Painting by Belynda Wilson Thomas

When diet is wrong, medicine is of no use. When diet is correct, medicine is of no need. Ayurvedic Proberb

What is easy to do, is also easy not to do. There are many ways we can make small changes in our lives. I was watching a podcast by Dr. Tim Spector about eating thirty different plant-based foods per week as a goal. Bread, rice, and pasta don’t count but seeds, nuts, legumes, fruits, vegetables, and even spices and herbs count as ¼ of a plant, but each one only counts once per week. The idea is the more varied our diet the more varied our gut buddies will be and the healthier our gut health the healthier we are. Some experts say all health begins in the gut.

It can sound daunting to eat thirty different plants in one week especially if our diet is not varied. This is where stir-fries, soups, and salads really get our numbers up.

Health is our first wealth and without health, we really won’t appreciate everything else in our lives to the fullest. Throwing a bag of frozen mixed berries and some frozen mixed vegetables in the shopping cart is an easy and economical way to add to our numbers. One of the things I don’t want to end up doing is adding to my food waste. Salad kits are another way of adding to our numbers without breaking the bank.

I thought it would be harder than it is to get thirty plants in my diet, and now I have an excuse to have a bowl of popcorn, but I only get to count one bowl, and then only if I haven’t had corn on the cob. There is also now an incentive to scout out exotic fruits and vegetables, look up new recipes, and get more inspired in the kitchen.

It is easy to do, but also easy not to do. It is easy to have a day when I haven’t added one new plant to my list. Too many days like that and on day seven I am cramming everything into a soup or salad.

Let food be thy medicine and medicine be thy food. Hippocrates

Is this a fad or a better way of eating? Kombucha is part of my diet and is supposed to be good for gut health and I have been making it since 2019. No one else in the house drinks it and I make a batch a week.

Dr. Tim Spector from the British Gut Project is pushing for 30 plants a week. He says the wider diversity of fiber-packed plants we eat, the happier and more diverse our gut microbiome will be. I like the idea of someone telling me to eat more and more variety instead of less and less. There was an idea that we should eat five plants a day – but some of us would eat the same five plants and that would not give our gut much diversity.

Our gut microbes do many things for us:

They train our immune cells.

Increase our resilience to infection.

Strengthen our gut barrier.

Communicate with our brain.

Balance our blood sugar, lower blood fats, and help prevent many diseases.

It makes sense we are what we eat and it is one of the areas in our life where we have control. Small changes can pay big dividends in our lives. It’s our life and it is up to us to make the best of it. What if a more varied and colorful diet is part of the answer to better health, does it start when we choose what food to put in the cart at the supermarket?

The beauty of food as medicine is that the choice to heal and promote health can begin as soon as the next meal. Unknown

Medicine is not healthcare. Food is healthcare. Medicine is sick care. Unknown

The food you eat can either be the safest and most powerful form of medicine or the slowest form of poison. Ann Wigmore

Thank you for reading this post. I hope you enjoyed it. I hope you will come back and read some more. Have a blessed day filled with gratitude, joy, and love.

To subscribe, comment, and see archives or categories of posts click on the picture and scroll to the end.

Thank you to those that read my books, and a special thank you to those that leave a review on Goodreads and Amazon. If you click on the Amazon link and purchase an item I receive a small percentage of the sale through the Amazon affiliate program.

Painting by Belynda Wilson Thomas

To eat is a necessity, but to eat intelligently is an art. Francois de La Rochefoucauld

I’m cleaning out my old art studio in the basement to give to my grandson for his bedroom and I’ve moved my art studio up to my son’s old room. I went through my vegan phase which started September 5, 2015, when I took the three-week vegan challenge my son issued. That challenge which lasted a few years led me to scour book stores for books on plant-based eating. I believe I am healthier and lighter from taking that challenge and eating more plant-based than we did before the challenge, but meat, eggs, and cheese are back on the menu.

My latest food challenge is removing fructose from my diet for two weeks. The idea is to keep the fructose eaten daily to between 25 and 35 grams after the fructose fast is completed. Ironically the best book I’ve found on fructose is called The Sugar Fix by Richard J. Johnson, MD with Timothy Gower and I had it in the basement with the books I am sending to Value Village.

I bought book after book after book on plant-based eating, but how we ate daily was by tweaking our normal meals and replacing meat with beans and starch. Meat replacements are not something I’ve embraced. Whole food, mostly plants is a good way to eat. I have six bags of books that are going back to Value Village which is where I bought most, but not all of them. I am still keeping many books on nutrition, healing, and cookbooks I’ve collected over the years I don’t want to part with. The books I am parting with were stored in the basement at the back of my art room. I’ve brought some books back upstairs over time but the ones that remained hidden in the recesses of the art room didn’t call out to me to keep when I looked through them. I only picked five books I couldn’t part with.

It is health that is real wealth and not pieces of gold and silver. Mahatma Gandhi

One of the things I’ve realized about myself is I buy books perhaps thinking that by osmosis everything in those books can be soaked up without actually reading and studying them. My art room is filled with books and if I were proficient at every technique in those books I would be a great artist. If I read all the books of wisdom I own I would be wise.

There are so many books on nutrition telling us to do this and do that. I am finding the way of eating I learned from Mom and Dad on the farm is probably the healthiest way of eating for me. Meat, eggs, potatoes, beans, rice, good bread, home-baked cakes, pies, cookies, lots of vegetables, butter and cheese, not much fruit, no sugar in tea or coffee, and packaged convenience foods kept to a minimum.

We may tweak our diet over our lifetime to keep ourselves as healthy as we can. Food is the best medicine we have to keep ourselves strong, and nothing can take the place of good nutrition. When we pass on healthy eating habits to our children we give them the best start we can.  

Those who think they have no time for healthy eating will sooner or later have to find time for illness. Edward Stanley

Healthy citizens are the greatest asset any country can have. Winston Churchill

Don’t allow a love problem or work problem to become an eating problem. Stop trying to stuff your feelings down with food. Karen Salmansohn

Thank you for reading this post. I hope you enjoyed it. I hope you will come back and read some more. Have a blessed day filled with gratitude, joy, and love.

To subscribe, comment, and see archives or categories of books click on the picture and scroll to the end.

Thank you to everyone that reads my books. A special thank you to those that leave a review on Goodreads and Amazon. If you click on the Amazon link and purchase an item I receive a small percentage of the sale through the Amazon affiliate program.

Painting by Belynda Wilson Thomas

All the money in the world can’t buy you back good health. Reba McEntire

This is the last week of official summer. To walk in the morning I already need a jacket. This morning the alarm rang and I turned over for another hour. No walk, no sunrise, no reading inspirational books. This is what happens when we give up our time. When we sleep in it is our-time we give up. It is our time for centering ourselves, our time for setting the tone of the day, our time for exercise, our time to make a better breakfast.

Today is a fast day so I’ll gain time that would have been spent making breakfast. Twenty-four-hour fasts are fitting into my life. It isn’t that hard going from dinner to dinner. It could be that too many experiments are going on at once in my life. Intermittent fasting has been a part of my life for quite a while, now I’m adding twenty-four-hour fasts and kombucha.

Our bodies live in perpetual summer getting ready for a winter that never comes according to Dr. Gundry. This is where insulin resistance comes in. We are prepared for lean, hard, hungry times; we put on weight because we will need it to get through the famine of winter. Except, year after year we don’t have that lean, hungry time. Almost all religions have fasting as part of their traditions.

When I look at pictures of my Dad’s family in their early years, they probably weren’t slim just because of youth, feeding a family of twelve in the thirties and forties would have been a challenge. Our abundance of food is both good for us and bad for us.

Maintaining good health should be the primary focus of everyone. Sangram Singh

According to Dr. Gundry, the key to longevity is to eat less sugar and less protein. Fasting is a way to do this and sometimes it is easier to stay away from something completely than to only eat a little bit. I won’t eat breakfast or lunch today but I will eat a nice dinner. Bone broth was on the menu during a few of my fasts but surprisingly my weight went up. Bone broth is said to be very healthy, and I do intend to bring it into my diet but not during my twenty-four-hour fasts.

My husband joined me on a twenty-four-hour bone broth fast and he noticed the same result. My son said to me, “Mom, there is no such thing as a bone-broth fast. You are either fasting or you are not.” Perhaps he’s right, and who wants to think they are fasting but not getting the benefit of it? There is no benefit to fooling ourselves, and they say we are the easiest person to fool.

Health is the first wealth. Dr. Gundry says the secret to longevity is a healthy gut. He tells us if we are careful of what we eat we can die young at a ripe old age. What I have gotten out of reading his books is we should follow his plan and then experiment with what works for us. Eat the things in moderation that agree with us and eliminate foods that don’t agree with us. Over time as our gut health improves we may find we can eat some foods that formerly bothered us.

This is not a one-size-fits-all. We are individuals with individual bodies; we need to learn to be our own control board. Some long-lived people have smoked. It isn’t recommended but what else did they do that made that okay?

Dr. Gundry believes kombucha is good for us, but we have to watch the sugar content. Homemade kombucha from the first ferment will not have much sugar, it is the second ferment where the sugar and flavoring are added.

My recipe of 1 cup sugar to 14 cups water and 8 tea bags (black or green) gives you a starting 17.9 grams of sugar per cup. According to research after 7 days of fermentation 34% of the sugar is left which equals 6 grams of sugar per cup. After 21 days it drops to 19% sugar which is 3.4 grams of sugar per cup. If we do a second ferment and add more sugar and fruit this is where the high sugar content comes from. Bottled kombucha available on store shelves has a wide sugar content, and some of it is pasteurized which will kill the good bacteria. Then all we are drinking is an expensive high sugar beverage.

Yesterday I picked up a book The Healthy Probiotic Diet by R.J. Ruppenthal, I was looking for a book on kombucha but The Big Book of Kombucha was $37.00 (I need to think about that.) The Healthy Probiotic Diet book is not about a diet it is about getting more healthy probiotics into our diet and kombucha is one he recommends. He gives recipes for turning kombucha into sparkling soda – this is done in the second fermentation stage.

If we don’t have health do we have anything? Our health is largely up to the genes we were born with and how we feed ourselves. Our choices shape our life, isn’t one of the most important choices we make what we put into our bodies?

You can’t take good health for granted. Jack Osbourne

Thank you for reading this post. I hope you enjoyed it. I hope you will come back and read some more. Have a blessed day filled with gratitude, health, and love.

To subscribe, comment, see archives or categories of posts click on the picture and scroll to the end. Please subscribe, comment, and share.

If you purchase an item through the Amazon.ca link I may receive a small percentage of the sale through the Amazon.ca affiliate program.

See all 2 images

The Healthy Probiotic Diet: More Than 50 Recipes for Improved Digestion, Immunity, and Skin Health Hardcover – Apr 15 2014

by R. J. Ruppenthal (Author) 5.0 out of 5 stars 1 customer review

 See all 3 formats and editions

• Kindle Edition
  CDN$ 16.99Read with Our Free App
• Hardcover
  CDN$ 7.9219 Used from CDN$ 4.3810 New from CDN$ 5.09

Let food be thy medicine, thy medicine shall be thy food. Hippocrates

I’ve been pulling up posts from last year now that I’ve passed my one year anniversary of blogging. It’s interesting to see what was on my mind a year ago. There is no corresponding post for today from last year. Maybe we were too busy getting ready for a wedding. Watching what we were eating so our bathing suits would look as good as they could.

We worked hard to get a few pounds off for the wedding but they have crept back on. The weight I lost when I cut out the cream in my coffee and moved to a more plant-based diet has stayed off.

I’ve been bringing eggs, cheese and meat back into my diet. I picked up The Plant Paradox by Dr. Steven Gundry, and then his earlier book Dr. Gundry’s Diet Revolution. I never embraced veganism but I did embrace plant-based. Deprivation doesn’t work for me. I choose what I eat, and I don’t pass up something I really want. If every day was a buffet it would be hard, too many choices means too much food.

Dr. Gundry tells us “Meat is bad for us because it is good for us, and plants are good for us because they are bad for us.” This is the food paradox. He tells us we can outwit our genes, which kill us off once we’ve outlived our usefulness. This phenomenon is genetic pleiotrophy, meaning genes that activate one sequence of events during part of our life cycle activate the opposite events when called upon to change direction. He says, “The foods of developed nations are so “good” for our genes that they are “bad” for us and our entire society.

He tells us we should:

Fool our genes into thinking that we are not fat enough to kill yet.

Convince them we’re not working overtime, struggling to survive.

Get them to reverse their effect so they undo the damage they – with our help – have already done to our body.

He tells us our diet allows us to grow faster, become stronger, and females can produce babies at younger ages and have more of them. But, all this high-calorie food has a price, because of the “calorie counter” for each species on earth. Within our master computer is a program that monitors the number of calories we consume and compares it to a standard that allows each human (like all other animals studied) to grow, reproduce and raise young, and then get out of the way in order to conserve precious food resources.

Take care of your body. It’s the only place you have to live. Jim Rohn

Dr. Steven Gundry is a heart surgeon who realized that bypasses and stints aren’t the answer to heart disease, diet is. He said even though he ran twenty miles a week, and put in an hour per day at the gym he still weighed 228 pounds. He was still plagued with high cholesterol, high blood pressure, high blood sugar, and frequent colds. He says his activity level, food consumption, and “pain” all conspired to inform his genes that he wasn’t a very successful animal, which he says activates killer genes, as does taking more than our fair share of food.

I’ve believed we are what we eat for a long time. Dr. Gundry puts a new spin on it. When he turned fifty he realized that the people he was operating on looked a lot like him, they were all part of the “Big Boy Club,” men who weigh over 220 lbs.

Where we carry our fat is important. Dr. Gundry says, “Fat on your ass, you are built to last. Fat in your gut, you are out of luck.”

He says we miss the point in the controversy over meat versus plant-based. The anti-nutrients in plants, when taken in the correct dose activate the hormesis response which prolongs our life with low doses of poisons that effectively tell our genes to protect us.

Marmoset monkeys which eat nothing but fruits are unable to reproduce in zoos unless their diet is fortified with 6 percent animal protein. It turns out the perfect zoo fruit was missing the worms and bugs naturally present in fruit in the wild. So it would appear some animal protein is a good thing.

Dr. Gundry’s diet is a balance between high protein and plant-based. He tells us the ratio of omega 6 fats to omega 3 fats is critical in balancing inflammation and anti-inflammation hormones. Ground squirrels won’t go into hibernation if the ratio is disrupted in the laboratory.

He says there is a contest between individuals and their genes, in earlier periods individuals were the winners, and species were the losers. Our modern way of eating is the perfect diet to increase our species but to cut down individuals sooner.

For years diet has been an experiment for me. Dr. Gundry’s Diet Evolution and Plant Paradox is just a continuation. Does he have all the answers? If we tweak our diet and lives resulting in progress isn’t that what we are looking for?

We are what we eat so let’s not be fast, cheap, easy, or fake.

If diet is wrong medicine is of no use. If diet is correct medicine is of no need. Ancient Ayurvedic proverb

Thank you for reading this post. I hope you enjoyed it. I hope you will come back and read some more. Have a blessed day filled with gratitude, health, and love.

To subscribe, comment, see archives or categories of posts click on the picture and scroll to the end. Please subscribe, comment, and share.

If you purchase an item through the Amazon.ca link I may receive a small percentage of the sale through the Amazon.ca affiliate program.

See all 3 images

Dr. Gundry’s Diet Evolution: Turn Off the Genes That Are Killing You and Your Waistline Paperback – Mar 3 2009

by Dr. Steven R. Gundry (Author) 4.1 out of 5 stars 141 customer reviews

 See all 9 formats and editions

• Kindle Edition 
  CDN$ 10.99Read with Our Free App
•  Audiobook 
  CDN$0.00Free with your Audible trial
• Hardcover 
  from CDN$ 26.178 Used from CDN$ 26.172 New from CDN$ 151.32
• Paperback 
  CDN$ 19.9953 Used from CDN$ 0.0126 New from CDN$ 9.361 Collectible from CDN$ 37.55
• Audio CD 
  CDN$ 39.432 Used from CDN$ 40.165 New from CDN$ 38.25