Joan’s Boomer Blog

A new Harvard study about potatoes making us fat was recently reported in the Wall Street Journal. It said too that the National Potato Council had no comment as of yet. If you just read the headline, you’d think skipping that baked potato will help you stay slim and if everyone reads only the headline, then the potato will soon have the same bad rap that eggs got several years ago. Skipping potatoes will become the cure-all for obesity in the US.

Read further, however, and you see it isn’t ALL potatoes, but French fries and potato chips that are the culprits. Really! Who didn’t know that eating chips and French fries packs on empty calories (if you would even consider a McDonald’s fry to be a real potato, which I don’t). Filling yourself with fries and chips is giving your body no nutrition to work with so it all goes right to the waistline.

The truth is white potatoes are high on the glycemic index, which means

which means eating a potato raises your blood sugar faster than eating, say some spinach. Spinach is a 15 on the glycemic index, while a boiled potato is 56. However, a sweet potato, at 54, is considered “low” on the glycemic index and many studies will tell you to eat a sweet potato and not a white potato.

If you’d like to read more about the glycemic index, click here.

The thing about these “studies” is that, if you simply read the headlines, which many people do, you don’t get the full story. Chips and French Fries are not only made up of potatoes, they contain salt and trans fats. Too much salt in the diet raises blood pressure and artificially produced trans fats from partially hydrogenated oils have been shown, by other “studies,” to contribute to heart disease. (but even here there is more to the story as naturally occurring transfat in beef and dairy products is not shown to be harmful. CLA, in fact has been shown to decrease belly fat and is found in higher amounts in grass fed beef vs commercially raised beef).

Confused yet?

To me, the very best advice is still to eat more fruits and veggies, exercise and avoid sugar and processed foods, such as chips and fries, or anything that comes out of a box. Stick to whole foods and the less processed the better. An occasional potato or egg or even a chip won’t ruin your health but the key is moderation.

Some things which aren’t technically good for us make life worth living. My 83-year-old mother eats ice cream every night. She says, “I know I probably shouldn’t eat this ice cream but what if I died in my sleep? Would it really matter that I’d eaten it?”

Now, my mom is healthy and spry for an 83-year-old. She gardens every day and watches her diet in all other ways, but to her, that ice cream makes life worth living.

I guess our health pretty much comes down to daily decisions that we make about what we eat, if we go for that walk or not, if we sit around and watch tv and eat chips every night. Being conscious of those daily decisions and choosing the right ones for us can keep us healthy well into our elder years. The opposite is also true. Make unhealthy decisions on a daily basis and your body will make you pay for that abuse with heart disease, high blood pressure, diabetes, cancer and all other manner of nasty things.

What health decisions are you making today?

If you want to know more about healthy eating, sign up for Eating For Energy - Free email course Raw Foods 101

When I first posted a few of my raw food recipes, I would never have guessed they would become some of my most popular posts. Interest in eating more raw foods has grown as people realize how health improves as more foods are eaten in their original form.

Why Eat Raw?

Raw food contains digestive enzymes, which help us use the nutrients in our food. As we get older, our natural digestive enzymes aren’t as efficient as they were when we were young. Cooking destroys many of these enzymes. Also, more and more young people are suffering from digestive problems-partly due to poor diet choices. Eating lettuce and tomato on a McDonald’s burger doesn’t qualify on the raw food diet!

Eating more raw foods means cutting back on processed foods, which contain chemicals and preservatives - basically anything that comes in a box or package. Fruits and veggies, nuts and grains can be eaten raw.

It’s getting easier to find raw foods too. Most supermarkets offer raw almond butter to use in place of peanut butter and of course, anything in the fruit and vegetable section qualifies.

After switching to more raw foods in their diet, many people report losing weight, smoother, softer skin, more vibrant energy, better digestive health and improved health issues, such as lowering high blood pressure, improving diabetes or heart disease and many, many others.

Raw Food Diet Newsletters and Resources

There are many resources out there to help you learn more about the raw food diet and why it’s so good for you. If you’re interested in learning more about the raw food diet and how you can incorporate more of these healthy foods into your daily diet, here are some resources to help you.

Free Raw Food Info at Vitamix

Owning a Vitamix or other powerful food processor is very helpful for creating raw food drinks especially. Green Smoothies are raw food wonders. You can throw any type of fruit or veggie into a Vitamix and make a drink from it. Don’t like Kale, Mustard Greens or Swiss Chard? Add some to a green smoothie with some banana and berries and it will be so delicious, you won’t even think about how healthy it is.

Vitamix has a Green Smoothie section with info and recipes

Free Raw Food Newsletters

Information on the Raw Food Diet at WebMD

WebMD is the go-to source for pretty much anything do to with health and the raw food diet is no exception. You’ll find an unbiased view of the pros and cons of eating raw here.

Raw Food 101- Free Raw Food e-course Raw food guru Yuri Elkaim offers a free raw food diet ecourse which contains lots of great info. He also has a wonderful ebook on the Eating for Energy Program, which is a raw food diet. This program isn’t free but it contains valuable info, plus many free gifts, including audios and free reports. Energy for Energy and the audios and reports are instantly downloadable.

Green Smoothie Girl - Green Smoothie Girl, Robin Openshaw’s free newsletter offers recipes and other info on Green Smoothies. Green Smoothies are based on whole food ingredients, such as spinach, kale and Swiss Chard. From there, you can use your imagination! I use nuts, oatmeal, chia seeds and other whole, nutritious foods in our morning smoothie.

Raw food recipes from Living and Raw Foods. Delicious recipes-everything from smoothies to soups to breads to main dishes. Have you considered how you would make bread if you were eating raw and couldn’t bake your bread or other dishes? These recipes tell you everything you need to know.

About.com offers an alternative medicine newsletter, which isn’t strictly about raw foods only, but is a great source of information about all aspects of alternative medicine.

Remember too, a raw food diet doesn’t have to be 100% raw to be effective and improve health. Begin by incorporating more fruits and veggies into your diet by adding some to every meal or trying new recipes, a few at a time. The more raw foods, you eat, the more you’ll like the way you look at feel. What’s important is making a start through your daily food choices.

This is my first post in a couple weeks because I’ve been on vacation. My husband and I drove from Texas to California and then to Oregon to visit family. Both going out and coming home, we drove through West Texas and saw nothing but wide open skies and a few tumbleweeds blowing about. On my first night home, I was walking my dogs and saw a strange site. A little black convertible drew up at the house at the end of the street. Taking up the entire back seat was a giant tumbleweed.

Mostly when I walk the dogs, I only say hello to the neighbors but I had to stop and comment on the tumbleweed. The lady getting out of the car told me she’d just driven through West Texas too and stopped to pick one up. The rest of her story got me to thinking about creating retirement incomes and second careers.

In 1994, Linda Katz wanted to build a website and start a business. As a joke she created a site called Prairie Tumbleweed Farm, offering to ship tumbleweeds to customers around the world. To her great surprise, her business became successful.

The woman on my street said she’d decided to get a tumbleweed and make a YouTube video about it’s life. When she and her friend were in West Texas, she said, the tumbleweed even got them out of getting a speeding ticket. When the police officer asked her about the tumbleweed in the back seat of her car, he probably thought she was crazy, but he laughed and let her go. Not, however, before he got his picture taken with the tumbleweed as part of the story.

What struck me about the tumbleweed business is this. If you’re looking for a second career after retirement or you need to make some supplemental income after you retire, think outside the box. Think about what interests you, think about a niche that you could fill, imagine how you could have fun making money with whatever it is. Perhaps you’ll even come up with a niche nobody has thought of yet like the tumbleweeds.

You never know what people will be interested in. Remember pet rocks? These days there is probably no idea so crazy you couldn’t make money with it, provided it’s legal. As for the tumbleweeds, they are a rather ingenious product as they can be a challenge to get rid of if you DON’T want one. In Kennawick, Washington, if a tumbleweed blows onto your property, it’s illegal to remove it to public property and the city website explains how to legally dispose of them. To some, tumbleweeds are trash but to some they are treasure.

If you have to work after retirement to supplement your income, or if you just want a second career that’s fun and interesting, put your thinking cap on and come up with something you’ll enjoy doing. Isn’t that what retirement is all about?