Cholesterol

I just HAD to put a link to this article by Dr. Mark Hyman MD for anyone out there with any kind of cholesterol concern. He talks about the real causes of high cholesterol, as well as whether it is actually something to be concerned about or not. One thing that I found worth pointing out is that the dangerous kind of high cholesterol comes from eating sugar, refined foods like white bread, and especially from high-fructose corn syrup, rather than fat. Not a surprise, really, when you realize that the worst damage comes from inflammation in your system--practically a certainty if you're regularly having high-fructose corn syrup, the highly-refined sweetener found in soda, most sweet drinks, and most processed foods.

Since many well-meaning but overworked doctors get much of their latest information from pharmaceutical representatives (who obviously have a product to sell!), they can sometimes come to conclusions that aren't always in your best interest. If you or anyone you know and care about are having cholesterol concerns or are taking cholesterol medication, please read this article!

Jennifer Oliver

This beautiful, lush painting that you are looking at was done by Jennifer Oliver at last year's Illustration Master Class. Since Jennifer sat next to me during most of the week's painting time, I was fortunate enough to see its development from the earliest stages as well as make a new friend. It's like the friendship and the painting were born at the same time!
And now she has sent me a recipe from her friend, Rhett Wickham, that I wanted to share with all of you. She had plans to try it with a sprinkling of cinnamon to push the exotic factor even further, but I don't know yet how that went. I suspect it was fantastic!

Rhett's easy goat cheese and pear pizza:
Preheat oven to 375 degrees.
Fresh pizza dough
One large white or Vidalia onion, sliced and caramelized
Two pears, thinly sliced
Sliced goat cheese or feta cheese, crumbled
Basil Pesto
Raw Walnuts
Coat rolled out pizza dough with pesto, cover with the onions, goat cheese
and pear slices. Sprinkle with ground pepper, sea salt and chopped walnuts
to taste. If using feta cheese, omit the sea salt. Bake at 375 for 15 minutes for a thin crust, 20-25 minutes for a thicker crust, or until golden. Yum!

Late night eating

I just read this on Dr. Andrew Weil's website:

"Want to Lose Weight? Don’t Eat Late

The timing of your meals may influence your weight, at least if you're a mouse. A new study from Northwestern University suggests that late-night snacks or eating when you should be asleep can pile on pounds. The researchers were investigating why shift workers who are on the job at irregular hours tend to be overweight. So they fed mice a high fat diet during normal mouse sleeping time and fed the same diet to a control group of mice during the hours when the animals are naturally awake. All the mice gained, but the ones fed when they should have been asleep increased their weight by 48 percent compared to the others whose weight went up only 20 percent. All the mice ate the same number of calories and performed equal amounts of exercise. This suggests that the timing of meals matters to weight control. Earlier research found that our circadian clock regulates energy use, which implies that when we eat may affect the balance between calories consumed and the number of calories burned daily. The study was published online Sept. 3, 2009 by the journal Obesity."

If you're like lots of artists I know and love, you like to work late at night--and maybe even have snacks to keep you company (along with NPR, of course!).
Anyway, I just thought it's a really good thing to keep in mind. Maybe a cup of unsweetened tea would be a good companion!

Tomato Pie

The tomatoes in this picture, photographed by The Magnificent Boris, were grown in my own yard from seeds that I planted. One of my neighbors told me "they'll never grow", but I really proved her wrong.
A different neighbor made a tomato pie from her homegrown tomatoes and it made our mouths freak out with happiness, so I had to share her recipe with you!

RACHEL’S TOMATO PIE

Filling:
2 or 3 large ripe tomatoes or 2 cups of cherry tomatoes, sliced
2 or 3 cloves of garlic, minced
Handful of basil leaves, chopped
1 Tablespoon olive oil
2 Tablespoons apple cider vinegar
¼ teaspoon salt

Pie crust:
½ cup brown rice flour
½ cup spelt flour
¼ teaspoon salt
2 Tablespoons olive oil
Approximately ¼ cup cold water

Topping:
2 ounces shredded cheddar cheese
2 ounces grated parmesan cheese

Combine sliced tomatoes and all other filling ingredients into a bowl. Cover and let
marinate at room temperature for about 6 hours or so.
Spray a 9 inch pie plate with spray oil.
For the pie crust, mix flours and salt, add olive oil and stir with a fork until mixture
resembles corn meal. Add water, just a little at a time while stirring with the fork, until the very moment it holds together in
a ball. Flour a wooden cutting board with spelt flour and roll out the dough into a circle with a rolling
pin. Transfer to the oiled pie plate.
Sprinkle about ½ of the cheeses onto the crust, add the marinated tomatoes, top with
the remaining cheeses.
Bake at 425 until crust is browned, about 30 minutes. Cool to room temperature before
serving.

Tanning Beds--Don't Do It!

This is a deadly serious subject and one that I'm qualified to rag on about because about 10 years ago, I had a mole on my leg that started changing a little. When I went to get it looked at by a dermatologist, he tried to act pretty calm, but I could see that he was alarmed by it. By the way, it wasn't even very big or scary-looking, but it had a light colored ring around it and it was slightly raised. So he cut it off and sent it in to the lab. A couple of days later (he rushed it through to get a quick answer), I got a call from his assistant saying that I had a malignant melanoma and had to have more skin removed from around the original site immediately.

It really wasn't a big deal and I was lucky that it was removed early before it had a chance to spread (it's cured 100%), but now, of course, I'm leery of every mole and freckle because people actually die from melanoma. Bob Marley died from melanoma! Almost 69,000 people are expected to be diagnosed with melanoma and over 8,500 people are expected to die from it in 2009. Of course, I'm sure Bob Marley never used a tanning bed and there are certainly other ways that skin cancer begins to grow besides tanning beds, but doesn't the fact that so many more (50% increase since 1980) skin cancer cases are in young women tell you something? Young men don't use tanning beds as much as young women and they haven't shown the same rise in melanoma incidence.

I have no doubt that the skin cancer I had was caused by the use of tanning beds when I was in my bodybuilding competition days. Truthfully, it's pretty dumb to tan for a contest because everybody uses a really dark skin dye on the day they compete anyway--even those with naturally dark skin such as African Americans, so it's a complete waste of effort.

Anyway, I hope you've all read by now that international cancer experts are confirming in an announcement published in the medical journal Lancet Oncology that tanning beds and the ultraviolet radiation they put out are as poisonous as arsenic. They literally described it as poison and said that they are at about the same level of cancer-causing danger as cigarettes. Personally, I think tanning beds are much worse than cigarettes and I really hate cigarettes. Also, they've said that people who use tanning beds before age 30 increase their risk of skin cancer by 75%.

So, can't we all just learn to love natural skin color whatever color it happens to be?

One more time...

So now, in the last four posts I've given you four important sources to learn great things about yourself and how to take the best advantage of your body/mind's potential.

Andrew Weil, Big Daddy of Medicine (my title for him), one of the most brilliant thinkers of our time, can help you find answers to just about any health question or concern as well as give you a good direction to follow for health maintenance.

Steven Gurgevich, a great brain coupled with a gentle spirit and an uncanny talent for teaching you to speak to your own subconscious mind, will encourage you to encourage yourself (yay for self-empowerment!).

John Sarno, a revolutionary doc who knows what really works to treat chronic conditions, will educate you in how to make use of your body's own nervous systems so you can heal yourself in a real and lasting way.

and
Candace Pert, a fearless supernova of energy and enthusiasm who researched it all, will show you the science behind Dr. Sarno's and Dr. Gurgevich's methods to take you even further into the empowerment that comes with knowledge.

The point of all this is to give you some serious resources to learn about a new paradigm of thinking about your own body. The work of all four of these very special people has helped Boris and me in so many ways that I feel compelled to share it with you. So read the posts below, think for yourself, and decide what's for you!

Dr. Candace Pert

I was reading Dr. John Sarno's book, "The Divided Mind", and he mentions that anyone interested in the subject of the biochemistry of emotions (that would be me!) should read a book called, "Molecules of Emotion" by a neuroscientist named Dr. Candace Pert. I jumped up (yes, actually jumped) and ordered myself a copy from Amazon.com and, besides being a lively and entertaining read, it was yet another introduction to a new doorway of thinking for me. Reading this material was like being introduced to my own body's systems for the first time. Learning about how your cells communicate with each other, directing their action, keeping you healthy (or making you sick) is now one of my passions.

Dr. Pert, who once came within inches of winning a Nobel Prize, has centered her work around chemicals called peptides that are what create the communication system in your body. At the present time, she's devoted herself to using this premise to find a cure for AIDS. This communication system in our bodies is so elegant and sophisticated that it makes the internet look like a telegraph, or maybe like paper cups and a string--no offense to the internet, I love it.

It's just too bad that all this isn't common knowledge that we were taught from the time we're little kids, maybe the way we were taught basics about our bodily functions like having a cardiovascular system, for instance. Or a brain, or a liver. It's that basic to our existence and we just never knew about it! And once you get the general idea of how it works, you can use your new understanding to enhance your own health and well-being in ways you never dreamed of.

Dr. Pert is currently Chief Scientific Officer of RAPID Laboratories in Rockville, Maryland which is developing a drug treatment and vaccine against HIV, the virus which causes AIDS.