That is, if you’re not going to the Picnic at the Brick Works. I’ll be there and it’s always an amazing event.

5 Days Healing with Superfoods

The first group challenge will start on Sunday, April 18th. The tutorial is now available for purchase, for the low price of $12.

You don’t have to participate in the group challenge in order to use the tutorial but here are a some advantages to the group challenge:

• Themed posts on Meghan’s blog all week.
• Twitter coaching (@meghantelpner)
• Group support through Meghan’s blog.

5 Days Healing with Everyday Superfoods, in Meghan’s words:

If food is what is making us sick in our society, what if we amp up our diets and use food to resolve the problem too. What if we looked at food as our fuel, as our medicine and made it easy, delicious, and so uber powerful that our body had no choice but to heal and repair itself? That is what this tutorial is about.

The more I began to learn about the healing properties of these superfoods, the more of them I wanted in my diet. What was missing for me, in everything I was reading, was the inherent lack of practicality. Some might argue that being able to throw everything into a blender, stir it together, and drink your meal down is the ultimate in practical. True, it might be for some people. But what about the people who have families to feed, who want to sit down to a meal with others, who get genuine pleasure from being in the kitchen and finding creative ways to blend raw superfoods, cooked superfoods and plain old whole, unprocessed foods into delicious meals?  That is where this tutorial comes in.

I will show you how to incorporate these superfoods into your everyday eating.

The guide contains 60 + pages of info including (but of course not limited to):

•    The Definition of a Superfood
•    Benefits of Whole Foods
•    Food as Fuel
•    Food as Medicine
•    Challenges with Food Guides and Diets
•    Calories Versus Nutrition
•    Benefits of Raw

Additional Resources
•    Conscious Eating
•    Sprouting 101
•    Food and Mood Journal
•    Whole Foods Shopping List
•    Blank Meal Plan Template

Even if this is not a program you want to follow full on right now, or even in the near future, the information included will  enlighten many of your food decisions and help you to understand how easily you can super-power your eating everyday!

You can read more about the Healing with Everyday Superfoods tutorial on her website here and here.

Also check out Meghan’s other e-tutorials: Green Smoothie Cleanse, Low GI eating, 5 Days Vegan, and The Lunar Cycle: Hormone Balance.

Meghan’s tutorials are her answer to the many questions and comments she gets via email and on her blog from people who are feeling challenged in their endeavors to transition to a healthier way of living but don’t know where to begin. She synthesizes years of nutrition education, kitchen experience, teaching experience, client/consultation experience, and her big book shelf into the vital information you need to know in one concise package. The guides are interesting, inspiring and at some points quirky, like Meghan herself. Meghan tries to make the meal plans and recipes easy, achievable and sustainable.

Regarding her e-tutorials, she says: “I am in no way working to convert anyone to any single way of eating, only to explore new and healthy foods, and new and healthy practices so my readers can decide what works for them and what doesn’t on an individual basis.”

Visit Meghan’s store to see everything she has to offer (for sale, that is).

Eat well, be well.

Edit: No, I’m not running a contest. Maybe I will in the future but I don’t think I have enough readers to make it fun. I’d want people fighting for it.

• In her new blog, Beer and Buttertarts, Sheryl goes into more detail about the recall as it applies to Canadians.

• Due to the city workers’ strike in Toronto many of the farmer’s markets were closed. Well, not anymore! [Source: Toronto Star. Thanks to @TOFoodie for the tip.]

• Good news for vegetarians: You’re less likely to develop blood, bladder and stomach cancer. According to the study, vegetarians had slightly higher, but not significantly so, rates of colon and rectum cancer. The study looked at vegetarians over 12 years. [Decision News Media]

• “EU scraps ban on misshaped fruit and veg”. Odd that there was a ban to begin with. [Decision News Media]

• Sometimes I read articles like this one from Europe and think that it’s unlikely this would ever happen in North America because of the influence that the food industry has over government: “Calls to curb meat consumption through labelling” [Decision News Media/Food Navigator]

• mmmm…watermelon. Amazing that I’ve never thought of watermelon varieties. Instead, I think “seedless”, “with seeds”, “regular sized” and “small enough that I can carry it home”. I usually buy the last one. [Saveur]

• “From January to June 2009, at least 69 people from 29 states have gotten sick with E. coli O157:H7.  Many of them confessed to eating Nestlé’s raw cookie dough.” [Marion Nestle]

• Fooducate’s 11 Quick Facts about Phosphoric Acid (Yes, that Chemical in Coca Cola) reminds me of Meghan’s recent post about Coca Cola titled “Coke Makes People Fat”. I read the update today, in which she printed an email response that she received from the Public Affairs Manager from Coca-Cola Canada defending the drink. I guess their PR people monitor mentions of their company online. It’s the right PR strategy. It’s what we do in government. (Media monitoring and now new media monitoring – blogs, Twitter, Facebook etc. -  thanks to me.)

• I still don’t believe that you can make processed cheese healthy. [Decision News Media]

• No thanks to bland, mutant strawberries: Letters in Saturday’s Toronto Star respond to their strawberry story from the previous Saturday. Reading the first letter, I felt like telling her to go see Food Inc., or to stay away from it. It would break her heart. See video of original story here:

• New national (Canadian) standards for organic food take effect today (June 30). [CBC]

• For my local readers: Taste T.O.’ Summerlicious Survival Guide.

Eat well, be well.

Yesterday morning while listening to CBC news in bed I heard that the Toronto District School Board had voted to extend its $550,000 contract with Pepsi for another year. The debate involved health concerns of Pepsi beverages.

On July 10 the Toronto Star  reported,

While aspartame is deemed a safe food additive by Health Canada, trustees and staff say they are uncomfortable with only offering artificially sweetened drinks without knowing the long term impact on health.

When I read the following quote in the Globe and Mail yesterday morning I became quite annoyed:

The board report elicited a missive from Refreshments Canada, the company selling Pepsi-Cola’s drinks. It quoted Health Canada’s defence of regulations that classify aspartame as a food additive that doesn’t prompt undue health concerns.

What the…? As a healthy living advocate and someone who reads the books (I’ve been working through Marion Nestle’s Food Politics for about a month and its always at the front of my consciousness) and watches the films, this really gets me going. The approval of aspartame by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration was followed by a retraction based on demonstrated public concern over the fact that it produced brain tumors in rats!

This “missive from Refreshments Canada” is exactly the kind of government conspiracy in the food and beverage industry that books and films talk about and it angers me.

As school trustee Cathy Dandy said, “it’s unrealistic to urge students to make healthy choices while offering pop and say, ‘we’re so poor, we want you to be able to buy Pepsi.’” (Toronto Sun, July 25) and as trustee Sheila Cary-Meagher said, “If I am not prepared to serve it to my own grandchildren, I am not prepared to give it to school children,” (Toronto Star, July 10)

I understand that the school board needs money and I’m sympathetic to that. However, I agree with Dandy. It’s hypocritical. I laud the effort to get rid of extra sugar in schools, as there are a myriad of health and behavioral issues surrounding sugar. I don’t think I need to qualify this with a source, but one website does list 146 reasons that sugar ruins health and Google results for “sugar health effects” and “sugar health problems” are numerous. However, as a parent I would not want my child exposed to any of the 92 + side effects associated with aspartame as compiled by the FDA after 10,000 consumer complaints (a figure that I assume is either rounded up or down).

Furthermore, the American Cancer Society confirmed that users of artificial sweeteners gained more weight than those who didn’t use the products, further undermining the supposed “purpose” for the existence of aspartame in the food (Mercola.com). Read the source of that fact, an interesting history of aspartame.

If not soft drinks, what?

How about water? I’d even say that regular juice is better than artificially sweetened fruit beverage, although when I do drink juice I tend to dilute it with water in part because of its sugar content. There are healthy alternatives for hydration. One of my favourite ways to hydrate is cold tea, either regular tea or herbal (tisane). I recently bought Uncle Lee’s Organic Chai in Orange Ginger flavour on sale. Caffeine free, its ingredients are rooibos, ginger, cinnamon, orange peel, cardamom, chicory, cloves, black pepper, stevia and natural orange flavour. I made a pot of two days ago, cooled it and stored it in the fridge. It’s quite refreshing cold! Some days I brew tea at work and either top it off with cold water or let it sit until it cools off. Tasty.

Let’s discourage chemicals in our school vending machines and reinforce the message of healthy living over capitalism.

Sources:

• Pepsi deal extension … or pop machine expulsion? Globe and Mail, July 13.
• Soda pop to stay, for now, Toronto Sun, July 25.
• Trustees to vote on fate of vending machines in schools, Globe and Mail, July 25.
• School vending machines on way out? Toronto Star, July 10.
• Aspartame Side Effects, Healthy Holistic Living
• Aspartame — History of Fraud and Deception, Mercola.com

Other related articles:

• School board mulls aspartame-only drinks, Toronto Star, July 10.
• School board votes to extend Pepsi contract, keep most pools open, CBC News, July 25.

If you read those news articles, read the comments too.

• Treehugger proposes a weekday vegetarian diet [Treehugger]

• Ever wonder why lemon makes milk curdle? It involves protein, negative charge and bondage (er, bonding). [The Kitchn]

• Also from The Kitchn: Tip: Use Cinnamon Sticks As Skewers when grilling fruit. Now I want a barbecue just for that purpose.

• Creating satisfying food is central to home cooks and chefs — as well as to companies that have produced foods that have helped lead to the obesity epidemic. Mark Bittman on Making Food Satisfying. [New York Times]

• In his article Bittman links the article “How the Food Makers Captured Our Brains“. It’s fascinating. Quote: “[Kessler] offers descriptions of how restaurants and food makers manipulate ingredients to reach the aptly named ‘bliss point.’”

• New Web Search Tool Shows What Pesticides are on Your Food

• According to this newsletter, the average child gets 5+ servings of pesticides in their food and water each day and the pesticide Atrazine is so toxic it is banned in Europe, but it is used so widely in the U.S., that it is found in 71% of the U.S. drinking water. (Thanks to my mother for forwarding me the newsletter. I went to the online archive so that I could share it with you.)

• One woman’s changing relationship with food and what she’s learned in the process of doing so while getting healthier. [In The Raw] There’s some great tips in there. The theme of conscious eating comes up (in my life) again and again I forget to exercise it, in part because I eat while doing other things. She touches on multitasking while eating.

• “Flapjack Fiasco” [This is Why You're Fat]

• Food porn: Grilled Cheese with Fresh Cherries [The Kitchn & Rachel Ray]

• Torontist on Toronto’s a la Carte food cart program. Not all good news.

• Meghan weighs in on milk and advises you not to drink conventional milk. [Making Love in the Kitchen] Milk bad. I know this and yet I can’t seem to give up cheese even though avoiding cheese would fit the reason I rarely eat meat.

• Food industry propaganda: New Organic Logo Will Provide More Opportunities For Organic Producers. [Canadian Food Inspection Agency] “Canada’s Organic Products Regulations (OPR)…set out rigourous standards for the certification of products as organic by accredited certification bodies. Products that meet the production requirements and contain at least 95 per cent organic content may be labelled as “organic” and feature the new Biologique Canada Organic Logo.

No links for tomorrow likely because I’ll be away from a computer all day. However, I do need to write a post about Food Share’s open house from last weekend. I’d forgotten.

• Why agave isn’t such as good sugar alternative. [Dr. Mercola] The article surprised me.

• Nitrites and nitrates, much maligned additives in processed and cured meats, may help cardiovascular health [Nutraingredients.com]

• Q & A: How Diet May Effect Depression… That’s just the start of it. [Disease Proof]

• A doctor’s perspective of Kinder’s new, “Have you played today” campaign”. [Weighty Matters] “The gist of the campaign? Treats are an important part of parenting and so to be better parents you’ve got to make sure you give them treats, more specifically – Kinder chocolates.”

• Meghan on the affects of coke on the body: Coke Makes People Fat [Making Love in the Kitchen]

• Gina Mallet refers to herself the “anti Food Inc”, and I’m not surprised. I feel a small amount of optimism in the statement “I’m gonna celebrate the way the fresh and local movement has brightened our meals and is influencing processed food.” but the rest is so far fetched and makes my head hurt.

And speaking of Food Inc., I saw it last night. Draft review for another website is written. It will be up in the next couple of days, pending edits and scheduling by the other website.

• Overweight Moms More Likely to Have Asthmatic Kids [HealthDay]

• Multivitamins Might Prolong Life [HealthDay] (But they’re not a replacement for a healthy diet, of course)

• Orange juice shelf-life may be extended by natural chitosan [FoodNavigator]

• Illustrated Guide to Steak Cuts, Plus Grilling Tips [Serious Eats]

• Last call for Fiddleheads: Now we eat them, soon we won’t [Toronto Life Daily Dish]

• Prix fixe roundup: A sampling of the city’s latest recession-inspired menus [Toronto Life Daily Dish]

• Corey Mintz on how he choses restaurants to review. [Toronto Star]

Looking forward to the opening of the Brickworks farmer’s market tomorrow!