RawZi wrote -   I know there have been Primal Dieters in Austin.  I've never been there.  From what I've heard previously, it sounded like one of the best cities in the US to avoid a lot of the garbage they 'feed' to the rest of the country.

That is in some ways quite true Zi - and that's why it's so surprising to me as the farmer's market here is the best I've ever seen so far in any place that I have lived up to now. There is a local farmer here that waters their pastures that has great frozen ground lamb btw. I don't seem to overeat it. I have been able to easily find excellent frozen grass-fed meats and organs so far of many different types. The challenge has only been finding fresh unfrozen grass-fed meat. 

You are perhaps right Eve - I made too big of a generalization. It's just from talking to farmer after farmer about their legal and practical concerns that I figured it was more than just the area surrounding Austin that those concerns would be relevant. I've been picking the brains of the fairly large Weston A. Price group here in Austin that includes a great many farmers and that is where I learned that the farmers get back their meats frozen and how impractical it is for them to be able to provide fresh meat (other than small animals). I've gotten quite an education from them.

I didn't think of what I said as "complaining" - just discussing my challenge. I will keep on searching.

Btw, I don't care much about the cost of fresh meat if I can get it. I find that eating raw animal foods is dramatically cheaper than eating all organic raw vegetables, fruits, seeds and grains that even the $35 a pound frozen grass-fed bison steaks I got from the farmer's market were cheap in comparison. I only need about a third of pound of meat a day to be completely satisfied. That, along with the eggs from my chickens and how long one gallon of milk will last me has made incorporating raw animal food into my diet the cheapest diet I've been on. I had to eat so much more volume before. With the price of organic vegetables what they are now and how much I had to eat --- raw animal foods is less expensive, easier and takes up dramatically less space and time.

Frozen grass-fed is fine, tastes good and is easy to find. I just really want to try some fresh grass-fed meat and I would like to try high meat. If I never find it, it wouldn't be the end of the world. I'm just really curious if that one aspect would make much of a difference. If it is not going to make a difference to how I feel or taste much different, then I would stop searching and buy a quarter or half an animal from one of the struggling local small farmers in the Price yahoo group and put it in my freezer as the farmer's market meat vendors are quickly dwindling because of the drought. Even the duck eggs are now gone. The farmer told me she used 100,000 gallons of water last month and still had almost no eggs to show for it because of the heat. We drove out to the country yesterday and the landscape is brown. Because of this, I am contemplating not spending so much time searching for fresh and making sure my freezer is full of frozen while I can still get local grass-fed at all and start my search again when the weather breaks.

The florets of broccoli have 7 times the amount of beta-carotene so which tastes better to individuals might have something to do with that?

The parts change how they tastes for me time to time  - or maybe it's from plant to plant.

I never supplemented with omega 3.. recently I read alot about it and its impacts on one's health and as I'm not a huge fan of fish I believe I need this extra supplement to get the omega3,6 ratio balanced.

How do I choose the best omega 3 supplements, what should I look for?
anybody supplementing with it already? maybe share your experience?

What about doctor mercola fish oil or salmon oil?

It is difficult to find a supplement that is not heated which is the key. The only one I have been able to find and which is really quite the miracle in efficacy compared to all other fish oils (and we tried almost every one) is the brand Minami. That way you just swallow a pill. It ain't cheap, but if you don't like fish it's worth it.

I imagine that most of the raw "vegan" gurus do eat animal products.  I've heard that Ann Wigmore would have cooked bacon, etc. quite regularly, in addition to her raw plant foods.

It's complex.  I can forgive Wigmore for secretly eating bacon, because she was dealing with people who did not have the willpower or support system to actually do raw veganism.  She didn't bother telling them that animal foods were necessary.  She knew they'd eat them anyway, as soon as they left her healing center.

Ann Wigmore did not eat bacon. That is just a strange rumor. What I noticed was that she didn't eat much at all. What happened was that she set up her institute with a board of directors that then stole all control from her even down to taking property so she broke away and set up a new diet based on just a few of the things that worked for her much later in her life living mostly in Puerto Rico. She tried to make everyone eat it in order to make her operations unique and hers again. She could no longer promote what worked for her the previous decades. Her new approach consisted mostly of something the entire staff called "cement soup" because it was awful and terribly constipating. She did not have the same problems with the small amounts she drank of it and she barely needed food. No one followed her directions to eat everything liquified because it was nonsense and even she knew it as she would eat whole produce herself. She would not drink watermelon juice in Boston winters like she instructed others to do either. She was filled with energy and vigor but at the end she was trying to forge something new. No one followed her advice because it made no logical sense. What was taken from her though - worked very well for many others and for her for a long time. You should have seen her at her oldest running around. Shame on whoever is making up things like bacon. Pure rubbish.

In the sense above she did not do what she preached either in that she ate whole produce and not exclusively liquified produce - but that wasn't the case for most of her career before it was taken from her. What happened is that at the end she could not take criticisms into account of her new teaching because of the betrayal from the people that were closest to her before and it was very sad.

I know nothing of the later gurus except that they also got strangely specific like Wigmore did at the end in order to anchor a spot for themselves. That's the problem as I see it. People trying to anchor a place with their own unique little ideas of what works for them at a moment in time.

The uniqueness of the individual and the individual throughout a lifetime of internal and external changes demands flexibility of mind and open options. Once a specific hole is dug and someone jumps in and keeps digging the longer they go on digging in that hole, the harder it is to jump out. No matter what the hole is - it comes to the same thing. Just because it worked for a particular individual does not make it what will work for every person considering the diversity of health, history, physical and social environment, genetics etc. and might not even continue to work all the way for that same person into old age. It's what I call "the guru trap".

Yes Phil - that was more of what I was trying to say. You said it better as usual. 

raw-al, the health bridges you posted look like something i would love!... they're $$$... i wonder if we have anything like that here?  are you going to increase to level 2, then 3?

loanna - I think I get more benefit personally from laying backwards over the edge of my bed. I can increase how much arch I get this way subtly. I also let my legs hang backwards over the edge so that my pelvis can open bending back. Eventually you get to where you can just do a backwards arch from laying on the floor working slowly up to it.

http://www.abc-of-yoga.com/info/wheel-pose.asp

Those bridges all showed are a nice place to start but soon most people that eat well will move past them so if they are too expensive - maybe just put parts of yourself off the edge of the bed like I do? You can position yourself to open each vertebra separately this way by putting just a little more pressure on it which feels very nice and works on the spot you most need too. You can get as much or as little arch as you like this way - and you can increase or decrease also just by using pillows to lay over. The benefit of the bed is that you can also stretch your neck and you can place your arms out to the side and get a great stretch for your chest and arms that you can't do with one of those bridges.

You also don't have to get out of bed to find anything...... you can do yoga as you're falling out of bed in the morning like I do. hee hee 

You can also make kefir from pasteurized milk. Better than nothing.

Al - I'm afraid that I disagree with you on this. I personally think it is better to make water or coconut milk kefir or kombucha or just about any other option for fermenting rather than pasteurized, homogenized, hormonized, antibioticized, de-natured milk from cows fed grains. Milk is a fabulous food when it's natural form and can be so very bad for a body when it is destroyed in this way. I think that raw grass-fed milk is to regular milk from the store what fresh berries picked from the wild are to twinkies. I'd take a stabilized for room temperature pill form of probiotic before using pasteurized milk to ferment with. Just my opinion from how my body reacts to the two different substances.

I say if you take whatever you have that is raised properly and ferment it - you will be better off. If you have good organic beets or cabbage or cucumbers etc. - use them. If you have un-heated hand packed honey, use that. If you have a great meat source use that. If you have someone who can share with you a kombucha scoby then use tea. You can use ginger, grapes, fruit - just put a cloth on top to let the alcohol release. Fermented vinegars can be some of the best ferments that help to break down foods that are difficult to digest beautifully. If you have great naturally raised eggs - ferment them. Those are supposed to be a real delicacy and when I finally have more eggs than I eat every day I will be excited to try it. If all you have is water - get water kefir grains. Even fermented grains are better than pasteurized milk imho. I'd drink a beer from a local brewery or home made with the yeast still in it before fermented pasteurized milk any day.

The only reason you would ever use pasteurized milk is if you had cancer, couldn't get raw, and needed the sulfured milk (cottage cheese) in order to get fats to by-pass your liver. But even then...... I would choose other ways to help the liver to digest the fats instead of challenging the liver to get rid of the toxins in the bastardized milk product. The sulfur in fermented raw milk however can make fats water-soluble and get them right past the liver into the cells and is one of the best cancer remedies ever discovered - by Johanna Budwig - super genius. If you have a liver that is up to par you don't need that.... but it's good to know.

Things that I cannot eat otherwise seem to be just fine if not really good for me otherwise. So, if honey, milk, cruciferous vegetables etc. etc. usually don't digest well - don't let that scare you away from trying them fermented.

Ok, that's my little "Song of the Ferment".  

Phil - quark makes my bowels move easily. I've been in a quark love affair for a while now - especially since eating raw meat. I find quark balances the meat nicely and makes my bowel movements quite comfortable. On all raw foods without meat and mostly vegetables having quark would create almost too fast and furious of a "cleansing". ;-)  I have often thought that perhaps quark is the reason that I have found the conversion to eating raw meat so easy for me.

I believe which ferment is better completely depends on a person's individual gut flora and what is needed. Kefir never has appealed to me. It tastes and feels terrible to me - both water and milk grains. I bet it's because my body doesn't want those bacteria. Kefir is incredibly easy so I wished I liked it more. Yogurt is another ferment from milk that sometimes is just right and other times I couldn't care less about it. I can go months without any and then suddenly really want kombucha real bad and drink it like it's going out of style. It's like that with all my ferments. Good thing most of them last so well when cared for properly. I also find that other people have strong reactions and preferences. Usually though - there is one out of all the ferments that "hits home" and a big smile goes across the person's face.

One of the reasons I love trying all sorts of ferments so much is because you never know which one is going to light things up for yourself or someone else at any given moment. I love opening the cupboard of the fridge and having a choice. It seems for me to go in big waves - a half a year I want this, the next half a year I want that. I imagine that it just has to be very individual based upon my experience.

Do you have access to good grass-fed raw milk Phil? It's definitely worth trying both in my opinion. Quark is the easier to try first because you don't need to buy any grains and if it works and you like it, then you are handled and don't need to nurse grains. If someone will give you some kefir grains then the kefir is easier to try first.

Hi Wolf. Remember when I talked about quark? Well, I can't digest raw milk but when I ferment it it's good for me. It's almost impossible to find a simple description of how to ferment raw milk into quark, quark cheese, fermented whey and fermented butter on the internet - but I would talk you through it if you would like to make those things to get your probiotics. They are all quite soothing generally and would be a great way to compete with the desire for pizza. When you are filled up with yummy milkshakes you won't even be tempted. Let me know if it interests you otherwise I won't go through all the trouble to describe the whole thing as it would take some time for me. Willing of course to do it if you would like to give it a try though.

Honey is a tough one because it's so darn hard to find decent honey and pollen. If it's heated even a little it's just not the same thing and it's hard to stop at just a tiny bit. If you were reaching your hand into an active bee hive you probably wouldn't be eating much. 

Sweets and carbos can be such a temptation. Fruits I can't do without some fat to buffer them. Peanut butter has the most funguses of any food to my knowledge. It's one of the very top allergenic foods there is. Perhaps you could make some almond butter instead??? You would be surprised though how fermented milk cheese for carbos with some berries for your sugar fix, eggs yolks for the fat fix and whey for the protein can handle those cravings. Leave out the honey. Just too stimulating to the carb desires. If you can eat your fruits with the fat you won't desire as many as often because your blood sugars will be more stabilized.

If you need to eat the bread put on butter instead of honey or at least put butter and honey - cinnamon on top of that to stabilize the blood sugars. Cinnamon helps to heal the adrenal glands.

Good luck to you with your healing.

Klow - I apologize - I just saw that you said "recreational" - so you wouldn't be professional.

But still - really cool.   

Mag - fat always tastes good with salt to me. I'm glad that it's part of the paleo diet because even though I can imagine no longer eating vegetables, I can't imagine my life without salt.

You bring up a good point too - my water is reverse osmosis and therefore devoid of natural minerals.   

Here's the one I saw
http://www.fitter1.com/Catalog/Items/BKNOB.aspx

If you are thinking of getting one raw-al - the one that eveheart linked to I think is better. Those perpendicular bars are very useful... even just as handles.

 

Oh yes Phil - they are two completely different actions and Mom's doctors explained them to me in detail. Mom had a form of cancer that caused such extreme blood clotting that it was imperative for me to learn all I could about it.

Plavix and Coumaden work very differently from each other as well. Heads up - the tests used for viscosity for Coumaden do not work for Plavix. 

When someone is on coumaden and they change too fast how many greens they eat they can bleed to death internally. All patients taking coumaden have to be careful about eating certain vegetables and keep the amounts stable. But there are MANY other natural food blood thinners that they don't warn you about. That's not the case with Plavix. There are now new drugs that are massively dangerous blood thinners. If you are on such drugs you need to understand how all of it works.

For the cancer patient not on drugs Vitamin K and salicylates are important but not usually delicate issues. One can of course eat greens, but it has to be taken into consideration and balanced with opposing forces. 

As a cancer patient - if you are not already on blood thinners - the trick it would seem to me is to make sure that you are getting some form of natural blood thinning foods/herbs/enzymes that are also cancer fighters and not worry too much about the particular action and if you are eating a great deal of foods high in salicylates to recognize that this can also have a blood thickening affect and take it into consideration - maybe have some foods with blood thinning action too.

I think if you aren't on allopathic blood thinners or Bayer type aspirin that the details of the difference aren't going to make that much of difference. The whole idea is just to make sure that you are doing something to help your blood flow better and not doing too much to goop it up.

Not very scientific I know - but sometimes it can get just too overwhelming for the average person who is just trying to figure out how to go about fighting their cancer. It might be as easy as having a cup of peppermint tea every day. It will dissolve bile sludge, help your liver, thin your blood a little and help with digestion.

It's not usually too complicated in practice.

GS - the list is too long to go into here. I'm already talking too much! I just kept it to the obvious paleo blood thinners. Cayenne is tops of course. I would put tumeric in front of it for cancer though.

I really want to say something to anyone who arrived here that might be in the position of their doctors and family members trying to make them do things that they don't want to out of fear. I want to tell you what your doctor won't/can't.

Usually, tumors themselves won't kill you. Nope. Not unless they are in places where they are blocking the flow of an important fluid or in the brain or in your pancreas that you need so much to fight with. There are three things that put you in danger.

1. Metastasis. This is where the cancer spreads. This is as easy as pie to prevent. All you have to do is take a product called pectasol C. It's a modified fruit pectin that makes it so cancer cells are not able to embed anywhere when travelling through the blood and it is scientifically proven. Not even Sloan Kettering could come up with anything bad to say about it.

2. Angiogenesis: This is where the cancer makes new blood vessels so that it can grow. This still won't kill you in and of itself unless blocking something but anyway - this is usually a slow process when you stop feeding the cancer. The cancer must have food to grow which you are denying on a ketogenic diet and there are many foods that actively block angiogenesis including ...... you got it ........ berries.

3. Cachexia: This is where the tumor gets so big or spreads so much that it steals all your sugar and nutrition and you starve to death. This is really how most people die of cancer. Remember - healthy cells can use fat and the mutant throw-back ancient cells can't. Your good cells will have food to fight and your cancer cells will get weaker. If you are not already in cachexia - if you use alternative therapies - you will probably never get to this point.

What they won't tell you is that as long as you are fighting the good fight you usually have much more time. When you start starving out the cancer and start oxygenizing and changing your ph you gain more time. Their doom and gloom numbers no longer have the same meaning. If the tumor can't spread, if you are stopping it from growing, if you are still getting nutrition..... you are not dying.  

Remember - once you destroy your immune system and severely toxify your body and destroy your organs with chemo and radiation - you might get rid of the tumor, but you will still die. Everyone has cancer cells all the time. You need to get to the cause not the symptom and a tumor is a symptom... and one that is NOT usually as scary as they tell you. With allopathic treatment the tumor may be gone but now the body has ruined organs, ruined immune system and tons of toxins to deal with when the liver was already overwhelmed. Research the side affects of the treatments being offered to you before proceeding. The big question to think about is after that one tumor is gone...... what will happen with all those new cancer cells that everyone makes all the time?

Treat the cause, not the symptoms and think about your long-term survival and make yourself healthier over time. Ask your doctor what the permanent cure rate with no recurrence will be of their treatment, about the side affects, and then compare it to the permanent cure-rates of the alternative treatments. Don't be frightened into impulsive action that you might regret later.  

It's your life. Make your own decisions. Don't let yourself get bullied into being maimed or dying just to put money into someone's pocket. Don't believe me either - I'm just someone who read a bunch instead of listening to the hype. Take a deep breath, relax. There are people out there that have healed completely from the kind of cancer you have. Do your own research and THINK because nobody else is in your body but you and it is ultimately your responsibility. Your family and your doctor do not have to live in your body. You do.


I was writing this same time as you were writing your Ayurvedic lesson Raw-al. That was fabulous to read. Thank you.