• Eat only real food, prepared by people, not machines. Don't eat anything with artificial ingredients or industrial processing.
• Eat lots of lacto-fermented vegetables, a little meat and
some animal fat.
• If
the ingredients list a non-food ingredient in it such as chemicals or preservatives, don't eat it.
• Get
food that has been grown without the use of pesticides or artificial
fertilizers.
• Eat whole, unprocessed
foods. Do not eat canned, packaged or processed food. • Eat
something
fermented with every meal. Make sauerkraut and/or
other lacto-fermented vegetables (pickles).
• Eat a
tablespoon of virgin
coconut oil every day.
• Eat wild-caught fish
(not
farm-raised) and shellfish from un-polluted
waters.
• Meat: fat, bones and organ meats are better than lean muscle meat (steaks, chops).
•
Use
animal fats
instead of vegetable fats or oils. Render your own lard and
tallow by
simmering in water.
• Use only extra virgin olive oil
or expeller expressed sesame, flax or virgin coconut oil if you need to use a vegetable oil.
• Drink raw, fermented or
lacto-fermented beverages such as ale every
day, especially when eating grains or other sugars and
starches/carbohydrates.
• Use naturally-fermented or cultured
condiments or cultured (sour)
cream.
• Make bone
broth and use it to
prepare food or drink half a cup a day plain.
• Use unrefined, full-array salt
such as Celtic sea salt or Himalayan crystal salt. Do not use table
salt.
• Use baked enamel for cookware,
or cast iron, glass or ceramic, or wrap
food in leaves and cook over wood fire. Do not use aluminum or reactive
metals.
•
Buy local fruits and vegetables if possible. It is not
necessary that
they are labelled "organic" as long as the farmer uses natural or
nourishing techniques.
• Eat
low quantities of grains if you eat grains. Use whole
grains
and soak them in liquid for
at least
12 hours. Soaking grains, as with most plant foods, will make them easier for you body to digest.
• Use natural sweeteners
in moderation,
such as raw honey, maple syrup,
date sugar, dehydrated cane sugar juice (sold as Sucanat or Rapadura)
and stevia powder. Avoid high fructose corn syrup.
• Make your own unpasteurized wine or
raw beer (ale). Drink unpasteurized
wine in moderation with meals.
• Use only natural, food-based supplements.
Supplements should include
cod liver oil and Vitamin
C. Take a multi-enzyme digestive enzyme tablet if you experience
"food allergy", indigestion
or other digestion malfunctions.
• Avoid vegetable fats that
are solid at room temperature and sold in cans.
• Avoid
refined vegetable oils made from
soy, corn, safflower, canola or
cottonseed.
• Do
not use polyunsaturated oils.
• Do
not practice strict vegetarianism
(veganism). Animal products
provide vital nutrients that cannot be found in an all-plant diet.
• Avoid
products containing protein
powders or texturized vegetable
protein (TVP).
• Avoid
processed, pasteurized milk; do
not consume ultrapasteurized
(UHT) milk products, lowfat milk, skim milk, powdered milk or imitation
milk products.
• Avoid
battery-produced eggs and factory-farmed meats and fish.
• Avoid
canned, sprayed, waxed and irradiated fruits and vegetables. Do
not eat artificial food additives, eat only foods.
• Do
not eat food with aspartame, artificial MSG or hydrolyzed vegetable protein.
Most commercial soups, sauces, broth mixes and condiments contain one
or more of these ingredients, even if it doesn't say so on the label.
• Do
not use commercial salt,
baking
powder or antacids.
• Do
not drink fluoridated water.
Organic or
non-organic?
The
certified organic label does not mean what it used to. Many additives
can be put in food certified organic, including non-organic
ingredients, and still meet the certified organic label standards. To
get "organic" food, know the people you buy your food from, if you
can't grow it yourself. Ask questions about it if you can't actually go
to the farm and see it growing. As close to the dirt as you can get is
the best food. Because of the costs involved in getting organic label
certification, and the fact that it is not that good an indicator of
the quality that went in to growing the good, many farmers and food
producers prefer to go back to calling their food "beyond organic" or
something similar. There is no government standard to regulate these
claims, as yet. You have to trust the seller. That's why it's best to
be able to go to the farm and look at the food you are going to eat.
Also, note that "organically grown" means "not organic". Usually it has
been irradiated after harvest and gassed as it was packaged, which is
the most common reason why something has to be labelled "organically
grown" rather than "organic." I would not trust anything labelled
"organically grown" because it means it was grown by farmers who only
wanted to meet the minimum requirements for organic for the money and
did not care what happened to their produce after it left the farm and
before it arrived at someone eating it.
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Seeds and Sprouting
• Sprout seeds (except linseed/flax) and soak beans before eating.
• Sprouted seeds such as sunflower, quinoa, buckwheat and
millet can be
eaten raw, sprouted beans should be steamed lightly before eating.
• Alfalfa
sprouts should be greened before eating.
• If you want gelatin to mix in a drink, soak linseed. Otherwise,
don't
soak linseed (flax) Eat 1 spoonful a day of crushed raw linseed.
Combine freshly ground flax seed with cultured dairy
• Soak nuts, almonds, pumpkin and
squash seeds, sunflowers and peanuts
overnight before eating.
Dairy (Milk and Cream)
• Drink
raw, whole milk. If you can't get raw milk, buy pasteurized whole
milk and culture it with kefir, rennet, sour cream with live enzyme or
clabbered raw milk to "re-raw" it (add pro-biotic organisms and enzymes
back into sterilized food).(See Culturing
Dairy.) Sour cream listed
with ingredients "pasteurized cultured cream" is not live but sour
cream listed as "cultured pasteurized cream" is live. Read the label
carefully.
• Do
NOT get UHT (ultra-pasteurized)
milk or cream. Do not drink skim,
low-fat or no-fat milk. It is OK to mix no-fat milk with cream in order
to get a non-homogenized, whole-fat milk. Then re-raw as above.
Grains
Grains
can be a good source of food in small
amounts, but they are
not a super-food and can be eliminated from a healthy diet if you
choose. Substitute coconut flour, tapioca, buckwheat, ground flax seed
or almond flour.
Limit grains to about 60 grams or 3-5 tablespoons a day.
Do
not use modern ("green revolution") wheat, which is almost all wheat
sold in stores and used in making wheat products. Use heritage wheats
instead. Heritage wheats are emmer, einkorn, khoresan (usually sold as
Kamut) and spelt.
If cooking with grain (making
bread) make a sourdough
bread that soaks the grain in a lacto-fermenting liquid for long
periods (days).
Eat fat and extra minerals with grains if eating grains.
Soak grains or flour overnight or for a day before eating to improve digestibility. To eat raw, see Raw
Wheat Cereal. Ferment grains to make ale.
Gluten-containing
grains are
harder to
digest, and the more gluten, the harder they are. This is one of the
reasons you should not eat modern wheat, which has been genetically
modiifed to have many times more gluten that natural wheat. A little
gluten can be good for you as a source of plant protein, but too much
is like eating glue. The gluten-containing
grains are: wheat, oats, barley and rye. These should always be soaked
and/or fermented before eating. Non-gluten-containing grains are:
buckwheat, rice and millet.
These do
not absolutely need to be soaked overnight before eating, but they need
to be slow-cooked, preferably in bone broth, or sprouted.
Always accompany any carbohydrate, cooked or raw, with a fermented
carbohydrate with live yeast (such as raw ale or kombucha) to help
digest it.
I don't recommend
"low-carb", but I do recommend "low-grains". How much
grain would a hunter-gatherer eat? It takes a long time to gather even
a handful of grain and remove the husk. That's the amount that is good
for you, not the amount that modern processing of flour makes available.
Meat and Animal Fat
• Get organic, pasture-fed meats.
• Eat a small portion of liver or other organ meat at least once a week.
• Render your own lard and use it for cooking. Always eat some fat if eating rabbit
meat, which has no fat or deer (venison) or other very lean, no-fat meats.
•
Lacto-ferment meat to eat raw. Put a pea-sized piece of raw meat
(wild-caught or organ meat is ideal), put it in sauerkraut juice and
place in the fridge. Let it ferment for a day. Cut it up and add
chopped garlic, ginger, avocado etc. and a spiced vinegar and sea salt
and you'll never know you're eating raw, fermented meat. Lacto-fermenting
fish.
Minerals
• Almost
all disease has some mineral deficiency component, either as cause,
exacerbation or inhibiting healing. It is very unlikely that anyone
living in a modern situation is getting enough minerals in their diet
without making some conscious effort to supplement them. Minerals can
be supplied by earth (clay), organic plant ash, bone meal and
full-array salts. See minerals
for ways to make your own mineral supplements.
Eggs
• Have your own chickens, if you can. Otherwise,
get free-range, organic eggs if
possible.
• Eat the yolks raw, if possible,
cook
the whites if you eat the whites. A good way to do this is to make a 2-minute
boiled egg that cooks the white and leaves the yolk warm but
uncooked.
• Eat a raw or fermented apple
every day if it's available. It will still
keep the doctor away.
• It is better to eat fruit and
vegetables
raw or fermented, such as sauerkraut,
but if you're going to cook, make a nutritious soup
with
leftovers and bone broth.
These
food usually do not need a lot of artificial fertilizers and pesticides
to grow, so if you buy food from supermarkets, these do have to
be organic and are usually fairly low in residual chemicals:
asparagus, avocadoes, bananas,
blueberries, broccoli, cabbage, eggplant (aubergine), frozen corn,
frozen peas, kiwis, mangoes, onions, papaya, pineapples, sweet potatoes
and watermelon. Because these fruits and vegetables do not need a
lot of pesticides to grow, they are usually low in chemicals even if
they are grown conventionally and sold in supermarkets. See Vegetables
for complete list of pesticide loads.
• Garlic, onion and chives are all
especially nutritious. Try to eat some
every day.
Onions are very easy to grow. Plant the sets and weed a little. Onions
are ready to dig up when the green sprouts dry up. Onions that you have
bought and that are starting to sprout can be planted in the ground to
harvest the onion greens that come up. Onions can be chopped and stored
in the freezer.Onions should be sauteed slowly in lard or other animal
fat to add to soups.
Beverages
• Drink 1 ounce of water
for each 2 pounds of weight. Make cabbage
water or clay
water
for extra nutrient value. Take extra minerals while you are drinking a
lot of water. Some people find that after they have been on a healthy
foods diet for a few years that they do not need to drink as much
water, but, at the beginning, it is good to help wash away any toxins
that have been accumulating throughout a lifetime of poor food options.
• Make Kombucha tea. Drink a minumum of 2 ounces of kombucha or a
spoonful of apple cider vinegar a day. The kombucha tastes *way* better
than the vinegar, so get a kombucha mushroom and start making your own.
• Make real ale.
• Make kvass.
• Make your own soft
drinks.
•Water
-- Unless you have reasons to counterindicate it, try to go on a
water fast for at least a couple days in the early spring. This helps
to flush out any toxins that have built up from eating meat and fat,
which are good for you in themselves but can leave by-products.
• Add a
teaspoon of clay to water to add back natural and trace minerals.
Use low temperatures as much as
possible. A pressure cooker should be set at the lowest pressure.
Pressure cookers will reduce the viability of some proteins and
vitamins, but they are suited to bring out the minerals
in bones. Slow cookers and rice steamers are good, but make sure the
piece inside a slow cooker does not have lead in the glaze. Use your
own glass bowl in a crockpot if you aren't sure. Use baked enamel
cookware or cast iron. Season cast iron by coating it with fat/lard and
heating it. Do
not wash in soap and water but use paper towels or plastic scrapers to
clean it after use. Add more lard to it if any food sticks. If you buy "pre-seasoned" cast iron, remove the seasoned
layer and re-do it yourself. Make sure any glass or ceramic cookware is
recommended for
stovetop use before putting it on top of direct heat, some pyrex or ceramic ware may crack on the stove if it has
been
scratched. Use a heat
diffuser and do not subject it to extreme temperatures, or rapid
changes in temperature.
YES:
seasoned cast
iron, baked enamel, pyrex, Corningware, ceramic, clay pottery.
NO:
non-stick, teflon, aluminum
Maybe:
stainless steel (if it has not been scratched).
•
Ideally, use baked enamel for boiling or slow cooking and oil-seasoned cast iron for
frying.
To
season cast iron cookware: If new, wash in hot soapy water to
remove any wax or seasoning on the pan. Then, coat with vegetable oil
(not soy), lard,
tallow or other animal fat. Wipe excess off with paper towel and bake
in oven at 500 degrees for 1
1/4 hour.
Cleaning cast iron cookware:
To keep
seasoned, cook with
animal fat. To clean, scrape stuck-on food off
with plastic knife,
spatula or fingernails. Wipe off excess fat with dish towel or paper towels (or allow to stay in the pan if
you are going to be using it again soon and not going to be putting it
away). Do not wash
in water. Cast iron seasoning
improves with age so let cooking fat build up over time.
Notes
about
pre-heating oven:
Most
recipe instructions include a pre-heated temperature so that the
recipe can be standardized for any kitchen, not because the item to be
cooked needs to go into a hot oven. I don't pre-heat. I turn the oven
on when I am ready to put the item in. Once you are used to how your
oven works, you don't need to waste energy pre-heating it for most of
what you cook. I suggest for this recipe you turn your oven on to your
favorite baking temperature when you are ready to put the cake in the
oven, keep an eye on it, turn it around halfway through cooking and
make a note of how long it takes to bake in your oven for next time,
and save that little bit of energy that went into pre-heating to a
precise temperature.
Eliminate
processed or refined oils as much as possible. Replace mayonaise by
mixing cultured
cream, kombucha
and sea
salt.
I do
not recommend eating mayonnaise. You do
not need all that oil, even if it is good, healthy raw, cold-pressed
oil. But if you are going to eat it, it is better to make it yourself
rather than purchased a manufactured product. To make mayonaise, put
all ingredients into a glass jar and put an immersion blender (stick
blender, magic bullet blender) into the jar. Start blending at the
bottom and slowly bring the blender up. You can then store the mayo in
the jar it was made in.
Use
small amounts of cold-pressed, extra-virgin olive oil as the only
pourable "vegetable oil". For salad dressing, mix kefir cheese, thick
sour cream or yogurt cheese with seasoned sea salt and lemons.
Meat marinade: Mix naturally fermented soy sauce with mustard and
honey. Soak meat overnight.
If
you eat white sugar or other refined carbohydrates, keep it to as
little as possible and accompany it with a glass of raw, fermented ale, soda or kombucha
with live yeast. The yeast will eat some of the sugar along the way and
produce carbon dioxide and vitamins, better for you than plain sugar.
Healthy sweeteners are raw
honey, agave syrup, stevia and malt syrup.
Beans are not
a super-food and cannot be eaten raw, so they can be eliminated from a
healthy diet if you choose.
Baked beans take at least 3
days to
make properly:
Day 1
Put beans in a jar, cover with water and allow to soak for a day.
Day 2
Pour off that water
Put the beans in pot, cover with water and bring to a boil
Turn off heat and pour off water
Transfer beans to a slow cooker and cover with bone broth.
Slow cook for a day or until soft. Add more bone broth if it gets too
dry.
Day 3
When
beans have been cooked soft, add full-array salt, naturally
fermented soy sauce, tomato sauce, lard-fried onions and garlic. Leave
on low heat for another day.
These beans can then be added to
other carbohydrates like brown rice or
sourdough bread and eaten with a raw, lacto-fermented pickled vegetable
(like sauerkraut or pickled cucumbers) for maximum nutrition.
Do's and Don'ts
Do:
• Eat at least 80% raw
• Drink an ounce of water for every half-pound of
body weight
• Eat something fermented with every meal
• Eat at least a little bit (teaspoon) of raw
animal
fat every day:
this may be in the form of egg yolks, fatty fish, butter, meat
• Get sunlight whenever possible
Don'ts
•
No refined food products
•
No heated/cooked (pasteurized) dairy products
•
No margarines or saturated vegetable fats
•
Avoid vegetable oils (except virgin olive oil and coconut oil)
•
No refined sugars (except fermented)
•
Avoid refined and processed oils and hydrogenated
oils
•
Avoid drugs,
whether recreational or medicinal, as
much as possible
Make sure all your
foodstuffs come only from the following categories:
* Wild-caught fish and shellfish
* Organic (meaning food that is grown without
pesticides or chemicals) meats and poultry.
* Organic, free-range eggs
* Raw honey
* Small amounts of raw and unheated extra virgin
olive oil and virgin coconut oil
* Small amounts of truly raw and unheated freshly
ground flax seed or chia seed
* Fresh raw
vegetables, preferably organic
* Fresh raw fruits, preferably organic
* Drink 1 ounce of water for every 2 pounds of body
weight per day.
Mix 1 quart water with 1 Tablespoon raw vinegar, 1/2 teaspoon clay, 1/4
teaspoon celtic sea or Himalayan crystal salt
* Raw, unheated, organic, pasture-fed raw dairy
(milk and cream)
* Limited amounts of truly raw and unheated nuts and
seeds
* Limited amounts of dried fruits, and only if truly
unheated and unprocessed (no oils, sugars or sulphur)
* Modest amounts of grain, about a handful or 60
grams a day, such as
well-fermented sourdough bread, or very limited amounts of unheated,
uncooked breads, such as "Essene Bread".
Where Do I Start?
Make gradual changes to
your diet,
Eliminating
the bad
things:
No commercially processed soy products
unless they have been
traditionally fermented or brewed naturally.
No vegetable oils except extra virgin
olive oil, coconut oil and
expeller-pressed oils
No hard vegetable
fats (like Crisco)
No white flour, refined sugar (except
for brewing fermented
beverages). No "high fructose corn syrup".
No processed and packages foods. (If you have to
purchase prepared foods, read
the label. Remember to eat only food. If an ingredient isn't food, like
artificial sweeteners (Splenda, aspartame), something with E-numbers or
chemicals, don't eat it.)
No soft drinks, no
pastries, no junk foods.
See Home Remedies for things you can
use
instead of chemical and medical drugs.
Once the bad things have been
eliminated, improve the quality of your
food. Look for grass-fed meats, farm eggs and raw milk in your area.
Add organ meats to your diet.
Add whatever super-food supplements
you want to your diet. Super-food
supplements are: cod liver oil, virgin coconut oil, kelp (in capsules),
bone meal, rosehips, papaya. Also very useful are Vitamin E, co-enzyme
Q10 and Vitamin C.
After that, learn to culture and
ferment milk products, vegetables
(sauerkraut) and ale.
Start making a bone broth to have on
hand all the time.
Replace
Replace
white sugar with natural sweeteners in
moderation, such as raw local honey, grade B maple syrup, raw agave
nectar, rapadura and sucanat.
Replace fruit juices with
lacto-fermented beverages, such as kombucha,
raw ale and beet kvass.
Replace vegetable oils and trans fats
with animal fats such as raw and
cultured butter, olive oil, sesame seed oil, coconut oil, lard, chicken
fat, tallow, etc.
Replace industrially produced cereals
with soaked oatmeal and brown
rice.
Replace pasteurized dairy products
with raw and cultured dairy.
Replace processed, convenience foods
(boxed, packaged, prepared and
canned food items) with fresh, organic, whole foods.
The
Yoga of Eating
by Charles Eisenstein
Fat:
An Appreciation of a Misunderstood Ingredient With Recipes by
Jennifer McLagan
Nourishing
Traditions by Sally Fallon
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Healthy Eating
