Some Changes, and I'm Officially a Weirdo

I haven't fallen off the planet, but a few changes are here since I last blogged.

Ready?

1. I am a mom & now I'm also in school. These are my priorities, so no promises on how often I'll be blogging.

2. I'm not vegan. I never was, but for a time I aspired to be, and even with supplements my health got worse the longer I did it, and now I'm doing better since I've gone back to being non-vegan.

3. I'm changing the blog title because I'm not eating 100% raw these days, and I want to share stuff about other nutritious foods, too.

4. I want to talk about other facets of my life & health in addition to food.

Okay, so with all that said, here is my funny experience from this weekend: this is not RAW food related, but it has to do with my (happily geeky) interest in health & nutrition.

I was recently told that my son needs more vitamin B6. We have been struggling a bit with this since he hates the taste of the kids' multivitamin I bought him, and he hasn't learned to swallow capsules. One day he started reading the label of a health bar I had bought for him & told me it had vitamin B6, so I've been looking at food labels to see what else it's in. Vitamin B6 isn't a required listing on the standard nutrition label, but some "health food" products are proud of their extra nutrients & will list them for you. We were at the grocery store recently, and I was reading a label of some whole-grain cereal that my son wanted me to buy for him. I saw B6 on the label, so I said to my son, "Hey, it has vitamin B6!" A random stranger walking past said sort of mockingly, "You can't live without THAT!" Haha! I guess not everyone shares my enthusiasm for these sorts of things (not that I asked him to...).

The Food - As Requested

I received a request to post the food that gave me the nutrition I talked about in my last post. Since the tracking feature on www.nutritiondata.com keeps track of ingredients, I'm going to attempt to list the foods, reconstructed from that list of ingredients. Ya never know, I suppose, but I'll do my best. Here you go, Aimee!

Fresh peas (a lot - I estimated very conservatively at 1 1/4 cups of shelled green peas)
pizza (flax crust with garlic seed cheese)
brownies
key lime pudding
1 mango
3 bananas

I realize now that I forgot to add the cacao to the list (in the brownies), so I really got an additional boost of magnesium, iron, calcium, etc. and of course, I ate more food after that - a huge spring mix salad was the main thing I remember in the evening.

Nutrition

I just entered today's food into my "tracking" on www.nutritiondata.com

It's 4 pm. I've eaten 3,328 calories so far - all raw. I haven't eaten enough calcium or sodium yet (and I get B12 from a supplement or shots because I don't want to eat enough animal products to get my B12 from those), but on almost all the other nutrients, I've gotten 2 or 3 days' worth of each. I am above the recommended glycemic load (dates, agave & bananas), but then I'm way over the recommended calories for my height/age/activity level, too. :D Today's diet is "strongly anti-inflammatory" as well - Yay raw food!

Raw Fat & Health

Raw foodies AND non-raw people have either hinted or directly said that I eat way too much fat to be healthy. Before I went high-raw, I had high cholesterol that wouldn't come down even with medication. The last time I got my lipid panel (blood tests for cholesterol, triglycerides, etc.) done, my doc said that the results were excellent and showed that I don't eat much fat. If I thought he'd appreciate the irony, I'd have fallen off the chair with laughter. :)

Sorting through "health information"

Okay, if you're like most people, then all the "health information" out there can be confusing. Today I'm on a rant about things that make it even more confusing!

How do you sort though everything out there to find what's real & true? I read something today that reminds me why "health information" can be so confusing:

This is on a website promoting a raw diet partly by explaining what's "wrong" with the typically prescribed diabetic diet. While I can't say that the medically prescribed diet is healthier, I get frustrated with things like this:

"It is generally recommended that 5% of total calories of the diabetic be protein. In a 1,500-calorie diet that would mean 75 grams of protein. This amount of protein greatly exceeds the needs of even the most active man. The average person cannot utilize more than about 20 to 25 grams of protein daily." The article then goes on to talk about how too much protein is hard on the body and how raw foods have enough protein.

Makes perfect sense, right? Sure, except that whoever wrote this obviously didn't do the math. Five percent of a 1,500-calorie diet is 75, but that means 75 CALORIES from protein. There are 4 calories in one gram of protein (just look at any standard nutrition label), so 5% of 1,500 calories would be 19.25 grams of protein - just about the amount that the article says a person can assimilate.

Happy Pizza (I mean Earth) Day!

So far, my Earth Day has consisted mainly of shopping & drooling. Let me explain! I was due for a produce shopping trip, but I didn't have any particular idea what I wanted to buy or eat. So I wandered through the produce section of my local health food store, and I started picking up things that looked good &/or were on sale. As I saw some fresh basil for a good price, I started getting visions of raw pizza. As I continued shopping, and then as I listened to the cashier tell me about food she made, my mind became a whirl of yummy recipe/menu ideas! I came home EXCITED about all the yummy ideas swirling around in my mind, and I immediately got to work on this pizza!



Crust:

2 1/2 c. ground golden flaxseed
3 Tbsp. Italian seasoning
1 tsp. sea salt
water

Mix dry ingredients first, then add enough water to mix it & make a moist dough. Flatten the dough into a circle on a sheet of teflex or parchment paper, then flip it onto a mesh dehydrator tray & remove the paper/teflex. Dehydrate at 145 F for about an hour while you prepare the cheese & toppings.


Vegetable topping:

1/3 c. olive oil
juice of 1 lemon
1 tsp. salt
1/4 c. chopped fresh basil

Mix together well and toss with sliced veggies of your choice - I used tomatoes, mushrooms and red bell pepper. Let marinate, tossing occasionally, while you make the cheese.


Garlic & black pepper cheese:

This was based on Zoe's Cheese With Spring Onions, except that I left out the spring onions and put in 3 cloves of garlic, 1 Tablespoon of nutritional yeast and 1 Tablespoon of freshly ground black pepper instead.


Assembling the pizza:

I spread about 1/3 to 1/2 of the cheese onto the pizza crust (the rest can be used for other things or frozen for the next time I want to make pizza), and then I drained the vegetables well and piled them on top. I put the whole thing back into the dehydrator for about an hour at 105 F. I had to drain off a little liquid from the pizza doing it this way, so next time I might dehydrate the veggies on a separate plate and then assemble AFTER everything is warm.

You're gonna need a fork!

Perfect Cheesecake

Crust:

2/3 c. raw almonds
2/3 c. raw cashews
2/3 c. raw macadamia nuts
3 Tbsp. agave
1/4 tsp. sea salt

Blend all ingredients in food processor and press into a 9-inch pie plate or into the bottom of a 9-inch springform pan.

Filling:

2 1/2 c. raw cashews
zest of 1 lemon
4 tsp. lime juice
1 tsp. vanilla extract
1/4 tsp. salt
3/4 c. agave
2 ice cubes (if using Vita-mix), or enough water to help it blend (if using a regular blender)

Blend all ingredients until creamy. I used a Vita-mix, but I have also used a regular blender, and I just had to add water to help it blend up. Pour into prepared crust or springform pan, and freeze for 24 hours to set (I didn't wait that long, so it is a little soft in the photo). The more water it has, the fuller it will fill the crust/pan. Less water also means a slightly stronger flavor.