Fats and Meat Don't Increase Prostate Cancer Risk

Beef-eaters rejoice, your gonads are not at risk from fats and meats alone! They are under threat though, if you over-consume and thereby make yourself obese - that will definitely up the risk, and add the risks of Type 2 diabetes and a lovely selection of cardiac and respiratory illnesses.

As I point out in The Body Friendly Zen Cookbook, meat has formed part of our diet for a really long time, and our bodies depend on it. An abundance of meat, not so. Meats and animal fats are our natural food and in order to have a sensible effective diet you need some meat, and it's about time scientists produced this result.

SOURCE: International Journal of Cancer, September 15, 2007.

Change To Prostate Cancer Biopsy Procedures

This is still the least acceptable outcome in my mind. As some of you may know, I began developing prostate cancer at age 48/49 and I checked into the treatments available to me. Not good news, the most common intervention, being a surgical procedure, results in impotence and incontinence for the vast majority of men, and chemical methods and radiotherapy having figures not all that different.

I developed The Body Friendly Zen Cookbook diet because this option has no side effects, unless you count a slow 1Kg/mth weight loss as a side effect. Being a bit of a scaredy-cat, I used nothing else but the diet for seven months, and at the end of that seven months, my PSA had reduced from 4.8 to 0.8, and my urologist said there was no need to take a second biopsy set of samples because a PSA that low meant there was no more cancer.

The first biopsy? That showed over 60% of cells with high grade PIN, which is cells turning cancerous. I'm confident, two years later, that this percentage will be hovering somewhere between zero and naff-all.

I developed the diet from some food hints my urologist gave me, and seven months intensive research on the Internet, ultimately testing each combination on myself. And "combination" is a carefully chosen word here, because one of the things I as a generalist found and which most specialists would miss, is that some foods harmonise together extremely well.

For example, tomato is good. Tomato sauce is better, and tomato paste is best, at supplying several antioxidant groups to fight the cancerous cells.

But tomato paste and grape seed oil together are up to TEN TIMES more effective than tomato paste alone, meaning you can use a lesser quantity to cook with and still get a huge benefit from the combination.

So if your prostate cancer is still in the low stages, try the diet. It's now worked for several people to lower PSA, has helped a woman get over cancer of the womb, and (because certain causes are similar) a Type 2 diabetes sufferer reduce her cholesterol and blood sugar.

Got Booze and Brains, Now Just Gimme Good Looks.

Always good to have a "bad habit" legitimised by research. God bless the Kiwis sometimes...

Depending on your body type, ethnicity, and habits, between one and four drinks a day increases "cognition." It makes you smarter. In one way, I knew that. We all know that, in some deep atavistic fashion. See? We're smart about alcohol!

Okay. According to my research for The Body Friendly Zen Cookbook, it was already known that a glass of red wine a day confers a health benefit for most people, and especially for my target audience, prostate cancer sufferers. I also unearthed that other alcoholic drinks confer benefits, provided they are used in moderation. If you're European, in fact, you have a gene that confers some immunity from some effects of alcohol.

And there are certain forms of alcohol that are better than others for you, especially if they are made in the time-honoured ways without commercial chemicals. I'll just say this - I like cider, I like beer, I like red wine, I like mead. Now that I have a reason to imbibe one or two a day, life is distinctly looking up again...

The Psychology of Food and Eating

Some good points on the psychology of food and eating here - chances are you have known this, subliminally, all along.

Just a few observations - if you present a big meal on a huge plate, it will look smaller and you'll tend to eat more to compensate. Better to sneak a smaller meal onto a small plate, your brain will make the "plate 90% full = huge meal" connection even when it *knows* the plate is smaller.

Eating while using a computer is a nasty habit anyway - and you do tend to munch more when distractedly reading your RSS feeds, so don't do it. Have snacks between meals, by all means. Just not while at the computer. And if you have snacks, try and skip a meal. Have a good breakfast, snack during the day, and skip lunch.

Are you the cook? Get a smaller set of saucepans, and when you read a recipe, mentally cut the fat in half and use body friendlier fats. Trust me, all these things work. Smaller serving sizes are great, but smaller serving vessels are even better. If there's less to go around, most people instinctively take a smaller serving on their plate. And if the plate is smaller too, they may end up eating a meal only two thirds of what they'd serve themselves if the serving vessel was huge.

Your brain is finely-honed and superbly tuned, just not for instances like this where old survival traits (like stuffing yourself at mealtimes) meet modern social requirements. (Like not becoming overweight, not taking the last serving, not appearing to be the "greedy" one.)

Unfortunately, when it has instances like this, your mind hands over to the old atavistic brain and that's why we need to fool it. So even if it sounds like utter crap to you, give it a go and be surprised.

The Colour of Cancer-Free

Found a "fresh minted" article here that will help with the diet in the Body Friendly Zen Cookbook, but it needs a bit of clarification I think. Before you go rushing out and buying everything in sight based on colour... hehehe...

First, this article, as in so many others, barely mentions the words "fresh" nor "natural." Not as in "the kind my supermarket would have you believe but in fact we've stored this stuff for up to a year already and bombarded it with chemicals to keep it looking bright and fresh" but the kind of fresh you get from taking a vegetable that has ripened in the ground, been harvested no more than a few days ago, and brought all nice and cool and crisp to the market where you've taken it home and cooked it within a day sort of fresh and natural.

Because, if the fruit or vegetable has been treated to make it keep longer, it's now contaminated with chemicals that are NOT in the human species' diet plan. If it's been stored for any length of time, the active ingredients have lost their potency and you may as well eat coloured starch. And most importantly, if it's out of season, then for most fruits and vegetables we've lost the other great natural healing force, the Pulse. In the Body Friendly Zen Cookbook I mention the Pulse for a range of ingredients and how it's actually a large part of the effectiveness of the diet.

Also note that not all things that are brightly coloured are automatically good for one. The beautiful red colour of Amanitae mushrooms hides a potent toxin that kills flies on contact and can kill a human almost as easily.

Also, bear in mind that the things that give a food the colour and the tart taste are the ingredients we want? Of grapes, it's the skins and seeds (especially the seeds) which give the antioxidant effect, and that is why red wine (which is brewed with the skins and seeds in the vat) is effective while white wine (which is brewed from white grape juice only, no skins or seeds) is not. The old saw that the "goodness is in the skin" of a vegetable is for a large part the truth.

Can I put it any plainer? Old wives' tales had to originate from something. Our ancestors didn't all know how to read and write, but they knew how to pass on observations. The family down the road, that peeled the skins off their vegetables and ate mostly potatoes and very few others, their kids sickened every year. It's as valid an observation as any made by a scientist in their laboratory today, and the way we passed that knowledge on was by repeating it until it stuck and became an old wives' tale...

So if you have any old lore like that, it needs to be preserved. If you leave it in comments here, I will try and collect it inot a coherent and searchable web page every so often. Meanwhile, have a great day, and don't forget to eat your greens, and your reds, and your purples.

Killer Soft Drink

A new study about soft drinks has concluded that one soft drink a day will do you harm. Geez I wonder why I am not surprised and neither should you be. Soft drinks all contain additives and preservatives up the wazoo, to stop what's inside from spoiling on the can and leading to a nasty lawsuit when a drink does obvious damage rather than the hidden subtle damage.

Remember the additives? If a soft drink was composed of fruit, water, and carbon dioxide, then I'd say they would be okay in quantities of one a day. But in addition, every soft drink contains additional very processed white sugar or artificial sweetener, and very artificial and unnatural preservatives, colourants, flavourings, modifiers, and, if you're lucky, up to 5% fruit juice. (Which by the way is not guaranteed to be pure fruit juice even if they had trademarked the name "pure fruit juice" because pure fruit juice has to have some form of preservative in it too.)

Of course the soft drink manufacturers immediately struck back with their most powerful weapon, the old "no it doesn't, either, nyah nyah! You can't prove a thing!" ploy. And of course I'm going to believe their research with its vested interest only in selling soft drink - NOT your health - to give me the results that I can trust, as opposed to a whole range of bodies whose research is set up specifically to find out what things are harming my health. But I must be in the minority, because I still see those drinks on the shelves...

The study doesn't actually go far enough for me, there are a few things I'm curious to know. For example, what about soda water drinkers? Are they at greater risk of arterial plaques and heart disease? What about beer? What about microbrewery beers produced without the range of preservatives and additives? Ciders and meads?

Because I'm betting that if you add fizz to something, it will not harm you aside from maybe giving you hiccups, but as soon as you add something whose parent food is a chemical formula, things are gonna get distinctly dangerous.

One last thought. Making all those chemicals costs us heaps in energy and pollution. Processing it all costs a lot in energy and pollution. Drinking it gives you a raft of health problems that are better off avoided. So why?

Allergy, Additive Be Thy Name

Doctors are finding an increasing number of young children have allergies. Doctors are"puzzled" by that, and sound a warning that in another six to eight years these kids will be rebellious teenagers and into experimenting, and many will die or end up in ER because they will trigger their allergies.

Taking the last point first. No no no - every report I've heard about kids with allergies says that their allergy has whipped them. They ask to make sure before they touch anything edible, and are generally more careful than most adults I know with allergies. What will be putting these kids in ER is something different.

First, to what's causing the ever increasing allergies, asthmas, type 2 diabetes, and other illnesses. I will crusade against this to my dying day, and I will tell you why it's bad, then tell you what it is, and then you can go to my zencookbook site and grab the free version of the e-book.

The thing that causes these illnesses is bad because: It takes millenia for the human species as a whole to adapt to particular foods. So in Europe, alcohol has been a part of the diet for 8,000 to 10,000 years in some form. And sometime in the recent past, Europeans have developed a gene that allows them to resist alcohol's effects more than say an Asian person. That's not to say that one day a person just became resistant - it took generation after generation of people dying from alcohol and thus failing to pass on their nonresistant genes before this happened.

Our bodies today are what the diets of 5,000 to 10,000 years ago made them into, lean mean WHOLEFOOD digesting machines. And as we've denatured our food and introduced additives we have been seeing increasing incidences of a range of illnesses. Cancers? Almost unheard of in the past. Diabetes mellitus? Oh yes a rare condition, poor unlucky souls that get it. Allergies? What, pray tell, might those be? We did have one boy in the village once, young Mongol, who perished in a most unpleasant way after drinking cow's milk but we aren't sure if that was the cause or not.

If you buy my book (which of course I recommend, natch) there's a listing of the additives and their effects on the human system. Sobering reading, around one third are outlawed in some countries, around half are not good for us in general, and the other half is the half that's least useful (and therefore least used) in modern food preparation and preservation.

Manufacturers need to stabilise food so it doesn't go off and result in a lawsuit. They need to colour and texture and flavour it so that today's flavour-driven buyers will find it appealing.

And you'll find that with the rise of every illness, there's a corresponding rise in the use of the relevant additive... Cancers increasing - a doctor whose children I know had made the connection almost 100 years ago that where white sugar and white bread went, so went cancer. I've noticed that when some additives became approved for food use and water use, the incidence if Type II Diabetes rose several years later...

"Yes," you can say, "our species adapted to new foods over a long time, but only because someone ate those foods and kept eating them."

And you'd be right, except that you're missing out the most important part of the equation: Of those earlier generations, those that first ate a particular item of food, died. So if you want to become a statistic today so that your great great great great great grandchildren won't get cancer from Exxx, you go right ahead.

But for those of us who want very much to not become a genetic statistic, it's far better to avoid that nasty stuff and let future generations grow up not resistant to Exxx...

Lastly, what will be putting those kids in ER. Think about the safe limit for additive Exxx - what is considered a "safe" dose? Well you can bet that Manufacturer A will make sure they don't use too much more than the "safe limit" in their product. And Manufacturer B also won't exceed the fabled "safe" dose. Nor Manufacturer C, and D and E and F. But you, who are going to eat the products from all six manufacturers in the course of your day, you still accumulated a dose six times more than the accepted safe limit of that additive... Now mix in a couple of bad tablets at a nightclub, and suddenly the real reason kidswill be at risk is a bit more obvious.

Why doctors are publicly lying about being "puzzled" when in fact they all have these same figures and statistics and are trained to put two and two together and comeup with Exxx? Who knows, but at least you can know better, and start reading labels for additives as if your life depended on it.

Because, you know, it just might...

Medieval Queen Of The Kitchen

Sabrina Welserin is a countrywoman of mine - she hails possibly from Germany, or more likely (to judge from her recipes) from Austria actually as I recognise some ingredients that weren't so well known outside Austria.

She's an unusual woman - in the 16th Century, she's educated, which places her in one of the larger households, she's a consummate cook, which makes her the lady of the house, and she thinks in pretty grand scale, because who would cook six chickens to "... lay them next to the other roasted meats ..." for just a humble forester and his family?

So you can safely say that this book is one of scant handfuls of cookbooks that made it through centuries to us, and is a snapshot of how life was. I note that food is important to Frau Welserin, was obviously important in the lives of her and the people around her, and they had quite sophisticated recipes. (A lot of these recipes is assumed to be known to the reader, one because it was a way to keep the commoners and non-cooks out, and secondly because it was laborious and expensive to commit every detail to paper.)

I'll be going through this and a few other recipe books from the early Centuries and seeing how well some of these recipes adapt to Body Friendly and modern cooking styles. Will be interesting, and recipes will be on TEdAMENU blog.

Read more Medieval recipe books and information here.

Species

Interesting reading, Charles Darwin's letters. He was both a dandy and a very astute thinker when he put his mind to it.

I find that I enjoyed reading those and will enjoy finding other Darwin letters online - yes I'll now be going to search for them.

For instance, I had a blue-eyed white tom cat - who was deaf. Darwin was very keen of observation to have picked that conection up before Mendel made his far more detailed studies which confirmed this and other genetic rules.

And, you know, history might have been quite different if Darwin hadn't written his book, so it's probably a good thing for us today.

Minus The Additives, Please!

In the Body Friendly Zen Cookbook, I have been pointing out the perils of the additives, and I keep finding articles like this one which find more and more things wrong with the "E" vitamins.

It's not surprising to see the modern childhood epidemic of such symptoms. We're allowing food manufacturers to conduct experiments in chemical tolerance on us and our children. The sad thing is that we will all pay for that, one way or another.

As I found out, our metabolisms have evolved over the millenia (five to ten thousand years, certainly) to make peak use of natural whole foods. Nowhere in our history until the last few hundred years have chemical preservatives additives colourings and flavourings entered our food chain, and it will take another five to ten thousand years before the first humans adapted to such chemicals will appear.

For us, right here and right now, these things are poisons. Nothing more and nothing less. You buy something that has preservatives to prevent natural spoilage, irritants to bring out natural colour, artificial colouring to augment the natural colour, and six different "agents" to prevent sticking caking clotting setting and slumping- and you have a cocktail that is almost guaranteed to throw your body into disarray.

Now look at everything you eat in a week. Take a note of only the additive chemicals, and add the amounts of each up. I almost guarantee that if you have an aveage suburbanite diet you will find that you are having more than the recommended amount of over half of those chemicals.

The scary thing is that each manufacturer makes the decision on how much of each additive to use, based on their product alone. After all, if you buy the competition's foodstuffs as well, then what have they to lose? If you come down with a case of poisoning, they can blame the opposition...

But if you read the ingredients on the label, remember that manufacturers aren't required to list all of them. It's a bit of a voluntary / legal / notsolegal grey area, and of many additives, manufacturers aren't required to inform you if the quantity is below a certain percentage. That means that while one manufacturer might tell you about the E614 they use, while three others won't.

Individually, those amounts may not be worth worrying about - but add upthe E614 in everything you eat during the week - admitted in the label or not - and you may come to a worrying result...

A Very Nice Appliance

Okay this is a very good appliance, it's pricey but as it replaces a dozen kitchen appliances I find it on the whole to be quite reasonable.

Read the review for what it can do, it's really very impressive.

Body Friendly Zen Cookbook Rocks!

I went to see my doctor today almost two years after developing signs of incipient prostate cancer. My diet book rocks, and I rule!

(for anyone who's just tuned in, there's more history and an E-Book at the Zencookbook Dot Com site - I had really poor results on a certain blood test two years ago, worse news on a biopsy, and then rather than let a surgeon near my precious bits with a scalpel or a doctor kill me with chemotherapy, I designed and used this diet - adn nothing else - and the results speak for themselves...)

Okay - results are far better than expected:

09-06-2005 ePSA 4.6
For anyone unfamiliar with PSA it's an antigen in the blood produced in response to a variety of prostate ailments ranging from Benign Prostate Enlargement to more sinister things. In most cases the change of PSA level indicates a problem more than the actual level, but at my age then (48 years old) that was quite high.

??-08-2005 60% Hyperplasia
My urologist scheduled a biopsy and over half the samples showed hyperplasic cells. There are two kinds, and mine was not benign...

I spoke to the urologist about the alternatives and he suggested that certain foods had been shown to be helpful in some cases of prostate cancer treatment. As he never gave me any exact figures or foods to work from, I developed the diet and used myself as the lab rat, and so after seven months I had what I thought was a useable diet. It took another month before I could do another blood test but:

05-04-2006 ePSA 0.8
This is around the level of PSA a healthy 25 year old would have. My urologist was pleased, my GP was worried that I might have received some false readings, and I was over the moon as you can imagine. No sharp knife near my goolies, no chemicals to ruin my body chemistry - and this is a very easy to use diet - you can apply much of it to your current lifestyle!

I have also submitted the manuscript to a researcher at CSIRO for testing and this is due to occur this year. I expect a lot of good and interesting things to be discovered about the Body Friendly Zen Cookbook Diet...

19-04-2007 ePSA 1.0
One year later and the diet is now pretty much a proven in my view. I am at the low to normal end of the spectrum for my age group, and recurrence is not likely.

Over the intervening year I've had some sales of the book, and so far all results have been encouraging. Two women who used it for various "down there" cancers have reported lowering of counts, but both elected to also take surgery and/or chemotherapy so these results are not yet conclusive for me. But promising. Very promising.

And lastly, there are a whole range of illnesses caused by cell inflammation and this diet will help in all of them - ranging from the slower forms of cancers to urinary tract inflammations, type 2 diabetes, and arteriosclerosis which is the precursor for most heart attacks.

So there are some good reasons why you should get interested and pass this on to as many people as you know. One, this diet can be used in moderate amounts to prevent most of these illnesses and stop them developing. Two, it can help in so many illnesses to put the body into a better state for fighting the illness, thus improving your recovery. Three, it can reduce or even reverse some of the slow cancers and arterial plaques. And four, it gives you a healthy understanding of why some foods heal and some foods harm so your general diet habits will improve.

Subsistence Gardens

I have a few things on the go, for the high vege prices expected soon. Let's say - if you could grow some of your own veges with minimum hassle - would you? If so I may have an answer. And as long as you have a balcony or north-facing window, you too could be reducing your food bills.

I'll try and write up these instructions and get them online in the next few weeks, as I am experimenting as I go which always makes for slow going.

At the moment I'm making up a small frame to test how well it goes, and will try and keep it going through this winter as well. (As this should be able to produce vegetables all year around, otherwise we might as well shop at Woolies and pay top dollar for poor produce...)

Yes it will be Zen and no there will be no GroLites - you're welcome but the amount of speculation you'll put yourself up for is not worth the hassle... hehehe...

Cos Its The Season To Make Olives

Want to make your own but not sure how? Seeing as it's the season when the olive trees are bearing loads of plump little darlings, here's the lowdown:

GREEN OLIVES: Avoid them, the flavour is nice but the lye solution processing is hardly worth it. Well, okay - if you must, here are some other people's methods. Personally, I will leave green olives to the experts. Here's another page of olive recipes.

BLACK OLIVES: Two ways to prepare them that are quick and easy, the first way is more trouble and results in olives with less of the very compounds we want for a Body Friendly diet, and involves spreading the olives on a fine mesh and sun-drying them until they get wrinkled and then proceeding as for normal black olives.

To make olives that you can eat without a serious stomach-ache or worse, you need to soak the bitter compounds out for a while. For fresh ripe olives, (yep they will be the ones that have turned black) you need to soak them in plenty of brine for about 10 to 12 days, and a bit shorter for the sundried ones. Up to 14 days is acceptable but remember you're also leaching out the good compounds along with the bitter ones so only as long as necessary.

I tend to put about half a litre's worth of olives with a litre of brine, or even more brine if I have a big container. If using lots of brine like that it's okay to change the brine every second day, if you use barely enough brine to cover the olives you will have to make and change to new brine daily. Your call. I set up Google Calendar to send me an SMS on the afternoons I need a brine change, makes it too easy. Also, I tend only to use a few kilos of olives and process them in multiple small batches like that because that way if I stuff one up I still have the others. Again, your call.

Okay making the brine. People will give you "x" "blah"spoons of salt per litre/cup/ewer whatever of water but that leads to some weird brines and uneven results. The idea isn't to make the olives adjust to a different salinity level each time you change the water, as that stresses the membranes and results in olives that feel like they're soft-boiled. Once you know the measurements that make YOUR brine, stick to them for that batch.

Popular Arab and Greek wisdom says that the most useful brine of all is just barely strong enough that a raw egg will float in it. And it's easy to get to that stage. Here's what you need:

• 1 fresh raw egg (The fresher the better as gas formation will make eggs float lighter as they age.)
• Several litres (depending on your situation - I will give the quantities that are relevant, and once you've made your brine once, you will know your measurements) of fresh and preferably filtered water.
• 2 kilos of rock salt (Don't use iodised salt it will taste horrible and discolour the olives.)
• Small saucepan and large jug/bowl to mix and test in.

Okay this is the easy bit. Put about half a litre to a litre of water into the saucepan and bring to boil. Take note of how much water you used. When it's close to boiling add about six to twelve tablespoons of rock salt to the water, again take note how many spoonfuls you put in.

If all the salt dissolves, add another tablespoonful of rock salt, keep doing this until the salt can't dissolve in the water any more. There you have what is known as saturated brine solution, it can't hold any more salt no matter what.

Let it cool until you can comfortably dip a finger in it. Now measure a litre of water into the mixing vessel, or whatever amount you've decided is enough to do your batch of olives. I tend to go a bit more than I need. Carefully put the egg into it. It will sink, which is what you want.

Start adding brine and stirring it in carefully, until the egg floats up. Add just enough fresh water to just cause the egg to sink again, very slowly it will descend. That's the brine you want. Take the egg out, rinse the brine off it, and put it back where you got it from...

If you noted that you used about half a litre of saturated brine to about a litre and a bit of fresh water, that's about the right strength, and all you have to do is reproduce that again for the next batch. I.e. if you used 12 tablespoons of salt in a litre of boiling water and then added only half of that to make the egg float, you know that from now on you only need six tablespoons of salt in half a litre of boiling water per batch.

Allow that brine to cool (as water that's too hot will also fade the colour and make the olives too soft) and add it to whatever container you used to brine the olives, and make sure the olives are all submerged. The brine will make them float like crazy, and you need to make sure they are all under brine.

It's for that reason that I use a washed-out plastic cordial or milk bottle to brine the olives, and make sure it's brimful of brine, as the narrow neck stops the olives rising up out of the brine. Also, it's a waterproof seal so once or twice a day I can turn the bottle upside down and back the right way again to make sure that if a stray olive did float out of the brine, it will end up somewhere lower in the pack afterwards.

For storing the olives once they've been leached, use a clean preferably sterilised jar with a good lid and big enough to fit the olives with a bit of space left over, then make a brine as for normal, then mixing that half and half with a vinegar you like, and bring enough salt/vinegar brine to boil as you'll need for the final jar. I add two cracked garlic cloves to the brine while boiling it, and make sure they end up in the jar. Make sure the salt/vinegar brine is cooled properly before putting into the jar, and if you like you can put a thin layer of olive oil over the water. But that just ends up looking bad if you're storing the olives in the fridge, so I tend not to do it.

In the fridge these should last until the next year's crop, but if anything develops that looks nasty - stop and throw them out... Otherwise, take out the olives you want to use, rinse in fresh water, and depending if you like the pickle or not, you may want to stand the olives you're about to use in fresh water for an hour and up to a day beforehand to take the strong salt and vinegar taste off.

The Diet Is Also For Athersclerosis.

As I describe in my natural diet book, The Body Friendly Zen Cookbook (and the namesake of this blog) a variety of slow cancers and illnesses such as atherosclerosis, urinary tract infections, and more, are due to cell inflammation.

Chemical treatments can reduce these inflammations, in fact here's the article on how anti inflammatory and anti oxidant chemicals appear to be beneficial for arterial plaques, reducing them and thus the associated angina and risk of heart failure.

This is also the case for many so-called slow cancers, cell inflammation first makes the cells dysplasic (i.e. adopting characteristics of cancerous cells) and finally that triggers cancerous changes in the cells. It's a very layman's description but it suffices - inflammatory disease of the cells leads to irritation, which leads to changes, usually not good changes.

In The Body Friendly Zen Cookbook I describe how natural anti inflammatory and anti oxidant compounds found in various foods can be used to halt, reduce, and even reverse the progress of cancer, plaque, and other illnesses. A lot of it has to do with interactions between these active compounds, i.e. if you're not aware of them, you may well be taking two foods which cancel out one another's beneficial effects. Similarly, there are some combinations which increase the beneficial effects of those active compounds by up to tenfold.

The book also shows you how to avoid the things which cause cell inflammation in the first place. The recipes are redacted to include the right foods in the right combinations, and better yet, the book shows you how to apply the principles to all other meals you might normally prepare, so that you really end up with very low impact on your lifestyle.

The whole diet was chosen for this minimal impact, which is certainly less than the impact of chemotherapy or surgical intervention. Due to all these reasons, the diet is one which can be followed at any time, and which will provide benefits to you at any stage of health. It's a set of good general guidelines to follow in general, and a specific diet that you can use immediately to reduce symptoms, reduce the illness, and possibly save yourself a stressful trip to surgery. And it's always good, as in the article linked to in the second paragraph, to read more and more confirmations of what I've been urging in the diet book all along.

Of course, I don't recommend that you just self-diagnose and just go for the diet for reasons of illness - I urge every one of you to consult your doctor and go for initial advice and regular checks on the progress of any illness. We have the technology to both diet AND take medical advice, and it's always best to play safe...

Meat To Please You

I've neglected diet tips for a while now, but last Saturday I spotted another one of those things that make you go hmmmm and it was in relation to the meat purchases. Here are a couple of observations:

First, I buy very little meat from a chainstore supermarket. They have all the tricks down pat, how much they can inject the meat with saline, how much they can irritate it to stay red, how much they can preserve it.

That's important to you for several reasons. First - "inject with saline?" Surely no self-respecting butcher would do that? Right. No self-respecting butcher would. But these days most butchers buy their sides of beef or even bulk cuts from a meat processor/abattoir. They have no such compunctions and they want your money so they will do that.

It's done for a number of reasons, first being that thanks to Heart Smart ticks, the market prefers leaner beef. So abattoirs would prefer to buy leaner cattle rather than buy fat cattle by the kilo and then throw part of the profits away in the fat. So the meat is less marbled and bacause fat equals flavour, the meat tastes more bland. (Yes it's true bbq steaks tasted so much better when you were a kidf because the meat WAS more flavoursome.) So saline raises the flavour of the meat, and ensures YOU go back to your butcher more often, and in turn the butcher goes bak to that processor more often.

Secondly saline is a preservative, and can allow the processor to store the meat longer before needing to sell it. That increases their bottom line because they can stockpile cheaper beef against a time when beef prices are up, and make a few cents a kilo on the deal. Which adds up to hundreds of dollars in some orders.

Lastly, as a fringe benefit to the meat processor, saline increases the weight if the meat, thus making another few hundred dollars per order when the processor sells saline solution at the price of beef or chicken...

And your supermarket is generally either a meat processor or a meat processor outlet, NOT a butcher. Heck, your butcher may not even be a butcher but just handle bulk cuts and turn then into mince and saleable sized cuts. And unless they can tell you where their meat comes from precisely, assume that there's a meat processor involved.

One way to tell with beef is to put some in the freezer in a plastic bag, freeze it, then thaw it again. Beef with a lot of saline will produce a puddle of very thin and pink watery blood, whereas unsalined beef will produce slightly watery red blood.

The other thing to watch for is lovely blood red beef. It has been treated with a chemical irritant which causes the redness. It's done with minced beef particularly, but watch out for it on the steaks and other cuts, too.

Why should you care? Hello! Irritant! This stuff irriates the meat into presenting inflamed red blood cells, and then you eat that and you're made of... ummm what are we made of again? Oh yes MEAT! and then we wonder why inflammation-based diseases are on the increase. It can make sensitive people ill, cause hyperactivity in some, and can cause a range of symptoms.

How can you tell? Some butchers spray the irritant into the mince mixture, but most just spray the top of the tray, and over the tops of the trays of steaks and so forth. You can tell because meat normally goes grey after sitting for a while. So if your butcher lifts a steak out of the tray and there is a grey steak behind it, the top steak has been sprayed. If the scooped out part of the mince is grey while the surface is pink, it's been sprayed. (It was this that I saw at my local butcher and I'll be asking them a few questions next time I see the owner there, some very hard questions . . . )

Ask for the grey steak or mince. It will taste the same but be better for you.

Last thought for you. Would you eat the stuff in your rubbish bin? Well, why eat the animals that have been fed on stuff like that all their lives. Trust me the Japanese know why they will pay $1000 for a kilo of grain and red wine fed beef. The flavour comes through.

As far as I know there is only one mark that guarantees that the cow or chicken or whatever has not been fed ground-up other animal carcasses, chemical waste from other manufacturing plant, and a ton of antibiotics and steroids. That is the 100% Organic label. If you value your health, that's what to go for.

Try this, it works for me

Do you have acid reflux? The doctor has put you on Pariet or Nexium and you've been on it a few years now? Getting nausea, diarrhoea, and acid despite the meds?

Apparently the PPI (proton pump inhibitor) drugs like Pariet and Nexium are very good at their job, but your stomach is too. Don't forget the stomach thinks it's under orders from higher up to prodcue more acid for digesting food. As efficient as any bunch of chemicals, your stomach adapts to the inhibiting effect - somehow - and you get acid, that old familiar burning burning not-quite-love, and if you let this go on for any length of time then the next thing is disgusting, and nausea follows soon afterwards, your PPI-blasted stomach will find it hard to hold down a glass of cold water let alone a flavoursome or fatty meal.

(Because lipids - fats - are a marker our bodies consider to be "flavour" in food, so tastier foods are generally higher in fats. And the wrong kinds of fats will do horrible things to you. Go read my book for info on this.)

At that stage your GP will often advise you to cut the PPIs back to once every two days or something like that. It may help you but if it doesn't then you're pretty much up Shit Creek (in more ways than one) without a paddle or a roll of paper.

Take heart, because I've found a paradoxical answer!

The right thing to do is to sip vinegar. Weird as it sounds, when the dodgy tummy sets in, I have some very special vinegar mixes that work for me every time. I have a couple because someof them are EXCELLENT salad dressings while others are for sipping down between squirming and gagging - at first, later you get used to them.

I have no idea why but I discovered this with a Turkish brand of pickled chilli. For years I'd been using pickled banana peppers to settle a hangover stomach, or bacterial gut infection - and it had always worked. But when my stomach started playing bigtime, I found that chilli at that time was not ideal. The banana peppers don't work for the acid reflux PPI miseries - but the tiny green turkish peppers did. I snacked on a few with every meal when I was feeling poorly in the internals, and they worked.

I left the peppers out and drank the pickle liquid. Very salty, medium vinegary, - and lo! - my ticky tummy settled right down.

SO the other night I made a favourite side dish of mine - red onion in salt and rice vinegar brine. I found that the onion I could take or leave, but my body was craving the salt and vinegar, badly.

So a series of experiements later and I have several recipes, they all work reaonably the same, but you may find a favourite, or at least a less detested one...

My favourite:
12/cup red wine vinegar 1/2 cup coconut vinegar, 1/2 cup red wine, 1 or two tsp salt. Stir together, leave to dissolve some more, stir again, refrigerate, sip about two to five tablespoons when the stomach starts squirming.

Another:
1/2 cup apple cider vingegar, 1/2 cup white or rice vingear, 1 to 3 tsp salt. Stir together, leave to dissolve some more, stir again, refrigerate, sip about two to five tablespoons when the stomach starts squirming.

Rice:
1/2 cup rice vinegar 1/2 cup coconut vinegar, 1 or two tsp salt. Stir together, leave to dissolve some more, stir again, refrigerate, sip about two to five tablespoons when the stomach starts squirming.

It sounds crap but it's anything but. I've spent this last week switching on and off my nausea and acid attacks, I don't know for sur ewhy this works but it does. I don't suggest swigging on this stuff all day as it can harden your liver better than alcohol does, in general I take a few tablespooons an hour or so before the times I know I'm going to get it.

Try it, you have nothing to lose but the need for medication. In my case I now take a Nexium maybe two times a week or less, and I'm eating really well. I take a sipped swig after a meal, and the worst effects are gone, I take another one the next day and it's like I never had a problem.

Yes I Have Spare Time, Why Do You Ask?

After a hectic few months where I was IT contracting, I finally have time to get behind the Body Friendly Zen Cookbook again. I'm currently home rendering some fine pork dripping for flavouring (no it is not contrary to the diet, as you'll see when you read it) and preparing some chicken wings for roasting tonight.

(The pork fat? Okay in the diet I recommend using olive oil and grapeseed oil, preferably mixed together 50/50 - but food tastes dead boring if cooked with the same fats all the time. As I say in the book, use about half the oil you think you'll need, and for flavour, reduce that to half that amount again - and then it's fine with the diet to add an equal amount of butter or pork dripping or duck fat or whatever flavour you're aiming for. The idea is to reduce your fat intake but not to stop taking in fats. Your body needs them. It creates a variety of building blocks from fat.

Also - much maligned as different fats are - our bodies have over thousands of generations become dependent on having them. Yes, there are a thousand vegetarians who will point to themselves and say this is proof that we don't need these animal products but I say it's a tribute to the adaptability and flexibility of the human digestive system. Those people are putting their bodies under undue stress and it will often show up in various deficiency illnesses such as skin and hair ailments, susceptibility to various community-acquired flu and colds, and so forth. If you are striving to return your cells to a normal state and thus reverse your cancer you shouldn't place ANY undue strain on yourself. )

So anyhow - the chicken wings turned out a treat and I'll soon start a recipe card series on these pages with extra recipes that fit the diet for one reason or another. These recipes will be basic and there will be more on the Bodyfriendly registered user website, with a better description and breakdown of the ingredients. And how does one register for the website? Well, if you purchase a book I will have your email address and when the registered website is operational you will be sent a link and a username and password you can use. It wil be that simple, and then you will be able to take part in online discussions with other people in a similar position to yourself, read the recipes, and (if I manage to get this going, it's proving a hard thing to program) a list of stores in your area where the more specialised ingredients are available. There are also a lot of staff of medical centres and research facilities who are going to get free copies of the book and free membership to the site so you may even be able to discuss matters with a professional.

For now - please visit the Zencookbook Dot Com site and look around - there's getting to be more and more material there.

Introduction To The Cookbook

This is now historical, the BFZCB is no more. If you want a copy for free email me teddlesruss@pm.me and I'll email you a copy.

The Body FriendlyZen Cookbook is now on its own site at http://www.zencookbook.com/, it is a work in progress so please download the free e-book there, or buy the full version, or donate something --- and leave a comment please. Your purchases and donations will make it possible for me to continue this work. For example, the CSIRO will in 2007 be running a test on my diet and those results will be published on the site. And I am investigating several promising sources of new treatment foods and those too will be published on the site once I have something to publish. For registered purchasers of the book, this will in effect mean that the book will always be up to date with the latest revisions. It is my intention to also supply the book in electronic form on a USB key, which will be able to actually update from the online server, thus creating the ultimate "perpetual book!" In addition I will hopefully be offering the book in formats to suit proprietary reader hardware etc. Prices are expected to be around $35USD for the USB version, (remember this is also a USB key,) $20USD for the hardcopy, with $15USD for e-text versions. As prices drop for the USB devices this will be reflected in the price of the USB book, and similarly for the e-text versions, Proprietary formats will be priced according to the relevant patent owner's prices. A printed copy is coming soon, stay tuned. Anyway - please head over to the main site, grab a copy of the book, leave me a donation (and email me about doing so - I'll remember to do something nice for you in turn when the full book goes into publication) and put your name down for the mailing list so that you'll know as soon as the first full copies are available.