Vibrant Health and Lasting Love for Valentines Day

How are you celebrating Valentine’s day?

Mine started with a delicious smoothie made by my beloved, followed by 2 beautiful bouquets of flowers..one for downstairs and one for my office.  Then to top it off, there was a beautiful plate of fruit, a wine glass filled with fresh coconut water and connect time with him.

I don’t know about you, but for me connection time and acts of love are my love language.  They say so much more than lavish gifts!

And to further celebrate, we have a new addition tot eh family who is due to arrive momentarily followed by a romantic raw foods gourmet meal at  Beets Cafe.  Here’s the menu.

Valentine’s Day Menu

Our Prix Fixe Four Course Gourmet Dinner:

Dolmas filled with Wild Rice Pilaf

Petite Arugula Cesar Salad with Carrot Gnocchi Croutons

Cheese Ravioli with Herbed Macadamia Cream Sauce
and
Pistachio Parsley Salad

Chocolate Lava Cake with Raspberry Glaze

Off to feel the love.

Big hugs and lots of love

Dr. Ritamarie

Raw Food Recipe: Dairy Free Coconut Mango Pudding

Naturally  gluten free and dairy free, this raw food recipe using fresh mango and young Thai coconut is heavenly.  And the best part is how easy it is to make.   I made this for dinner one evening when I felt like I’d had enough greens for the day and could splurge.

Two of my favorite foods are mango and coconut.  Not sure why I hadn’t thought of making a pudding from them before.  Eating this creamy pudding made me feel like I was in Hawaii.  Oh, yes, I also loved the coconut water that comes as a bonus when you make this pudding.

Dr. Ritamarie’s Coconut Mango Pudding

Ingredients

• 1 ripe mango
• 2 young Thai coconuts

Instructions

1. Peel and pit the mango.
2. Cut mango into blender-manageable chunks.  This will vary depending on the type and size of your blender.  The Vitamix can handle big chunks.
3. Cut open the Thai coconuts.  There are lots of methods.  Spend some time on you tube and find one that suits you.
4. Pour the coconut liquid into a glass.  Sip as you make the pudding.  Ahhhhh!!!
5. Scoop out the coconut flesh and put into your blender.
6. Add just enough of the coconut water to allow the ingredients to blend easily.  Save the rest to enjoy as a delightful beverage.
7. Blend until smooth and creamy.
8. Enjoy.

We have additional pudding and dessert recipes in our new book “Dessert- Making it Rich Without Oil”.  With over 50 raw foods recipes, perfect for anyone on a gluten free diet and everyone who, in the interest of health, desires to avoid sweeteners and refined foods.

It’s easy and fun to consume  a diet high in raw and living foods.  The big advantage is with recipes like this, you can have dessert instead f dinner!  Just make sure you eat plenty of greens earlier in the day.

With Love and Gratitude,

Dr. Ritamarie

Raw Foods Classes: Pictures of Dairy Free Cheeses Continued

Raw Dairy Free Cheese is as delicious as it looks.  Here are more pictures of the recipes we’ll make in Cheese:  Dairy Free, No Guilt.

I love spreading the cheeses on chia crackers, like those we teach in Dried and Gone to Heaven.

Layered “Cheese” with Pesto and Sun Dried Tomato

Cheese Ball

Feta Cheese

Cheddar Cheese Slices with Blueberries

Register HERE for Cheese: Dairy-Free,  No Guilt.

Both the Live class and the  Online Broadcast include online videos afterward and full color, beautifully photographed recipe guide.  Live class includes generous samples.

Raw Foods Diet: Should you consume Raw Dairy Products?

There’s a lot of disagreement amongst health professionals about the role of dairy products in human nutrition.  Some believe dairy is a cornerstone to strong bones and teeth; others believe it to be a poison to be avoided at all costs.

My personal opinion, based on over 25 years of research and clinical application is that dairy products are not a good idea for humans.  I strongly believe that species specific milk is an ideal food for infants of that species.  In nature we rarely see cross species milk consumption, except in the rare case of when a nursing mother animal takes on the care of an animal whose mother has been killed, leaving behind her newborns.

Animals in nature do not drink milk after weaning.

Species specific milk is ideally suited for the physical and brain development of that species.  One of the clearest explanations I’ve seen is in a set of YouTube videos called Udderly Amazing with Dr. Walter J. Veith. There are 8 videos in the series.

Video 2 explains why drinking milk of any species after weaning is a bad idea.  He discusses casein, the primary protein in cow’s milk, and how that effects human growth.  He offers a nice chart that compares the milk of different species alongside the typical growth rate for that species.  Feeding cow’s milk to human babies causes their bodies to grow rapidly and their brains to grow more slowly.

Here’s a good video by Dr. Mark Hymen, MD on the subject of the adverse effects of dairy on humans.

In it he references evidence that drinking milk does not result in better bone health, as is widely believed,  and shares an overview of the link between dairy consumption, insulin like growth factor and cancer rates.

Eliminating dairy from your diet is an effective way to increase your energy and boost your zest for life!  It will also decrease your health care costs in the long run.  Eliminating dairy can reduce allergies and decrease your risk of autoimmune disease, cancer, heart disease and diabetes.

Many people believe that as long as the dairy is raw and organic that it’s ok to consume.  I disagree.  While raw and organic is certainly better than commercial dairy, there are still problems.  One is the casein.  Raw or heated, casein is allergenic, contains opiate like peptides, called caseomorphin that appears to act as a histamine releaser and has been implicated as a cancer promoter.

If you choose to consume dairy products, it’s best to limit to raw, organic and fermented or cultured products, such as raw organic goat yogurt or kefir.

Making the shift away from milk is not that difficult for many people.  There is such a wide variety of milk substitutes to choose from.  Typically, when you enter a grocery store, there will be almond milk, soy milk, rice milk, hemp milk, and sometimes even coconut milk on the shelf.  There are sweetened and unsweetened options and some milks come in different flavors.

If you would rather try to avoid the processed milk substitutes at the grocery store, you can make always make one yourself.  It is a fairly easy process to do at home.  You just need the right tools.  Basically, a nut milk bag and a blender is all you need.  You’d be surprised at how simple it really is.

The hardest part of eliminating dairy for most people is letting go of cheese.  Cheese seems to be an almost universal comfort food! Cheese and crackers, wine and cheese, or simply cheese by itself has an appeal unlike no other food.

Great tasting cheese substitutes are harder to find.  Most of the cheese substitutes sold at the store are highly processed and are not even really dairy-free because they contain casein, the protein extracted from cow’s milk that’s used to make them creamy. Casein is the protein that causes dairy allergy symptoms as well as many of the problems Dr. Veith discusses in his video. It seems like it would defeat the purpose to make a cheese substitute with casein in it. There are a few almond or rice based cheese substitutes, but they’re all highly processed and they include iffy ingredients like canola oil.

If you have a blender and are willing to invest about a half hour a week, you can learn to make your own cheese substitute right in your home kitchen!  Your dairy-free cheese substitute includes probiotics to boost your digestive system and other nutrient dense ingredients that will promote health and energy.  You can make cheese from raw nuts and seeds, probiotics, some lemon juice, seasonings and binders like psyllium husk and a sea vegetable called Irish moss.  These cheeses are so delicious and bursting with nutrition.  They support digestive as well as immune system health.  And they’re easy to make, once you know how.

I’ve teamed up with Chef Karen Osborne to teach our secret cheese making techniques on January 16.  The live class is in Austin, Texas and it will also be broadcast over the internet and available on digital video afterward.  We’ll be teaching recipes for soft ricotta like cheese (we use it to make ravioli), cheese ball rolled in nuts, white and cheddar cheese blocks, macadamia nut feta cheese, Swiss cheese slices and a beautiful party spread made with a white cheese layered with pesto and sun dried tomatoes.

These cheeses taste fantastic.  Karen gifted me with two types of cheese as a Christmas gift.  One was a spreadable block and the other was firm enough to cut into slices.  I enjoyed both on chia crackers, topped with sunflower sprouts!  I couldn’t get enough.  It was such a great feeling to enjoy the tangy creaminess of cheese, knowing it’s so nutritious.

If you can’t make the class, you can register for the online videos and the pdf e-book with all the recipes.  We’re offering a discount for early sign-up.

Sign-up for Raw Cheese Making Class HERE

Adrenal Fatigue: Tips to Restoring Your Energy and Your Health

Do you ever wake in in the morning, even after a long night of sleep, only to feel sluggish and wishing you had another few hours to rest?

This is one of many signs of adrenal fatigue.

Adrenal fatigue is a common condition in our fast paced, stressed out society.

Your adrenal glands are your body’s mechanism for responding to stressful situations.  In the olden days, this meant getting chased by a tiger or dealing with severe cold without shelter or proper clothing.

Fortunately for us, tigers and lack of clothing are not problems we deal with on a regular basis.

Unfortunately we have our own modern day tigers, and they chase some of us 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

Modern Day Tigers that Stress Your Adrenals

• Deadlines at work?
• Juggling kids schedules with your own?
• Worry about the economy?
• A sick parent or child?
• An unreasonable boss?

Whatever it is, the response is similar to a real tiger chasing you.  Your adrenal glands step into action and do what they do best…shift you into what is often called “fight/flight mode”, and in scientific terms, “sympathetic nervous system dominance”.

In hyper vigilant adrenal state, your heart rate increases, your respiration quickens and the blood supply to your brain and vital organs decreases and is sent to your extremities…so you can run away or fight.

In addition, your digestive track activity decreases and the sphincters– the valves between sections of the digestive tract– tighten.  This is to protect you from needing to use the bathroom in the middle of running away from or fighting a tiger.

Translate this into modern life.  If you find yourself stressed out and worried quite a bit of the time, you increase your risk of indigestion, constipation, gas and bloating as well as heart and circulation problems due to prolonged increased heart rate.

Oh, and I forgot to mention.  In fight flight mode, your sex drive goes away, too.

Doesn’t help to be having lustful thoughts when you’re trying to get away from that tiger.  On a biochemical level, the same chemical molecules that make the adrenal hormone cortisol, which gets elevated under stress, are also needed to make estrogen, progesterone and testosterone, all needed for libido and reproductive function.

Another problem with cortisol is that in excess it can cause damage to your mitochondria, the energy producing mechanisms in each of your cells.  Cortisol also damages your hippocampus, the part of your brain that helps with short term memory.  Ever walk into a room, only to forget what you went there for?  That’s likely because your hippocampus has been impeded by the cortisol you produced when you were stressed out.

Yikes!  SO if this is you, what can you do to fix things?

In my over two decades of clinical practice, I’ve seem many cases of adrenal burnout and the damages caused by chronic stress.

Fortunately there are actions you can take reverse the damage and repair your adrenal glands.  But if you keep getting stressed out, you’ll be a lot like a hamster on a wheel….working hard but never getting anywhere. Repairing your adrenals and transforming your response to stress take some time and retraining, and the transformations you experience when you do can be miraculous.

3 Tips for Combating Adrenal Fatigue

1- Learn stress management and stress transformation techniques. One of my favorites is called Heart Math, and uses a combination of deep breathing, focusing on your heart and feeling appreciation.  It completely changed my life.  I did a 90 minute stress transformation teleseminar a couple of years ago that guided the participants through the process and the response was dramatic.

2- Nourish your adrenals. Did you know that 80% of the vitamin C used in your body is used by your adrenal glands?  Excessive stress depletes your vitamin C stores and can lead to allergies, poor wound healing, easy bruising and increased susceptibility for colds, flu and other infectious disease?  Your adrenals also use lots of B vitamins, especially pantothenic acid and B6.  That’s why a lot of B complex formulas are called Stress formulas.  Eating a whole foods, high raw, high green diet will ensure you have adequate intake of nutrients to maintain your adrenals when they are brought back to normal;however, when you’re in the mode of recovery, supplementation is often needed.

3- Support your body’s detoxification systems by periodic cleansing. Face it, eating on the run, making even occasional poor food choices and being stressed out impair your liver’s ability to do it’s job of cleansing.  One of my favorite ways to cleanse my body is with green  smoothies. Even though I eat really healthfully, exercise on a regular basis, and do my Heart Math exercises daily, I’m not perfect.  I still get stressed out sometimes, I’m exposed to toxins and I eat on the run more often than I’d like.

I personally do a Green Cleanse at least quarterly by taking a week off eating and just drinking green smoothies or juices for 7 days.  I am always amazed at how much more energy I have when I do this.  That’s why every 3 months, I lead a group green smoothie cleanse.  I have hundreds of success stories from people who feel they got their life back after a green cleanse.  This time around I’ve added a new component – daily interactive journals.  The details about the cleanse, go to my Green Smoothie Cleanse Website.

If you’ve already done a green cleanse or a short cleanse and are ready to take it to the next level, I suggest you do a deep tissue detox like my Six Week Deep Tissue Detox or something similar.

Bedtime and Wake-up Rituals for Adrenal Fatigue Support

One last tip for rebuilding your adrenals – create supportive bedtime and morning rituals that re-establishes
your circadian rhythm. Here’s a starting set that I recommend to my adrenal fatigue patients:

1. Shut off all electronics within an hour of bedtime.
2. Eat your last meal within 3 hours of bedtime.
3. Fill a 16 ounce glass with pure water and the juice of 1 lemon and put it by your bedside.
4. Find 3 things to appreciate before you fall asleep.
5. Find 3 things to appreciate before you get out of bed.
6. Drink the water as soon as you get up.
7. As soon as you get up, go outside and get 5 – 15 minutes of sun, even if the sun is not out.  Face in the direction of the sun and sip your water.

Get going on these habits, cleanse regularly and master the Heart Math techniques and you’ll soon be bouncing out of
bed in the morning with vim, vigor and enthusiasm for life.

I hope to meet you soon on a green smoothie cleanse.

Love, Health and Joy,

Dr. Ritamarie