Good-bye Wheat Part 1

I am always seeking to eat healthier. With so much cancer, allergies, chronic illness, diabetes, obesity and so many other health issues just becoming more and more common I think that it is crucial that we only feed our bodies wholesome foods. As the old adage says "Garbage in, garbage out". We cannot feed our body "crap" and expect it to function well for the rest of our lives. Especially with having children I want them to have a healthy body and learn good life-long eating skills while enjoying a wide variety of wholesome food. In a way I do not like learning about where our food comes from and how it is processed. The more I learn the more determined I am to just eat local, oraganic, small farm produced food or things I have grown myself. Just a few small examples of how messed up our food system is. Salmon is healthy, right? Well if you live on the East Coast you can eith have a) Atlantic salmon raised in un-enviromentally friendly fish farms full of chemicals and diseases and fed a dye to make their flesh pink or b) Wild Pacific salmon which is caught off the west coast, shipped to China to be processed un questionable procedures then shipped all the way to the Atlantic coast creating a large carbon footprint. Ok, well then what about the super-food, garlic? It is a powerful broad spectrum antibiotic and antiviral that boosts the immune system but the ones you but at the supermarket are not so "innocent". Apperantly, Canada grows some of the best garlic in the world which we export and then we turn around and import garlic from China which is many times grown in old landfills (because it will grow anywhere). Sometimes it gets overwelming and at times I think that "Ignorance is bliss". So my latest undertaking is "wheat". As you know, wheat is every where and in many, many food items. I got started looking at wheat since Tim gets frequent headaches so he wantd to try goig gluten-free to see if it helped. Well it did not seem to help his head much he finds he has more energy and mental focus and feels generally better when he is off of gluten (wheat). In the past 6 or 7 months I have felt that something is "off" with Samuel. He cried and whined all the time (or so it seemed), did not seem happy or full of life like he should be; plus in the past year he has not grown at all and recently has had chronic dirrhea. Since he fit all the syptoms for celiac disease I pulled him off all wheat and gluten for this past month. He is like a new child! His eyes have a sparkle back, he is MUCH happier. I almost cried a few weeks ago when he made a "joke", lol, well a two year old one anyway. I had not seen his humour in so long. His dirrhea is gone too. So after that I read Wheat Belly and researched wheat more. Turns out that the wheat we eat now is very different from the wheat even 30 years ago as it has been do genetically altered. The wheat we eat now resists more pests, stores longer and creates much bigger yeilds but is very hard for our system to properly digest. My baby has woken up and wants to nurse (his dad went there but from the sounds of it Tim does not have what Isaac wants) now so I will continue these thoughts later. What are your thoughts on this topic?

Stop and Smell the Roses

Due to some late naps, when bedtime was coming up the two middle ones were bouncing off the walls. So I decided to take them on a walk around our small block. They took along their strollers and babies. An off we went. But we got nowhere fast. Had to stop and pick a dandilion, look at a boy skateboarding, pick up a rock, sit and watch a beetle, re-arrange the "baby" in the stroller, talk to the old man on his porch, walk backwards, gather up sticks, stare at a dog. It took us a full hour to get around one small block but boy did we get to "stop and smell the roses" and we enjoyed doing so :)