Have you ever considered the idea that burning sweet smelling incense is very similar to breathing second hand smoke? Until today, I hadn’t either. I heard it on the radio news and decided to check it out.
This study, of more than 61,000 people across 12 years, found that people who burned incense all day were 80 percent more likely than non-users to develop squamous cell carcinoma of the entire respiratory tract. While a number of people on the study did contract lung cancer, those numbers were not necessarily increased from the general population. However, the instances of nasal, oral, throat, or larynx cancer were significantly increased.
This article at Natural News.com explains that the air quality inside a poorly ventilated temple with heavy incense use was 40 times more polluted than the inside of a cigarette smokers house or similar to standing at a busy intersection filled with car exhaust.
Whether you burn incense all day or just occasionally, it seems helpful to highlight the idea that we can avoid many diseases when we breathe clean air, drink clean water, and eat natural food.
People ask me all the time to help them “healthify” a recipe and I’m happy to do it. Apparently I’ve had enough experience messing up recipes that I know the pitfalls to avoid when substituting.
While some recipes cannot be redeemed - Deep-Fried Snickers Bars, for example - most can either be made healthy or can be re-worked to keep the same flavor elements you love, but in a new recipe.
Here are a couple of practical suggestions:
Make it healthier and smaller. Grandma’s cheesecake can be made with 1/3 less fat cream cheese, half the sugar, topped with real fruit, and made in a half-batch when having company over. Everyone enjoys a big piece, and then it’s gone.
Rework the proportions. Use the largest amount of the healthiest ingredient and the smallest amount of the unhealthiest. In a cheesy chicken and broccoli casserole, use a huge amount of broccoli, then a reasonable amount of brown rice, then some chicken, and top with a little cheese. This concept works in most casseroles and soups.
Experiment with new brands to use. There are tons of pastas, breads, crackers, and cereals made with whole grains. The ones with the most nutrition have “whole” wheat or oats, etc as the first ingredient in the list. They all have a different taste and texture, so experiment until you find ones you like and then use whole grains.
If you have a favorite recipe that you would like to “healthify” but can’t figure it out, email it to me and I’ll be glad to tell you how I would do it.
Some people who are trying to eat healthier make lists of foods to avoid - no McDonalds, no fried foods, no candy bars, etc. I tend to go the opposite route. My husband might say I am ALWAYS going the opposite route…but that’s a story for another day.
Years ago, I found a list of the healthiest foods to include in your diet. At mealtimes, I would look over the list and see how many foods I could include in that meal. So instead of trying to avoid certain foods and suffering through eating my second choice, I am looking for ways to include healthy ingredients and making them my first choice. And by linking the good result I want in my body with the foods that will give it to me, it makes it easier to take the viewpoint that it really is my first choice.
One of the great lists on the web is at Worlds Healthiest Foods. They have a fantastic list of healthy foods to include in your diet. Another good list is the Glycemic Index of foods. I try to include lots of foods from the low glycemic index category, some from the intermediate GI cagegory, and very few from the high GI category. This Glycemic Index from Former Fat Guy is a simple and easy to read chart. I hope some of these ideas make it easier to look for good foods to include in your diet.
I like to add some flavor to brown rice, quinoa, and pilaf type dishes. In addition to onion, garlic, celery, carrots and such, I usually add bouillon. But what kind should you use? I would say that depends on what you currently eat.
If your taste buds are accustomed to fast food, restaurant food, and pre-packaged gravies or sauces you are used to large amounts of sodium and msg (monosodium glutamate). And while there is lots of evidence to support that msg should be avoided, you might not want to quit cold turkey. So when you cook rice, quinoa, or barley you may want to use a teaspoon of Wyler’s instant bouillon or a store brand bouillon. If you decide in the future you want to eliminate msg from your diet, you can change to a healthier (and also more expensive…) bouillon.
If you have already eliminated msg from your diet by avoiding prepackaged meals, sauces, dressings, soups, etc, you may want to use Herb Ox bouillon, which is labeled msg free. It has the same flavors of regular bouillon, but without the chemical that tricks your brain into thinking that what your are eating is good for you, tastes amazing, and you want more.
If you are concerned about excess sodium, you could use Herb Ox sodium free, msg free bouillon. It is made with potassium chloride (salt substitute) and sugar. In fact, sugar is the first ingredient listed. (Many things that are low sodium add sugar to please your taste buds and counteract the bitter aftertaste of salt substitute.) This one is a toss up for me. I’m not entirely convinced that sugar with chemicals is a better alternative than salt.
Boxes or cans of stock come in all varieties - low sodium, low fat, etc. You can read “Store Bought Chicken Stocks, Reviewed: Which are the best?” by Michele Humes at Serious Eats. The comments on that article also provide some good input. I personally think canned or boxed stock tastes like slightly flavored water, which is why I lean toward bullion. I also often want concentrated flavor without additional liquid.
Which brings me to my latest idea. What if I stewed some bone-in chicken (or the leftover carcass from roasting a whole chicken), sea salt, fresh pepper, parsley, a bay leaf, and some thyme, with tons of onion, celery, and carrots all day in the crockpot in a small amount of water? I could food process that mixture (minus the bones and bay leaf), freeze it in ice cube trays, and then add one or two to a recipe instead of the bullion granules. It might even be cost effective if I plan it for the day after I’ve roasted a chicken with vegetables and already have it all on hand. Hmmm, I’ll let you know how it works.
Well, the FDA approved many of them and they are in all kinds of foods, so they must be healthy, right? I hate to question authority and the norm, but…
Let’s look at this ingredient that many people ingest regularly if not multiple times a day that research and experience indicates causes a variety of health problems. Now, if you currently use artificial sweeteners, just take a deep breath and consider allowing some information to help you change your mind (and your health). I am lumping all artificial sweeteners together, although different ones have different side effects and some newer ones do not have much data available about potential side effects. I personally avoid them all and use small amounts of natural sweeteners like raw honey, turbinado sugar (raw cane), molasses, brown sugar, and even white sugar.
Here are a few commonly reported side effects of regular use of artificial sweeteners which gradually disappear when their use is discontinued:
headache or migraine
increase in appetite and cravings for sweets
slow, steady weight gain and lowered metabolism
lack of sex drive, decrease in quantity and quality of sperm
moodiness and depression
increased instance of cancer
fatigue and tiredness
same symptoms as Fibromyalgia and Graves disease
aching joints
ringing in the ears
increase in blood pressure
loss of hair
lack of mental clarity and memory recall
There really are too many side effects to name. As of 1995, the FDA had received well over 10,000 aspartame related complaints, more than all other complaints combined. And it is estimated that only 1 out of 100 people having symptoms actually file an official complaint about a food product.
In short, not only are artificial sweeteners not delivering what people want (all the sweet with none of the bad consequences) they are giving people a lot of things nobody wants. There is evidence suggesting that damage from artificial sweeteners is cumulative. So the longer you have used them, the more pronounced symptoms you are likely to have. In fact, one of the terms used by doctors is “aspartame poisoning”.
There is a great resource about artificial sweeteners at 321 Recipes that has hundreds of articles from doctors and nutritionists. You can also do a google search for “side effects of artificial sweeteners” and have thousands of websites to examine. I hope you will consider kicking the sweetener habit and then letting me know the health improvements you experience.
Special thanks for the photo to ruthdeb on Flickr.
Have you ever considered the idea that burning sweet smelling incense is very similar to breathing second hand smoke? Until today, I hadn’t either. I heard it on the radio news and decided to check it out.
