Posts Tagged ‘natural foods’

It’s my website and I’ll yell if I want to….

Thursday, February 18th, 2010

you can yell too if it happens to you! – dada dadaDA! And it does to all of us.

Pills, pills, pills, pills, pills…….endless TV commercials promoting the Big Pharma compressed concoctions. Enough already! And blasting our audio and ocular senses every few minutes or less for 10 different afflictions that they helped contribute to with lab engineered foods and ‘remedies’. And what about the one where the actors are followed around by a hospital gurney over hills and dales and through sliding steel/glass doors just waiting for your arteries to clog and congeal enough for you to keel over backward…(can you keel over backwards or is it, fall…) into the ‘cozy’ steel arms of the patiently waiting gurney – instead of a more normal crumple and cracking your skull, God forbid. Wait a minute, you’d need another pill or an additive to that one that instantly senses the fall and turns that part of your skull into a cushiony protective sponge! So if your fall don’t getcha your arteries will. BUT ward off that fall and gurney with a pill!! Here it comes to save your day….save your life….a pill. And what about the pill for depression that causes suicidal thoughts?!?!? Dahhh! “I can do that on my own!” say those same depressed individuals. “Why do I need to pay for a pill?”

And the partner closeness pill that causes us to seek separate bath tubs….that one I can’t figure out at all. First it’s togetherness then it’s separateness. Make up your minds. Are the tubs replacing the quintessential aftermath cigarettes? What’s the point? I know, the other person in the other tub may not be the original partner since we don’t see faces? Hmmm. Pills promoting open relationships? If they’re selling tubs too, by the way, then give us a brand name. I happen to like those old claw foot cast iron relics.

And on and on and on….what’s the old adage? “If it don’t kill you, it’ll cure you.” Or something like that. Don’t believe it! Way too many to go into here. But I do sense a book or a more in-depth blog coming to me. I’ve been planning to take notes re all those assaulting horrors, and now I will…maybe Killer Pills…with all the double meanings.

Obesity, autism, hi & lo BP, ADD-ADHD, ED…..get this, for most every affliction there is a food or foods and combinations for you and your pets with lifestyle changes to suit. So simple. Slow the pills. Shop the natural food stores and farmers’ markets. Start eating real whole grains. Sniff out real herbs. Seek out local and organic farmers and their friends. Single out real reading material on and off the web to suit your realigning health goals. Venture into the world of responsible personal healthcare. Take advantage of the bottomless well of support available to you. While weaning away from the pharmaceuticals, dive into a world of intuitive judgment that served and saved our ancestors…as recently as our grandparents and great grandparents for us baby boomers. So shout it out….I’m mad as hell and I’m not gonna take it anymore! And don’t.

Healthy Kids…Yours, Mine, Ours

Saturday, May 23rd, 2009

I’ve been called diminutive, and I guess I am at 5’2”, and kinda thin. So when I walk anywhere with my son who’s 6’4”, 330 lbs, no one believes I’m his mom. In fact, when he was little, people thought I was his nanny – he was so big compared to me even then. His high school football team had a good laugh when I walked onto the field with him during Mom’s Day. His dream was to be an NFL defensive lineman, and although his workout routine still, at 24, equals NFL stats, he changed his direction to pursue another lifelong dream unrelated to sports. Most of his friends are athletes and most of them stayed with us at one point or another. And they all came to know and really appreciate the food he was brought up on – whole grains, fresh veggies, beans, and sugars all as organic as I could find and cooked at home from scratch. Before their next visit, they’d phone in their orders to me or through him. Feeding a football team if you’ve never done it, even for a few days, can be daunting, but surprise of surprise, they finished it all and wanted more.

Doc applauds our lifestyle. My son ate his first beef burger at age 12 or 13, inadvertently, and never really did develop that much of a taste for it. True story: during a football game in high school, he banged bodies with an offensive lineman, also big. What a hit! What a horrible sound! It was a clash of the titans. And they were both carted off to the hospital. The orthopedic surgeon reported to us that the other kid came away with a broken shin bone, I’m sorry to say. However, he was incredulous at my son’s injury, a slight bone bruise. With taped leg and crutches he went back to the sidelines to cheer his team on.

“Whatever you’re feeding him, keep doing it. I’ve never seen bones that size or that dense in a kid before!” Those were his exact words. That was an extraordinary feeling to have our lifestyle applauded, though not the way I would have chosen.

A living answer to questions. He’s still my trophy and my testament to natural foods for kids especially when he visits my cooking classes. People just don’t believe it. True, you’re thinking there must be some big genes somewhere in the family, and yes there are, but it’s not the size, it’s the quality. He’s a walking testimonial to a lifetime of natural foods with a presence that answers their questions: “Will my child get enough calcium?” “Will they grow?” “Won’t they get sick more?” “Can they grow up healthy without all the protein and vitamins from meat and dairy?……… Yes, yes, no, and yes. Absolutely. Here. Look. And in he walks.

I’ve had non natural foods kids raiding my pantry, freezer and refrigerator forever. One 10-year-old made a B-line for seaweed whenever he came. Didn’t bother him at all what it was. He just wanted it. Loved the taste and he said it made him feel good. You can’t argue with that.

Kids know. Like that 10-year-old. They want to be shown, but also to be allowed to experiment. I have another true story here: I was asked to make two dishes for a grand opening for a holistic health center last year in Coronado, CA. One of the dishes was an Asian style tofu appetizer (go to my website: www.chewbite.com and click on Asian Style Tofu Wrap-Around – the very same one). A 13-year-old boy (difficult to please at that age regardless, unless…) came by in the line and wouldn’t try it (tofu, yuk!) until I told him he could spit it out in from of me if he didn’t like it. No pressure. That intrigued him enough to try it. Guaranteed he liked the idea of spitting it out in front of me.

I was distracted by other people asking questions and didn’t see his reaction or his leaving. About ten minutes later, he returned with a few friends. They didn’t say a word, but they did polish off the entire platter and left. Maybe they had a new regard for tofu after that. I like to think so. Kids want to know you care by giving them options, challenging them, and respecting their opinions. And what better place to start than in your own kitchen where your daily soul replenishment for the five senses of sight, smell, hearing, taste, and feeling all come together to create the ultimate sense of well being from food. ‘Home [and hearth] is where the heart is.’

Pride of creative ownership.
Make it a game, interesting, fun. Dress it up. Make it all natural and as organic as you can. Make it look like what they’re used to, but the ingredients can either mimic or be completely different. Season it and spice it up with a familiar aroma, appearance, and mouth feel. But whatever it is, it’s got to taste great! Another thing about them which you probably already know, they don’t spare your feelings. They tell you the truth. So ask them what the dish needs and get them involved in the kitchen and the preparation by letting them fix it the way they want. Let them make it their own. For you it’s hands off unless asked. Whatever the mess, whatever their tastes, whatever their additions or deletions it’s theirs’ and not only deserves but requires your respect. My son is getting to be one incredible chef choosing food and spice combinations I would never think of in a million years. He astounds not only me but his friends with his choices and complexities of taste while still sticking to organic whole grains, veggies, even meat, chicken, and wild fish. Allow them the gratification of astounding you. Their tastes are often so different from ours. There’s no age limit or requirement, by the way. So much more fun than going to formerly frozen formula Chili’s or McDonald’s or wherever and their memories are priceless. Oh yeah! And invest in a bread machine. Let them invent variations on their staple. So easy.

Prenatal to post natal to pre-school to post college, they need and want guidance from mom and dad. Their culinary creativity being rewarded early with applause and respect will give them the confidence to continue natural foods in their lives and to teach their friends and their own children. Give them their jump start by changing to whole grains and veggies during pregnancy. When nursing they’re already used to the foods. And when you start introducing solid foods, they intuitively know them already. Even seaweeds. Really. Yup, even seaweeds can be luscious. It all depends on your creativity and that intangible ingredient that makes it all a hit, your LOVE.

My son once observed to us from a boarding school he attended for one year for football before going to college, that he thought he was the only person there who loved his parents. Wow! Now that blew us away. He realized that we always inspired him to achieve and create, to have his own opinions, and respected his choices. Experiment. That was the year he started cooking for himself and starting teaching me. Very gratifying. He’s still teaching me.

Some answers really are that simple. With the meteoric rise of childhood and young adult health diseases: diabetes, obesity, eating disorders, high cholesterol, asthma, high blood pressure, depression, ADD, ADHD, and the lists goes on and on…… Diseases once thought to be brought on by age deterioration in adults are now epidemic, even plagues among our children. Drugs are not the answer. One definite answer is natural foods. Too simplistic? Things in life don’t have to be that complicated. You really are what you eat.

We sold our souls and our health. It’s the insidious invasion of the soul snatchers in the guise of the big pharmaceutical companies and the big brand name food manufacturers all in collusion with the advertising companies and the food/chemical lobbyists in Washington D.C. I refer to Dr. David Kessler’s (former FDA commissioner, 1990-1997) new book, “The End of Overeating: Taking Control of the Insatiable American Appetite”. He writes about just this, not that we didn’t know it already, but a former FDA boss telling us from the ‘inside’ about how our souls and health have been hijacked for profit is pretty frightening along with our disastrous eating habits being engineered by those companies’ food scientists. Very scary, but not irreversible.

Now it’s time to create your own good health! Get your whole family into the kitchen. Have fun creating a lifestyle change that makes you happy and gives you the power of choice. Food becomes an exploration into a culinary world of individual tastes designed by you that changes with your whims by adding a little bit of this or a whole lot of that. And your children? They’ll love it!

ABOUT: Wellness Chef Helen Sandler
Lecturer, personal chef, teacher, wellness coach, & speaker, Helen promotes a healthier lifestyle through common sense, organic / natural approach to a happier, positive life.

Helen Sandler is used to being an innovator and at the cutting edge of whole foods whole grains awareness. After graduating from SUNY, New York with a teaching degree, she began to follow her real passion for healthy cooking which took her from Los Angeles to Boston to attend the cooking school of the late and great master Japanese natural chef, Aveline Kushi. Later that passion took her to Kyoto, Japan to continue her studies, where she spent four more years learning the art of healthy Japanese cooking (Seishoku).

As Wellnes Chef Helen she is the featured authority at CTNgreen /wellness with articles in the library there and the virtual paperless magazine at CTNGreen Magazine



970-618-0731
helskitchen@gmail.com