Nightshades, Part 2
I wrote about Nightshade Vegetables a while back and received a huge and positive response to the information that I wrote about. It is a very fascinating subject, one that is full of history, and yes, quite unbelievable too! Unbelievable in that food can have such a direct, and instantaneous, positive or negative effect on our health. It’s our own choice.
I just found another informative article about nightshades that I feel I must share with you, along with this link to an interesting website that is put out by a man who has pretty much devoted his entire adult life to the study and correlation of nightshade vegetables to all sorts of arthritic, auto immune, chronic pain, and inflammatory conditions. Please see www.noarthritis.com. The sites author, Dr. Childer, developed debilitating arthritis at age 50 or so, and is now close to 100 years old, and it looks to me like he is more flexible, more mobile, and more limber, than I am!! Well, not really, I don’t think, but I hope to be in as good of shape as he is when I am 100 years old. Hey, I’ll even be happy to be in as good of shape as he is in by age 75!! And I do plan / hope to be via healthy diet and lifestyle habits!
Anyway, the previous article that I wrote about nightshades (tomatoes, potatoes, bell peppers, black pepper, eggplant, and tobacco) focused more on their unique and unfortunate ability to interfere with our body’s absorption of calcium and other important bone building minerals. I also mentioned a few vegetables (spinach, swiss chard), that contain oxalic acid, which also interferes with calcium absorption.
But today I want to point out the substance that Dr. Childer talks about on his website called Solanine. It is by definition, a poisonous alkaloid that naturally occurs in all of the vegetables categorized as nightshades, and is a powerful inhibitor of cholinesterase, an enzyme that originates in the brain and is responsible for flexibility of muscle movement (thus the arthritis, joint pain, inflammatory connection!). Several other foods that are not specifically categorized as nightshades also contain high amounts of naturally occurring solanine, such as okra, artichokes, and bananas. So again, just as I said in my previous newsletter on nightshades, this does not mean that you can never eat a potato, tomato, etc. More, it is meant to make you aware that you make powerful choices every single day in regard to what you decide, or don’t even think about, when you ingest your food each day. And I encourage you to make powerfully GOOD, well informed, and well educated choices!
Please also refer to the website above for much more extensive information on nightshade vegetables in specific. Please read what he writes about livestock, and their painful physical reaction to grazing weeds that contain solanine. (Yes, he is from the generation where livestock actually grazed in open pastures. Fortunately for us, through this important observation, the understanding of negative effects of nightshades was developed).
Please note, that we never use nightshade vegetables or any of the other above guilty culprits in our Wholly Macro menus. But we do use a huge array of other super healthy foods.
The star this week is Rutabaga. No one ever uses rutabaga. It is as yet, "undiscovered". But it is a powerfully healing round root vegetable that in Oriental Medicine is relaxing and healing to the stomach and pancreas organs. It has a naturally sweet flavor which not only tastes just delicious, but also relaxes the middle part of our body where the stomach and pancreas are located. To put it very simply and to sum it up quite well, my macrobiotic teacher Michio Kushi, refers to Rutabaga as “the best insurance possible against stomach cancer”.
Our best to you as always.
Gayle and Jaime.
I just found another informative article about nightshades that I feel I must share with you, along with this link to an interesting website that is put out by a man who has pretty much devoted his entire adult life to the study and correlation of nightshade vegetables to all sorts of arthritic, auto immune, chronic pain, and inflammatory conditions. Please see www.noarthritis.com. The sites author, Dr. Childer, developed debilitating arthritis at age 50 or so, and is now close to 100 years old, and it looks to me like he is more flexible, more mobile, and more limber, than I am!! Well, not really, I don’t think, but I hope to be in as good of shape as he is when I am 100 years old. Hey, I’ll even be happy to be in as good of shape as he is in by age 75!! And I do plan / hope to be via healthy diet and lifestyle habits!
Anyway, the previous article that I wrote about nightshades (tomatoes, potatoes, bell peppers, black pepper, eggplant, and tobacco) focused more on their unique and unfortunate ability to interfere with our body’s absorption of calcium and other important bone building minerals. I also mentioned a few vegetables (spinach, swiss chard), that contain oxalic acid, which also interferes with calcium absorption.
But today I want to point out the substance that Dr. Childer talks about on his website called Solanine. It is by definition, a poisonous alkaloid that naturally occurs in all of the vegetables categorized as nightshades, and is a powerful inhibitor of cholinesterase, an enzyme that originates in the brain and is responsible for flexibility of muscle movement (thus the arthritis, joint pain, inflammatory connection!). Several other foods that are not specifically categorized as nightshades also contain high amounts of naturally occurring solanine, such as okra, artichokes, and bananas. So again, just as I said in my previous newsletter on nightshades, this does not mean that you can never eat a potato, tomato, etc. More, it is meant to make you aware that you make powerful choices every single day in regard to what you decide, or don’t even think about, when you ingest your food each day. And I encourage you to make powerfully GOOD, well informed, and well educated choices!
Please also refer to the website above for much more extensive information on nightshade vegetables in specific. Please read what he writes about livestock, and their painful physical reaction to grazing weeds that contain solanine. (Yes, he is from the generation where livestock actually grazed in open pastures. Fortunately for us, through this important observation, the understanding of negative effects of nightshades was developed).
Please note, that we never use nightshade vegetables or any of the other above guilty culprits in our Wholly Macro menus. But we do use a huge array of other super healthy foods.
The star this week is Rutabaga. No one ever uses rutabaga. It is as yet, "undiscovered". But it is a powerfully healing round root vegetable that in Oriental Medicine is relaxing and healing to the stomach and pancreas organs. It has a naturally sweet flavor which not only tastes just delicious, but also relaxes the middle part of our body where the stomach and pancreas are located. To put it very simply and to sum it up quite well, my macrobiotic teacher Michio Kushi, refers to Rutabaga as “the best insurance possible against stomach cancer”.
Our best to you as always.
Gayle and Jaime.