Blogs
Sunchokes, Immunity, and the mysterious Inulin
Sunchokes are a delicious member of the daisy family, which includes many of the superstars of the botanical world: dandelion, burdock, artichoke, arnica, echinacea, chicory, and elecampane to name a few. Something all of these plants have in common is that their roots contain a compound called inulin. Inulin is a polysaccharide that acts as a type of soluble fiber. Fibers do not get broken down by our normal digestive process in the small intestine, so it remains intact as it is either absorbed or sent to the large intestine.
When inulin arrives in the large intestine, it can function in a manner similar to other prebiotics such as fructooligosaccharides. It serves as food to the healthy bacteria living in the digestive tract and thereby can help to grow and develop a healthy balance of flora. The large intestine is our largest immune organ: 70% of the immune tissue of the body resides here. Healthy flora help to protect this immune tissue, boost our natural defenses against infection, and prevent inappropriate inflammation in the digestive tract and throughout the body.
The problem with eating foods high in inulin is directly related to its benefits. When those happy bacteria consume it and grow, they create waste products in the form of gases such as carbon dioxide and methane. This can cause gas, bloating and general discomfort in the belly for some people. Processed foods that contain isolated inulin (which also can be called chicory on a label) do seem to cause problems for many people, so check your labels. That said, many traditional diets have contained high levels of inulin-containing foods and it is well tolerated by many people. Whole foods, such as sunchokes, can cause fewer gassy issues for people so it may be worth the experiment to give your flora a healthy snack!
Bitter Greens to Stimulate Digestion
Happy Chinese New Year week to all! When I lived in Seattle, I had the benefit of being immersed in a city heavily influenced by Asian culture and food. I loved being able to taste the wide variety of fruits, vegetables and other delights available from the other side of the Pacific, including a range of leafy green things. Greens can have a wide variety of flavors; sweet, sour, spicy, and especially bitter. Although in this culture we do not generally have a taste for bitter food, it can be a lovely facet of a meal and does serve an important digestive purpose.
Bok Choi and Tatsoi are two of my favorite leafy greens of all time because of their combination of crispy, juicy, tenderness, and a light bitterness. The fiber and water contained in these greens is of course going to benefit the digestion because it will help to bulk and move the stool. However, there is additional benefit from the bitter component.
Approximately 35% of our digestive process takes place in what we call the "cephalic" or thinking stage. This means, when we think about food or taste food, it affects how the rest of our digestive tract is working. When bitterness touches our tongue, it tells our gall bladder to make bile, our stomach and pancreas to make digestive enzymes, and our intestines to start the peristaltic motion that moves food through the digestive tract. This helps to coordinate the entire digestive process so we are able to absorb and utilize food more readily and move it through more easily. This is why apertifs have traditionally been bitter and why eating bitter greens will help to digest and absorb our food more efficiently.
Enjoy your greens!
Kale and Hormone Balance
This piece was written as a contribution to Chef Lilly Allison Steirer's weekly newsletter "In Season"
I think of kale as an amazing vegetable, primarily because of its hardiness in my garden. Kale is one of the very first vegetables in my garden ready for eating in mid-to-late April; it weathers the heat of the summer and stays hardy all the way through late November when we till everything up for the winter. Frankly, if we didn't so get many feet of snow each year I think it could go year-round. Given the wide variety of temperatures and weather here in Colorado I think of this as nothing short of remarkable.
One of the interesting aspects of the vegetables in the cabbage (also called crucifer) family is their affect on the endocrine, or hormone, system. All of the members of this family including kale contain some amount of indole-3-carbinol, a chemical that has been getting a lot of press lately. Indole-3-carbinol helps the body to metabolize our most potent estrogens into a less active form, which can be quite useful therapeutically for those who would benefit from reduced estrogen levels. This can include problems with uterine fibroids, menopausal symptoms due to high estrogen and low progesterone, fibrocystic breast disease, and prevention of breast cancer. Although this chemical can be found in an isolated form in a nutritional supplement, eating whole foods from the crucifer family will give you the added benefit of fiber, B vitamins, minerals, and chlorophyll.
On the flip side, cruciferous vegetables also can inhibit absorption of iodine which will decrease production of thyroid hormone. This can be of some use to those with hyperthyroidism, but people with low thyroid should be wary of consuming these too frequently. That said, many sources note that heat destroys the component of kale that inhibits the absorption of iodine so if you prefer your kale cooked, this should not be too big of a problem.
Home Grown Tomatoes--Healthy Garden, Healthy Food, Healthy People!
--I originally wrote this piece for Dr Stephanie Smith's Create Mental Health Week blog earlier this year; it's a personal story about how gardening helps me create mental and physical health for me and my family.
"Only two things that money can't buy and that's true love and home grown tomatoes."
-John Denver
It's springtime again and my yearly obsession is in full swing: tomatoes! Every year for the past 10 years sometime in the middle of February I notice a warm breeze in the air and start dreaming. I dream of ripe, warm, luscious, juicy tomatoes picked right off the vine, sliced, drizzled with some good olive oil and a touch of sea salt. My alternate dream is of fresh, toasted sourdough bread, crunchy thick-cut bacon, a light smear of mayo, a fresh lettuce leaf, and thick juicy slices of a giant tomato from my backyard.
This year the process is particularly special. We just rebuilt our backyard and put in several new garden beds; we have been watching workmen transform a bit of the open mountain behind our house into a home for all our delicious dreams. We're putting in fruits, vegetables and herbs, hopefully enough to substitute for the farm share we used to get weekly. Right now our garden is all anticipation, and for me is the fruition of many years of "halfway" gardening in various combinations of limited space, poor soil, pots only, unfavorable climates, or limited time. This year, we are fully committed.
Will Asparagus Cure Cancer?
A colleague of mine, Jacob Schor, ND, wrote this article regarding asparagus and cancer:
Will Asparagus Cure Cancer?
Jacob Schor, ND, FABNO
June 5, 2011
If you have cancer, you may have been forwarded an email that claims asparagus will cure you. If you haven’t seen it yet, it’s only a matter of time before a well-meaning friend or relative sends you a copy.
Those of us who specialize in naturopathic oncology hear about this asparagus claim from our patients—many of who assume the information is true. Unfortunately, it’s not. There is no evidence asparagus will cure cancer. And in fact, it may make a few cancers worse.
Here is what we know about these claims.
The “Asparagus Cure for Cancer” first appeared in print in the February 1974 issue of Prevention magazine. A similar article appeared in the December 1979 issue of Cancer News Journal, a magazine once distributed in health food stores. Both articles claim that a dentist named Richard R. Vensal discovered that eating asparagus could cure cancer.
According to the email that is circulating, you can cure your cancer by consuming four tablespoons of pureed, cooked asparagus twice a day. Improvement is supposedly seen in two to four weeks. Unfortunately no articles, studies, or reports by Richard Vensal have ever been published substantiating this information.
A single recent study, published in 2009, offers a bit of support for asparagus’s cancer-fighting claims: Chinese researchers report that a chemical that they isolated from asparagus had an anticancer effect when added to liver cancer cells.[i] But this study was only on cells—no studies have been published that show positive results from feeding asparagus to animals or humans with cancer.
Newsletter Summer 2011
The Vibrant Health Alliance Newsletter All Good Medicine is here! This quarter we are talking about keeping the family healthy. Enjoy!
Hormone Testing
In my practice, I often see patients with a variety of symptoms that may seem unrelated but may all be somehow connected to either the reproductive (estrogen, progesterone, testosterone), stress (cortisol and adrenalin) or thyroid hormones. Some of the issues that are often related to hormone imbalance include menstrual problems, insomnia, migraines, anxiety, weight gain, fatigue, and menopausal symptoms such as hot flashes and low libido. As a woman approaches menopause, the production of the reproductive hormones (estrogen and progesterone) will shift from the ovaries to the adrenal glands, which also produce our stress hormones. If the adrenals are already fatigued from a lifetime of other stressors, giving them this extra job can make this transition particularly uncomfortable. Additionally, shifts in the reproductive or stress hormones can also throw the thyroid out of balance.
Usually, just getting some good objective information is the best first step towards resolving the issue. Most of these hormones can be evaluated using a simple saliva test, with the exception of thyroid hormone which is best evauluated through the blood. Once we know which hormones are out of balance, either in excess or deficiency, then we have many natural options to help bring things back into balance and get you feeling better. Please feel free to call or email me if you have questions regarding hormone testing!
Eating For Vitality: Metabolic Typing
I have spoken before about the importance of maintaining good blood sugar to feel our best each day. We can take this question one step further, however, and think about how to eat to feel good for the long-term. One of the most common questions we get at the clinic is :"What is the BEST diet?" Well, just as each of us are individuals with different personalities, each of us also has individual nutritional needs. So, while it is good to strive for eating high quality, seasonal, locally produced whole foods, we can also look further into what is best for each of us as individuals.
Metabolic typing is a type of testing that does just that. This in-office test looks at a variety of factors, including blood sugar, urine, saliva, and blood pressure, to determine how your body individually responds to the food you put in it. We also look at an array of subjective factors to determine what eating style helps you feel your best. After the testing is complete, we compare all this information to how you currently eat and come up with an individualized plan to meet your long-term nutritional and health needs.
Feel free to ask Dr. Rosen for more information!
Balancing Blood Sugar to Feel Your Best
It's a common story: "I wake up early for work feeling tired so I have a cup (or three) of coffee with milk and sugar to wake up, and a bagel or a donut for breakfast. Work is busy so I don't stop for a break until 1pm, and then I have some chinese takeout or a piece of pizza for lunch. At 3pm I'm falling asleep at my desk so I have a diet soda and grab a couple pieces of candy out of the jar at work. I go home and make something quick for dinner and watch some TV, then go to bed. By 2am I wake up and can't fall back to sleep until 4am so I wake up exhausted the next day and start over..."
For many of us, this cycle of stress, fatigue, and compensation for the two with marginal food choices becomes a self-perpetuating cycle. When we're tired, we often go for caffeine, sugar, and refined carbohydrates (like those in bagels, pizza, and noodles) to boost our blood sugar for a temporary feeling of increased energy. The down side is that when we spike our blood sugar quickly, it will not be maintained and will crash again a few hours later, resulting in greater fatigue. Also, when we eat infrequently the blood sugar will crash and again we will feel exhausted. Additionally, when we eat early in the evening, by the middle of the night many people will wake because they are hungry and not be aware of it, which can keep us up for a couple of hours and make us more fatigued the next day.
The simplest way to combat this cycle and improve energy throughout the day and stay asleep at night are to follow a few easy rules:
1. Eat protein and fiber with every meal. This slows the rate at which food enters the bloodstream which prevents the blood sugar from getting too high or too low.
2. Eat Frequently, preferably every 2 to 3 hours throughout the day. You do not need to increase overall caloric consumption, sometimes breaking up a meal in to two separate snacks works great.
Healthy Snacking
I have been thinking about snacks quite a bit lately. From the days of my pregnancies where I seemed to need some food what seemed like hourly, to my current days of trying to find something yummy and healthy that a 2-year old and 9-month old will be excited to munch on, I am always on the lookout for something convenient, portable, low-sugar, high-nutrition, and relatively allergen-free. In the past, common wisdom said that snacking between meals was unhealthy and promoted weight gain. However, healthy snacks can help to balance blood sugar and mood and can promote restful sleep; it also helps the body to use your calories properly and not store them as fat. So, with this in mind, and a bit of inspiration from The Shoshoni Cookbook, I came up with this recipe for a "cookie" that gets the toddler as well as an adult thumbs-up:
Oatmeal Banana Raisin Cookies
Makes about 6 dozen--you can halve this recipe!
2 cups bananas, mashed
1/4 cup coconut oil, melted
2 eggs (can substitute 2 Tbsp flax meal mixed with 6 Tbsp warm water if egg sensitive or vegan)
2 tsp vanilla
1/4 cup honey
3 cups rolled oats
1 cup brown rice flour
1/2 tsp salt
1 tsp cinnamon
1 tsp xanthan gum
1 cup raisins
Optional: 1/2 cup of shredded, unsweetened coconut, sunflower seeds, or chopped walnuts (for added healthy fats and protein)
Preheat oven to 350 degrees
Mix banana, oil, eggs, vanilla, and honey in a medium sized bowl. In another bowl, mix oats, flour, salt, cinnamon, and xanthan gum. Combine wet and dry ingredients, then mix in raisins and coconut, seeds, or nuts. Drop by tablespoonfuls onto a parchment lined baking sheet--they don't spread much, so you can put them close together on the sheet. bake 14 minutes until lightly browned.
