Beware the Miracle Foods Fads

Can you tell me what you think of the nutritional or medicinal value of Chia seeds?

Sheila

I shall tell you about Chia what i tell everyone about 'miracle foods': Noni juice, Kombucha tea, Goji Berries, Chia seeds...

The only thing they have in common is that some greedy capitalists do excellent marketing on those 'healing foods'. People buy them in earnest for a lot of money and then after a while, when they realise that they didn't get the miracles they were expecting, they give up.

Meanwhile, the sharks have another product ready to market and it's alway the same: has been used for thousands of years by the ancients Aztecs/ Polynesians/ Egyptians/ Eskimos; has everything: protein/antioxidants/ omegas. They seem to always contain high levels of the nutrients currently fashionable in the popular media: so while Goji berries were touted to be full of antioxidants, Chia are full of omegas, and so on.

Let me give you an example: a couple of years ago Goji berries were sold for about $100 for a 100mls bottle of extract in fancy packaging in health food shops. Now you can buy them loose for $20 / kilo in supermarkets!

See what i mean? Next year people will feed Chia seeds to their chickens (just like the Aztec did actually).

This is the sort of things that give natural therapies a bad name. All whole foods are good for you: blueberries will give you more antioxidants than Goji berries, organic wholemeal bread is certainly better for you than white bread made with bleached flour 'enriched' with Chia seeds or any other ancient just discovered ingredient.

So beware the miracle cure. Again!

I am vindicated on cod liver oil

Right! Let's rewind a bit. One of my first posts was about vitamin A, was it poisonous or not and i gave you the whole low down. So go and check it.

Now let's rewind further still. I see a lot of pregnant women and their babies (After all i did write the book "Natural Childcare"). Because of this absurd fear of vitamin A poisoning in the past 10 years or so, pregnant women have absolutely stayed away from cod liver oil.

Mind you i have to put an interjection here, and you wouldn't love me so much if it wasn't for my interjections, BUT i am always amazed to see that many women are prepared to give away things like vitamins because it may be bad for the baby but somehow they are not so keen to give up alcohol, cigarettes, coffee, cannabis or pain killers. Funny about that. Glad i got that out!

Back to cod liver oil, which, remember, contains both A and D in the correct proportion. Why am i vindicated? Because recent research has shown that vitamin D deficiency in pregnancy may be one of the causes of problems such as allergies, asthma and possibly autism and ADHD in the resulting child. Ha! Told you so told you so told you so!

So, what does Grannie suggest? Simple: you can be neurotic about not taking cod liver oil in the first half of the pregnancy (after all, i keep supplements for pregnant women to a minimum myself in the first 20 weeks), that will make you feel safer, always a good thing. But after week 20 it is a good idea to get back to taking cod liver oil. And make sure it's a good clean brand, not one that contains synthetic A to boost the count. One capsule or one teaspoon a day will do. This way you will be having about 4,500 iu of A and 450 iu of D every day. Because if you are not spending enough time exposed to the sun you will be D deficient.

But vitamin D deficiency is definitely another blog.

Vitamin A -is it poisonous?

People always ask me about the safety of vitamin A. I wish I could put to rest the myth of ‘the poisonous Vitamin A’, once and for all. The “for all” bit might be a little ambitious but maybe it can be done for you. Here is the story.

Early last century, three explorers took off for Antarctica. They had provisions, sleighs and of course sleigh dogs to pull them. As always happens in these situations, at some stage, they lost one explorer, his sleigh and all their provisions. But they still had their dogs.

I can cut the story short because you know what was bound to happen: they ate the dogs. The problem is, they did not just eat the dogs, they made sure they ate the livers, because they thought that liver is better for you. One of the explorers was a vegetarian, he ate mostly the livers because he could not bring himself to eat flesh; he found liver easier to cope with (very bizarre). Being Europeans and having no knowledge of Arctic zoology, scientific or empirical, they did not know that for the Inuit people eating the liver of carnivorous animals was absolutely taboo.

Why is it taboo? Well, simply because the liver of arctic carnivorous animals being the last of the food chain is incredibly rich in… Vitamin A! (Nowadays it is also rich in DDT, but that’s another story). So when Inuit hunters kill a polar bear, they throw the liver to their dogs! Dogs livers can cope with almost anything. Our explorers did not know that of course and as a consequence they suffered from severe Vitamin A poisoning. The vegetarian? Well, he died.

Because of this story Vitamin A has been maligned ever since. In spite of all the research that has since proven that one can take large amounts of it without dying or going mad, the myth survives. I could carry on and illustrate the point further with a very good joke about a Greek herbalist, stone masonry, boat building and a goat, but I won't because it is a little X-rated.

The best source of Vitamin A is Cod Liver Oil. Don’t worry you don’t have to drink it. Fortunately, Vitamin A oil capsules are easy and very cheap to buy. This is really the only source of Vitamin A that is worth bothering about. Synthetic vitamin A on the other hand is useless and causes problems.

So there you have it. The habit of having cod liver oil daily is a good habit but don’t drink the whole bottle and don’t eat your dog’s liver.