The Standard American Diet is absolutely bizarre. When the term is abbreviated, SAD, that says what everyone needs to know about typical American eating habits.

I opted out forty years ago when I decided to become a vegetarian. I was seventeen at the time, and could not understand why animals had to give their lives in order to sustain ours. However, my eating habits did not change without a struggle.

My first experience of negativity toward my diet choice came when my boyfriend’s step-father referred to me as a ‘vegetable’. My self-esteem was not strong and his comment devastated me and remained imprinted on my consciousness for years.

All my life I’ve been surrounded by meat eaters. Men either left me, in part because of my vegetarianism, or exerted influence over me until I accepted their eating habits as my own. However, I was never happy to be anything but vegetarian, and eventually these relationships ended. Each time I immediately reverted to my vegetarian diet.

I do not want to support an industry that kills animals. I also don’t believe meat is ideal for human consumption. A lot has been written to show associations with heart disease, hypertension, and cancer. In recent years I’ve learned about Mad Cow Disease, injections of antibiotics and Bovine Growth Hormone, and the horrendous living conditions of chickens and other animals intended to become food. Perhaps worst of all, the food given to livestock is unhealthy. It has been found to contain chemicals, dead and diseased animals of the same species, animal waste, plastic, and unhealthy amounts of grain – especially our ubiquitous and over-produced GMO corn. How could any good come from eating an animal that has consumed all this?

Over the years, vegetarian or not, I’ve been duped into using products that were not healthy for me. For example, aspertame. When it was put on the market I was led to believe it was a healthy substitute for supposedly more-dangerous saccharine. I thought Equal brand aspertame could be the answer to my post-pregnancy weight-gain problems. I used it exclusively as a sweetener for years, then switched to saccharine and Splenda. Since then I’ve done a study of various forms of sweeteners, both natural and artificial, and found that aspartame is especially toxic.

Aspartame was developed by a chemist working for a pharmaceutical company, G. D. Searle. It was approved for public distribution by CEO Donald Rumsfeld before he became Secretary of Defense for President George W. Bush. Despite reports that it may cause brain dysfunction and cancer it continues to be approved. It is still used in Diet Coke under the brand name, NutraSweet. It is also used in pharmaceutical medications and over-the-counter medications, including many intended for children. Aspertame is an ingredient many food manufacturers use in cakes, cookies, and prepared meals as well as other food products.

At one time I consumed a lot of diet cola, not realizing I was poisoning myself with aspertame, but now I’ve cut all sodas from my diet. Looking back at that era of my life I’m chagrined, wondering how many ingredients in those drinks were of animal origin. How can we possibly know since we’re not privy to the recipes and formulas?

Not knowing the true source of ingredients is a problem for vegetarians when using processed foods manufactured by industry. An example of this is pink yogurt. As a ‘vegetarian’ I often ate cherry yogurt. You would probably think this is an excellent food for a person who eats dairy products but not meat. Unfortunately the red food coloring used in cherry yogurt, carmine, is made of dried and crushed female cochineal insects. Hardly a vegetarian treat! Carmine is also used in pink ice creams, red candies, and fruit punch drinks. Again I was duped by the food manufacturing industry to think I was eating something healthy; instead I consumed something non-vegetarian which I would not normally choose to eat if I knew the source of the ingredients. I still eat yogurt, but I now buy organic, pure yogurt and use natural, organic fruit puree to flavor it.

Another danger many are unaware of is fluoride, that controversial chemical added to the public water supply in most American towns and cities. I consider this a much more pernicious danger because it gets into almost everything. For every manufactured food product there’s a good probability that fluoride is included. If the manufacturing plant is in an area where water is fluoridated, there’s most likely some in the food. Fluoride is associated with thyroid disorders, osteoporosis, cancer, memory lapses, dementia, ADHD, autism, and Altzheimer’s Disease. Fluoride even causes tooth decay which is the thing we’re supposed to believe it will prevent. There’s more, but I’ll stop here.

A few years ago I worked in a restaurant where I sucked down green tea flavored bottled drinks, at least once each working day. My partner warned me to stop drinking them because they could be fluoridated. I ignored him, and even laughed about it. Eventually I did a study on fluoride and woke up. I no longer buy bottled drinks because I don’t know where they came from or what is in them. Our local water supply doesn’t contain fluoride so that is the source of my cooking water. My drinking water comes from a spring at the foot of Mt. Shasta, here in Northern California.

One of the hardest things to give up is genetically modified (GMO) food. I’ve given up most soy. As a vegetarian, I do not even eat tofu. Most soy grown these days comes from GMO soy crops. I occasionally use a tiny bit of soy sauce and that is all. I’m amazed at all the food products created for vegans and vegetarians that contain soy. Choose your poisons wisely!

GMO corn is even harder to avoid because it is in almost all manufactured processed foods, and unfortunately I like corn chips. I am trying to say no to all corn products now. For more information on GMO corn, and corn in general, I recommend the documentary movie, King Corn.

I consider all prepackaged, processed, manufactured foods to be potentially unsafe. This leaves me eating mostly foods I prepare at home. I have a garden and believe the healthiest foods – fruits and vegetables – are grown locally in areas such as mine where the water supply isn’t intentionally fluoridated.

It is a fact that when we buy from a supermarket we don’t know where our food came from, what chemicals were used on or in it, who picked it, and what was on the farm worker’s hands. E. coli food poisoning is usually traced to beef, but it has also been found on vegetables. I wash most of my store-bought vegetables and fruit with natural castile soap before using them, but even that won’t remove fluoride if that’s what the plant was watered with.

I may seem radical to most of you who read this, but I’ve been improving my diet over the course of many years; this didn’t happen all at one time. It is apparent to me that the very sad Standard American Diet is extremely unhealthy, but Americans everywhere still eat it. When I worked at the restaurant I saw people every day drinking sugary or diet sodas and eating sausage, chicken, roast beef, and other foods I consider unhealthy. The restaurant even offered packets of aspertame. I prepared and served foods I would not ever consider eating. I was shocked at the things people choose to consume, even with all the information available now on the internet.

I realize in the end I can save only myself. Most people aren’t willing to take food health threats seriously because that would involve uncomfortable, radical change. We grew up with a convenience food mentality, depending on cake mixes, canned soups, and fast food restaurants. Very few people want to change. Most don’t want to know they’ve been eating things that aren’t healthy. Perhaps learning the truth about processed foods would be too painful.

There are things you can do if you too decide to improve your health:

If you live in an area where fluoride is put into the public water supply, start a citizen’s campaign to end fluoridation there. Surely you’ll find many others who feel the same.

Just say no to sodas, bottled drinks of all kinds, GMO soy and corn, meat, and prepackaged, processed, manufactured foods of all sorts

If you find it hard to give these things up, tackle them one at a time. For example, say, “This week I’ll give up corn tortillas. Next week, no more diet cola.” Go easy on yourself and change your lifestyle gently, one unhealthy food at a time.

The Reality of Feed at Animal Factories

GMOs: The Greatest Threat Ever to Humans and Animals

Could There Be Evils Lurking in Aspertame Consumption?

Over-the-Counter and Prescription Drugs Containing Aspertame

When we left our home that morning we didn’t expect bad weather. We’d been enjoying an early spring for a few weeks, with intermittent rainstorms. So we took off for a drive to Arcata, on the coast, not thinking all that much about precipitation.

Our route is the Klamath River Highway - also known as the Bigfoot Scenic Byway because it passes by Bluff Creek where the famous Patterson-Gimlin Bigfoot movie was filmed, and there are a lot of Bigfoot sightings in this region. You can see a bit of the highway on the left side of this river photo. You can click on that photo for a larger version of it.

Forty miles downriver there are two tall bridges. With my acrophobia… and bridge-phobia… I have actually stayed awake nights fretting about these darn bridges! But that was years ago. After I discovered EFT (Emotional Freedom Techniques) I learned to tap away my phobias, and now I’m learning to cross these bridges without slowing down to a chicken-crawl first. I’m doing pretty well at this!

Anyhow, not long after we cross the bridges we come to the Junction School, and then Somes Bar which is nothing more than a solitary store - currently called the Salmon River Outpost - and homes that are scattered into the hills nearby, none of them visible from the highway. We stopped there and I took advantage of their coffee bar… got myself a mocha. You know, our town of Happy Camp has ten times the businesses, people, activity, etc… but not one decent coffee house! A local woman has promised to create one but it has been a couple years in the thinking phase, so far. I recently noticed some restaurant equipment being unloaded from her truck and stored in the restaurant space, so maybe something will happen this summer.

So, back to my story - I stopped at the store in Somes Bar and then we took off down the Klamath River Highway, continuing toward Eureka, but we didn’t get very far. We were stopped at the Salmon River Road turnoff by a CalTrans employee who informed us that a landslide would prevent us from continuing down the highway.

Okay… “So is there another way around?” I asked him.

“Take the Ishi Pishi Road,” he said.

He continued to talk and my boyfriend chatted with him. I was anxious to turn around and get on my way but then realized that the man was probably bored and lonely with all that road guarding. I mean, there he was in the wilderness next to this landslide and there was nobody else around anywhere. So the guys chatted a while and eventually we turned around and drove back to the store. People outside there were looking at us. “Yeah, we got told,” I muttered… and I turned onto the Ishi Pishi Road which is on the other side of the store.

The map shows Ishi Pishi Road, which is just west of the closed Highway 96. Google tells me it is 6.9 miles, taking about sixteen minutes to drive.

We drove past a couple of hitch hikers (sorry guys but my boyfriend isn’t into picking them up) and over a bridge, then were on the road to Orleans. The road is one-lane, narrow, paved (thankfully,) but with no lines painted on. When you meet someone going the other way someone has to sidle up to the cliff and edge around - hopefully gracefully - and if you’re lucky there’s a very narrow turnout. Aside from that, there’s always the backing up option. Fortunately we didn’t have that experience and managed to get through just fine though my boyfriend was upset because I was driving. He’s a former professional truck driver and thinks he knows it all about driving! (He does, but believe me, sometimes I just don’t want to hear it!)

After a few miles on this road he was saying, “I don’t like it. I think we should turn back.”

I shuddered. I hadn’t driven more than forty miles just to turn around and go home. I wanted to go have some fun at the coast! I rarely get to go out of town - and living in the middle of a forest gets claustrophobic at times. A trip out of town is a very special event! I managed to convince him it was okay to keep going. I’d been on Ishi Pishi Road once before, about nine years ago.

“It isn’t all that long,” I told him.

Not long after we got onto the Ishi Pishi Road we were able to see the landslide on the other side of the river. WOW. That hillside came down and covered the entire road, and continued on down to the river. A very impressive mess! It happened two weeks before we got there, but nothing had been done to fix the problem. We passed a surveyor on Ishi Pishi Road. I don’t know how surveying helps… but apparently they’re being very cautious on how they’re going about correcting this problem.

The photo is by a CalTrans worker (fair use, government property!) … I found it at this article about the slide, which includes a video of the slide in progress!

After about twenty minutes (seemed like an hour) we finally got to the end of twisty, narrow Ishi Pishi Road. It curved around down the hillside into the very small town of Orleans, and we turned right to continue on our way to the coast. After Orleans we pass through Weitchpec, originally a Yurok village, and then Hoopa, a Native American reservation town. The next town is Willow Creek. In that town we went to visit a Bigfoot research and blogging friend, Steven, at his Bigfoot Books store a few miles east of town. It was the first time my boyfriend (and Bigfoot research partner) had met Steven so they talked for a long time while I looked for art books, then herb books, then yoga books… and I even got a Bigfoot book. I’ll put links to the books I bought at the end of this story.

After that we went to Arcata, ate dinner, and got ready to return. On the way back we stopped at the Blue Lake Casino from which I emerged about fifty dollars richer. Here’s my casino tip: twenty dollars, twenty minutes. If you don’t win in the first twenty minutes, get out. The longer you stay the more chi is expended from your energy stores, and the longer they have to send you subliminal “spend money” messages. And don’t spend more than twenty dollars. Also, if you win anything, leave immediately. If you win you think you’ll win more and then spend all your winnings trying. Don’t do it! Take the money and run!

Anyhow, I won, took my money, and was happy that it paid for my gasoline and dinner in Eureka. So we made our way back up the hill toward Willow Creek, noticing intermittent snow flurries. I’d seen them on the way down too. Nothing big or spectacular - just a few small flakes. Nothing to even slow down for.

In Willow Creek we stopped for gas and then took off down Highway 96, the Bigfoot Scenic Byway, heading for home. Perhaps I should mention that it is a three and one-half hour drive from Eureka to the town we live near, Happy Camp. In Hoopa my boyfriend took over the wheel, and I settled back for a pleasant drive home.

As he turned onto Ishi Pishi Road in Orleans, the snow started coming down again. Before long, it took on blizzard proportions, and there we were on the one-lane mountain road with no lines on it, at night, with drastically reduced visibility due to all the white stuff swirling around us. At that point I was glad that my boyfriend, the ex-truck driver, was driving, but still I decided it was time to pray. As we drove on, the snow got thicker and started to stick to the ground. As the non-driver I was instructed to keep an eye out for deer, and was reprimanded by the nervous driver when I wanted to listen to my SanDisk - Sansa Fuze to help me calm down. Okay, no music! Prayers… probably a better idea anyway!

We finally got to the end of the Ishi Pishi Road - I was so happy about that - and turned onto the Klamath River Highway - we still had another 40 miles of cliffs and twists and turns - but at least now there was a set of lines on the road to help guide us. There have been a lot of really terrible accidents on this road, even with better weather. If you go over the cliff side it is a long way down, so to be precise, I’d have to say I was as terrified as I’ve ever been in this life. I don’t particularly like the road on a good day; but on a day when you can barely see five feet in front of you because of the swirling oncoming large snowflakes reflecting in the headlights, it was very, very scary.

Well, as you can tell, I got home safely and there was only one stretch with snow covering over the lines on the highway. As we got closer to home there was less snow falling, and that helped a lot.

On the way home I didn’t want to mention it but once we felt safe again I asked, “You didn’t happen to look at the weather report before we left today, did you?” He sort of growled at me. Neither of us had expected snow because the weather recently had been so warm and spring-like.

I told him, “I think this happened for a reason - to teach me to trust you and God more.” After all, he’d had the intuition, when we were heading out, that Ishi Pishi Road wasn’t a great route and that we should turn back. In the future, I will definitely be listening for his intuitions, because apparently they are better than mine.

…

Here, as promised, are the books I bought at Bigfoot Books in Willow Creek. It is a used bookstore and as you can see most of these are out of print but still available through Amazon.

Looks like I got a bargain on that Herb Bible! Thank-you, Steven! It is a beautiful book…
…

Earlier this month I reached my limit of patience with weight gain. My clothes were getting tighter and I had to do something to turn things around. Being as I was particularly desperate, I decided to cleanse my system with the Lemonade Diet. Ever heard of it?

I first heard of the Lemonade Diet (aka: Master Cleanse or The Master Cleanser) on an Internet message board about two and a half years ago. The person writing there warned that it wasn’t for everyone. I agree, because it takes incredible determination and commitment that most people won’t have. The process is somewhat grueling, but the results are a much cleaner body, internally.

Actually, once the fast starts, after a day or two, there’s not much desire for food… so it usually isn’t hunger that’s difficult. I don’t want to go into all the particulars of the fasting process, but it is complex and people indulging in this process are encouraged to get the definitive book on the topic, The Master Cleanser, and read it through first.

The book, which is more like a semi-thick booklet, was first published in 1976 by Stanley Burroughs. It claims that cleansing the body through fasting is “basic for the elimination of every kind of disease.” He wrote that the Lemonade Diet started over forty years before as a cure for stomach ulcers. The diet takes ten days to heal. Ten days is the minimum, though many people fast longer, up to forty days, and even beyond.

The Lemonade Diet is also an effective weight loss diet, and that’s what I needed. The book states “fat melts away at the rate of about two pounds a day” and during the first few days of my fast, that was true for me. Toward the end of my ten-day fast it slowed down a bit, but I was happy to lose thirteen pounds in ten days. That’s a start.

The lemonade recipe is simple, and here’s my generalized version of it. Take the juice of two medium sized lemons, add two to four tablespoons of real maple syrup (to taste, with less if you want to lose weight), add water to make one quart, and add a tiny tiny tiny bit of cayenne. I’ve seen other versions of this recipe on the web wherein a bit of salt is added, and it is considered an electrolyte replacement drink (like Gator-Aid). But with the Lemonade Diet, add no salt.

This is what I drank for ten days straight. We’re supposed to drink six to twelve cups per day. I figured that meant at least three lemons. I personally had trouble drinking more than six cups. I supplemented with cold spring water. Lots of it. We’re allowed a cup of peppermint tea once daily. Plus we have to do an internal cleansing routine consisting of laxative tea at night plus a salt water flush in the morning. This is very effective in getting toxins to move on out of the body. It is essential to the success of the fast because detox symptoms build up if the salt water flush isn’t used.

The back of Burroughs’ Master Cleanser book contains information on how to break the fast, recipes for sustaining healthy eating after the fast, and other health information. It is all good advice… and don’t forget, if you plan to do the fast, reading the book first is very important.