Weblog Entry - 07/16/2002: "7/15/02 Raw Food"

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07/16/2002 Entry: "7/15/02 Raw Food"

My new sadhana is underway. I connected all the dots yesterday and did all the pieces. This morning I rose, with not enough sleep, at 3:30 to begin my second day. There were, I am grateful to say, moments of Grace in the morning sadhana.

I have found that there are two ways to approach when to wake up with respect to morning sadhana. One way is to vary when I get up with respect to when I go to sleep. When I follow this pattern, things get very erratic, as I will tend to geo sleep at midnight or later, and then not get up until 5 or 6 (This is late to me. I like to finish my morning practice by 6:30 AM.) However, when I hold to a fixed time of getting up, without regard to when I go to sleep, after three days my body will require me to start going to sleep earlier. My preference is to be asleep by 9:30 PM, but this is rare.

I read, a little while ago, about a report that cooking starches at high heat creates a significant carcinogen. That the worst culprit is French fries, especially the darker parts, but that there even were significant amounts of the carcinogen in cold cereals like Cheerios.

Quoting from the article in the June 28th SF Chronicle: "The carcinogen, known as acrylamide, is believed to be created in food by a chemical reaction between carbohydrates and heat, said Carl Winter, a food toxicologist who is the director of the Food Safe Program at UC Davis. French-fries and potato chips are believed to be the most susceptible because they are usually deep-fried at high temperatures. The darker the fry or the chip, the higher the concentration of acrylamides………… The Environmental Protection Agency limits the amount of permissible acrylamides in an 8-ounce glass of water to 0.12 micrograms. But in a study released this week by the Center for Science in the Public Interest, the Washington, D.C., advocacy group found levels that were hundreds of times higher in popular snack foods. They ranged from 7 micrograms in an ounce of Cheerios cereal to 25 micrograms in an ounce of Pringles potato chips to 72 micrograms in a large serving of McDonald's French fries."

What is particularly interesting about this to me is that I have some friends who have become raw food advocates. They seem to be doing quite well on their diet. I was curious about the diet, and I asked them to help me learn more about what they are doing. They gave me some books to read, but the books were so shrill, that I found them too hard to read. Particularly, as they referred to all cooked foods as toxic, without explaining why or how that might be the case. I put the books aside, and had dropped the subject from my mind. Now, along comes this article, and I have to pause and wonder.

Over the years there have been so many new concepts that have entered my mind, which I had at first dismissed as off the edge – in food and in politics, and in the politics and economics of food. Did you know that in Japan, sugarless sodas are sweetened with stevia (a healthful herb) rather than aspartame, which is generally believed to be toxic? Stevia, being a naturally occurring herb is not patentable, whereas aspartame, being a chemical compound is. I resisted this info for a while. Actually, like most Americans, there is little that a government or a business could do in the way of corruption or malfeasance that would surprise me.

The question that occurs to me is when you brown foods such as tofu; Tempeh, hash browns, etc. are you creating acrylamides? What about foods with a crust like pie or pizza, or fried Indian snacks like samosas, Japanese tempura, and Chinese egg rolls? Generally all those things are too greasy for me to eat, except as on occasional treat. But should they be eliminated from the diet completely?

What else is true about cooking foods to a high heat? Where does the raw food info come from? Who knows more about this?