To Cook or Not to Cook
Dear Friends
Well it is the season for all of us to wish each other well and for families to try to come together—like our friends in the picture to the right. Happy Thankgiving everyone!!!
Food certainly is centerpiece around this holiday. So, I thought to add some Therapeutic Foods for thought.
Down at the bottom of this email, in Green Fact, you will find a link to a debate that is coming up next Wednesday, entitled: The Great Debate- Don’t eat anything with a face.
As we know the research today is informing us that diets rich in polyphenols have positive effects on our health. So, what effect does cooking have on these health giving nutrients?
Current research by Rodriguez-Mateos et al. addresses this question:
Impact of Cooking, Proving and Baking on the (Poly)phenol Content of Wild Blueberry, October 2013, J. Agric. Food Chem. In conclusion they found that anthocyanin levels decreased during cooking, proving, and baking, whereas no significant changes were observed for total procyanidins. Quercetin and ferulic and caffeic acid levels remained constant, whereas cooking increased levels of chlorogenic acid.
So it depends on what nutrient we are looking to augment as to what is the best method of preparing the food for consumption—particularily in our specialty- food as medicine. Let’s take a look at this a bit more in clinical notes.
Sincerely yours,
Seann Bardell
Clinical Notes:
Wild Blueberry Extract: There is no heat employed in this product. The blueberries are raw, picked at the high of their rippening, flash frozen in the field, and then transported to our manufacturing facility where the anthocyanin extract (the pigment) is recovered, which is then freeze-dried into a powder. The anthocyanins (multiple forms of cyanidin, delphinidin, malvidin, peonidin, and petunidin) are extremely powerful antioxidants and anti-inflammatories. As you know, it takes one and a quarter cups of blueberries to fill one 500mg capsule with this extract.
Phyto Power: With this product we employ a different drying technology. First of all we are providing in a 500mg capsule four species of wildcrafted Alaska blueberry (the whole berry), three species of wildcrafted Alaska cranberry (the seeds and all), and four species of wildcrafted Alaska dandelion (leaves, roots, and flowers). With this precious produce we utilize a belt drying process called refractory drying. The result of this process, with very little heat employed (the belt is just under boiling temperature), and little time required to fully dry the produce (the product is dried within a minute), is a dried powder that retains high levels of all phytonutrients while eliminating spore and microbes.
Cruciferous Spouts Complex: In this product we are looking at magnifying the glucosinolates family of nutrients which are very heat sensitive. We employ several technologies: (1) We harvest the sprouts on the third day for that is when their glucosinlate production is at the highest. (2) We blanch the sprout because they are very perishable and this removes all microbes without over cooking the sprouts and destroying the glucosinolates and (3) We freeze-dry the sprouts into a powder for encapsulation. No excipients (ie mag stearate, silicone dioxide, etc) are used.
Each of these products are maximized for the health giving properties.
The Last Quiz Answer:
At least 442 new species of animals and plants have been discovered over a four year period in the vast, underexplered rainforest of the Amazon (Science News Oct 2013). Amongst them is the Callicebus caquetensis
a monkey whose babies purr like kittens when huddled together. This amazing new species is by definition endangers for it is endemic to this region of the Amazon- an area that is now being destroyed.
Coming up on December 4, 2013 is being billed as The Great Debate!
The Topic: Don’t Eat Anything with a Face
Chris Masterjohn PhD, nutritional sciences researcher and author of The Daily Lipid.com and Jeol Salatin, guru of the pastured farming movement versus Neal Barnard, MD, president of Physicans Committee for Responsible Medicine and Gene Baur, President and Founder, Farm Sanctuary.
The debate will be livestreamed, and also broadcasted over some PBS stations.