Healthy Summer Fruit Tart You Can Be Proud Of

Summer is blooming, if not quite here, literally, in San Diego with our recent heat wave, it is in the imagination-- the season of flowers and fruit and fruit tart. Make yours the healthy way. Food, not candy.


http://bodymindwellnesscenter.com/healthy-summer-fruit-tart/

copyright Eyton J. Shalom, M.S., L.Ac. San Diego, CA All Rights Reserved, Use With Permission Ayurveda, Acupuncture, and Chinese Medicine in San Diego http://www.bodymindwellnesscenter.com

Baked Eggs Middle Eastern Style: Shakshuka

Great way to make eggs that is not fried and has more vegetables. Baked eggs are really creamy. Use free range eggs. By me, I don't use peppers, and if you are a Pitta type, don't you either; I do use carrots or kale or collards, the latter two help balance the dish and pacify Pitta. Adding coriander powder to the spices will help keep Pitta down, as will topping with Cilantro vs. Parsley. All told though this dish will increase Pitta, so don't make it if you have a strong physical Pitta imbalance.

But its a very good dish for Vatta types, provided they delete the peppers and paprika and cook the onions till sweet. Cumin and Black Pepper are good

For Kapha, no feta cheese,and use the peppers and paprika and maybe even some red chili.

P.S.  the way she drops the powdered spices flat on the hot pan, they will burn, drop them into olive oil or the veggies and stir.

Video from NY Times Chef: How to make Shakshuka 




copyright Eyton J. Shalom, M.S., L.Ac. San Diego, CA All Rights Reserved, Use With Permission Ayurveda, Acupuncture, and Chinese Medicine in San Diego http://www.bodymindwellnesscenter.com

The Acu-Ball, a Great Tool for Trigger Point Pain and Myofascial Pain

 Here is my new post on using a great device called the acuball, or acu-ball, developed by Dr. Michael Cohen, as seen on Dr. Oz., endorsed by Deepak Chopra, and now me, but with a lot more specifics. Here is a link to my article,

http://bodymindwellnesscenter.com/acuball-for-the-treatment-and-prevention-of-trigger-point-pain/ ,

and here is Dr. Cohen's acu-ball website


copyright Eyton J. Shalom, M.S., L.Ac. San Diego, CA All Rights Reserved, Use With Permission Ayurveda, Acupuncture, and Chinese Medicine in San Diego http://www.bodymindwellnesscenter.com

Mindfulness, Trigger Point Pain, Myofascial Acupuncture, and the Anti-inflammatory Diet

Just posted this article on Acupuncture, Trigger Point Pain, Mindfulness, and the Anti-inflammatory Diet on my Website:

http://bodymindwellnesscenter.com/trigger-point-pain-acupuncture-mindfulness-and-the-anti-inflammatory-diet/

In which I discuss the different pieces of the myofascial pain puzzle, diet-inflammation, mental tension/stress and muscular tension.

Tension originates in the mind and influences inflammation and pain perception, whereas diet affects systemic inflammation more directly. Check it out!

Copyright Eyton J. Shalom, M.S., L.Ac. San Diego, CA All Rights Reserved, Use With Permission Ayurveda, Acupuncture, and Chinese Medicine in San Diego
http://www.bodymindwellnesscenter.com

Are Calcium Supplements Wise for Post Menopausal Women?

Americans seem to think that everything can be solved with a pill. Whereas in Chinese Medicine it says that only after diet and lifestyle have failed do we utilize drug medicine.

Vitamin and Mineral supplements fall somewhere inbetween. They are clearly no substitute for a healthy diet rich in green leafy vegetables, yellow starchy ones, fruits, probiotic rich fermented foods, bone broths, nuts, seeds, and a little bit of everything else.

Interesting article here from Jane Brody, health writer from the New York Times on Calcium supplementation for post-menopausal women.

In February, the United States Preventive Services Task Force recommended that postmenopausal women refrain from taking supplemental calcium and vitamin D. After reviewing more than 135 studies, the task force said there was little evidence that these supplements prevent fractures in healthy women.
Moreover, several studies have linked calcium supplements to an increased risk of heart attacks and death from cardiovascular disease.

And here is a quote from this article.

A government task force formally recommended on Monday that healthy postmenopausal women avoid taking low daily doses of vitamin D and calcium to ward off bone fractures.

 This does not apply to women with osteoporosis, however. One thing is clear, and i have seen a number of studies on this. Vegetable calcium from leafy green vegetables cooked with an acidic substance like lemon, vinegar, etc. is more absorbable.  So at a minimum, don't count on your calcium from dairy, make sure you eat your greens.

http://www.bodymindwellnesscenter.com

Using Daikon Radish to Detoxify, Promote Digestion, Reduce Dampness

Daikon Radish is a great soup or salad vegetable. It is spicy, and acts as a digestive by stimulating digestive fire, just as the small radishes that Mexicanos eat with corn and meat do, but it is more aromatic, especially when boiled, than the small radishes and not quite as hot.

Daikon is used in Chinese Medicine Nutritional therapy to balance heavier foods that are high in harder to digest animal protein and fat, like beef or pork, which are are also neutral and cool in natural temperature, and therefore likely to produce toxic dampness in the gut, which then spreads to the rest of the body.

Chopped Daikon Half Moons

 Chicken, on the other hand, for example, is already hot in nature and very easy to digest, because it is lighter, so does not need daikon. It is chicken's hot, light nature that makes it an excellent choice when fighting or recovering from a cold or flu; not just because its easy to digest, but because its hot nature helps fight the chills, and its light energy has a lifting effect that makes you feel better, especially when combined with Astragalus/Huang Qi at the end of a cold.

For this same very reason Chicken is a terrible choice for skin disorders like eczema, psoriasis and acne, because its hot nature heats the blood and its lifting energy brings that heat to the skin, the last place you want it with hot skin disease. Its for this reason chicken is often paired with bitter green vegetables or grains like Yi Yi Ren/Job's Tears Barley which are naturally cooling and balances the natural heat of chicken.

Notice that Chinese Medicine grades foods, like herbs, as hot, warm, cool, cold, or neutral, spicy, sour, salty sweet, astringent, heavy, light, drying, moistening. Chinese cooking in general, Chinese Medicine nutritional therapy in particular, and Chinese philosophy overall, seeks to balance these opposing natural elements, or Yin and Yang. Chinese medicine sees food and human life as nature in a microcosm—a series of interdependent and mutually enhancing elements—water creates moisture, fire creates heat and dryness, etc.

Daikon often finds itself cooked with fresh ginger root, to further stimulate the digestive fire in the presence of heavy or greasy foods. Daikon is also considered to help prevent the development of pathological dampness in the gut such as develops when we overeat heavy moistening foods like meats and sweet tasting cooling heavy, meaty, high gluten grains like wheat.

In fact, the compendium of Chinese Herbal Medicine and Foods, the Ben Cao of Dr. Li, 1578 c.e. describes daikon as both carminitive (digestive) and “corrective” which means “detoxifying.” As such it was cooked with stale or old meat, which was a necessity, given the poverty of the day. The flowers, fermented in wine, were used to produce brilliant eyes, and the seeds were also used medicinally as an expectorant, digestive, and diuretic.

Daikon makes an excellent pickling vegetable, and is a favorite amongst Koreans, along with cabbage. The Korean beef bone marrow soup restaurant I used to go to, whose soup contained organ meats like spleen liver and lung, with a naturally building, but also toxic element, always served cabbage kimchee and pickled daikon with their soup and rice.

Japanese serve raw shredded Daikon with any kind of deep fried food, for all the above reasons. Deep fried food, though warming, is also very damp producing, as it contains super-concentrated fat, and therefore a little harder to digest. Daikon, like radish, stimulated bile, which helps digest high fat. Then they often are deep frying crustacean seafood like shrimp, which are quite naturally toxic--many people are allergic to shrimp. High heat oil has a certain toxicity, too, another reason for daikon.

Japanese also serve shredded raw daikon with sashimi. Again, raw fish has a certain natural toxicity, and when we take sashimi we tend to eat more fish than when we have it as sushi, hence the daikon. Of course raw fish is also cold in the stomach, so along with pickled ginger and wasabi horseradish there is daikon.

Kiriboshi/Dried Daikon
In fact the Japanese love Daikon so much they even dehydrate it, which concentrates its onion-like flavor, bringing out its sweetness, too, for use in soups, especially in winter, when concentrated intense flavors are in tune with the more deep energy of the season. Kiriboshi daikon in Japanese (buy Eden brand organic Dried daikon like fresh daikon, is excellent as a base for miso soup, along with Konmbu sea vegetable and Shitake mushroom. 

Shitake is also an excellent blood cleanser and immune booster, and Konbu stimulates the thyroid function and cleanses lymph. Combined with the digestive properties of miso, this is a very delicious and medicinal winter soup, that you can modify for the season depending on your additional ingredients, such as
Springtime: fresh bitter greens, like dandelion. Add burdock root
Summer: Cooling hydrating veggies like fresh corn or summer squash
Autumn: Kabocha and other hard squashes, daikon,

Daikon Radish Miso Soup Recipe
Boil 3-4 cups water
Add 1 cup daikon radish, peeled, and chopped. I like half moons. Or use 2 tbsp dried daikon. You can always just add a pinch of dried daikon to any miso soup recipe.
Add 3 dried shiktake mushrooms that have first been soaked and then sliced. Use the soak water, too. (Wash before soaking)
Add 1 three inch piece of Kombu seaweed
Add 3-4 slices fresh ginger root
Bring to the boil, reduce flame, simmer till the radish is cooked.
Take 1-2 tablespoons mellow white miso and 1 tsp your favorite darker miso, like barley miso or red miso.
Mix in small cup of water into a dilute paste.
Add to your soup, stir, simmer for 2-3 minutes. Serve.
Garnish with fresh chopped scallions.

Ayurveda

Kapha: Daikon is spicy, warm, and light; so Kapha can eat it “till the cows come home.” It can only benefit, or pacify Kapha, even raw.

Vatta: Vatta can benefit quite a bit from daikon, especially when cooked in soup, where it adds warmth and a kind of light heaviness, heavier than greens, lighter than potato or meat. Vatta can eat small amounts of raw daikon, but need to be careful with the spicy hot taste. Just don't overdo it; its still a raw vegetable, so think of it as more of a condiment, when raw. Daikon can be used by Vatta and Kapha in summer to balance other more cooling veggies like tomato and cucumber

Pitta: Pitta is the dosha that can aggravated/vitiated/elevated by daikon. Daikon cooked in soups is usually quite ok in moderation, and a balanced Pitta can tolerate raw daikon as a condiment when eaten appropriately, such as paired with cucumber. But someone with elevated Pitta, meaning, for example, with heat symptoms like rashes, hives, eczema, heartburn, needs to avoid fish, fried food, and raw daikon, as that is heat increasing heat. Pitta in general eats less fish and avoids fried food like the plague.

copyright eyton j. shalom, l.ac. san diego, ca february 2013 all rights reserved use with permission only


copyright Eyton J. Shalom, M.S., L.Ac. San Diego, CA All Rights Reserved, Use With Permission Ayurveda, Acupuncture, and Chinese Medicine in San Diego http://www.bodymindwellnesscenter.com

Overuse of Antibiotics and the Alternative

Tragically, the overuse of antibiotics in the west is only the tip of the ice burg. In much of Asia and Latin America you can simply walk into a pharmacy and ask for antibiotics and they will give them to you, without a prescription. People even take them for the common cold.

And now we see this excellent statement http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2013/mar/11/superbugs-antibiotics-bacterial-diseases-infections by the Chief Medical Officer of  Great Britain, Dame Sally Davies,  and i quote, " If tough measures are not taken to restrict the use of antibiotics ..., "we will find ourselves in a health system not dissimilar to the early 19th century at some point".

Please do not take antibiotics unless:

 a)you know for sure what you have is bacterial and not viral, and that means culturing sputum, and
  b) there are no alternatives...which there always are in the case of bronchitis, sinus infection, ear infection, bladder infection...

According to western medicine's own Merck manual, we know the vast majority of bronchitis is viral, not bacterial. So if your M.D. irresponsibly wants to give you antibiotics, "just to make sure," ask them to culture your sputum like my pediatrician used to do when we were kids. Its a simple and cheap test.

Chinese Herbal medicine has been treating bronchitis and cough and colds and flu for abut 2500 years of written medical history. It works very very well, but has to be tailored to your specific pattern, which can vary from person to person with the same western medicine defined disease. 

Person A with bronchitis may have more dry heat with less phlegm and Person B have phlgem damp heat. Different pattern; different prescription. Ask your licensed herbal medicine doctor.

According to the American Association of Pediatric Physicians the vast majority of ear infections are viral. The standard of care is to treat the very severe pain, with painkillers, but to NOT use anti-biotics, because they don't work. On the other hand, Blue Poppy brand Bupleurum and Angelica works like a charm for the pattern of disharmony that causes most pediatric ear infections. I have had amazing results with it.

Sinus infections can be bacterial, but also fungal. In any case, Chinese herb formulas like Sun Ten brand Tong Bi, and also Qing Bi Tang work like a charm, so no need, when these herbal medicines are used correctly, according to pattern of disharmony, to use anti-biotics

Bladder infections must be differentiated from interstitial cystitis, which is a chronic inflammation without infection. But if you do have a bladder infection there are great Chinese Herbal medicine formulas like Ba Zheng San and Si Miao Wan, that, depending on the symptoms can be combined with Cranactin Extra strength Uva Ursi with Cranberry extract. At all costs huge amounts of fluid must be pushed, particularly fluids like barley water or juiced watermelon rind. The more you push fluids the quicker you will recover, as it helps flush bacteria from the walls of the bladder and dilutes them in the urine.

If you need to take antibiotics to save your life, by all means do, of course. But this irresponsible habit of dispensing them like candy is making them useless in the long run, as well as creating super bacteria, and that hurts everyone.




copyright Eyton J. Shalom, M.S., L.Ac. San Diego, CA All Rights Reserved, Use With Permission Ayurveda, Acupuncture, and Chinese Medicine in San Diego http://www.bodymindwellnesscenter.com

Ayurveda and Fruit: Match to your Dosha; Eat in Season

Fruits are naturally sweet sour and refreshing. Some fruits, like apples, also have an astringent or drying property, depending on variety, macs more than fiji, for example. Your mouth feels a bit dry after a bite of apple, or quite dry after a bite of unripe banana--this is the astringent flavor. Pomegranates are another great example of this, as are  persimmon, especially if not perfectly ripe.
Some fruit are more sweet than sour, like ripe figs, dates,  bananas, some fruits are especially cooling, like watermelon, ripe bananas or oranges. Some fruits can be less cooling, like raspberries, strawberries and peach which are actually a bit spicy and considered warm in Chinese medicine. . And some fruits that are actually very sweet, like tree ripened mango, are still quite sour and acidic.

Why are the flavors of foods important? Because Ayurveda and Chinese Medicine both have observed the effects of the flavor of foods on different body-mind types, called Dosha in Ayurveda. 

This aspect of food medicine is especially advanced in Ayurveda, where it is observed that, for example, Vatta dosha, dominated by elemental air, and therefore naturally cold, dry, ungrounded, is grounded, warmed, nourished and soothed by foods that are naturally sweet, sour, and salty, when consumed in moderation, especially if combined with other foods that have an unctuous and warming quality. This is because the sweet taste is naturally moistening—think about how your mouth tastes in the morning with a swig of juice vs just water.
The sweet taste is naturally nourishing and moistening, which ethereal dry Vatta needs desperately-- most grains, flesh foods, dairy, vegetables are sweet, the sweet taste is the staff of life, all the other flavors either aid the digestion of sweet things or cleanse our bodies. This is why fleshy earthy damp solid Kapha needs to limit sweet tasting foods; it is already naturally well nourished and moist and need to eat more cleansing bitter green vegetables and stimulating spices.
Sour and salty are also moistening and building like sweet-- they hold fluids in, which is good for Vata, and they are also  heat producing flavors, which benefits cold Vatta (and aggravates Pitta).
Though many fruits are naturally sweet and sour, raw fruits are generally also cooling, so in excess will actually aggravate Vatta, which is naturally cold. The idea is to not increase what is already tending to be excess. Vatta is cold and dry so cold and dry foods and experiences increase or aggravate cold dry Vatta. So each dosha has to choose fruits that are appropriate, and in the case of Vatta, be careful about overeating raw fruit, especially in winter, and may even benefit from lightly cooked fruit, and when in a state of strong elevation or imbalance will want to eat stewed or baked fruits, even sweetened and with warming sweet spices like nutmeg, cinnamon and clove.
The astringent quality of some fruits like apples aggravates/elevates Vatta, because the astringent flavor is naturally drying, which is why, exactly, they are pacifying to wet muddy Kapha dosha, composed of the Water/earth element. Kapha on the other hand needs to restrict the naturally moistening quality of sweet fruits, which, practically speaking means less fruit altogether. Since water is cold/cooling, Kapha also likes warmth, so should not overeat raw fruit, especially in Kapha season, late winter/early spring, and may add spices, even hot ones like cayenne, to fruit, as is done in Mexico and India, but without the added salt and citric acid.
Pitta on the other hand is easily aggravated by the sour and spicy/pungent taste and pacified by bitter, sweet, and astringent. These are the people, people with any kind of heat symptoms on the skin, in the gut, in the mind, such as eczema, psoriasis, GERD, ulcers, some colitis and IBS, hemorrhoids, migraines, who should avoid sour fruit like the plague, avoiding all but the sweetest fresh picked berries, mangos, oranges, and tomatoes, and even then should eat them only in extreme moderation.
Pitta is the firey hot dosha, so it can be quite liberal with cooling fruits, especially in summer. These are the folk that can plough thru large portions of watermelon and still feel great, and can tolerate winter stone fruits like pear and apple quite well. I think any dosha has to be mad eating melons out of season, again, as its going to creat Ama/digestive toxins, but also because its just the wrong season to eat such a cooling food.
On Fruit Out of Season and Picked Green (Factory Farmed Fruit)
Fruit picked green that is left to ripen in the supermarket coolers create a huge problem for digestion and dosha balance. These fruits are often overwhelmingly astringent and sour, as we see with supermarket berries. This strongly aggravates the all three doshas, and in general promotes Ama/digestive toxins, because you are asking the body to digest something that has not gotten to the place nature intended for it. It is unripe. Try that in the real world.
In the real world, in nature, you would not pick a green strawberry or peach and try to eat it. It is inedible. In nature, there are numerous fruits that appear on bushes and trees for brief periods, in season, so we get less of them, but when we do get them they are very sweet, giving overwhelming pleasure and sweet memories. My memory of rambutan in Sri Lanka and jackfruit in India is like that, and even if I never taste them again, the memory sustains me and continues to nourish, which is the nature of sweetness. Sweet food and sweet experiences are nourishing, whereas bitter is cleansing; we grow as much from failure as success, for example. And when you eat fruit in season your longing for them grows, and with this longing, which is a kind of heat, grows your digestive fire/Agni, so that when you finally get that fruit in season your fire matches the cooling energy of the fruit.
So its best to avoid fruit out of season and fruit picked unripe as much as you can. Its not 100 % possible, unless you grow your own and live in every climate. But you can do it more than less. And if you are a landowner living in San Diego, my god, the list is endless; you can even grow decent bananas and mangoes here.
A particularly egregious example of fruits out of season are berries, incredibly sour and astringent when out of season. Though Ayurveda and Chinese Medicine are against frozen food, because it is not fresh and is old and transformed into a wrecked item, I think you would even be better off freezing ripe in-season berries than buying them in the winter off the shelf. Then you have to heat them up when using.
This is the difference between looking at foods from an energetic natural standpoint, and just counting nutrients. Sure, there may be anti-oxidants in green berries, but can your digestive fire liberate them? Sure pomegranate is high in anti-oxidants, and, being high in astringency, is excellent for Pitta and Kapha. But pomegranate juice and cranberry can strongly aggravate Vatta, except for very sweet juice in very small portions. This becomes urgent info in a disease like interstitial cystitis, which is very much  a combined Pitta/Vatta imbalance, in which cranberry needs to be modified with something like licorice root, or in cases of insomnia and anxiety, emblematic of Vatta imabalance.
The starting point of a healthy diet in natural medicine is to match foods and cooking styles to your bodymind type, moderated by personal inclination, taste, and experience. If there is a food here or there that makes you feel great even though it is theoretically wrong for you, tell them Dr. Shalom said its OK. Listening to your body is as important as any dogma. Lists and theories have to be digested like anything else, internalized and made your own. This info is the beginning of the process, not the end. Do your best, don't worry, and experiment.
Summary

In Ayurveda fruits picked at the wrong time (too soon, as in factory farm fruit growing,) and fruits eaten in the wrong season, (imported from far away lands in another hemisphere) create digestive toxins, called Ama. Try to eat fruits in season and that are ripened on the tree to maximize digestion of nutrients and experience. Match fruits and how you eat them to your body-mind type/Dosha, for Vata—sweet, sour and salty, possible heated, and with sweet warming spices in cold weather, for Pitta—sweet, bitter and astringent, avoiding heat producing fruits, for Kapha—astingent, bitter, pungent, less fruit altogether, with added hot spices even.

Vatta—pacify with sweet, salty, sour. Aggravate with spicy, bitter, astringent
Favor: Sweet fruits, cooked fruits, fruits in season, grapes, cherries, peaches, melons, coconut, banana, sweet citrus, pineapple if sweet, plums and berries if sweet, mango, figs.
Avoid/Reduce: Dried fruits, apple, pear, pomegranate, cranberry, melon out of season
Pitta—pacify with sweet, bitter, astringent. Aggrevate with spicy, salty, sour.
Favor: Sweet fruits same as Vatta, larger quantity than Vatta, add astringent like pomegranate
Avoid/Reduce: Grapefruit, peach, sour fruit of any kind, papaya (its heating), persimmon, olives, berries out of season.
Kapha—pacify with astringent, bitter, spicy. Aggravate with sweet, sour, salty.
Favor: Astringent fruits like apple, pomegranate, cranberry, persimmon, small amounts of dried fruit.
Avoid/Reduce: Less fruit altogether, all sweet fruits, see Vata favor list for fruit to avoid.
copyright eyton j. shalom, m.s., l.ac. february 2013 san diego ca all rights reserved use with permission please contact for reprint permission.


copyright Eyton J. Shalom, M.S., L.Ac. Feb 2013 San Diego, CA All Rights Reserved, Use With Permission Ayurveda, Acupuncture, and Chinese Medicine in San Diego
http://www.bodymindwellnesscenter.com

What's Wrong with "Energy" Drinks?

 Great article recently in NY Times today on energy drinks.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/02/health/scant-proof-is-found-to-back-up-claims-by-energy-drinks.html?pagewanted=2&_r=0&hp

One of the operative quotes:

...one thing is clear, interviews with researchers and a review of scientific studies show: the energy drink industry is based on a brew of ingredients that, apart from caffeine, have little, if any benefit for consumers...."

So the question is, why not just have an espresso?

Is it something about the can, the macho power workout imagery suggested by names like Red Bull or Monster? Or is it the blatant fake advertising and, according to the experts in the article, undocumented pseudo-scientific claims about taurine?

"...Caffeine is called the world’s most widely used drug. A stimulant, it increases alertness, awareness and, if taken at the right time, improves athletic performance, studies show. Energy drink users feel its kick faster because the beverages are typically swallowed quickly or are sold as concentrates."

Iced coffee, anyone?

"These are caffeine delivery systems,” said Dr. Roland Griffiths, a researcher at Johns Hopkins University who has studied energy drinks. “They don’t want to say this is equivalent to a NoDoz because that is not a very sexy sales message."

 The grandaddy of all energy drinks Lipovitan-D, from Japan, from the company that began the claims about taurine, has this history--

 "The roots of the energy drink phenomenon ... can be traced to Japan. Those origins appear tied to the emergence of supposed cure-alls after World War II, a time when drugs there were in short supply.

In fact early marketing for the Japanese beverage claims taurine's effectiveness in treating illnesses as diverse as neuralgia, fevers, fatigue, and whooping cough. Whooping cough?!? Sorry guys, but the only panacea I know off is an all expense paid vacation laying on the beach; anytime anyone makes such diverse claims about one substance, you just about know its bogus.

The problem with getting your pre-workout caffeine fix from these dubious products are multifold--

First, there is the fact that almost all cans are lined with a highly toxic material called Bisphenol-A (BPA). http://www.edenfoods.com/articles/view.php?articles

Second, there is the amount of sugar in these drinks. Do I really need to address that? One Red Bull contains nearly 2 tbsp of sugar. Try putting that much sugar in a double espresso and see what it tastes like.

Third, there is the issue of getting caffeine from a highly processed source. At least when you get caffeine from tea or coffee there are all kinds of anti-oxidants present that are actually good for you.

Fourth, Of course you could get sugar-free, which means imbibing large amounts of highly toxic artificial sweetners that are probably far worse for you than sugar.

Fifth, Finally, there is cost. Coffee and tea, a 12oz Starbucks at 1.85 has the same caffeine, the essential ingredient that makes you feel energy, as a 16 oz. "energy" drink that sells for 2.99.
The guys that make and sell these products are gazillionaires. The Thai part-owner of Red Bull is the 250th richest man in the world. Wanna make him richer?

If you need your caffeine cold, why not have a strong iced tea? You can get all kinds of cold bottled iced teas, too, with and without sugar,  if you want to spend money on a packaged drink, as opposed to bringing from home.  The one product I would ever recommend from Herbalife is this tea mix I once had, combination of green and black tea with stevia, that really packed a caffeine kick without the afterburn of coffee.

P.T. Barnum said a sucker is born every minute. Wanna be one of them? Spend your hard earned dough on hi-sugar energy drinks.



copyright Eyton J. Shalom, M.S., L.Ac. San Diego, CA All Rights Reserved, Use With Permission Ayurveda, Acupuncture, and Chinese Medicine in San Diego http://www.bodymindwellnesscenter.com

Grass Fed Milk, Cultured Butter, Butter in Ayurveda

If you eat butter, let it be from cows that exercised in the fresh air and sun and ate grass in summer pastures, not soybeans and grains in barns.  I really like the Organic Valley brand Pasture Butter (and also Grass Fed Milk. ) http://www.organicvalley.coop/products/butter/pasture/ 

As the cows graze on grass over the long summer days, they produce a milk that  provides higher levels of vitamins, CLA (conjugated linoleic acid), and balanced omega-3 and omega-6 fats. And because they are out in the fields, their milk has the flavor of the terrain, like single origin chocolate or wine, what's called the "terroir" in fancy french.

Also, like European butters, Organic Valley's Pasture butter is cultured. And that does not mean they listen to Opera in the barn over the winter. (Though when I spent a summer at a dairy farm in Vermont, they did play music for the cows in the barn, and swore they liked the company. But it was just A.M. radio).  That means it is made with microbial cultures just like yogurt is. Which seems to me to make it less cloying and easier to digest than sweet cream butter. Makes sense.

In Chinese Medicine as in Ayurveda, anything you do to make food more digestible, like cooking fish with ginger, or adding cardamom to milk, helps your "spleen qi" or "Agni/digestive fire" to transform foodstuffs into energy. Here is the wiki-scoop on cultured butter vs. sweet cream butter (what Americans are used to):

Before modern factory butter making, cream was usually collected from several milkings and was therefore several days old and somewhat fermented by the time it was made into butter. Butter made from a fermented cream is known as cultured butter. During fermentation, the cream naturally sours as bacteria convert milk sugars into lactic acid. The fermentation process produces additional aroma compounds, including diacetyl, which makes for a fuller-flavored and more "buttery" tasting product.Today, cultured butter is usually made from pasteurized cream whose fermentation is produced by the introduction of Lactococcus and Leuconostoc bacteria.

I am unable to opine whether there is a health benefit to these bacteria as pro-biotics, but its hard to imagine there not being one. But as I said above, anything you do to make fats more digestible, though, means you you are creating less gunk (digestive toxins/Ama in Ayurveda) in your body by lessening the load on your digestive fire/Agni. In any case, for me, I  prefer the  slightly sour flavor and lighter texture of cultured butter.

Another great advantage of the Organic Valley line is that their products are really organic. And that is not just good for your body, its good for the enviornment.  An 8oz. weekly purchase (what is that, a family of 8?) of organic butter prevents the following annually:

21 lbs Synthetic Nitrogen Fertilizer
4.5 oz Synthetic Herbicides & Pesticides

Well, you get the idea.

Most United Stateseans eat too much of everything; so I am not saying you should go out and eat a stick of butter a day. Amongst natural foods, there are none that are unhealthy or healthy, there are only healthy/unhealthy diets. If you are going to eat butter as part of a healthy diet, eat organic butter first, and if possible, from the milk of grass and hay fed cows, not cows made obese with soybeans and grains.

Butter in Ayurveda

Butter, like milk, is cooling, so it pacifies Pitta. Like all fats, it is heavy, so it is well tolerated by Vatta, especially when combined with something warm, like hot grain cereal and cinnamon. Like all fats, it aggravates Kapha, but all the more so since it is cooling and Kapha is cold water. Not the best choice for Kapha, who would do better to choose a warming fat like olive oil.

copyright eyton j. shalom, l.ac., san diego ca December 2012, all rights reserved, use with permission.

Ayurveda, Acupuncture, and Chinese Medicine in San Diego http://www.bodymindwellnesscenter.com