pre-ordered boxes to different places in the city. One of the drop-off points is here on campus.

The box is an omakase kinda deal. You get what is in season and available, with no substitutions. Overall, this is good, as that is what we should be eating anyway, and I probably wouldn't have the knowledge and discipline to research and buy these things on my own. In the grocery store I mainly just default to things like avocados and broccoli year round because they are super-accessible taste-wise, and I know how to store and cook them. This same laziness had led me to consider skipping the CSA box this week, but then I got an email from my friend in China, telling me how, because of all the bacteria on the food where she is, she is relegated to eating McDonalds, porridge and stuffed buns if she doesn't want to get sick. This made me say to myself, "Self, suck it up and order your CSA box."

This week's box consisted of lots of leafy greens that I never buy on my own: Blue Kale, Siberian Kale, Green Chard, Red Chard, as well as beets, peaches, many zucchinis, and these:
I had to write and ask what they were. (To be clear, I would not have recognized most of the greens, but they were on the packing list, while these were not). They are Ronde de Nice squash--kind of like mini zucchinis, apparently. I would link to a wikipedia page, but it seems they are so exotic that one doesn't yet exist for them.

Morning K-Town

One of my June projects has been to start taking the bus to work. I actually take two buses to work. The corner where I get off one bus and onto another is located in Koreatown, more affectionately known as "K-town." This is the strip mall where I wait for the second bus.

Here is the the reverse angle. There is no bench, so most people sit on this wall. If I were not taking the picture, I would also be sitting on the wall, although I like to sit on the high section of the wall, which is also closer to the actual stop. I don't know why they prefer the low wall.
Usually, about the time I arrive in K-town I am just beginning to feel hungry and I wish that I had the time to go into this restaurant and try what I assume is the breakfast special. The description is in Korean but it is $4.99 from 6am-11am. While Paul and I eat dinner at Korean restaurants fairly often, I have never eaten a Korean breakfast, so I have no idea what the food would be. I've never arrived at this stop so early that I could afford to skip a bus and hang out in the restaurant eating breakfast, but maybe someday I will.

Oh, Baby, Baby, Carrot, Oh!

My snack this week at work has been baby cut carrots with spicy hummus. I recently learned from a co-worker the origin of baby cut carrots:

Once upon a time (like back in the 80s) people could only buy "adult" carrots. They would take them home and cut them, dice them, slice them, etc, in order to put them in their stir-fries, on crudite platters, or in a carrot and pea combo side dish to go with their meatloaf.

But some of the carrots were too ugly to sell. So a guy named Mike Yurosek, came up with a system, (using a green been cutter and potato peeler) to pare the big, ugly carrots into small, cute carrots.

Armed with this new knowledge, as I sit on a bench eating my with my baby carrots and spicy hummus, I find myself wondering if the carrot I'm eating is an ex-ugly carrot. Was it shunned by the other carrots before it became lithe and cute?

I guess it tells my age, that I remember when the grown ups around me were a little bit coy about such things. There was a small amount of secretiveness about dying one's hair to touch up the gray. People asked, "do you think she's a natural blonde?" or "do you think those are real?"

It shouldn't matter of course, I hate to think that I would have the judged the carrot on it's looks to begin with. It probably says something about me that I waste a gossipy minute wondering if my baby carrots smoothness is its own, or the result of carrot-botox.

Upon return to my desk (but still during my lunch hour, of course) further research reveals that the popularity of baby carrots has exploded to such an extent that majority of baby-cut carrots we eat today were never ugly to begin with, they were just regular carrots.

But that, too, is a little sad, if you allow yourself to think too much about it (which I obviously have). The existence of these clean, cute and convenient carrots that parody actual baby carrots--i.e. carrots which are actually small because of their extreme youth-- means that normal carrots no longer seem quite good enough, they feel obligated to mill themselves down to a size and uniformity that frees us from having from having to question our choices or test the limits of our tolerance for disparity.

Happy 2011

Woke up with a great Saturday feeling. No plans today. I will probably read and write in bed for a few hours. I might decide to go to the gym, or an Indian New Year's ceremony at the Art of Living Center. If I want to--but I'm giving myself permission not to.

And I feel healthy--thanks to my friend K!

On Tuesday I felt a UTI coming on, and went to the doctor. The urine test showed up negative for bacteria, so he sent me home with no prescription for antibiotics. This made me very nervous, since the holiday weekend was approaching, the health center was going to be closed. If I was right, and this was the earliest phase of a UTI, I'd up on New Year's Eve or Day trying to get someone to see me--or I wouldn't, because I can't afford it, so I'd just spend the weekend in misery hoping that no permanent kidney damage occurred before Monday. I expressed my worries to the doctor, who reassured me--I could call the next day if I was still having problems, and we'd work it out. I left empty-handed because of this promise--and because I questioned myself. If the test was negative, maybe it wasn't an infection--even though it felt like one. I hadn't had a UTI in years-- maybe I was mis-remembering something. Maybe it was just an inflammation of some sort that would resolve on it's own.

I tried to keep telling myself this on Wednesday, although I didn't feel any better. I decided I really needed a back-up prescription, even if I didn't fill it. So I called--twice. I got sent via a chain of receptionists and nurse attendants to two different voice-mail boxes. I left messages. I called a third time, the office was closed--ten minutes earlier than their already shortened holiday hours. That's okay, I told myself, I can call first thing in the morning tomorrow. My assigned doctor had indicated he wouldn't be in, but the website showed they had hours on Thursday, so I figured I'd just talk to anyone who was there.

But Thursday when I called, I discovered they had decided to close a day early.

Fine. I'd take more cranberry juice tablets. It was my mom's last day staying at our house, so it was ridiculous to spend it in a random short-term medical clinic--and, what if I was still wrong, and another test turned up negative? I'd have wasted my day for nothing.

But by evening, after dropping my mom at my sister's house, I had a familiar ache in my back. The infection had traveled to my kidneys. But maybe it was just a back-ache? I stopped off at the CVS for a home UTI test. The dip-stick showed bright purple--lots of white blood cells from trying to fight off an infection. Great. I was in exactly the position I had dreaded--after business hours the night before New Year's Eve Day, feeling terrible, with now prescription. I wanted to throttle the doctor for being so cavalier, for not trusting me, and for making me question myself. And I wanted to throttle myself for not being so forceful--for questioning myself despite my own experience and my recognition of physical evidence, just because he was in a position of authority. If anything, I should have stopped trusting him when he babbled some stuff about acid and alkaline that didn't jibe with any of my research--and I do a lot of research! I was mad at him for not looking at my record and making some assessment of me as a patient, realizing that I've had one round of antibiotics in eight years--I'm not a misuser. Then I was mad at myself for making that point myself--for not saying, Look, I had cancer, and I turned down chemo, I'm not a frivolous medicine user!

But the time had passed, and now I was in that place...Should I ask our friend who's a radiologist if she can write a prescription? We hadn't spoken in over a year, but she and her husband had sent a Christmas card. Still, I hated to put her in that positions...

Eventually, I settled on calling family and friends to see what they had hiding in their medicine cabinets. On the second call, I hit gold--my friend K had seven Septa tablets--expired--from her last UTI. Yes! That would exactly get me through the weekend until Monday, when the clinic would open again.

The doctor's refusal to give me a prescription to begin with has to do with a very real concern about the overuse, and misuse of antibiotics, which then cause tougher strains of antibiotic resistant bacterias. This is why doctors are loathe to prescribe when the problem won't be helped by an antibiotic (for a cold that is caused by a virus for example), they ask us to finish each round, and not hoard old pills and try to self medicate later.

The irony, of course, is that what I have learned from this experience is that it doesn't pay to have unconditional faith in the medical system or the people in it--and that if I ever get prescriptions for anything--pain-killers, sedatives, antibiotics--I will fill them and hoard them for a rainy day, the apocalypse, or the day a friend calls in need on a holiday weekend!

Oh--All that was going down a long road that I hadn't actually intended. The point I was getting to--is that every brush with ill-health makes me super grateful for good health. And that little bottle of pills on the dresser, from my friend K, makes this day a completely different day from the kind of day it could have been. And I feel gifted by the universe in this regard. A great start to 2011!

Healthy Eating Guidelines

Last week I went to a presentation called Food for Thought: What You Need to Know About Nutrition and Cancer sponsored by Cancer Treatment Centers of America. I was interested in the evening’s presentation because it featured both a nutritionist and a doctor of gastroenterology. As a colon cancer experiencer who has self-treated primarily with diet, I was interested to see what they had to say, and I was hoping that for them to specifically address nutrition as it relates to gastroenterological cancers.

The presentation fell short of the kind of depth I was envisioning, but it was interesting The evening was, without a doubt, a public relations effort on the part of Cancer Treatment Centers of America. I'm not a fan of sell-jobs, but at the same time, I do feel that CTCA would be one of my top options if I were to have to shop for cancer treatment. I appreciate a cancer establishment that at least uses the terms "integrated" "whole person" and "nutrition," when describing their mission.

Hosted at the Luxe Hotel, the event offered white table clothes, free food, and lots of swag—I now have a canvas tote bag, cute notebook and pen all with CTCA branding. I also received some literature. As I sat in the courtyard listening to light jazz before the presentation began, I looked it over and thought the “Healthy Eating Guidelines” might be worth visiting here. They are all in keeping with rules I have arrived at through my own research and reading in recent years.

• Limit “fast foods” and sugary beverages like soda and juice drinks.

• This is a good one. I’m not sure if by fast foods in quotes, they are talking only about McDonalds and the like, which certainly should be included. But I would prefer it to also include “fast sugars”—these are also called “simple sugars,” as opposed to “complex carbohydrates.” These are white bread, fat-free ice cream, anything with the word “syrup” in it’s list of ingredients—all simple carbs that turn to sugar and release a fast burst of glucose into your bloodstream. There is a relationship between reducing sugar and fighting cancer, which I will discuss in a future post.

• Choose a diet rich in plant-based foods such as fruits, vegetables whole grains, and beans.

• Yes, yes, yes. For some reason when I read these kinds of lists, the “don’ts” always stands out more than the “dos.” But the fact is that if we followed this one piece of advice, most of the other recommendations here would be automatically included. Plant-based foods tend to be high in fiber and complex carbohydrates, low in simple sugars; they offer nutrition and anti-oxidents. If you are an alkaline/acid diet person, plant-based foods usually fall on the alkalizing side of the chart.

• Limit red meat consumption to no more than 4 meals per week. Also, limit portion to 3 ounces per meal, which is about the size of a deck of cards.

• This is something I really try to adhere to—although I tend to apply it to meat of all colors. Without being a vegetarian, whenever there is a decent vegetarian option available, I will tend toward that, and when I choose an animal protein, I try to reverse the normal plate layout, so that vegetables comprise the main portion and I “garnish” with meat.

• Avoid processed meats as much as possible (deli meats, hot dogs, sausage, bacon, etc)

• This is a fairly easy one for me, although it makes it harder to make a quick sandwich from a lot of writers/production office fridges. Barring extreme hunger, the only big temptation is bacon…because bacon is delicious. If it is served at a dinner party draped across a piece of chicken, I will usually eat a limited portion. But I don’t go to that many dinner parties. I might also mention here though—that along with these meats, I also try to keep my non-organic chicken to a minimum. It is often framed on restaurant menus as the low-fat option, but the amount of hormones and antibiotics present in conventional chicken is something I think we are just beginning to discover, not to mention ethical considerations. So this again, is something I’ll eat a few ounces of if it is being served by someone I know—after all, it’s being made with love—and that’s got to be nutritious!—but I don’t buy chicken from grocery stores or restaurants unless it’s organic, and even then, there’s usually a vegetarian choice I like just as well.

• Avoid or limit alcohol

• I drink maybe a couple times a year. I don’t have a lot of in-depth information about alcohol, but I believe people who say it’s not good for someone in my health situation. My dad had pancreatic cancer twice in his life, and in both cases it was preceded by an increase in his normal drinking habits for a period of time. Coincidence? Maybe, maybe not. Generally, if you’re not in a high-risk group, alcohol messes with your glucose and insulin levels in some way, and that as a result of your body reacting to the alcohol as if it’s a poison. So limiting that seems wise.

• Limit salt-preserved, salted, or salty foods.

• I love salt, but don't think I overdo it. My feeling is that the biggest culprit is “sneaky salt,” which is when you look at the back of packaged food and realize that your soup has a thousand milligrams of sodium. Fast foods are also infamous for their salt content of course. I will eat a bag of McDonald's french fries with about the same frequency as I drink alcohol. I’m not sure what the relationship is between cancer and salt, so I may do some research and do a future post.

• Eat more high fiber foods such as 100% whole grain breads and cereals.

• I will be the first to agree—colon health is really important! Maybe because I am hyper aware of digestion, I feel like I hear so much about fiber all the time, but beyond “pushing things through” what does fiber actually do? Well, it also can reduce blood sugar and cholesterol. And it reduces your risk of cancer, heart disease and type 2 diabetes. And

• Choose vegetable oils such as canola or olive oil and use sparingly. Limit fatty foods, especially animal fats.

• Olive oil is great. Canola oil has some caveats. I heard a great lecture once about the relationship between the kinds of fats we take in and cancer, deserving of a future post.

All the italicized guidelines are quoted from "Healthy Eating Guidelines" by Cancer Treatment Centers of America.

Bigger Better--and Carcinogenic?

One last article of interest concerning the salmon. A certain growth hormone is greater in the GM salmon. A little bit probably won't hurt you, they say...but the author points out that a lot of little bits--occurring in other parts of our food supply--can combine to become more than just a little, and could then cause harm.

Swimming Upstream, Bigger Faster

I've been loosely, but with some horror, following the issue of genetically modified salmon. If you haven't, the basic story is that a company has spliced some genes to make a "super-salmon" that grows twice as fast as its wild brethren. The FDA has said that the salmon meat is essentially the same, and is safe for human consumption, but have not yet entirely approved the fish and fish eggs for to be sold yet.

(This picture, stolen from AP, shows a GM salmon in the back, and a "regular" salmon in the front. No one has mentioned the GM salmon being giant, so I assume, that given its full lifespan, the salmon in front would grow to the size of the one in back.)

My own instinctive "ewww" factor goes beyond the food on my plate to the "what if" scenario, of what happens if these new salmon somehow migrate--either via Disney style escape, or through someone's greed--from their inland homes into the ocean. A fish that grows faster eats faster, and would have an advantage over the slower growing fish. The bigger, faster growing fish could eventually take over the population, which is disturbing in itself, without even considering how such a skew would affect the whole ocean food chain. I don't know much about marine life--but I lived in Australia for long enough to know that whenever unfairly advantaged species are introduced to an environment--even with the best of intentions--it tends to wreak havoc in unforeseen ways.

The other thing the FDA must rule on, is whether the fish must be labeled as genetically modified on its consumer packaging. The company, AquaBounty Technologies (sounds like a name from a Philip K Dick novel, doesn't it?) argues that they shouldn't have to label, that consumers might interpret the label as a "warning," putting the GM salmon at a disadvantage.

In other words, people might not want to eat food if they know it has been genetically modified. Wow, really?

In other arenas--mainly human social interaction--I pride myself on being rather a free thinker, and so I feel a bit knee-jerk conservative when it comes to modification of our food. As if I'm too rigid to see the progress we are making toward feeding the worlds population. "Those damn scientist-kids with their GM rice and fish and cloned meats!"

Be that as it may, however...I don't have a good feeling about this.

You can draw your own conclusions. Some recent coverage appears on NewsDaily, and the website for The Independent, but if you want to read just one article that give a sense of the broader context, you should read this from The Guardian, and if you are still interested, check out the related stories in the sidebar.

The Dawn of A New Fitness Day

Yesterday we bought an elliptical trainer that was on sale at Kmart. Today we assembled it. I’m very excited because I think I will work out more. Is getting on an elliptical so much easier than unrolling the yoga mat? No, but with the elliptical I can bribe myself with the prospect of watching TV.

Foodie

My parents are coming tomorrow for Thanksgiving. Since we have a little kitchen I want to pre-cook some dinner items for the next few days. Right now I am simultaneously cooking, each at different stages-- Thai-pumpkin soup with coconut milk, Pasta Fazool, and Cranberry Sauce made with Rosemary, Ruby Port and Figs.

Paul, who is not a fan of wine or rosemary, says it smells like ass. I say, thanks for the love and support, hon. Although I must admit, that Italian, Thai, and Thanksgiving smells together are an interesting blend.

Natto

So Eric and I went to check out the Asian grocery the other day. That’s a great thing about having guests, you finally do the things you have intended to do, but just haven’t gotten to yet. It was cool because after his three years in Japan, he’s pretty good at reading the packaging. On his recommendation we bought some natto, a kind of fermented soy bean dish many Japanese eat for breakfast. He says everyone there swears to its health benefits, that you go to the doctor with the flu, he'll say, “Go home and eat natto.”

It’s not nasty tasting, but its distinctive smell, and the way the there are strings of goo between the beans take some getting used to. I ate half the contents of my little polystyrene container, and he said that was pretty good for a first-timer, as it has been known to make people gag. However, if I keep practicing and get hard core, I can start to add chives, a raw egg, and soy sauce. Something to aspire to in the future.

Travel Day

Travel Day

Ah the dilemma…to discuss international events? Or food….
I guess that’s not really a dilemma at all, is it?

I traveled to my parents' house in Indiana today, and as I sat on my U.S Airways flight from Tallahassee to Charlotte, the beverage cart approached--something I was unusually excited about, since today’s increased security measures required that I surrender my bottle of water at the ticket counter.
The flight attendant handed me my short plastic glass, along with napkin and a small foil bag—a snack, I’m sure also welcome to those who had randomly been told to remove food before boarding as well. I eyed it and was happy to see I had recieved “Spinzels: Braided Pretzels.” As plane fare goes, plain pretzels are nutritionally about as innocuous as one can hope for—for me a choice superior to any kind of nuts or cheese product filled pretzel nuggets. Additionally there was a little foil picture of a farm house and the “Harvest Road” brand logo incorporates two stalks of wheat, all and all feeling very wholesome.

I opened the foil bag and popped a braided pretzel in my mouth, and as I chewed and swallowed, it occurred to me to wonder “Why do my braided pretzels taste like microwave popcorn?” I flipped over the pouch and began to examine the ingredients: Wheat flour, Vegetable Oil (may contain corn, canola, partially hydrogenated soy),

(PARTIALLY HYDROGENTATED SOY? In a PRETZEL? I could spend an entire post ranting just about this but I’m going to spare the readers in an attempt to proceed to the following ingredients)

…salt, ARTIFICIAL BUTTER FLAVORING, corn syrup, yeast.

Since when, even in America’s heartland, has a profound amount of salt on a flour based item not enough? Has the public been clamoring for artificial butter flavoring on their pretzels while I wasn’t listening?

Or do we just tolerate it? Or assume that in the same way my mother used to try to sneak bran into our pancakes to give us extra fiber, the corporations in our motherland are tossing in a little partially hydrogenated oil, artificial flavor and corn syrup into items to, uh…to…

Why DO creators of javascript:void(0)products like this feel the need to distribute, albeit in tiny quantities, substances that are--let’s not say poisonous; let's just say--banned in other countries, and/or associated with a myriad of health risks? Hasn’t anybody told them that there is no daily minimum requirement for corn syrup?

I’m sure there is a perfectly good reason, I’m just not sure I want to know what it is.

Links Are Up!

Very proud of myself. I have successfully edited the links on the sidebar. All friends of mine who are clever and creative. Except for Avant Game. I just wish she was my friend, but I've never met her. Is there some kind of protocol where I should write and ask permission before adding that link?

Healthy(er) Baking Tip
Tonight I made some cookie dough from a mix. A fan of the baking mix for many years, I have cut back significantly since embracing different diet practices in the wake of my illness. But occasionally I veer from the path, and when I do, I grab the Ghiradelli chocolate chip cookie mix. This is the only mix on the entire shelf that does not contain partially hydrogenated oils. I've read a lot of labels and have not seen another product without them. Even the other Ghiradelli products, like their brownies, contain partially hydrogenated oils.

Trivia: The history behind baking mixes is that when cake mixes originally debuted after WWII, all you had to add was water. They either sold or tested badly--I can't remember which--because the ladies of the house didn't feel they were "doing" enough. So the manufacturers pulled the powdered egg from the mix, and required the homemaker to add a real egg. This was apparently enough to assuage her guilt, and today's pre-made mixes do a rollicking business, if the full aisle of products is any indicator.

Edit 11/10: I have recently seen Krusteaz cookie mixes that also are partially-hydrogenated-oil-free!