You are currently browsing the monthly archive for March, 2008.
One of the more hotly debated topics today is whether to buy organic or locally grown products. Well, here’s my 2 cents.
To me, the issue is about whether you really want to know what you’re eating – and whether convenience trumps that awareness. Here’s what I mean. Several years ago when professing to be vegetarian was chic, I would hear people tell me that “yes, I’m a vegetarian – but I do eat chicken.” I was never quite sure which food group the chicken was in, a fruit or a vegetable. Their reasoning was that being vegetarian when eating out was so inconvenient because at that time there were so few vegetarian choices on menus.
So, for the first part. Do you really want to know what you’re eating? Well if it’s packaged, start by reading the ingredients. In the U.S., food manufacturers are required to list ingredients in the order of greatest to lowest weight. So that first ingredient makes up most of the weight of the product.
If it’s not packaged like produce or bulk foods, do you really want to know where it was grown and under what conditions? Many people understand the inconsistencies of regulations related to the growing and handling of produce in countries outside the U.S. But there are fruits and vegetables grown here that contain high levels of pesticides (click here for a list) and meat products that contain high levels of hormones and anti-biotics. With these products, organic can be an important choice to minimize your exposure.
Aside from that, do you know the conditions in which your food was handled? Remember the spinach scare last year? The contaminant in that situation was e-coli bacteria. Buying organic spinach may not have made a difference, since manure (an organic fertilizer) can also carry e-coli bacteria. How about the cleanliness of the hands of the workers that picked, boxed and unpacked your fruits and vegetables. That isn’t affected by buying organic either.
If you really want to know what you’re eating, the best way to ensure quality is to grow it or raise it yourself. The next best way is to know the person who is growing it or raising it for you. This isn’t as difficult as you might think. Growing a vegetable and herb garden around your home during the summer months is a simple and fun thing to do. You might also consider a community garden in your neighborhood and share the expense, labor and produce with others. To obtain the items that you can’t grow for yourself, check out the many community farmer’s markets that spring up during the spring and summer months. There you can actually talk to the farmer or rancher and get to know them, maybe even arrange a visit to their farm or ranch.
After that, read the labels for the list of ingredients and the country of origin. I am amazed each time I walk through the produce section of the grocery store and see so many fruits and vegetables available that are “out of season” for our region. With the proliferation of cheap energy and global economies, shipping is no longer a factor. So many people today don’t even recognize that there are growing seasons for fruits and vegetables (check here for the growing seasons of many fruits and veggies). If it’s winter and your about to buy some summer season produce like peaches, you know they were grown half way around the world where it’s still summer.
If you doubt this, consider the proliferation of sushi (raw fish) restaurants in land locked places like Arizona! Serving raw fish requires that it’s fresh – and you can be certain that the fish wasn’t caught locally.
So, starting with my first choice: grow it yourself. Then, buy it from someone who did grow it themselves close to where you live. After that, consider organic especially for the “hot listed” products. And finally, read the list of ingredients and buy products that have fewer ingredients with names of things that you know and can pronounce.
Now, after all of that, what choice will you make when your in a hurry and short on money? How big of a part does the convenience and the cost of what you’re about to buy factor into the mix? In my thinking, that’s the real issue.
Most adults think that exercise means sweating at the gym on a treadmill during a “workout”. But kids don’t think about exercise, they just move while having fun – if you give them limits on their use of video games, t.v. and internet. Remember when games of hopscotch, jump rope and tag would break out spontaneously any time a group of 3 or more kids were together? It’s all about having fun, because when you’re having fun it can’t be work – right?
As parents, we need to take an active role in promoting physical activity for our children. First, we need to start moving ourselves. If we’re sedentary, then we’re not setting the example of the value of physical fitness. Research shows that physical activity, among other benefits, produces a leaner body, lowers the risk of diabetes, lowers blood pressure and cholesterol levels and helps to produce a positive outlook on life.
So now that spring is just around the corner, it’s a perfect time to begin taking steps to become more active, not just for yourself, but active as a family. The key to developing ideas for fun family activities is to think like a kid and not think about “working out”. First, identify the physical activity your children are already doing and start by joining in with them. Let them teach you how to play and follow their lead. Do you have a trampoline? Get out there and try a few seat drops.
Introduce your children to the games you played back in the day of the dinosaur (as my 12 and 14 year olds constantly remind me). Recall the games you played when you were their ages. Even hopscotch, jump rope and tag can be adjusted in difficulty to be age appropriate. Remember the pogo stick? They’re still available.
Here in northern Arizona we are at a huge advantage with the climate and geography. Make your family activities a journey with a bike ride or a hike. Our region is surrounded by forest service roads. Flagstaff has the FUTS trail system. All make great routes for an hour bike ride or simple hike. We have an abundance of national parks and monuments at our disposal as well as more established and maintained hiking trails than you can experience in a lifetime. All provide for a days worth of fantastic family activity.
The red rocks of Sedona make for some of the most beautiful day trips on the bike or on foot for most of the year when the temperature is cooler. The trails around Flagstaff are better suited to warmer months, especially the fantastic hikes in the Kachina Peaks Wilderness area.
Last weekend my family and I, along with our dogs, took a hike up and into Colton Crater, north east of Flagstaff. There are no formal trails there which made it a fun exploration and exercise in finding the best way up and down. We had a small picnic lunch and had a great time. The round trip time from our house and back was a total of five hours. Enough time for some video game playing when we returned.
If you’re unsure of the good places to hike or bike hit the book store. There are plenty of hiking guide books for all of Arizona. You can also start by checking out these links for ideas:
For more ideas on finding fun exercise for your family, try these web sites.
Family exercise can be the key to healthier lifestyle for kids
Make Exercise a Fun Family Affair
If you have a heartbeat over the past three months, you’ve observed the headlines and the cries of journalists, politicians and economists: recession, inflation, stagflation, housing slump, sub-prime mortgage crisis, stock market volatility, record high oil prices! You name it, there’s a lot of fear out there. Whether that fear is justified or not really depends on your personal situation. But either way, it’s a good time for some self-reflection to determine what’s reality for you.
Yet when everyone’s running around ducking for cover from the falling sky, it’s tempting to become frantic and act on impulse or become paralyzed and fail to act. Both situations are the result of losing your awareness of your presence in the moment. Of this moment. Because this is the only moment that matters.
Professionals who are exposed to life or death types of emergencies are trained to make good decisions, in the moment. If an airline captain on a routine flight from Phoenix to Seattle was suddenly faced with an engine failure, their first reaction isn’t likely to be, “Oh no! We’re all gonna die!” They are trained to recognize the problem, identify what is working (i.e. the plane is still flying, they have another good engine, etc), then find a solution to the problem. All of that decision making happens in the moment, not the past nor the future.
So, if you’re feeling the pressure of this economic fear I was describing, take a deep breath right now, in this moment as you are reading this. Become aware of where you are and what you are doing. Let’s recognize the problem: the economy is very unsettled and that may impact you personally. Second, let’s recognize what is working in the moment: you’re sitting at your computer (otherwise you wouldn’t be reading this), you have electricity, you have a roof over your head, and probably other blessings too numerous to mention here. Now, from this vantage point, how do you feel about the problem? Do you feel better able to identify solutions to the problem? Does the problem even exist for you anymore?
If you really managed to bring your full awareness into the moment, you probably had a different perspective on the problem than when you first started reading this. That’s because fear is an emotion that does not live in the moment. It’s an emotion of the past in the forms like regret or remorse. Fear is also an emotion of the future like doubt or worry. But notice how these emotions are not actions. Fear can move you to action which can be a good thing. But being fearful creates a state of ineffective inaction: paralysis or panic both of which I view as the same thing at two different vibrational frequencies.
In the moment is where action resides (along with being). In the moment you can act on a choice. But if you are fearful, you are dwelling on a past outcome or bracing for a future expectation – “Oh no. We’re all gonna die!” There’s no choice there. You’ve already decided.
Your goal during these times of uncertainty and Chicken Little’s running around in panic is to expand your awareness of the moment so you can recognize the choices around you in order to enact the best solution for your highest good. For starters, begin by focusing on your breath to help you back into the moment. You have resources available to you as well like yoga and meditation classes, massage and bodywork are all excellent opportunities to shut out the din of the world and move inside, into the moment.
What are the ways you use to get yourself into the moment? Let me know. I’m always open to more ideas.
The massage and bodywork therapists at Mountain Waves Healing Arts are trained to help you become as comfortable as possible so you can achieve the results you seek from your session. After all, we can’t make you relax. We can however, create an environment in which you find it easy to relax. But the details of that environment differ from person to person. That’s where good communication between yourself and your therapist is important.
I’m amazed at how many people will suffer through a session where the therapist is either applying too much pressure, or not enough. Or maybe your feet are cold. Personally I hate receiving a massage in a room that’s too cold. How about the music? If you can’t stand it, please let us know.
Our therapists want clients to tell them if there is anything that makes you uncomfortable during the session, or if there is anything we can do to make you more comfortable. That’s what we do – seek to make you comfortable so you can let go of the tension in your muscles. The truth is that’s how massage works best. It less about the massage technique and more about your ability to trust and let go. If you’re not comfortable, I don’t care how skilled the therapist, the session won’t be as effective in achieve the results you desire.
So during your next session, if you find that something is just not right and we don’t fix it, please let us know as soon as possible. We won’t be offended.
I’m usually pretty good about spotting the key ingredients in a product that will cause me to put it back on the shelf. MSG is one ingredient that will cause me to do just that. But I recently learned of the many other names that this flavor enhancer can be packaged under.
Monosodium glutimate (MSG), is a flavor enhancer that was first isolated from it’s natural sources and patented in 1909 and gained widespread use in the U.S. in the 1950’s. A health scare in the late 1960’s associated MSG with the symptoms of headache, sweating, facial swelling, numbness and chest pain after eating Chinese food. From that, the condition took on the name “Chinese Restaurant Syndrome”. Since then, most studies have failed to show that MSG affects most people in the manner described.
But since I don’t consider myself “most people” and I try to only eat ingredients that I can pronounce, MSG remains one of the ingredients that will cause me not to purchase a product containing it.
Monosodium glutamate is a manufactured form of glutamic acid, an amino acid that is naturally found in combination with protein in all living cells. Glutamic acid (glutamate) stimulates specific receptors in the taste buds by which the flavor of the food being eaten with it can be enhanced. The problem I have is that the concentration of the glutamate that manufacturers add is much higher that would naturally occur in the free form which can lead to reactions in some people.
The FDA requires that the label of any product containing monosodium glutimate identify it as such in the list of ingredients. However, if the manufacturer derives the glutamate from other sources, it is not required to label the product as containing MSG.
Other sources of glutamate in the ingredient listing might appear as: hydrolyzed soy protein, autolyzed yeast, yeast extracts or protein concentrates. One additional catch is that a product can list “vegetable broth” as an ingredient and not need to mention the sub-ingredient of hydrolyzed soy protein within the broth.
So if it comes in a package and it tastes too good to be true, it probably is.
References: Wikipedia, New York Times
I’m just getting this up and running, but I wanted to jot a quick note about the content you are likely to find in this section of the Mountain Waves web log.
Rather than inundating your e-mail inbox with wellness tips in a newsletter, I’ll be posting weekly wellness tips in this column instead. These tips will likely coincide with the topic of the weekly Wellness Wednesday radio segment I do on Sunny 100FM.
I’ll also likely post questions about Mountain Waves Healing Arts, massage, bodywork and the other services we offer in order to get feedback from you about how we are doing and ways to improve your experience when visiting us.
We’ll still publish our e-newsletter, but this way we can keep that to a monthly publication rather than bi-weekly.
So, in the meantime enjoy the blog, visit our web site and better yet, visit me at Mountain Waves Healing Arts.
