An Invitation to Creative Life Change

Please join me on Saturday, November 20, 2010 for a day of creative exploration, movement and fun.  Share your hopes and dreams for your next phase with others on a path of Creative Life Change.  Learn specific creative skills that can help you visualize and manifest your best life, at any life stage.

My friend, artist and author Fred Mandell and I will be offering the Life Change Studio, sponsored by Discovering What’s Next in Newton, MA.  Join us for a transformational experience!

8:30 A.M. to 4 P.M.
$195 (includes lunch and snacks)

You can become a Life Change Artist! Life is a process,
unfolding in often unexpected and challenging ways. But
challenges can become creative opportunities. The Life Change
Studio is based on both the art and science of personal
change. You’ll learn how to apply the skills of the master artists
to your life change journey and how to draw on powerful mind/
body traditions to make meaningful change. This foundational
workshop introduces you to our unique Four Dimensions of
Personal Change and the Seven Creative Skills.
In the workshop you’ll experience creative activities, including
collage and drawing as well as mind/body practices such as
yoga, breath work, and visualization. You will learn new
concepts through short, informative lecturettes and you will
have an opportunity to integrate what you are learning
through group conversation and individual journeling.
Newton Cultural Center
225 Nevada Street, Newton
Register on-line at www.discoveringwhatsnext.com

For more information, email info@discoveringwhatsnext.com or call 617-467-5438.

Bounty of the Season

It’s a cool, sunny day in the Berkshires and my tomatoes are finally all ripe.  Here’s a photo of a dozen from my little organic garden, blanched and ready to become sauce!

I’m using a simple recipe from The North End Italian Cookbook by Marguerite DiMino Buonopane.  Marguerite taught Italian cooking at The North End Union in Boston, a nonprofit community settlement house that became a neighborhood landmark in the years after it’s founding in 1892.  Her recipes are always tasty and her book is still available (in its fifth edition) on Amazon.

She has a great recipe for making pesto in the blender…that will be next – my basil has been growing like mad and I LOVE pesto.

Can’t get enough of that Mediterranean diet!

Memory Foods for Midlife

At one time in the not so distant past, it was “common knowledge” that you never saw people who were both old and overweight.  Heart attacks, strokes and other cardiovascular diseases took their toll in midlife and most of the elderly were literally “little old men” and “little old women.”  Not so today.

Thanks to recent advances in cardiovascular medical care, we have a growing population of overweight and even obese elders.  But surviving into old age doesn’t mean thriving.  It may mean living with memory loss and general cognitive decline. According to the Journal of the Gerontological Society of America, the “adverse affects of being overweight are not limited to physical function but also extend to neurological function.”

A recent Swedish study found that men and women with higher midlife body mass index (BMI) scores had significantly lower cognitive ability and steeper decline than their thinner counterparts over time. Other studies reported in the Journal point to other serious health problems for overweight elders, including poor muscle strength and depression.

So…how to fight midlife weight gain and boost your memory power?  Exercise is a big help, of course.  But for foods that are good for the waistline and good for the brain – start with celery!  The Real Age doctors say that celery is a great source of a flavonoid called luteolin, a substance thought to cool off inflammation in the brain’s memory center.

And that crunchy green is also only about six calories per stalk!

Chop up some celery and combine it with other sources of luteolin -  green pepper, lettuce and spinach – and you’ve got a green giant of a memory-boosting salad.

Project Sprout

Lots of wonderful things can happen when a school community makes a commitment to going organic.  A student led effort at Monument Mountain Regional High School in Great Barrington, MA has been cultivating organic food on school grounds for just two seasons and the results are amazing.  Project Sprout is a great model for schools nationally.

In 2008, a few students set a goal of cultivating and maintaining a 1000 square foot trial garden over the summer vacation.  They wanted to supply organic veggies to the school cafeterias in their district in the Berkshires.  They had a vision of using the garden as a natural classroom to educate kids from pre-kindergarten and up about growing their own food and connecting to the natural world.

Student and community support was enthusiastic and garden plans took off much faster than expected.  That first year, students were able to cultivate 3500 square feet, donate over 1000 pounds of produce to families in need and host kindergarten groups once a week. In the fall, they served salads and soups when their fellow high school students returned to class.  All of this was financed with private donations and fundraisers.

In 2009, the vegetable plot tripled in size.  Student gardeners planted an heirloom fruit orchard and 100 raspberry plants, then built a shed and a farm stand.  Last spring, dozens of classes and after school programs gathered in the garden to study everything from microbiology to art.  Plans are afoot for keeping bees and raising chickens.  And Project Sprout has inspired sister projects from Martha’s Vineyard to Uganda.

Project Sprout is bringing organically grown food into the lunch room.  But this effort is about much more than healthy food.  It’s about experiencing a real connection to the Earth, building community through shared work and inspiring others.

And guess what…when the veggies and salads are served in the cafeteria, all of it is eaten, with enthusiasm!

Childhood Obesity and Our Tax Dollars

This week, we’ve learned that Michelle Obama and Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsak are making it official – the First Lady and the Obama administration are declaring war on childhood obesity. They’re asking kids to get more exercise and eat better foods.  Some of their goals: no more sugary sodas, fatty French fries and candy bars will be sold in school cafeterias.  Vending machines in schools will instead be filled with healthy snacks.  More money – a proposed $ 1 billion more to be added to our current $ 18 billion school meals program – will be spent on fruits and veggies.  All of these changes are just proposals right now.  Congress might not go along and many local school officials have said they don’t want to give up funding  from food companies that help pay for underfunded sports and arts programs.

We live in a toxic food environment that makes it difficult for our kids to choose healthy foods.  The streets that lead to and from school are lined with fast food and pizza joints.   Few school systems have formed partnerships with farmers to provide fresh, local  produce.  How many schools give kids the chance to plant a vegetable garden and then harvest and cook their own carrots, tomatoes or zucchini? We don’t teach good nutrition or even model it in most schools. And our federal tax dollars do little to subsidize a healthy harvest.

As taxpayers, we subsidize corn growers with tens of billions of dollars each year.  Most of their corn goes to feed cattle in feed lots, an efficient and very unhealthy way to get cheap beef…which becomes cheap burgers at the fast food restaurants.  Tons of corn – full of pesticides and highly processed  – is used to produce high fructose corn syrup, which is then added to snack foods, cookies, crackers, cereal – almost any processed food on the shelf. Again, it’s a cheap filler and a leading cause of the obesity epidemic.

According to epidemiology Professor Adam Drewnowski of the University of Washington, obesity rates that are high in all income groups are even higher in low income families.  The cause:  inexpensive, empty calories.  Drewnowski compares the cost of “energy-dense” and “nutrient-dense” foods. For energy-dense, consider Ding Dongs — 360 calories, 19 grams of fat, and a liberal dose of high-fructose corn syrup. Compare Ding Dongs to a three-ounce, nutrient-dense chunk of wild salmon, a source of high-quality protein and essential fatty acids in a 185-calorie package. The former will run you about one dollar and will be easy to find at any convenience store. For the latter, you can go to the Whole Foods fish counter and shell out at least $ 5. For families on a budget, we make it much easier to buy more “energy-dense,” high calorie and nutrient poor foods.

Americans are spending billions to subsidize unhealthy foods on the one hand while funding a national campaign against childhood obesity on the other. Even if  the Obama administration recognizes the craziness of that public policy, it would no doubt face huge political obstacles to changing agriculture supports. But if we really want to fight obesity,  cut our skyrocketing health care costs and raise healthy children, perhaps subsidizing healthier food would be a good start.

The Jungle Effect

Have you heard about the “Cold Spots”?  Epidemiologists – the researchers who study disease trends in populations – have sometimes referred to places in the world with unusually high levels of a certain type of disease as a “hot spot.”  The disease detectives often flood into “hot spots” to do interviews, gather medical data and investigate environmental factors, trying to pinpoint the cause or causes of the disease.

On the other hand, a “cold spot” is a place or community where an unusually low number of people suffer from a particular disease.  There are several cold spots on the planet – places where there is very little type 2 diabetes, heart disease, depression, colon cancer, breast cancer or prostate cancer.  Places where people eat a traditional diet that seems to protect them from the diseases of modern Western culture – the protection that Daphne Miller, MD calls “The Jungle Effect.”

Dr. Miller was surprised when her overweight and unhealthy immigrant patients in San Francisco came back from extended trips home to their native countries having lost weight and having lost many unwelcome symptoms.  What was happening? Why were these folks, the first generation in their family to develop chronic health problems, doing so poorly in the US?  She decided to investigate and ended up taking trips around the world – with some surprising results.

Some cold spots on Dr. Miller’s diet map:  Copper Canyon, Mexico (a cold spot for diabetes); the island of Crete, Greece (a cold spot for heart disease); Iceland (a cold spot for depression); Cameroon, West Africa (a cold spot for bowel diseases); Okinawa, Japan (a cold spot for breast and prostate cancers).  A wide variety of local ingredients and traditional ways of cooking ended up having a lot in common. All led to longer, healthier lives.

The Jungle Effect is a fascinating book about one woman’s international diet detective work.  Dr. Miller offers recipes that you can cook at home and advice for all of us here in the modern world based on the Nine Key Components of these indigenous diets:

1. Food that is local, fresh, in season
2. Recipes passed down through generations
3. Eating as a communal activity
4. Sweetness gathered from whole foods like honey and fruits
5. Salt from unprocessed sources like seafood and sea greens
6. Naturally raised meat and dairy in small quantities
7. Non-meat fats from nuts, seeds, grain and olive oil
8. Fermented and pickled foods
9. Healing spices

I highly recommend this book for anyone interested in the wisdom of traditional diets and learning how to adapt our own ways of eating for more health and more pleasure.

Help for Haiti

If you are moved to make a donation to help the victims of Haiti’s devastating earthquake, please consider a donation to Partners in Health.  Founded by Dr. Paul Farmer and Dr. Jim Kim, PIH has been in Haiti for many years and has clinics in rural areas which survived the quake.  They know how to work with local people – they train their patients to become health workers – and they know local government officials.  They will be there working after this immediate crisis is no longer the lead story of the day.

Dr. Farmer was the subject of Tracy Kidder’s wonderful book “Mountains Beyond Mountains.”  Read it and be inspired.

Go to www.pih.org to make a contribution.