I read "French Women Don't Get Fat" by Mireille Guiliano

It was cheap at a thrift store in Boca Grande, and I needed some reading, figuring some nonfiction about eating habits was better than a Mary Higgins Clark mystery. I think her book is better than her title, though it was a very quick read saying many common sense things we all already know, and listing many recipes that I am excited to try (pumpkin pie with hazelnuts, cauliflower gratin, asparagus flan!, cooked pears with cinnamon, carrot soup).

Her book offers a cross-cultural comparison of eating between America and France and worries that if french culture goes by the wayside, her pais-mates will be getting obese like Americans. She quotes Brillat Savarin, the great 18th-century French gastronome: “The destiny of a nation depends on how it feeds itself.” She worries: "Where are we going? And why is everyone following?"

She advocates regulated gastronomic pleasure instead of diets as the most powerful tool of weight control and is shocked by how overweight we in the USA are. She presents a plan to change eating habits and lose weight. Start off writing down everything you eat, and send it to her; she'll find your main "offenders" in habit or food choice and advise you a solution. Just kidding she won't send you anything, you have to find your own "offenders." She stresess that you move a lot; french women walk everywhere and do little secret exercises with their arms and abs at home. Climb lots of stairs.

Second step to your new french-style life is to eat leek soup for 3 days. Thereafter, include lots of leeks in your life.

She speaks about having a variety of seasonal foods on your plate, sitting to eat giving full attention to the meal, chewing slowly deliberately meditatively, buying food at the local market and only enough for a few days. We must not cut out the fats; eat butter and whole milk and goat cheese. Just moderate. And if you eat a large meal today, compensate tomorrow with no sweets, and minimal bread etc.

The funniest thing is her encouragement to fool yourself and others. Example: When you don't really want a dessert when everyone else is getting their own, go ahead and order it, eat 2 bites slowly and engage your neighbor in conversation so they won't notice that you've put your fork in the 5 o'clock position that tells the server to take it away and of course s/he will without anyone noticing that you were so moderate!!

What a notion that we are all going to start spending 1 hour shopping every 2 days and an hour preparing meals with 4-5 sides on a set table with linens and candles. But her idea of variety and small portions of each makes a lot of sense for your digestive enzymes and nutrient requirements.

I do like leek soup... Her anecdotes describing the wild blueberries and mirabelle plums are delightful, and you can learn a lot about different little foods (how to clean mushrooms) and french food culture. The 2 days a year at Christmas where everyone eats a few slices of cake are a charming picture.

She encourages doing chores, cleaning things the old fashioned way, taking the stairs; essentially stop being lazy! Work to enjoy food and work to reap psychological reward and exercise benefits. Oh, and she is the CEO of Clicquot, Inc. and encourages us to drink champagne often; it's not just for New Year's and rare celebrations. Her recipes call for Champagne Veuve Clicquot Yellow Label Brut, and that you drink the rest with dinner.

She just falls a little short by not discussing our society and culture bent on consumerism, professional competition, fitting in lots of activities aimed at kids' pleasure because of parental guilt, socializing with wide unconnected sets of friends, and needing to do things fast, and get places fast so there is more time doing activities with our gadgets (watching, talking, playing, texting, buying). I guess she is challenging us individually to make gastronomic pleasure a bigger priority and an enjoyable family affair.

I read "Dharma Bums," by Jack Kerouac

It's hard to believe that this book was assigned to me as a freshman in a Jesuit university - an 18-yr old sheltered catholic girl, straight out of all-girls catholic nun-style high school, not knowing the first thing about beatnicks, poems, buddhism, hippie-freedom, california culture, pot-smoking or sex and not ready to investigate these either. I was only just discovering what male humans looked like and talked about and that's all I wanted to put my attention into. Now I've read some about tibetan-style buddhism so thought this book - which made a big poetic impact about this guy who wandered the country by thumb and traincar in the 1950s with his backpack, beans and notebook living a simple life - would resonate.

Ray Smith (autobiographical of the author) is our wanderer trying to co-lead the rucksack revolution with his mentor/idol Japhy Ryder (who in real life was modeled after poet Gary Snyder). We follow Ray during his joyful do-nothing year relying on his wits, fearlessness and friends to do a year traveling, visiting, partying and meditation. He is happy to sit and pray for the world; "something good will come of it."

Japhy gets on his case for not doing much besides sitting and poems while Japhy chops wood, works and reads Zen buddhist texts. He is an old bikkhu who loves haikus, satoris, the mountains and "hoos!"; he plans a trip to Japan. He tells Ray what it's all about. I loved that Japhy practiced charity all the time and I loved how it charmed Ray: "There was nothing glittery about it but almost sad and sometimes his gifts were old beat up things but they had the charm of usefulness and sadness of his giving."

The rucksack revolution that they both wanted was described by Japhy: "refusing to subscribe to the general demand that they consume production and therefore have to work for the privelege of consuming all that crap they didn't really want anyway such as refrigerators, TVs, cars, certain hair oils, and general junk you finally always see in the garbage a week later anyway, all of them imprisoned in a system of work, produce, consume, work, produce, consume. I see a vision of a great rucksack revolution with people going to the mountains to pray, making children laugh and old men glad, making young girls happy and older ones happier, all of 'em Zen lunatics who go around writing poems..." They had a fantasy of West meets East, with guys hitchhiking and tramping around the mountains praying and writing poems.

Kerouac talks about food alot, albeit simple food: beans, soup, food supplies, food storage, dinner, lunch, Hershey bars...

Ray had a breakthrough in his mother's back woods in North Carolina. He became empty and awake and saw no difference between himself or anything else; became a buddha. He felt the same as the trees, he felt blank, he became "Bikkhu Blank Rat." He experienced transendental visits without drugs - Samapatti. His life was a "glowing empty page and I could do whatever I wanted."

And that he did. He went back to Japhy's place in California (I saw the very tracks on the beautifuul coast south of Sta Barbara a few months ago), and they partied, got drunk, naked, and had sex in what they called the yabyum ceremony. Ray's justification for what seemed like Samsara stuff to me was that "the dharma can't be lost; nothing can be lost on a well-worn path." Interesting justification.

In a final scene, Japhy gets on his boat to Japan, makes love to his favorite girl and literally throws her from the boat to the pier as the boat pulls away so he can get on with his business of the Dharma. Is he finally seeing the partying as samsara chatter distraction?

Ray went to the Cascades to be a fire lookout, following Japhy's advice as usual. He got to be completely solitary on a mountain. And very happy claiming he learned all up on that Desolation peak, falling in love with God, and fearing his return to people and cities.

Jack Kornfield's "After the Ecstasy, the Laundry" would be a good book for Japhy and Kerouac to read. It discusses living a compassionate, loving-kindness, buddhist meditation, present mindful life with busy job, family, account numbers, jealous defensive people, rules and forms. Can someone maintain a Kerouac-style bikkhu-ness in 2009 in a literal way? Maybe outside the USA or in some parts of Montana, South Dakota where thin populations may engender some sympathy for a lone person on a rural highway. One can certainly adopt some of the rucksack philosophy to eat and live simply, having just the food needed for the next few days; figuring out stuff for ourselves or with our neighbors; having just the furnishings needed for sitting/staying, cooking, sleeping; and for sharing the used reusables given with attention to the potential to reduce further consumption.

Raw Goat Milk!

I bought a gallon of goat's milk yesterday from a farm with > 40 dairy goats including a recent Grand Champion Nubian (see photo of the champion). They are large with trademark floppy ears and known as the "jerseys of the goat world" for producing milk with high butterfat content.

So why goat milk? I figured it would be fun to go to a goat farm to pet and feed them but only a giant pyrenees let me pet him.

But actually, goat milk is mostly known for being more easily digestible than cow milk which can be partially digested leaving behind slimy goo of undigested stuff that ferments in your colon!

Why is it more completely digestible than cow's milk?

#1. The average size of goat milk fat globules is about 2 micrometers as compared to 3-1/2 micrometers for cow milk fat. These smaller- sized fat globules provide a better dispersion and a more homogenous mixture of fat in the milk (?)

#2. Goat milk does not have agglutinin as does cow milk which makes fat glob together and harder to digest. (?)

#3. It also has more linoleic and arachnodonic (spider??) acids as well as more short-chain fatty acids which our intestines can easily digest (?)

#4. Goat milk curd is small and light (good for drinking) compared to cow milk curd which is big and dense (good for making cheese). There are lower levels of alpha-s1-casein in goat milk. Softer casein curd with smaller flakes results in more rapid digestion of milk proteins. (?)

Diabetes: "Recent research published in February, 2003 has implicated the protein A1 beta-casein as a trigger for Type 1 diabetes and other health issues (Elliott et al, 1999). Commercial efforts are now being made to select and farm cows which only contain A2 beta-casein, which is considered the safe variant of beta-casein. Goat milk only contains the A2 variant of beta-casein, and is therefore a natural choice for those seeking to avoid A1 beta-casein" See link

Why is it more nutritious?

#1. Some Granadian scientists made the news in 2007 showed there was higher bioavailability of iron, calcium, phosphorus and magnesium in rats. (?)

This is one of the main sires!

#2. One article online claimed that goat milk has 13% more calcium, 25% more vitamin B-6, 47% more vitamin A, 134% more potassium and 3 times more niacin. 27% more of the antioxidant Selenium, but way less vitamin B-12 and way less folic acid. (?)

Hmm, I had a hard time finding comparative nutrition info between raw cow and raw goat milk but claims of the higher minerals and vitamins listed above were like common knowledge.

I compared raw goat milk to fortified homogenized pasteurized cow milk using USDA nutritional database online. There is no entry in the USDA database for raw cow milk. It listed goat milk as having 13 mg of Ca compared to cow milk having 113 mg per 100g of milk. They missed a digit. In this goat milk study in Greece, they reported 132 mg. Conversely, other minerals were lower in the Greek goats than the USDA goats but there is a breed variability along with diet factors and seasonality.

Homogenization hurts milk!

Homogenization of milk became widespread in America in the 1930s and nearly universal in the 1940s--the same decades during which the incidence of atherosclerotic heart disease began to climb. Luckily, goat milk does not separate like cow milk because the fat globules small.

There is a big debate about these claims made famous by two Connecticut cardiologists Oster and Ross in 1973 and 74:

#1. When fat globules cut into pieces with the machines, the enzyme xanthine oxidase is freed in a raw state and absorbed by your intestinal blood where it can scar arterial and hear tissue! wierd. And this can cause a release of cholesterol to pave over the scarred areas, yuck. (?)

#2. When milk is homogenized, it passes through a fine filter at high pressure so the fat globules are made a tenth as small and proteins are broken up. They become little express delivery packages that bypass the regular digestive process (sort of like the movie, fantastic voyage) so proteins that would normally be digested in the stomach or gut are not broken down, and are absorbed into the bloodstream. (?) Not good, this is like a foreign substance (I read a book about inflammation and this is a hot topic, partially digested things in your blood cause histamines and mucus and inflammation that causes disease). Oster & Ross demonstrated that milk antibodies are significantly elevated in the blood of male patients with heart disease! In 1983, there was this rebuttal and more after...

Pasteurization hurts milk!

It's heated to about 161 degrees for about 15 seconds, which destroys the bacteria that cause foodborne illness. All enzymes and good bacteria dead! Ultra pasteurization (my organic milk I used to buy!) heats things up to 260 degrees. (?)

#1. Kills (denatures) phosphatase, critical for absorbing calcium.

#2. Kills lactase which works on lactose (everyone complains about that).

#3. Kills lactoferrin, helps us absorb iron.

#4. Kills lipase, which helps us break down fat

#5. Kills good bacteria (probiotics) so we are drinking lots of dead bacteria!

#6. Destroys lactic acids that allow good bacteria (if it were alive) to implant in our intestines (?)

#7. Some say more than half of vitamins A, D and E are lost (?)

#8. Disables a good cortisone-like factor in butterfat (?)

Whereas raw milk naturally tastes sour from the lactic acid so is edible and nutritious, pasteurized milk rots because of all the dead bacteria in it.

Then there's the whole issue of grain-fed vs. grass-fed cows! Volume II of the story...