Flower Power

Flowers beautify our homes and our tables and are the go to gift for apologies and Valentine's Day. But did you know that a great many of the flowers that fill our vases are not only edible but highly nutritious and even tasty? Come one admit it. You didn't.

Marigold petals cooking into an omelette or quiche will give it a tangy, citrusy flavor. Many people say the taste is similar to saffron only milder. The flowers are a powerful anti-inflammatory so good for you as well.

Lavender flowers add a sweet flavor to foods and make a tasty tea when steeped for 5 minutes in hot water. You can use them as a replacement for rosemary in just about any recipe. Try them on a baked potato. They have strong anti-oxidant properties.

Violets have a sweet and floral taste, making them a perfect companion for everything from salads to iced drinks. Dip them in egg white and powdered sugar for a colorful topping for frosted cakes. Violets are anti-oxidants and contain high amounts of soluble fiber, helpful in lowering cholesterol.

Squash blossoms taste faintly like the squash itself. They are a great source of vitamins A and C and work well as a salad topper. If you want to bet a little more adventurous, stuff them with goat cheese and bake for a memorable side dish.

If you would like to take a deeper dive and explore some of the many flower varieties that are both tasty and nutritious, here is a good place to get started:

40+ Edible Flowers

Flowers! They're not just for Valentine's Day any more.

Cheesecake Factory Wins 21st Extreme Eating Award

The Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI) has awarded its not-so-coveted Extreme Eating Award to the Cheescake Factory for its Cinnamon Roll Pancakes. Cheesecake Factory is no stranger to the honor, having previously won the award 20 times. With 2/3 of Americans either overweight or obese, its great to have businesses doing what they can to move the numbers - albeit in the wrong direction.

If you often eat 11 Krispy Kreme Original Glazed Doughnuts at one sitting, then the Cinnamon Roll Pancakes may be something you want to check out. They are nutritionally equivalent. You do have to admire a company that can create a brunch item containing a whole day's worth of calories (2,040), two and a half days supply of saturated fat (51g), more than a day's worth of sodium (2,950mg) and (wait for it!) a three day supply of added sugar (137g).

Is it any wonder that restaurant chains so adamantly oppose showing nutritional information on their menus?

Diabetes Can Be Reversed

Type 2 Diabetes has been regarded by the medical establishment as irreversible. Once you had it, it inevitably went only one way - downhill. Treatment focuses on minimizing the damage and slowing the decline, yet diabetics suffer from a wide range of serious conditions including high blood pressure, increased risk of stroke and heart attack, blindness, neuropathy, ketoacidosis, digestive disorders and fatigue. And if that were not enough, about 60% of all foot and leg amputations are caused by diabetes.

The current thinking is that there is nothing you can do other than try to manage the symptoms and minimize the inevitable damage. But that may all be about to change thanks to a clinical trial underway in the UK called the Diabetes Remission Clinical Trial (DiRECT) that released its initial results in March of 2019.

The trial assigned 272 people in the UK to receive either the standard treatment (the control group) or a closely supervised, very low calorie diet (the intervention group). For those in the intervention group, all diabetes medication was halted on day one of the trial. After one year, 46% of those in the intervention group were completely free of diabetes and off all their medications. At the 2 year point in the trial, 36% of those in the intervention group remained diabetes free. And the control group? After 2 years, 3% were diabetes free and off their medication. Regardless of which group they were in, 64% of those who lost 22 pounds or more were diabetes free after 2 years.

So the approach did not work for 100% of the people or 100% of the time. But nearly half of those assigned to the intervention group were diabetes free and medication free after 2 years.

This is not an approach for the faint of heart, and it absolutely, positively should not be attempted unless under close medical supervision. The intervention group was on a diet that provided only 850 calories a day from vegetables, salads and a specially formulated nutritional shake. They remained on this diet for 12 - 20 weeks. After the initial restrictions, they slowly added foods back into their diet over the next 4 - 8 weeks. After that, they had regular meetings with a nurse clinician and dietician to help them maintain their lower weight. Anyone who gained 10 or more pounds was immediately restarted on the initial calorie restricted diet.

Clearly this was no fun. But if you were one of those who walked away free of diabetes and all its many health dangers, perhaps worth the cost.

In the United States, the number of people with Type 2 diabetes has tripled between 1990 and 2010. In 2015 there were 30.3 million Type 2 diabetics, about 10% of the population. Another 84 million (nearly 1 in 3 of us) have pre-diabetes, many of them undiagnosed and unaware.

The takeaway from this is embarrassingly simple. "The incidence of diabetes increases if a population is overfed," says Roy Taylor, one of the researchers involved in the DiRECT study. "If a population is short of food, diabetes disappears."

We eat to much of the wrong things and we exercise too little. And it can kill us. Now, at least, it looks like we can step back from the brink. IF we are willing to give up the garbage we bring home from the grocery store, the 3,000 calorie meals we eat in restaurants and some of our couch time.

For more details on the DiRECT trial go to ncl.ac.uk/magres/research/diabetes/reversal/#publicinformation .

America's "Healthcare" System

Tasteless Tomatoes by Design

You've probably tasted a fresh, garden grown tomato at some point. And you've probably mentioned how tasteless the typical store-bought variety is more often than your friends want to hear. So you think store-bought tomatoes are tasteless? Well, according to research done at Cornell University and published in the journal Nature Genetics, you are right. But probably not for the reasons you think.

More than 90% of store-bought tomatoes lack a specific gene that is responsible for producing the chemicals that cause their distinctive taste. The tomatoes lost the gene as growers produced varieties selected for their size, color, shape, sturdiness and shelf life.

Your best bet for finding a tomato that still tastes like a tomato is with heirloom varieties.

Mo Pro(biotics)!

Probiotics are all the rage. Between 2007 and 2012 the number of Americans taking probiotic supplements more than quadrupled. As of 2012 that is 4 million adults and 300,000 children. In 2016, the market for probiotics reached $4.3B and was projected to grow by 38% a year through 2021. Probiotics are forecast to outsell all other supplement products by 2020.

Considerable research supports the positive impact of a healthy microbiome - the trillions of bacteria that inhabit our gut, urinary tract, lungs, mouth and skin. Human studies confirm that certain strains of bacteria can alleviate irritable bowel syndrome, stave off the diarrhea sometimes associated with antibiotic use and certain illnesses and enhance our ability to digest the lactose in dairy products.

With that much money on the table and that much projected growth, you will probably be shocked to learn that food and supplement manufacturer's marketing departments are tripping over each other to capitalize on the boom. Equally surprising, many of their claims are bulls....err, questionable.

According to Prevention magazine, there is little evidence that probiotic supplements or additives have any impact at all on healthy people, and most of the benefits touted by the companies that manufacture them are, at best, hypothetical. "There is no compelling evidence that continued consumption of probiotics if you are healthy has any benefit," according to Jack Gilbert, head of the University of Chicago's Microbiome Center. But wait! There's more.

Probiotic manufacturers have a labeling problem. Shocking, I know. In one 2015 study analyzing the content of 16 probiotic supplements from a variety of manufacturers found that only 1 accurately identified their contents on the label.

Taking a page from their fiber playbook, many supplements contain only cheap, common and relatively ineffective bacteria when in fact a dazzlingly wide variety inhabit our innards.

And to ice the cake, many of the supplements sold today pass right on through your gut before the bacteria have any chance at all to replicate there. "You often read that probiotics are supposed to colonize and then reshape the microbiome," says University of Alberta microbiologist Jens Walter. "But there is virtually no evidence that that can actually happen."

This may all change soon. Scientists are developing "cocktails" of organisms that may be more potent and posses more staying power. In the meantime, if you are a basically healthy person and are spending money on probiotics, you are not spending it on something that might actually do you some good.

All this being said, there are things you can do to nurture and care for your microbiome, and you don't need a supplement to do it.

"One of the largest influences on our microbiomes and their activity in our gut is diet," advises Susan Lynch, a microbiome researcher at UCSF. Cultured milk like kefir and yogurt brim with healthy bacteria. And fiber encourages healthy bacteria to multiply, so - surprise! - fruits, vegetables and whole grains will do more than a supplement. Also, skip antibacterial products containing triclosan. Studies suggest that is can severely alter your microbiome, and it is in everything from soap to deodorant to toothpaste.

A Brief History of Diets

The idea of dieting - as opposed to having a diet - is fairly new to human history, not really gaining traction within a mass audience until after World War II. Since then the diet industry has surged (to a $64 billion business in 2014), with this fad and that promising better health and less weight. Recently though the growth trend has begun to reverse as more and more people realize that actual nutritionists have been right all along: a varied, balanced diet is best.

Here is a rundown of 60 years of diets.

1950: The Cabbage Soup Diet
           "Lose 10 - 20 pounds in one week!"
           Well ok, but you do it by basically eating water for 7 days.
           Besides being unhealthy, you can't remain on this "diet" for
           very long.

1965: Weight Watchers
           "Follow our point system to maintain balanced, healthy
            eating habits long term."
           Combined with AA-style support groups and a simple to
           follow system rather than a list of permitted and forbidden
           foods, this is one of the few really sensible diet programs to
           come along.

1990: Diet Shakes
          "Simply replace one meal a day with one of our tasty, easy
           to use shakes, and watch the pounds melt off."
           Slim Fast Foods built a following of 23 million people on this
           promise (and $100 million in advertising). There is little
           evidence that it works long term.

1995: Low Fat Diets
          "Cut out the fat to lose weight and protect your heart!"
          Manufacturers rolled out some 1,300 new fat free and low
          fat foods in response to the government's recommendation
          to adopt a low fat diet. They pretty much all crashed and
          burned because the products were packed with sugar.

2000: The Blood Type Diet
          "Customize your diet to your own unique blood type
           and metabolism!"
          This really was a thing. Sadly there is ample evidence
          showing no variation in nutritional requirement by
          blood type.

2003: The Atkins Diet
          "Ultra-low carbs not only solve blood sugar problems
           but improve your health and energy across the board!"
          It also gave people headaches and fatigue and proved
          too difficult for most people to stick with.

2004: The South Beach Diet
          "The realistic Atkins Diet: low carbs and reduced fat."
          This quickly became the best selling diet book of all time
          and is one of the better approaches and still popular today.

2015: Gluten Free
          "Eliminate this wheat protein from your diet an enjoy
           almost unlimited benefits."
           Perhaps 3% of the US population needs to be on a gluten
           free or reduced gluten diet. The rest apparently just likes
           to eat whatever is popular in Hollywood.

2016: The Paleo Diet
          "If it worked for cave people it will work for us!"
          Experts warn that the diet, which attempts to recreate the
          meat heavy, grain and dairy free diet of our paleolithic
          ancestors is dangerously misguided. The meats available
          to our ancestors is not available to us but were "biologically
          distinct". Also, the food groups eliminated have significant
          nutritional benefits.

2017: The Ketogenic Diet
         "Burn fat instead of carbs!"
         Originally developed as a treatment for pediatric epilepsy,
         this diet forces your body into a potentially dangerous state
         of ketosis. Ketosis occurs when people eat a low- or no-carb
         diet and molecules called ketones build up in their
         bloodstream. It can indeed help you shed a few pounds, but
         Ketosis is actually a mild form of ketoacidosis. Ketoacidosis
         mostly affects people with type 1 diabetes. In fact, it is the
         leading cause of death of people with diabetes who are
         under 24 years of age.

Since 2018, eating plans promoting balance and variety began making headway. The DASH, Mediterranean and Flexitarian diets were ranked #1, #2 and #3 on the US News and World Report diet plan listing. Atkins, Paleo and Ketogenic were the worst three diets evaluated.