Monday, 18 July 2011

Raw Fresh Tomato Salsa


Serves 12
12 medium Roma tomatoes
1 1/2 cups chopped fresh cilantro
1 1/2 cup chopped scallions (add some of the green)
6 Tablespoons lime juice
4 cloves garlic, minced
1 medium jalapeno (remove seeds)
1/2  teaspoon cayenne pepper
1 1/2  tsp. sea salt
3 teaspoons ground cumin
1 1/2 teaspoons ground coriander 
1 tsp. of sweetener of choice (optional)

Combine all ingredients, except tomatoes into a food processor and  process for a few seconds.  Add tomatoes and continue to pulse until you have the consistency you like in salsa.

Sunday, 17 July 2011

Vega Community Ride & Wellness Seminar

On Saturday, July 9th Vega had its First Annual Bike Ride at the base of the beautiful Wasatch Mountains of Utah. Besides being an absolutely gorgeous and sunny day for biking, the bikers were excited about meeting Brendan Brazier. Brendan Brazier is one of only a few professional athletes in the world whose diet is 100 percent plant-based. He’s a professional Ironman triathlete, bestselling author of The Thrive Diet (Penguin, 2007), and the creator of an award-winning line of whole food nutritional products called Vega. He is also a two-time Canadian 50km Ultra Marathon Champion.

Brendan is recognized as one of the world’s foremost authorities on plant-based nutrition. He is a guest lecturer at Cornell University and teaches an eCornell course called The Plant-Based Diet and Elite Athleticism.

It was really exciting meeting Brendan.  He is a very humble guy for all that he has accomplished!

I was also able to meet the Vega Representative here in Utah-Tyler Hunt. Tyler did an excellent job overseeing the activity and making sure everyone had what they needed.
Brendan kicked off the bike ride with a Welcome Speech at Whole Foods Market Highland Drive, and the Vega team sampled pre-work out Vega Sport drinks to the participants.  The bikers started at the Whole Foods in Cottonwood Heights, Utah.

The group cycled to the Whole Foods Market Sugar House store to power up and meet even more riders in Salt Lake City.

The riders then met for the Wellness Seminar and Book Signing at 12pm, held at the NEW  Whole Foods Market Trolley Square store- Salt Lake City. All the participants were given a Vega swag bag, at the end of the ride with samples, a water bottle & Vega T-Shirt!

The seminar was awesome!  To learn more about Brendan and a plant-based diet follow his Thrive in 30-30 days to optimum health and vitality.  After signing up you will receive a new message in your email every day for 30 days. I have been enjoying reading these messages. 

This event was a lot of fun.  I was able to hand out samples of the Vega bars, shakes and answer the bikers questions. My mountain bike is in St. George, Utah, so I wasn't able to actually ride with the bikers this time, but they looked like they had a lot of fun:)

Saturday, 16 July 2011

Mushroom Hunting in West Virginia

Just a little show and tell here.  On my way up to Wheeling I stopped in the Monongahela National Forest for some backpacking and general Tom Foolery.  Along the way I found some chantrelle mushrooms that were absolutely huge.  Chantrelles are very common in the backcountry all over.  I find them in Colorado like it's nobody's business.  But this was my first Southern Fried chantrelle finding. 

The best way to cook them is not like other mushrooms, where you cook them on high heat and try to get some good brown color on them.  The water content of chantrelles is simply too high to pull that off without drying the chantrelles partially before doing it.  And even when you do that the flavor of the actual chantrelle is flat and the texture is rubbery.  Weak sauce.  Instead, just cut them into a few pieces and sweat them (low heat in a frying pan) in lots of butter.  When you do, the juices leak out and it simmers gently.  Season with salt and eat almost like a simple mushroom soup.  It's actually pretty dang good. 

Anyway, check out these giants.  My hand smelled like them for 3 hours after just touching one for 15 seconds.  Yeah I brought my video camera.  Always looking for that frickin' sasquatch.  Can't seem to get health or cooking videos to go viral...

Thursday, 14 July 2011

RBTI – Challen Waychoff Delivers

I went to see Challen Waychoff because I was told he could look at a basic set of numbers ascertained from a series of simple urine tests and tell what was wrong with a person, what they ate and even when they ate it, and precisely what course of action to take to fix their body chemistry. This seemed like incredibly powerful knowledge, and hinted at a more sophisticated understanding of nutrition than anyone else in the world possesses.

On the first day I watched a few clients come in. The first was an average construction worker kind of guy. He had a big gut and was just a regular Joe. He had a heart attack at which point he decided to pay Challen a visit. Within 48 hours his chest pain was gone. He had no problems whatsoever, including having energy, which he had suffered from to the point he could hardly get out of bed, until he deviated from the diet. When he did, his problems returned. Nervous about having another heart attack, he went back to Challen and once again, within a couple of days, chest pressure was gone and things back to normal. No trouble since, and he reports feeling great.

The second and third client came in after that. The 2nd was about to try yet another round of chemotherapy, but really felt like she didn’t have the strength left to survive another chemo serving. She tried the RBTI once again. And in 3 months all her tumors were completely gone without a trace.

The third client was a very attractive young girl who started out working with Challen and looking pale, sunken-cheeked, and bulimic according to Challen’s description – with acne. Radiant would be a huge understatement of her physical presence. She has gained 10 pounds since she started, and honestly had one of the best female figures I have ever seen. I don’t mean that in a creepy way. Just reporting here.

Her acne was still slightly visible, but she mentioned how much better it had gotten. She had just come back from vacation, so her “numbers” were all over the place. She had already begun drinking lots of distilled water in anticipation of what her numbers would be. She was right. Her urine brix (a reading of carbohydrate content) was roughly 400% higher than the ideal. Drinking distilled water in a systematic way lowers the urine brix. If you have low urine brix, drinking plain water is strictly forbidden.

And then of course, it was my turn. I went into the bathroom, whipped out the magic Johnson, and hit the little pee cup with a strong burst of embarrassingly-dark urine (I had not had much to drink that day – it was my first day and I had sort of forgotten about my physical needs).

Challen and his office diva laughed at how dark it was, and then Challen proceeded to run the tests on it. With a little dish he added a few drops of various solutions, had me spit in one part, mixed a drop of Matt whiz and stirred it around with something 120 times, put 15 drops into a big test tube full of distilled water, held my urine up and eclipsed the light with it (and had the skin color of an Oompa Loompa briefly), put some kid whiz on the refractomer and had me look at the reading, and 5 minutes later I had my “numbers.”

Urine brix = 4.2
Urine pH = 7.4
Saliva pH = 7.6
Salts = 28c
Albumin = 4m
Nitrate Urea = 8
Ammonia Urea = 12

And there ya have it.

He looks at my numbers for 15 seconds or so before he starts to talk. I’m waiting for a John Edward psychic moment to spill out of him. He says, “Do you take any medications?”

I say, “fool you crazy!!!”

He says, “Well, how about some herbs or supplements?”

“You betta ax somebody sucka!”

I’m thinking, “Wow, this is a disappointment.” But he insists there’s gotta be something causing the pattern he is seeing. As if he barely believes it, he says, “Well, do you eat a lot of bananas?”

I laughed and said “oh snap!”

“Well how many do you eat?!!” he asked as if I must be eating an amount of bananas that he’s never seen someone eat. And in fact, I had been. In June I ate 2 entire cases of bananas (roughly 170 bananas in 30 days). The day before I had eaten 4 in one sitting. My nickname to the 5-year old daughter of my Florida gal is “banana” because of all the bananas I eat.

Well played sir. I’m very attentive now. I take out my corn rows and remove the red bandana from my head and roll down the one pant leg I had up to my knee so I could hear dis fool betta. (Sorry, this gangsta spoof is a little out of sync with Wheeling. I should have said I got off my sister – who had a picture of Sarah Palin taped to her face as an aphrodisiac, put down my Moon Pie, and turned down the romantic sounds of the Georgia Satellites for a minute to listen more carefully…)

He then proceeded to tell me what was wrong with me starting at my feet (which have been hurting like hell this year – especially walking barefoot on hard surfaces), and working his way up. He mentioned feet, then lower back (one of my most chronic conditions – a major problem for me since the age of 16 when I began seeking treatment for it), and pain in the center of the chest (my most recent health problem that began after a year or so of being on a low-carbohydrate diet). He didn’t mention pet allergies, but I was still pretty damn impressed.

Challen, and the RBTI is not part of the psychic network. It’s just simple analysis. Anyone can do it. Challen is the first to systematize basic patterns in the numbers and their relationship with one another. For example, if your urine pH is low – like 5.5, and your Nitrate urea is higher than your ammonia urea (forgive me if I’m saying anything incorrectly, it’s only my 2nd day for Pete’s sake), then you have consumed pork in some form. This is one of the recognized patterns of which Challen has formulated dozens, hundreds maybe I don’t know, and has them all in a 3-ring binder.

It’s just very diligent investigative work that he has put together. No one on earth has done this. Other supposed practitioners of the RBTI deny that it’s even possible. Oh it’s possible alright, and freakishly accurate. So accurate, in fact, that I think it’s kind of scaring people away. I can sort of relate. I mean, this knowledge is making me have a complete identity crisis. It’s hard to explain why exactly. I feel like the hitchhiker in There’s Something About Mary when Ben Stiller suggests that 7-Minute Abs sounds like a good business idea, but warns about the potential of someone releasing 6-Minute Abs as a competing product…



For example, if you are taking dolomite as a supplement and the total of your urea numbers is 13 or less, your neck stiffens up. Then you stop taking the dolomite and it clears up right away. Likewise, if he sees your ureas getting closer to the low levels and you are taking dolomite, he can say, “You might get a stiff neck sometime this week. If you do, stop taking the dolomite.” He said this to a 180 follower that switched to the RBTI “dark side” and it happened like clock work. Earlier today someone (another 180 follower that has been working with Challen for 2 months) self-reported a total of 10 and was taking dolomite and didn’t have a stiff neck. Challen then knew that she had mis-reported her number, which she had. The total was 14, not 10.

A lady today came in (wearing a Beavis and Butthead t-shirt - I'm being totally serious) and Challen looked at her numbers for no more than 10 seconds before he said, "You eat some chocolate?"

"Yes, last night."

"And some nuts 6 days ago?"

"Yes, cashews." 

That’s how crazy this stuff is. And as you are reading this you are thinking the same way I thought when I first heard about it – that it is sounding like some super-creepy guru bullshit. That’s why I had to come here. I had to see it for myself, and I didn’t want to be one of those db’s who negates something just to protect his own ego, which just took a cold shower by the way, and will be quite raisin-like if my health problems substantially improve in the days, weeks, and months ahead (and more 180 followers continue to get much better results with the Challen-ator than I am capable of delivering to them).

We’ll see how things go as the bigger question is answered – “Does it work?”

Wednesday, 13 July 2011

Why Antidepressants Can Cause Gut Pain

Selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors frequently produce significant gastrointestinal side effects.  Nausea was reported by up to 26% of subjects and diarrhea in up to 30% of subjects in a recent review of the new antidepressant vilazodone.  Gastrointestinal side effects tend to be seen with the initiation of antidepressant drugs commonly followed by a period of improved tolerability.

The mechanism for this gastrointestinal effect is poorly understood.   The gut is known to have serotonin receptors.  Some gastrointestinal therapeutic agents target the serotonin receptor as their mechanism of action.  For example, the antinausea drug ondansetron appears to act through it's antagonism of the 5HT (serotonin) 3 receptor.  This results in inhibition of gastric activity while components of activity of the small intestine remain functional.

To better understand the effects of serotonin on GI motility, Janssen and colleagues from the University of Leuven conducted a novel experiment.  Twenty healthy subjects were studied in a GI motility study following administration of placebo and the selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor citalopram.

The authors found that administration of citalopram significant reduced the gastrointestinal transit time compared to that found at baseline and placebo (see chart).

Upper gastrointestinal transit time is composed of three separate phases known as the migrating motor complex of MMC.  Citalopram appeared to reduce the duration of phase 1 and phase 2 while the time spent in phase 3 was unchanged.

The authors attribute the change in transit time to a direct effect of citalopram on GI serotonin receptors although a central CNS effect could not be ruled out.  The speculate this effect may be potentially therapeutic in individuals with constipation predominant irritable bowel syndrome.

This study did not directly address the issue of GI side effects associated with the SSRI antidepressants.  Nevertheless, it suggests acute increased GI transit times with SSRIs may be a mechanism that contributes to GI side effects of nausea, diarrhea, cramping and pain.

Further studies of this effect are needed looking at a longer time frame.  Since most GI side effects improve with prolonged administration, it is possible a receptor compensation mechanism may be involved in changes in side effects over time.

Graph of gastrointestinal transit times is an original graph produced by the author from data in the manuscript.

Janssen P, Vos R, & Tack J (2010). The influence of citalopram on interdigestive gastrointestinal motility in man. Alimentary pharmacology & therapeutics, 32 (2), 289-95 PMID: 20456311

Tuesday, 12 July 2011

New Exercise Guidelines Add Neuromotor Domain

Article first published as New Exercise Guidelines Are Here on Technorati.

The American College of Sports Medicine (ACSM) recently published an update on their recommendations for exercise.  These guidelines follow an extensive review of the research literature and update guidelines that were previously published in 1998.

The guidelines note four specific areas of exercise: cardiorespiratory fitness and reduction in risk of cardiovascular and metabolic disease, maintenance of muscular fitness, flexibility and neuromotor fitness.

The guidelines provide a very extensive review of exercise research.  I will summarize the key recommendations by area of exercise:

Cardiovascular fitness and reduction in risk of cardiovascular and metabolic risk factors:

  • Moderate intensity aerobic exercise for 30 minutes per day on five or more days per week or
  • Vigorous intensity aerobic exercise for 20 minutes per on three or more days per week or
  • A combination of moderate and vigorous aerobic exercise resulting in a total energy expenditure of 500 to 1000 MET minutes per week
The MET (metabolic equivalent of task) minutes per week is a method of quantifying exercise.   By definition, the amount of energy needed at rest is one MET.  Moderate intensity is assigned activities such as walking that can be rated in the 3 to 6 MET range.  Vigorous exercise (such as jogging or running) is rated at MET levels about 6.  A person walking at a 4 MET level for 200 minutes per week would expend 1000 MET minutes in a week meeting the exercise guidelines

Muscular fitness
Resistance training for each of the major muscle groups two or three times per week

Flexibility
Complete a series of flexibility exercises two or more days per week (60 seconds per each of the major muscle and tendon groups

Neuromotor Exercise
Exercise focusing on balance, agility and coordination for 20 minutes on two or more days per week

The benefits and recommendations have been expanded in this version of the ACSM guidelines.  The authors note the growing literature supporting the benefits of exercise such as tai chi and yoga in promoting balance and flexibility.  Balance and flexibility become increasingly important to counteract the effects of aging.  There is more research support for these types of exercise programs to reduce risk of falls and fall-related medical complications in older individuals.

The ACSM notes the limited compliance with exercise guideline compliance in the general population.  Although walking is ranked as the more frequency physical activity in adults, less than 10% of walkers meet the weekly guideline threshold for duration and intensity.

The ACSM makes some recommendations to increase compliance with the guidelines:

  • Patients and their physicians should work together to develop and monitor customized programs
  • Use behavioral strategies of "goal setting, social support, reinforcement, problem solving and relapse prevention
  • Further research targeting factors promoting maintenance of exercise compliance over extended periods
The ACSM has provided a valuable to put together a comprehensive exercise program with benefits in many areas.  Now it's time for more individuals to adopt a healthy lifestyle that includes meeting these recommended guidelines.

Photo of women getting exercise by walking from the author's private collection.

Garber, C., Blissmer, B., Deschenes, M., Franklin, B., Lamonte, M., Lee, I., Nieman, D., & Swain, D. (2011). Quantity and Quality of Exercise for Developing and Maintaining Cardiorespiratory, Musculoskeletal, and Neuromotor Fitness in Apparently Healthy Adults Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise, 43 (7), 1334-1359 DOI: 10.1249/MSS.0b013e318213fefb

Why RBTI?

So why exactly have I journeyed up to the dilapidated town in West Virginia known as Wheeling, where tattooed rednecks walk around with no shirt through city streets, where the Klopeks would be scared of their neighbors – and would have the best kept house in town...



...where cars like the one shot with my phone are parked on lawns, where some of the world’s most unnattractive and physically debilitated Americans can be found “wheeling” up and down the streets in wheel chairs like a scene out of Wall-E?

Well, because Carey Reams (who looked a lot like Harry Caray, coincidentally – maybe I’ll start calling him Harry Carey Reams) spoke to God and God gave him an equation for the numbers you should score on a bunch of pee pee tests, that’s why! Reassuring isn’t it?  Holy Cow! 

Today, for the first time, I meet with Challen Waychoff II, practitioner of a very purist form of RBTI – Reams Biological Theory of Ionization. And trust me, I’ve got more red flags flying than China during a big parade. More red flags flying than even Canadians visiting a foreign country to distinguish themselves from Americans (we really hate it when you do that by the way).

So why in the name of all that’s Holy would I make such a great effort to check this wacky stuff out?

I’m making the effort because Challen has such great mastery over the RBTI that he can look at some pee pee test values from anyone on earth, near or far, recite their medical history more or less, and then proceed to bring their “numbers” to the “healing range” within a week. This has been a consistent report from the people I know who have been working with him this year, which includes one of my most trusted informants – ol’ Pippa Galea, who is one of my best personal friends on the planet, and who has been following my writing since before I even began blogging (although, after seeing Wheeling I'm thinking of ending the friendship!). 

But none of that really impressed me. What really got me was that Challen could reliably tell when a person deviated from the eating regimen he laid out for them, and even tell what they ate to cheat and roughly what time of day they ate it – even if it was just a miniscule amount of something forbidden on the Reams program (like say, chocolate or canola oil).

I mean think about the power in that? With RBTI you are looking at a slew of tests that can be ascertained with home testing equipment. Using an agricultural tool called a refractometer you get a measurement of overall carbohydrate in your urine. With pH strips you get your saliva and urine pH levels and see what they are in relation to one another. You test other things as well, such as dissolved “salts” and albumin.

So Challen, looking at what these numbers are and the relationship to one another, sees sort of a fingerprint that is unique to each individual but at the same time shows a host of general and, depending on level of mastery and understanding of this cultish RBTI, specific information.

“Looks like you had some chocolate 5 days ago.”


“Yes, I had two chocolate chip cookies that night.”

Not only that, but using this information he can forecast a lot of what a person is going to go through as they undergo the healing process – also with freakish and difficult-to-believe accuracy.

Anyway, I’m keeping my skepticism flying mightily. As should any readers of the many articles I will soon write on my Wheeling dealings. But, knowing how powerful this knowledge could really be, and that he clearly possesses knowledge in an area of using nutrition that I do not, I’m eager to learn as much as I can and hopefully discover something very useful.

I’m attracted to the idea because of the general mantra of Reams, which is “Why guess when you can know?”

To me, gathering real observable data and using nutrition with surgical precision to bring that data into a harmonious balance is the ultimate use of nutrition. It’s basically doing what Western Medicine attempts to do with their endless array of blood and hormone tests, but foolishly and unecessarily using medication in isolation to tweak those “numbers.” With the human body, this doesn’t work very well, and comes with consequences. The RBTI, however, is about bringing several markers of good function into a synergistic alignment, stepping back, and watching how well the body heals itself from illness under those ideal conditions. At least that’s it in theory.

And, if the theory works even slightly like it ideally is supposed to, it would really be amazing. To me, the concept behind taking real numbers and, like I said, tweaking them with “surgical precision” using nutrition would be by far the most sophisticated, scientific, and reliable use of nutrition out there. Otherwise people just keep volleying back and forth between diets getting relief in some areas but causing problems in others, only to reshuffle the deck with a totally different diet and get a very different, but still mixed, mediocre hand.

And I think what is one of the potentially coolest things about it all, is that RBTI was designed specifically to achieve the type of healing a person might get from truly eating the perfect food grown in the perfect soil, but doing so using supermarket food. Regular old plain stuff that anyone can access.

And if Reams is right – that all disease stems from an imbalance or lack of minerals in the body to stimulate proper energy production (not a bad argument as we know how instrumental minerals are for the pH and productivity of soil, the basis of all life, and how this directly translates to the health of the animals that eat food from that soil), then that would certainly provide a better explanation for why refined, mineral-stripped carbohydrates always seem to be there at the onset of modern disease.

Most importantly, it’s going to be spectacularly fun and interesting for yours nerdingly. I’ve never done anything quite like this. It was time for a good shock to the groin, and hopefully Challen is the man to deliver the voltage.