Day 357- Amylopectin- The Super Starch

We already know that for most of us gluten is not a good thing, but did you know that besides the gluten aspect of wheat it also contains what some call a “Super-Carbohydrate,” or “Super-Starch?” Wheat is made up of chains of glucose (sugar), which are called polymers. These polymers are made mainly of chains of branching glucose units called amylopectin, and a smaller amount of linear chains called amylose. Both amylopectin and amylose can be digested by the salivary and stomach enzyme, amylase, but amylopectin is more readily digested and broken down into glucose during this process than in amylose. Amylose can make it’s way to the colon undigested much more often, thus having less effect on the body’s blood sugar levels. Since amylopectin is broken down easily into glucose it raises the blood sugar in the body.

We also know that a lot has changed to the structure of grains over the last few years. Bread products have become more “fluffy.” Even bread labeled, “Whole Wheat,” is soft and gets stuck to the top of your mouth. So what has changed?

“We eat dwarf wheat, the product of genetic manipulation and hybridization that created short, stubby, hardy, high-yielding wheat plants with much higher amounts of starch and gluten and many more chromosomes coding for all sorts of new odd proteins. The man who engineered this modern wheat won the Nobel Prize -- it promised to feed millions of starving around the world. Well, it has, and it has made them fat and sick.” –Mark Hyman, MD

I came across a website created by Dr. Davis on the difference between the different forms of Amylopectin. Although I searched for more information and research on the different forms, I was unable to find a lot of information. To me what Dr. Davis is describing makes sense, but I guess my disclaimer is to take this information that I am presenting with a grain of salt.

According to what I learned on Dr. Davis’s website the starch that we now find in wheat is called amylopectin A. Amylopectin has various structures, which alter the amount of amylopectin that can be broken down by amylase, remember the more amylopectin that can be broken down affects the amount of glucose that the body will have to deal with. Amylopectin A, what is found in wheat, is the most digestible form of Amylopectin. Other forms such as Amylopectin C and B are less digestible. Amylopectin C is the lease digestible and is found in legumes. This is why many people experience gas or bloating after consumption of beans. The undigested amylopectin is able to make it’s way down to the colon, where bacteria loves to feast on the undigested starches generating lots of lovely gas. Amylopectin B is more digestible than the C form but less so than the A form, and is found in founds such as bananas and potatoes.

So the short, but not so sweet version of all this information is pretty much that wheat is making us fat. Regardless if it is white bread or whole wheat bread they are both raising out blood sugar. Two slices of whole wheat bread now raise your blood sugar more than two tablespoons of table sugar. Beware of labels advertising whole wheat or whole grain, many of those products are already loaded with sugar and they are trying to use those claims to mask that fact. Blood Sugar dysregulation is a huge issue that can lead to obesity, inflammation, diabetes, fatty liver, or other not so favorable things.

Pura Vida!

Alica Ryan, NTP

Day 356- Chicken and Wild Rice Soup

Ingredients:

• 1 package of uncooked wild rice
• 1 carton of organic chicken stock
• 4 cups water
• 3 chicken breasts, cut into small pieces
• 2 cups carrots, chopped
• 1 bundle of celery, chopped
• 1 cup mushrooms, chopped
• 1 onion, diced
• 2 cloves of garlic
• 1 tablespoon oregano
• 1 tablespoon basil
• Sea salt and pepper to taste

Directions:

1. Place chicken in a pan and cook slightly, no longer than 5 minutes
2. Place all ingredients in crock pot and cook on low for about 5-6 hours

Pura Vida!

Alica Ryan, NTP

Day 355- Workout of the Week

• Bear crawls, 2 minutes
• Side Lunges, 25 each leg
• High jumps, keep hand straight out in front and touch your knees to your hand, 15x
• Lateral arm raises with dumbbells, 20x
• Rows with dumbbells, 20x
• Side plank hold, 1 minute each side
• V-up crunches, 20x

Repeat each exercise 3 time though

Pura Vida!

Alica Ryan, NTP

Day 354- Homemade School Lunches Get Searched

Here is a pretty disturbing article that I read on Natural News. Imagine spending the time to put together a healthy lunch for your children that they will eat, just to have your children told at school that what their parents packed for them was not "healthy" enough. Not only does that take authority away from the parents, it also gives them incorrect information. If their homemade lunch is not good enough for them, and they are taught that school lunches are a healthier option, then they are going to begin to associate processed foods as healthy meals. It seems to me that it is somewhat of a slap in the face for all those that have been fighting to change lunches in schools.

Here is the article from Natural News:

U.S. schoolchildren now subjected to sack lunch searches by government agents who enforce nutritional insanity

"A local elementary school in North Carolina is searching the homemade lunches of school children with the goal of forcing children to ditch their nutritious, home-made meals and learn to consume pasteurized, homogenized USDA-approved cow's milk and chemically-laced processed meats that promote cancer.

This is what happened, as reported in the Carolina Journal yesterday:

"A preschooler at West Hoke Elementary School ate three chicken nuggets for lunch Jan. 30 because a state employee told her the lunch her mother packed was not nutritious."

The paper goes on to report:

"The girl's turkey and cheese sandwich, banana, potato chips, and apple juice did not meet U.S. Department of Agriculture guidelines, according to the interpretation of the agent who was inspecting all lunch boxes in her More at Four classroom that day."

Hold on a sec there, partner. There are AGENTS inspecting lunch boxes of schoolchildren?

You thought the TSA was bad? Get ready for school lunch pat-downs!

That's the first highly disturbing part of this entire story. See, the corrupt state is trying to take over everything, including the American family. Telling little Johnny that his mom packed an "inferior" lunch is one way of teaching children that they should worship the state instead of their parents. It's entirely consistent with the actions of pathetic child health sellouts such as California Governor Jerry Brown who recently signed a law giving 12-year-old children the right to "consent" to being injected with Gardasil vaccines as long as they don't tell their parents.

Parents are useless. The state is God.Write that down, boys and girls, as you'll be tested on it later. And please don't tell all the TSA perverts that new jobs are opening up involving searching the sacks of elementary school children, or they'll quit the TSA in droves and line up to be part of anything that might involve touching little children.

In North Carolina, the homemade school lunches that don't meet USDA guidelines are then "enhanced" with what the state calls the "missing items" (the processed meat laced with chemicals, or the dead, pasteurized milk, produced with Bovine Growth Hormones). Parents are then billed (fined) for the additional cost of these "missing" items.

In other words, the state is forcing parents to buy cancer-causing processed foods and feed them to their children!

"What got me so mad," said the girl's mother, as reported in Carolina Journal.com, "...is, number one, don't tell my kid I'm not packing her lunch box properly. I pack her lunchbox according to what she eats. It always consists of a fruit. It never consists of a vegetable. She eats vegetables at home because I have to watch her because she doesn't really care for vegetables."

But the other truly disturbing part about all this is that the "official" USDA-approved nutritional requirements for children are nothing more than a total sellout to the corrupt dairy industry! Here, drink pasteurized, homogenized, hormone-produced milk which will probably make the girls hit puberty at age 9 while causing the little boys to grow armpit hair before they're old enough to tie their own shoelaces.

Ditch your healthy food and eat this homogenized crap!

So the girl brought to school a turkey and cheese sandwich, a banana, some potato chips and some apple juice. Admittedly, it's not the lunch of champions or anything, but guess what the school forced her to eat instead? Chicken nuggets.

Yeah, those are the deep-fried "parts is parts" chicken-like objects made from mechanically-separated chicken (yuck). They probably contain MSG or some other taste-enhancing chemical, too, and they're no doubt fried in genetically-modified soy oil or corn oil. That must be very conducive to a learning environment, huh?

And this elementary school's current home page features a giant photo of children holding up signs that read, "HELP FIGHT HEART DISEASE." Seriously? Do they honestly think feeding chicken nuggets to preschoolers is an intelligent way to fight heart disease? (Dear God, what has public education come to in America?)

Since when was the state any kind of authority on nutrition anyway?

All this takes a lot of gall for a government that routinely formulates the most nutritionally-depleted school lunch programs and prison food imaginable. If the government was in charge of our nutrition, we'd all be eating genetically modified poison laced with pharmaceuticals and birth control. It's almost like Bill Gates' heavenly recipe for "feeding the world," huh?

Eat this and die. That's what the government's pushing these days. After all, the sooner you all die, the more money the government will save on social security, Medicare and other entitlements it can't afford to pay for much longer. I bet that's one social science lesson these kids aren't taught in school.You're more valuable to the state dead than alive.

The government likes to act like it's all "official" or something, and that it's somehow looking out for the welfare of these children. It was the Division of Child Development and Early Educationat the Department of Health and Human Services which enforced these loony requirements. According to all those "officials" (i.e. government nutritional morons who eat junk food all day while sitting at their desks and injecting themselves with insulin all day), a "healthy" meal for a child should consist of:

• One serving of meat, such as sausages laced with cancer-causing sodium nitrite, which is linked to a 300% increase in brain tumors in children and a 67% increase in pancreatic cancer

• One serving of pasteurized, homogenized, heart-disease inducing cow's milk which also causes allergies, autoimmune disorders and digestive problems.

• One serving of grain, which could be met by serving some nutritionally-depleted white bread.

• Two servings of fruit or vegetables, including those gross canned peaches floating in corn syrup.

Yep! That's the USDA's pathetic definition of nutrition, folks. A bunch of disease-inducing processed dead food that's sanctioned by the very same state that wants a dead population. So it all makes sense, you see.

God forbid the mom that packs a lunch for her child that looks something like this:

• A fresh sprout salad (state officials have never seen living sprouts and would probably condemn them as being too "alive" to be safely consumed. Irradiate it!).

• A fresh avocado sprinkled with paprika and nutritional yeast (huh? Is that a fruit? A vegetable? What does it count for? This would confuse school officials for weeks who would have to convene a committee to study the issue...)

• An egg sandwich made from free-range chicken eggs, served up on gluten-free whole grain English muffins (what? No meat! You are murdering your child, you careless parents! Call Child Protective Services!)

• A bottle of fresh juice made that morning from oranges, carrots, lemons and a hint of ginger. (LIVING food? That's the food of terrorists! Nothing alive is allowed in the schools! Forbidden!)

You see, school officials wouldn't recognize a nutritious lunch of it slapped them across the face. There's nothing quite like being cold-cocked with an egg-and-tomato sprout sandwich.

Instead, these pathetic state "health department" enforcers apparently ended their own nutritional education with health class in high school, which gives you evenlesseducation than the innate knowledge of a typical mule, because at least the mule knows to eat the living grass and flowers growing right out of the soil. Yep, I said it: These state officials knowless than an ass about nutrition."

To read more of this story on Natural News, click here.

Pura Vida!

Alica Ryan, NTP

Day 353- Beef Vegetable Soup

Isn't funny how certain tastes and smells can bring back strong memories? There aren't very many dishes that remind me of my grandma, but her vegetable soup was one of them; well that and the rock hard brownies she always made that everyone for some reason always seemed to love.

Her soup is probably something that no one will ever be able to recreate in it's entirety, but I have a feeling that many of us will continue to try. The soup outside from the warm and cozy house that it was originally served in is irreplaceable, hence so is the most important ingredient in her soup.

I do have to commend myself on my first attempt. It may not be exactly as I remember, but it was close enough for me.

Ingredients:

• 2 potatoes, peeled and diced
• 1 bag of shredded cabbage, or 1 head of cabbage diced
• 2 cups of diced carrots
• 1 onion sliced
• 1 carton of organic free-range chicken stock or vegetable stock
• 1 pound of 100% grass-fed ground beef
• 1 can of diced tomatoes, or about 2 cups of fresh diced tomatoes
• 1 bunch of celery, chopped
• 1 tablespoon of dried oregano
• 1 clove of garlic, crushed
• 1 tablespoon of dried basil
• 1/2 teaspoon fresh ground pepper
• 1/2 teaspoon of sea salt

Directions:

1. In a crock pot add the ground beef, chicken stock, carrots, celery, onion, and potatoes.
2. Cook for for about 8 hours on medium heat
3. Add the cabbage, tomatoes, herbs, garlic, salt and pepper
4. Cook for an additional 1-2 hours or until all vegetables are tender

Pura Vida!

Alica Ryan, NTP

Day 352- Paleo Flow Chart

The paleo diet is becoming more and more popular as people start to see all the positive results from this dietary lifestyle. It may seem like a struggle at first to adaptive to a whole different way of eating, but if you were to break it down it really is quite simple.

Below is a helpful and clever Paleo Diet Flowchart. Eating paleo basically means eating more meat, healthy fats, vegetables, a smaller amount of fruit, and eliminating grains, potatoes, peanuts, corn, and soy. I am definitely a strong advocate of the paleo diet, although my words speak louder than my actions (I just added potatoes to the soup I am making). But life is all about moderation, at least for the most part (gluten is an major exception to that rule), so having a potato every once in awhile, depending on the person, is still in my opinion doing good.

There are many days that I go without any type of grain and trust me it's not hard. Give it a shot if you are interested, and I can guarantee that you will feel better. Once we eliminate the weight of so much processed foods, and carbohydrates from our bodies we will be able to feel lighter and more energized. It's funny how amazingly powerful nutrition can be!

Pura Vida!

Alica Ryan, NTP

Paleo Hacks Flowchart

Day 351- Valentine's Day Dinner

I came home after a long day of work to a delicious Valentine's dinner made by my wonderful husband. He used scallops, which I love and made a perfect gluten-free salad that was just my style. Happy Valentines day to everyone!

Baked Scallop Citrus Salad:

Ingredients:

• 1 pound bay scallops
• 4 cups organic spinach
• 1 avocado, diced
• 1 clove of garlic
• 1 orange, cut into small pieces
• 1 teaspoon Dijon mustard
• 1 tablespoon rice vinegar
• 1 teaspoon honey
• 1 tablespoon olive oil
• 1/2 cup carrots, diced
• 1/4 cup shredded cabbage
• Sea salt and fresh ground pepper to taste

Directions:

1. Mix olive oil, honey, rice vinegar, and mustard together and chill
2. Saute scallops in a little bit of olive oil with garlic for 3 minutes
3. Place scallops in baking dish, sprinkle with sea salt and fresh ground pepper
4. Bake scallops at 350 for about 10 minutes
5. Mix spinach, avocado and oranges with the citrus dressing
6. Top with baked scallops, and enjoy

Pura Vida!

Alica Ryan, NTP