A couple months ago I accepted some cookbooks to review. At the time they either perfectly complimented my diet or I was just curious to take a look. Now the ones that were perfect are less so, as I start my journey with paleo, and the one that I was simply curious about is not as much help as I would have hoped. The world is full of surprises I guess. I never imagined I would do a 180 on my diet but when you feel the urge to make the change you just have to trust that you have done your homework and take the leap. So far, so good. REALLY good.

Anyway the 3 cookbooks…

Another Fork in the Trail – Vegetarian and Vegan Recipes for the Backcountry. I haven’t missed grains in the least since I abandoned them but the muffins on the cover of this book look heavenly, no denying that! As you can guess this is a recipe collection designed for the veggie based diets of outdoor enthusiasts… hikers, campers, backpackers, etc. When I got this book I was really excited to try some of these recipes in the spring. The quinoa berry muffins, hazelnut fig granola, and pumpkin breakfast bars were calling my name. Even after reviewing it with my grainless, primal eyes I still see tons of value in this book though. There are plenty of veggie based meals that do not include grains/beans and I love me some veggies. If you are eating vegetarian or vegan then this is an excellent cookbook to add to your library, one the best I have seen in a long while.

The Raw Truth: Recipes and Resources for the Living Foods Lifestyle - I think this is an excellent beginner book for anyone wanting to explore more raw foods. The recipes are simple and not daunting as many raw recipes can be and they look appetizing. I have dozens of raw food un-cookbooks and I hate it when they take a glamorous photo of something that looks like baby vomit and expect that we will actually want to make it. Recipes that caught my eye were the banana date pudding, Pesto Wraps (which I plan on making), and the Black Raspberry Prickly Pear, which I would also make if I still lived in a place where I could get cacti locally. I AM an Arizona girl living in the Midwest.

Most of these recipes, while I am sure they delicious, are not going to make their way to my plate anytime soon because they have lots of nuts and high glycemic fruit. Nuts are getting harder for me to digest the longer I stay away from grains (same with dairy) so I think my gut is likely healing from sensitivities I did not know I had and now it is objecting to other hard-to-digest foods. Fruit is perfectly okay but I am staying away from dried fruits and fruits high on the glycemic index like bananas and dates. Raw food recipes typically utilize metric tons of all of the above. Still want to make that prickly pear recipe though. Eating cacti is totally primal!

The Cooking Light Gluten-Free Cookbook – Since I don’t eat grains it goes to follow that a gluten free cookbook would be perfect right? Yeah, not so much. This book is full of recipes that incorporate gluten free flours not recipes that are grain free. It is actually kind of grain centric with lots of bread recipes, pasta, rice, and corn. That may be typical for gluten free cookbooks though. I never looked at one before. The Pan Seared Scallops with Bacon and Spinach and the Prosciutto Stuffed Pork Chops look good but overall there are not a lot of recipes I can use. When I flip through and see all those grains I don’t get a “cooking light” vibe. All that stuff would make me feel bloated and heavy. I would pass on this one.

Anyway, since the publishers were nice enough to send these books my way I wanted to give them a quick review. Even though I am not eating raw or vegetarian anymore I would still recommend the first 2 books for any who are. Off to write down some recipes from the primal books I got at the library. Be well!

This month the Green Moms Carnival is addressing green pets. Why October? October is Adopt a Shelter Dog Month and also National Pet Wellness month. I haven’t really blogged about green pets much… can only think of one or two other times that I have. Shameful I tell ya!

I guess the reason I don’t discuss pets all that often is because I don’t really have any. Yes, we have reptiles but those belong to my son and he pretty much does all the work in taking care of them. Since we rent our home we don’t want to pay a deposit and monthly fee for having a dog or cat. But when we do buy a house (still trying to figure out where we want to lay down some roots) then we will be getting a dog right quick and I have all sorts ideas and plans for how to keep it green. We are going to feed our pup organic raw foods and forgo the bags of unregulated, toxic dog food. We are going to buy green chew toys, use natural flea and tick repellents, and hopefully find our perfect companion at a shelter. In short, I am really, really excited to get a dog. Is this what happens when the children grow older and you can’t have more? You get a puppy and decide to mother it? ;)

In the mean time we keep it green with the pets we have and reptiles are actually pretty amazing in that regard. We have two Bearded Dragons, a female named Samantha and a male named Skyler. Also a Russian Tortoise named George Lopez.

They reside mostly in terrariums made of metal and glass. We got them second hand at an estate auction along with UVB lights and heat lamps. Decor for inside the tanks is really easy as well. We use crushed walnut shells substrate to line the bottom of the two tanks and there are other natural items like wood logs and rocks. My son sourced all of it from local woods.

Their diet is also very “natural”. We feed them the same greens and fruit that we eat along with bugs and worms (the beardies only). These things can be expensive if you buy them exclusively through pets stores so my son goes hunting for them in areas he is sure have not been sprayed with pesticides. He also breeds worms and crickets as needed. When we do have to go to the pet store we end up with plastic bags (crickets) which we won’t reuse because they had bugs in them and plastic tubs that hold worms. The plastic tubs get reused many times over for various things but it still brings more plastic into the home, so limiting that is important.

I find them to be excellent pets if you want to keep things minimal and green. It is really easy to find all the gear you need second hand at yard sales and on Craigslist because you can use reptile habitats as well as fish tanks. They do, however, require more electricity than your average pet because they need a UVB light and a heat lamp. The temperature in their tank has to be regulated and they need the the UVB light to remain healthy. We made this more manageable by putting these on timers so that nothing accidentally gets left on longer than it needs to be. We also have thermometers in the habitats as well as Timothy Grass for burrowing on colder evenings. During warm and sunny weather the tanks are put directly in front of windows so they can get natural UVB rays and the sun heats their tanks without a heat lamp too. If you live in a climate where it is always warm than you will have an even easier time caring for them.

They are actually quite fun too. GREAT for kids. They can explore the house and they love to sit on your lap or your chest while you watch TV, play on the computer, or do some other task. The beardies are really very friendly and like to be with their “people” and to play. The tortoise is less interested in people but he is very entertaining to watch. It is pretty easy to clean up after them too.

They do have a big downside though in that they aren’t animals that you can just pack up and board someplace unless you are lucky enough to have a place that boards reptiles nearby. If you want to go on vacation they cannot be left on their own for more than a day or so. You pretty much need to have a backup care giver you can take them to or a reputable pet sitting service available that specializes in reptiles. We aren’t looking forward to that situation when the times comes. Having these guys in the house has really curbed our wanderlust. But as far as pets go, they are pretty easy to care for, inexpensive, and they are wonderful pets for those who want something more lovable than fish but less work than a dog.

Do you have pets? How do you “keep it green”?

A few years ago I picked up the book Raw in Ten Minutes by Bryan Au and became an immediate fan. I LOVE raw foods but sometimes the prep can be so daunting… aka sprouting, juicing, dehydrating, etc. This is why the idea of raw meals in ten minutes sounded awesome to me and the food was good. The raw nachos and chili cheese fries stand out to me in particular. I have been anxiously awaiting his next book which I asked him some questions about several months ago. It just recently came out for sale so I thought I would publish the interview now. Anyway the book is Raw STAR Recipes: Organic Meals, Snacks & Desserts Under 10 Minutes. Enjoy!

Tiffany: Why should non vegans look into adding more raw foods to their diet?

Chef Bryan Au: Vegans and everyone should eat more organic fresh fruit and vegetables because it is very healthy and doctors always recommend it too. With my recipes it is so much fun, fast and easy while being incredibly delicious too! And all my recipes are made out of fresh organic fruit, vegetables with some nuts or seeds so you don’t have to worry about getting “enough” because you will! It is also very new with amazing flavors and assortment of new desserts and recipes to enjoy. It really is for everyone. And everyone absolutely loves it!

Tiffany: Do you think your recipes are easy enough and tasty enough to fool those strapped for time or dead set against “health food”?

Chef Bryan Au: Yes definitely! I actually designed ALL of my recipes to look and taste even BETTER than everyone’s favorite junk foods, comfort foods and international menu. I did this on purpose because we all enjoy these foods the most. But I was able to combine all my years of being a chef, culinary expert and was finally able to combine perfectly the two worlds of junk foods and have it be actually the most healthy food on the planet! It is very incredible and you have to experience it yourself. My recipes are actually the most creamy, decadent and gourmet yet so simple and tasty!

Tiffany: What are some of your favorite recipe recommendations for those just getting started with raw foods?

Chef Bryan Au: Many people really love my Pasta Alfredo because it is so simple to make yet so refreshing and flavorful it is a great introduction into how amazing Raw Organic Cuisine can be and then of course ANY of the desserts will instantly make anyone and everyone a huge fan of Raw Organic Cuisine and they will totally understand and want more as a result! I have seen this happen many times. But I do have more than 100+ recipes to choose from and anything or everything that you already enjoy I have a raw organic cuisine recipe or version of it that is fresher, faster, healthier and even more amazing! My goal is to make Raw Organic Cuisine the Main Food Trend in 2011 and Media Diet because it is so delicious, fun, and new with tons of health benefits. No other new “diet” or cuisine even exists or can come close so please give my new recipe book ECO CHEF BRYAN AU Raw Star Recipes: Organic Meals, Snacks & Desserts In 10 Minutes a try I promise you will love it and it already has become a major Food Trend in 2011 all the schools will be using it and you will see it everywhere.

Tiffany: Do you need any special equipment to whip up these recipes?

Chef Bryan Au: In general you can make most of my recipes with a very sharp knife, a cutting board and a good blender. But for a few recipes you do need a Good4U Dehydrator but even if you do not have one you can sometimes use the sun or a oven to dehydrate the recipes. But I would say 95% of all my recipes can be made with the sharp knife, cutting board and a good blender and most people have those already in the kitchen.

My “healthy diet” ideas are spread out among numerous ideologies and theories. I cherry pick things that I like and that work for me and drop the things that I don’t like. I like the WAPF ideas of a nourishing diet for the most part but I do not like their obsession with meat. Same thing for primal eaters but I do like the primal practice of minimizing grains. I prefer a vegetarian diet but not so much the fact that LOTS of vegetarians could actually be called grainarians. Living off pasta, bread, and rice is not healthy in my opinion. I ended up deciding that for me the best diet is a nourished vegetarian diet with little in the way of grains and lots in the way of raw foods and greens (ala Crazy, Sexy, Diet). The chief way I choose to eat lots of greens is via green smoothies. I drink 2 quarts per day, minimum, loaded with things like spinach, collard greens, turnip or beet greens, parsley, mustard greens, wheatgrass, or wild greens like dandelion. Greens have a lot of the nutrients that WAPF enthusiasts claim they need meat for but when you drink 3-4 cups of greens in one sitting you are getting tons of those nutrients. You are also ingesting ALKALINE foods.

When I was diagnosed with cancer in 2006 I moved from Ohio to Arizona so I could go to one of the best doctors in the country. His treatment is a mix of conventional and non-conventional and he encourages diet and other alternatives as methods of cure as well. One of the first things he told me was to stop to eating meat and dairy. The reason? They encourage acidity in the body and cancer cells LOVE acid environments. Meat and dairy would in fact contribute to an environment that makes cancer very happy. Later on a I read several books that backed him up and one of those is The pH Miracle: Balance Your Diet, Reclaim Your Health.

It is a very eye opening book and shows with perfect clarity why a diet based upon acid foods like meat and dairy are NOT a good idea. Of course this is not to say that you cannot ever eat these things but the typical person is not striking a balance between acidic and alkaline foods. The book goes into the exact things that happen when our body is too acidic… it is like giving your cells and acid bath and giving a place for things like Candida (yeast) a place to thrive.

In all honesty the diet at the back of the book is quite radical and there is NO way I could live on it long term. Cold cucumber, avocado soup in the morning doesn’t sound yummy. But thanks to pioneers in the raw foods movement I can drink my green smoothies in addition to other greens and veggies throughout the day and strike a good balance. Or so I hope. ;)

This book inspired me to get some pH testing strips to test my pH daily to see how I am doing. I also got some  pH booster drops to add to my water. Eventually though that became cost prohibitive and I got an Alkamate, portable alkazing water bottle instead. LOVE it! One of the first reviews on that page was from someone who claimed they were to acidic and were getting hives. Ironically I get hives when I stop drinking my smoothies and let my diet get out of whack. I have never been able to explain way they come on but perhaps it too has to do with my pH. After filtering my tap I now add the pH drops and some lemon for the ultimate alkaline water. I have already seen a difference, especially in my skin. This month my period crept up on me and caught me by surprise. My skin usually gets oily and a just a bit blotchy a couple days before that time of month but this go round… nada. If the outside cells of my skin react this way to a more alkaline environment I can only assume the inside cells are swimming around in joy.

Do you know what your pH is?

This morning I watched an incredible documentary called Food Matters. I
was enthralled from the first few opening seconds and hooked until the credits. I even watched the credits because they had some background music lyrics that were interesting too. This film is all about the “you are what you eat” concept.

Doctors today don’t receive very much training in nutrition and most patients believe there is a pill that cures everything. IMO and the opinion of the makers of this film…that is exactly the way the “sickness” industry… doctors, pharma companies, junk food companies, etc… want to keep it. There just isn’t comparable profit in health and wellness so the object is to make us sick and keep us sick.

As one gentlemen in the film, Andrew Saul said…”good health makes a lot of sense but it doesn’t make a lot of dollars”. I have many “what if” moments when I think what my life would have been if I had been educated when I was kid about whole foods, raw foods, organics, etc. and if those were the exact foods that had been marketed to me when I was growing up. If companies had been concerned about selling my parents or your parents, fresh fruits and greens instead of pop tarts….where would society be. We might have a healthier society but less wealth would have been created. It is the oldest trick in the book…create the “poison” and then “sell” the antidote. I often tally the cost of good health in my mind and then compare it to the cost of the chemotherapy I had at 28 years old. At $7000 a week for chemo and related treatment the costs are not even comparable. Add to that the 4 surgeries (2 major and 2 minor) I had that year. The REAL money is in sickness. Imagine if we had an epidemic of health? The pharma companies would be out 300 billion a year just in the US… they have ZERO incentive to push health on us.

One scary statistic is that since our food travels 1500-2000 miles to reach us and it is already a week old when it hits stores so we are lucky if we get 40% of the original nutritional content from that food. The food is probably already being grown in unhealthy, depleted soil to begin with. Add to that the herbicides, fungicides, chemical fertilizers, GMOs, etc…all the crap that is put in our food or done to it as it grows and we have a SERIOUS problem….a perfect recipe for sickness. A recipe that is profitable. It may not have gotten its start as something malicious but the fact that it continues to go on is IMO.

We take home these deficient foods and then cook them…destroying half or more of the remaining nutritional content they have and all the enzymes or “life” in the food. Interestingly in the video they mention that when we eat cooked food our body makes white blood cells in response to the food…reacting to what it considers to be no longer “natural” and taking a pro-active stance…as if saying “What is this crap? I need to be on guard in case this stuff is toxic.” Incredible…our bodies think “cooked” food is unnatural or an invader.

David Wolfe discusses superfoods like Spirulina and cacao beans and how they are some of the most “perfect” foods out there as far as nutrients. He also discusses how our values are making us sicker. We put more emphasis on having a nice car or house than we do having the best possible foods. Why? Because every day we have people marketing to us to tell us that the car is important, the iPod is important, that flat screen is important. We don’t get bombarded with ads for spirulina, kale, or spinach do we?

My favorite part was where Andrew Saul spoke about how the very things that may make us healthier… vitamins, natural medicines, herbs, or supplements, etc. are being touted by our government via the FDA as suspect or dangerous. Every year the assault gets more vicious. They raid stores selling herbal tinctures, they threaten them with law suits, and they make draconian laws that say they can’t tell people that these things can “cure”. The DO NOT want us to have access to the things that could heal us. Thir position is that the only things that can heal us are pharmaceutical drugs. This is the greatest travesty. They want us to believe that anything therapeutically valuable MUST be dangerous. It is in fact illegal in many countries to treat cancer with any sort of nutritional therapy. Even if that is the route you want to go… it is illegal. The only legal therapies are chemo, radiation, and surgery. Ask yourself why that is… money… 200 billion dollars annually.

Doctors rarely if ever prescribe a mere diet change to heal illness. You could have knocked me over with feather when my oncologist told me not to drink milk or eat meat while on Chemo…well I already knew this but I surprised when he told me… cancer cells LOVE acidic animal proteins. How many other cancer patients get this same advice? Not many I think. One of the doctors on the video declared that he thinks 80-90% of hospital patients are admitted due to issues caused directly by poor nutrition. But society at large and the medical community have been trained to ignore that elephant in the room that is nutrition. In fact I remember reading before that medical doctors only get a few weeks of nutritional training. A few weeks in 8 plus years time. That is how much importance they place on food and we are the ones paying the price for that arrogance and ignorance.

One thing that made me see red when I watched this video is that they specifically mention a vitamin that can really help with controlling seizures. I have an epileptic child and due to diet (my doing not the doctor’s) he has been seizure free for 2 years or so now. I never heard one word about vitamins being able to help him. All I heard was MEDICINE. Well, the medicine made him weak, made him lose 20 pounds until he was a skeleton, and it made him scratch his arms until they were bloody and all his doctor wanted to do was increases the dosage. I decided to put him on a special diet, use supplements, and wean him off the meds without the doctor knowing. The Doc’s eyeballs about popped out of his head when he saw a seizure free kid in good health due to naught but good nutrition. The vitamins and nutrients in the food didn’t heal him it just gave him what he needed so his own BODY could heal ITSELF. Now I can clearly see what put us in that position to begin with, his vaccine injury coupled with being a McDonald’s kid for several years.

The only thing I really did not agree with is when one guy said that surgery isn’t helpful. Well, I understand that the body can heal itself but in my case if I had not had my colon re-section I would be dead now most likely. And the amount of pain I was in was un-bearable. I was too far gone to do otherwise and I think for many it does get to that same point. I do however regret letting them remove my gall bladder later on. Yes I got acute pancreatitis but if given time I think I could have healed that on my own…except for the fact that I was taking massive doses of Chemo. I did actually refuse any more Chemo after that against their advice but I didn’t think to insist I keep my gall bladder. That I do regret.

The video also has some VERY alarming things to say about things we are introducing into the body like chemicals, drugs, and silver, mercury fillings you get at the dentist…one word about those…DON’T. There are some horrifying things about cancer which honestly made me really uncomfortable to watch. It was super scary stuff. But along side that there was great info about the Gerson Institute and all they have accomplished in healing cancers without drugs and many times without surgery.

This video is one that all people should watch and high schools should be showing it annually. This information needs to get out to people so that they know that health and wellness can be just a matter of taking personal responsibility.

You can watch it online for only $5 or buy the DVD for $30. I watched online but will also be buying the DVD so I can pass it around to my friends and family. It is an AMAZING film. Watch the trailer below: