Courageous Joy

Beware - early morning mental wanderings shared below...delete now if you don't care. :::snort:::

Nutritional Research/Thoughts

I’ve been online this morning researching various nutritional substances. I quickly checked out durum and semolina as they are listed as ingredients in most pastas and I wasn’t sure what they were. I’ve heard two things 1. They are nutritionally stripped wheat (from people) and 2. Durum is a variety of wheat and semolina is ground durum (from websites). Now to sort it out.

I’ve also been researching Carob and Chocolate. This one started not because of any specific leaning or such on my part but because some want to split carob chips in the co-op next month and I wanted to be sure that it would be o.k. for Zander. Then I began to hear that carob has “nutritional benefits” but no one ever says WHAT those are. I began to research.

I asked friends, read books, websites and asked on SHS. Wow – can folks get hot over this issue. {G} The websites are amazing. Of course there are claims of unsanitary processing of chocolate (which I know exist for processing of anything – probably why we should all eat from scratch and not eat Carob or Chocolate or any other processed thing…back to Little House days…)..the thing that amazed me is that these “unbiased” sites never mention unsanitary processing of Carob. Shoot….I even found on the sugar sites one that admitted that Rapadura tastes bitter because it’s the ground stalk of the cane and some dirt and such gets in to the product. This didn’t surprise me as I can remember the fields of drying cane and sugar being processed as a child….What’s with the Carob/Chocolate fanatics???? I have a friend here, Becky, who has been a great source to bounce things off of. She has her ideas but is fair with the evidence. I like that. {G} She basically told me that Carob has trace minerals and is usually processed with better additives than Chocolate because it is marketed to “Health Nuts – Crunchies as I prefer to call us”. {G} However, she also told me that Chocolate has anti-oxidants which Carob doesn’t have. The problem is in the refined sugars, soy lecithin, oils and vanillin used. This is what we’d already noted and quit using because of Feingold. We get the chocolate without vanillin…..and I’d like to find some made with coconut oil…I have found some made with palm oil…..

In all the research I came across warnings from folks who had allergists tell them that they see way more allergic reactions to Carob than Chocolate. THEN I began to read in the Feingold materials to be very careful with Carob because often it is flavored with “orange flavoring” which is often synthetic (and we don’t do synthetic flavorings around here any longer). Since it is impossible to be sure the labels have listed everything (really, it’s amazing what they get away with in the food industry as far as not completely labeling a product) I will only use carob or chocolate that is listed in the FG food lists. They have both listed….so there I am…back to the Carob/Chocolate question. Of course, if I find a chocolate or carob that I really like I can request that the FAUS check it out. They have choices already though for both Carob and Chocolate.
Here’s a quote that surprised me from wiki: “Recent studies have shown that cocoa or dark chocolate has potent health benefits for people. Dark chocolate, with its high cocoa content, is full of the flavonoids epicatechin and gallic acid, which are antioxidants that help protect blood vessels, promote cardiac health, and prevent cancer. It also has been effectively demonstrated to counteract mild hypertension. In fact, dark chocolate has more flavonoids than any other antioxidant-rich food such as red wine, green and black tea, and blueberries.”
Of course this must be DARK CHOCOLATE and not MILK chocolate or combined with milk. There is even study going on now on using chocolate medicinally – like I need the FDA to tell me that chocolate is a drug!!! I did find out there is a “chocolate diet” out there and may have to look further into that. LOL I’m thinking maybe there is something to the idea of taking your own dark chocolate and adding coconut oil and honey to it…but I’m sure someone out there MAKES it that way already. And really…there you have it; I’d best eat some daily to deal with my blood pressure issues.

What about the caffeine in chocolate – yes – it’s there…but less than a cup of tea or coffee has….I suppose the thing here would be to watch cumulative buildup….there go those espressos with the cute little chocolate stirring spoons. (I HATE COFFEE and don’t drink a lot of tea down here either).

THEN I decided to see what others are saying about Dr. Ben Feingold and the Feingold Diet. Hmmm….it seems that there are many out there determined to label Feingold as a quack…but I can’t help but be amazed at the changes we’ve seen in Zander. I’m glad I didn’t hear the quackwatch folks before we proved this works for Zander. I did take note of the “negatives’ they mentioned on various websites to keep track of. Seems the big one is that these kids NEED DRUGS and if you “mask the symptoms” with diet they won’t get their drugs. I don’t think I’ll comment further on that line of thinking. Reminds me of being pregnant and having borderline diabetes and being told not to change my diet so that I wouldn’t “mask the symptoms”. Gee I masked the symptoms so well that I’ve not developed gestational diabetes in the last 4 pregnancies…though doc repeatedly warn me to eat “normal” with each pregnancy so that I don’t “mask the symptoms”. Other negatives are that a child learns to blame food for his behavior rather than himself. This sort of cracked me up as I’ve seen many families going the drug route who blame the lack of drug for a child’s behavior. Not sure there’s a difference there. We’ve already thought this one through and none of us ever tell Zander that eating the wrong thing will “make you be bad”. We tell him that eating the right food “makes it easier to be good”. Shoot – he’ll still have a SIN problem – don’t we all? They also said that it will ostracize a child and make him feel weird to eat this way….well….homeschooling and having 8 siblings probably already pretty much took care of that. {G} There were no medical negatives (other than not getting drugs you need – which you don’t need if the problem is fake food). Feingold is NOT against drugs…they simply say to try the diet treatment first and then add in the drugs you may need in lower doses….not sure why they are painted as “anti-drugs” – they aren’t.

Since there have been huge rises in so many behavioral type diseases from 1950 – 1980 why don’t folks want to investigate the changes in diet made during those dates? There was a huge move to eating more processed food. This led to more synthetic colors, dyes and petrochemicals being used in many, many foods. I tend to tell the boys now “we don’t spend real money on fake food”. So…hmm….is chocolate a food or a drug?