Turkey and Mixed Green Salad

Salad:

3 large hard boiled eggs, remove shell and chop into small pieces

6 cups mixed salad greens

1 medium onion, slice into thin strips

1 large tomato, slice into thick strips

1/2 yellow pepper, remove seeds and cut into thin strips

6 thick turkey slices

6 black olives, chopped

Sea salt and black pepper

Arrange salad ingredients on a large serving platter (refer to picture).

Vinaigrette:

8 large garlic cloves, roasted and peeled

3 tablespoons red wine vinegar

1 tablespoon whole grain mustard

1 tablespoon fresh lemon juice

1/2 cup extra virgin olive oil

Sea salt and black pepper

Combine the garlic, vinegar, mustard, lemon juice and sea salt and black pepper in a blender and blend until smooth. With the motor running, slowly add the oil until emulsified. Drizzle generously over the salad.

Serves 4

How Food Additives Threaten Your Health

www.theecologist.org - January 18th, 2012

In an extract from his new book, The Power of Self-Healing, Dr Fabrizio Mancini explains why sugar and food additives - from aspartame to trans fats - could have a severely detrimental effect on your health.

More than ever, I believe that we’ve become increasingly concerned about what’s in the 1,500 pounds of food each of us eats every year. We’re enjoying more lean meat, vegetables and fruits - and trying to cut back on fattening stuff like desserts and fried foods. All of this is certainly a step in the right direction, but many of us still have a long way to go. Our misconceptions run rampant, too. Some people still think margarine is much better than butter (it’s not - margarine is high in nasty, artery-clogging trans fats), so they’ll use twice as much. Or they think granola bars are a healthy snack, when they’re actually processed foods, loaded with fat and sugar.

The Suppressors

Any dietary problem can turn into a health problem. What I’d like to do is look at what I call the suppressors, foods that negate self-healing. They can make an unexpected appearance in your lifestyle, and you might not even be aware of them. Fortunately, I don’t have a long list so a few little tweaks will obliterate suppressors from your diet.

Added Sugar 

Ever wondered why you get cold sores or canker sores after eating candy or sweets? The reason is this: sugar is an ‘immunosuppressant.’ It interferes with the activity of immune-boosting lymphocytes. Your natural defences go down - and you get infections. Imagine 150 bags of sugar piled up in your garage. That’s how much sugar the average person consumes in a year! This means many of us are suppressing our immune systems by eating too much sugar. I believe that if we stopped eating such large amounts, we’d see a major decrease in colds, flu, and other infections.

You may have heard that sugar feeds cancer cells. There is evidence for this, but here is actually what happens: A diet high in sugar and refined foods makes blood sugar, or glucose, spike really high. This spike increases insulin production in the body (insulin helps your cells store and use glucose). Blood chemistry marked by chronically elevated glucose and elevated insulin sets the stage for cancer and its spread. Cancer cells are studded with insulin receptors. Receptors operate like door locks. Once insulin gets to the receptor, it acts like a key and unlocks the receptors on the cell wall. The cell opens up and lets insulin in the cancer cell, where it stimulates the division of the cell. Can you circumvent this process? Yes - in the following ways: avoiding refined sugars and flours, exercising regularly, cutting back on alcohol, reducing stress, and taking certain nutritional supplements. Sugar in all its various forms, including corn syrup, contributes to obesity and therefore to a whole range of related problems such as high blood pressure, heart disease, diabetes, and depression. We don’t really need sugar to live.

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Peach Blueberry Compote

4 large peaches

2 cups blueberries

1 cup maple syrup

1 cinnamon stick

pinch of cloves

pinch of nutmeg

1/2 orange, juiced

1 orange, zest

Remove skin and pit of the peaches and slice into thick strips.  In a medium pot on high heat, add maple syrup, orange juice and zest, nutmeg, cloves, and cinnamon stick. Bring to a rolling boil until the liquid has reduced to a syrup that will coat the back of a spoon. Lower temperature to medium low and add the fruit. Cover and gently simmer for about 5 minutes or until the peaches are soft.

Remove cinnamon stick and serve warm by itself or as a sidekick to your favorite dessert.

Makes 6 servings id served on it's own.

The Tampered Apple

www.care2.com - January 16th, 2012

“A bowl of apples is like a piece of art,” says Tony Freytag, marketing director at Crunch Pak, an apple-processing company. “It’s display. People won’t touch it. But you put out a tray of cut-up apples — that’s food.”

From a 2006 New York Times article looking at the booming industry of sliced and packaged apples

Apples, beyond looking like art and being the symbolic embodiment of the fertile, natural world, are also a hugely popular and profitable “natural” commodity. But as the above quote implies, cut apples are seen as more inviting and approachable than even the most perfect and flawless apple. This would explain why the cut and packaged apple industry is utterly booming. According to The New York Times, in 2006 “McDonald’s stocked 54 million pounds of pre-sliced apples, to sell with caramel dip or in salads, and this increased visibility boosted enthusiasm for them in school cafeterias and among time-strapped, health-conscious parents nationwide.” Crunch Pak, and the entire pre-sliced apple industry have greatly impacted how apples are sold, packaged, and consumed, and this, in large part, is due to the technological innovation employed to keep apples from browning. Apples, upon being sliced and exposed to oxygen, naturally begin to discolor, or brown, but companies like Crunch Pak have figured out how to cheat nature by rinsing apples in a combination of calcium and ascorbic acid — vitamin C — to maintain “freshness” and color. This is because a package of beige apple slices, no matter how delicious, will just not sell.

While this little preservation method has insured the viability of the apple-processing industry, it has also brought forth other entrepreneurial enterprise – namely the introduction of the genetically modified (GM) apple. A Canadian biotechnology company, Okanagan Specialty Fruits, has asked the United States to approve a genetically modified apple that won’t brown soon after its sliced, saying this improvement could boost sales of apples for snacks, salads and other uses. The conceit is that this biotech development, called the “Arctic” Apple, will improve upon Mother Nature, and will provide greater shelf stability and durability for retailers (no word yet on how this will at all benefit consumers). This would not be the first genetically modified fruit on the market. Back in 1992, the US Department of Agriculture approved a genetically modified tomato that was proven to ripen more slowly, and genetically modified salmon are still working their way through the system, hoping to hit the market as early as 2011. And domestically produced apples (at least the ones that are conventionally grown) are far from being wholly natural, with lots of cloning, spraying, and tinkering done behind the scenes. Even still, the leap from relatively natural to GM is a hard bite to swallow.

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