Showing posts with label Barnard. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Barnard. Show all posts
Tuesday, February 7, 2017
Free Mastering Diabetes Summit
This summit has been going on for a week now, but I only found out about it when someone posted that Dr. McDougall is going to appear. Well, I found the registration page and signed up.
Many of the big names in WFPB living are here, not just Dr. McDougall. There's Dr. Barnard, Dr. Fuhrman, Dr. Klaper, all the Esselstyns - over 25 of your heroes in one summit!
Here's the schedule of who and when they're appearing.
Have fun!
Sunday, September 1, 2013
VeganMoFo Day 1 - Heart Healthy Breakfast - Dr. Barnard's
I know I said my VeganMoFo theme is meals from the heart-healthy books, but the first dinner won't be until tonight, so I decided on a peace offering from another heart-healthy plant based doctor. These waffles are from Dr. Neal Barnard and have appeared in a few of his books as well as his 21 Day Kickstart daily recipe emails. I'm sure I've seen the same recipe in McDougall newsletters, too.
Let me start out by saying I rarely ever, in the 36 years I've been married and the decades before that, made waffles. When my son was young I used to buy him store-bought frozen waffles, but as I got deeper into McDougalling I decided I wanted to get him away from the overly processed, white flour ones and turn him on to healthy whole grain ones made with healthy sugars. So I bought a waffle iron, just a little 2-waffle one that looks like this one, but white:
No matter how much I greased it up, no matter what recipe I used, the waffles stuck like crazy. I scrubbed it one last time about 28 years ago, packed it up, and put it away. It got moved from one house to another, to Florida, and back to NJ, bounced around from closet to closet until it settled in the bottom of an old cabinet.
Until now. While trying to find foods that would tempt my husband to eat, one day I did the unthinkable and offered to make him pancakes (my choice) or waffles (Please say pancakes!). He chose waffles, so I dug out the waffle iron, gave it a quick wipe to make sure it was still clean, reviewed all the waffle iron tips and tricks on-line, and got ready to bake up some waffles.
Oatmeal Waffles
Serves: 3 (full waffles)
2 cup rolled oats
2 cup water
1 medium banana
1 tbsp raw sugar, or other sweetener
1/4 tsp salt
1 tsp vanilla extract
Place all ingredients in a blender and blend until smooth. Let stand a few minutes; if batter becomes too thick, add enough additional water to make batter easily pourable. Pour into a heated, oil-sprayed waffle iron. Cook for 10 minutes without lifting the lid.
I was determined not to use any oil at all, and since so many people on all the whole foods plant based forums, blogs and Facebooks said none is necessary if using non-stick, the waffle iron went un-oiled. I did plug it in as soon as I started gathering my ingredients and waited until well after the red light lit before pouring the batter on the griddle plates, maybe 15 to 20 minutes total pre-heat. I closed the waffle maker up tight and let it sit. My husband and son got a bit worried, seeing all that steam coming off of it. My son wanted to open it up after 5 minutes, insisting the waffles were burning. He didn't believe me that it wasn't until he did what all 20-somethings do when they want to learn something - he watched a YouTube video:
Of course, because that chef drowned the waffle maker in non-stick spray my son told me I did it all wrong, but at least he now believed the waffles weren't burning.
When the steaming stopped and the green light came on the waffle maker I opened it up.
And half the waffles were stuck to the top half of the waffle maker, the other half stuck to the bottom half. I closed it up and let it cook for a few more minutes, hoping the 2 sides would bake together. They never did. This is what always happened to me in the past, why I put that darn waffle maker away almost 30 years ago!
One of the hints I read was on removing the waffle from the non-stick waffle maker with a chopstick. I gently pried up a side and started pushing the half-waffle towards the center, and it naturally rolled up upon itself. I turned the waffle maker over and did the same for the top half. Here's what I ended up with:
He liked them! My husband put maple syrup one one but ate the other plain, saying the syrup made it too sweet.
I got the waffle iron cleaned after a bit of a struggle, wrapped and packed it all up again, and it has now been returned to its place of dishonor at the bottom of a closet. It's only pancakes being offered from now on.
Thursday, March 28, 2013
Keeping the Brain Limber
I finally got a chance to watch Dr. Neal Barnard's new PBS special, Protect Your Memory. A preview:
If you missed any of the showings on your local PBS stations, Amazon is now selling the DVD of the broadcast. This lecture is an off-shoot of his new book, Power Foods for the Brain which I purchased the day of release but it's still sitting in the ever-growing pile of health books to read.
In the video, he stated that there are three very important things we should be doing to ensure the health of our brain, and thus protecting our memories:
Well, I always hated anagrams and always get those questions wrong in Jeopardy, and Sudoku - ANY puzzle that involves numbers - just makes my head hurt. Learning languages? Well, in high school, the nun that taught us Spanish used the Castillian pronunciation of all the words so nothing we learned were we able to transfer to real-life usage. And the nun who taught us freshman Latin? She terrorized us all. She followed me into adulthood when, as an RN and working in a nursing home I was the primary caregiver of her mother, and she terrorized everyone in the Catholic Church-run nursing home just as she did high school girls. But I did love the language, and even won a few awards in competitions back in the 1960's. Knowing Latin really helped me in nursing school and when working with the doctors and even pharmacists. Eventually most of my Latin knowledge slipped away when I stopped working as a nurse and became a stay-at-home mom.
Fast forward a few years and I'm now home-schooling a sixth grader. We used a canned curriculum, and he was usually finished with all the required schoolwork by 10 am and I needed more work for him to do, something that would hold his interest. The curriculum focused on the Classics, so why not teach him a Classic language, and what's more Classic than Latin! Because home-schooling was starting to get popular, there were many resources out there, and I was able to get flashcards, workbooks, textbooks appropriate to his age group, even a few children's books written in Latin, like Winnie Ille Pu. We had fun doing the work together and he continued with Latin courses throughout high school, even taking a college level course when only 14. Knowing Latin helped his vocabulary greatly, so much so that it helped earn him a full-tuition scholarship to the state's engineering university and entrance into its Honor's College. He's proud of his vocabulary skills and is mocked incessantly by his friends for it, even now when they're all in their late 29's and early 30's. It's all in fun - all but one of them was also in the Honor's College in the same university, each in their own engineering major. The one in the bio-mechanical engineering program is now in med school and yes, he still laughs at my son's "very correct word usage," as he calls it, and has been known to IM him when writing papers to get his opinion on the wording of things.
Back to Dr. Barnard and the brain. I think it's time to dust out the cobwebs in mine with something a little more challenging than matching games on Disney videos or nutrition books, so I dragged out the old English From the Roots Up cards my son made all those years ago and I signed up at the Latin Word A Day web site:
I'll be adding this widget to the sidebar later.
I even dusted off my well-worn copy of the Winnie the Pooh book shown above.
Hopefully this will help prevent my brain from becoming Swiss cheese. There's no history of Alzheimer's in my own family, even though a lot on my mother's side lived into their late 80's, 90's and my great-grandmother and her sister both went over 100. But it exists on my husband's side. His mother started her Alzheimer's symptoms in her late 60's, and her sister, the aunt who just died from it last month, was lucky enough to not start until she was in her early 90's, but it ravaged her. By the time she died, she not only know who anyone was, where she was, when it was, but who she was. She forgot everything, including how to eat. She had forgotten a few years ago how to go to the bathroom and I was so grateful for adult diapers until she eventually needed a colostomy to go #2 (for another reason, not the Alzheimer's) and a catheter for #1 (this was because of the Alzheimer's. It was necessary for hygiene and infection control reasons.) I do NOT want either my husband or myself to wind up like that! Or our son, but he has many year to go to worry about that, but he wold be the one who would have to take care of us if we started to suffer from dementia. If following a healthy low-fat plant based diet, doing a few Leslie Sansone or Richard Simmons workouts and learning a few new vocabulary words a day will help prevent it, so be it!
If you missed any of the showings on your local PBS stations, Amazon is now selling the DVD of the broadcast. This lecture is an off-shoot of his new book, Power Foods for the Brain which I purchased the day of release but it's still sitting in the ever-growing pile of health books to read.
In the video, he stated that there are three very important things we should be doing to ensure the health of our brain, and thus protecting our memories:
1) Skip bad fatsTo exercise your brain, he includes both physical, aerobic exercise, especially regular walking for 30 to 40 minutes three times a week, as well as exercises for your brain itself, such as learning new things, doing word and number puzzles like anagrams and Sudoku, even learning a language and being bilingual.
2) Knock out free radicals
3) Exercise your brain
Well, I always hated anagrams and always get those questions wrong in Jeopardy, and Sudoku - ANY puzzle that involves numbers - just makes my head hurt. Learning languages? Well, in high school, the nun that taught us Spanish used the Castillian pronunciation of all the words so nothing we learned were we able to transfer to real-life usage. And the nun who taught us freshman Latin? She terrorized us all. She followed me into adulthood when, as an RN and working in a nursing home I was the primary caregiver of her mother, and she terrorized everyone in the Catholic Church-run nursing home just as she did high school girls. But I did love the language, and even won a few awards in competitions back in the 1960's. Knowing Latin really helped me in nursing school and when working with the doctors and even pharmacists. Eventually most of my Latin knowledge slipped away when I stopped working as a nurse and became a stay-at-home mom.
Fast forward a few years and I'm now home-schooling a sixth grader. We used a canned curriculum, and he was usually finished with all the required schoolwork by 10 am and I needed more work for him to do, something that would hold his interest. The curriculum focused on the Classics, so why not teach him a Classic language, and what's more Classic than Latin! Because home-schooling was starting to get popular, there were many resources out there, and I was able to get flashcards, workbooks, textbooks appropriate to his age group, even a few children's books written in Latin, like Winnie Ille Pu. We had fun doing the work together and he continued with Latin courses throughout high school, even taking a college level course when only 14. Knowing Latin helped his vocabulary greatly, so much so that it helped earn him a full-tuition scholarship to the state's engineering university and entrance into its Honor's College. He's proud of his vocabulary skills and is mocked incessantly by his friends for it, even now when they're all in their late 29's and early 30's. It's all in fun - all but one of them was also in the Honor's College in the same university, each in their own engineering major. The one in the bio-mechanical engineering program is now in med school and yes, he still laughs at my son's "very correct word usage," as he calls it, and has been known to IM him when writing papers to get his opinion on the wording of things. Back to Dr. Barnard and the brain. I think it's time to dust out the cobwebs in mine with something a little more challenging than matching games on Disney videos or nutrition books, so I dragged out the old English From the Roots Up cards my son made all those years ago and I signed up at the Latin Word A Day web site:
I'll be adding this widget to the sidebar later.
I even dusted off my well-worn copy of the Winnie the Pooh book shown above.
Hopefully this will help prevent my brain from becoming Swiss cheese. There's no history of Alzheimer's in my own family, even though a lot on my mother's side lived into their late 80's, 90's and my great-grandmother and her sister both went over 100. But it exists on my husband's side. His mother started her Alzheimer's symptoms in her late 60's, and her sister, the aunt who just died from it last month, was lucky enough to not start until she was in her early 90's, but it ravaged her. By the time she died, she not only know who anyone was, where she was, when it was, but who she was. She forgot everything, including how to eat. She had forgotten a few years ago how to go to the bathroom and I was so grateful for adult diapers until she eventually needed a colostomy to go #2 (for another reason, not the Alzheimer's) and a catheter for #1 (this was because of the Alzheimer's. It was necessary for hygiene and infection control reasons.) I do NOT want either my husband or myself to wind up like that! Or our son, but he has many year to go to worry about that, but he wold be the one who would have to take care of us if we started to suffer from dementia. If following a healthy low-fat plant based diet, doing a few Leslie Sansone or Richard Simmons workouts and learning a few new vocabulary words a day will help prevent it, so be it!
Friday, March 15, 2013
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