Science fiction, fantasy, mystery and what-not
Time for me to eat lunch. It’s a tougher choice with recent health issues (nothing major), being on meds (nothing major), and de-conflicting healthy choices, hunger, social justice, environmental issues, price, and convenience. To help make decisions, I created this handy matrix to help me decide. It’s so useful, I thought I’d share it, in case others are in a similar situation. You’re welcome!
(Okay, it is a lil’ bit o’ Friday snark. Forgive me.)
Having experienced benign prostate hyperplasia (BPH) and then discovering my blood pressure was residing north of 220/130, I’ve become more mindful about my food and nutrition. (BP is now hovering around 136/70 now, thanks.) Searching for foods that are benevolent to my prostate, I read recommendations about celery. In my own tests, I felt that the results bore this out; eating a stalk of celery each day seemed to please my prostate.
However, I read, beware: celery has high levels of sodium. Oh, dear, don’t want that; sodium is bad for blood pressure. Wanting hard information, I hunted the net and discovered that a stalk of celery can have as much as almost thirty milligrams of sodium.
That didn’t strike me as high. As far as I could tell, that was pretty low, as long as I wasn’t eating stalks by the minute. Thinking about it more returned me more net searching about sodium levels in food.
The U.S. government’s nutrition guideline recommends that people keep their daily sodium intake below twenty-three hundred milligrams a day. There’s a big gap betweeny celery’s thirty and twenty-three hundred. For a food to be considered low sodium, it should have one hundred forty milligrams per serving, or least. Calling celery high in sodium compared to that seemed excessive.
Which prompted me to hunt for common food’s sodium levels. Fortunately, many websites eagerly compile and post this information. The American Heart Association provided a summary of the CDC’s findings in 2017. From that, they created a list of the twenty-five most hazardous foods for sodium levels in the U.S. It’s a disturbing list. They then distilled the list into the top ‘Salty Six’:
These are foods that I was frequently eating. I was checking fat, sugar, and fiber levels but ignoring the sodium levels. Now, it was like, holy crap. Gotta check those sodium levels, too.
I know, this is a post by the converted. I respect that response, but my ignorance went on until it was an emergency. Just thought I’d share my experience and maybe keep you from stumbling down the same path.
On the bright side, I found that beer and wine do not typically have much sodium. There’s some in them, with beer typically have eight to twelve milligrams of sodium per sixteen ounces, and most domestic red wines containing twelve milligrams per glass (imported red wines have about six milligrams); mindfulness about how much is being consumed — and what else is being consumed that day — is required.
Just like with celery.
You’re now free to resume your normal day.
Time for some self-congratulations. Medical appointment went well today. Lost seven pounds since August 8th. Blood pressure was 230/131 on that day; today, it was 130/64. Cool beans.
All the blood tests came back with nothing there to explain my high BP. It all looked good on paper. I always suspected weight and sodium. Based on that, I went on a three-day-green smoothie that began August 9th. Then we began a modified green-smoothie-diet. Based on the book, “The Green Smoothie Diet”, we consumed smoothies for breakfast and lunch. For breakfast, I also had a banana, prune, a handful of raw nuts (usually walnuts) and a boiled egg. Fresh veggies such as celery, radishes, and carrots were consumed for lunch.
Dinner was usually a romaine lettuce salad and then fish with something. For example, Monday, we had a salmon Caesar salad. Tuesday was cod with ginger sauce with rosemary oven fries. Wednesday was steamed broccoli and a baked sweet potato with the salad.
I also cut back on coffee, beer, and wine consumption. For perspective, I drink few things beyond those three items and water. I drink a lot of water.
Meanwhile, checking my regular foods for sodium, I was horrified by the findings. I’d always checked foods for sugar, fat, and fiber, along with general contents. Now I see that sodium needs to be on the check list. Once again, it comes down to being mindful. Well, it’s paying off.
Put me off my writing schedule by a few hours but got my coffee now. I’m in the seat. Time to write like crazy, at least one more time.
Floofears (floofinition) – A unique hearing capability among pets that allow them to hear cans and refrigerator doors opening, rattling kibble, and package rustling, often from amazingly far distances and frequently through walls and doors.
In use: “Opening a can of food for one cat pestering him, a scratching at the door pulled his attention. Staring in through the window beside the front door, the cat meowed at him. Shaking his head, he went to the door to open it and let the cat in to be fed, even as he marveled at their floofears.”
The house was always silent except for his quiet and her cats. He was aware of how much he sighed, and the cats…the cats were always darting underfoot, jumping up onto the furniture, counters, and tables, and peering around corners.
Flowers and plants were everywhere. He’d told everyone to send money to her causes in lieu of flowers and that shit, but…well, here they were. Here he was.
She was always trying to get him to eat healthy. The ‘frig was lousy with salmon and salad ingredients. Sighing (but what else?), he prepared the salmon per the instructions, sharing some with the cats, who were enthusiastic in their enjoyment, and made a salmon Caesar salad and poured a glass of wine for himself. Eating, he told himself, for her, chewing and swallowing the despised flavors, washing it down with wine.
For her.
After reading about savory muffins this week, I thought I’d do something similar with my morning oatmeal.
Fruit, cinnamon, nuts, and coconut usually finds its way into my oat meal. Today, nutritional yeast, shredded Mexican cheese mix, sliced Kalamata olives, and diced onions and green peppers were tossed into the oatmeal.
Sensational. I imagine sauteed or grilled mushrooms, onions, and peppers would also work well. Looking forward to trying some new ideas. It puts a whole new spin on breakfast.
I suppose that it won’t surprise anyone to learn that today’s song, “Can’t Fight This Feeling” by REO Speedwagon (1985) came about from a food fight. I was fighting with myself about eating something. Not anything critical (chocolate was involved), it wasn’t that big a deal, a restriction that I put upon myself. The climax came when I said, “Screw it, I can’t fight this any more, I’m eating it!” That opened the stream to one of the Speedwagon’s hits from its multi-platinum album, Hi Infidelity. The song’s not really my cuppa – too soft, really – but it’s soothing on the ears.
Perfumes and French-fries
Grilled burgers and fried chicken
Scentways fly me back
Floofpectation (floofinition) – a housepet’s strong belief that something will happen; an attempt, through behavior or sounds, to make something happen.
In use: “He had a sandwich. The animals crowded around with floofpectations. In exasperation, he said, “This is banana and peanut butter guys. You won’t like it.” But with floofpectations remaining high, the cats started purring and meowing and the dog emitted a little, “Woof”. Sighing, he held the sandwich out for their inspection.”
It’s humbling to think about how little I know, and disturbing to ponder how much I’ve learned and forgotten, or how often I learned, retained, and applied wrong information.
The information was sometimes wrong because we thought that’s how things worked back when we learned it. Then, later, you discovered, “Oh, shit, that works for everyone else, but it doesn’t work for me.”
Yes, this is another Big Lie rant. The Big Lie is that we’re all the same. Eat these foods, gain these nutrients, do these exercises, and you should be good to go.
Yeah, they then admit — you know they, the great aggregate of society, social media, medical professions, governments, you know, they — well, they admit, there are some exceptions. Like, you may be diabetic because your body rejects the insulin it makes. So you’re like, whaat?
Maybe you’re allergic to things. Or you may have problems because your body doesn’t process certain vitamins and minerals well, rejecting them. Maybe you hear things different. Perhaps you hear shapes, or you taste something because you hear a sound.
Whacked, right?
I grew up learning that people that talked to themselves were most likely not right in the head in some way. Now we’ve learned, no, they’re probably fine. Their personality is different from your personality. Conversely, telling me to come out of my shell and socialize more works on the assumption that I’ve made a choice to stay in my shell and not socialize, and not because of the components at work inside me.
Not all people we called slow were slow thinkers, but they didn’t benefit from the learning environment. Too bad for them, back then, because we didn’t know.
We keep learning that there’s a lot that we don’t know, and that what we thought we knew and pushed as truth was wrong. This was sometimes done deliberately to further someone’s wealth — remember how they told us for years that smoking cigarettes aren’t bad? — or to achieve a political advantage.
That takes me to food shopping. Oh, lawdy. I’ve decided to cut down on processed foods and reduce my sugar intake, so I’m reading labels more intently than before. A correlation often exists; if a food is low-fat or non-fat, it’ll be loaded with sugar. If it’s sugar-free, it has a lot of fat.
They say — now — that supplementing your diet with vitamins and minerals probably doesn’t do anything for you, if you’re healthy. You really can’t tell that from the advertising and commercials that abound, can you?
If you’re not healthy, too much of one mineral or vitamin can cause greater problems. All this comes with that caveat, for some people. You need to learn early that you may be some people. You learn by observing your body and reactions to different inputs, studying those differences, and consulting experts when necessary.
And these deficiencies can have profound effects. Constipated, tired, and depressed? You might have a potassium deficiency. Or something else. Just saying.
Consulting experts — or the Internet — doesn’t always work out. Some experts dismiss study results. Reasons vary for why they dismiss the results, or skew them. It could be from ignorance, religion, or false information that they acquired. It could be because they’re being paid to dismiss the evidence, or they’re pathological liars, or protecting someone or something else. This spectrum about why is as broad as humanity.
Even when you find your flaws and shortcomings and address your patterns to cope, it ain’t over. Your body and brain, and our society, are dynamic. Our body is changing, sometimes from aging, sometimes from abuse. Sometimes, it’s just a slow shift because of habits.
As a society, we’re always learning new information, or revealing old frauds, or finding something new about the human body. Our food security gets exposed in unimaginable ways. Consider from this week:
In each case, these findings surprised scientists and investigators because it wasn’t expected. The sunscreen lotions were most interesting to me. They’ve been around back to a time before governments, industries, or individuals worried about the active ingredients in sunscreens, so they were never tested. That was partly propagated by the good ol’ common sense approach that sunscreen is rubbed on your skin; how the heck would it get into your blood? (That’s typically followed by mocking chortles because doesn’t that seem so self-evident?)
Yeah, there’s a lot that isn’t self-evident, isn’t there?
Michael Seidel, writer 