MUSHROOMS and FUNGI....NOT created for Human FOOD #1
MUSHROOMS AND FUNGI.....not Created for Human Food #1
I have known the truth about mushrooms and fungi not being created by God for human food for decades, but I've had to wait for decades to finally have someone write the technicalities of it, in simple to understand language - Michael Pollan has done just that. When you finish reading this two-part study, some simple logic common sense should tell you that mushrooms and fungi, were never given by the Creator for us to eat - Keith Hunt
GATHERING: THE FUNGI
by Michael Pollan from his book "Omnivore's Dilemma"( 2006)
.......I hadn't actually thought about the gardener's worldview in this light till I'd spent some time mushroom hunting, which proposes a whole other way of being in nature. Hunting for mushrooms is an operation that superficially resembles harvesting—you're looking around in nature for the ready-to-eat—yet you quickly discover that the two activities could hardly be more different. For starters, mushrooms are usually hunted in an unfamiliar place where you stand a very good chance of getting lost, particularly since you are looking down at the ground so determinedly the whole time. Getting lost just isn't much of a problem in the garden. (Which is why gardeners looking to create that experience plant mazes.) And whereas in your garden the ready-to-eat tomato beckons to you, flashing red from out of the undifferentiated green, mushrooms definitely hide. Picking and eating the wrong ones could get you killed, too, something not easily done in the garden. No, gratifying human needs and desires is just not what mushrooms are about. Mushrooms, you soon discover, are wild things in every way, beings pursuing their own agenda quite apart from ours. Which is why "hunting," rather than harvesting, is the mycophile's preferred term of art.
1. FIVE CHANTERELLES
It was a Sunday morning in late January when I got the call from Angelo.
"The chanterelles are up," he announced.
"How do you know? Have you been out looking?"
"No, not yet. But it's been three weeks since the big rains." We'd had a torrential week between the holidays. "They're up now, I'm sure of that. We should go tomorrow."
At the time I barely knew Angelo (we had yet to go pig hunting), which made his invitation to come mushrooming with him all the more generous. Mushroom hunters are famously protective of their "spots," and a good chanterelle spot is a precious personal possession (though not quite as precious as a good porcini spot). Before Angelo agreed to take me I'd asked a slew of acquaintances I knew to be my-cophiles if I might accompany them. (The Bay Area is home to many such people, probably because mushroom hunting marries the region's two guiding obsessions: eating and the outdoors.) I was always careful to solemnly swear to protect the location of their spots. For some people you could see at once that this was an entirely outrageous request, tantamount to asking if I might borrow their credit card for the afternoon. Others reacted more calmly, yet always cagily Angelo's friend Jean-Pierre is reputed to have good chanterelle spots right within the Berkeley city limits, but he repeatedly found polite ways to deflect my entreaties into the distant future. Several mushroom hunters responded to my request with the same joke: "Sure, you can come mushroom hunting with me, but I must tell you that immediately afterward I will have to kill you." What you fully expect to follow such a jokey warning (a warning I always parried with an offer to wear a blindfold coming and going) is some sort of conditional invitation, but it never arrives. Without ever exactly saying no, the mushroom hunter will defdy beg off or change the subject. I thought maybe the problem was that I was a writer, somebody who might do something as crazy as publish the location of a favorite spot, so I emphasized that a journalist would sooner go to jail than reveal a secret from a confidential source. This swayed precisely no one. I was beginning to think it was hopeless, that I was going to have to learn to hunt mushrooms from books—a dubious, not to mention dangerous, proposition. And then Angelo called.
Though I probably shouldn't overstate Angelo's generosity. The place he took me mushrooming was on private and gated land owned by an old friend of his, so it wasn't as though he was giving away the family jewels. The property was a vineyard outside of Glen Ellen, with several hundred untended acres of oak chaparral stretching to the northeast toward St. Helena. As soon as you stepped out of the manicured vineyard the land relaxed into gently rolling savanna, with broad sloping passages of grass, verdant after the winter rains, punctuated by shady groves of live oak and bay laurel.
The chanterelle is a mycorrhizal species, which means it lives in association with the roots of plants—oak trees, in the chanterelle's case, and usually oak trees of a venerable age. Though there must have been hundreds of promisingly ancient oaks here, Angelo, who had been hunting chanterelles on the property for years, seemed to be on a first name basis with every one of them. "That one there is a producer," he'd tell me, pointing across the meadow with his forked walking stick to an unremarkable tree. "But the one next to it, I never once found a mushroom there."
I cut my own walking stick from an oak branch and set off across the meadow to hunt beneath the tree Angelo had declared a good producer. He had instructed me to use the stick to turn over the leaf litter wherever it seemed uplifted. The stick also would carry spores from one tree to another, Angelo explained; evidently he regarded himself as something of a bumblebee to the chanterelles, transporting their genes from tree to tree. (In general mushroom hunters view their role in nature as benign.) I looked around my tree for a few minutes, walking a stooped circle under its drip line, flicking the leaf litter here and there with my stick, but I saw nothing. Eventually Angelo came over and pointed to a spot no more than a yard from where I stood. I looked, I stared, but still saw nothing but a chaotic field of tan leaves and tangled branches. Angelo got down on his knees and brushed the leaves and soil away to reveal a bright squash-colored trumpet the size of his fist. He cut it at the base with a knife and handed it to me; the mushroom was unexpectedly heavy, and cool to the touch.
How in the world had he spotted it? The mushroom hadn't even peeked up from the leaf litter yet. Apparently you had to study the leaves for subtle signs of hydraulic lift from below, and then look at the ground sideways, because the fat gold shafts of the chanterelles often reveal themselves before their tops break through the leaves. Yet when Angelo pointed to another spot under the same tree, a spot where he had obviously seen another mushroom, I was still blind. Not until he had shuffled the leaves with the tip of his stick did the golden nugget of fungus flash at me. I became convinced that Angelo had some other sense working for him besides sight, that he must be smelling the chanterelles before looking down to see them.
But that's apparendy how it goes with hunting mushrooms: You have to get your eyes on, as hunters will sometimes put it. And after following Angelo around for a while, I did begin to get my eyes on, a little, though at first, oddly enough, this would only happen when I was in Angelo's presence, working the same oak tree. Other novices talk about this phenomenon, and I suspect it's a little like the trick of the counting horse, who is not really doing arithmetic, as it appears, but is merely picking up subtle clues in the body language of its trainer. Wherever Angelo lingered, wherever the beams of his gaze raked the ground with particular intensity, I would look and occasionally would see. I was the horse who could count, the man who could find a chanterelle using someone else's eyes.
But before the morning was out I'd begun to find a few chanterelles on my own. I began to understand what it meant to have my eyes on, and the chanterelles started to pop out of the landscape, one and then another, almost as though they were beckoning to me. So had I stumbled on a particularly good spot or had I learned at last how to see them? Nature or nurture? There was no way of telling, though I did have the eerie experience of resurveying the very same patch of ground and finding a Siamese pair of chanterelles, bright as double egg yolks, in a spot where a moment before I could swear there had been nothing but the tan carpet of leaves. Either they had just popped up or visual perception is a lot more variable, and psychological, than we think. It is certainly ruled by expectation, because whenever I was convinced I was in a good spot the mushrooms were more likely to appear. "Seeing is believing" has it backward when it comes to hunting mushrooms; in this case, believing is seeing. My ability to see mushrooms seemed to function less like a window than a tool, a constructed and wielded thing.
After spotting a couple of nice ones I developed a measure of confidence that ultimately proved to be unfounded. Based on my still modest scores I worked out a snap theory of the Good Spot, which involved the optimal springiness of the soil and the distance from the trunk, but the theory didn't hold up. After a brief run of luck I prompdy went blind again—and failed to find another mushroom all day. I would say there were no more mushrooms left to find, except that Angelo was still finding them under canopies I had supposedly exhausted; not a lot— we were a few days early, he decided—but enough to fill a grocery bag.
I had managed to find a total of five, which doesn't sound like much except that several of them weighed close to a pound each. My five chanterelles were tremendous, beautiful things I couldn't wait to taste.
And that night I did. I washed off the dirt, patted them dry, and then sliced the chanterelles into creamy white slabs. They smelled faintly of apricots, and I knew at once that this was the same mushroom I had found near my house, the one I had been afraid to taste. The squashy hue matched, and these had the same shallow gills, ridges really, running up the stalk, which flared out to meet the gently in-folded cap like a stout golden vase. I sauteed the chanterelles as Angelo had recommended, first in a dry frying pan to sweat out their water, which was copious, and then with butter and shallots. The mushrooms were delicious in a subde way that could easily be overwhelmed or overlooked. They had a delicate flavor, fruity with a hint of pepper, and a firm but silky texture.
You might reasonably ask if, eating my wild mushrooms, I felt the least bit concerned about waking up dead. Did I harbor any lingering doubts that these mushrooms were really chanterelles—edible delicacies and not some deadly poison Angelo had mistaken for chanterelles? An understandable question, yet oddly enough, in view of my myco-phobic predilections, it was no longer an issue. Oh, maybe I felt the vaguest shadow of a doubt as I lifted the first forkful, but it was easily brushed aside. I trusted Angelo implicitly, and besides, these mushrooms smelled and tasted right.
At dinner that night we joked about mushroom poisoning, recalling the time Judith had stumbled upon a prodigious patch of morels while biking with her friend Christopher in Connecticut. She came home with a trash bag half full of them, an astounding haul. But I could not bring myself to serve the mushrooms until we could get some kind of confirmation that these were indeed morels and not, say, the "false morels" that the field guides warned against. But how to be sure? I couldn't quite trust the books, or at least my reading of them. The solution to the dilemma seemed obvious, if perhaps a little heartless. I proposed to Judith we put the morels in the refrigerator overnight, and then give Christopher a call in the morning. Assuming he was sufficiently alive to answer his phone, he would undoubtedly mention whether he'd eaten the morels the previous night, and we would then know ours were safe to eat. I saw no reason to mention his role as an experimental human subject.
Well, that's one way of dealing with the omnivore's dilemma. Wild mushrooms in general throw that dilemma into particularly sharp relief, since they confront us simultaneously with some of the edible world's greatest rewards and gravest risks. Arguably, mushroom eating poses the starkest case of the omnivore's dilemma, which could explain why people hold such strong feelings, pro or con, on the subject of wild mushrooms. As mycologists are fond of pointing out, you can divide most people, and even whole cultures, into mycophiles and mycophobes. Anglo-Americans are notoriously mycophobic, while Europeans and Russians tend to be passionate mycophiles, or so mush-roomers will tell you. But I suspect most of us harbor both impulses in varying proportions, approaching the wild mushroom with a heightened sense of the omnivore's basic tension as we struggle to balance our adventurousness in eating against a protective fear, our neophilia against our neophobia.
As the case of mushrooms suggests the omnivore's dilemma often comes down to a question of identification—to knowing exactly what it is you are preparing to eat. From the moment Angelo handed me that first mushroom, what is and is not a chanterelle suddenly seemed as plain to me as sunshine. I knew right then that the next time I found a chanterelle, anywhere, I would recognize it and not hesitate to eat it. Which is peculiar, when you consider that in the case of the chanterelle I found in my neighborhood, a half dozen authoritative field guides by credentialed mycologists had failed to convince me beyond a reasonable doubt of something I now was willing to bet my life on, based on the say-so of one Sicilian guy with no mycological training whatsoever. How could that be?
In deciding whether or not to ingest a new food, the omnivore will happily follow the lead of a fellow omnivore who has eaten the same food and lived to talk about it. This is one advantage we have over the rat, which has no way of sharing with other rats the results of his digestive experiments with novel foodstuffs. For the individual human, his community and culture successfully mediate the omnivore's dilemma, telling him what other people have safely eaten in the past as well as how they ate it. Just imagine if we had to decide every such edibility question on our own; only the bravest or most foolish of us would ever eat a mushroom. The social contract is a great boon to omnivores in general, and to mushroom eaters in particular.
The field guides contain our culture's accumulated wisdom on the subject of mushrooms. Curiously, though, the process of imparting and absorbing this life-and-death information works much better in person than it does on paper, whether through writing or even photography. Andrew Weil discusses this phenomenon in a wonderful series of essays on mushrooms he's collected in a volume called The Marriage of the Sun and Moon. "One learns most mushrooms in only one way: through people who know them. It is terribly difficult to do it from books, pictures, or written descriptions."
I wonder if books fail us here because the teaching transaction— This one is good to eat, that one not—is so fundamental, even primordial, that we're instinctively reluctant to trust it to any communication medium save the oldest: that is, direct personal testimony from, to put it blundy, survivors. After all, precisely what is meant by "this one," the myriad qualities embedded in that modest little pronoun, can be conveyed only imperfecdy in words and pictures. Our ability to identify plants and fungi with confidence, which after all is one of the most critical tools of our survival, involves far more sensory information than can ever be printed on a page; it is, truly, a form of "body knowledge" not easily reduced or conveyed over a distance........"
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MUSHROOM FOLLY
by Michael Pollan
......So my fungiphobia was another thing I'd have to overcome if I hoped to ever serve a personally hunted and gathered meal, because wild mushrooms had to be on the menu. Mushroom hunting seems to 1 me the very soul of foraging, throwing both the risks and rewards of eating from the wild into the sharpest possible relief. If I hoped to host representatives of all three kingdoms on my plate, learning to distinguish the delicious from the deadly among the fungi was a necessity. (Actually I hoped to wangle a fourth kingdom in there—a mineral—if I could manage to locate a salt flat within driving distance of my house.)
I began consulting field guides to help me identify the many unfamiliar species I'd been content to treat as leafy, fungal, and feathery background noise......
I scanned the leaf litter around a couple of oaks but saw nothing. Just when I'd given up and turned to head back, however, I noticed a bright, yolky glimmer of something pushing up the carpet of leaves not two feet from where I'd just stepped. I brushed away the leaves and there it was, this big, fleshy, vase-shaped mushroom that I was dead certain had to be a chanterelle.
Or was it?
How certain was that?
I took the mushroom home, brushed off the soil, and put it on a plate, then pulled out my field guides to see if I could confirm the identification. Everything matched up: the color, the faint apricot smell, the asymmetrical trumpet shape on top, the underside etched in a shallow pattern of "false" gills. I felt fairly confident. But confident enough to eat it? Not quite. The field guide mentioned something called a "false chanterelle" that had slighdy "thinner" gills. Uh oh. Thinner, thicker: These were relative terms; how could I tell if the gills I was looking at were thin or thick ones? Compared to what? My mother's mycophobic warnings rang in my ears. I couldn't trust my eyes. I couldn't quite trust the field guide. So whom could I trust? Angelo! But that meant driving my lone mushroom across the bridge to San Francisco, which seemed excessive. My desire to saute and eat my first-found chanterelle squabbled with my doubts about it, slender as they were. But by now I had passed the point of being able to enjoy this putative chanterelle without anxiety, so I threw it out.
I didn't realize it at the time, but I had impaled myself that afternoon on the horns of the omnivore's dilemma.
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YES I GUESS HE HAD IMPALED HIMSELF ON A DILEMMA!!
YOU HAVE TO BE AN EXPERT ON MUSHROOMS TO PICK THE RIGHT ONES; IF NOT YOU CAN KILL YOURSELF!!
NOW GOD TOLD THE FIRST HUMANS THE 'rule" FOR PLANT EATING....FRUIT EATING.....MUST BEAR SEEDS.
SIMPLE AS THAT..... OF ALL FRUITS AND VEGETATION TO EAT IT MUST REPRODUCE BY SEEDS.
MUSHROOMS, FUNGI, MOSS, SEA-WEED, AND SUCH DO NOT BEAR SEEDS!!
THEY SHOULD NOT BE EATEN!!
WHY WOULD GOD CREATE SOME MUSHROOMS THAT LITERALLY CAN KILL YOU, AND HAVE IT AS FOOD; NEEDING A PhD TO KNOW WHICH ONES WILL NOT KILL YOU. SIMPLE ANSWER......MUSHROOMS WERE NEVER CREATED TO BE EATEN BY HUMANS.
NOW IT DOES NOT MATTER WHAT SOME "DIET-NUTRITIONIST" HAVE TO SAY, ABOUT MUSHROOMS HAVE THIS VITAMIN OR THAT, OR THIS MINERAL OR THAT, AND HOW GOOD THAT IS. I HAVE A "HEALTH BOOK" THAT TELLS YOU ALL THE GOOD VITAMINS ETC. IN "PORK" - MAKES NO DIFFERENCE - GOD'S LAWS SAY PORK IS AN UNCLEAN SUBSTANCE [I WILL NOT CALL IT "FOOD"] AND IS NOT TO BE EATEN TO BE HEALTHY.
THERE IS NO DILEMMA - MUSHROOMS ARE NOT TO BE EATEN - THEY ARE PART OF THE UNCLEAN VEGETATION LAW OF GOD.
NOW ALL THE ARGUMENTS [LIKE THE "YEAST" ONE] GIVEN AS TO WHY YOU CAN EAT MUSHROOMS ARE ANSWERED ON MY WEBSITE UNDER "HEALTH AND DIET."
Keith Hunt
NEW approach for optimum HEALTH!!
Intermittent Fasting Beats Traditional Diets and Even Chronic Calorie Restriction for Weight Loss and Other Health Benefits
December 20, 2013 |
Mercola
Intermittent fasting or “scheduled eating” is one of the most powerful interventions I know of to shed excess weight and reduce your risk of chronic diseases like diabetes and heart disease.
These health benefits are more or less beneficial “side effects” of shifting your body from burning sugar to burning fat as its primary fuel. I’m really pleased to see this approach now receiving more mainstream media attention, as it’s such a potent health-promoting tool.
Most recently, The Wall Street Journal1 did a write-up on intermittent calorie restriction, specifically mentioning the 5:2 diet, promoted by Dr. Michael Mosley2in his book The Fast Diet: Lose Weight, Stay Healthy, and Live Longer with the Simple Secret of Intermittent Fasting.
The 5:2 strategy involves eating regularly five days a week, and fasting for two. On fasting days, Dr. Mosley recommends cutting your food down to ¼ of your normal daily calories, or about 600 calories for men and about 500 for women, along with plenty of water and tea.
As reported by featured article:
“Some research shows that this more radical-sounding approach may be a struggle at first but ends up being easier to stick with compared with the typical route of cutting calories each day. Some animal studies suggest it also offers other health benefits, including cognitive improvements.”
There are many different variations of intermittent fasting, however. If you are like 85 percent of the population and have insulin resistance, my personal recommendation is to fast every day by simply scheduling my eating into a narrower window of time each day. I find this method to be easier than fasting for a full 24 hours or more, twice a week.
Once you are at your ideal body weight, don’t have diabetes, high blood pressure, or abnormal cholesterol levels, you can eat more at other times. However, it is probably best to regularly resume some type of scheduled eating regimen on a regular basis.
‘Intermittent Eating’ May Be Easier Than Day-Long Fasts
In order to understand how you can fast daily while still eating every day, you need to understand some basic facts about metabolism. It takes most people eight to 12 hours for their body to burn the sugar stored in your body as glycogen. Now, most people never deplete their glycogen stores because they eat three or more meals a day. This teaches your body to burn sugar as your primary fuel and effectively shuts off your ability to use fat as a fuel.
Therefore, in order to work, the length of your fast must be at least eight hours. Still, this is a far cry from a 24-hour or longer fast, which can be quite challenging. I believe that, for most people, simply restricting the window of time during which you eat your food each day is far easier.
For example, you could restrict your eating to the hours of 11am and 7pm. Essentially, you’re just skipping breakfast and making lunch your first meal of the day instead. This equates to a daily fasting of 16 hours—twice the minimum required to deplete your glycogen stores and start shifting into fat burning mode.
Please keep in mind that a proper nutrition plan becomes even more important when you’re fasting and/or cutting calories, so you really want to address your food choices before you try any form of fasting.
This includes minimizing carbs and replacing them with healthful fats, like coconut oil, olive oil, olives, butter, eggs, avocados, and nuts. Many would benefit from getting as much as 50-85 percent of their daily calories from fats. (While this may sound like a lot, consider that, in terms of volume, the largest portion of your plate would be vegetables, since they contain so few calories. Fat, on the other hand, tends to be very high in calories. For example, just one tablespoon of coconut oil is about 130 calories—all of it from healthful fat.)
Three Reasons Why Intermittent Fasting Works
One of the primary mechanisms that makes intermittent fasting so beneficial for health is related to its impact on your insulin sensitivity. While sugar is a source of energy for your body, it also promotes insulin resistance when consumed in the amounts found in our modern processed food diets. Insulin resistance, in turn, is a primary driver of chronic disease—fromheart disease to cancer. Mounting research confirms that when your body becomes accustomed to burning FAT instead of sugar as its primary fuel, you rather dramatically reduce your risk of chronic disease. Becoming fat adapted may even be a key strategy for both cancer prevention and treatment, as cancer cells cannot utilize fat for fuel—they need sugar to thrive.
In short, fasting increases insulin sensitivity along with mitochondrial energy efficiency, thereby retarding aging and disease, which are typically associated with loss of insulin sensitivity and declined mitochondrial energy. Two additional mechanisms by which fasting benefits your body include:
- Reducing oxidative stress – Fasting decreases the accumulation of oxidative radicals in the cell, and thereby prevents oxidative damage to cellular proteins, lipids, and nucleic acids associated with aging and disease.
- Increasing capacity to resist stress, disease and aging – Fasting induces a cellular stress response (similar to that induced by exercise) in which cells up-regulate the expression of genes that increase the capacity to cope with stress and resist disease and aging.
Watch Cravings ‘Magically’ Vanish While Excess Weight Falls Off...
Intermittent fasting is one of the most effective ways I know of to shed excess weight. And, although it might be challenging in the beginning, once you’ve adapted to burning fat, you’ll typically find that sugar cravings vanish without a trace.
The featured article3 cites a recent study4 comparing the effectiveness of intermittent fasting versus daily calorie restriction to produce weight loss in overweight women with a history of breast cancer. All in all, intermittent fasting was determined to bemore effective for weight loss and improving insulin resistance than daily calorie restriction:
“Participants were divided into groups and instructed to eat a diet for three months in a way that reduced their typical calorie intake by about 25 percent. The first group ate only low-carbohydrate foods for two consecutive days, while the second was limited to two straight days of low-carbohydrate, low-calorie foods. The third group restricted calories daily.
The two intermittent restriction groups lost twice as much weight as the chronic restriction group, but the intermittent groups didn't differ from each other. In addition, more people in the intermittent groups lost weight: 65 percent of intermittent restrictors, compared with 40 percent in the chronic restriction group.”
Keep in mind that while most people will successfully switch over to burning fat after several weeks of intermittent fasting, you may need several months to teach your body to turn on the fat-burning enzymes that allow your body to effectively use fat as its primary fuel. So don’t give up!
Once you’ve become fat adapted and are of a normal weight, without high blood pressure, diabetes, or high cholesterol, you really only need to do scheduled eating occasionally. As long as you maintain your ideal body weight, you can go back to eating three meals a day if you want to. I restricted my eating to a six- to seven-hour window each day until I got fat adapted and lost about 10 pounds. Now, I still rarely ever eat breakfast, but several days a week I will have two meals instead of just one.
Other Health Benefits of Intermittent Fasting
Aside from removing your cravings for sugar and snack foods and turning you into an efficient fat-burning machine, modern science has confirmed there are many other good reasons to fast intermittently. For example, research presented at the 2011 annual scientific sessions of the American College of Cardiology in New Orleans5 showed that fasting triggered a 1,300 percent rise of human growth hormone (HGH) in women, and an astounding 2,000 percent in men.
HGH, commonly referred to as "the fitness hormone" plays an important role in maintaining health, fitness, and longevity, including promotion of muscle growth, and boosting fat loss by revving up your metabolism.
The fact that it helps build muscle while simultaneously promoting fat loss explains why HGH helps you lose weight without sacrificing muscle mass, and why even athletes can benefit from the practice (as long as they don't over train and are careful about their nutrition). The only other thing that can compete in terms of dramatically boosting HGH levels is high-intensity interval training. Other health benefits of intermittent fasting include:
Normalizing your insulin and leptin sensitivity, which is key for optimal health | Improving biomarkers of disease |
Normalizing ghrelin levels, also known as "the hunger hormone" | Reducing inflammation and lessening free radical damage |
Lowering triglyceride levels | Preserving memory functioning and learning |
Intermittent Fasting May Boost Your Brain Health
With Alzheimer’s incidence on the rise, it’s well worth noting strategies that can help prevent such a fate, and intermittent fasting appears to be a particularly effective one. As reported in the featured article:
“... [F]asting for periods of as short as 16 to 24 hours seems to induce a state of mild stress in the body. The brain releases additional neurotrophic proteins that help stimulate and support the growth of neurons and other cells, heightening their responsiveness and activity. Just as exercise makes muscles stronger, fasting makes the brain stronger, Dr. Mattson says. The body chemicals produced by fasting and exercise also could help boost people's moods.”
The brain-boosting protein referred to here is called brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF). Dr. Mattson, mentioned in the paragraph above, is a senior investigator for the National Institute on Aging, which is part of the US National Institutes of Health (NIH). He has researched the health benefits of both intermittent fasting and calorie restriction, and his research suggests that fasting every other day can boost BDNF by anywhere from 50 to 400 percent,6 depending on the brain region.
This is great news, as BDNF activates brain stem cells to convert into new neurons, and triggers numerous other chemicals that promote neural health. This protein also protects your brain cells from changes associated with Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease.
Interestingly, BDNF also expresses itself in the neuro-muscular system where it protects neuro-motors from degradation. (The neuromotor is the most critical element in your muscle. Without the neuromotor, your muscle is like an engine without ignition. Neuro-motor degradation is part of the process that explains age-related muscle atrophy.) So BDNF is actively involved in both your muscles and your brain, and this cross-connection helps explain why a physical workout can have such a beneficial impact on your brain tissue—and why the combination of intermittent fasting with high intensity interval trainingappears to be a particularly potent health-boosting combination.
Are You Ready to Boost Your Health Potential?
Based on my own phenomenal experience with scheduled eating, I believe it’s one of the most powerful ways to shift your body into fat burning mode and improve a wide variety of biomarkers for disease. The effects can be further magnified by exercising while in a fasted state. For more information on that, please see my previous article “High-Intensity Interval Training and Intermittent Fasting - A Winning Combo.”
To get started, consider skipping breakfast, and avoid eating at least three hours before you go to sleep. This should effectively restrict your eating to an 8-hour window or less each day.
When you do eat, make sure to minimize carbs like pasta, bread, and potatoes. Instead, exchange them for healthful fats like butter, eggs, avocado, coconut oil, olive oil, and nuts—essentially the very fats the media and “experts’ tell you to avoid. You may also want to restrict your protein a bit if you’re typically a big meat eater. I strongly suggest eating only high-quality pastured protein, and limiting it to about one gram of protein per kilogram of lean body mass (about one-half gram of protein per pound of lean body weight) may be appropriate for most people. (Note: if your body fat mass is 20 percent, your lean mass is 80 percent of your total body weight.)
These kinds of food choices, in combination with intermittent fasting, will help shift you from carb burning to fat burning mode. Last but not least, intermittently fasting will also help support healthy microorganisms in your gut. Your intestinal health, as you may know, in turn has a tremendous influence on your overall health, as 80 percent of your immune system resides in your gut.
Remember, it usually does take a few weeks, and you have to do it gradually, but once you succeed to switch to fat burning mode, you’ll be easily able to fast for 18 hours and not feel hungry. The “hunger” most people feel are actually cravings for sugar, and these will disappear, as if by magic, once you successfully shift over to burning fat instead of sugar.
Some caveats: If you're hypoglycemic, diabetic, or pregnant (and/or breastfeeding), you are better off avoiding any type of fasting or timed meal schedule until you've normalized your blood glucose and insulin levels, or weaned the baby. Other categories of people that would be best served to avoid fasting include those living with chronic stress and those with cortisol dysregulation.
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FERMENTED FOODS.....Good for your health !
Fermenting Foods—One of the Easiest and Most Creative Aspects of Making Food from Scratch
December 29, 2013 |
By Dr. Mercola
Ninety percent of the genetic material in your body is not yours but belongs to the bacteria that outnumber your cells 10 to 1. These bacteria have enormous influence on your digestion, detoxification and immune system.
Sandor Katz is a self-described “fermentation revivalist,” and has published two books on this topic, along with a third on the underground food movement. He’s a native of New York and a graduate of Brown University. Sandor currently lives in Tennessee, where he pursues his interest by presenting workshops around the world on fermentation.
Fermented food is something I too have become quite passionate about, and I firmly believe it’s an absolutely essential factor if you want to optimize your health and prevent disease. The culturing process produces beneficial microbes that are extremely important for human health as they help balance your intestinal flora, thereby boosting overall immunity.
Moreover, your gut literally serves as your second brain, and even produces more of the neurotransmitter serotonin—known to have a beneficial influence on your mood—than your brain does, so maintaining a healthy gut will benefit your mind as well as your body.
Fermented foods are also some of the best chelators and detox agents available, meaning they can help rid your body of a wide variety of toxins, including heavy metals.
“It wasn’t until I was in my 20s... that I first began to learn about and observe some of the digestive benefits of eating live culture fermented foods,” Sandor says.
“It was another decade after that when I left New York City, moved to rural Tennessee, and got involved in keeping a garden that I first had a reason to investigate the practice of fermentation. All of the cabbages were ready at the same time, and I thought I should learn how to make sauerkraut. I did a little bit of research in cookbooks and started making sauerkraut. Thus began my investigations into fermentation about 18 years ago.”
Starter Cultures versus Wild Ferment
When fermenting vegetables, you can either use a starter culture, or simply allow the natural enzymes in the vegetables do all the work. This is called “wild fermentation.” Personally, I prefer a starter culture as it provides a larger number of different species and the culture can be optimized with species that produce high levels of vitamin K2, which research is finding is likely every bit as important as vitamin D.
For this past year, we’ve been making two to three gallons of fermented vegetables every week in our Chicago office for the staff, which they can enjoy with the lunch we provide as an employee benefit.
We use a starter culture of the same probiotic strains that we sell as a supplement, which has been researched by our team to produce about 10 times the amount of vitamin K2 as any other starter culture... When we had the vegetables tested, we found that in a four- to six-ounce serving there were literally 10 trillion beneficial bacteria, or about 100 times the amount of bacteria in a bottle of high potency probiotics.
There are about 100 trillion bacteria in your gut, so a single serving can literally “reseed” 10 percent of the bacterial population of the average person’s gut! To me that’s extraordinary, and a profoundly powerful reason to consider adding fermented vegetables as a staple to your diet.
You don’t have to use a starter culture however. Wild fermentation is fermentation based on microorganisms that are naturally present in the food you’re fermenting. It’s just as simple as using a starter culture, but it will take a little longer for it to ferment.
“It’s very predictable when you salt and submerge vegetables [in their natural juices or brine]. The bacteria that will initiate at fermentation are always Leuconostoc mesenteroides. Then it’s a successive process whereby, as the pH changes and as the environment changes, different strains of bacteria come into dominance...” Sandor explains.
“Typically, in a mature sauerkraut, the late-stage bacterium that’s dominant is Lactobacillus plantarum. It’s a very predictable succession, what happens with raw vegetables, [but] the specific strains will always be somewhat different depending on the vegetables you’re using and the environment that you’re doing it in.”
To Salt or Not to Salt?
Whether or not to use salt also largely comes down to personal preference. While it’s not a necessity, Sandor does provide some compelling reasons for adding a small amount of natural, unprocessed salt—such as Himalayan salt—to your vegetables. For example, salt:
- Strengthens the ferment’s ability to eliminate any potential pathogenic bacteria present
- Adds to the flavor
- Acts as a natural preservative, which may be necessary if you’re making large batches that need to last for a larger portion of the year
- Slows the enzymatic digestion of the vegetables, leaving them crunchier
- Inhibits surface molds
Again, natural unrefined salts are ideal as they contain a broad spectrum of minerals, and the fermentation process makes the minerals more bioavailable—a win-win situation!
“Just now, I’m getting near the bottom of a 55-gallon barrel of sauerkraut that I made last November mostly out of radishes. That would not be possible without the addition of salt,” Sandor says. “You can make sauerkraut, and then you can ferment for several weeks in a cool environment. Maybe you could get to several months. But what would happen eventually to a salt-free kraut is that enzymes in the vegetable would basically digest the fiber of the vegetables. It would just turn into a mush, which is not at all appealing to me.”
What Type of Container Should You Use?
There’s no need to over-think or spend large amounts of money on containers. The material they’re made of is important however. You do NOT want to use plastic or metal. Plastics are loaded with chemicals you don’t want leaching into your food, such as bisphenol-A (BPA) and phthlalates. Metal is also inadvisable as salts can corrode the metal. Even if you don’t add salt, most vegetables have some natural salts in them. Good options include:
- Glass jars (wide-mouthed Mason jars are ideal, so that you can get your whole hand in there to press down the vegetables)
- Ceramic crocks
- Wooden barrels
I completely agree with Sandor’s sound general advice here:
“My main message that I would encourage your viewers and listeners to remember is you don’t need to buy anything special. You need a head of cabbage or a couple of pounds of vegetables, and beyond that everything you need is already in your kitchen. Whatever tools or devices you typically use to chop or shred vegetables, you can use that. Add some salt, mix it around, squeeze it with your hands for a couple of minutes, and stuff it into a jar.
Beyond that, you could use any kind of shredding device you like: a mandoline, a food processor, a continuous feed food processor, or a specialized cabbage-chopping device. You could buy beautiful elegantly designed crocks. But you have everything that you need to get started in your kitchen. Don’t let the beautiful crock that you don’t have yet be the reason why you don’t start doing this.
I think it’s really important to recognize that you don’t need anything special to start a fermentation practice. You might decide you want to play with starter cultures, but you don’t need starter cultures to get started. You might decide that you want to invest in a crock, but you don’t need a crock to get started.
If you take two pounds of vegetables, you can stuff a quart-sized jar with those. Just chop them up. Shred them. They can be extremely fine, or they can be coarse and chunky. It doesn’t matter. Lightly salt them to taste or else weigh them and measure out 1.5 percent salt. I prefer to salt them lightly to taste.”
Two Helpful Tips...
As Sandor explains, an important step in the process is to squeeze the vegetables before packing them into the jar. You don’t need any fancy tools for this; just use your hands. “Bruising” the vegetables in this way allows the cell walls to break down and release their juices. Capture the juice in the jar you’re going to ferment your vegetables in. Then stuff as many veggies into the jar that will fit. You want to stuff them in as tightly as possible, forcing out any air pockets that might ruin the batch. The brine should cover the vegetables.
Sandor then simply covers the jar with the lid and leaves it on the kitchen counter. A helpful tip I learned from Caroline Barringer is to top off the jar with a cabbage leaf, tucking it down the sides. Again, make sure the veggies are completely covered with the natural brine you squeezed out of the vegetables (or add a small amount of celery juice), and that the juice is all the way to the top of the jar to eliminate trapped air.
To speed up the fermentation, store the jars in a warm, slightly moist place for 24 to 96 hours, depending on the food being cultured. Ideal temperature range is 68-75 degrees Fahrenheit; 85 degrees max. You don’t want it too hot, as heat will kill the beneficial microbes. Don’t tuck them away in a dark closet and forget about them, though! As Sandor explains:
“The reason why you don’t want to just put it in the closet and forget about it is that it’s going to produce pressures, especially in the first couple of days. You want to relieve that pressure by opening the jar for a second. In that way, you don’t get a huge accumulation of pressure and risk the possibility of the jar exploding – or what’s more likely to happen, if you’re using a canning jar, where the glass is thick and the lid is thin, it will just contort the top. But it’s best to consciously release the pressure.”
The second tip is to smell and taste your ferment regularly. There’s really no objective moment when the fermentation is ready, so go ahead and taste it at frequent intervals, starting after about 48 hours. Then keep on tasting it every few days or a couple of times a week as it matures. It typically takes about a week for the optimal amount of fermentation to occur. Resist the temptation to eat out of the jar, however, as this can introduce undesirable organisms from your mouth into the jar. Instead, always use a clean spoon to take out what you're going to eat, then, making sure the remaining veggies are covered with the brine solution, recap the jar.
When the flavor is to your personal liking, transfer the jars into the refrigerator to dramatically slow the progression of the fermentation. Keep in mind, the vegetables will tend to get increasingly sour as time goes on, but according to Sandor, you could let the vegetables ferment for weeks and even months without worrying about them spoiling—after all, that’s what the fermentation process does: It preserves food without refrigeration.
Some additional info on how to ferment vegetables can be found here.
On Allowing Your Creative Juices to Flow
There is no food that cannot be fermented. As Katz states in a recent NPR article1, bread, coffee, pickles, beer, cheese, yogurt and soy sauce are all examples of foods that have been fermented at some point during their production process. That said, not every vegetable will produce equally delicious results, and not every food is as easily fermented as vegetables, but your imagination is really the only limit when it comes to what you can concoct.
“If you ferment summer squash, which are very watery, they will tend to get soft and mushy much faster than any other kind of vegetable would,” Sandor says. .. You can certainly ferment kale and other dark green vegetables, but the high levels of chlorophyll in these vegetables produce a really strong flavor in fermentation. I prefer to use dark green vegetables as a minor ingredient rather than as the primary ingredient. Then I feel like that strong flavor can become a nice accent.
But if it’s pure dark green vegetables, that flavor’s a little bit too strong for me, although I have heard from other people who really, really love it. In a way you can only learn what you like by experimenting.
My biggest batch every year has been from radishes. I have a farmer friend who uses daikon radishes as a cover crop over acres and acres of his land. He invites me to pick a truckload full of daikon radishes. And I augment that with some cabbages, some chili peppers and garlic, and make a 55-gallon barrel full every year... Then you can also ferment whole vegetables. The difference with whole vegetables is that you can’t pull the water out of them, so you need to mix up a brine – salty water – and ferment them in the salty water.
... I met a woman whose grandmother was from a town in Poland, where they used mashed potatoes in their sauerkraut. And I love making mashed potatoes sauerkrauts. What I do is I steam potatoes, I mash them up, cool them to body temperature, and then I layer the mash potatoes in with my salted cabbage. That makes a beautiful sauerkraut. You can really be experimental and go wild. You can add things other than vegetables.
... In German tradition, juniper berries are often used. I’ve been tasting wildly experimental krauts with curry seasonings and things like that. Really, the only limitation is our imagination, once we understand the underlying principles of getting the vegetables submerged.”
A Word of Caution Regarding Meat Fermentation
As just mentioned, while virtually any food can be fermented, and the fermentation process automatically renders the food exceptionally safe since the probiotics produced kill any pathogens present, a disclaimer regarding fermenting meats is worth taking note of.
“Fermenting vegetables is an intrinsically safe practice. In the United States, according to the USDA, there’s never been a single case of food poisoning reported from fermented vegetables. There is no danger. The food itself is a strategy for protection. Fermented vegetables are safer than raw vegetables,” Sandor says. “With meat, I can’t say this. The word “botulism,” which is the most feared food poisoning form of all, comes from the Latin word “botulist” or sausage. Until the advent of canning, which was in the 19th century, it was from fermented sausages that people knew about the rare food poisoning disease of botulism.
There’s a little bit more of a learning curve. Another limitation with fermentation of meat for preservation process is the acids, which are what enable certain fermented foods to preserve so well. Acids are produced from carbohydrates, and meat fundamentally lacks carbohydrates. There’s a tiny bit of glycogen, but not enough to support a significant fermentation and formation of lactic acid. Typically, when salami is produced, the meat and the fat are minced or ground. And then they’re mixed with a tiny bit of sugar. The sugar is really what is fermented by the lactic acid bacteria and creates the acidic environment that is able to preserve the meat.
It’s not through acidification alone that the meat is preserved. It’s a combination of acidification, drying (the meat is partially dried), and salting (the meat is always salted). Any one of these mediums could preserve the meat, either making it very, very dry as in something like jerky, making it very, very salty as in a food like prosciutto, or very highly acidic.”
More Information
To learn more, pick up one of Sandor’s books, The Art of Fermentation: An In-Depth Exploration of Essential Concepts and Processes from Around the World, or Wild Fermentation: The Flavor, Nutrition, and Craft of Live-Culture Foods.
You can also find more information on his website at WildFermentation.com.
Vegetarianism - God's ideal diet?
What did the Lord teach to Adam and Eve?
by Keith Hunt There are those who are vegetarians because they see that our animals are polluted from man made "shots" of this or that substance. They are well aware that most commercial meats are not anywhere as wholesome as they used to be 50 years ago and more. These people decide to become vegetarians from a modern "health" viewpoint, and if they can not obtain natural "organic" meats they will eat no meat. I admit I am one of them, and eat very very little meat unless I can obtain "organic" meat. But there are thousands of "religious" vegetarians who are non meat eaters BECAUSE they think the word of God teaches that it was the Lord's original plan for mankind to eat only fruits,seeds,grains,and nuts. No better illustration of this teaching and belief can be found than in the adult Sabbath school lessons of Jan/Feb/March l993, published by the Seventh Day Adventist Church: DIVINE DIET(GEN.1:29;3:18). "What did God originally intend for us to eat? Gen.1:29. What did He add after the fall? Gen.3:18. Before they sinned, Adam and Eve ate fruits, seeds, grains, and nuts.......When did God finally give His consent for people to eat meat, and why? Gen.9:1-3. What restrictions did God place on eating meat? Gen.7:2. Think about it: Why does it make sense now more than ever to return to God's original diet......" The scripture that religious vegetarians use to support their argument that God's original plan was to have humans eat only no meat foods, is Genesis 1:29. We shall see that when you take the WHOLE written word of God, when you do as Jesus said we should do, and that is "Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God"(Mat.4:4) - when that is followed we shall see that Gen.1:29 is NOT teaching that God originally intended mankind to be vegetarians. Is ALL vegetation good for food? Of course it is not! Some vegetation if eaten will KILL YOU! Even some of the seed bearing vegetation is harmful to you. So Gen.1:29 is NOT an all encompassing simple formula as to what God intended our first parents to eat. God would have had to spend some in-depth time with them concerning diet and what they should and should not eat to remain healthy and strong. We need to remember that the first chapters of Genesis only hit the high spots - much more than what is recorded for us must have transpired. Are we to assume that after God blessed and sanctified the 7th day Sabbath, He never instructed Adam and Eve on how to keep that day holy? Are we to believe that after God created sex He never gave our first parents any instructions on sexuality? What about husband and wife relations, are we to understand that God gave no lessons of instruction on this topic to Adam and Eve before they fell into sin? The Bible gives us no time frame from the 7th day of creation to the serpent leading Eve into sin - it could have been a number of weeks, months or even years. In any event, knowing God to be the loving, kind and merciful person that He is, it would be very improbable that He did not give much more detailed instructions on many important subjects that Adam and Eve would need as they began the beginning of their lives. I have written very extensively on the law of Gen.1:29 concerning eating foods bearing seeds. In a nut shell (pun intended) the main teaching that God is giving us in Gen.1:29 is NOT that we should, or that He originally wanted us to be vegetarians, but that the vegetation we should eat should be seed bearing and green. In other words or as an example, what this verse in Genesis is teaching is that things like mushrooms or moss were not created to be food for the health and wellbeing of mankind. There is a teaching of "limitations" of what vegetation is to be eaten in this verse. This limitation teaching is the theme and main point of what God said to Adam and Eve in Gen.1:29,30 and NOT that they were only to eat vegetation. Now ask yourself this question, if it was the Lord's original "state of the art" plan for mankind to be vegetarians, then would you not suppose those Christians who were following God's original design to be the stronger - the more spiritually stronger - the less spiritually weaker? Of course you would I think,for they would be the ones going back to the way it supposedly was before sin entered the world. You would think the Bible would hold up such people as the "strong in the faith." Well hold on to that for a while, and if you believe the vegetarian only eater is the more stronger in the faith, then you are in for a big surprise, right out of the very Word of God. Before I give you that eye opening verse that will "blow your mind" (if you've never read it before), first, I want you to understand a very important point of Bible STUDY. God has caused His word to be written down as a jig-saw-puzzle. He has deliberately and methodically done this so people will be led astray and deceived - blinded from His truths. Until God removes that blindness through the power of the Holy Spirit, not only can no one come to Christ to be saved from sin, but they can not understand God's word. Oh, they may understand little portions of it, but their errors will outnumber by far the truths they have. You need to look up and read carefully these scriptures that prove what I have just said is true: Rev.12:9; Acts 4:8-12; John 6:44,65; Mark 13:11,12; Mat.13:10-16. Even those who have been called and chosen by the Father are to "Study to show thyself approved unto God,a workman that needeth not be ashamed, rightly dividing the word of truth" (2 Tim.2:15). It was Jesus who said "Thy (the Father's) word is truth"(John 17:17). He was referring to God's inspired word as found in the Holy Bible. This only is truth, not some writings of a man or woman. I want you to turn to Isaiah the 28th chapter. Notice what Isaiah says in verse 9, "Whom shall he teach knowledge? And whom shall he make to understand DOCTRINE?" A very good question indeed, then he gives the answer, "them that are weaned with milk, and drawn from the breast." But in what way does being "weaned from the milk" mean? Isaiah was inspired to tell us in the next verse, "For precept must be upon precept, precept upon precept; line upon line; line upon line; here a little and there a little." God has put His word down like a jig-saw-puzzle - you must hunt and search for all the pieces of any particular area or topic before you can know and understand the truth of any doctrine. Just as Jesus spoke in parables to the vast population NOT so they would better understand but so they would NOT UNDERSTAND, so they would not "get it" but be left in darkness and sin. So, God has written His word a little here and a little there, a line here and a line there, in order that those who will not study to show themselves approved, rightly dividing(putting together) the word of truth, searching it out and fitting it together like a jig-saw-puzzle, will, "....go and fall backward, and be broken, and snared, and taken"(Isaiah 28:13). So let's put what we have just discovered into practice. Sometimes God has given us a line of truth in Genesis within the context of a certain topic and another line of truth on the same subject in another book of the Bible far away from Genesis. And this is the case here on this question as to the original diet God intended Adam and Eve to follow. We find more to this puzzle way over in the book of......TIMOTHY! Yes, way over in the New Testament. Turn to the first book of Timothy and chapter 4. Paul was inspired to foretell about the latter days and a time when some would "depart from the faith" in verse one. They would become so hardened in their false beliefs that were doctrines of demons, that their minds would be branded and just about impossible to change to acknowledge the truth. I hope dear reader your mind is not seared to the point where you can not admit your errors and rejoice in the truth. We see in verses 3-5 that Paul mentions TWO wrong doctrines in particular. One is "forbidding to marry" and we certainly have that doctrine around us today. One large Christian church still teaches its priests to remain single, and there are others who teach people not to marry when they are within God's law to do so. But now on to the second false doctrine that Paul talks about in some detail. Paul is telling us that some would depart from the faith in the latter days and teach that we should abstain from "meats" or food, of what kind? - creatures is the answer(verse 4). The word used here for "creature" is the same as James 1:18. We humans of flesh and blood are "creatures" in that sense of the word. So are cows, sheep, goats, and pigs and horses for that matter, as well as all birds and fish. Is Paul in these verses telling us that we are now allowed to eat anything that moves, creeps, wiggles or crawls? Some say he is and that God's laws concerning clean and unclean meats is no longer in effect today. As we carefully examine the words Paul uses we can see that is NOT what Paul was teaching. The meats that Paul was saying some would tell you to abstain from, were to be received with thanksgiving OF THEM which believe and know the truth. Again, let me ask, what is truth? I gave you the answer earlier - God's word is truth said Jesus. And we are to live by every word of it He told us (Mat.4:4). God's word in Lev.11 and Duet.14 gives us the laws of the clean and unclean creatures. Nothing in the New Testament teaches that New Covenant Christians are set free from the physical laws of health that were set down by the Lord under the Old Covenant, and even before that covenant came. But all of that proof must be given in another study on CLEAN AND UNCLEAN MEATS. Notice verse 4 and 5. Every creature is good and nothing to be refused FOR, verse five says, "For it is SANCTIFIED by the WORD OF GOD and prayer." Those creatures that are to be received with thankfulness by those who know the truth, are FIRST of all, sanctified by God's word - set apart by God's word. God's word sets them apart for you - tells you which kind of creatures are given to you for food to eat. It is not prayer that is first, you can not just pray over any slimy unclean creature and ask God to bless it to your bodies health when He has never sanctified it by His word for you to eat. Those who know the truth, those who know what meats are set apart as fit to eat in God's word, can receive it with a thankful heart. These sanctified creatures are to be received and not refused as some in the latter days would teach. Remember when Paul was writing this there was no large scale meat pollution of clean animals like there is today. Yet even with our polluted planet it is possible to obtain organic natural meats that only acid rain has contaminated, then acid rain has contaminated many organic vegetables also. This prophecy of Paul's should make would be "vegetarianism is God's original design" preachers SHAKE in their boots! Paul said that in the last days a departing from the faith would include a doctrine from demons that would teach people to abstain from meats/creatures which God created to be received - as given in Lev.11 and Duet.14. And that brings me to that word in verse three - CREATED! The Greek phrase reads "which God created for reception." When were these clean, sanctified by God's word, creatures made clean? Sometime after the fall of man, or after Noah's flood? No,they were CREATED clean, from the very beginning when God made them during those 7 creative days. Genesis 7 tells you that Noah took seven pairs of CLEAN animals into the ark and only two of a kind from the unclean. The animals were clean and unclean before the flood. Paul was inspired to tell us they were made this way WHEN they were created. Paul tells us they were created to be received by those who would know the truth. Did Adam and Eve know the truth? Sure they did! God walked and talked with them - instructed them in the way they ought to go. He had Adam give names to the animals, surely at that time God instructed him about which were created clean and which were created unclean - which were fit for him to eat and which were not. PAUL AND THE ROME CHURCH CONTROVERSY Even during the apostolic church age this argument of eating or NOT eating meat arose in a least one of the churches of God. And who did the Lord inspire to judge the matter, why the man who undoubtedly was the Churches most scholastic minister - the man who was highly educated and a past expert in Pharisaical teachings - the man Paul. This man was a student of the Old Testament and Jewish teachings and traditions. More important, he claimed he was personally taught by Christ - see Galatians 1:11,12. Certainly he had many of the gifts of the Spirit and was not afraid to use the scriptures to prove his point. He was not slow to use the first few chapter of Genesis to bear evidence to his stand. I would like you to note how he backed up instruction to Timothy about women teaching in the church (l Tim.2:11-14). He used the book of Genesis to prove his point concerning physical circumcision and faith to the Romans and Jews, in his book of Galatians. Paul was very well versed in the scriptures. There arose among the members of the church at Rome the issue of eating all things (within the laws of God) and eating herbs only. In other words the issue of vegetarianism as opposed to those who were not vegetarians. Here was the grand opportunity for Paul to wax eloquent and put the record straight not only for those at Rome but for the whole New Testament church from that time on. Surely if any man knew the truth of Gen.1:29 it would have been Paul. If he had been fully taught by Christ and the Holy Spirit that Gen.1:29 taught God's original ideal for mankind was vegetarianism, he now had the opportunity to proclaim that truth to the Church in straight forward language. He could have easily said as Jesus often did, "from the beginning" it was not so or it was so. He could have easily quoted Gen.1:29 as he did with other Genesis verses, to prove the faith of the herb only eaters was the correct one from an "original" point of view. He could easily have upheld as "stronger in the faith" those who taught vegetarianism as God's original ideal as found in Gen.1:29. But he did NO SUCH THING! It would seem from what he did say the verse in question in Genesis DID NOT ENTER HIS MIND for one second. He did not allude to it, quote from it, give it as an example, or even come close to it in any way. Now look at what he DID say. You will find it in Romans 14:1-2. "Him that is weak in the faith receive ye, but not to doubtful disputations. For one believes that he may eat all things: another who is weak, eateth herbs." Notice carefully, Paul is not talking about someone who is PHYSICALLY weak in body or health, but one who is weak "in THE FAITH." Now who would you say could be "weak in the faith"? A person who understands God's basic 10 commandments, who knows the 7th day Sabbath should be kept holy, who has repented and accepted Jesus as their savior, who has been baptized in water - could he/she be still looked upon as weak in the faith, not knowing too much else about the Bible, still having lots to read and learn about God's way of life? Yes I think they could be described as "a babe in Christ" - "weak in the faith". Many coming into the Church of God at Rome were from a pagan society, they knew very little about what God's word said on many aspects of living. They were still looking into the word to see how they would change their thinking, acting, and customs. Few would have come from the background that Paul was raised in, even many of the converted Jews had much to learn about the REAL truths of God's word, most of them had followed the traditions of the Pharisees or some other Jewish sect. There would be many in the church who would be as Paul said, "weak in the faith." Some understood that God's word sanctioned the eating of MEAT - "may eat all things." In passing, there are those who say this is "doing away with" the clean and unclean food laws of the Old Testament, but does Paul mean by the use of the phrase "may eat all things" that a person can now eat the plant DEADLY NIGHT SHADE, or POISON mushrooms? Of course not! The "all things" that Paul is referring to is ALL THINGS WITHIN the LAWS of God. Paul said, "another who is weak" and we have seen he was referring to weak in KNOWLEDGE, weak in the UNDERSTANDING of the faith, those, some at least, believed you should ONLY eat herbs and vegetables. These are the two verses that should "blow you away" as I told you earlier that I would give you. There is just no way around it, the truth of the matter is pretty plain to see if you are willing to see it. In Paul's mind (and he was as spiritually strong in knowledge as any one, being directly taught of Jesus - Galatians 1) those who believed that it was God's original intention, or that it was spiritually more faithful, to be a vegetarian, were WEAK IN THE FAITH! They just did not understand, they had, at least on this point of the faith, some growing in strength yet to attain. Paul did make it very clear in the following verses that the meat eater and the vegetarian were to accept each other as full members of the body of Christ. They were not to condemn each other. They were both at liberty under God, to either eat meat or not eat meat. Both were fully received by God as His child. There is no law of God that says you MUST eat meat. God has given the clean and unclean food laws to show which creatures He created to be good food for humans, but He never said a person MUST eat meat as a way of life. It is interesting in passing that the PASSOVER and those participating in it were to eat LAMB! So all circumcised men and all women were to eat lamb at least once a year under the Old Covenant. Under the New Covenant this was replaced by BREAD and the fruit of the VINE. So, from the death of Christ forward no person has to eat ANY meat, at any time, if they do not want to. Eating meat or not eating meat is a PHYSICAL thing. Spiritually it has NO influence on God at all. It is NOTHING to Him. He allowes His children to eat or not eat meat. God shows no more favor to the one or the other. This eating meat or not eating meat is strictly PHYSICAL unless the vegetarian WANTS TO MAKE IT A MATTER OF FAITH, wants to make it into a spiritual issue, then if they do, Paul was inspired to write that from THE FAITH point of view, the vegetarian was "weak in the faith" - there was no scriptural ground for their belief that it was God's original design for mankind to be herb eaters only. To take it one step further, by saying such a stand was equivalent to being "weak in the faith" would indicate that the opposite, understanding God gave clean animals to be eaten by Adam and Eve from the beginning, was to be "strong in the faith." WHAT ABOUT THE EXAMPLE OF DANIEL? Many religious vegetarians who want to take their stand on the platform of "the faith," will try to use the example of Daniel as found in the book of daniel, chapter 1 and verses 1-20. The Seventh Day Adventist study lessons before cited were true to the context when they wrote: "Daniel's test case was not so much over the benefits of vegetarianism as it was over his loyalty to God." Notice verse 8 of Daniel chapter one. He was determined in his heart "not to DEFILE himself with the portion of the king's meat, nor with the wine which he drank...." This section of Scripture does not tell us what the king was eating or drinking but whatever it was it would have DEFILED Daniel. As this young man knew the health and food laws of God he was not going to defile himself by breaking those laws. Obviously, if he had eaten the king's food he would have compromised his faith. Nothing in this section of God's word shows vegetarianism to be spiritually superior or to be God's original ideal diet for mankind. THE EXAMPLE OF JESUS It is recorded that Jesus was sinless, that He came to this earth and set us the PERFECT example of how to live - mentally, spiritually, and physically. His life in word and deed is the ultimate in perfection. He said that He did only what His Father in heaven wanted Him to do and to speak. Jesus often had confrontations with the religious leaders of His time. Many of those encounters involved PHYSICAL things, customs and rites, such as eating with unwashed hands. Sometimes Jesus would answer by taking them back to BEFORE Moses and to God's original law and ideal. The laws of clean and unclean meats had been a part of daily life among the Jews. Here was Jesus magnifying the laws of God, restoring them to their correct understanding and application, talking about the way things should be in the lives of His followers, setting the example in word and deed. If He knew that it was Scripturally correct from Gen. 1:29 that God's original ideal for mankind and especially His children, was to stop eating meat and become vegetarians, you would think that somewhere, at some time, during those three and a half years of public ministry, He would have corrected the situation, at least for His followers of that time and those to come afterwards. BUT HE NEVER UTTERED A WORD ON THE SUBJECT!! Even after His resurrection, and His return to the Father in heaven and the coming of the Holy Spirit to reveal all the truth and to bring all things to remembrance that He spoke, was anyone (that was used to write the New Testament) inspired to affirm that God's original ideal was to have all people as vegetarians. Not one word about this in the New Testament - complete SILENCE! And when something is said about the issue of eating or not eating meat, the person who believes as a matter of FAITH, is regarded by the inspired Paul as "weak in the faith." Jesus set us an example. Did Jesus eat meat? He observed the Passover all of His life - so He ate LAMB at least once every year. The Bible is full of examples of the men and women of God eating meat, eggs, fish, butter, and milk! Yes, in today's polluted societies, we need to be careful about the eating of meats, fish, milk, and the like, but then we need also to be careful about our choices of flour, rice, and sweets, for they can be terribly polluted also and/or robbed of all their natural goodness through refining processes. I have seen far too many none meat eaters, who think they are returning to God's original ideal in diet, eating, as a way of life, white flour products, white rice, white sugar, too many refined sweet products, and drinking soda pops by the carton. God's design for us was to follow His food laws as laid out in His word. I will publish other articles under this food law heading as time permits. ................ Written January 1993 FOOT NOTE: Some would say that in God giving man dominion over all the earth He was given the power over all creatures to rule and subdue them, so the horse would serve man, the donkey and the mule, the ox, even the elephant etc. He could train them and build circuses BUT they would not be for food, not even the "clean" animals, the argument would go. This falls in the light of God giving man dominion over the FISH of the seas! If a man was to be a vegetarian why would God hive him rulership and dominion over that which was in the sea? The sea and that in it would be of no concern for mankind if God had told him to be a vegetarian and he was only to eat nuts, grains, seeds, and plants. Man has never used the large sea creatures as cargo carriers of merchandise, so why at the beginning of man's creation was he told by the creator that he could have dominion over the fish of the sea, if he was not to eat of those fish? Surely nobody thinks this means that God was telling mankind he could catch fish to put in a glass tank and watch them swim around during the evening time while relaxing in his tent or hut because they would have no TV to view. Surely no one believes this was the Lord's instruction for man to catch fish, for Adam and Eve to catch fish, and put them in a big pond so Cain and Abel could watch them swim around. I suggest that by God telling Adam and Eve RIGHT FROM THE BEGINNING that they had dominion over the fish in the seas, He was telling them that the fish of the sea were for FOOD. As I have said in the body of this article, God would have spent a number of hours and lessons of instruction to inform Adam and Eve about His food laws - the clean and unclean animals, birds, fish and creeping things, that He had created to be good food for mankind to eat. He would have spent some time with them instructing them about what green see-bearing plants were good for food, as some of them if eaten can make you sick, or even kill you within a very short time. Verse 28 and 29 of Genesis chapter one, are GENERAL statements only. They tell us God gave to the first man and woman creatures of the sea, land and air, the plants and vegetation of the earth that was green and seed bearing, for food. These verses are GENERAL STATEMENTS and not all encompassing instructions as to what God told Adam and Eve about His food laws. In the same way Genesis 2:24,25 are not all encompassing verses about marriage and sex. The lord would have given them any number of lessons and instruction on both marriage and sex, as well as childbirth and delivery.
Facts on Pigs and Pork It's Creepy!
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