Dirty Secrets of food processing Industry

Posted on September 24, 2015 by Hank Rouse

We have always processed our food; this is an activity that is uniquely human. We chop, soak, cook and ferment our food – as well as grind and dry – these are all types of processing.

Traditional processing has two functions: to make food more digestible and to preserve it for use during times when food isn’t readily available. Nutritious, long-lasing processed foods including pemmican, hard sausage and old-fashioned meat puddings and haggis, as well as grain products, dairy products, pickles—everything from wine and spirits to lacto-fermented condiments. Farmers and artisans—bread makers, cheese makers, distillers, millers and so forth—processed the raw ingredients into delicious foods that retained their nutritional content over many months or even years, and kept the profits on the farm and in the farming communities where they belonged.

Unfortunately, in modern times, we have substituted local artisanal processing with factory and industrial processing, which actually diminishes the quality of the food, rather than making it more nutritious and digestible. Industrial processing depends upon sugar, white flour, processed and hydrogenated oils, synthetic food additives and vitamins, heat treatment and the extrusion of grains.

BREAKFAST CEREALS
Let’s look at the processing involved in the typical American breakfast of cereal, skim milk and orange juice. Cold breakfast cereals are produced by a process called extrusion. Grains are mixed with water, processed into a slurry and placed in a machine called an extruder. The grains are forced out of a tiny hole at high temperature and pressure, which shapes them into little o’s or flakes or shreds. Individual grains passed through the extruder expand to produce puffed wheat, oats and rice. These products are then subjected to sprays that give a coating of oil and sugar to seal off the cereal from the ravages of milk and to give it crunch.

In his book Fighting the Food Giants, biochemist Paul Stitt describes the extrusion process, which treats the grains with very high heat and pressure, and notes that the processing destroys much of their nutrients. It denatures the fatty acids; it even destroys the synthetic vitamins that are added at the end of the process. The amino acid lysine, a crucial nutrient, is especially damaged by the extrusion process.

Even boxed cereals sold in health food stores are made using the extrusion process. They are made with the same kind of machines and mostly in the same factories. The only “advances” claimed in the extrusion process are those that will cut cost, regardless of how the process alters the nutrient content of the product.

With so many millions of boxes of cereal sold each year, one would expect to see published studies showing the effects of these cereals on animals and humans. But breakfast cereals are a multi-billion dollar industry that has created huge fortunes for a few people. A box of cereal containing a penny’s worth of grain sells for four or five dollars in the grocery store–there is probably no other product on earth with such a large profit margin. These profits have paid for lobbying efforts and journal sponsorships that have effectively kept any research about extruded grains out of the scientific literature and convinced government officials that there is no difference between a natural grain of wheat and a grain that has been altered by the extrusion process.

THE RAT EXPERIMENTS
Unpublished research indicates that the extrusion process turns the proteins in grains into neurotoxins. Stitt describes an experiment, conducted in 1942 by a cereal company but locked away in the company’s file cabinet, in which four sets of rats were given special diets. One group received plain whole wheat grains, water and synthetic vitamins and minerals. A second group received puffed wheat (an extruded cereal), water and the same nutrient solution. A third set was given water and white sugar. A fourth set was given nothing but water and synthetic nutrients. The rats that received the whole wheat lived over a year on this diet. The rats that got nothing but water and vitamins lived about two months. The animals on a white sugar and water diet lived about a month. The study showed that the rats given the vitamins, water and all the puffed wheat they wanted died within two weeks—even before the rats that got no food at all. These results suggest that there was something very toxic in the puffed wheat itself! Proteins are very similar to certain toxins in molecular structure, and the pressure of the puffing process may produce chemical changes that turn a nutritious grain into a poisonous substance.

Another unpublished experiment was carried out in 1960. Researchers at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor were given eighteen laboratory rats. These were divided into three groups: one group received cornflakes and water; a second group was given the cardboard box that the cornflakes came in and water; the control group received rat chow and water. The rats in the control group remained in good health throughout the experiment. The rats eating the box became lethargic and eventually died of malnutrition. The rats receiving the cornflakes and water died before the rats that were eating the box! (The first box rat died the day the last cornflake rat died.) Furthermore, before death, the cornflakes-eating rats developed aberrant behavior, threw fits, bit each other and finally went into convulsions. Autopsy revealed dysfunction of the pancreas, liver and kidneys and degeneration of the nerves of the spine, all signs of insulin shock. The startling conclusion of this study was that there was more nourishment in the box than in the cornflakes. This experiment was designed as a joke, but the results were far from funny.

Most Americans eat boxed cereals today. Because these are fortified with synthetic nutrients, the USDA can claim that they are as healthy as the grains from which they are made. Many of these cereals contain at least 50 percent of calories as sugar. Those sold in health food stores may be made of whole grains and fewer sweeteners. However, these whole grain extruded cereals are probably more dangerous than their refined grain counterparts sold in the supermarkets, because they are higher in protein, and it is the proteins in these cereals that are rendered toxic by this type of processing.

THE EXTRUSION PROCESS
When we put cereals through an extruder, it alters the structure of the proteins. Zeins, which comprise the majority of proteins in corn, are located in spherical organelles called protein bodies. The scientific literature does contain one study on extruded grains, which investigated changes in protein body, shape and release of encapsulated alpha-zeins as a result of the extrusion processing. Researchers found that during extrusion, the protein bodies are completely disrupted and the alpha-zeins dispersed. The results suggest that the zeins in cornflakes are not confined to rigid protein bodies but can interact with each other and other components of the system, forming new compounds that are foreign to the human body. The extrusion process breaks down the organelles and disperses the proteins, which then become toxic. When the proteins are disrupted in this way, it can adversely affect the nervous system, as indicated by the cornflake experiment.

OLD FASHIONED PORRIDGE
There is only one way to put these companies out of business, and that is not to eat their food. So, what are you going to have for breakfast instead of cheerios and corn flakes? Eggs–any style–are always a good choice. As for grain, old-fashioned porridges made from non-extruded grains provide excellent nourishment at an economical price. Grains such as oats should be cut or rolled and then soaked overnight in a warm, acidic medium to neutralize the many anti-nutrients naturally occurring in grains, such as irritating tannins, digestion-blocking enzyme inhibitors and mineral-blocking phytic acid. This treatment can also gently break down complex proteins in grains. You soak the grains in warm water plus one tablespoon of something acidic, like whey, yoghurt, lemon juice or vinegar. The next morning, your grain will cook in just a few minutes. It’s best to eat your porridge with butter or cream, like our grandparents did. The nutrients in the dairy fats are needed in order for you to absorb the nutrients in the grains. Without the fat-soluble vitamins A, D and K2, you cannot absorb the minerals in your food. Furthermore, the fats in butter and cream slow down the release of glucose into the bloodstream, so that your blood sugar remains stable throughout the morning.

MILK
Milk is one of nature’s most perfect foods. Most of our milk comes from a sacred animal, the cow. Today, however, in the industrial system, we imprison cows indoors for their entire lives; we give them inappropriate feed such as soy, bakery waste, citrus peel cake and the swill from ethanol production, foods that cows are not designed to eat. The confinement environment and the inappropriate feed make these cows sick, so they need antibiotics and other drugs. We breed them to give huge amounts of milk, and give them hormones to increase milk production as well. These cows produce large quantities of watery milk with only half the amount of fat compared to milk produced by old-fashioned cows eating green grass. Then this milk is shipped to factories for processing.

Inside the plants, the milk is completely remade. As described by Emily Green in the Los Angeles Times, centrifuges separate the milk into fat, protein and various other solids and liquids. Once segregated, these are recombined at specific levels set for whole, lowfat and no-fat milks. Of the reconstituted milks, whole milk will most closely approximate original cow’s milk. What is left over will go into butter, cream, cheese, dried milk, and a host of other milk products. The dairy industry promotes lowfat milk and skim milk because they can make more money on the butterfat when used in ice cream. When they remove the fat to make reduced-fat milks, they replace it with powdered milk concentrate, which is formed by high temperature spray drying.

Then the milk is sent by tanker trucks (which are not refrigerated) to bottling plants. The milk is pasteurized at 161oF for fifteen seconds by rushing it past superheated stainless steel plates. If the temperature is 230oF (over the boiling point), the milk is considered ultrapasteurized. This ultrapasteurized milk will have a distinct cooked milk taste, but it is sterile and shelf stable. It may be sold in the refrigerated section of the supermarket so the consumer will think it is fresh, but it does not need to be. The milk is also homogenized by a pressure treatment that breaks down the fat globules so the milk won’t separate. Once processed, the milk will last for weeks, not just days.

Processing makes the milk difficult to digest and renders the proteins allergenic. Animals fed pasteurized milk exclusively develop nutrient deficiencies and become infertile after several generations.

Fortunately, Real Milk from pasture-fed cows, milk that is not pasteurized, processed or homogenized, is becoming more widely available. In fact, demand for Real Milk is growing rapidly. To find Real Milk in your area, visit realmilk.com

In order to make powdered milk, fluid is forced through a tiny hole at high pressure and then blown out into the air. This causes a lot of nitrates to form, and the cholesterol in the milk becomes oxidized. Contrary to popular opinion, cholesterol is not a demon but your best friend; you don’t have to worry about consuming foods containing cholesterol, except that you do not want to consume oxidized cholesterol. Evidence indicates that oxidized cholesterol can initiate the process of atherosclerosis.

Powdered milk is added to reduced-fat milks and milk products to give them body. So, when you consume reduced-fat milk or yoghurt, thinking that it will help you avoid heart disease, you are actually consuming oxidized cholesterol, which can initiate the process of heart disease.

ORANGE JUICE
Now, let’s turn to the orange juice, part of our “healthy breakfast” of cereal, lowfat milk and juice. An article from Processed and Prepared Foods describes a “a new orange juice processing plant is completely automated and can process up to 1,800 tons of oranges per day to produce frozen concentrate, single strength juice, oil extracted from the peel and cattle feed.” The new method of producing juice puts the whole orange in the machine. Another abstract states: “Various acid sprays for improving fruit peel quality and increasing juice yield are added to these processed oranges.” These compounds are added to extract as much juice as possible, as well as the oil out of the skin. The conventional orange crop is sprayed heavily with pesticides called cholinesterase inhibitors, which are very toxic to the nervous system. When they put the whole oranges into the vats and squeeze them, all that pesticide goes into the juice. Then they add acids to get every single bit of juice out of these oranges. So commercial orange juice can be a very toxic soup. This may be one reason that consumption of fruit juice is associated with increased rates of dementia.

What about the peel used for cattle feed? The dried, left-over citrus peel from orange juice production is processed into cakes, which are still loaded with cholinesterase inhibitors. Mark Purdey, in England, has shown how this practice correlates with mad cow disease. The use of organophosphates either as a spray on the cows or as a component of their feed, causes degeneration of the brain and nervous system in the cow, and if it’s doing it to the cow, there’s a possibility it may be doing it to you also.

The U.S. government tries to give the impression that pasteurization of juice is necessary to ensure our safety. However, it might surprise you to learn that researchers have found fungus that is resistant to pressure and heat in processed juices. They found that seventeen percent of Nigerian packages of orange juice and twenty percent of mango and tomato juices contained these heat-resistant fungi. They also found E. coli in the orange juice; it was pressure resistant and had survived pasteurization. So there is plenty of danger from contamination in these pasteurized juices.

In one study, heat-treated and acid-hydrolyzed orange juice was tested for mutagenic activity. The authors found that the heating process produced intermediate products which, under test conditions, gave rise to mutagenicity and cytotoxicity. In other words, there were cancer-causing compounds in the orange juice. In another study, gel filtration and high performance liquid chromatography were used to obtain mutagenic fractions from heated orange juice.

So if you want juice with your breakfast, avoid commercial processed orange juice. Instead, squeeze yourself a couple of organic oranges or an organic grapefruit–in other words, process the juice yourself! Mix that fresh juice with sparkling water and a pinch of salt for a delicious spritzer.

NATURAL NOURISHING BROTHS
In the past, many traditional cultures made use of animal bones to make broth. They recognized the health-giving properties of bone broth as well as wonderful flavors broth gave to soups, sauces, gravies and stews. Modern science has shown us that homemade bone broths are indeed the healing wonders of the food pharmacopia; they provide minerals in abundance, strengthen bones and sinews, heal the gut and help us detoxify. The gelatin in homemade bone broth is a natural digestive aid.

INDUSTRIAL SOUPS
Most commercial soup bases and sauces contain artificial meat-like flavors that mimic those we used to get from natural, gelatin-rich broth. These kinds of short cuts mean that consumers are shortchanged. When the homemade stocks were pushed out by the cheap substitutes, an important source of minerals disappeared from the American diet. The thickening effects of gelatin could be mimicked with emulsifiers, but, of course, the health benefits were lost. Gelatin is a very healthy thing to have in your diet. It helps you digest proteins properly and is supportive of digestive health overall.

Research on gelatin and natural broths came to an end in the 1950s when food companies discovered how to induce maillard reactions–the process of creating flavor compounds by mixing reduced sugars and amino acids under increased temperatures–and produce meat-like flavors in the laboratory. In a General Foods Company report issued in 1947, chemists predicted that almost all natural flavors would soon be chemically synthesized. Following the Second World War, American food companies discovered monosodium glutamate, a food ingredient the Japanese had invented in 1908 to enhance food flavors, including meat-like flavors. Humans actually have receptors on the tongue for glutamate—it is the protein in food that the human body recognizes as meat–but the glutamate in MSG has a different configuration, which cannot be assimilated properly by the body. Any protein can be hydrolyzed (broken down into its component amino acids) to produce a base containing MSG. When the industry learned how to synthesize the flavor of meat in the laboratory, using inexpensive proteins from grains and legumes, the door was opened to a flood of new products, including boullion cubes, dehydrated soup mixes, sauce mixes, TV dinners, and condiments with a meaty taste.

The fast food industry could not exist without MSG and artificial meat flavors, which beguile the consumer into eating bland and tasteless food. The sauces in many commercially processed foods contain MSG, water, thickeners, emulsifiers and caramel coloring. Your tongue is tricked into thinking that you are consuming something nutritious, when in fact it is getting nothing at all except some very toxic substances. Even dressings, Worcestershire sauce, rice mixes, flavored tofu, and many meat products have MSG in them. Almost all canned soups and stews contain MSG, and the “hydrolyzed protein” bases often contain MSG in very large amounts.

So-called homemade soups in most restaurants are usually made by mixing water with a powdered soup base made of hydrolyzed protein and artificial flavors, and then adding chopped vegetables and other ingredients. Even things like lobster bisque and fish sauces in most seafood restaurants are prepared using these powdered bases full of artificial flavors.

The industry even thinks it is too costly to just use a little onion and garlic for flavoring–they use artificial garlic and onion flavors instead. It’s all profit based with no thought for the health of the consumer.

Unfortunately, most of the processed vegetarian foods are loaded with these flavorings, as well. The list of ingredients in vegetarian hamburgers, hot dogs, bacon, baloney, etc., may include hydrolyzed protein and “natural” flavors, all sources of MSG. Soy foods are loaded with MSG.

Food manufacturers get around the labeling requirements by putting MSG in the spice mixes; if the mix is less than fifty percent MSG, they don’t have to indicate MSG on the label. You may have noticed that the phrase “No MSG” has actually disappeared. The industry doesn’t use it anymore because they found out that there was MSG in all the spice mixes; even Bragg’s amino acids had to take “No MSG” off the label.

HEALTH PROBLEMS
While the industry was adding MSG to food in larger and larger amounts, in 1957 scientists found that mice became blind and obese when MSG was administered by feeding tube. In 1969, MSG-induced lesions were found in the hypothalamus region of the mouse brain. Subsequent studies pointed in the same direction. MSG is a neurotoxic substance that causes a wide range of reactions in humans, from temporary headaches to permanent brain damage. It is also associated with violent behavior. We have had a huge increase in Alzheimer’s, brain cancer, seizures, multiple sclerosis and diseases of the nervous system, and one of the chief culprits is the flavorings in our food.

Ninety-five percent of processed foods contain MSG, and, in the late 1950s, it was even added to baby food. Manufacturers say they have voluntarily taken it out of the baby food, but they didn’t really remove it; they just called it “hydrolyzed protein” instead.

An excellent book, Excitotoxins, by Russell Blaylock, describes how nerve cells either disintegrate or shrivel up in the presence of free glutamic acid if it gets past the blood-brain barrier. The glutamates in MSG are absorbed directly from the mouth to the brain. Some investigators believe that the great increase in violence in this country starting in 1960 is due to the increased use of MSG beginning in the late 1950s, particularly as it was added to baby foods.

INDUSTRIAL FATS AND OILS
The food processing empire is built on industrial fats and oils, extracted from corn, soybeans and other seeds. Crude vegetable oil–which is dark, sticky and smelly–is subjected to horrendous processing to produce clean-looking cooking oils, margarine, shortening and spreads. The steps involved in processing usually include degumming, bleaching, deodorizing, filtering and removing saturates to make the oils more liquid. In the process, the nutrients and antioxidants disappear–but not the pesticides. Most processors also add a hexane solvent in order to squeeze the very last drop of oil out of the seeds. Caustic refining, the most widely used process for oil refining, involves adding very alkaline, chemicals to the oil.

In order to make a solid fat out of liquid oil, manufacturers subject the oils to a process called partial hydrogenation. The oil is extracted under high temperature and pressure, and the remaining fraction of oil is removed with hexane solvents. Manufacturers then steam clean the oils, a process that removes all the vitamins and all the antioxidants—but, of course, the solvents and the pesticides remain. These oils are mixed with a nickel catalyst and then, under high temperature and pressure, they are flooded with hydrogen gas. What goes into the reactor is a liquid oil; what comes out of that reactor is a smelly mass resembling grey cottage cheese. Emulsifiers are mixed in to smooth out the lumps, and the oil is then steam cleaned once more, to get rid of the horrible smell. The next step is bleaching, to get rid of the grey color. At this point, the product can be called “pure vegetable shortening.” To make margarines and spreads, artificial flavors and synthetic vitamins are added. But the government does not allow the industry to add synthetic color to margarine–they must add a natural color, such as annatto–a comforting thought. The margarine or spread is then packaged in blocks and tubs and advertised as a health food.

Saturated fat is the type of fat found in such foods as lard, butter and coconut oil. Saturated fat molecules are straight, so they pack together easily. That is why saturated fats are solid at room temperature. Unsaturated fats have a little bend at each double bond, with two hydrogen atoms sticking out on the same side. And when that molecule gets incorporated into your cells, the body wants those two hydrogen atoms to be on the same side of the carbon chain, forming an electron cloud; that is where controlled chemical interactions take place.

During the process of partial hydrogenation, one of those hydrogen atoms is moved to the other side, causing the molecule to straighten out so that it behaves chemically like a saturate—although biochemically it behaves very differently. The original, unsaturated molecule is called a “cis” fatty acid, because the two hydrogens are together, and then it becomes a trans fatty acid, because the two hydrogens are across from each other (“trans” means “across”). Your body doesn’t know that this new molecule is something that has never existed in nature before, and when you eat one of these trans fatty acids, it gets built into your cell membranes. Because of the chemical rearrangement, the reactions that should happen can’t take place. Enzymes and receptors don’t work anymore. The more trans fatty acids that you eat, the more partially hydrogenated your cells become and the more chaos that you are going to have on the cellular level.

All of the margarines, shortenings and even low-trans-fat spreads are made with these harmful ingredients. They’re used in chips and crackers, and most restaurants use them for cooking fries. Until the early 1980s, fast food outlets and restaurants cooked the fries in tallow, which is a very safe fat, but now they use partially hydrogenated soybean oil.

In the past, when you made desserts for your kids, at least the sugar they contained came with butter, eggs, cream and nuts—all good wholesome foods. Now manufacturers can imitate the butter, eggs, cream and nuts, so all you have is sugar, industrial oils and artificial ingredients in these instant puddings, pastries and other artificial desserts.

Many diseases have been associated with the consumption of trans fatty acids—heart disease, cancer, and degeneration of joints and tendons. The only reason that we are eating this stuff is because we have been told that the competing saturated fats and oils—butter, lard, coconut oil, palm oil, tallow and suet—are bad for us and cause heart disease. Such assertions are nothing but industry propaganda.

WESTON PRICE
Weston A. Price, DDS, discovered that as populations adopt processed foods, with each generation the facial structure becomes more and more narrow. Healthy faces should be broad. We are all designed to have perfectly straight teeth and not get cavities. When you are eating real, nutrient-dense foods, you get the complete and perfect expression of the genetic potential. We were given a perfect blueprint. Whether or not the body temple is built according to the blueprint depends, to a great extent, on our wisdom in food choices.

When primitive societies abandoned the traditional diet and began to eat processed foods, the next generation developed narrowed facial structure and many diseases. We know that if you continue this diet for three generations, reproduction ceases. This is the terrible price of the West, the Western Price. Civilization will die out unless we embrace the food ways of our ancestors. That means turning our backs on processed foods and getting back into the kitchen, to prepare real foods–containing healthy fats–for ourselves and our families.

OPTIMAL FOOD PREPARATION—MADE WITH LOVE
Food preparation is actually a sacred activity: According to esoteric lore, “If a woman could see the sparks of light going forth from her fingertips when she is cooking, and the energy that goes into the food she handles, she would realize how much of herself she imbues into the meals that she prepares for her family and friends. It is one of the most important and least understood activities of life that the feelings that go into the preparation of food affect everyone who partakes of it. This activity should be unhurried, peaceful and happy because the energy that flows into that food impacts the energy of the receiver.

“That is why the advanced spiritual teachers of the East never eat food prepared by anyone other than their own chelas (disciples). The person preparing the food may be the only one in the household who is spiritually advanced. An active charge of happiness, purity and peace will pour forth into the food from him, and this pours forth into the other members of the family and blesses them.”

To be healthy, we need to prepare our own food, for ourselves and our families. This doesn’t mean you have to spend hours in the kitchen, but you do need to spend some time there, preparing food with wisdom and love. If no one in the family has time to prepare food, you need to sit down and rethink how you are spending your time, because this is the only way to get nourishing foods into your children. We can return to good eating practices one mouth at a time, one meal at a time, by preparing our own food and preparing it properly.

The Superfoods That Could Change the Way You Eat, Feel and Live

Posted on September 18, 2015 by Hank Rouse

O’s editor in chief travels to Peru to experience a trove of life-giving superfoods that just might revolutionize your view of nutrition.

Around 4 o’clock on any given morning, Darin Olien will walk into his Malibu, California, kitchen and make himself a smoothie. This will not be an ordinary drink. The other day, for example, he tossed the following into his blender: coconut water, fermented sprouted brown rice, maca, aloe vera juice, barley grass powder, kamut juice powder, almond butter, camu camu, avocado, goji, lucuma powder, noni juice, cacao nibs, MSM, maqui, bee pollen, sacha inchi oil, omega-3-DHA/EPA oil, Hawaiian deepwater salt, chia seeds, nopal, goat yogurt, luo han guo, and a powder called Shakeology.

If you’ve never heard of many of these ingredients, you’re not alone. But stay with me here, because they’re among the most powerful nutrients on Earth. Olien’s specialty is what’s known as “formulating,” taking wildly beneficial substances and combining them into something even more potent: a supplement, a snack, a tea, a medicine, a smoothie. Every food in nature contains a mix of proteins, fats, and carbohydrates, along with noncaloric vitamins, minerals, fibers-all of which fuel our cells-and each one has unique abilities that we really don’t understand, but it is now clear that some foods pack an extra biochemical punch. Camu camu fruit, for instance, provides the richest source of vitamin C known to exist. Maca, a hearty root that grows only in the high Andes, comes in yellow, red, and black varieties, boosts fertility, is said to balance hormones, and dispenses a day’s worth of kick-ass energy. Sacha inchi is another South American treasure, a protein-rich, metabolism-revving nut that delivers an omega-3 bonanza. Olien’s final ingredient, Shakeology, contains more than 70 components itself, a crazy cornucopia of good.

No one understands Shakeology better than Olien, who created it in 2008, after Carl Daikeler, CEO of the fitness company Beachbody, challenged him to come up with a supplement to match the tagline The Healthiest Meal of the Day. His customer was someone who wanted optimum wellness, wanted to lose weight, wanted cholesterol levels to drop-but had no intention of eating a platter of broccoli each day. Daikeler gave Olien no limits on quality, no cost/revenue restrictions; the goal was to shoot the moon, to seek out and combine the most extraordinary plants, fruits, nuts, herbs-nature’s secret weapons. And Olien found them: ashwagandha from China, cordyceps from Bhutan, yacon from Peru. An alphabet of vitamins and minerals from the purest sources. Prebiotics. Probiotics. Green tea and grapeseed extracts, chlorella and spirulina and hydrilla, a spectrum of enzymes. Since hitting the market in March 2009, more than 400,000 bags of Shakeology, at $119.95 each, have been sold.

Olien himself is a strapping guy, north of six feet and solid. He looks, in fact, like the steak-fed Midwestern varsity football player that he was, until a back injury derailed his athletic career. From that low point Olien had tried to rehabilitate himself using traditional methods-lots of animal protein, relentless physiotherapy-but it was only when he adopted a radically new diet of superfoods that he was able to regain his strength. This not only improved his health, it revealed his calling. “It was one of the greatest turns in my life,” Olien says, “because it got me into the question, ‘What can I do to fix this?’ I became very curious about the body, switched my major to exercise physiology and nutrition. Then I healed myself.” Over the years he also managed to help many others with their diet and fitness regimens, and Olien’s “concoctions,” his powders and bars and health innovations, began to attract attention.

On the first morning I met Olien I watched him doing squat jumps holding 40-pound weights, while holding his breath underwater. Another workout he likes to do involves harnessing himself to a 150-pound railroad tie and dragging it through thick sand. Whatever he eats needs to fuel these exploits, so people are often surprised to hear that his diet consists mostly of plants. Olien consumes no processed foods, no polysyllabic ingredients invented in labs, no high-fructose corn syrup or trans fats, no artificial flavorings, no antibiotic-laced dairy products, nothing that comes out of a drive-thru. In short, he doesn’t eat what’s generally on offer in the modern food world. “When people find out that I don’t eat this or I don’t eat that, I feel a sense of pity coming from them,” he says, “and I think, ‘Wow! You have no idea. I’m not deprived at all. Come to my kitchen! I’ll blow your mind.'”

Thing is, science is now catching up to something that nature has known all along: the rich greens, the vibrant yellows, the deep indigos of plants are key to our well-being. That meat we love so much? Proven to clog our arteries. Convenience foods-heavily sweetened and salted, laden with fat and chemicals-wreak havoc on everything from our immune systems to our moods to our weight. Here are the facts and they’re not very pretty: Americans are the fattest people ever in history. Obesity, a body composition topping 30 percent fat, is the most pressing health crisis we face, with 34 percent of the adult population falling into that category (plus 29 percent of all children). If you add in the merely overweight it’s closer to 68 percent. In the past 50 years the weight of the typical American citizen has increased, on average, by 25 pounds. If we continue at this rate, by 2050 every last person will have eaten himself into the danger zone.

“Every time you eat processed foods, you exclude from your diet not only the essential nutrients that we are aware of, but hundreds of other undiscovered phytonutrients that are crucial for normal human function,” Joel Fuhrman, MD, writes in his new book, Eat to Live: The Amazing Nutrient-Rich Program for Fast and Sustained Weight Loss, which stresses the importance of a diet full of high-quality produce. Mehmet Oz, MD, who wrote the foreword to Fuhrman’s book, believes that even a slight shift away from meat can improve your health. “What we really want to do is have people nudge themselves in the right direction,” he told me. “If you want to have a few bacon bits on your salad, God bless you, fine. That’s not where we’re losing the battle. We’re losing the battle when you have sausage for breakfast, a big pastrami sandwich for lunch, and pork chops for dinner.”

Yet we live in a mass-produced, big-box culture, where economic interests hold sway. Meat, corn, sugar-they come cheap, and we buy them. Plus, we tend to like the taste. But there are steep hidden costs in a food system that makes calories rather than nutrients-from the factory farms that treat animals like parts on an assembly line to the fact that obesity-related ailments like heart disease, stroke, and diabetes are skyrocketing and account for approximately $150 billion in healthcare expenses each year. As both Fuhrman and Oz would attest, anyone consuming a steady diet of man-made edibles would benefit even from something as prosaic as lettuce, but far more intriguing foods exist. As Olien began to talk about the vegetables, fruits, grains, herbs, and other plants he was hunting, I realized there was an entire universe out there I didn’t know about. I had never heard of lucuma or sapote or aguaje. What the heck was gac? The list was long.

Learning more requires a passport, because in acquiring these superfoods Olien doesn’t simply call up a supplier with his FedEx number, he goes directly to the source. In doing so he often ends up in extreme places, searching out plants that-although they may have been revered by past civilizations-are now largely forgotten. South America, with its jungles and rainforests and mountains, is especially rich. So when I heard that Olien was headed back to Peru, I invited myself along. I wanted to see firsthand what he was up to because it sounded so incredible to me, so mysterious and even magical. I wanted to taste these lost, powerful foods that had fueled warriors and emperors, plants with miraculous properties that had somehow almost vanished, disappearing beneath a sea of fast-food wrappers.

Lima
From the outside, Nicolaza Mendoza’s warehouse looks like any other drab building on the industrial fringe of a sprawling Latin American city. When I walked through the door, however, that impression was washed away by a wave of earthy scent. Colorful sacks were piled high on wooden palettes, each one stuffed with precious plants. Their names-una de gato, achiote, huasca-were written on the sacks in thick black marker. Mendoza, a small-statured woman with a serious face, is one of Peru’s most respected herbalists. She spoke no English; her daughter Luz Maria, a striking 32-year-old in a short black skirt and lavender eyeshadow, was there to translate.

“How do you say, ‘Hit the jackpot’ in Spanish?” Olien asked, smiling. He was carrying a list of substances he wanted to investigate, and it was a good bet that many were on the premises. Standing beside him, Bernd Neugebauer, PhD, surveyed the warehouse and nodded. At 59, with a mane of white hair and vivid blue eyes, Neugebauer has a distinguished air, bolstered by the four languages he speaks fluently and his provenance from one of Germany’s oldest forestry families. Neugebauer’s accomplishments and interests include cultivating organic aloe vera, beekeeping, shamanism training, and studying ancient farming methods. Currently he is restoring an entire Mayan village in the Yucatan. But his primary interest is soil. Only healthy, mineral-rich soil produces healthy, mineral-rich food, and the world’s topsoil is under great stress these days, overused, undernourished, and (due to increasing deforestation) prone to erode into the sea. Though he is an organic farming expert, Neugebauer has gone even beyond that, reaching into history to discover how past agricultural empires-Maya, Aztec, Inca-treated the land, and what we can learn from them. In 2006 Olien read an academic paper by Neugebauer about creating holistic and sustainable agricultural practices, and sought him out as a kindred spirit. Now the two team up often, with Neugebauer helping the farmers who grow Olien’s raw materials get the most out of their crops without pesticides or chemical fertilizers.

Olien’s relationship to his suppliers is a deeply personal one. He believes in cultivating relationships first, supporting indigenous practices, seeking the highest-quality products and paying generously for them. The farmers he works with have become his close friends. “It’s fair trade on steroids,” he says of his approach. To that end, every last leaf that now sat in Mendoza’s warehouse met this gold standard. The herbs here were locally grown and carefully harvested. Her collection was all the more impressive when you considered Peru’s outlandish biodiversity. Luz explained how her mother traversed the country constantly, from one extreme to another, from the Amazon to the Andes to the Pacific Coast and everywhere in between, seeking out each region’s botanical treasures. The stakes were high: Billion-dollar drugs had been obtained in the rapidly dwindling rainforest-antimicrobial, antipain, anticancer medications, among countless others-and yet scientists agreed that only a small fraction of nature’s pharmacopoeia had ever been studied. “I’m amazed by what she knows,” Luz said, shaking her head.

I walked down the aisles behind Mendoza and Olien, leaning over the herbs to examine them. Una de gato, or cat’s claw, was a vine that had been chopped into little shingles; it was adobe red and smelled like the primeval forest. I had seen it referenced in a number of books as an antiaging “superherb.” Recently scientists have discovered that the most prized plants and herbs in native cultures contain high levels of nutrients that contribute ferociously to cellular health in ways we are only beginning to understand; cat’s claw has been shown to fight infection, decrease inflammation, and repair DNA. “This is the real pharmacy,” Olien said, gesturing at the sacks. “Hippocrates said, ‘Let food be your medicine’-and there’s a lot of medicine out there.”

There was a row dedicated entirely to teas, lush manzanilla (chamomile), lemony cedron, eucalyptus, and menta blanca-white mint so strong it was as though an entire field had been squeezed into a teacup. Every smell was amplified. “Stand here for three minutes and just breathe deeply,” Neugebauer advised, “and you will be in wonderful condition.” The intensity of these substances was striking, given that we live in a diluted world, willing to eat a tomato that only vaguely tastes like a tomato, or an orange that looks orange only because it’s been shot full of dye.

One sack had frayed at the ends and its contents spilled out, revealing a root that looked like a thick, spiral cinnamon stick. I was examining it when Miguel Berumen, another member of Olien’s team, came over. Berumen was a walking superfoods encyclopedia, and the learning had started early. As a boy growing up outside Mexico City, he’d watched his grandmother heal family members with plants from her garden. “I’d get sick,” he recalled, “and she’d come over and brew up some herbs and say some prayers. That was just the logical thing to do.” When Berumen was asked a question about, say, sarsaparilla, the knowledge poured out, streams of words rushing and tumbling over themselves in excitement. “In ancient times they used this herb to make root beer. They also used sassafras. And manioc root to generate the bubbles!”

“Can you ask Nicolaza about kaniwa?” Olien asked Berumen. He’d mentioned kaniwa, a grain I’d never heard of, several times today.

“Kaniwa is a beautiful plant,” Neugebauer said, with admiration in his voice.
“It bounced off the page to me this morning,” Olien said, pointing to his notes. New quinoa, high Andes, he’d written in the margin. “We could sprout it. Make it a little more bioactive.”
Olien had explained to me how his formulas come together first by instinct, a gut knowing that eventually leads him into the lab, where everything will be rigorously tested. “I start with a question,” he said. “For Shakeology it was, ‘What do people need to thrive?'” From that point the different ingredients pop into his mind, inspirations bubble up, ideas appear-“and then I back into the science.” Once a product has been fine-tuned, Olien uses himself and his friends as guinea pigs. “That’s the ultimate test,” he said. “In your own body.”

The intricate synergies that keep our livers humming and our eyes focused and our brains remembering where we put the car keys are mirrored in the plant world. Each organism contains a universe within itself, countless components working together seamlessly to keep things in perfect balance. When Olien combines his raw materials-all of them functional foods-he’s seeking this same effect, in which the whole adds up to more than the sum of its parts. When we supplement our diets with specific vitamins-a vitamin D capsule, a CoQ10 pill-we’re doing the opposite: breaking nature’s systems apart. “The best example of this is the work that’s been done on vitamin A,” Oz had told me. “When you eat vitamin-A-rich foods like carrots, you reduce the risk of lung cancer. When you take vitamin A as a pill you increase the risk of lung cancer. How is that possible? It’s possible because when you take a carrot and put it into your mouth you don’t just get vitamin A, you get all the retinols. The different subtypes of all these different phytonutrients. And they’re in the perfect mix for us. Literally dozens of them in the right combinations-they’re the key that unlocks the cells’ abilities to defend themselves against cancer. If you take only a massive pharmaceutical dose of vitamin A, then you actually block the body’s ability to absorb the other components of the carrot.” The way these things operate, Oz said, is like a band playing in perfect tune: “The true benefit doesn’t come from just having the drum banging. You need the guitar, a little trumpet, a singer. That’s what makes the music.”

This vast, emerging alchemy was the most exciting part of his work, Olien agreed, stepping out of Mendoza’s warehouse into the hazy afternoon heat: “I’m not a fan of isolating. Who are we to separate things out? All of these herbs and vitamins have their buddies, and they want to come together.” He walked toward the bus that would take us from Lima into the wild folds of Peru. “It never ceases to amaze me,” he added, “watching the magic.”

Tarma
Fresh cacao is a strange and wonderful fruit. Outside, it’s a tough vermilion pod the size and shape of a toy football, but inside it contains another set of textures: a mass of wonky-shaped cubes nestled in a 3-D jigsaw puzzle, each with a furry white covering and a chewy bean in the center. When you bite into cacao the sensation is sexy and silky and delicious, kind of bitter and kind of sweet, with a darkly complex flavor that only hints at the chocolate it will eventually become.

“They called it the Food of the Gods,” Olien said, handing me another cube. “And it truly is.” He was wearing a pair of black shoes that slipped on like gloves, all five toes outlined, giving his feet the appearance of paws. It was perfect jungle footwear. We stood on the slippery hillside with three men from the small, organic cacao plantation where these fruit trees had been planted. Olien was always on the lookout for good sources of cacao, a key ingredient.

Botanists and herbalists-and superfood hunters-tend to get very worked up when describing cacao; its health attributes seem almost too good to be true. Cacao has more protective antioxidants than red wine, pomegranates, and blueberries combined. It’s a huge source of magnesium, a critical mineral for heart health, bone strength, and brainpower that many of us could use more of. These little beans contain a rainbow of minerals, a wallop of vitamin C, many essential fats, and the calming amino acid tryptophan, which in turn elevates levels of the happiness-inducing neurotransmitter serotonin. “Cacao is an absolutely perfect mood stabilizer,” Olien said. And more: The beans are rich in a wonderful substance called phenylethyl-amine (PEA) that our bodies produce when we fall in love; PEA also acts as a natural appetite suppressant. An aphrodisiac that helps you lose weight is so precious, in fact, that the Maya and Aztecs used cacao beans as currency, valuing them above gold.

“I want to make a convenient medicinal chocolate,” Olien said, holding up one of the pods. “As pure and raw as possible, all hand grown. It’d be like handing out delicious antidepressants to people!” To be honest, it was quite an idea: What if the foods we loved also happened to be incredibly good for us? What if, instead of doughnuts and nachos, we craved nature’s most exquisite gifts? What would the world look like if everyone functioned at peak energy, tipped the scales at their ideal weight, and ran around in a good mood? What if we didn’t need to take drugs to be happy or keep our hearts running smoothly or get a decent night’s sleep?

Neugebauer began to talk to the farmers, giving them some new ideas to fend off a fungus known as Monilia that was reducing their harvest. I watched him speaking to them in Spanish, kneeling down next to the trees and examining the soil. A walnut-skinned man in black rubber boots listened intently, a curved machete hanging from his belt. Standing at the edge of the path, Olien and Berumen were deep in conversation. “It can’t help but propel me into neurotransmitters,” I heard Olien say. His face was still smeared with red achiote dye from a stop we’d made earlier at a lowland jungle village called Pampa Miche, where we’d visited a tribe called the Ashaninka, renowned for their knowledge of local plants. Olien had stood by good-naturedly as a group of village women painted his face with scarlet stripes, looped boa constrictors around his neck, and dressed him in a native outfit consisting of a loose caftan, an elaborate sash of beads, and a jaunty straw hat.
Later, on an exploratory walk through the rainforest, he had downed a murky brown drink with a bitter flavor and the texture of phlegm. “What are the medicinals in this?” he asked Nuria, a sturdy woman in a red headscarf. She responded in a gale of Spanish, gesturing at the towering trees.

“Five different tree barks,” Neugebauer translated.
“Para potencia!” Nuria stressed. The women erupted in giggles.
Olien went on to sample wild cashew nut, a reddish fruit shaped like a small bell pepper. The shell of the nut contains a burning acid (something Olien had learned the hard way in Mexico last year, and ended up having the skin of his lips peel off). Stepping off the path, one of the Ashaninka men, who happened to be carrying a small monkey, reached up with a long knife and cut into the trunk of a nearby tree. A thick red sap began to ooze out. “Sangre de grado,” Berumen said, leaning over to examine it. “Dragon’s blood!”

This was a sighting: Sangre de grado is a substance so valuable and rare that counterfeit versions often show up in the markets. Used externally as a salve, it acts as a second skin to close wounds and stop infection; taken internally it heals ulcers and other stomach ailments. Dragon’s blood also exhibits antitumor and antiviral activity, qualities that have captured the pharmaceutical industry’s attention.

Nuria rubbed a few drops onto Olien’s forearm. The sap first looked red, then quickly turned a shimmery golden, before morphing again to a soapy white. “It’s sticky,” he said, touching it. “That’s how you know it’s really good,” Berumen said. “When it gets creamy like that.”

The visual effect was startling. The dark red liquid stood out against the light bark, as though the tree really were bleeding. It looked eerily like a human arm or leg. Olien traced the wound, letting the liquid drip onto his fingers. He was completely transfixed, and he stood there for several minutes, oblivious to anything else around him, even the scampering monkeys.

Junin
At 14,000 feet in the Andes, not much grows in Junin. There is one noteworthy exception: maca. This windblasted place is the maca capital of the world, and for that Olien loves it. “Ah, yeahhh,” he said as the lunar vistas rolled by, dust-colored barren hillsides dotted with the tiny figures of llamas and vicunas. The more I’d heard about maca, the more fantastic this little tuber seemed: A relative of the radish, it has been cultivated for 2,000 years in these parts. Maca is an adaptogen, Olien said, explaining how the brutal terrain had bred into the plant a kind of survivors’ guile that enabled it to respond to any conditions. In the body it helps balance whatever’s out of whack, particularly hormones. It boosts endurance, allowing people (and animals) to work long days at high altitude. Incan warriors liked to take maca before going into battle. In Junin, the local people ate it roasted, stewed, marinated, dried, fermented, made into tea. But for all its benefits, maca had flirted with extinction. In 1979 only 70 acres of it could be found in Peru. Since then its stock as a superfood has been steadily rising, and small farmers have started planting it again, realizing it’s worth far more in the marketplace than potatoes.

We were headed to visit Dina Guere Vega, a maca farmer whom Olien had been working with for six years. She and her family lived in a jumbled compound of low buildings that included a warehouse filled with maca bulbs. Guere Vega was a pocket-size woman with large brown eyes and a brilliant smile, bundled in a hand-knit alpaca sweater, and she greeted Olien, Berumen, and Neugebauer like family. Her husband stood beside her, wearing a wool hat with earflaps. Outside the wind howled, shaking the roof.
The smell of maca is intense and unique, like earth meets nuts meets a wood fire with undertones of licorice and wasabi, and it filled the warehouse-sacks of maca lined the walls. On one side of the building two women sorted through a sea of bulbs spread across a tarp. Olien reached into an open bag and pulled out a handful. The root looked like a petrified fig. “Powerful stuff,” he said. “This is dried. Takes about three months.” After that it would be carefully powdered and shipped to the United States. Maca’s strong odor (and that of other pungent herbs) had challenged Olien when it came to perfecting Shakeology’s taste without resorting to artificial ingredients. “I spent a year trying to get it right,” he said, describing the two flavors that resulted, chocolate and greenberry. “Because if I didn’t, no one in Middle America would drink it. You have to meet them in the place where they can receive it.”

Dina and her husband reappeared holding trays of a golden liquid. “Liquor de maca!” Neugebauer said, reaching for a glass with a somewhat shaky hand. Since our arrival we’d been chewing coca leaves, the native remedy for altitude sickness, but he was feeling the elevation, and hoped that a little maca toddy would clear that up. We had three rounds of the stuff and later we would drink more maca, blended with dark beer and papaya. Its effect was smooth and kicky, like stepping on the accelerator of a fine sports car. As Olien said, it was an easy plant to love. The locals felt the same way and had even installed a 70-foot-high, shocking purple maca monument in the nearby town of Huayre.
But the picture wasn’t entirely rosy. Part of Neugebauer’s task here was to solve a pressing problem: Over the past year Dina’s fields had been producing far less maca, and the plants that were growing had shrunk dramatically in size. Dina thought that climate change was the culprit, erratic weather patterns bringing warmer temperatures and rain out of season. Neugebauer, however, believed a change in planting methods would not only restore her maca yield but double it. The two of them hunkered on a couch in the drafty room with wool caps pulled low over their heads. “He wants her to use a crane rather than a tractor,” Berumen translated. “To reach out and loosen a little area without turning the soil over. And he doesn’t think she’s digging deep enough.” Neugebauer also explained how he had resurrected the chaquitaclla, an Incan maca-planting tool shaped like a spear gun: “I took it into a machine design shop in Germany and told them, ‘Please mechanize this.'”

As old as maca’s tradition was, I could see that much of what was happening here was new. “Five years ago, none of this existed,” Olien said, surveying Dina’s compound, where a 2,000-year-old crop was being reintroduced to the world. Though we tend to think of progress as a straight charge ahead-more, new, bigger, faster-in maca’s case, moving forward required going back in time. I recalled a conversation I’d had with William Li, a Harvard-trained MD and the cofounder of the Angiogenesis Foundation, a vanguard group that’s proving how, at the molecular level, the foods we eat have a direct impact on whether our bodies are vulnerable to cancer. “Today we’re at a very awkward moment, I think, in human existence as it relates to food and health,” Li had said, “where we know intrinsically that there’s more to these things than we concretely recognize. And there’s a lot of historical stuff that’s been lost. How do we rediscover that? How do we take ourselves out of this cereal box?”

“I mean, why not think about trying to replace wheat with maca, for example,” Neugebauer had mused earlier. “Maca is the absolute superfood. Wheat has all sorts of problems.” On the surface this sounds preposterous-but is it? Considering that we’ve adopted a food system that’s created massive increases in both obesity and hunger, where prices are spiraling out of control, and monoculture and genetic modification work in opposition to
nature’s strategy of endless diversity, what these maca fields really represented, I thought, were ancient yet urgent ideas about how to live.

Huanco
“What does this look like?” Berumen asked, holding up the aguaje fruit in the open-air market.
“A hand grenade?” I said. Because it did.
“An ovary!”
The aguaje is a huge source of phyto-estrogens, Berumen said, and a perfect example of biomimicry in action. In other words, even before there were textbooks and search engines, nature had given us very clear directions. It’s no accident that walnuts, with their squiggly oval hemispheres, are the ultimate brain food. Or that a plant the rainforest natives call chanca piedra (“stone breaker” in English), which produces tiny green balls, is a natural remedy for kidney stones. Or that dragon’s blood, the sap that acts as a coagulant, actually bleeds out of the tree.

We stood in an aisle of the Huanuco market, squeezing aside as people bustled past. A short woman in a flouncy skirt walked by with a pig on a leash; another woman crouched on the ground next to a net bag writhing with tiny chicks. Fruits and vegetables were heaped everywhere. A light rain drizzled outside. Huanuco is a midsize city in central Peru, usefully located between the sierra and the high jungle. If you’re a farmer, there’s a lot of business to do here.

“The phytoestrogenic property of aguaje is different than soy,” Berumen continued, citing another plant with strong hormonal effects. “It actually assists the body in making estrogen.” He cut into the aguaje and handed me a piece. The fruit was bright orange, with the dry texture of cheese. The vivid colors in fruits and vegetables-created by chemicals called flavonoids-signal power. So far scientists have identified about 6,000 of these compounds-names like peonidin, kaempferol, apigenin, hesperitin, quercetin-but undoubtedly, thousands more exist. Flavonoids have been shown to improve brain function, motor skills, blood flow; they protect cells from inflammation and potential damage that can lead to cancer.

Eating a variety of plants is the best way to assure your body a wide array of flavonoids; in Peru, I’d discovered, this wasn’t a problem. Since my arrival I’d been presented with a steady stream of unknown foods. Along with cacao, maca, and aguaje I’d tried granadilla, a fruit that cracks open with a snap, revealing a fist-size mass of seeds, each covered in a translucent membrane. The seeds were crunchy and sour, the membrane was soft and sweet, the combination was sublime. Olien had produced a bag full of dried aguaymanto, raisinlike fruits with a sharp citrusy tang. Berumen had talked about “monster fruit”-a corncob-shaped plant that tasted like a cross between a guava and a pineapple-and declared it “the most delicious thing ever.” ButMonstera deliciosa (its Latin name) had to be carefully ripened and prepared, he warned: “If you bite into it fresh, it’s like eating razors. It cuts up your whole mouth.” There was black sapote, a fruit that tasted like chocolate pudding, and the succinctly named peanut butter fruit. In the market we had also come across lucuma, a fruit Olien likes for its mild, butterscotchy taste (in Peru, lucuma-flavored ice cream is as popular as chocolate or vanilla). “It blends well,” he said, slicing the skin off like that of a mango. “Balances out the astringents.” The fruit had a soft, cakey texture. “It’s one of the most mineral-rich foods in the world,” Berumen added.
We walked past rows of fish on ice, midsize animal carcasses dangling from hooks, rafts of flowers and sheaves of herbs. A heavyset woman in fuchsia lipstick presided over bushels of coca leaves. In a back corner, a group of older ladies had gathered around two large pots. One of them, an Indian woman with a long braid, ladled something that looked like porridge into a metal bowl. “Medicina!” she said, pointing at Olien and then handing
the bowl to him. Then she pointed to her stomach: “Medicina!” she stressed again, flashing a smile that revealed many missing teeth.

“Ah, the gringo needs some medicine,” Olien said, raising an eyebrow. “What is this?” he asked Berumen to inquire. The stuff in the bowl smelled acrid, even rotten. Berumen spoke to the women in Spanish and then after a moment he turned to us. “It’s called tocosh,” he said. “A traditional Andean food made from fermented potatoes.” The process, he translated, involved burying the potatoes in river soil for up to two years. Amazingly, this produced a natural penicillin.

Olien raised a gloopy spoonful to his mouth, hesitated for a moment, and then bravely swallowed it. Even from three feet away the aroma made my eyes water. “It’s a lot better than it smells,” he said, delivering the verdict. “It’s actually good.” I tried it, and agreed. The tocosh was warm and subtly sweet, with hints of vanilla. There was something comforting about it, and I could feel my body wanting more. Later I would learn that tocosh had been an Incan delicacy, and that even in sophisticated cities like Lima, Peruvian doctors still prescribed it for stomach disorders, and for its overall healthful effects.

“Oh my God, would I like to see the nutrient content on this,” Olien said, taking another spoonful. “Because that is not a potato anymore. It’s a completely new structure.” Fermenting a food, he explained, was like turbocharging it. This is the process, of course, that turns grapes into wine, milk into cheese. Essentially you’re letting food go bad in a good way, by creating an oxygen-free environment around it. During fermentation, benevolent armies of bacteria break down starches to sugars; those are converted to health-enhancing alcohols and acids. Whole new vitamins, enzymes, and amino acids can spring up. The result is a food with alchemical potency. This technique is so ancient that we don’t have any records of its origin, but historians believe it goes back at least 9,000 years, to China.

“If you look at the history of food, there’s been this tribalism,” William Li had pointed out. “Things are passed down-and there’s so much we don’t know. Space is a frontier. Oceans are a frontier. I think food is a whole other frontier,” he said. “And it’s not something you have to train with NASA for, or put on scuba gear for. It’s sitting in front of us every single day.”

Ambo
The Yacon farm was perched at the top of a road that zigzagged up the mountainside in a series of hairpin turns. The road was narrow and crumbly with scree, its thin ribbon of shoulder edged by sheer cliffs. There were no guardrails. I watched the bus driver hunch over the wheel in tense concentration, muttering under his breath. The view at the top, however, was worth the white-knuckle ride. The farm was tucked in a pristine valley glowing with more shades of green than the spectrum seemed able to hold, ringed by majestic peaks.

“Have I talked to you about yacon?” Olien asked, describing the potato-shaped vegetable that was, improbably, a cousin of the sunflower. “It’s an amazing food, a tuber that has a bunch of different sugars in it.” The most important of these sugars is a rare type known as fructooligosaccharide (FOS), and yacon is the richest known source of it. Although FOS tastes beautifully sweet, it’s not processed in the body like other sugars because we lack the enzymes to digest it (making it perfect for diabetics-and dieters, because few calories are absorbed). But rather than being expelled like some alien substance, on its way through your body yacon does a number of helpful things. It acts as a prebiotic, encouraging healthy bacteria in your intestines and colon, and aids in fat metabolism, cholesterol management, vitamin absorption, blood sugar regulation, even bone density. “It could be a sweetener solution for the entire planet,” Olien said.

The farm’s owner was a local man named Luis Alva, known to his friends as Lucho. He was burly, in his 30s with a wide face that looked both tough and kind. Alva had a quiet gravitas, which made sense when you learned what he’d been through on his family land. Twenty years ago, at a house only a mile away, his father was killed by the Shining Path, the leftist guerrillas who brutalized Peru during the ’80s and ’90s (and remain on the U.S. State Department’s list of terrorist groups). It was not a tragedy that anyone around here had forgotten. But today Lucho was buoyant, glad to see Olien and Berumen again, and to meet the rest of us.

In 2006 Berumen had been trolling the Internet and came across an arcane reference to yacon. He sent it to Olien, who was astonished by the “perfect storm of health benefits” the plant seemed to provide. “I thought, ‘This is an amazing product,'” Olien recalled. “You can’t get it anywhere, not even online. And then I was like a pit bull. I just kept saying, ‘We gotta bring it here.’ And maybe I got ahead of myself. ” He laughed, then added: “But that inspired all of what’s growing here.”

The next morning we headed to the fields in Alva’s truck, driving up a red dirt road that also served as a thoroughfare for Andean shepherdesses and their flocks. The women wore bright shirts and shawls in magenta, canary, emerald, tangerine, turquoise, along with the traditional pleated wool skirts and black flat-brimmed hats, which they decorated with bits of tinsel. We passed a group of alpacas, shaggy white beasts with unicorn faces and cranky dispositions, and a cow with long eyelashes that was mowing some bushes.
Yacon produces large green leaves that gave Alva’s fields a lush appearance, like a vast carpet of salad. “Historically, yacon was called the apple of the Earth,” Berumen noted. After sitting in the sun, apparently, it literally tastes like an apple, though the tuber itself resembles a yam. “You can dehydrate it, extract juice, or make a syrup out of it,” Berumen said. I watched as a field hand pulled up a plant, its roots caked with soil. Alva peeled the brown skin with a knife. Inside, the yacon was crystal white with tiny violet dots around its perimeter. It had an icy, juicy look and a crisp texture and it tasted fresh and light, like highly delicious air or a ghost carrot. I could have eaten it all day. “No applicacion de herbicida,” Lucho said. “Nada, nada, nada.” He used only organic fertilizer in his fields, no chemicals at all.

The spectacular valley, the happy workers, the mountain air, the bountiful crops-no one could argue against this as an ideal. Earlier I’d asked Olien what I thought was a key question: Is it possible to mass-produce this kind of quality? “I think we’re proving that you can,” he answered without hesitation. He added, “If you get the highest nutritional value from your food, you need less of it. The vacant foods-we need more of them, because they’re posers. They’re empty.”

He was right. It was really that simple: The body with its unknown galaxies of cells, its unseen cogs and wheels, its ropes and coils of DNA, needs to be nourished, and it doesn’t thrive on red dye #40 or propylene glycol or butylated hydroxyanisole with a ciprofloxacin chaser. “These plants you’re writing about have powers that are sacred,” Oz had stressed. “That word belongs in your story.” And these sacred foods do not have to remain in backcountry Peru. They could be available to all if we were willing to think and farm and eat differently.

Alva pulled his truck over to the side of the road and pointed to a field where eight varieties of yacon were growing. He wanted to see which type would do best in this environment, and produce the most FOS. The winner would be a kind of superyacon, a super-superfood. Olien opened the passenger door and got out, walking to the edge of the field. Below he could see the blue rooftops of a tiny school, kids playing soccer in front of it. The workers moved among more yacon, small figures bent in the furrows, and the Arischaca River rushed in the background while the Andean women tended their sheep in the peacefulness and fullness that was now here. The valley stretched out before him, green and red, the vertiginous perfection of it all, the terraced fields, the veins of soil. In the gold afternoon light Olien sat down in the yacon field, among the floppy leaves. And then he lay back and closed his eyes, smiling.

5 Rules for Post-Workout Nutrition

Posted on August 22, 2015 by Hank Rouse

Get the Most Out of Your Training!

After exercise, your muscles are completely depleted of the nutrients they need to begin the recovery process. But the good news is they are also highly receptive to take up nutrients, refill glycogen stores, and restore protein balance to kickstart muscle protein synthesis or muscle building once again. So if you are serious about building muscle tone and reaping the benefits of your hard work in the gym, then it is absolutely critical that you fuel your body with the right post-workout nutrition.

During a workout, there is an increase in oxidation or a breakdown of the critical components that drive muscle function and energy production, including glycogen and essential amino acids. Exercise causes muscle protein turnover, which is the rate at which protein degradation or muscle breakdown increases, and the rate at which skeletal muscle protein synthesis decreases— essentially resulting in catabolism of muscle mass. The aminos, more specifically the branched-chain amino acids, are involved in the exact pathways that stimulate muscle building and the recovery process. As glycogen is depleted and used up, the body will switch to using the essential aminos to maintain energy and make glucose, and even after a workout, breakdown will continue until the right nutrition is received. Therefore, in order to halt muscle breakdown and ensure all your hard work in the gym doesn’t go to waste, you need to get the right post-workout nutrition, and what’s more, you need to ensure you get the right mix of macro and micronutrients at the right time!

Some people call the time after the workout the “window of opportunity.” As time elapses, this window begins to close, ruining your chances for a full recovery. Research suggests that consuming your post-workout meal within 30 minutes to one hour of training will ensure you are getting the most benefit out of your time spent in the gym! Consider the following five rules for post-workout fueling to enable proper muscle recovery and repair for a lean and firm hard body!

Rule #1: Make it Liquid. The key to your post-workout nutrition is ensuring a fast delivery! Therefore, it must be liquid; this will ensure rapid digestion and delivery of the important hormones that are necessary to stimulate the muscle growth and repair process.

Rule #2: Pack it with Protein and BCAAs. Following an energy-draining, muscle-tearing workout, one of the most important nutrients you need to consume post-workout is protein. In terms of quality and bioavailability, whey protein isolate (WPI) or whey protein hydrolysate (WPH) are excellent choices. Both are extremely fast-digesting proteins and highly soluble, which means they can kickstart the repair process quickly!

WPI and WPH also contain a high concentration of branched-chain amino acids or BCAAs, which are considered the building blocks of muscle. They are critical for driving protein synthesis, reducing protein breakdown, and stimulating the release of insulin. Insulin is an anabolic hormone responsible for building various energy molecules in the body and preventing the breakdown of muscle following a hard workout.Several studies suggest that BCAAs can help delay fatigue and the onset of muscle soreness, as well as the markers of muscle damage associated with intense exercise. By ensuring that adequate amounts of the branched-chain amino acids are available to your muscles after training, you can delay fatigue, guard against training-induced muscle breakdown, and expedite recovery. WPI and WPH also contain a high proportion of the BCAA leucine, which is one of the most important because of its ability to directly stimulate muscle building by activating a major complex in the protein synthesis pathway called mTOR. Research has shown that leucine has a positive effect on protein metabolism, increasing the rate of protein synthesis, and decreasing the rate of protein degradation after intense training. Aim for a serving of 20 to 30 grams of whey protein that offers up a high concentration of essential BCAAs in every serving.

Rule #3: Become a Sugar Baby. Although you might be tempted to skip out on the carbohydrates, especially straight up sugar, it is actually necessary to drive protein and nutrients into your depleted muscles! Your post-workout meal should contain a source of high-glycemic carbohydrates, such as dextrose, sucrose or straight up table sugar! Sugar is easily digested and can quickly raise blood sugar and, hence, insulin levels. The elevated insulin levels will help to drive fuel into the muscles to help replenish lost muscle glycogen, and will also stimulate muscle synthesis and repair! Try a carbohydrate powder that can be easily mixed with your protein powder. Consume a 2:1 ratio of carbohydrates to protein for best results.

Rule #4: Hold the Fat and Fiber. Simply put, fat and fiber slow down digestion. Therefore, if you combine fats or fiber with the two needed components of your post-workout meal as mentioned above, protein and simple carbs, you will only be slowing down their digestion— which, of course, is the exact opposite of what you want to happen.

Rule #5: Grab Recovery Essentials. Be sure to add glutamine and vitamins C and B to your post-workout recovery plan! Supplementing with glutamine can reduce the amount that is robbed from the muscles during training. It has also been found to decrease neutrophils, which cause cell damage, and preserve muscle tissue and have a direct effect on protein metabolism.

As for vitamin C, multiple studies have found blood and plasma levels of vitamin C to be diminished in those who exercise regularly. Vitamin C is a powerful antioxidant that helps protect muscle cells from free radical damage by acting as an antioxidant itself and by helping generate other antioxidants.

B vitamins are highly involved in protein metabolism by aiding in the manufacturing of amino acids and are also involved in carbohydrate utilization. Research has shown that athletes have an increased need for B vitamins and that performance can be improved with supplementation. Supplement with 3 to 5 grams of glutamine, 500 mg to 1 gram of vitamin C, and stick to the daily recommended dose of B vitamins.

8 Great Fibrous Foods

Posted on April 10, 2015 by Hank Rouse

High Fiber Foods
How much fiber should we be eating? If you believe the television commercials that run during the nightly news, we’re not even coming close to getting what we need.
First off, let’s look at why fiber is such a big deal. I used to think of fiber as stringy, ropy stuff, like the threads in celery or cabbage. But fiber has actually become a catchall term for any indigestible material that we consume, not all of which is actually fibrous. Cellulose, the building block of much of the fleshy part of fruits and veggies, is an example of non-fibrous fiber. There is soluble fiber, which dissolves in water and helps stabilize blood sugar by slowing the rate of digestion. There is also insoluble fiber, which, as its name would suggest, does not dissolve in water—although it does attract water in the intestinal tract and, well, without getting too graphic, is responsible for the trains running on time, keeping the mail moving, releasing the payload, etc. Most importantly, more and more studies are linking a high-fiber diet to a decreased risk of heart disease and diabetes.

For optimal health, nutritionists recommend 30 to 38 grams of fiber every day for men and 21 to 25 grams of fiber every day for women. You can find the fiber content of labeled food as a subcategory under carbohydrates. If you’re counting carbs, you can always subtract the amount of fiber from the total number of carbs, because the fiber will only be visiting your body for a little while, unlike the sugars, which, if not burned for fuel, will likely end up stored as fat.

Most studies indicate that Americans don’t get nearly enough fiber, especially with the proliferation of processed foods filled with white flour, which is made only from the fiber-less endosperm of the grain and none of the bran and germ parts that provide the fiber. In fact, if you read labels, it’s pretty rare to find any prepared food that has more than a gram or two of fiber. It can make you despair if you think about having to get to the 21 to 38 grams you need every day. So how can you get your daily dose of fiber without eating yourself into a coma? There are some fiber-rich superfoods that can help get you to your daily recommended allowance, without the coma.

1. Legumes
The humble bean (and also chickpea, lentil, and pea) is chock-full of nutritious fiber. A cup of black beans or lentils contains a whopping 15 grams of fiber—half the daily minimum supply required for a man and more than half the minimum required for a woman. Chickpeas, or garbanzo beans, have 13 grams of fiber. A cup of peas has 9 grams of fiber. The big winner is the cranberry bean with 18 grams of fiber and 17 grams of protein. Cranberry beans have a creamy texture and a chestnut-like flavor.

2. Bran
While not as great a source of fiber as beans, they’re still pretty fiber rich, and may not have the unpleasant auditory and olfactory effects associated with excessive bean consumption. A cup of bran flakes has about 7 grams of fiber, and a cup of oatmeal has 4 grams of fiber. Substituting whole-wheat products for their traditional white-flour counterparts is an easy way to work some fiber into your diet without much hassle. A cup of whole-wheat spaghetti has over 6 grams of fiber, and whole-wheat bread has about 2 grams of fiber per slice.

3. Prunes
Not just for old people anymore. Grandpa and Grandma knew what they were doing when they were suffering from constipation. A cup of prunes contains 8 grams of fiber, and the prune’s hydrated counterpart, the plum, is also an excellent source of fiber—prunes/plums contain insoluble fiber in the skin and soluble fiber in the pulp. That’s a two-for-one special!

4. Artichokes
One medium artichoke contains 6.5 grams of fiber. One cup of artichoke hearts contains 14 grams of fiber and only 90 calories. I like to get one of those little jars of marinated artichokes (in vinegar, not oil) and treat myself to eating the whole jar as an afternoon snack or hors d’oeuvre before dinner. Tasty and filling, you’ll eat less at dinner and put a serious dent in your daily fiber tally.

5. Brussels sprouts
Yes, they look like the alien heads from Mars Attacks!, but these little powerhouses pack almost 7 grams of fiber into a 1-cup serving and only about 60 calories. Not everyone is enamored with their slightly chalky taste. I recommend a generous spritz of lemon juice and maybe a dash of soy sauce or Tabasco to enhance the flavor. A sprinkle of Parmesan cheese is delicious too.

6. Asian pear
According to the Micronutrient Center of theLinus Pauling Institute at Oregon State University, the Asian pear is one of their five fiber-rich superfoods (legumes, bran, prunes, and quinoa are the others). One Asian pear, about 3 inches in diameter, contains a whopping 10 grams of fiber, the most of any similarly sized fruit. And because it has a higher water content than its European brethren, it only contains around 100 calories. So you can crunch your way to a cleaner colon.

7. Quinoa
Relatively new to the U.S., quinoa has been a South American staple for over 6,000 years. In a 1-cup serving, the edible seeds of the quinoa plant have 10 grams of fiber and 8 grams of protein—in fact, quinoa seeds contain many essential amino acids that are missing from rice, proving to be a good substitute for rice. If you check your local health food store, and even some supermarkets, you can find quinoa plain and as a main ingredient in many cereals, breads, and salads.

8. Nuts
Not just filling, heart-healthy snacks, nuts are great sources of fiber (but highly caloric, so nosh carefully). A quarter-cup of almonds has 4 grams of fiber and about 200 calories. It’s another great snack for between meals. Watch out for the salt content in the hickory-smoked varieties. Also, it’s a good idea to portion out a serving size beforehand, so you don’t absentmindedly munch a thousand or so calories from a big bag.

7 Foods That Can Lower Blood Pressure

Posted on April 4, 2015 by Hank Rouse

Oranges

Stock up on this citrus fruit the next time you hit the grocery store. Oranges are bursting with vitamin C, and some studies suggest that people who get lots of vitamin C in their diet may reduce their risk of developing high blood pressure.
Best bet: Drink the juice (it’s loaded with other compounds that may reduce blood pressure) or eat the whole fruit for some extra fiber along with the vitamin C.
Other sources of vitamin C: Guava, grapefruit, broccoli, tomatoes, strawberries, bell peppers, kiwi
Try this: Toss together a fresh citrus salad of peeled sliced oranges, shaved fennel, thinly sliced onion, olives and a drizzle of extra virgin olive oil, recommends Aglaia Kremezi, author of Mediterranean Hot and Spicy.

Cranberry Orange Fruit Bars

The cranberries in these scrumptious treats boost their vitamin C content up a notch: One bar boasts 25 percent of the Daily Value recommended for C.
Get the recipe here.

Low-fat or skim Milk

Getting enough of the white stuff isn’t just good for your bones. Milk and other dairy products contain a trio of nutrients that may push down your blood pressure: calcium, potassium and magnesium. These nutrients are so important that the DASH diet (short for Dietary Approaches to Stop Hypertension) includes two to three daily servings of nonfat or low-fat dairy products.
Best bet: Stay away from artery-clogging saturated fats by choosing nonfat dairy products.
Other sources of calcium, potassium and magnesium: Hazelnuts, wheat bran, calcium-fortified orange juice
Try this: Whip up a healthy version of an old-fashioned milkshake by blending skim milk, frozen strawberries and nonfat vanilla frozen yogurt.

No-Bake Macaroni & Cheese

Don’t like to take your milk straight? You don’t have to! This grown-up version of the kiddie fave is studded with broccoli – and the cheese in the creamy sauce bumps of the dish’s calcium content to 40 percent of the Daily Value.
Get the recipe here.

Bananas

If your blood pressure has been inching up lately, make bananas your go-to fruit—they’re rich in potassium and fiber. “A diet with plentiful potassium-rich foods has been shown to help lower blood pressure,” says Joan Salge Blake, R.D., author of Nutrition & You: Core Concepts for Good Health.
Best bet: Bananas taste sweetest when their skins are slightly speckled with brown but they’re still firm.
Other good sources of potassium: Potatoes, tomato paste, apricots, lentils
Try this: “For a guilt-free dessert or breakfast, top banana slices with plain low-fat yogurt and a sprinkle of cinnamon,” Kremezi suggests.

Banana Pudding Pops

These frozen treats taste way more decadent than they are: One popsicle has just 1 gram of fat and only 82 calories.
Get the recipe here.

Sweet Potatoes

This super-sweet Thanksgiving staple packs a powerful potassium punch, which is why it deserves a spot at the dinner table year round. “Potassium causes the kidneys to excrete excess sodium from the body, and keeping sodium levels low can help drive down blood pressure,” Salge Blake says.
Best bet: Eat them with the skin for a tasty fiber boost.
Other sources of potassium: Beet greens, white beans, plain nonfat yogurt
Try this: Bump up the potassium content of potato salad. Boil sweet potatoes, then combine them with chopped apple, diced celery and sliced scallions. Toss with a dressing of olive oil, cider vinegar and honey.

Black Bean Smothered Sweet Potatoes

In less than 15 minutes, you can have this potassium-packed treat on the table: While the sweet potato is cooking in the microwave, just toss the black beans with tomatoes and Southwestern spices.
Get the recipe here.

Herbs and spices

Salt may be off-limits when you’re trying to lower your blood pressure, but you can spice up your dishes with fresh herbs. Even easier, raid your spice rack. “It’s no doubt stocked with wonderful dried herbs and spices that are naturally sodium free,” says Salge Blake.
Best bet: If you like fresh herbs but don’t have time to chop them, try herbs in a tube, like the ones from Gourmet Garden.
Other sources for flavor: Onions, garlic, balsamic vinegar, lemon juice
Try this: Make an exotic spice mix by combining Aleppo or Maras pepper (available at Middle Eastern markets or Kalustyans.com) with ground cumin, lemon zest, Greek oregano and chopped cilantro, Kremezi suggests.

Herb & Onion Frittata

The best thing about this single-serving egg dish is its versatility: Any combo of your favorite herbs will work – you can make it different every time.
Get the recipe here.

Salmon

Few foods have more heart-healthy benefits than this nutritional superstar. Salmon is rich in omega-3 fatty acids, which studies suggest not only lower blood pressure, but may also boost good cholesterol, cut triglycerides and slow the growth of arterial plaque.
Best bet: Turn it into a supper staple. Salmon and other omega-3-rich fish are so good for your heart that the American Heart Association recommends eating two 3.5-ounce servings per week. No time to cook? Canned or pouched salmon is just as good: Instead of tuna, mix it with nonfat yogurt and diced celery to make a tasty sandwich spread, or toss it with greens and other veggies for a main-dish salad. It’s available with or without bones and skin.
Other sources of omega-3 fatty acids: Herring, mackerel, sardines, anchovies
Try this: Give grilled or broiled salmon steaks or filets a tropical flair with a fresh and spicy salsa. Combine diced papaya, mango, pineapple, red bell pepper and red onion with chopped cilantro, olive oil and lime juice.

Black Bean & Salmon Tostados

A cut above fish tacos, these tasty tostados are made with canned salmon; leave in the bones (so soft you won’t notice them) for a shot of calcium to go along with the ample omega-3s and 12 grams of fiber.
Get the recipe here.

Dark Chocolate

The next time you crave chocolate, give in. Besides their mood-boosting effects, the flavonols in dark chocolate may protect against high blood pressure and stroke, in part by improving the elasticity of blood vessels.
Best bet: When choosing chocolate, go as dark as your taste buds can stand. Check labels for the percentage of cacao, which is the source of all that antioxidant goodness. Dark chocolate typically ranges from 45 percent to 80 percent cacao. And eat a square, not the whole bar.
Another healthy chocolate treat: Sugar-free hot cocoa—in one study it lowered blood pressure, but the sugared kind did not.
Try this: “Toast slices of chewy whole-wheat bread, then brush them with fruity extra virgin olive oil while they’re still warm. Sprinkle the slices with Aleppo or Maras pepper to taste, and top with shavings of good quality dark chocolate,” says Kremezi.

Chocolate Crunch

The bittersweet chocolate in this sweet-and-salty snack is a good source of flavonol-rich cacao and it has less sugar than semisweet chocolate, bumping its health benefits up a notch. Most important, it’s addictive!
Get the recipe here.

11 Tips for Cooking Out Without Pigging Out

Posted on November 29, 2014 by Hank Rouse

It’s summertime, which means it’s time to fire up the grill and enjoy the great outdoors. It all sounds pretty healthy, until somebody shows up with a bowl of mayonnaise and potatoes, which, without a trace of irony, will be announced as a salad. It’s like calling a stick of butter a nutrition bar. A few side dishes like this, combined with some fatty hot dogs, hamburgers, potato chips, and ice cream, and bathing-suit season can become caftan season before you know it. But if you only invite the neighbors over for celery sticks and tofu kabobs, you can count on getting the stink-eye from everyone next time you’re out mowing the lawn. The secret to throwing a great barbecue is to find ways to eat healthily without making it seem like last call at fat camp. Fortunately, with so many great foods available during the summer months, it’s easy to plan a menu that will include great-tasting food and let you keep your P90X^®, Slim in 6^®, or ChaLEAN Extreme^® figure. Here are some tips to keep in mind when planning your outdoor culinary excursions, so you can picnic without the pounds, still enjoy good food, and keep yourself and your family and friends healthy.

1. Veg out
The cookout doesn’t need to be a celebration of the weather being so good that the unhealthy foods we used to eat in front of the TV can now be eaten in the backyard. It’s summer! The time of year when all the best fruits and vegetables are at their peak. And grilling vegetables is a great way to get tons of flavor without tons of calories. Delicious on their own or as a complement to another dish, grilled veggies are a must-have for a healthy cookout. Use them in salads, on burgers, or by themselves. Check out what’s fresh at your local farmers’ market. Good veggies for grilling include peppers, asparagus, artichokes, eggplant, zucchini, squash, scallions, and onions. Just brush them with a little olive oil, some fresh herbs, and a pinch of salt and pepper, and you’re serving something healthy that you and your guests can load up on guilt free.

2. Herbal remedies
Only the worst chefs need to rely on fat and salt for seasoning. Now’s the time to stock up on fresh basil, oregano, tarragon, dill, rosemary, thyme, cilantro, etc. Or even better, grow your own. Oftentimes, a pot of living basil from the nursery costs less than a handful of leaves from your produce section. Use fresh herbs liberally in all of your recipes, and you’ll be replacing fat with flavor.

3. Hold the mayo
Nothing lays waste to the best-laid plans for a healthy barbecue like mayonnaise. A main ingredient in picnic staples like potato salad, macaroni salad, and coleslaw, mayo loads up enough fat and calories that your only hope of weight loss is that the dishes stay out in the sun long enough to cause salmonella poisoning. Try using healthier ingredients, like yogurt or low-fat ricotta cheese, and adding fresh herbs. Instead of mayonnaise, use yogurt and fresh dill in your potato salad. Make a whole-grain pasta salad with cherry or grape tomatoes, fresh basil, and a balsamic vinaigrette.

4. Don’t be so starchy!
There’s no law that says every picnic “salad” needs to begin with potatoes or pasta. There are plenty of salad recipes out there that are so delicious, no one will miss their starchy, fatty counterparts. How about making that old-time favorite, three-bean salad! Or if you want something a little heartier, lentils mixed with a light vinaigrette, a little onion or garlic, some fresh herbs, and a sprinkling of feta cheese will fill you up and give you enough energy to play more than horseshoes and lawn darts later. Make some simple, fresh vegetable salads. Slice up some tomatoes or cucumbers, and toss them with a bit of vinegar, olive oil, lemon juice, fresh herbs, and onions or garlic, and you have a refreshing side dish that will fill you up without filling you out.

5. Know your cuts of meat
It’s not just a game on Letterman. While of course substituting skinless chicken or fish for your rib eye would be the BEST nutritional decision, we know you’re not made of stone. Sometimes it doesn’t feel like a barbecue without the scent of grilled steak or pork in the air. But not all cuts are created equal. For beef, the best rule is to look for cuts with the word loin or round. Other great lean cuts are flank steak, skirt steak, tri-tip, and London broil. With pork, the leanest cuts are the tenderloin and loin chops. With both pork and beef, try to avoid anything involving the ribs (including rib eyes), which have the fattiest cuts of meat. And those baby back ribs will make you look like you’re having the baby. Because of their low fat content, most of the lean cuts will need to be marinated for a couple of hours before grilling. Read on for marinade ideas.

6. Lay off the (store-bought) sauce
One of the main ingredients in most store-bought barbecue and teriyaki sauces is high fructose corn syrup (HFCS). Even the most casual Beachbody reader knows how we feel about HFCS. Instead, bust out those herbs you bought or grew (see tip #2), and make some gourmet marinades and sauces that won’t send your blood sugar into a tailspin. Using ingredients like fresh herbs; citrus juices; olive, sesame, and canola oils; wine; low-sodium soy sauce; and various vinegars, you can liven up your meat dishes and save the sugar for dessert. And when you’re planning your marinades . . .

7. Go global
Since the U.S. is one of the most obese nations in the world, maybe it’s worth checking out what those in slimmer nations are grilling. How about a Cuban marinade for your chicken, or pork with citrus juice and garlic? Or Indian tandoori-style skinless chicken thighs marinated in yogurt and spices like turmeric, curry, or cardamom? Try making your own Japanese teriyaki with sesame oil, ginger, soy sauce, and honey, and skip the corn syrup from the store brands. Try out Greek kabobs, Korean barbecue, or Jamaican jerk-rubbed meat—whatever catches your eye or your taste buds. And throwing a barbecue with an international theme sounds a lot more appetizing than a barbecue where “we’re watching our weight.”

8. Good dogs
Of course, not everyone is going to be keen on vegetables and treats from foreign lands. Kids, for example. So you’re probably going to need some kind of hot dog for these less adventurous eaters. Pretty much anything can end up in a hot dog, but in most cases, hot dogs are tubes full of fatty meat and carcinogenic nitrates—yum! This is where it really pays to read the label. A regular hot dog runs over 200 calories and 18 grams of fat. A turkey frank has half of that. The fat, calorie, and sodium contents of various brands and types of dogs vary wildly, so choose carefully. For the less fussy, there are also several varieties of chicken and turkey sausages with gourmet ingredients that are delicious and low in fat and calories.

9. Better burgers
A friend of mine who is highly phobic of meat-borne illnesses like E. Coli and mad cow disease had the great idea of asking the butcher to grind up a piece of sirloin or top round that she selected from the meat case for hamburgers. This limits your exposure to contaminants, as there’s only one cow involved in the making of a steak, where there could be hundreds involved in a package of ground beef. This also allows you to control the fat content that’s in your hamburger. If you have a decent food processor, you could even grind your meat at home and blend in spices, garlic, or onion to enhance the flavor. If all this talk of cows and contaminants has put you off beef, you might give a turkey burger a try. But again, read the label. Many packages of ground turkey contain ground-up skin and other fatty pieces, resulting in a fat and calorie content not much better than ground beef. Try looking for extra-lean or ground turkey breast. And if you’re worried about the bird flu, it might be worth giving veggie burgers another try. If you haven’t had one in a few years, you may remember them as I do—some sort of reconstituted cardboard patty that smelled like feet. But there have been great strides in veggie burger technology. In fact, there are a couple of brands a vegan friend of mine refuses to eat, because they taste too much like meat. Try a couple of different brands. You may be surprised.

10. Topping it off
When you’re putting together the topping trays for your grilled delights, you can also save a few calories. The traditional lettuce, tomatoes, and onions are great, but skip the cheese, mayonnaise, and corn-syrup–laden ketchup. Instead, try putting some of those grilled veggies you made on your burger or chicken breast. Or add a slice of avocado if you miss the creaminess of melted cheese. Put out a variety of mustards, hot sauces, and salsas, which are low in calories and fat, and don’t usually contain corn syrup. Don’t forget to look for whole-grain buns for your dogs or burgers, or try eating them open-faced or bunless, if you’re trying to cut carbs.

11. Just desserts
Well, you’ve behaved admirably during the rest of the barbecue, so you deserve a little summer treat. Have a little bit of ice cream (although frozen yogurt would be even better, and plain yogurt better yet!), but heap a bunch of fruit on it, instead of a dollop of fudge or a side of pie. After all, what we said about vegetables goes for fruit too. This is the time of year where you can get your hands on the best fruit, at the lowest prices. Indulge in berries, peaches, oranges, melons, and all your favorite seasonal fruits. Make a huge fruit salad, or blend fruit with yogurt and ice for a smoothie. Or for those with ambition and an ice cream maker, try making your own fruit sorbet. You may decide to skip the ice cream after all!

Hopefully, these suggestions will help make your summer barbecue a huge success. And in the worst-case scenario that you end up being forced to partake in your neighbor’s annual Salute to Mayonnaise, you can always use Beachbody’s 3-Day Refresh^® to minimize the damage before the next pool party! so you don’t absentmindedly munch a thousand or so calories from a big bag.

10 Foods You Should Eat

Posted on November 4, 2014 by Hank Rouse

We’ve all heard about superfoods—consumables with mystical powers to cure whatever it is that ails you and that will help you live forever. This list will be different. Today we’ll look at some common items that should be on your menu, even though you probably haven’t heard them touted as the next great miracle cure. In fact, some of these you probably thought were bad for you. I begin this list with a caveat; we’re all different. One person’s superfood is another’s trip to the emergency room (soy comes to mind here). There are some nutritional factors we all share, such as the need to eat a certain amount of calories that come from fats, proteins, and carbohydrates to keep our bodies functioning as they should. Beyond this, our exact dietary needs begin to diverge.

There are some obvious reasons for this. Lifestyle and activity level are pretty easy to understand. That someone who is pregnant or training for an Ironman needs more calories than a computer programmer who sits for 14 hours a day isn’t difficult to fathom. Neither is the fact that a 90-pound ballerina uses less fuel than a 350-pound lineman. That we all eat a different number of calories and a different percentage of fats, proteins, and especially carbs is obvious, or at least should be, since the bigger you are and the harder you work the more fuel your body needs to recharge itself.

What’s more subtle are body type differences. These can be difficult to understand, and many people never figure them out. Blood type, heredity, and other factors come into play and make each of us unique individuals. When it comes to eating, most of us spend a fair portion of our lives figuring out just what we should be eating to maximize our life experience (which doesn’t necessarily mean we choose the healthiest options). For this reason, there is no true “superfood.” There are, however, helpful foods that are specific to each of us. By experimenting with our diets, we will all find a course of eating that makes us feel better than anything else.

To help you begin your self-experiment, here’s a list of common foods that you’ll want to try. Most of these are very healthy for almost everyone, even though some have been vilified by society. This doesn’t mean that they’ll transform you into an epitome of health, but they’re certainly worth a try.

1. Peanut butter
I’m leading with this because I’m fairly certain peanut butter single-handedly kept me from getting chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS) during the no-fat 90s. In the early 90s, the average amount of fat in our daily diets plummeted while the incidence of CFS* (the colloquial veil for debilitating disorders marked by chronic mental and physical exhaustion) skyrocketed. This was particularly true among the otherwise healthy endurance sports sect. In the early 90s, my body fat was once recorded at 2 percent. Sure, I was ripped. Healthy? Not so much. I’m pretty sure that only my adherence to peanut butter as a healthy fat source kept my athletic obsession intact.

A bevy of modern studies now vindicates my opinion with science. Peanuts are high in both fat and calories but their fat has been associated with decreased total cholesterol and lower LDL and triglyceride levels. It’s also high on the satiation meter, meaning that a little can fill you up.

2. Cabbage
Every Asian culture, as well as European, eats more cabbage than we do and it’s time we thought about it more often than when we happen to splurge on P.F. Chang’s. Cabbage is absurdly low in calories and very high in nutrients. Among these is sulforaphane, which a Stanford University study showed as boosting cancer-fighting enzymes more than any other plant chemical.

3. Quinoa
This “grain” isn’t technically a grain at all. It just tastes like one. It’s actually a relative of spinach, beets, and Swiss chard. All of these are extremely healthy from a nutrient point of view, but quinoa is the only one that can fool you into thinking you’re eating a starch. It’s high in protein, minerals, vitamins, and fiber.

4. Spelt
This one is actually a grain but its origin is slightly mysterious. Some claim it comes from wheat while others say it’s a different species. Regardless, it has a high nutritional profile and can be eaten by many people with gluten intolerance, making it a good alternative to wheat products. Spelt can be found in many products, but as it’s still considered a “health food,” it’s off the major processing radar. Unlike wheat, if spelt is on the ingredients list, it’s probably good for you.

5. Walnuts
All nuts, really, but walnuts seem to be the king of the nut family. Used in Chinese medicine for centuries, walnuts are becoming more associated with Western health than ever before. A 2006 study published in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology found that eating walnuts after a meal high in bad fat could reduce the damaging effects of the meal.

6. Avocado
Another villain in the old no-fat movement, avocados are now thought to be one of the healthiest fat sources available. Beyond this, they have very high amounts of cancer-fighting antioxidants, and recent research seems to indicate that avocados’ phytonutrients may also help with the absorption of nutrients from other sources.

7. Mushrooms
The more we learn about phytonutrients—those that come in a small enough quantity to be missed on a food label (this is a layman’s definition only)—the more we should admire ancient cultures. These culinary delights have been feuded over for decades until, for some reason, we’d decided they were pretty much empty calories. The study of phytonutrients has taught us that warring over fungi may have held some rationale after all. Mushrooms are loaded with antioxidants and are thought to boost the immune system, help ward off some cancers, and have high amounts of potassium. Furthermore, researchers at Penn State University have found that mushrooms may be the only food to contain an antioxidant called L-ergothioneine.

8. Tea
Despite a ton of positive press over the last, oh, century, tea and coffee are still the devil’s brew in some circles. Perhaps even worse is how many coffee and tea restaurants have bastardized these natural brews into sugar- and fat-filled dessert items. Both tea and coffee, in their basic states, have no calories and many healthy benefits. Between the two, coffee is arguably more popular, most likely due to its higher caffeine content. But tea is probably healthier. Both have a high amount of antioxidants but stats on tea are almost off the charts. A recent study on calcium supplementation in elderly women, published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, showed that bone mineral density at the hip was 2.8 percent greater in tea drinkers than in non-tea drinkers.

9. Cinnamon
Maybe the novel Dune was more prescient than we’ve given it credit for. After all, the plot revolves around an entire solar system at war over a cinnamon-like spice. Nowadays, we think of this as little but the flavoring in a 1,100-calorie gut bomb we find at the mall. But Frank Herbert knew a thing or two about history and cinnamon has long been the prized possession of the spice world. It has a host of benefits, but perhaps none more important than this one: USDA researchers recently found that people with type 2 diabetes who consumed one gram of cinnamon a day for six weeks significantly reduced their blood sugar, triglycerides, and LDL cholesterol. “He who controls the spice controls the universe!”

10. Natto
This is on the list because, for one, it’s one of the few foods I’ve eaten that I truly don’t like. But mainly, it’s here because we’ve really messed up the way we eat soy. Natto is fermented soybeans and very popular in Japan, which is where I had it. It’s becoming more popular here and this is most likely due to its health benefits. Nearly all the soy options we’re offered in the U.S. are non-fermented. The list of health benefits of fermented soy is a mile long. It’s associated with reducing the risk of cancer, minimizing the likelihood of blood clotting, aiding digestion, increasing blood circulation, an improved immune system, improving bone density, lessening the likelihood of heart attacks, more vibrant skin, and reducing the chance of balding. And it also has strong antibiotic properties, among other things. So you might want to ditch the soy crisps, soy ice cream, and your iced soy mochas and add some natto to your diet.

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Posted on December 25, 2012 by Hank Rouse

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