What’s In Your Grocery Cart?

What’s In Your Grocery Cart?

What’s In Your Grocery Cart?

I discovered when I decided to change my family’s diet that reading food labels can be especially tricky. Over the course of 9-10 years of consistently healthy eating habits, I’ve discovered some shortcuts that make the transition much more simple.

First and foremost (and you may have heard this before) it’s wise to shop the perimeters of your grocery store. That’s where you’ll find the fruits, veggies, fresh meat, dairy and whole grain breads. My quick forages into the middle of the store are only for items like all-natural applesauce, organic dark chocolate, marinara sauce, whole-grain flour or pasta, and frozen veggies. Alter your shopping “map” and you’ll significantly reduces the process items that end up in your cart.

Then again, we all know life isn’t always simple, and processed foods will inevitably end up on our table at one time or another. For those times, its easier to know what ingredients to AVOID in order to make the healthiest possible choices.

Here are my top three picks for ingredients to avoid in prepackaged foods. When you cut out these additives, you significantly reduce the chemicals in your daily meals.

1) Artificial sweeteners and high fructose corn syrup. Natural sugars, although refined, are much more healthy than these chemically altered substances. Try raw, organic sugar crystals, local honey, 100% maple syrup, unsulphured molasses, or brown rice syrup instead. Contrary to popular belief, “diet,” “low-sugar,” or “sugar-free” groceries are usually not the best choice for a healthy lifestyle, and some studies have shown that people who consume artificial sweeteners in large quantities are more likely to be overweight.

2) Sodium nitrite/nitrate, which is in almost all processed meat products. It is a very powerful preservative which has been linked to cancer. Look for natural or kosher alternatives in your deli section. Better yet, cook a few extra whole pieces of fresh, organic meat when you’re preparing meals so you have extra to slice for a yummy sandwich or snack the next day.

3) MSG (monosodium glutamate), a chemical flavor enhancer. This is a tricky one, because many companies are now changing MSG on the label to innocent-sounding words like “yeast extract.” Check the link at the bottom of this page for more names of MSG in processed foods. MSG is even in natural products like flavored or kettle-cooked potato chips.

The best rule of thumb for healthy eating is to choose foods as close to their natural state as possible. The best wrapping is something is its own skin!

Mary
Certified Personal Trainer

WorldLegacy Graduate Rice Diet Renewal Book

WorldLegacy Graduate Rice Diet Renewal Book

WorldLegacy Graduate Rice Diet Renewal Book

Author of the New York Times bestselling book, The Rice Diet Solution, Kitty Gurkin Rosati, graduate of WorldLegacy’s NC73 Leadership Program has just published a new book called The Rice Diet Renewal.  While many diets can help you lose a significant amount of weight in a short period, the Rice Diet can document that 43 percent of its participants have maintained or increased their weight loss over six years. Now, in The Rice Diet Renewal, Kitty Gurkin Rosati, presents the essentials of the four-step Rice Diet program.  Rosati explains how it helps you heal your underlying food and health issues and replace negative, powerless thinking with an awakened awareness of your passion and purpose. Then she introduces a new generation of powerful exercises and tools based on the latest research including energetic healing methods, music, art, quantum physics, aromatherapy, and more.

Bio
Kitty Gurkin Rosati, M.S., R.D., L.D.N., has worked in the field of weight-related disease prevention and reversal for two and a half decades.  She is the nutrition director of the Rice Diet Program and has been a clinical instructor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Kitty is a graduate of WorldLegacy’s NC73B Leadership Program.  Purchase the Rice Diet Renewal.

Kenneth Fielding Morehead Complexity

Kenneth Fielding Morehead Complexity

Kenneth Fielding Morehead Complexity

By Kenneth Fielding Morehead, MSOM, Lac, DOM (NM), DAONB

Complexity as a theory for how systems work and maintain stability is a popular topic today in many fields, including physics, chemistry and mathematics. These concepts have even entered the popular consciousness, with references to it in such films as Jurassic Park. The various theories about complexity also have validity in the area of diet and health. How can complexity theory clarify our understanding of food quality? And can complexity theory have practical application in the way we eat?

What has research found that points the way toward understanding how complexity is a component of what makes us tick? Let’s start with some general observations. At its best, food is a vastly complex and synergistic mix of various nutrients. Processed foods have fewer nutrients and lean heavily toward specific micronutrients. They also reduce micronutrients often found in whole foods. In addition, nutrients are altered in a ways not found in traditional food processing. As such, modern processed foods are simpler than the full-bodied complex foods of antiquity.

For the moment, let’s assume that complexity in food can be associated with higher quality and simplification in food with lower quality. Can the relative complexity of food be imparted into our tissues? This is important, because higher complexity in human tissues has been linked to vitality and health.

Here’s a simple analogy. If a table has one hundred legs (a very stable complex structure), and we shoot a bowling ball at 100 mph under the table, we might knock 50 legs out from under the table. But with 50 legs still intact, the table remains secure. However, if there are only three legs to the table and we knock out only one, the table falls over. Higher complexity yields higher stability in response to stress.

Complexity in Food

Processing strips our foods down to their simplest components – sucrose in white sugar, glucose in white flour, filtered vegetable oils, pasteurized reduced-fat mild products and artificial flavors. Theses processes also remove the vast array of nutrients that work together synergistically in whole foods. The food industry has long claimed that the removal of nutrients can be rectified through “fortification”, the addition of synthetic vitamins. For example, synthetic vitamin A is added to margarine to make it “nutritionally equivalent to the natural vitamin-A complex in butter. However, synthetic vitamins can cause imbalances and often have undesired effects. Synthetic vitamin A has been show to cause the type of birth defects that natural vitamin A prevents.

Lately, there is a huge push to get women to take supplementary folic acid to prevent neural tube defects during pregnancy. Folic acid by itself is a simple nutritional constituent. It’s only one nutrient in thousands that are part of whole, nutritionally complex foods. While it is claimed that supplying this nutrient in pill form may have a positive effect in reducing neural tube defects, why are women told that this is what they need rather than being given a choice between supplementation or a diet of whole foods that provides this nutrient in context? Is this ignorance or rationalization? Either way, it seems more respectful to fully inform the public rather than simplifying the truth and giving women an uninformed choice. Lack of whole foods is the root cause of folic acid deficiency, not a lack of pills.

BIO
Ken Morehead, founding member of Oriental Health Solutions, LLC, is a licensed acupuncturist in Durham, NC, licensed as a Doctor of Oriental Medicine in New Mexico, is nationally board certified as an Acupuncture Orthopedist and is a credentialed acupuncturist at Duke Integrative Medicine. He is the past secretary and chairman of the NC State Acupuncture Licensing Board and an advisory board member of the Weston Price Foundation in Washington, D.C.  Ken Morehead is a graduate of WorldLegacy’s NC45 Leadership Program.

Pumpkins are good for your health

Pumpkins are good for your health

Pumpkin is low in fat and calories and rich in disease-fighting nutrients such as:

  • Alpha-carotene
  • Beta-carotene
  • Fiber
  • Vitamins C and E
  • Potassium
  • Magnesium
  • Pantothenic acid

Pumpkins are good for your health

The alpha-carotene and beta-carotene are potent antioxidants found in pumpkin and are pro-vitamin A carotenoids, meaning the body converts them to vitamin A. Vitamin A promotes healthy vision and ensures proper immune function. The beta-carotene in pumpkin may also reverse skin damage caused by the sun and act as an anti-inflammatory. Alpha-carotene is thought to slow the aging process and also reduce the risk of developing cataracts and prevent tumor growth.
Dr. Lori Todd

Herbs and Your Health

Herbs and Your Health

Herbs and Health

Aloe Vera

Traditionally, aloe was used topically to heal wounds and for various skin conditions, and orally as a laxative. Today, in addition to traditional uses, people take aloe orally to treat a variety of conditions, including diabetes, asthma, epilepsy, and osteoarthritis. People use aloe topically for osteoarthritis, burns, sunburns, and psoriasis.

Evening Primrose Oil
Evening primrose oil has been used since the 1930s for eczema (a condition in which the skin becomes inflamed, itchy, or scaly because of allergies or other irritation).  It has been used for other conditions involving inflammation, such as rheumatoid arthritis.  Evening primrose oil is used for conditions affecting women’s health, such as breast pain associated with the menstrual cycle, menopausal symptoms, and premenstrual syndrome (PMS).  Other conditions for which evening primrose oil is used include cancer and diabetes.

GINGER
Ginger is used in Oriental medicine to treat stomach aches, nausea, and diarrhea.  Many digestive, anti-nausea, and cold and flu dietary supplements sold in the United States contain ginger extract as an ingredient.  Ginger is used to alleviate post-surgery nausea as well as nausea caused by motion, chemotherapy, and pregnancy.  Ginger has been used for rheumatoid arthritis, osteoarthritis, and joint and muscle pain.

Garlic
Garlic’s most common uses as a dietary supplement are for high cholesterol, heart disease, and high blood pressure.  Garlic is also used to prevent certain types of cancer, including stomach and colon cancers.  Some of the most popular traditional uses of garlic have been for colds, flu and other infections, earaches, vaginal yeast infections, and high blood pressure. Modern research has focused on four main areas: heart disease, cancer, infectious disease, and antioxidant effects.  Garlic reduces cholesterol levels and raises the level of healthy high-density lipoproteins.  Garlic also appears to lower blood pressure directly.

Green Tea
Green tea and green tea extracts, have been used to prevent and treat a variety of cancers, including breast, stomach, and skin cancers.  Green tea has also been used for improving mental alertness, aiding in weight loss, lowering cholesterol levels, and protecting skin from sun damage.

Peppermint oil
Peppermint oil has been used for a variety of health conditions, including nausea, indigestion, and cold symptoms.  Peppermint oil is also used for headaches, muscle and nerve pain, and stomach and bowel conditions such as irritable bowel syndrome.

WorldLegacy Graduate Rice Diet Renewal Book

WorldLegacy and The Rice Diet Renewal

WorldLegacy and The Rice Diet Renewal

From the book, “The Rice Diet Renewal: A Healing 30 Day Program for Lasting Weight Loss” by Kitty Gurkin Rosati.

The following excerpt is part of this section on The Responsibility Game; the book then leads the reader into the Day 6 experiential titled “Responsibility Jump Start.”
The Responsibility Game
The responsibility Game was introduced to me by Robert Katz, the director of the WorldLegacy in Morrisville, North Carolina, where I participated in a leadership training program called the Journey.  It is a simple, yet effective way to manage even the most intense emotions and disempowering mind-sets.  In a concrete, practical way, the Leadership Program and the’s Transformational Workshops teach you how to use the law of attraction, a law of physics that is defined as like attracting like.  It will teach you this principle by letting you consciously approach your life like a game, which can help you understand that your positive thoughts, feelings, and faith, when intentionally enjoyed simultaneously, can fuel your co-creative abilities to manifest your heart’s desires.  This practice can greatly help you let go of feelings you may have of being a victim to what happens outside of you.

This tool can make the journey into your emotions fun yet powerful, while not igniting the blame or shame response that many readers may know too well.  When Rob coached me during the Game, which is about claiming your power in life, Rob said, “Every time you make a choice that gives you power, you use that power to move ahead toward your goal.  It might be a big step or it might be a tiny step, but it’s moving forward. Every step in the game earns a point in the game. Every time you allow your feelings to stop you from moving ahead, you’ve given up your power.  Every time you see your situation as hopeless or overwhelming, you miss a step or even take a step backward.  Each blocked or backward step costs you a point in the game.

When you’ve scored enough points to achieve your goal, you win the game.  That is, when you make enough choices to claim your power, and you use it enough times to succeed at your goal, you’ve won.  Celebrate!  Do a victory dance!  Then you can set your sights on your next goal and play again.”

Rob told me about Laura, who was a marketing executive and a mom, raising four kids who included her teenage son Tommy.  She worked daily with Tommy, helping him through the typical struggles that teenagers face, until one unforgettable day that changed her life. Laura came home from work to find that Tommy had killed himself.  Laura’s husband blamed her and filed for divorce.  When she moved away to start a new life, her family stopped supporting her and, at times, even refused to talk to her.  This is enough to devastate many people, but today Laura is happily remarried and is the director of a teenage leadership program that touches hundreds of lives. How does Laura rise above her circumstances?  She plays, and habitually wins, the Responsibility Game.

In every situation in life, you always have choices you can make.  Even in the worst of life’s tragedies, you still have choices.  If nothing else, you can always choose your attitude.  Every time you look at a situation as if you have some power over it, you put yourself in the driver’s seat of your life.  Every time you see your power in a situation, you can take the step forward toward your goals. Conversely, every time you look at a situation as if you have no authority or say in the matter, you have no power.

What is the Responsibility Game?  It is a way of looking at the world and a way of living life.  The objective of this game is to achieve your goals.  By playing the Responsibility Game, you are much more successful at having your life be the way you want it to be.  Your game’s strategy is determined by the goals you set: you reach your weight and your health goals, you make more money, and/or the quality of your relationships go up…whatever you have prioritized as your game’s goals.  The game is an easy yet potent way to make your life turn out the way you want it to.

Like any game, the Responsibility Game has points to score, it has a way to win, and it has some rules to follow.  To earn points in this game, you make choices that put you in control of your life.  A responsibility choice is choosing a viewpoint about what’s happening that gives you power to affect the situation, rather than feel powerless about it.  You look at what’s happening around you and decide how you feel about it.  What will be your attitude about it?  “My kids are rambunctious today – I’m thrilled they are so healthy and vibrant.”  “My kids are rambunctious today – they are going to drive me crazy!”  Once you are conscious of your thoughts and feelings, you can enjoy them, be angered by them, or choose to shift your attitude.

Laura could have easily seen herself as powerless after the death of her son, her divorce, and her family’s response.  At times, her feelings were so strong that she was overwhelmed by them.  Playing the Responsibility Game, however, she knew that her goals were to provide a safe and loving environment for her family and to save other teens before they committed suicide.  Every day she made choices.  Some days she scored many points, and the children she worked with received all of her love and caring.  Other days she didn’t score many points. Over time, by staying focused on her goals, not only did she score enough points to heal and expand her family, but she also created a position where she may prevent her tragedy from happening to others.

It is a very challenging and exciting game to be alert and recognize your responsibility to be truly aware of your present thoughts and feelings; you can cultivate the mindfulness to assess whether you want to continue to create from that paradigm or shift to a stand that positively supports the outcome you want.  My team for the WorldLegacy Journey was called NC73B, and our motto was “Shift happens.”  And it does!  You can choose to take full responsibility for steering your emotional rudders, or you can waste a lot of potentially creative time being stuck on events or actions whose emotions you don’t want to feel.  This invitation to “shift from self-defeating emotional states to empowering ones” is not meant to encourage you to minimize your emotional processing of pain or suffering, which can be powerful teachers, but to remember that you don’t have to camp out there or become frozen with inertia.  When you become an active player in the Responsibility Game, you develop a habit of consciously choosing to perceive everything as an opportunity to win your heart’s desire and maximize your life’s potential.

The Responsibility Game is a way of looking at the world and approaching your life as if you can make a difference in how it evolves.  You either think you are responsible for creating the life goals you have, or you don’t and thus are willing to accept the victim role in your life.  You may be saying, “Yeah, this is true most of the time, but what about….blah, blah, blah?”  I don’t want to hear your but story; it will not serve you in actualizing your goals, or the life that you want. I am inviting you to enter a paradigm shift in consciousness, which is nothing more than a shift, or change, in your way of perceiving the world and your power in co-creating the world.

Bio
Kitty Gurkin Rosati, M.S., R.D., L.D.N., has worked in the field of weight-related disease prevention and reversal for two and a half decades.  She is the nutrition director of the Rice Diet Program and has been a clinical instructor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Kitty is a graduate of WorldLegacy’s NC73B Leadership Program.  Purchase the Rice Diet Renewal.

WorldLegacy Trainings Supported Clearing Colitis

WorldLegacy Trainings Supported Clearing Colitis

WorldLegacy Trainings Supported Clearing Colitis

Shortly after my father died almost 8 years ago, I started to experience massive digestive and stomach issues, sometimes they were very debilitating to the point where I couldn’t stand or walk. At one point, I had to go the hospital it was so intense. After months of pain and suffering, a doctor told me that I had ulcerative colitis (a colon disease) and that it was incurable, but with 9 pills a day for the rest of my life, I can minimize its impact on me. I wasn’t so happy given I hate medication, and I hate being sick in any way. So, I started taking the pills, and the issue maintained somewhat, and I got used to living with pain and discomfort on a regular basis. This was in 2003.

In October of 2004, I came and did the WorldLegacy trainings on the recommendation of my business partner. While I was at WorldLegacy, I was in the midst of the worst bout of issues I had experienced since the onset of the disease, however, something miraculous happened. As I started to actually open up (I was a bit resistant to going to the WorldLegacy workshops at first, but went because I trusted my business partner), and I started to allow myself to see things from different perspectives, the pain, discomfort, and issues cleared up, and when I was in the WorldLegacy Advanced Course, I was so into the training, I actually forgot to take most of medication over the course of the five days, and I felt like a million dollars. I decided that I was going to just stop taking the medications, and see what happened.

Six years later, haven’t had a pill since October of 2004. I have no issues, no pain, no suffering, no discomfort whatsoever. Since my new found openness to different ideas and possibilities, I did something I never would have done before, I looked up colitis in a book about how mind and health are connected. The book says that colitis is caused mentally by our fear of letting something go that is already gone. My issues started 2 weeks after my father died. One of my biggest moments because of the trainings was truly allowing myself to grieve over the loss of my father and actually let go of him.  Add it all up, and it makes perfect sense to me why I had a health issue, and why I stopped having a health issue. WorldLegacy supported clearing colitis.

Jeffrey Buck
Leadership Graduate

Healthy Wonderspice – Turmeric

Healthy Wonderspice – Turmeric

Turmeric is a delicious spice frequently used in Indian and other asian cuisines. It lends a beautiful and distinct earthy yellow color to food (careful- it can stain clothes and plastic cookware). You can spice up many dishes that can use an earthy, peppery flavor by adding a tablespoon or two of turmeric, or just try to find dishes to make that traditionally contain turmeric.

So what’s the big deal about turmeric? Summarizing from WHFoods page on Turmeric, it has been shown or believed to be effective for:

  • anti-inflammatory- comparable to cortisone and ibuprofen
  • inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) like Crohn’s and ulcerative collitis
  • rheumatoid
  • cystic fibrosis
  • cancer prevention
  • inhibiting growth and metastases of existing cancer
  • colon cancer prevention (with the help of onions)
  • active prostate cancer (with the help of cauliflower)
  • reduced risk of childhood leukemia
  • improved liver function
  • atherosclerosis (hardening of arteries)
  • diabetic heart disease
  • lowering cholesterol
  • prevention of Alzheimer’s disease

Look at that list! It reads like the boogeymen of modern medicine! Amazingly, turmeric does all of this without toxic side-effects. It’s food. All you need to do is regularly add this inexpensive spice to your cooking.

Warning: People taking Coumadin (Warfarin) should avoid turmeric because it may interact with this drug possibly causing issues with bleeding or coagulation. Sadly, there are a lot of healthy foods must be careful of eating while on Coumadin- it’s a tricky drug to take safely. Add turmeric to that list.

The best place to buy turmeric is in Asian grocery stores. It is cheaper there, an available in large quantity packaging.
Maximize the health benefits of turmeric by combining it in your food with black pepper. The main chemical component of turmeric thought to cause all of these health benefits is “curcumin”. Unfortunately, by itself its bioavailability is poor because it gets rapidly broken down in the intestine and liver. However, a substance found in black pepper called “piperine” has been shown in humans to increase the bioavailability of curcumin by 2000%! Black pepper and turmeric taste great together, so  I automatically add some black pepper in when we are cooking with turmeric.

To your health!
Jon-Erik Lido, L.Ac.
Balanced Being Acupuncture

Nutrition and Healing Arthritis

Nutrition and Healing Arthritis

My mom suffered from severe arthritis in her right wrist (among other ailments) and she had several surgeries on it, which ultimately only brought temporary relief. It got to a point where they were going to fuse the joint permanently when my dad found a nutrition clinic in Florida that might be able to help. We spent 6 weeks there in 1972 while my mom was treated by a Dr. Melvin Page, who balanced her body chemistry through diet and supplements. The main thrust of his diet was nothing processed, especially no sugar or white flour. Her arthritis went away entirely, but if she even ate so much as a breath mint containing sugar, she would have a raging fever in her arm within minutes. Dr. Page wrote a book called “Your Body is Your Best Doctor” (among others) and he followed in the footsteps of health and nutrition pioneers Drs. Weston Price and Francis Pottenger.

Soo Keith, NC124 WorldLegacy Leadership

Nutrition and Healing Arthritis

My mom suffered from severe arthritis in her right wrist (among other ailments) and she had several surgeries on it, which ultimately only brought temporary relief. It got to a point where they were going to fuse the joint permanently when my dad found a nutrition clinic in Florida that might be able to help. We spent 6 weeks there in 1972 while my mom was treated by a Dr. Melvin Page, who balanced her body chemistry through diet and supplements. The main thrust of his diet was nothing processed, especially no sugar or white flour. Her arthritis went away entirely, but if she even ate so much as a breath mint containing sugar, she would have a raging fever in her arm within minutes. Dr. Page wrote a book called “Your Body is Your Best Doctor” (among others) and he followed in the footsteps of health and nutrition pioneers Drs. Weston Price and Francis Pottenger.
Soo Keith, NC124 WorldLegacy Leadership

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