The Heart of Raw Food: Sprouts

Sprouting is the centerpiece of raw foods.  It brings life back into food and increases the level of protein.  Sprouting legumes allows you to eat them raw, so you keep the enzymes intact but make it edible.

My suggestion is that you try sprouting lentils.  You can use any kind of lentils (although red doesn’t always sprout as well), and my favorite is to do a combination of half green lentils and half black (or mung beans, or any other small lentil.)  

The equipment you will need is one glass mason jar, and then either your nut milk bag OR a lid for the mason jar and a piece of cheesecloth.

Steps:

1. Soaking.  Put about 1 or 1.5 inches of lentils in the bottom of a mason jar. Fill to the top with water and soak for about 12 hours on your countertop.

2. After the 12 hours, rinse very well and drain your lentils.  

3. Draining. Method 1: If you have a nut milk bag, put your lentils in it and hang it over a bowl or your sink to drain (this process is going to take about 2 days, so pick a good spot.

Method 2: Alternatively, if you want to use your mason jar, simply put a piece of cheesecloth (or a piece of screen if you have it) in the removable part of the lid, screw it back on, and leave the jar inverted in a colander.  Watch the cheesecloth to make sure it doesn’t get moldy; if it appears iffy, replace it.   Choose your method based on the equipment you have.

4.  Every morning and every night during the “draining” period, rinse out your lentils (you can leave them in your jar or bag while you rinse), and then invert and leave draining again for the next 12 hours (or so--it can be approximate.)  The whole process takes about 2 days.  You will know your sprouts are done when they look like this, below. The tails should be at least ¼ inch long (although it’s fine if they are ½ an inch or longer, too).  

5. Store finished sprouts in a jar in your refrigerator. Rinse them before eating.

You can add sprouts to salads, or you can eat them as a side dish.  Raw foodists often add a dressing on top--a yummy one to put on top is an almond-ginger dip.

Sprouts are outstanding for your health, and really so easy to do. I hope you try them!

Mushrooms

Mushrooms are one of the most powerful cancer-fighting foods available to us.  If you have been following this blog for awhile, you've heard me talk about Dr. Joel Fuhrman, an incredible food-medicine pioneer who likes to talk about GOMBBS, an acronym to help us remember the best cancer-fighting foods:

• Greens
• Onions
• Mushrooms
• Berries
• Beans
• Seeds

Mushrooms are an integral part of the human immune system.  Eating mushrooms every day reduces your risk of breast cancer (as one example) by 64%.  They stop many cancers from metastasizing. They are full of natural angiogenesis inhibitors, and phytochemicals, which fight cancer.  They are full of many minerals, including copper, potassium, zinc, B vitamins and more.  Some mushrooms (shiitake, maitake and reishi) even are good sources of protein, iron, and vitamin C. 

In many cultures, mushrooms are considered a sign of longevity, because they have so many health-promoting properties.   They are also used medicinally for cancers and other ailments through Chinese Medicine Doctors.  

The best mushroom is a mix of mushrooms! Even button mushrooms have healing properties. Some days have shiitake, some days portobello, some reishi or oyster...try them all. 

It is super easy to sauté any mix of mushrooms in olive oil with a clove of minced garlic.  Here's another delicious, quick and easy way to prepare mushrooms as a main course alongside a soup and salad.

Pan-Seared Portobellos

Adapted from The Cancer Survivor’s Guide

(Serves 2)

• 4 large portobello mushrooms
• 2 Tbsp. water
• 2 Tbsp. tamari
• 1 Tbsp. balsamic vinegar
• 2 garlic cloves, minced
• ½ tsp. dried oregano

Clean the mushrooms and cut off stems.  Combine all other ingredients in a small bowl and then put in a large heated skillet.  When it bubbles, add mushrooms, top down.  Lower to medium and cover.  Cook for 3 minutes. Flip mushrooms, add a few more Tbsp. water if necessary, and cover again, cooking for about 5 minutes longer. Serve hot.

Just writing this blog made me forage into my fridge to find some mushrooms to saute. They are delicious!

Substituting Your "Bad" Habits with "Healthy"

When you are trying to be healthy, it is very frustrating when you "slip up."  You know veggies are the best for you, so you cut some up to make a delicious crudite, and then pour the ranch dressing from your refrigerator into a bowl.  Later on, you glance at the dressing ingredients, and lo and behold, the main ingredient is sugar, followed by a zillion other ingredients you cannot pronounce. Aargh! Did that negate all the good vegetables you just slaved over?  Not exactly, but it is definitely better to be prepared so this doesn't happen next time.

Part of what makes this work is advance preparation.  For me, Sundays are my day of thinking ahead about what food will be in the fridge all week.  I usually soak some rice, make some almond milk, make a salad dressing, and making some of this delicious dip to have on hand is great, too.  In the evenings, when you are preparing dinner, instead of grabbing for crackers and cheese, you can simply set out the dip and get some yummy vegetables on a plate.  Then you are filling your hunger pangs with absolute health, and tons of enzymes, too, since this dip is raw.

Nutty Pesto Dip

1/2 cup pine nuts or cashews, soaked for 1-2 hours, then drained
4 Tbsp. olive oil
1/2 tsp. garlic
1/2 Tbsp. basil
1/2 Tbsp. oregano
zest from one lemon
juice of one lemon
1/8 cup water (can add more water if you want it thinner)
1/2 tsp. sea salt
Puree together in Cuisinart.

Serve with cut up vegetables of your choice.

This could also be a wonderful gift to drop off for a friend who has cancer, if you don't have time to prepare a whole meal.  She may be very grateful to have some "snacky" food.  You aren't always in the mood for a full meal, and this will allow her to be healthy and well-fed in between meals.

Wheatgrass

I was turned onto wheatgrass years ago because, in addition to being incredible for overall health, it is one of nature's best cancer fighters.  The regimen at some of the world's best cancer institutes mandate at least two glasses (2-3 ounces each) of wheatgrass a day.

Eva lurking in the wheatgrass.

I learned almost everything I know about wheatgrass from two sources.  1) The Raw Food Institute.  And 2)  The Wheatgrass Book, by the renowned expert, Ann Wigmore.

Lately I've become rather obsessed with wheatgrass again and recently re-read Ann Wigmore's book.  I'm growing several flats of it my dining room table, and let me tell you why.  Wheatgrass is filled with chlorophyll, which mimics human blood more closely on a molecular level than any other food.  This is tremendous for fighting cancer because drinking it is like getting a blood transfusion and crowding out the free-radical cells.  Wheatgrass has a tremendous anti-mutagenic effect, and also a anti-neoplastic ability, which means it fights tumors without any toxins or chemicals. It is also packed with enzymes, which results in increased circulation and better nutrition to your cells, along with more efficient removal of waste and toxins in the bloodstream.  Chlorophyll also regenerates the liver, which is the body's main detoxification organ, super important if you're fighting cancer.

And that's not even including the other health benefits of wheatgrass. It is a cleanser.  It stimulates healthy circulation.  It restores high energy levels. It bolsters the immune system. It can protect us from high and low levels of radiation.  It is a great source of iron, potassium, magnesium, and trace minerals, like selenium, which has anti-cancer properties, too.

Cut wheatgrass ready for juicing. 

You can buy wheatgrass at many health food stores and juice it at home if you have a juicer.  Some places even sell wheatgrass shots (as in: tiny glasses.)

It is also very simple and inexpensive to grow yourself.  All you need is a few trays, some organic soil, and hard wheatgrass seeds.  The steps are simple:

1. Soak a cup of hard wheatgrass seeds in a glass jar of water overnight.
2. Drain (using cheese cloth or a screen, secured to the top of the jar), for a remaining 12 hours.

3. Fill a tray with soil and scatter sprouted wheatgrass seeds evenly on top.  Water.
4. Cover for 2-3 days with another tray until shoots are about 2 inches tall.

5. Leave uncovered in indirect sun for 7-10 days, watering occasionally.
6. Harvest by cutting close to the roots, and use as soon as possible.
7. Seeds will have a second growth, though not quite as nutritious.
8. Juice your wheatgrass!

I like to bring my mom little glasses of wheatgrass in the morning.  While my husband and I truly LOVE the taste, I have to admit that my mom does not.  The taste reminds me of sitting on a picnic blanket on a warm spring evening and smelling the grass all around me.  The amazing thing about wheatgrass is that you only need a tiny bit to have incredible health benefits.  Like I always say to my mom: "It's better than chemo!"

Green Juice

I have been asked dozens of times lately to do a post on Green Juice.  I am so excited about the powers of Green Juice that I talk about it a lot.  It has been fairly life-changing for my family.

Green Juice is PACKED with micro-nutrients and enzymes.  It gives your body a tremendous health boost.  Think about a cutting board piled high with dark green leafys, green vegetables, root vegetables, ginger, limes, garlic....you could never eat that much.  But you can JUICE that much, and by juicing, you get all the micro-nutrients from the produce without any of the fiber, making it incredibly easy for your body to absorb and put to good use.

Most disease is started by cellular inflammation.  Cellular inflammation can be caused by some of the food we eat, by toxins in our environment, by stress, and many other factors.  Flooding your body with enzymes and micro-nutrients reduces inflammation, allowing your body to stay healthy, or fight disease if you already have it.

One of the keys to Green Juice is VARIETY.  This is for several reasons:

1) Every vegetable has different qualities, vitamins, minerals, and nutrients.  By varying what you put in your juice every day you give your body more of the good stuff, more often.

2) You want to make sure that you don't eat brassica vegetables every day.  The brassica family can, if you have any trouble with your thyroid, give your body too many goitrogens and throw off your thyroid function.  The brassica family includes kale, broccoli, cabbage, etc.  Goitrogens also inhibit cancer growth, so don't eliminate them completely! Just skip it every few days.

I have been making a huge batch of juice every morning for about 5 months now.  I have the Raw Food Institute and Lisa Wilson to thank for really making this a daily ritual.  I make enough so that Garth, my mom and I all get some.  (I can't quite get the kids to drink it yet....someday!) I always say "I can feel it in my finger tips!" and I really can.  My mom is healthier than ever.  I am convinced it has fended off chemo for 5 months now.  It is truly amazing stuff.

There is no "recipe" for Green Juice since you really should vary the ingredients every day.  However, the base of mine usually includes:

1-2 cucumbers

4-5 pieces celery

1 head romaine lettuce

1 lime or lemon

1 inch of ginger

a big pile of sprouts of some kind (pea shoots, wheat grass, alfalfa sprouts)

sometimes a half or whole clove of garlic

a BIG pile of some greens (chard, kale, spinach, collards, mustard greens, parsley...)

Today, a beet was in there. Yesterday, a few carrots.

Would you be interested in a Green Juice workshop? If so, please comment (click on blue "comments" below!)

Immunity & Probiotics

A block print of an Albatross I made for my dad, who loves Albatrosses.  

They survive pretty extreme conditions, just like those nice little bacteria in your belly!

Did you know that 80% of your immune system resides in your intestinal tract (or "gut" as my sometimes un-ladylike school refers to it)? Yes, it is true. This is why the food you eat matters so much to your health.

You are what you eat, they say. When you eat foods that encourage a healthy digestive flora, then your immune system stays strong, and can fight off illness more easily. When you eat foods that cause inflammation or can't be digested properly, then the bacteria in your gut is forced to fight these unwanted substances, and then your immunity is weakened, and you are susceptible to disease growth or other infections.

So let's talk about probiotics!!!! Probiotics help provide your body with the right amount of healthy bacteria.  They protect your body from other micro-organisms that cause disease, and also encourage the proper absorption of food.  Antibiotics, medication, chemotherapy, and lack of proper nutrition can throw the balance off and cause trouble.

Probiotic supplements are great, but they are short-term.  It is important to eat a diet that includes healthy, fermented foods, which will provide those healthy bacterias, as well as helping you digest your food.  Yogurt, kimchi, sauerkraut, Kombucha (try GT's brand of this delicious drink from Whole Foods!), pickles, and tempeh all fall into this category.

All fermented foods sold at Whole Foods. From left to right: GT's Kombucha, 

Bubbie's Sauerkraut, and Sunjay Kimchee.

If you choose to take a probiotic supplement (which is a great idea), it's best to take on an empty stomach.  Maybe 15 minutes after you've broken your nighttime fast with a whole lot of water, and a little bit before you have breakfast.

If someone you know just told you that the stomach flu is going around, run home and take a probiotic.  It just might fend it off!

Raw food Heals

Since I continue to be so excited about raw foods and its benefits for ALL people, but especially anyone living with or wanting to prevent cancer, I think I will be touching on this topic more often.  There are some fantastic cookbooks out there.  I just have bought:

-Ani's Raw Food Kitchen by Ani Phyo
-RAWvolution by Matt Amsden
-Superfoods by David Wolfe

The Raw Foods Institute recommends dozens of titles, but these were the three I was most excited about.

To increase the amount of raw and living foods into our diets, to give us more enzymes, micronutrients, and cellular power, we need to make raw foods more interesting. You can't live on salad--it's just not interesting enough.  Soon enough you will be craving something bread-y, something chip-y, something dessert-y, something pasta-y.  These cookbooks provide us for recipes with all of these, to make our food dynamic & healing at the same time.

Because we have a sweet tooth over here, I made a raw dessert the other night: Chocolate Coconut Macaroons.  It was a huge hit.  They assemble in minutes and get eaten just as quickly...and they are actually good for you!

Chocolate Coconut Macaroons

Adapted from the Raw Foods Institute

3 cups coconut flakes (I use large and fine flakes, combined)

1/3 cup coconut butter

1/2 cup raw cacao powder

1/2 tsp. sea salt

1 tsp. vanilla

1 cup maple syrup

-combine in your Kitchen Aid, or with a mixer in a large bowl.

-form into small, tablespoon sized balls

-chill until firm, 30-60 minutes

-store in the refrigerator to keep firm

DELICIOUS!!!!!

Raw Foods, part 2

I just spent a week at The Raw Food Institute in Washington D.C.  It is run by the fabulous Lisa Wilson, who has designed a 7-day curriculum, immersing you in raw foods preparation, and, of course, the WHY behind raw foods.  During the week you are only eating medicinal raw foods, and therefore fully detoxifying your body the whole time.  There is a tremendous range of doctors, healers, meditation leaders, and of course raw foods chefs to lead & teach you.  I highly recommend the program if you are healthy and want to learn how to prevent chronic disease, are in a "healing crisis," or if you love someone who is!

Raw food can cure chronic disease because they flood your body with enzymes, oxygen, and micronutrients.  When we cook our food, we lose 30% of the nutrients and 100% of the enzymes.  Eating raw vegetables, greens, nuts, seeds, sprouts and juices gives our body needed enzymes to absorb all that healthy food we are eating, and therefore reduces the cellular inflammation that causes disease.  Eating raw heals at a deep cellular level.

We met and heard the stories of a number of people who have healed their illnesses (cancer, type 2 diabetes, heat disease, obesity...) through switching to a raw food diet.  We drank green juices and wheat grass shots throughout the day.  And we ate delicious, real, nutritious food.

In lieu of a recipe today, I will show you pictures of my growing wheatgrass, and of the sprouts which I prepared (it is so easy!)

Mung bean and lentil sprouts, ready to eat! They flood your body with protein and energy.

Sprouted wheatgrass, JUST starting to grow. It will be another week before I can juice them.

Perhaps next time I will tell you how to sprout....or maybe I will share a raw recipe or two.  We'll just have to see.  Until then, au revoir!

Alternatives

I am posting this blog for and sending heaps of love out to my friends Krista and Bill.

There are so many cancer treatment alternatives out there....sometimes chemo and/or surgery are the right choice. But that doesn't mean it is the only choice. In my years of research about this topic, I've found a few people that I think are very interesting. I've not worked with all of them. But I know that in certain instances, they work.  I am posting about a very small number of them here. This is no endorsement of their services, just another avenue that can be explored.

Firstly, though, I want to mention 3 books that were recommended to me by numerous alternative health professionals. They are:

-"Choices in Healing: Integrating the Best of Conventional and Complementary Approaches to Cancer" by Michael Lerner, who is the founder of Commonweal, a health and environmental research institute, and also the Commonweal Cancer Help Program, which produced a landmark study on unconventional cancer treatments. This book is incredible. It offers so many suggestions and links you to many other health professionals dealing with any given cancer.

-"The Macrobiotic Approach to Cancer" by Michio Kushi, famous for bringing the Macrobiotic Diet to the United States. Their family still runs the Kushi Institute, where you can go to learn how to adapt a Macrobiotic lifestyle.

-"Knockout" by Suzanne Somers, who interviews 4 doctors who are knocking out cancer successfully with alternative treatments, and 7 other doctors who have effective methods for preventing recurrences or cancer in the first place. It is a real eye-opener, and very worth the read.

These books will give you many ideas. Some of the specific practices I mention below come out of these books, others from health professionals.

Doctors:
Dr. Stanislaw Burzynski at the Burzynski Clinic They have had consistent success dealing with brain, breast, prostate, colon, lung, ovarian, and Hodgkin's lymphoma cancers.  His technique is to supply the body with antineoplastons (peptides), which fortifies genes to eradicate cancer.

Dr. Nicholas Gonzales, in New York City, who fortifies the body with enzymes that keep cancer at bay for up to decades. Individualized nutrition plans are also a major component of his work.

Paul Beals, MD, from National Integrative Health Associates in Washington, DC, who combines traditional therapies with alternative ones, and advocates for toxic-free cures.


Nutritionists/Diet:
The Raw Foods Institute, in Washington, D.C. teaches cancer patients how to radically change their diets with foods that have proven in countless cases to eliminate cancer, without any toxins whatsoever.

The Kushi Institute in Becket, MA, is a remarkable haven with even more remarkable outcomes. Go to their website to hear the testimonials from patient who thought chemo wouldn't work and believed that was their last chance, but are now fully recovered after adapting the Macrobiotic lifestyle. Incredible.

 Just a few ideas. To delve into completely, or to use in conjunction with "traditional" chemotherapy practices. It takes a long time to navigate these waters, so these are just a few of the pearls I have uncovered over time...