A good friend of ours recently got word from his medical doctor  that he had to lower his blood sugars or diabetes would soon follow.   So, it was goodbye to lovely Hawaiian Sweet Bread sandwiches for  lunch and the occasional bowl of ice cream for desert.  And instead  he is turning toward a high protein base for meals with plenty of  chicken, beef, fish, eggs and cheese.  And this will indeed lower  one's blood sugars and has even recently been acknowledged by the American Diabetic Association as doing so.  And this is the diet my  brother, a diabetic, chooses as well. Thanks largely to the work of Diana Schwarzbein, M.D., we now  know that it's not fat and a high calorie diet that causes diabetes,  as has long been the official stance, but rather, a diet high in  processed carbohydrates that turns out to be the culprit.  The only  problem is that a high animal protein diet which is currently being  promoted as a solution, is now also known to wreak havoc with the  vascular system, often resulting in an increased chance of stroke or  heart attack.  The most common first symptom of which, sadly, is  sudden death.  Not such a great alternative. But fortunately, there is another way to drop one's blood  sugars while keeping those arteries and veins clean to freely move  our blood around and that's a whole-food, plant-based diet.  In other  words,  "Eat your fruits and vegetables."  Not canned, not frozen,  but fresh whole foods, straight from nature, right out of the ground  and right off the tree.  So, this is what Frank and I have been  mostly doing for the last several years and blessedly it has helped  to normalize and keep our blood sugars low and it even helps to keep  us fit with all that composting, digging, planting and harvesting. Also, by reducing the amount of animal products that we consume, we  reduce the amount of suffering caused on our behalf in the factory  farming industry.  And we all get plenty of protein from plants.  The  average piece of fruit is four percent protein, that's roughly the  same amount of protein as is in mother's milk.  And there is no time  in the life of a human when we have more need to be actively  manufacturing muscles, bone and tissues then when we are in our  infancy.  So, if you're getting four percent or more protein from  your food, you've got it covered.  And most plant foods are amply  rich in protein.  Basically, all we need to do is to fall in love  with our farmer's markets and our own backyard gardens and start  having fun with the harvest in our kitchens again. So here enter delicious delights like summer's ratatouille  recipe.  Frank makes his ratatouille with fresh onions, eggplant,  summer squash, maybe even a little fennel bulb or mushrooms and a  couple of tomatoes all in about the same quantity, sauteed one after  the other in a good organic olive oil (or even coconut oil,) and then  tossed together in a bowl to serve. This with a little quinoa or a  small non-russet baked or boiled potato and a lovely salad chock full of nice dark leafy greens and a few sweet tender lettuces, followed  by a bowl of fresh berries and other fruits for desert, makes a  wonderful nutritious and fully satisfying meal, that you could even  serve to friends.  And we have. But, this is merely one example of a perfectly scrumptious way  to entertain guests while steadily bringing those blood sugars down.   Skip the rice, especially the white rice and white bread, and throw  the sugar out the window.  If you simply must have bread, only enjoy  the one hundred percent whole sprouted grain breads, preferably  without any wheat and go real easy on them, or better yet, eliminate  the bread and grains all together.  A little quinoa or amaranth even buckwheat will do in a pinch because like a small to medium sized  purple, red or yellow potato, (not the big white russets, which are  the common restaurant potatoes,) these all have a medium to low  glycemic index which means that in moderation, or small portions,  these carbs won't jack up those blood sugars too much.  In regards to fruit, even though some fruits are high in  sugars, so long as you are not sitting down to eat a case of grapes,  I don't have a problem with anyone enjoying fruit.  I once heard it  said that "If it's sweet and it's not an organic piece of fruit, spit  it out."  The problem lies with a lifetime of refined sugars, not the  natural organic ones.  I believe that we are meant to enjoy the  garden's beautiful jewels of summer.  And I think that we do need  sweetness in our lives.  So I say, skip the sugar and enjoy your fruit. Among the natural sugars, even honey and maple syrup are not as  addicting to me as the refined sugars are.  If I eat white or brown  sugar, I've simply got to have it again the next day.  If I eat honey  or maple, it's no big deal, and I can easily go without it.  So  that's how I get off of sugar.  I go to the kitchen and invent a  desert, something like coconut cashew-butter honey balls.  Then the  next day I can easily step down to fruit.  And it's almost the same  for me with white bread.  I can get really hooked on that stuff.  You  know the old adage, "The whiter the bread, the sooner you're dead." Some of those crusty fresh baked white loaves can really send my own  blood sugars to the moon and back again. So, at our house, instead of bread, Frank has been perfecting  his nut cracker recipes. They are a delicious heart-healthy, high- protein and blood-sugar-friendly, satisfyingly savory and crunchy  bread substitute.  To make them, you soak a half of a cup of raw  sunflower seeds and a half of a cup of buckwheat groats and one cup  of raw almonds in a bowl of water over night.  (We use organic, because why would you want to eat insecticides which are all mostly  seriously potent nerve toxins.)  In the morning, rinse well and drain  the now plump seeds and nuts and dump them in the food processor and  grind them up while slowly adding about a half of a cup of water or a  little more, until you get a nice fluffy paste; it takes just a few  minutes and should be a little bit like a moist ricotta cheese.  Add  some dried ground cumin for flavor and a little of that wonderful  Celtic Sea Salt to taste.      By the way, it's been my experience that the Celtic Sea Salt, when paired with a clean, plant-based diet, does not adversely affect  blood pressures.  This holds true for my friends who enjoy it as  well, and certainly it is the case for me.  The real "Celtic Sea  Salt" is just dehydrated ocean water, harvested in the ages old  traditional way in France with drying ponds and wooden rakes.  It  contains more than eighty minerals and is very like our own blood in  it's chemical composition.  We buy it in bulk at our local Co-Op.  It  is quite unlike common table salt which is just plain Sodium combined  with Chloride, both derived from any industrial source and then  spiked with plenty of aluminum to keep it from clumping so it will  stay free flowing and easily exit from the little holes in a salt shaker.  There is enough aluminum in commercial table salt that it  has to be listed as an ingredient.   And "Sea Salt" isn't much  better.  I understand that salt can be called "Sea Salt" if it is  Sodium chloride with any four industrially derived minerals added to it.  So, it's worth it to pay the two or three pennies a day to get  the real thing which usually costs around ten dollars a pound.  My  grandmother used to have a cute little crystal salt cellar with an  even cuter tiny little silver spoon.  So, that's what we've got, only  in ceramic.  A friend of mine makes them and they look adorable on the dinning room table.  Because, as you may well know, aluminum has  been strongly implicated in the cause of Alzheimer's disease.  And we  certainly don't want to be heading in that direction, if we can help  it, which we can by merely using a cellar instead of a shaker. Another good tip is that coconut oil has recently been found to  arrest and even reverse Alzheimer's disease.  It has a nice flavor as  well as a very high heat tolerance so it's good to cook with.  We get a nice organic one that comes in a great reusable wide mouth glass  jar.  And all of these plant based fats don't adversely affect heart  health like the saturated (animal derived) fats do.  These fats help  lower the bad cholesterol  and raise the good cholesterol.  I must  say here, that even though margarine is a plant based fat, I can not  recommend it, because they use nickel, which is a heavy metal, in  processing it when they make it.  And I don't feel that regularly eating trace amounts of heavy metals is good for anyone.  Crisco is  another big red flag for me.  I understand that it is only slightly  different chemically from car wax.  I never would want to put that  saturated fat into my body and I carefully avoid all suspect pastries  and pie crusts because of it.  I'd much rather see folks enjoy butter  which makes beautiful pastry and is a pretty darn good food,  especially when it's not combined with processed sugar.  Butter has  been around for a long time.  They actually found a carefully sealed  hollowed out section of a tree trunk, I believe it was in an Irish  bog, and it was full of perfectly good butter just about as fresh as  the day it was put up, only it was dated to be at least three thousand years old.  Isn't that amazing.  Someone stumbled upon it  just a few years ago. But back to raw nut crackers.  You can even add a few soaked  and softened dried bell peppers or sun dried tomatoes to the nut and  seed paste and grind this all together for some interesting flavor  varieties.  Pour the mixture out onto a dehydrating sheet and spread  it thin with a spatula.  Sometimes we press dried garlic or onion  bits on top.  Dry the crackers until crispy in the dehydrator; (we  have and like the Excalibur 2000.)  Or you can use some old cotton  cloth on a cookie sheet in the oven on your lowest heat.  If you  don't have a dehydrator, prop open the oven door with a wooden spoon  to let the warm air flow for drying.  Pull them out to score them and  then flip them when they are almost dry, peeling off the sheet after  they've been flipped.   When we do it, we usually sandwich the crackers with another rack to make the flip easy before peeling off  the sheet.  Then, later they will break easily into nice triangles or  squares along whatever scoring lines you've made, for easy storage in  an air tight glass jar.  Once dry they'll keep well for months. We try to store all of our food in glass.  We have a whole  cabinet devoted to clean empty jars of various sizes and shapes, all with good fitting lids.  Fortunately,  a lot of foods still come in  glass.  So we've collected and have been using glass jars for years.   Recently, I've been very happy to see organic, Bavarian, pasture  raised, whole milk, plain yogurt stored in reusable glass quart jars  at our local Co-op.  And the organic pasture raised Strauss milk has  come in glass for some time now.  Hooray!  They are getting it. Because of course, now they are realizing how much the plastic  leaches into the food.  Especially if the food is hot.  And it  follows that we don't ever want to drink a hot beverage from a  plastic cup.  Our young neighbors, the Materials Engineering majors  are all well aware of this.  Their professors make sure that they  know that plastics when heated are particularly toxic and should  never be used for holding hot foods and that plastics certainly should never be burned in a camp fire as it creates extremely toxic  air pollution. So there you have it.  It's really so simple, as are all great  solutions.  Enjoying the fruits of nature's harvest and eating real  foods helps us to feel better.  When we feel good, we love to be  active and we get our exercise.  When we get our exercise and eat a  diet consisting of lots of lovely, fresh, organic, whole, low- glycemic plant-based foods along with only quality salts and quality  fats and fruits for sweetness, then Viola!, down come the blood  sugars, down comes the cholesterol, down comes the high blood  pressure and the brain stays nice and strong.  It's so much nicer for  the animals and it's easy for us and delicious too.  So make yourself  some lovely Ratatouille and Nut Crackers and I hope that you enjoy  these wonderful recipes as much as we do.

Josephine Laing As an eco-feminist and a practicing medical intuitive for the past 25 years, Josephine Laing sees the emerging role of women in our culture as an essential element in our human transformation away from the dominator model of society into a golden age of peace which celebrates life in all of it's astounding creativity and diversity.

Positive Possibilities Natural Healing Disclaimer and Warning by Josephine Laing

I need to make sure that everyone understands that I am not a licensed physician. I have not had any official training nor am I  certified or licensed in any form of alternative or complimentary healing arts services.  However, I am a person who has done years of  personal research and one who has had a fair amount of experience  with natural healing materials and methods. And, I am glad to say that I have been granted the right within  the First Amendment of our Constitution to freely share my  experiences and express my viewpoints on all matters of public  concern.  So I take the liberty to do so here in hopes that it may  help you as it has helped me.  However, pharmaceutical companies and  medical groups have made it so that I must legally give you the  following WARNINGS: Any healing modality, including standard western medical protocols in addition to natural therapies, can cause harm rather  then the benefit you seek.  Just like medications, sometimes herbs, foods, or other natural substances can cause allergic reactions or  they can have side effects which can be dangerous.  After all, some  individuals have been injured or even killed by ingesting  strawberries or peanuts.  So please understand that any of these  natural healing suggestions that I write about may be potentially  dangerous, or even lethal for healthy people and they may especially  be so for people who are ill.  Thus before you begin any healing  modality, I need to ask you to please consult a Medical Doctor. In addition, if you have been diagnosed with a disease, or if  you are ill, I must, for my own protection, insist that you Ask Your  Doctor First, before attempting any natural healing programs that I  may refer to in these articles.  But please remember that due to  their lack of experience and lack of education in natural healing  methods and herbal medicine, most Medical Doctors will probably  attempt to discourage you from trying these natural therapies. I would also like to mention that Naturopathic Doctors, Doctors  of Chiropractic and Doctors of Oriental Medicine are also licensed  physicians.  They are typically trained in a variety of healing arts  and natural healing modalities often including homeopathy or  herbology.  I have personally availed myself of the services of all  three of these types of complimentary or alternative doctors and have  generally found them to be kind, knowledgeable, patient,  understanding, dedicated and very helpful. Josephine Laing