Rebuild from Depression Blog

Food allergies can at least aggravate depression. I some people they can be the primary cause. Increasingly, people are finding out that they are sensitive to gluten, a component of wheat and some other related grains. In fact, I find that my body gets a bit puffy from wheat. I do not have serious gluten allergy symptoms, but the puffiness is a reminder that the gluten is probably not doing me any favors.

So how do you know if you are allergic? It's actually pretty simple. Cut the food out for a month and then take a day to binge on the food. If the month was going well, the binge day will tell you if the reason was the food you cut out. Here's an excerpt from my book about my experience with cutting out corn. I had never heard of a "corn allergy" before and thought my chiropractor was nuts for suggesting it.

This approach would work if you suspect a food or two. Do it one food at a time.

~~~Excerpt from Chapter 5, "Corn allergies"

I am a lover of beef. It is rich in minerals and B vitamins. It is a depression buster food. However we haven’t even gotten through the first month of 2008 without a string of hamburger recalls due to the pathogenic bacteria E. coli 0157:H7. January is not even the peak month of E. coli. Look for that in late summer and early fall. All indications, then, are that E. coli 0157:H7 is on the rise and you may get a whole lot more than you bargained for in your burger.

So what in the heck do you do?

Some people reduce their risks by doing what I do – buying a steer from a small rancher and saving it from spending its final days on a feedlot. My steer continued to graze and eat a bit of grain in its last month. With less grain feeding, he would be less likely to have E. coli 0157:H7 in his gut, but he would not be immune to it. He might still have the pathogen in his system and when he was slaughtered and gutted, some of that bacteria may have made it to the carcass. Bacteria from another animal at the meat locker may have made it to my meat as well. You just never know.

I do shoulder some risk and eat medium-well burgers from this particular steer. My gut has withstood other food borne illnesses and my general strategy is to keep my digestion healthy enough to withstand the sorts of challenges it will inevitably face from beef, peanut butter, or spinach.

I’m on the road this week and have the opportunity to do what I almost never do: shop for food. We keep a freezer stocked with meat, a hen house full of layers, and a pantry stocked with food co-op items. When we are really on the ball, we even have produce in our garden. (When we are not on the ball, my husband shops for groceries to fill in where we need them.)

I know that makes us sound really hard core, but we do live in the absolute middle of nowhere actually in the Sequoia National Forest. We have friends here who pretty much hunt and forage all of their food. That is what I consider to be “hardcore.” Here, “hardcore” is pretty much the only way to live. If you're not "hardcore," you could run out of food or use a full tank of gas to get some.

Now I find myself on the road, all by myself and not knowing how to behave without a kindergartener with me. I visited Costco and called a friend.

“Have you seen these bake-your-own pizzas for ten bucks? That ten bucks would buy you and I two giant meals. That’s $2.50 a meal, we wouldn’t have to cook, AND we would get to eat pepperoni pizza!”

It's high in iron and B vitamins, but that is a small consideration if you find yourself in the ICU after eating an E. coli burger. I have deprived myself this summer of burgers from my favorite cowboy restaurant in the High Sierra's Ponderosa. Granted, the restaurant is stronger on the cowboys than on the burgers, but the burgers are a key part of the package. Lamenting my deprivation the other night, the topic of the Nebraska Beef recall came up.

My son Frederick was incensed that not only would pathogens find its way into beef and deprive me of burgers, but that the company providing the beef would actually blame others for resulting illnesses. Back in June, Nebraska Beef sued members of the Salem Lutheran Church for not preparing their meatballs properly for a church dinner. Had those ladies used better food safety measures, the pathogen that was illegally present in the food in the first place would have made no one sick.

The dinnertime discussion was made more interesting by Frederick's recent fascination with Old Testament stories. Could God be punishing Nebraska Beef for its behavior earlier this summer with even more recalls? Would locusts swarm Omaha? Would the Missouri River turn to blood? Probably not, but perhaps some figurative lightning was striking the Omaha area nonetheless. Our dinnertime discussion inspired a painting (below) in the spirit of Frederick's series of "Pollan Paintings." At the same time, apparently a friend of food injury attorney Bill Marler has been counting the pounds of beef recalled and pointed out that 6.66 million pounds have been recalled so far. The Mark of the Beast embedded in a hamburger recall along with all of the other signs of the looming Apocalypse may send me to the Ponderosa for one final comfort burger.

In case I don't return, I leave you with a final message from Frederick (6 years) called "Nebraska Beef's Final Days," poster paint on construction paper.

Diets of teenagers have likely never been particularly good. I remember leaving my junior high campus with my blue "off campus" pass to purchase the a soda and fried burrito at Elmer's Drive-In. It cost a whole buck. A friend of mine didn't have a pass, so I forged one for her and she spent a whole buck as well. In high school we left our law-breaking ways behind but I do remember eating a package of Zingers for lunch one day (like a Twinkie with frosting).

Today is no different except perhaps that the average American diet is so abysmal that the average American teenage diet looks like an abomination of nature. When I went back to my hometown after a decade of being off in college and graduate school, I happened into town during the lunch hour. The quick stops along the main drag in Delano had turned into lunch providers. Students exited with half-gallon sized soda pops and those "Big grab" bag of chips, chips designed to be eaten by one and yet should not be considered food.

I was appalled and mentioned it to my father who was still teaching high school at the time. "Breakfast is a big soda and a donut," he responded. There was a small donut shop just off campus to tempt students on their way to school in the morning.

Inside the campus fence offered some temptation. That is where I purchased the Zingers after all. The lion's share of campuses have had soda machines, some have snack machines as well, in addition to the food prepared in the cafeteria itself.

Here in California last year, a new law went into effect monitoring those on-campus vending machines. They have limits on calories, fat, and sugar that any particular item in the machine can have. The law also allowed only juice, milk, and electrolyte drinks to be sold, causing an uproar with companies providing sodas. A new law was passed in August clarifying some elements of the original law. Even though peanuts, for instance, are exempt from the calorie/sugar/fat requirements (perhaps because it is an actual food, bless its heart), you can't cover it with chocolate and get around the calorie/sugar/fat requirements. You can't turn milk into a sugar drink, call it "milk," and avoid those same requirements.

Good for California.

Certainly students are plagued by obesity and later diseases with abysmal diets. They are plagued by depression as well. Depression has increased in every new generation in this country. Diets of chips, donuts, and soda pop do not help: at a minimum they displace actual foods in our diets that contain nutrients depressed people tend to be deficient in.

Now if students could just be convinced not to buy the donuts off campus...

Technorati Tags: depression, foods that fight depression, teen nutrition, Rebuild from Depression, school lunches

Phytic acid is a component in grains, legumes, nuts, and seeds most commonly known as an anti-nutrient. It binds the minerals in your food and keeps you from digesting it. For instance, quinoa which could be a reasonable source of iron, has phytic acid which binds to that iron and keeps you from digesting it.

It is the anti-nutrient quality of phytic acid which lands phytic acid in the book Rebuild from Depression. The book contains a large food science section on increasing depression-fighting nutrients in your diet.

What if you already have too much iron in your body? Is phytic acid still a bad thing? What about the reports on phytic acid's antioxidant qualities? Is phytic acid good or bad? It depends.

Learn more in the phytic acid video.

Read more about phytic acid in various foods:
Soaking beans
Soaking grains
Phytic acid and rice
Phytic acid and soy

This post is part of Real Food Wednesday.

So you are thinking about trying Mom's chicken liver and rice casserole and have heard that your chicken liver may well have a whole lot of arsenic in it. What to do?

First, I do like liver for its nutrient density. Chicken liver is high in B vitamins, iron, and zinc, all of which fight depression if you are deficient. But, heck, arsenic would be a bad trade-off for some vitamin B-12.

The basic problem is that chicken feed can contain roxarsone, an additive that contains arsenic. Chicken producers are required to stop feeding this additive to chickens in the days leading up to slaughter to allow for a decline in arsenic in the actual meat. The ultimate levels of arsenic depend greatly on when the additive is pulled from the feed (and of course if the additive was used in the first place).

One study [full text PDF] found that our exposure in regular old chicken meat is much higher than researchers expected as a result of this feed additive. Arsenic in the liver meat itself is higher than the muscle, certainly a concern for liver-eaters.

The Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy (IATP) took the analysis further for consumers and tested popular brands of chicken meat, including livers [PDF]. As a consumer, a good point to keep in mind is that this feed additive is not allowed in organic product. The IATP analyses did find some arsenic in organic chicken, but organic chicken was far more likely to have low or non-dectable levels than was conventional chicken.

None of the organic liver samples tested contained arsenic.

The bottom line appears to be that if you are a liver lover, it is probably best to look for that "USDA Organic" label when shopping for chicken liver.

This post is part of Fight Back Friday.

Is bologna healthy or a junk food?

Ohhh, who comes up with these questions? All I can picture when I think of bologna is the bologna sandwiches I used to eat at my grandma's house on Wonderbread. Maybe it's the Wonderbread but it is very hard to imagine that bologna is healthy. Let's look at the numbers.

In the book Rebuild from Depression I list top foods that fight depression. Many of the top foods are actually in bologna. Remember that bologna is basically a mash-up of all of the parts and pieces of beef they can't package any other way. Heck, bologna could well have just about anything in it and, somehow, that is actually what makes it somewhat nutritious (you see, I still have to qualify with "somewhat" because of that Wonderbread).

In the graph below I present the vitamins and minerals of focus here at the Rebuild Blog for "bologna" based on data from the USDA nutrient database.

So maybe if we pass up the Wonderbread, we should eat bologna for B-12. If so, I would probably still shop for quality.

In fact, with the growing interest in gourmet grass fed beef items, you can even buy grass fed bologna these days. (Here is some bologna for $7.98/pound.) You can expect this beef to be leaner and it may have a bit more of the beneficial Omega 3 fatty acid (Omega 3 and grass fed beef).

This post is part of Fight Back Friday.

You have probably noticed that I use a lot of graphs on this site. I actually do a lot of reporting in my day job using data visualizations. If you have purchased either of the digital papers at the Rebuild Market you know they center around these same sorts of data visualizations.

I programmed a couple hundred graphs, focusing on those with a lot of nutrients. Usually I would write the code so that the scale on the graphs would be identical across all of them. In this batch I forgot to add that part of the code and it didn't matter for most anyway.

Except one.

Somehow, margarine made it into this group of nutritious foods. Look at the graph! It looks similar to the mackerel graph I display below it. At first glance I wondered how it had so much vitamin B-12 in it. B-12 is pretty much only found in animal products.

Then I looked at the scale. Look at the two scales. Notice the "percent of RDA" labels for each graph. The scales are indeed a bit different.

Poor margarine. If it were potato chips at least it would be tasty.