And in Today's News...

Forget for a moment the detriment that this food does to your body and overall health each time you ingest what these businesses call "food", and instead pay attention to its business practices:

McDonald’s is squirming over the revelation that more than 99 percent of the eggs they use in the U.S. come from chickens who are subjected to immense cruelty. In fact, behind every Egg McMuffin are chickens who have had their beaks cut off so they won’t peck each other to death when they are driven to insanity in tiny, barren cages. McDonald’s talks about “Happy Meals,” but gets its eggs from what may be the most abusive factory farming system in existence.
 
Even Burger King, and McDonald’s Europe, have announced plans to do away with this level of extreme cruelty. But for McDonald’s in the U.S., it’s still standard practice.
 
Check out Bruce Friedrich’s excellent article about what’s really going on, and how you can help put more pressure on the world’s largest fast food chain:

 http://www.foodrevolution.org/blog/mcdonalds-cruelty/

And Here We Have...

A Picture Says A Thousand Words...All On Its Own.

The Importance of GMO Education

I know many people may not even know what a GMO is or what it means, but it's important that people start understanding what it means.

GMO stands for "genetically modified origins": plainly put - GMO's are genetically modified materials that are bred into our food...genetically modified to be bigger, juicier more plentiful, more withstanding of pesticide - more importantly Monsanto's Roundup and other chemical company's products.

What this also means is that these genetically altered items in our foods that we ingest are metabolized into our body. They don't leave. They don't "digest out". They are speculated to change us in fundamental ways. 

GMO Free Moms website provides a concise statement:

"There are many claims from the public that there are detrimental effects from eating GMOs such as autism, gastrointestinal disorders like IBS, colitis, leaky gut, and crohn’s. The medical establishment has seen an increase in said disorders during the time period GMOs have been on the market, but we much be careful in attributing them to GMOs until there have been the appropriate studies done to validate the claims. Though we should proceed with caution and a safe approach is to avoid GMOs."

But their statement does contain one falsehood: there have been appropriate studies done - no matter what the naysayers may want us to believe... they've been done on pigs and rats and other animals and it's shown that when fed foods with GMO ingredients, over a period of time there were huge increases in cancerous tumors, issues with breast cancer in animals, etc.

Don't believe me? the picture below shows rats fed a diet of Monsanto's GMO Roundup ready corn. These were not the only ones to show results like this.

http://www.motherearthnews.com/natural-health/gmo-safety-zmgz13amzsto.aspx#axzz2WWqtlDmO

Another study, done recently, dealt with pigs...and an excerpt from an article by Tom Laskawy references it below:

Look who’s squealing now: GMO lovers freak over new study of sick pigs

By Tom Laskawy

"Australian scientists, working with an Iowa farmer and U.S. veterinarians, studied 168 “commercial” piglets as they were raised and fattened for slaughter. Half of the pigs received non-GMO feed and another half ate feed made from GMO corn and soy. Researchers made sure that the GMO feed contained multiple kinds of genetically modified grains that are common in livestock feed; one grain was raised from seed that is herbicide-tolerant, for example, and another from seed that expresses its own pesticide. (One of the complaints of past GMO feeding trials is that they did not reflect actual feeding practices and thus couldn’t account for any potential “synergy” from exposing animals to more than one of these so-called “transgenes.”)

The vets who examined the pigs post-mortem didn’t know whether they were looking at an animal raised on GMO feed or not — to preserve the “blind” nature of the study.

The results, as reported by Reuters:

Researchers said there were no differences seen between pigs fed the GM and non-GM diets for feed intake, weight gain, mortality, and routine blood biochemistry measurements.

But those pigs that ate the GM diet had a higher rate of severe stomach inflammation — 32 percent of GM-fed pigs compared to 12 percent of non-GM-fed pigs. The inflammation was worse in GM-fed males compared to non-GM fed males by a factor of 4.0, and GM-fed females compared to non-GM-fed females by a factor of 2.2. As well, GM-fed pigs had uteri that were 25 percent heavier than non-GM fed pigs, the study said.

Interestingly enough, Many critics of the study agree that it was conducted in a rigorous way, and the findings are intriguing and worth pursuing. The researchers did, after all, find high rates of severe inflammation. As the study’s main author, Judy Carman, observed in a response to critics, all commercial pigs raised in typical hog barn conditions experience gut inflammation to a degree. The point is that the severity was much worse for GMO-fed pigs. "

Any of this should give anyone who is concerned about GMO versus non-GMO reason to have concern about what we feed our children. Even if you had no concerns before now, you should from this day forward ... 

GMO is not natural. And any time you screw with nature - bad things happen.

Do I believe we will be able to rid our market of GMO items? Not necessarily ... however I do believe that mandatory labeling of genetically modified origin products should be law in all 50 states - other countries ban them altogether or require it labeled ... why can't the USA?

My Beef With Meat!

Another BEST SELLER!! Must Read!

A New Way To Taco!!

http://engine2diet.com/the-daily-beet/saving-time-with-char-potato-taco-time/

A yummy EASY recipe!!

Deena Burton's Yummy VEGAN Banana Bread Recipe...With NO Oil!

Here is the original post in all its glory ... Deena Burton's Plant-Powered Kitchen is such a great site!

http://plantpoweredkitchen.com/recipe-page/?recipe_id=6025844

I've included the recipe basics below...

INGREDIENTS:

• 1 cup whole-wheat pastry flour (or 1 cup + 3-4 tbsp spelt flour for wheat-free version)
• 3/4 cup oat flour
• 2 tsp baking powder
• 1/2 tsp baking soda
• 1/2 tsp cinnamon
• 1/2 tsp freshly ground nutmeg
• 1/4 tsp sea salt
• 1 cup pureed overripe banana (see note)
• 1/3 cup pure maple syrup
• 1/2 cup plain non-dairy milk
• 1 tsp pure vanilla extract
• 3-4 tbsp non-dairy mini or regular chocolate chips (optional)

Instructions

• Preheat oven to 350. In a large bowl, mix dry ingredients. In a separate bowl, combine pureed banana, maple syrup, milk and vanilla. Add wet mixture to dry, and add in chocolate chips (if using), and stir through until just well combined (don’t overmix). Wipe a loaf pan lightly with oil (or use a silicone loaf pan). Pour batter into pan and bake for 43-48 minutes, until golden and a toothpick or skewer inserted in the centre comes out clean. Makes 1 quick bread.

Notes:

• If you have an immersion blender, puree several medium-large overripe bananas in a deep, large cup, then measure to get your 1 cup. If you don’t have an immersion blender, mash banana very well.
• To make muffins instead of a quick bread: Pour mixture into a 12-cup muffin pan fitted with cupcake liners. Bake for 17-20 minutes, or until a toothpick inserted comes out clean. Remove, let cool for a few minutes in pan, and then transfer to a cooling rack to cool completely

READ THIS ARTICLE! HFCS and Fructose... They WILL Inhibit The Road To Good Health!

http://news.yahoo.com/corn-syrup-might-making-us-hungry-fat-210000069.html

 

Article in it's entirety....

 

Grocery store aisles are awash in foods and beverages that contain high-fructose corn syrup. It is common in sodas and crops up in everything from ketchup to snack bars. This cheap sweetener has been an increasingly popular additive in recent decades and has often been fingered as a driver of the obesity epidemic.

These fears may be well founded. Fructose, a new study finds, has a marked affect on the brain region that regulates appetite, suggesting that corn syrup and other forms of fructose might encourage over-eating to a greater degree than glucose. Table sugar has both fructose and glucose, but high-fructose corn syrup, as the name suggests, contains a higher proportion of fructose.

To test how fructose affects the brain, researchers studied 20 healthy adult volunteers. While the test subjects consumed sweetened beverages, the researchers used fMRIs (functional magnetic resonance imaging) to measure the response of the hypothalamus, which helps regulate many hunger-related signals, as well as reward and motivation processing.

Volunteers received a 300-milliliter cherry-flavored drink sweetened with 75 grams (equivalent to about 300 calories) of fructose as well as the same drink sweetened with the same amount of glucose. These different drinks were given, in random order, at sessions one to eight months apart. The researchers also took blood samples at various time points and asked volunteers to rate their feelings of hunger and fullness.

Subjects showed substantial differences in their hypothalamic activity after consuming the fructose-sweetened beverage versus the one sweetened by glucose within 15 minutes. Glucose lowered the activity of the hypothalamus but fructose actually prompted a small spike to this area. As might be expected from these results, the glucose drink alone increased the feelings of fullness reported by volunteers, which indicates that they would be less likely to consume more calories after having something sweetened with glucose than something sweetened with more fructose.

Fructose and glucose look similar molecularly, but fructose is metabolized differently by the body and prompts the body to secrete less insulin than does glucose (insulin plays a role in telling the body to feel full and in dulling the reward the body gets from food). Fructose also fails to reduce the amount of circulating ghrelin (a hunger-signaling hormone) as much as glucose does. (Animal studies have shown that fructose can, indeed, cross the blood-brain barrier and be metabolized in the hypothalamus.) Previous studies have shown that this effect was pronounced in animal models.

The study, led by Kathleen Page, of Yale University School of Medicine and published online January 1 in JAMA, The Journal of the American Medical Association, was small and was not able to pinpoint precise neural circuits that might be affected by the sweeteners. But the results, along with other research, suggest that, thanks to the "advances in food processing and economic forces" that have boosted the intake of fructose, added sugar and high-fructose corn syrup are "indeed extending the supersizing concept to the population's collective waistlines," wrote Jonathan Purnell, of the Division of Endocrinology, Diabetes, and Clinical Nutrition, and Damien Fair, of the Department of Behavioral Neuroscience, both of Oregon Health & Sciences University in Portland, who coauthored an essay that appeared in the same issue of JAMA.

Could fructose consumption alone really be playing such an outsized role in expanding our pant sizes? "A common counterargument is that it is the excess calories that are important, not the food. Simply put: just eat less," Purnell and Fair noted. "The reality, however, is that hunger and fullness are major determinants of how much humans eat, just as thirst determines how much humans drink. These sensations cannot simply be willed away or ignored." In order to eat less (and consume fewer calories overall), they argued, then, one should avoid foods or ingredients that fail to satisfy hunger. And that, according to the results from the new study, would mean those fructose-sweetened foods--and drinks.

Being Vegan In a Non-Vegan Household Is a HUGE Challenge!

My daughter and I recently moved to Oregon for my husband's new job after retiring out of the Navy. He's been in Oregon for the last 6 months while we finished up obligations at our old address in Washington state. So for those 6 months I did perfectly fine on my road of Vegan eating.

Well, not so much now that we are all settled back together in our new house...

I can see being vegan around here is going to become a challenge now that we're all back under one roof.

One out of three people in a household willing to consume vegan food could spell disaster for me if this was not a mandatory thing for the rest of my life - even when the other two have said they are more than willing to try the recipes I have to follow.

Yet I hear, "don't force this stuff on me" at any given time... wth?. Ugh! So aggravating!

I even hear this about non-vegan HEALTHY food no less!! Mainly because it doesn't taste all sweet, salty, greasy and all the other things that make processed unhealthy food taste so good to people.

But I am holding firm: I am not a restaurant, nor am I going to cook three different meals each time I cook.

I do compensate by making things I think they will like, I think about them when I figure out what to make, and give them cheese on their burgers, and they have dairy products when they want them. So I am not "forcing" this eating lifestyle on them!

But if they want to dump on me about what I cook and be negative, then I have no choice but to get angry...what do they expect? No one likes to hear people be so negative about something they HAVE to now do for their health!

If they want to have other stuff, fine. No Problem. But they are going to have to find it elsewhere or cook it themselves! I have better things to do with my time than spend it for hours in a kitchen catering to each person's wants for meals!

Finding a New Doctor is a NIGHTMARE!

Oh man...I never figured trying to find a new doctor after this move would be so overwhelmingly difficult!

 

My previous vegan doc was fantastic, and even he has had a difficult time trying to link me to a doc here that will take our insurance, and is in our isurance companies's networks (United Healthcare and Tricare)

 

Yikes....

 

I now live in the Forest Grove, OR area...so I am looking for a vegan or vegan-supportive doc in or around the Forst Grove, Hillsboro and Beaverton areas who accepts UnitedHealth (UMR) and/or Tricare. At some point I will be fine with a doc who will take one or the other, if not both. I really don't care.

 

But I need to get in soon to get my 90 day A1C checkup...

 

Any info is appreciated!