The Amazing Hempseed

The Origins

Hemp was cultivated in China more than 6,000 years ago, from a wild plant that grew in central Asia. The Chinese recognized hemp's amazing nutritional value, and used it as a food source long before soy foods. About a thousand years ago, hemp traveled to Europe, where peasants used the plant in several ways, one of the most popular being the making of hemp butter by grinding the tasty seeds.

A Nutritional Powerhouse

Hempseed is considered by leading researchers and medical doctors to be one of the most nutritious food sources on the planet. Shelled hempseed is packed with 33 percent pure digestible protein and is rich in iron and vitamin E as well as omega-3 and GLA. A recent report funded by the Canadian government states that hemp protein is comprised of 66 percent high-quality edistin protein, and that hempseed contains the highest percentage of this of any plant source. Hemp also contains three times the vitamin E contained in flax. Unlike soy, hemp is not genetically modified, and it doesn't contain the anti-nutritional qualities commonly found in soy.

Got Your EFAs today?

Because the human body produces no Essential Fatty Acids (EFAs), it is important that EFAs be consumed on a regular basis. It is estimated that more than 90 percent of Americans take in too little of one of the most important EFAs--omega-3--which is found in flax, walnuts, deep-water fish, and hempseeds. EFAs are the "good fats" that doctors recommend as part of a healthy, balanced diet. The quality of omega-3 is vital, and can be diminished by oxygen, heat, and light. Thus consume the freshest seeds possible and store them in a dark, cold environment such as a refrigerator. Nutiva obtains its seeds exclusively from Canada, and we date all our products. Great nutrition never tasted so good.

Q & A:

Q. What is the difference between hemp and marijuana?
A. Marijuana and hemp both come from the same species of plant, Cannabis sativa L., but from different varieties. There are different varieties of Cannabis, just as Chihuahuas and St. Bernards are different breeds of dogs, Canis familiari.

Marijuana is the flowering tops and leaves of psychoactive varieties of Cannabis that are grown for their high THC content.

Hemp, also referred to as industrial hemp, are low-THC varieties of Cannabis that are grown for their seeds and fiber. Hemp is grown legally in just about every industrialized country except the USA.

Q. What is the recommended daily intake of hemp seeds?
A. Health practitioners suggest three to five tablespoons of shelled hempseed per day.

Q. What is the recommended daily intake of hemp oil?
A. Health practitioners suggest one or two tablespoons of hemp oil per day.

Q. Why is hemp so nutritious?
A. Hemp oil contains the most essential fatty acids (EFAs) of any nut or seed oil, with the omega-3 and omega-6 EFAs occurring in the nutritionally optimal 1:3 ratio.

Q. Why are essential fatty acids (EFAs) important?
A. Essential fatty acids cannot be produced by the human body; they must be obtained from your diet. As the name implies, they are essential to your health and well being. Seventy percent of adults who eat a typical Western diet do not get enough omega-3 fatty acids, and at the same time, they get too much omega-6 fatty acids. This imbalance can cause a wide range of health problems.

Q. What are the benefits of hemp vs. flax?
A. Shelled hempseed is more easily digested than ground flax seed, while whole flax seed passes through your body undigested. Hemp seed and hemp oil also contain higher-potency omega derivatives, GLA and SDA, which flax seed lacks.

Q. I would like to know more about hemp and hemp foods. What are some good sources of information?
A. To learn more about hemp food, please read the article: "Hemp and Flax Seeds and Oil in Modern Nutrition" by Gero Leson, D.Env. (PDF file 305k)

For an excellent overview of hemp and hemp foods, please read "Hemp is Hip, Hot and Happening" and the series on hemp at Innvista.

Source: http://nutiva.com/hempinfo.php

New Synergy Kettlebell Training Blog Author- Adam Farrah

I would like to welcome a new author to the Synergy Kettlebell Training Blog. He is a fellow IKFF Teacher Adam Farrah.

Adam has been weight training ever since he first saw Arnold Schwarzenegger as Conan The Barbarian and The Terminator as a kid. For the past 16 years, Adam has trained seriously with weights in powerlifting and bodybuilding and he’s spent the last 5 years training extensively in martial arts. Currently training in Mixed Martial Arts and Brazilian Jiu Jitsu, he focuses on functional strength, kettlebells, health, training longevity and Paleolithic nutrition.

I know he will offer some great insight to all of our blog readers. I hope you enjoy his posts and articles.

How To Lose Weight Fast With Coconut Oil

Everyone these days wants to lose weight fast. Perhaps it’s those extra pregnancy pounds that just aren’t coming off despite all the nursing in the world. Maybe it’s the midlife spreading waist line. Or maybe you’ve always just been a little bit overweight.
One of the best things you can do to easily drop pounds without radically changing your lifestyle (besides going ultra-low carb and ditching grains altogether) is to eat coconut oil.

In America’s recent past, coconut oil got an undeserved bad name.
Why?
Because it’s high in saturated fats, and they were unjustly demonized. Cutting-edge research has pretty much shredded most of The Lipid Hypothesis — the theory that there is a direct correlation between saturated fat and cholesterol intake in the diet with incidence of coronary heart disease. We now know, for example, that most of the studies which showed dietary intake of saturated fats (particularly those using coconut oil) were bad for you were actually proving that trans fats are bad for you.
(If you’ve got time, you can watch an 18 minute video tutorial I created called Good Fat Bad Fat.)
But unrefined, virgin coconut oil is an excellent and traditional fat and contains no trans-fats whatsoever.
How can Virgin Coconut Oil boost your metabolism and promote weight loss?
A few things:

1. It’s high in medium-chain fatty acids (MCFAs). A study published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition found patients lost weight when they included MCFA’s in their diet. In fact, when you compare a diet including olive oil or MCFA’s, it was found patients lost more weight using MCFA’s.
2. It’s high in lauric acid. Lauric acid is an MCFA so it will help you lose weight, but it’s also documented to have amazing antiviral, antibacterial, and antiprotozoal properties. In other words, it fights everything from the common cold to serious lipid-coated viruses such as HIV and herpes!
3. It will reduce your food cravings. When you add coconut oil into your diet, you’ll feel more full and eat fewer calories over all.

Still Don’t Believe Me?
Check out the amazing progress these two ladies had when they eliminated the junk fats (vegetable oils like corn, soy, and canola) from their diets and switched to healthier fats (coconut, hemp, and olive oil).
PLEASE NOTE: This is all these ladies did! They switched to good fats, period.

Finding Good Quality Coconut Oil
If you’re looking for a good source of coconut oil, you’re not very likely to find it at your grocery store. Fortunately, there are several decent sources online.

• The least expensive unrefined, virgin coconut oil I’ve been able to find is from Mountain Rose Herbs. It’s $41/gallon.
• The best tasting organic extra-virgin coconut oil comes from two places. The first is Nutiva. It’s $50/gallon and well worth the cost! The second is Tropical Traditions Gold Label Virgin Coconut Oil (not to be confused with their other labels, which I’ve found have inconsistent flavors). It’s $70/gallon and just about the BEST tasting coconut oil I’ve put in my mouth!
• Wilderness Family Naturals sells a good quality coconut oil, but it’s neither the best tasting nor the cheapest. But if the other online retailers are out of stock, or if your taste buds vary from mine, or if you just want a good middle ground between cost and flavor, they’re worth trying. It’s $65/gallon.

NOTE: All these retailers also sell smaller (& larger) sizes. I listed the price by the gallon because it’s often the best value.

Original Post by: Kristen Michaelis, The Food Renegade, BLOGGED HERE.

High Fat Eating Menu

Here's just a quick post about what we had for our evening meal last night.  It was a great high fat day and I want to share it with all of you so that you can add it to your menus.

Starter: Humongous Greek Salad

*25 min. staggered wait until next course for adequate digestion and enzyme release.

Black Bean Soup:
2 tomatoes stewed with unrefined walnut oil, cumin, garlic and onion. Add 2 cans of black beans. Bake till bubbling. Top with raw mild cheddar cheese, avocado, organic sour cream, and fresh squeezed lime juice.
*25 min. staggered wait until next course for adequate digestion.

Vegetable Casserole:
Sautee onions, baby portebello mushrooms, zucchini, broccoli, cauliflower and some garlic with some unrefined walnut oil. Add fresh spinach on top at the end. Put in large casserole and top with raw cheese. Bake just till brown.
*25 min. staggered wait until next course for adequate digestion.

Wild Caught Halibut and Bay Scallops:
Cook over medium heat with unrefined walnut oil, garlic, and onion.
*25 min. staggered wait until next course for adequate digestion.

Greek Style Plain Whole Milk Yogurt:
This was my "dessert" with 4 large strawberries mixed in.

Celebration of Hope 2009: Hunger and Thirst

Celebration of Hope 2009: Hunger and Thirst

We live in a land of plenty. Despite economic events of the past year, most of us still have a place to live, a car to drive, and food to eat. And that’s just the beginning.

We’ve got computers and cell phones, back yards and barbecues, closets near capacity, and store after store ready to sell us more.

That changes our perspective.

Surrounded by abundance, housing becomes a matter of status, not shelter. Clothes are deemed unusable because of style, not wear. Water flows freely in long hot showers or summer slip-n-slides. Food becomes entertainment, consumed as a backdrop to social gatherings.

But there are many places in our world where morsels of food and sips of water are a matter of life or death. Every day, hunger claims the lives of 16,000 children. Another 5,000 children die from water-related illness—every day.

Hunger. Thirst. Life. Death.

You can bring hope.

What Can We Do?
During Celebration of Hope 09: Hunger and Thirst, we have an opportunity to come alongside people who live with hunger and thirst by participating in three challenges:
We Stand: 5-Day Food and Water Challenge
We will take a stand against global hunger and thirst by participating in the 5-Day Food and Water Challenge.
We Serve: Meal Packing
We will join with others to pack 4 million meals, and serve children in Zimbabwe who are in desperate need of food.
We Give: Solutions to Hunger and Thirst
We will give to those who hunger and thirst by providing funds for food and clean water solutions.

Support for 5-Day Challenge

Sign up for email updates HERE.
Or visit our Facebook page to interact with others about your experience during this challenge.

"For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty
and you gave me something to drink...

Matthew 25:35(NIV)

The Shopper's Guide to Pesticides

The Shopper's Guide to Pesticides ranks pesticide contamination for 47 popular fruits and vegetables based on an analysis of 87,000 tests for pesticides on these foods, conducted from 2000 to 2007 by the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the Food and Drug Administration. Nearly all the studies used to create the list test produce after it has been rinsed or peeled. Contamination was measured in six different ways and crops were ranked based on a composite score from all categories.
The six measures of contamination we used were:

• Percent of the samples tested with detectable pesticides
• Percent of the samples with two or more pesticides
• Average number of pesticides found on a sample
• Average amount (level in parts per million) of all pesticides found
• Maximum number of pesticides found on a single sample
• Number of pesticides found on the commodity in total

The philosophy behind the guide is simple: give consumers the information they need to make choices to reduce pesticides in their diets. In this spirit, the Guide does not present a complex assessment of pesticide risks, but instead simply reflects the overall load of pesticides found on commonly eaten fruits and vegetables. This approach best captures the uncertainty of the risks of pesticide exposure and the value judgments involved in the choice to buy food with less pesticides.

Pesticides cause many adverse effects in well designed animal studies, from cancer to nervous system damage to reproductive effects. Rather than assign more weight to cancer than birth defects, we simply assumed that all adverse effects are equal. There is a significant degree of uncertainty about the health effects of pesticide mixtures. This ranking takes this uncertainty into account in the most defensible way possible, by simply ranking fruits and vegetables by their likelihood of being consistently contaminated with the greatest number of pesticides at the highest levels.

The produce listed in the Guide was chosen after an analysis of USDA food consumption data from 1994-1996. The 47 selected were those reported eaten on at least one tenth of one percent of all "eating days" in the survey and with a minimum of 100 pesticide test results from the years 2000 to 2007. An eating day is one day of food consumption reported to USDA by one individual, some of whom were followed for three days.

Conventionally grown food is also typically tainted with a multitude of chemical residues, including chemical fertilizers, insecticides, and herbicides.

These chemical concoctions can cause a wide variety of health problems, including:

1. Neurotoxicity
2. Disruption of your endocrine system
3. Cancer
4. Immune system suppression
5. Male infertility and miscarriages in women


The Full List: 47 Fruits and Veggies

Here is a ranking of 47 different fruits and vegetables, but grapes are listed twice because both domestic and imported samples were reviewed.

RANK	FRUIT OR VEGGIE	SCORE
1 (worst)	Peach	100 (highest pesticide load)
2	Apple	93
3	Sweet Bell Pepper	83
4	Celery	82
5	Nectarine	81
6	Strawberries	80
7	Cherries	73
8	Kale	69
9	Lettuce	67
10	Grapes - Imported	66
11	Carrot	63
12	Pear	63
13	Collard Greens	60
14	Spinach	58
15	Potato	56
16	Green Beans	53
17	Summer Squash	53
18	Pepper	51
19	Cucumber	50
20	Raspberries	46
21	Grapes - Domestic	44
22	Plum	44
23	Orange	44
24	Cauliflower	39
25	Tangerine	37
26	Mushrooms	36
27	Banana	34
28	Winter Squash	34
29	Cantaloupe	33
30	Cranberries	33
31	Honeydew Melon	30
32	Grapefruit	29
33	Sweet Potato	29
34	Tomato	29
35	Broccoli	28
36	Watermelon	26
37	Papaya	20
38	Eggplant	20
39	Cabbage	17
40	Kiwi	13
41	Sweet Peas - Frozen	10
42	Asparagus	10
43	Mango	9
44	Pineapple	7
45	Sweet Corn - Frozen	2
46	Avocado	1
47 (best)	Onion	1 (lowest pesticide load)

Sources:
http://www.foodnews.org/methodology.php
http://www.mercola.com

Food - Not Nutrients - Is The Fundamental Unit In Nutrition

The title of a 2007 article in the journal Nutrition Reviews says it all: Food, Not Nutrients, Is The Fundamental Unit In Nutrition.
We need to shift our focus away from “nutrients” and towards “food” in order to understand the effects nutrition has on health. Why? Because whole foods are so much more complex than nutritional science can understand.
Focusing too narrowly on nutrients has obscured the true value of eating Real Food.
And, as Michael Pollan argued in his latest book, In Defense of Food, nutritionism (the reductive way we’re tempted to think about food in terms of nutrients) is a boon to Industrialized Food:

“No idea could be more sympathetic to manufacturers of processed foods, which surely explains why they have been so happy to jump on the nutritionism bandwagon.  Indeed, nutritionism supplies the ultimate justification for processing food by implying that with a judicious application of food science, fake foods can be made even more nutritious than the real thing.”

In the opening chapter of her newest book (Real Food For Mother And Baby), Nina Planck makes a similar point:

“Nutritionism has been good for the food companies and supplement sellers ready to profit from government-approved health claims. Orange juice with added calcium and chocolate with added probiotics would not exist if not for the nearly universal acceptance of nutritionism. But it has not been noticeably good for our health….

She then takes it a step further, to show just how ridiculous nutritionism can be when we jump on that bandwagon.

“However, you don’t have to count calories, grams of saturated fat, milligrams of vitamin E, micrograms of folic acid, or jillibeters of anything else. I never do. It would be downright wacky to create shopping lists of nutrients. (”Sweetheart, I’m pregnant! Don’t forget complex carbohydrates, lauric acid, and betanine.”) As a nutrition geek, I have a basic understanding of the major nutrients and a few minor ones, but I am still firmly in favor of the tangible material formerly known as food. In our house we call it real food. It’s good for you. It’s good for babies. It’s good for everybody.”

Why should we focus on whole foods as they’ve traditionally been eaten? Because if the scientific study of nutrition has taught us anything, it’s that whole, real foods have a complex relationship of nutrients both within themselves (a  carrot is more than beta-carotene, a tomato more than lycopene) and with the other foods we serve them with. Nina makes this point in Chapter Two — The Fertility Diet:

“Another reason to eat whole foods is that many nutrients work together. Sperm health improves dramatically when vitamins A and E are eaten together, probably because E prevents oxidation of A. You need vitamin C to absorb iron, and saturated fats extend the use of omega-3 fats. There are countless relationships like this in nutrition. There is no need to remember them. Just eat whole foods in their natural state and in classic combinations, such as leaves with olive oil, or fish with butter, and you’ll get everything you need.“

I couldn’t agree more. Even though I study nutrition and am forced to speak about the wonders of certain foods in terms of nutrients, I don’t want any of you to get the wrong idea.
Although I’m glad that nutritional science can help me understand exactly why coconut oil is a great fat, or why grass-fed beef is a healthy food choice, that’s not why I eat these foods.
I eat these foods because they’re Real Food. They taste great. I loved how Nina Planck defined Real Food for us in yesterday’s interview:

“It’s old and it’s traditional.”

So simple, really! This is food that your great grandmother would have recognized as food. This is food that has been eaten or prepared this way for hundreds, if not thousands of years.
This post was inspired, in part, by a recent post of Rob Smart’s called Experiencing Food v. Thinking Nutrients.
This post is also part of Kelly The Kitchen Kop’s Real Food Wednesday carnival. For other interesting articles, anecdotes, and stories on Real Food, go check it out!

(photo by femenistjulie)

Original Post by:  Kristen Michaelis, The Food Renegade, BLOGGED HERE.