Kale and Kant

Food, family, health, and the meaning of everything

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Good Reads July 2016

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IMG_3947 2I’ve been doing a lot of summer reading and below I briefly review three books I recently read and enjoyed very much.

My Fat Dad is the touching memoir of nutrition consultant and New York Times writer Dawn Lerman. If you’ve seen any of her “fat dad” blog posts, you will know that she was raised by a father who was seriously overweight and food-obsessed and spent most of his life cycling through every imaginable fad diet until a stage-3 lung cancer diagnosis forced him to finally turn his eating around. His food issues traced back to his mother, Beauty, who was a fabulous Jewish-style cook. Since Dawn’s mother was a creative, [Read more…]

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K&K is Back! Let’s Celebrate with Chocolate Cake

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cake-horizontalMany people have asked about my online whereabouts. I’ve been busy working with the awesome Stan Smith on KALEandKANT’s redesign. The goal has been to make the blog easier to navigate, and to merge it with my formerly distinct Health Coaching site. Coaching has happily taken over my professional life this year, but my blog posts will continue as always to reflect my research and thoughts on food and nutrition, health and wellness, kids and family life, and philosophy. As a subscriber, you can expect posts on Sundays and Thursdays.

As a favor to me, I would greatly appreciate your forwarding and/or sharing anything you may like and inviting your friends and family to become regular KALEandKANT subscribers, too. I’m looking forward to resuming our conversation.

Today I wanted to share a simple recipe that I adapted recently when we had our neighbors over for dinner. Their son has an egg and dairy allergy, but my eleven-year-old, Robert, wanted to bake cake, so I told him to start googling. He found a very simple egg and dairy free recipe that would’ve been fine had it not been entirely of white flour and had its sugar content not been almost 1:1 with said flour. I tweaked things and we ended up with a much healthier version that everyone loved. [Read more…]

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Motown Freedom Bakery

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IMG_2527Here’s a great new motown find: a local allergen-free bakery that gets the meaning of “whole grain.” As I’ve noted before, most of the “gluten free” products on the market are nutritional duds. In lieu of wheat, you most often find tapioca starch, potato starch, and white rice flour as primary ingredients–all of which mistreat your body like the refined carbs they are.

Motown’s flour blend is teff-based instead. Teff is a high-protein grain that has been a staple in Ethiopia for millenia, and is the central ingredient in their delicious and oddly spongy injera bread. (For more info, see last year’s post on Bob’s Red Mill teff porridge—my family’s favorite.) [Read more…]

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Savorfull

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DSC_0141Funny how life take its twists and turns, and you find yourself reconnecting with people from your past.  Nearly ten years ago, I took a mom-tot class with one of my boys and really enjoyed getting to know one of the other moms in the class, a nurse named Stacy Goldberg. Our kids wound up at different schools and we lost touch, but as Stacy’s nutrition-based business, Savorfull, grew in the ensuing years, I always enjoyed following her in the local media. She, in turn, happened upon KALEandKANT last fall and wrote me a really nice email.

Stacy suggested that given my interests and the fact that I was dealing with food allergies at home, I consider sampling one of her “Free From” Specialty boxes, a monthly subscription service that delivers to your door a boxful of foods to try that are free of allergens, artificial colors, dyes, sweeteners and HFCS. [Read more…]

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Milk, Whose Body Does It Do Good?

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Mark Bittman, the NYT food writer and general culinary wizard, just published a piece on how within 24 hours of going off dairy, his lifelong heartburn disappeared, seemingly never to return.  A follow-up article appeared as well, sparked by the 1,300 comments he received on the first one, describing ailment after ailment that just went away after dairy was eliminated from the diet. Dairy is now the #2 food allergy after peanuts.

Bittman: “Today the Department of Agriculture’s recommendation for dairy is a mere three cups daily — still 1½ pounds by weight — for every man, woman and child over age 9. This in a country where as many as 50 million people are lactose intolerant, including 90 percent of all Asian-Americans and 75 percent of all African-Americans, Mexican-Americans and Jews… There’s no mention of water, which is truly nature’s perfect beverage.” [Read more…]

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Gluten—Is it Bad for Me?

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You hear a lot in the popular media about the benefits of going gluten-free, but going gluten-free will only benefit you if you have celiac disease or a gluten allergy or sensitivity. Otherwise, most of the gluten-free packaged foods you’ll find are highly refined (often made from white rice and tapioca flour), low in fiber, sometimes high in sugar, and not particularly great for you.

Gluten is a protein found in wheat, rye, and barley. It’s estimated that around 1% of Americans have celiac disease—an autoimmune disorder in which eating gluten leads the body to attack its own tissues, destroying the villi that line the intestine and make possible nutrient absorption. The disease can manifest in various ways, and may not even present with intestinal symptoms (details at celiac.org). It leads to malnutrition and a host of other ailments, and if you have reason to suspect you’re celiac, you need to see a GI right away. The doctor may order bloodwork as well as an endoscopy to check your intestines, and if there is a suspicion of celiac disease, you will be taken off gluten for 2-4 weeks to see if your symptoms improve. If you are scheduled to see a GI, do not go off gluten prior to your appointment! They need to test and examine you in your current condition, eating a regular diet. [Read more…]

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Soy? Oy

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Despite strong evidence to the contrary, manipulated-soy foods and supplements continue to bask in the aura of health. Soy protein powder, milk, yogurt, formula, hotdogs, nuggets, bacon, crumbles, cheese, chips, etc. are touted by manufacturers as heart-healthy alternatives to meat and dairy products, but I have been reading up on the effects of these foods, and they should be avoided. The Soy Deception, a recent book from Dr. David Brownstein and nutritionist Sheryl Shenfelt, catalogs and debunks widespread misconceptions, as do posts on Ms. Shenfelt’s informative website, aplacetobe.com.

[Read more…]