I have the dehydrator running for the first time. I’m making flax crackers from a recipe I found on the Give It To Me Raw community.  I also whipped up a few atom bombs, according to the orginal recipe from many moon ago in my London days, and am having a go at dehydrating four of them.  It makes a fan sound, but otherwise is a pretty innocuous machine.

The Green Star juicer is proving to be a fab partner in the kitchen.  Amazing yield and fantastic juices.  I whipped up a little celery-carrot-purple carrot-pear-parsley-garlic green juice the other morning and man did it kick ass!  I walked around the whole day with garlic on the tongue, but I sure felt energized, even though I’d been up half the night with the baby.

The Blendtec Total I’ve also been using but am not totally convinced yet.  It is great for smoothies, and I made a fantastic almond mylk today.  But I agree with the critics of the Blendtec that the pre-programmed control panel is a bit of a pig to intuit.  I think I’d have preferred and nice twisty little knob.  And, the Blendtec doesn’t come with a tamper, like the Vita-Prep.  This means the dreaded situation where your ingredients are pasted to the edges of the jar while the blades fruitlessly whirl through air arises with frequency.  Or, at least, with what I’ve tried to do with it.  Maybe I am trying to make my blender be a food processor? Above-mentioned flax crackers were certainly not a happy glob in the ol’ blender.  Nor was the coconut I tried to cream the other day, but that might be because it actually turned out to be bad.  I dunno.  I am going to keep trying and see where the Blendtec leads me.

The cool thing is the my dude is getting quite into the whole raw thing. He’s making smoothies in the morning, salads at lunchtime, reading Shazzie’s books and generally quite enthused about the left-of-centre ideas that I keep springing on him.  Yay!

That’s right:  the headline for today is that we don’t know everything.  If we did, there’d be no scientific investigation, no debate and probably a lot less confusion.  So, when you’re dealing with wholefoods vs. supplements, the two mains unknowns to consider are the Life Force and the undiscovered.

1.  Supplements generally are not living foods.  With the exception of something like Kiki’s Nature’s Living Superfood, a living food, and a supplement at the same time.  But even the most carefully prepared and handled extracts end up losing their Qi.  It’s inevitable.  Think about what happens when you pick some lettuce from your carefully tended plot:  at first it’s green ad chunchy and lovely and expressing all the care and happiness that you put into its cultivation.  But if you leave it sitting on the counter for a couple of days…well, it loses something intrinsic.  It loses it’s Life Force.

2.  Wholefoods are not standardized, so, no, you never know exactly how much you’re getting of any one nutrient.  But if you think about it, you realise that a nut is more than it’s amino acids, vitamin E and minerals.  In fact, wholefoods contain a range of phytonutrients whose biological role we haven’t even begun to discuss let alone analyse.  So, by taking a selenium supplement you certainly guarantee your dosage of that mineral, but by eating a handful of Brazil nuts, you get a whole bunch of other goodies that might be pro-biotic, pre-biotic, alkalysing, and who knows what else.

Finally, when you think about what we put into our bodies, how we nourish ourselves, you realise that supplements are not nourishing.  Taking a handful of pills never gives a sensation of satiety.  So for people fighting obesity and overweight, anorexia or just plain bad eating habits, taking supplements might be a good initial step to getting their bodies fitter, but in the long term it doesn’t serve them well.  It’s more important to eat a handful of almonds and feel satisfied and ‘full’ than to take a vitamin E gel-cap.  It’s more important to get into the habit of eating a big salad with avocado and sprouts than to take an antioxidant then eat a bunch of icecream thinking ‘I’ve taken my pill, I’ve done my bit, now I can slack off a bit’.

I come out firmly on the side of whole foods.  Where do you stand?

What can transform someone from being diagnosed with bipolar disorder and chronic fatigue syndrome to a state of total mental and physical wellbeing? As James Boschman discovered, omega-3 fatty acids can work those wonders and more. Within three weeks of incorporating flax seed — the highest known vegetable source of omega-3s — into his diet, he was sleeping normally and, in his words, “not crazy anymore,” as the omega-3 fatty acids leveled out the wild fluctuations in his brain.

After experiencing flaxseed’s amazing abilities for himself, Boschman spent the next 15 years researching omega-3 fatty acids and eventually began the flaxseed packaging and distribution company Randolph & James Flax Mills Ltd. During his Winter 2005 lecture on essential nutrition, he brought this unique and delicious flaxseed and his wealth of knowledge to share at the First Annual Arizona Choices Exposition in Tucson, Ariz., and all those attending the lecture learned what a little dietary flaxseed could do for this modern mental illness epidemic.

Omega-3 deficiency is a major cause of mental illness in North America, according to Boschman. Food manufacturers don’t use ingredients high in omega-3 fatty acids because they grow rancid quickly. Since money ranks ahead of good nutrition, they use hydrogenated oils, which have a long shelf life but also create trans fats in the foods as a byproduct of the hydrogenation process. Research links trans fats to cancer, heart disease and a number of other chronic diseases, making them the “number one killer in North America today,” says Boschman.

As a result of our processed-food-rich diets, we’re consuming large amounts of omega-6 fatty acids and little or zero omega-3 fatty acids, which is a recipe for feeling “stressed out,” as too many people often are. Stress, caused by events like someone cutting in front of you in traffic, turns on the production of adrenaline from omega-6 fatty acids, according to Boschman. Think of it as an “on button.” The problem is that we need omega-3 fatty acids to turn off the stress response, which is precisely why there are so many high-strung people in our omega-3-deficient society. They simply lack the “off button” required to stop their bodies’ responses to everyday stressors.

However, omega-3 deficiency is linked to much more than angry drivers yelling out their windows. Boschman believes that the lack of the essential fatty acid in pregnant women might be a cause of both postpartum depression and the development of symptoms popularly diagnosed as ADHD, Tourette’s syndrome and even mental retardation in the delivered child. During pregnancy, almost all of a woman’s omega-3 reserves are used to form the brain of the developing fetus. If she doesn’t increase her intake of the essential fatty acid accordingly, postpartum depression can occur. Additionally, if her body lacks enough omega-3 to form the fetus’ brain sufficiently, and the child is not given proper omega-3 through diet or supplements during the first two years of life, then Boschman believes one of three brain disorders will occur, depending on the severity of the deficiency:

* ADHD (relatively less deficient)
* Tourette’s syndrome
* Mental retardation (severely deficient)

In this sense, these three brain disorders are part of the same continuum, all with the same root and the same necessary preventative measure.

However, all flaxseed is not created equal, says Boschman. The higher the latitude where the crop is grown, the higher the seeds’ omega-3 content. Randolph & James Flax Mills Ltd. packages and distributes organic flaxseed grown north of the fifty-third parallel, which is then milled and packaged one bag at a time so less peroxidation occurs. This way, you eat flaxseed that smells and tastes fresh. Randolph & James is also the only manufacturer that tests for E. coli and other biological contaminants, according to Boschman. These safety measures guarantee you high-quality, delicious and safe flaxseed every time.

Boschman ended his lecture by opening up a new bag of Randolph & James Flax Mills Ltd. flaxseed for his lecture attendees to sample. What a flavor! You could actually taste its fresh and wholesome nature. Randolph & James Flax Mills Ltd. doesn’t have a website, but you can order many of their products online through other companies. Just type the company’s name in any search engine.

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And I’ll copy it in here in case it gets moved:

A single omega-3 fish oil capsule taken daily could help keep some people with heart failure out of hospital, a study released yesterday revealed.

A second trial, however, found that statins – conventional medicines prescribed for many healthy people with high cholesterol at risk of heart disease – have no effect once the arteries have narrowed to the point where heart failure occurs.

Both results were revealed yesterday in Munich at the European Society of Cardiology meeting and published online by the Lancet. Italian researchers investigated the potential of omega-3 polyunsaturated fatty acids on patients with chronic heart failure – which occurs when the heart struggles to pump blood around the body because of narrowing arteries.

Professors Luigi Tavazzi and Gianni Tognoni from the ANMCO research centre in Florence found that more patients who were given the omega-3 survived than those who received a placebo. In the omega-3 group, 955 died (27%), whereas among those given a placebo, 1,014 (29%) died. More in the placebo group were also admitted to hospital. Experts said the difference was enough to recommend omega-3 for patients with heart failure.

Statins did not prove useful in a trial where 2,285 patients were given 10mg a day of rosuvastatin while 2,289 received a placebo. The researchers found there was no significant difference between deaths and hospital admissions.

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