How and When to Be Your Own Doctor - Moser and Solomon (simple ebook reader .txt) 📗

to an irritating substance such as pollen when, at the same time, the body’s mechanism for dealing with irritations is weakened. Generally weak adrenals causes this because the adrenal’s job is to produce hormones that reduce inflammation.

Once the irritating substance succeeds at producing a significant inflammation, a secondary reaction may be set up, called an allergy.

Once established, an allergy is very hard to get rid of.

(3) in a way very similar to the second, but instead of being irritated by an external substance, it is irritated by repeatedly failing to properly, fully digest something. Pasteurized milk for example, basically impossible to completely digest even in its low-fat form, often sets up an allergy that applies to other forms of cows milk, even raw, unpasteurized cows milk or yogurt. Eating too much white flour can eventually set off a wheat allergy. My husband developed a severe allergy to barley after drinking too much homebrewed beer; he also became highly intolerant to alcohol. Now he has allergic reactions to both alcohol and barley. And gets far sicker from drinking beer (two separate allergies) than from wheat beer, hard liquor or wine (only one allergy).

Eating too much of any single food, or repeatedly eating too much of an otherwise very good food at one time, can eventually overwhelm the body’s ability to digest it fully. Then, the finest whole food products may set up an allergic reaction. Worse, this allergic reaction itself subsequently prevents proper digestion even when only moderate quantities are eaten.

An allergy may not be recognized as an allergy because it may not manifest as the instant skin rash or stuffy nose or swollen glands or sticky eyes. that people usually think of when they think “allergic reaction.” Food allergies can cause many kinds of symptoms, from sinusitis to psychosis, from asthma to arthritis, from hyperactivity to depression, insomnia to narcolepsy—and commonly the symptoms don’t manifest immediately after eating.

Frequently, allergic reactions are so low grade as to be unnoticeable and may not produce an observable condition until many years of their grinding down the vital force has passed. When the condition finally appears it is hard to associate it with some food that has been consumed for years, apparently with impunity.

Thus it is that many North Americans have developed allergies to wheat, dairy, soy products (because many soy foods are very hard to digest), corn and eggs. These are such common, widespread, frequently found allergies that anyone considering a dietary cause of their complaints might just cut all these foods out of the diet for a few weeks just to see what happens. And individuals may be allergic to anything from broccoli to bacon, strawberries to bean sprouts. Unraveling food allergies sometimes requires the deductions of a Sherlock Holmes.

However, food allergies are very easy to cure if you can get the suffered to take the medicine. Inevitably, allergic reactions vanish in about five days of abstinence. Anyone with sufficient self-discipline to water fast for five days can cure themselves of all food allergies at one step. Then, by a controlled, gradual reintroduction of foods, they can discover which individual items cause trouble. See Coca’s Pulse Test in the Appendix where you’ll find step-by-step instructions for allergy testing that are less rigorous, not requiring a preliminary fast.

Flour, And Other Matters Relating To Seeds One of the largest degradations to human health was caused by the roller mill. This apparently profitable machine permitted the miller to efficiently separate wheat flour into three components: bran, germ and endosperm. Since bread made without bran and germ is lighter and appears more “upper class” it became instantly popular.

Flour without germ and bran also had an industrial application—it could be stored virtually forever without being infested by insects because white flour does not contain enough nutrition to support life. Most health conscious people are aware that white flour products won’t support healthful human life either.

Essentially, white flour’s effect on humans is another demonstration of Health = Nutrition / Calories. When the bran and germ are discarded, remaining are the calories and much of the protein, lacking are many vitamins and minerals and other vital nutritional substances.

Whole wheat bread has been called the staff of life. In ages past, healthy cultures have made bread the predominant staple in their diet. Does that mean you can just go to the bakery and buy whole grain bread, or go to the healthfood store and buy organically grown whole wheat flour, bake your own, and be as healthy as the ancients?

Sorry, the answer is almost certainly no. There are pitfalls, many of them, waiting for the unwary.

White flour has one other advantage over whole wheat flour. It not only remains free of insect infestation, it doesn’t become stale (meaning rancid). In the wheat germ (where the embryo resides) there is considerable oil, containing among other things, about the best natural source of vitamin E. This oil is highly unsaturated and once the seed is ground the oil goes rancid in a matter of days. Whole wheat flour kept on the unrefrigerated shelf of the store is almost certainly rancid. A lot of its other vitamin content has been oxidized too. If the wheat flour had flowed directly from the grinder into an airtight sack and from there directly to the freezer, if it had been flash frozen and kept extremely cold, it might have a storage life of some months. Of course that was not the case. Maybe you’re lucky and your healthfood store is one of the very few that has its own small-scale flour mill and grinds daily.

Probably not.

How about your baker’s whole wheat bread? Where does the baker get flour? From the wholesaler’s or distributor’s warehouse! In fifty pound kraftpaper sacks! How much time had elapsed from milling to wholesaler to baker to baking? The answer has to be in the order of magnitude of weeks. And it might be months. Was the flour stored frozen? Or airtight? Of course not.

If you want bread made from freshly ground flour you are almost certainly have to grind and bake it yourself. Is it worth the trouble? You bet. Once you’ve tasted real bread you’ll instantly see by comparison what stale, rancid whole wheat flour tastes like.

Freshly ground flour makes bread that can be the staff of life and can enormously upgrade your health—if the wheat you use is any good.

But before we talk about wheat quality, a more few words of warning.

If you think wheat goes rancid rapidly, rye is even worse. Rye flour goes bad so fast that when you buy it in the store it usually is the rye equivalent of white wheat flour. The germ has been removed. The bag may not say so. But it probably has. If you are going to make rye breads, even more reason to grind your own. Corn meal from the grocery store has usually been degerminated too. If it hasn’t been, the oil in the seed’s germ has probably gone rancid.

Grinding flour at home is easy these days. There is an abundance of at-home milling products and no shortage of hype about them. You’ll find staunch advocates of stone mills. These produce the finest-textured flour, but are costly. The sales pitch is that stones grind at low temperature and do not damage the oils (remember the development of rancidity is a function of temperature) or the vitamins, which are also destroyed at high temperature. This assertion is half true. If you are going to store your flour it is far better to grind it cool. However, if you are, as we do, going to immediately bake your flour, what difference does it make if it gets a little warm before baking. That only accelerates the action of the yeast.

On the negative side, stone mills grind slowly and are very fussy about which grains they will grind. If the cereal is a bit moist or if the seed being ground is a little bit oily, the mill becomes instantly blocked.

Steel burr mills grind fast and coarsely and are inexpensive. Coarse flour makes heavy bread. The metal grinding faces tend to wear out and have to be replaced occasionally—if they can be replaced. Breads on the heavy side are still delicious; for many years I made bread with an inexpensive steel burr mill attachment that came with my juicer.

Some steel burr mills will also grind oily seed like sesame and sunflower. However, oily seeds can be ground far more easily half-a-cup at a time in a little inexpensive electric spice/coffee mill, the sort with a single fast-spinning propeller.

I currently think the best compromise are hammermills. The grain dribbles into a chamber full of fast-spinning teeth that literally pound the grain into powder. Since air flows through with the grain the flour is not heated very much. This type of mill is small, very fast, intermediate in price between steel mills and stone mill, lasts a long time, but when grinding, sounds like a Boeing 747 about to take off. It is essential to wear hearing protectors when using it.

Awareness of bread quality is growing. One excellent new U.S.

business, called Great Harvest Bakery is a fast-growing national franchise chain. They bake and sell only whole grain breads; all their wheat flour is freshly ground daily on the premises in the back. Unfortunately, as of the writing of this book, they do not grind their rye flour but bring it in sacks. I can’t recommend their rye breads. The founder of Great Harvest is a knowledgeable buyer who fully understands my next topic, which is that wheat is not wheat.

There are great differences between hard bread wheats; being organically grown is no cure all for making good or nutritious bread. Great Harvest understands this and uses top quality grain that is also Organic.

When I first stated making my own bread from my own at-home-ground flour I was puzzled by variations in the dough. Sometimes the bread rose well and was spongy after baking like I wanted it to be.

Sometimes it kneaded stickily and ended up flat and crumbly like a cake. Since I had done everything the same way except that I may have bought my wheat berries from different healthfood stores, I began to investigate the subject of wheat quality.

The element in the cereal that forms the rubbery sponge in risen bread so it doesn’t crumble and rises high without collapsing, is gluten. The word glue derives from gluten. The gluten content of various wheats varies. Bread bakers use “hard wheat” because of its high gluten content. Gluten is a protein and gluten comprises most of the protein in bread wheat; the protein content and the gluten content are almost identical.

Try this. Ask your healthfood store buyer or owner what the protein content is of the hard red wheat seeds they’re selling. You’ll almost certainly get a puzzled look and your answer will almost certainly be, “we have Organic and conventional.” Demand that the store buyer ask this question of their distributor/wholesaler and then report back to you. If the distributor deigns to answer, the answer will be the same—I sell Organic or conventional hard red wheat. Period. When I got these non-answers I looked further and discovered that hard bread wheats run from about 12 percent protein to about 19 percent and this difference has everything to do with the soil fertility (and to an extent the amount of rainfall during the season), and almost nothing to do with Organic or conventional.

This difference also has everything to do with how your dough behaves and how your bread comes out. And how well your bread nourishes you. Thirteen percent wheat will not make a decent loaf—fourteen percent is generally considered #2 quality and comprises the bulk of cheap bread grain. When you hear in the financial news that a