BiG TeA PaRtY

Low Carb, Without the High Protein:

The Glycemic Index

By ELIZABETH FIEND

The Glycemic Index could save your life — literally. It could make living with diabetes easier. Or prevent diabetes in the first place. It can reduce your risk of heart disease. It will lower your cholesterol. It will make you thinner. It might even get you laid.

The Glycemic Index is a scientific measurement of how rapidly foods release their sugars into your blood. It’s an invaluable, easy-to-use tool for maintaining or getting to a proper weight. Forget diets. Get jiggy wit’ the GI instead.

Research on the Glycemic Index originally began as a way to pin-point the best foods choices for diabetics; to help them better control their blood sugar and therefore insulin production. But soon it became apparent that the Glycemic Index was a great tool for people to use to control their weight.

The concept was popularized in diets like Atkins, The Zone and The South Beach Diet which center around the philosophy of low-carb/high protein. The problem with these diets is that they rely on too much protein and not enough fruits and vegetables to keep you healthy in the long run. Carbohydrates are found in foods like bread, pasta, cake and fruit as these foods contain sugars. Foods that are low in carbs are fish, meat, cheese; these foods contain fat and protein.

The Glycemic Index was built by sitting down 10 people and measuring their blood sugar after feeding them a specific food — and then measuring their blood sugar again two hours later. Days later, the process was repeated and the numbers were combined and averaged. So yeah, they made a list checked it twice, and found out which foods were naughty or nice.

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Soy to the World!

BY ELIZABETH FIEND

You wait and wait, eagerly anticipating your favorite time of the year, and suddenly, it’s here! April is National Soy Month, the most delicious month of the year!

Soy is one hell of an amazing plant, one that’s been part of the human diet for over 5,000 years. But it’s much, much more than just veggie burgers. The soybean is also used as food for livestock and it has all the properties of petroleum — except unlike petrol, soy is biodegradable.

Wow, doesn’t knowing that you could fuel up your car or feed your cow with it make soy even more mouth-watering, appetizing and desirable to you?

This bean’s potential is astounding.

Ben Franklin was so intrigued by the story of a “cheese” made from a bean he acquired some seeds, soybeans actually, and sent them to his West Philly homey John Bartram’s estate. Ben also sent along directions on how to turn the beans into curds, aka tofu.

Despite Ben’s efforts, soy never really caught on in Ye Olde America, and was primarily grown for livestock feed and oil until food shortages during WWII stimulated interest in the plant as a source of food for human beans.

Tofu, which had Ben so jazzed up, wasn’t sold in an American supermarket until 1958. Not coincidentally, I made my own debut that year.

Franklin was only one great thinker (and eater) who was intrigued by the potential of the plant from Asia. Both George Washington Carver and Henry Ford donated a great deal of their lives to this marvelous bean.

Carver, the African-American educator and agricultural genius, began investigating soy in hopes it would become a crop newly-emancipated slaves might use to gain financial independence. His soy products include candles, soups, coffee, cheeses, ice cream, flour and oil. (Click to see my in-depth article on GW Carver.)

Henry Ford also had a million projects going on involving soy and dedicated the last two decades of his life to the bean. Among other things, he unveiled a car made with soy-composite body parts in 1941 and was known to be out and about town in a suit spun out of soy.

As a food, soy can’t be beat. It’s packed with more protein than any other bean. In fact, the soybean is the only plant food source that contains ALL of the nine essential amino acids, making it equal to the protein from animal sources. But unlike animal products, soy has no cholesterol and is much lower in saturated fat.

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ALLERGIES ARE THE LIES THE BODY TELLS ITSELF

BY ELIZABETH FIEND 5/8

What do vaginal dryness, lousy driving, methamphetamine, cocaine, steroids and Kleenex all have in common? You guessed it: this article is going to be all about seasonal allergies.

Allergies are caused by a body’s misplaced, overblown reaction to something that in reality isn’t harmful. When this happens the culprit is called an allergen. Pollen is an allergen, though it’s a harmless substance, not poisonous in any way to humans. But for a growing number of people, pollen, mold, animal fur and dust mites trigger an unnecessary, and unfortunate, attack by their immune system. The result of this attack is an allergic reaction — nasal secretion, itchy throat, eyes, and ear canals, sneezing, tearing eyes, stuffy nose and ears. Allergies also make some people tired, cranky, impair memory and concentration and prevent sleep.

More and more people are becoming allergic, to food, pollen and — crazy as it sounds — there’s currently a boom in allergies to ladybugs! As for hayfever, at least one in 10 people will suffer from hay fever at some point, and that number is growing.

If one of your parents has allergies you’re at a 50 percent risk of developing allergies yourself. If both of your parents have allergies, you’re screwed — there’s a 70 percent chance you will, too. Strangely enough, even birth order seems to have an influence on who develops allergies: If you have three or more older siblings, you might get off Scot free (presumably due to the fact that your parents gave up by the time you came along and you were exposed to more immune system-building germs than your sibs). Breastfeeding also gives a child an edge over allergies. Allergies can get worse as you age because your system is more easily traumatized and overreacts, even more, to allergens.

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THE SELLING of SICKNESS

by ELIZABETH FIEND

Pharmaceutical corporations hire PR firms to sell disease like they do sneakers. “Just do it” becomes “just take it” — the little purple pill, that is.

Do you have a going problem, or is it a growing problem?

One pill (Viagra) makes you larger and one pill (Avodart) makes you small. But the question remains, do they do anything at all?

Go ask Alice.

Alice went to sleep one night feeling perfectly fine. The next day she woke up to learn she had high blood pressure! Absolutely nothing about her changed, her numbers were exactly the same. But a committee redefined the definition of high blood pressure and Alice and about a million others developed the medical condition, literally overnight.

Naturally, they need treatment. Wow, what a great marketing strategy! And that’s exactly what it is….

High blood pressure, high cholesterol, bone density loss, these are not diseases, they’re risk factors for illnesses and injuries like stroke, heart disease and broken hips. But they’ve been repackaged by pharmaceutical corporations, via PR firms, via the medical community, to be diseases in their own right. These “diseases” are then pushed at us in a very scary way by describing them with language like “silent killers.”

It’s a killer way to maximize your market.

What used to be a risk factor is now a disease. Mild symptoms turn overnight into the forewarning of a serious health problem. What was once was an ordinary process of life is now a medical problem.

They call them “lifestyle drugs.”

Female sexual dysfunction, apparently 43% of women have it! Can’t get it up? Erectile dysfunction has a new regular-guy nickname, ED.

Even personal, social problems like shyness are now defined as psychiatric disorders. Geez, and I thought you were just quiet.

These new designer prescription drugs take attention away from down-to-earth, non-pharmacological strategies for healthier, happier living, such as exercise and diet. Often, these are enough to nip the problem in the bud. How about a calcium/magnesium supplement for that restless leg? Take 500mgs of calcium and 250mgs of magnesium, morning and night, limit your caffeine and alcohol.

Call me in a month.

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Wash Your Hands!

The single, most painless way to stay healthy and to stop the spread of illness to others is to wash your freaking hands.

The Importance of Hand Washing to Our Health. And the Dangers of Antibacterial Soap.
By ELIZABETH FIEND

You already know that you’re supposed to wash your hands after going to the toilet and before food preparation and eating. But did you know it’s recommended to wash up after eating as well? Or that the best place to sneeze is into your elbow? And that you shouldn’t use the hand blower in the public rest room, it might actually be blowing germs onto your just-washed hands?

It’s so important to wash hands because the flu, diarrhea and colds are transmitted either in the air or on surfaces you touch. Germs, bacteria, and viruses can live for two hours on hands and on a clean, dry surface. On a wet surface they can live for weeks.

Your average pair of worn undies contains a .1 gram of feces. Salmonella, hepatitis A and rotavirus, all found in fecal matter, can cause violent diarrhea and terrible tummy aches. Water must be at at least 140 degrees to sanitize and kill theses germs, yet only 5 percent of Americans use water that hot for their washing (isn’t it amazing the things we know?). These nasty germs can also survive the average 28-minute drying cycle. Therefore, experts recommend that you wash your hands after doing laundry. Hardcore, huh?

Unwashed hands kill a lot of people each year. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says that poor hand washing contributes to almost half of the 9,000 deaths caused each year by outbreaks of food-borne illnesses like salmonella, shigellosis, hepatitis A and E. coli. More people are killed by germs in hospitals each year than by fires, car crashes and drowning combined, and the government has estimated that about 20,000 of those deaths might have been prevented by the simple act of proper hand washing.

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