Seaweeds, Crucifers, the Thyroid and Iodine

Many critics of the raw food movement claim that it is harmful to eat raw crucifers. The crucifer family which is now called "Brassicaceae" covers the largest group of veggies that people eat. Root crops include radishes, turnips and rutabagas, as well as wasabe and horseradish, two root mustards. Leaf crops include cabbage, kale, Chinese and Japanese cabbages and kales and mustards, and hundreds of leafy greens that are wild or semi-wild like arugula, cress, and rocket. Edible flowers include honesty and dame's rocket. We even eat the seeds in the form of mustards, and the oil. But the queens of this family include broccoli and cauliflower and all the crosses in between.

Why do people discourage eating raw crucifers? Because they contain goitrogens, substances that suppress the thyroid, causing its enlargement in the disease called goitre, which the USDA fights by putting iodine in table salt. Other foods that suppress the thyroid in their raw state are soybeans, pine nuts, peanuts, millet, strawberries, pears, peaches, bamboo, spinach and sweet potatoes. The goitrogens are deactivated by cooking.

Worse yet, foods containing goitrogens in combination with caffeine, are thought to cause thyroid cancer. So people who cut back their salt and start eating raw cabbage, broccoli and arugula on their salads, not to mention fruits, must be aware that they are suppressing the thyroid.

There is an easier solution. Table salt is very toxic to the body. It is bleached and treated so that it is more poisonous than is considered to be healthy, even in small amounts. However, people do need salt. Often people go overboard and do not get enough sodium in their diets. The ideal is to get a balance of potassium and sodium. If you get leg cramps, have low blood pressure or high, have headaches, and generally feel fatigued, it is probably because you have a salt imbalance. The ONLY salts that are worth eating are sea salts and mineral salts that have not been bleached or otherwise treated. They are expensive, yes, but you do not need to use a lot of salt. If your food tastes good, you can easily cut back on salt.

A better way to deal with the problem is to look at a whole food solution. This is another controversial food. Some raw foodists scorn seaweed because of the sodium content. This is silly. If you eat a vegan diet you may not see much in the way of sodium at all and that is bad.


This is Malcolm and Nutmeg from the Touchwood Project in Scotland, showing you what seaweed looks like out of the package. Nutmeg is an unusual cat, not minding the wet and cold, and I tell you, this water is COLD!

Seaweed is one of nature's wonder foods. What is totally ironic is that seafood and seaweed have been scorned in the British diet because they are associated with famine and poverty. Rich people eat salt beef and white bread, not shellfish or seaweed! Much of the tragedy of the Irish Famine could have been averted if the Irish had the fishing traditions of their Norse cousins. Scotland has much more of a sea tradition being closer to their Viking and Celtic fishing roots.

Seaweed is fabulous fresh and raw, crunchy, juicy, and sometimes a bit hard to eat. But most seaweeds favored by people are delicious. They are treated in all kinds of ways, some of them cooked, but most of them dried. It is easy nowadays to get seaweed if you are inland; yes, it is expensive, but you don't need much of it since it is full of minerals and vitamins even when dry. It also soaks up to ten times the dried size.



Sometimes people try out seaweed salad in the Japanese restaurants. This is usually not seaweed, but a seaside plant called "salsola", related to tumbleweeds and beets. It is stripped and cooked. What you see here are the stems, called "land seaweed" in Japanese. It is good, but not raw and not seaweed.

There are a number of seaweeds to try: nori, arame, hijiki, wakame--the list is endless. I like to eat cold water seaweeds from Europe, grown here locally, such as dulse, kelp, and bladderwrack, which you see in the picture above with Nutmeg. I can't say enough good things about dulse, a red seaweed, and I use kelp granules instead of salt for flavoring everything from crackers to salad dressings.

BUT, you can overdo seaweed, too. People caution against too much sodium and too much iodine leading to hyperthyroidism, the opposite of goitre. So, balance, balance, balance. If you like raw crucifers, pine nuts and strawberries, eat seaweeds to balance the iodine levels.

Next time you want to eat raw broccoli, be smart, eat it with some dulse.

Fun with White Roots!

I'm keen on root crops in fall and winter. Most root crops are meant to be cooked: taro, sweet potatoes, potatoes, yams and arrowhead all have anti-nutrients in them or enzymes and chemicals that make them toxic or pretty nasty to eat raw. I've known people who ate potatoes and yams raw, but they are both so full of starch as to be pretty slimy and vile.

I eat plenty of carrots and dark greens, so I walk around with orange-ish palms anyways, so I don't worry about how much nutrition to get in root crops. I want bulk, carbs, and that full feeling that you can't get from most veggies. I also have the taste buds of a child, so I'm not keen on strong-tasting food.

I'm enticing you with this picture of a mushroom dish on some celeriac that I colored with a dab of spirulina to show you that white roots can be fun, even for kids.




Queens of the roots are the umbel family. They've been domesticated for hundreds of years as to not look like these wild roots here. But if you are running around in the wilderness in winter and KNOW your umbels (remember hemlock is in this family) you can get a pretty good meal out of even roots like this. But umbels love the mud, the muddier, the better. I'm showing you these roots in a more natural state to show you that the grocery cleans them up (A LOT) before they put them on their neat shelves.

If you grow umbels, they want mud, well not all mud, but light, almost sandy soil that is constantly moist. Any drought, any check in the moisture and those lovely carrots will be BITTER. And umbels can get mighty bitter. They can also be pretty strong, so taste them before you go crazy with them. If you grow them, they want coddling, unlike some other roots that are more forgiving of bad climate.

Umbels with edible roots number in the hundreds. But here are the more common ones you can find in the grocery: carrots, celery, celery root (celeriac) parsley, parsley root, dill, caraway, cilantro (leaves) and coriander (seeds), anise, fennel, bulb fennel (finocchio), and parsnips.

If you have enough beta carotene and want to try a sweet variety of carrot, go with white. White carrots tend to be sweeter than orange and much sweeter than red or yellow carrots. They also seem more resistant to the bitterness of the colored carrots. When you eat raw, you really notice things like bitter carrots.

(I love this cat.) Here is a pile of white carrots courtesy of the web (I'm using some of these photos that are not mine to show you what these plants look like.) You can see that white carrots look very much like parsnips. But, big taste difference. All the roots of the umbels above are edible, some very good. Fennel root is as good as fennel stalks. People use them mostly in soups, but I just like eating them for a crunchy treat out of hand or grated up in some experiment.

Most moderns don't know that the roots of parsley are good. I like growing veggies that have multiple functions. Carrot tops are good when young, and some varieties of parsley have good roots like this small one here. The large root is a parsnip. Note that the leaves of parsnips are NOT edible. Many umbels can cause dermatitis in some people, anywhere from a mild rash to a serious case like poison oak. If you get rashy after you've been pulling carrots, use a gentle soap right after you deal with the greens and don't eat them. Parsnips greens will give many people a rash, which is why they cut the tops off in the stores. But parsnips are wonderful in raw dishes. They have a spicy, sweet taste that goes well in many dishes. Experiment!


But my favorite of the root umbels is celeriac. It's grown in muck and highly sprayed. NEVER buy and eat celery and celeriac that is chemically grown. The bugs love it and it's full of pesticides. The higher price for organic is totally worth it for carrots and celeriac. Some crops don't get bugs and the organic label is more for "show" than something that you must choose.

Grated celeriac is dry and mild. I use it in my sushi recipes, but it's equally good grated for everything. It thins the blood, which is good for some and bad for others and cleans the liver, helping with gout, arthritis and a host of auto-immune diseases. You can also eat the leaves, but they are strong.

Just as carrots come in other forms, so do beets. I do not use white, golden, or pink beets because they give me a sore throat, just as other roots in the chenopod family do. Pay attention to things like this. A golden beet might make your throat sore; a tea made with yellow dock might make your throat close up (happened to me.) Be careful when trying new foods, especially in the raw form. Try a little, then wait for a reaction. But white beets, both round like this and mangels (sugar beets) are an alternate white root crop for fun. But if you find the taste of red beets to have a strong, "beety" taste, white are even stronger! They are good mixed with other roots, and again, the leaves are as good as spinach or chard.

Many people have seen jicama roots, which look like large, brown turnips on steroids. They are delicious. Many bean crops have edible roots. I'm showing you the foliage and flowers here, because, although the roots are wonderful, the seeds are poisonous. Many bean seeds are more or less poisonous, which is why most of them are cooked. If you eat raw, there are seeds you can eat as well as green and seeds you can't, like American common beans (although green beans are okay.) Jicama, like kudzu, is a tropical crop, so the roots are coming in from Mexico. They are a juicy root and a great nibble. But if you have gas problems with beans, jicama might give you gas. They are full of indigestible starches that bother some and don't bother others.

Another "gassy" root crop are the roots of the sunflower family. This is a picture of chicory, which grows a fine root. Other familiar roots in this family are sunchokes (jerusalem artichoke), burdock and many, many wild crops like balsam root and Oregon sunflower. They are tooted as a good root for diabetics because the carbs are in the form of inulin, which is indigestible, thus they are low in sugar. Some people do fine with inulin; for others it is a nightmare of gripe and gas. Eat a little bit first. Cooking does not help, unlike with beans.

But chicory and burdock and dandelion roots are unparalleled as liver cleansers, excellent for gout and other diseases of toxic blood. Beware though, of another problem. If you have ragweed allergies, do not eat anything in this family: lettuce, chicory, sunflower seeds, are all going to aggravate it. But for most people, the roots of these crops are easy to grow, giving edible leaves and seeds, are healthy and make a crunchy root for eating out of hand or grated.

Here is the other most famous of the root crops, roots from the cruciferae family: radish, turnip and rutabaga. The hot spices are found from horseradish and wasabe which are both roots in this family. Mustard is from the seeds.

Radishes, like these daikons, practically grow themselves. They are very weather resistant. But, bugs love them, so go with organic. Daikons and other radishes come in a hundred varieties, some red and green, many with colored skins from red to green to black. Daikon radish is delicious raw and is a staple in sushi bars.

But if you have a sensitive stomach, almost everything in this family may give you gas. So go slowly at first. Most people get used to this family after some time being raw, others do not.

One of my favorite roots is a weed. And I mean a weed. If you've had problems with campanula in your yard, you know that even the tiniest piece of root will grow into a hundred monster plants. Why? Well, it's also known as rampion and rapunsel and was bred to be a plentiful, cheap root crop like radishes. People stopped eating it, why? Only Rapunsel's mother knows. She had to forfeit her baby for stealing the greens from her neighbor's yard.

Rapunsel is mild and crispy. It's relative, platycon or balloon flower is as pungent as radishes and is found dried in Korean grocery stores. But Americans don't grow it or eat it and you can't even find a picture of it, only an old drawing like this. So sad. The flowers, leaves and roots are edible, some better than others. Plants for a Future Database has a long list of the best of the campanulas to try, but you must grow them. Italian seed houses still sell the seeds of rampion, but to get seeds, you may have to go to English seed houses for wild and native plants. Or check your backyard. The campanulas have wonderful purple bellflowers or harebells--yep, same plant. But some have almost no root and others, these thick crunchy, yummy roots.

Okay, enough on roots. Time for a winter dish!

Blue roots with Mushroom Sauce

One cup grated celeriac tossed with a pinch of spirulina
(try tumeric for yellow, beet powder for red and pink)

Marinate a handful of shitake mushrooms. (Do NOT use the regular button mushrooms or criminis or portobello mushrooms which are not good for you raw.) Most mushrooms are not good raw, so stick with the ones recommended, like shitakes.
Marinate in 1 tsp raw cider vinegar and olive oil
With:
Chopped raw, oil cured olives (or sun cured)
Soaked sesame seeds (soak and wash to get rid of oxalic acid)
For an Asian dish, you can use some soy sauce. I'm allergic to it, so I've used a little bit of fennel here for a more Italian taste.

This dish is fun, filling and good!

Experiment, have fun, give your kids blue food! Hah.

Eating Local

I'm on what I call the "mermaid diet." This is a diet that is a combination of blood type diet and paying attention to my ancestry. The ONLY way I was able to overcome many of my food-related health issues was to do some serious research along these lines. I cannot do the "normal" raw diet.

Susun Weed brings up a valid issue in her debate with Brigitte Mars. Although I know Brigitte and know that she eats locally and grows her own food, she does eat quite a bit of tropical food, food that is shipped in from far away. It is difficult to understand the food politics, but it is harmful to many countries even to buy fair trade food. My problems are a little more involved in that I cannot eat many tropical foods like citrus and coconut which are mainstays of a raw diet. I also have trouble with most nuts because they are acidic.

Because of my ancestry, I have a very acidic system. Not my blood, which is normal, but my stomach. There are two kinds of acid reflux; over seventy percent of cases involve, not too much stomach acid, but too little. As enzyme activity dies out in the middle years, most people have trouble digesting their food. My problems were with always with high stomach acid--runs in the family. Eating many fruits and grains and nuts and legumes just make my stomach go into overload, not while I'm eating but after my stomach empties.

But I have rare respiratory allergies to coconut and to citrus, both of which give me eye infections, asthma and sinus congestion.

I have found that eating foods native to the British Isles and Northern Europe helps me quite a bit with allergies. I can eat some American foods, but not many. Tomatoes and beans and corn are all no-nos with me.

I love being on the West Coast. I can eat food that's pretty much local to the NW and to California. It isn't trucked in very far and much of it agrees with me. However, even when I was in Colorado, I was able to get good salads out of my garden in January. In the West, we have enough sunlight to grow all year--there is no excuse at all for not having good food from your own yard all the time if you live in the West. Even when I lived at 9000 feet, the solar power was so great that I had to vent my grow boxes.

But most of the gardeners I know do not grow in the winter. I think it's too depressing. But I always get a rush about August and into September when I know it's time to plant for winter. I abhor the thought of the old-fashioned NE winter diet where one eats old cabbages, and root-cellared carrots and sprouted potatoes! It's just not necessary. Even NE gardeners can grow all year around--Anna Edey proved this in her book Solviva.

But there is one thing that is very hard to get in winter--fresh fruit. My raw diet does not revolve around fruit--it can't, I have blood sugar issues that limit my fruit and carb intake. I believe that, in addition to eating raw, it's possible to widen one's perspective about eating fruit or eating from the store, period. Even though it's hard to want to eat a salad when it's pouring out, the greens are very warming and I always feel warmer after eating a salad. Eating dense foods like winter squash and roots like beets and rutabagas and carrots are good for winter. I also step up my intake of nuts and oils in the fall, before the Solstice. After the solstice, no matter if it's 50 below outside, I try to eat more cleansing food like salads to get ready for the brightening days.

Although dried fruit is hard to eat if you have blood sugar issues, I can get away with a small amount of it. The key is to eat three dates, not ten. I cannot eat raisins, apples or pineapple and mango (way too much sugar) dates, figs, apricots, plums, berries of all kinds, are okay in SMALL amounts. They are very warming as a small snack, especially followed by nuts.

Don't take eating raw for granted. At first it's easy to eat all those strange fruits. I encourage people to explore. Don't think about what you can't eat, but explore new foods. But once you get going, try to pay attention to what you eat and be open to strange things like having asthma from coconut. Try eating what your ancestors ate, or combining diets like the blood type diet with your raw diet.

Happy eating!

How to Eat a Salad

I hope you're laughing! I would have, but yes, I've learned to prepare salads.

Susun Weed did a good job of showing how thick the cell walls are on plants. Some nutritionists don't advise depending on greens for calcium and other minerals unless they are cooked because they can't be digested unless the cell walls are destroyed.

I always sit down when I hear things like this and think, in my usual way, "but then why do we have teeth?" And then I hear that apes are not cows and not cats and only meant to eat fruit. And I have to sit down again.

The favorite way for a chimp to eat leaves is to roll up a bunch of leaves into a pack and then chew and suck on them for an hour or so. Like gum or chaw. That seems like a very logical, very practical way of getting out all those nutrients, mixing them with enzymes and not eating all that cellulose. Cool. Now should we all start chewing leaves and spitting out the dead pack into spittoons in our offices? Hm.

I hear of many people eating blended salads. My husband is not big into noise, so no blenders at our house. And I did learn that chopping up salad greens was very bad because chopping destroyed the cell walls and turned the greens brown. Hm, I say, in my very Anne-ish way. Chopping destroys the cell walls. Chopping is good.

So I started cutting up my salads with scissors. I'm not a good chopper. But I have a wide, shallow dish for salad, and cut off the leaves of kale, lettuce and what have you into this dish and then go at it with the scissors until I can eat it with a spoon. Then I use the ol' grater. I grate beets or other roots or raw winter squash or summer squash or green papaya and put them in salad or use them as a rice substitute in a nori sheet. I also grate stuff as a pasta substitute and put pestos on top.

Pesto is another great way to eat a salad. I use a mortar and pestle and mash up herbs and greens that go a long way (strong tasting) like dill and basil and mix them half and half with dandelions or nettles or parsley, mix in a bit of olive oil, maybe some soaked nuts or seeds and, voila! pesto.

But the key to eating veggies is to masticate them into almost a juice by the time you swallow them. You can chew for a long time, but if you're rushed, used the scissors.

Recipe for a iron-rich salad

Three red lettuce leaves (or dandelion)
Three red kale leaves
A few sprigs of parsley
A tablespoon of dried dulse flakes
A grated beet
A teaspoon of dried nettles
Dill or other herb to taste
A tablespoon of sprouted sunflower seeds (or sesame seeds)
Some olive oil.

I cut up the greens very fine, and find that this combination of greens and such is very mild. I've found that certain strong-tasting herbs and greens seem to cancel each other out, or blend together to make a very palatable salad.

Here is my favorite pesto recipe

A cup of basil
A cup of parsley
A cup of dandelion greens
A teaspoon dried nettles
A half-teaspoon kelp granules
A tablespoon of some kind of soaked nuts (walnuts, sunflower seeds, pine nuts, etc.)
Olive oil.

I can't eat garlic, but if you can add it. I cut up the greens and them mash them in the mortar after I have mashed up the nuts with a little oil. Keep adding oil until you get the paste consistency you desire.

This is delicious on a cup of grated butternut squash.

Pestos are a great way of getting greens into kids and other people who won't eat nettles or dandelions or such. The basil is strong enough to hide the taste of almost anything. Basil is so strong that I usually cut it with another less expensive green anyway like parsley.

Enjoy!

Cooking Cavemen

Boy, people sure get messed up as soon as they try to drag science into food debates. I sometimes get a laugh out of people posting comments about cavemen cooking.

Why? Well, if you read accounts of modern hunter-gatherers, they, like many omnivores, were opportunists. They ate a LOT of raw food, snacking as they went, especially in summer. Most of them only cooked game at rare intervals and then pigged out on it. What if modern Americans just ate meat once a week, but ate a couple of pounds or more of it at that sitting? The other thing that hunter-gatherers cook are roots, which are usually tough and hard to eat. So, they ate soup/stew once a day. I don't see any caveman of any kind passing up a patch of berries or a tree full of fruit and not pigging out. Susun Weed in the debate, claims that raw fruit that is ripe has been "cooked" by the sun, by it's own enzymes and it's not raw. ???? Hm.

She also goes into great detail about some idea that cooking gave us a bigger brain. No, not so. Cutting edge archeologists have decided that we got the bigger brain by accident. Our ancestors probably lived in the shallow waters along the coasts of Africa and ate a lot of raw shellfish. Easy to eat, good for you, and gives kids bigger brains.

Most ancient people despised muscle meat. They preferred organ meats. I'm not a vegetarian, and eating raw meat is quite the treat, but very rich. It may be important to cook the bones down into a stew, but I'm sure that our cavemen ancestors ate plenty of raw liver, raw fish, raw shellfish, raw bugs, and raw fruit.

One can certainly join either side in the enzyme debate, but trying to "prove" that cavemen ate all their food cooked and that gave them bigger brains is pretty silly.

Brigitte Mars

Going raw for me was not as big a deal as it is for some people. I was Brigitte's neighbor in Boulder and was continuing to have my usual problems with food allergies and doing an elimination diet for severe acid reflux. I had always eaten a lot of fresh fruits and vegetables, even being teased as a child for it. I was also an avid gardener, which is how Brigitte and I met again, over the garden fence, so to speak.

I read many of her books and picked up her book, Rawsome and decided to give raw a try, since I was already half-way there. I did not have Brigitte's experience with going raw; my food allergies were too severe and my body was very different from hers. I have since discovered that I am allergic to many of the "backbone" foods of the raw diet: citrus, coconut, and all soy products. I also have major problems with many foods, raw or cooked and stay away from all plants in the onion family, most crucifers, all plants in the grain family, sprouted or cooked or whatever, many plants in the beet family, and many fruits that are very sugary, like apples.

I'm not sure about the enzyme debate, however, I do think that eating raw forces us to eat better food, and, as Brigitte often says, that may be what is really going on, we just don't know.

Yet, what inspired me to finally write this blog was seeing this debate on YouTube between renowned herbalist Susun Weed and Brigitte. I found it appalling.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5nRwn7VRvb8&feature=related

Some of why I found this debate really sad and appalling was that Susun not only gets much of her nutrition wrong, but she backpedals on much of the cooking definition until she's talking about dehydration and fermenting foods as "cooking" them. This is just silly. By the rawfoodists' definition, "cooking" is raising the temperature of food over 114 degrees Fahrenheit. Neither dehydration or fermenting need raise the temperature of food this high.

But the positive treat of this debate is that Brigitte is loving, shining, glowing with health, and she's just enthusiastic. Now Brigitte is an enthusiastic person, but you can just see that she's done something that agrees with her health, period.

My experience going raw is that it is an alternative for HEALTH. It's not weird or funky or trendy or all of that, it just makes me feel better. The first rule of nutrition is: eat what makes your body feel and work better. So much of what we eat makes our moods temporarily better. Although we may pay the price later with a sugar crash, that chocolate bar does a temporary trick. Eating for long-term health just has to be a pleasant experience that will make you feel better all the time.

I have always disliked eating. I'm a grazer and a muncher, but I don't like sitting down and eating. I get no rush off of eating, no pleasure. Eating for me became a nightmare of pain and terrible side effects. Going raw has allowed me to eliminate the foods from my diet that gave me problems and has made eating something I actually enjoy.

So, I'm going to post quite a bit here. Enjoy!