COVID Comfort Food

iHop's Cereal Pancakes

Why do some people deal with Coronavirus so well? The answer is simple - they have strong immune systems.

During our enforced stay-at-home, so many of my friends have been posting their comfort foods on social media. One friend dreamed of this blue concoction - image above - from iHop. Another posted a fluffernutter sandwich - peanut butter and marshmallow on white bread. One friend, who does yoga and wears her mask faithfully, consumes a candy bar for breakfast now and then.

Fluffernutter Sandwich

We all have our comfort foods. I do too. I always say that it’s our favorite food and drink that will get us in the end. But, it’s been two months of quarantine and it really is about time to stop eating fake food comfort foods.

Pizza. How many pizzas have been sold during lockdown? Can you believe that pizza makers have sold record numbers of pizzas during COVID? 

Frozen Pizza

It’s hard to believe that Americans could actually eat more pizza.

Americans have bought approximately $275 million worth of frozen pizza since the start of the coronavirus pandemic in March. That’s an increase of 92 percent compared to the same time last year. 

“It’s incredible,” says Gina Bolger, vice president of branding for Home Run Inn Pizza in the Detroit area, which is churning out as many as 85,000 pizzas a day at its 60,000-square-foot factory in Woodridge, Illinois.

“We equate this to every day being like Super Bowl Sunday — the orders don’t stop. The demand is through the roof. We’re trying to keep up as best we can,” she says. 

And, that’s just frozen pizza. Pizza parlors have also been delivering take-out!

What do fluffernutters, iHop pancakes and frozen pizza have in common? They’re not real food. They’re fake oils made in the lab.

Let’s face it - Americans are not eating real food. 

Many Americans have NEVER eaten real food.

Take the fluffernutter - most peanut butter on the supermarket shelf has very little actual peanuts in it. It’s a fake oil made to taste like peanuts whipped to a dreamy texture with lots of sugar to make it the most popular brand. The same with pizza cheese - very little actual dairy. In fact, dairy has very little actual dairy since the cows do not graze on growing grass and are fed hormones, antibiotics and Genetically Modified corn and soy (in no way their natural diet).

What Americans are eating all day every day are fake oils created in the lab and flavored to resemble the thing they think they’re eating whether that is peanut butter or cheese, ice cream or cake, breakfast cereals or donuts, tacos or hot dogs.

Fake oils are not human nutrition. We can eat them occasionally without creating too many problems in the body, but they do not nourish our bodies. 

Fake oils made in the lab create lots of excess mucus in the body during illness when your body is trying to get the mucus out, i.e. the lung phase of the coronavirus when breathing can become so difficult. These fake foods are also flavored with large amounts of salt and artificial lab-created flavorings, i.e. chemicals, which can create more mucus in the body.

Meat is another culprit. Meat has huge amounts of salt already in it before meat products are flavored again with more salt and chemicals. Meat eating has been linked to the occasional overactivity of the immune system in COVID patients that die suddenly after seeming to be improving.

What is really happening when a young person contracts the coronavirus and does well for a while but then crashes and dies? The doctors say that young person was "healthy and had no previously existing conditions.” But, they were NOT healthy and DID have a previous condition which was malnutrition and a compromised immune system.

The key to dealing with the Coronavirus is to strengthen your immune system.

It’s so simple and we all learned it in school. I can’t help thinking - There are two kinds of people in the world: those who paid attention in school and those who didn’t.

1. The Triangle of Health: Nutrition, Sleep, Exercise has always been a basic part of my life and it’s so simple, though not always easy to implement. Often, we can’t get the sleep we need, nor do we have time to exercise. However, nutrition should never be allowed to slacken. 

2. The Healthy Plate:

Though recently re-emerged from Harvard, this simple plate has been with me since elementary school. I have, since then, updated my protein from meat to a healthy vegetable protein of beans, or occasional good quality fish. (Our fish supply has also been usurped by factory farms, so it is not as easy to find good fish as it used to be. Be careful: good fish looks good and smells fresh and clean; its edges are moist, not dry and curled; it smells sweet, not fishy; the flesh is white, not yellow or rubbery.

We must make the effort to find good food! Real whole foods at places like Whole Foods, Trader Joe's, good quality markets, co-ops, buy directly from the farm if you have to! You'll be surprised how many are delivering during COVID lockdown!

3. Fresh air! Open a window! Get that fresh air circulating in your home! (Remember, the worst places for COVID deaths - stuffy, stale, enclosed spaces with recycled “air” - old age homes, airplanes, factories, hotels, cruise ships and, the worst - HOSPITALS!) 

4. Sunshine! Go outside! If you can’t go outside, open a window and stick your head out! Ten minutes a day is enough to get Vitamin D to strengthen your immune system. Even on cloudy days, enough sun gets through.

Years ago, I lived near a convenience store and would see construction workers - otherwise, strong healthy young men - coming out of the store with their lunches of huge bags of chips and a bottle of Coke, as Jay Leno used to say, “Bigger than their bladder!” 

You can eat chips or Twinkies or frozen pizza for your meals if you like or you may choose health.

You don’t really have to give up all meat. Choose wisely. Better cuts, organic chicken, good quality fish. Adding brown rice to your plate will begin to change you in amazing new ways!

You really don’t have to give up your comfort foods. Just limit them. After a while, you’ll notice the difference in the way you feel after you eat that Cap’n Crunch pancake stack compared to how much better you feel after a good dinner of brown rice, broiled fish and salad, strawberries for dessert; you won’t dream about iHop any more. 

Other sources for good healthy choices are:

Denny Waxman's macrobiotic cookbook, The Ultimate Guide to Eating for Longevity: The Macrobiotic Way to Live a Long, Healthy, and Happy Life

If you wish to start macrobiotics - with personal advice and guidance - dennywaxman.com. 

Allen Campbell: Nutrition Studies Allen Campbell was Tom Brady's nutrition coach and chef. His advice on inflammatory foods has helped me a great deal with any occasional pain.

Hip Chicks Guide to Macrobiotics

Aveline Kushi's Complete Guide to Macrobiotic Cooking: For Health, Harmony, and Peace

Edward Esko online Coronavirus Lecture. 

©Patricia Goodwin, 2020

Patricia Goodwin is the author of When Two Women Die, about Marblehead legends and true crime and its sequel, Dreamwater, about the Salem witch trials and the vicious 11-year-old pirate Ned Low. Holy Days is her third novel, about the sexual, psychological seduction of Gloria Wisher and her subsequent transformation. Her newest poetry books are Telling Time By Apples, And Other Poems About Life On The Remnants of Olde Humphrey Farme, illustrated by the author, and Java Love: Poems of a Coffeehouse.

Patricia has been a practicing macrobiotic for 46 years. 

Within this blog, Patricia writes often about non-fiction subjects that inspire or disturb her, hopefully informing and inspiring people to be happy, healthy and free. 

***Disclaimer: The information on this blog is not meant to substitute for medical care. Please consult your physician before beginning any new dietary guidelines. 

Nostradamus Says, “Wash Your Hands!” and “Don’t Eat Meat!”

Nostradamus

When my daughter first went to school, I asked her many questions about her first day, including if the teacher had led them down to the bathroom to wash their hands before lunch.

She looked at me as though I had just suggested something very weird, like did they all jump off the roof?

“No,” she said.

“No!” My turn to be astonished. “You didn’t wash your hands before lunch? How about after lunch?”

“No.”

I felt like a very fussy old lady who’d been taught by a bunch of other fussy old ladies. (That could be true. But, fussy old ladies are often right.)

I have recalled this incident several times during the news about the coronavirus. I know that children are doing very well with the illness because they are exposed to so many germs every day that their immune systems have responded to that exposure by getting stronger. Yes, they are getting well faster than other more vulnerable groups like the sick and the elderly. But, generally speaking, they do get sick a lot! My daughter was never sick until she started school. Then, she got sick every few weeks from something that was going around the classroom. 

Of course, she also got well. Often, not easily. A few times, I slept with my face on her bed to listen to her breathing. I wiped her brow with a cold face cloth, her neck, the inside of her elbows, to reduce fever. Of course, I used medicine too. And diet. As a practicing macrobiotic, my child has been macrobiotic since before birth. We ate and still eat very simply at home: brown rice, vegetables, beans, sea vegetables, occasionally fish when good quality fish can be found. When she was sick, I fed her simple, clean foods to get her well and strong, usually brown rice and veggies, and fruit.

But, why is this article titled “Nostradamus Says Wash Your Hands and Don’t Eat Meat?”

Nostradamus, besides being a prophet, was also a renown physician. Born in 1503, in France, the son of a grain merchant, Nostradamus was well educated in both Hebrew and Christian religions as well as Latin, Greek, astronomy and mathematics. At the age of 14, he entered medical school at Avignon where he pretended to learn all the wrong things in order to pass. As the son of a grain merchant, I like to think Nostradamus had a background in good quality food and cooking. He certainly had strong common sense. Nostradamus couldn’t hang around medical school and wait for his degree; he had to get out there - medieval France and Italy - and cure the Bubonic Plague. Nostradamus cured the Bubonic Plague, which had originated from flea bites from flea infested rats, using hygiene: he burned the infected clothing and bedding of plague victims; he encouraged them to wash and keep themselves clean at a time when washing was thought to be dangerous - one’s skin could fall off! He also used immune-strengthening Vitamin C that he had garnered from rose hips; he made his own rose pills and preserves. In order to keep their blood clean, Nostradamus advised his patients to not eat anything unclean, which in those days was a Biblical reference to animal food, that is, meat or anything coming from an animal, such as eggs or dairy. Lastly, and this is vital, plenty of fresh air!

PETA published an important letter today from their Australian Director saying this: 

“The virus, an anagram of carnivorous, appears to have emerged from a fish market that was also selling wild animals such as beavers, porcupines and snakes in the city of Wuhan, in central China. The 2002-2003 SARS pandemic was similarly traced to civet cats. In these markets, urine, faeces and other bodily fluids from live, wild animals end up mixing with blood from butchered ones, providing ideal breeding grounds for viruses and bacteria.

Overwhelmingly, human diseases start with the abuse of animals. Hunting and the appropriation of animals’ habitats has led to diseases such as Hendra and Ebola. The 2009 H1N1 epidemic started in pigs. Measles originally came from cattle, and whooping cough from dogs.” 

And what about that recommendation of fresh air? I can’t help thinking after stories of some of the quarantine situations I’ve read about - including a room in Vietnam that had no running water and no toilet - cruise ships, isolation rooms, army tents, that people being held together, sick and not sick, breathing the same stale, circulating air are just getting more and more sick. One passenger of a docked cruise ship said, “We’re sitting in a petrie dish.”

I mean, Nostradamus was curing the plague in 1536! He was telling people to wash their hands nearly 500 years ago! In Vienna, almost 400 years later, Dr. Semmelweis  couldn’t get doctors to wash their hands after examining cadavers - before they put these filthy hands up inside of women who’d just given birth. The doctors said, “Why wash our hands, they’re just going to get dirty again!” 

Dr. Semmelweis suspected that the death rate for childbirth in his hospital was being exasperated by infection from the examining doctors’ germ-ridded hands. After all, the midwives, who washed their hands frequently, did not have such a high infection and death rate among their new mothers. No one would listen to Dr. Semmelweis who died of the very infection he spent his life trying to prevent.

We are also vulnerable during this time from infections that occur only in hospitals that are resistant to any known antibiotics - resistant, ironically, back to PETA’s warning - because we consume animal products from animals that have been fed so many antibiotics every day, the bacteria become resistant. Why are these animals - usually cows, pigs and chickens - fed antibiotics? Because they live in filthy unnatural conditions with little or no fresh air, often in feces and urine, a veritable disease soup.

Recently, on the PBS talk show Greater Boston, an informative gem readily available to us online and on TV, Stephanie Leydon, WGBH News, talked about super bugs mutating and becoming resistant to drugs, saying, “100 years ago during the Spanish flu outbreak, it wasn’t the flu itself that caused most deaths, but bacterial infections.” https://www.wgbh.org/news/local-news/2020/03/11/coronavirus-surprised-the-world-but-doctors-have-been-sounding-the-alarm-on-another-global-health-threat-for-years

And, here we are. 

There are many sites for information on the coronavirus, much of it erroneous, so I’m going to advise going to the CDC for all coronavirus questions. I cannot speak to you as a medical professional, so I’m going to speak as a mother and as a friend.

We all wash our hands at home. We take off our shoes when we come in the door. I wash my hands whenever I touch something from the outside and before (and after) I touch food. 

The Triangle of Good Health: Nutrition, Sleep, Exercise has always been a basic part of my life and it’s so simple, though not always easy to implement. Often, we can’t get the sleep we need, nor do we have time to exercise. However, nutrition should never be allowed to slacken. Here is a good base for every day nutrition: the Healthy Plate:

Though recently re-emerged from Harvard, this simple plate has been with me since elementary school. I have, since then, updated my protein from meat to a healthy vegetable protein of beans, or occasional good quality fish. (Our fish supply has also been usurped by factory farms, so it is not as easy to find good fish as it used to be. Be careful: good fish looks good and smells fresh and clean; its edges are moist, not dry and curled; it smells sweet, not fishy; the flesh is white, not yellow or rubbery.)

Other sources for good healthy choices are:

Denny Waxman's macrobiotic cookbook, The Ultimate Guide to Eating for Longevity: The Macrobiotic Way to Live a Long, Healthy, and Happy Life

Denny Waxman's Up-coming Macrobiotic Lecture on the Macrobiotic Approach to the Coronavirus, sign-up link, $10 suggested donation (I am not affiliated with this program, nor do I profit from it, except by knowing I’ve given you the info!) 

Allen Campbell: Nutrition Studies Allen Campbell was Tom Brady's nutrition coach and chef. His advice on non-inflammatory foods has helped me a great deal with any occasional pain.

Please do your best and stay well and happy! And remember what Nostradamus says, "Wash Your Hands!" and "Don't Eat Meat!"

Edward Esko live online lecture on Coronavirus.

©Patricia Goodwin, 2020

Patricia Goodwin is the author of When Two Women Die, about Marblehead legends and true crime and its sequel, Dreamwater, about the Salem witch trials and the vicious 11-year-old pirate Ned Low. Holy Days is her third novel, about the sexual, psychological seduction of Gloria Wisher and her subsequent transformation. Her newest poetry books are Telling Time By Apples, And Other Poems About Life On The Remnants of Olde Humphrey Farme, illustrated by the author, and Java Love: Poems of a Coffeehouse.

Within this blog, Patricia writes often about non-fiction subjects that inspire or disturb her, hopefully informing and inspiring people to be happy, healthy and free.

***Disclaimer: The information on this blog is not meant to substitute for medical care. Please consult your physician before beginning any new dietary guidelines. 

Violence Belongs To The Meat-Eaters: I’ve Never Seen A Vegan With A Gun

Jesus Enters Jerusalem, Palm Sunday

It’s Palm Sunday, named after the day Jesus rode into Jerusalem on a donkey and the people placed palms on his path. The donkey symbolized Jesus’ humility, the palms, peace. Talk about a demonstration! Peaceful though it was, it sparked the jealous and paranoid violence of rulers, Roman and Hebrew.

Yesterday, students marched worldwide for an end to gun violence. From Parkland, Florida to Rome, Madrid, London, Paris, and small towns across the planet, children and adults picked up signs and banners to combat violence with love. Paul McCartney appeared in New York City to pay respects to “a good friend of his who was shot nearby.”

When I think of peace marchers, I see pink-hatted men and women with babies on their backs. When I see pro-gun rallies, I see meat-eaters with guns; I see their violence in their screwed-up, screaming faces and their brandishing fists.

Actor, Charlton Heston upholding his rifle

In 1979, when the American hostages were taken in Iran, I remember one of the macrobiotic seniors summing-up terrorism: “They’re eating meat in the desert.”

For a macro, this statement is crystal clear. Meat is extreme yang and for human beings, very hard to digest. The result in the human body is tension, anger, closed-minds, stubbornness, and violence resulting from the continuing eating of meat: dirty blood and all that follows: dehydration, constipation, organ stress and failure, cancer, heart disease and other degenerative diseases. Eating meat causes all that. Eating meat in the desert is not a balanced way, nor a traditional desert way of life. The traditional eating of a desert-dweller, a Bedouin, for instance, is lentils, yogurt (made from goat’s milk), grain, dried fruits and tea. Traditional peoples of most cultures did not slaughter and eat animals on a daily basis. Animals were slaughtered only for special occasions and feast-days. The anger and violence that develop from meat-eating is intense enough without adding the desert to the mix, extreme heat, dangerous dehydration, nor all the drugs most terrorists are taking, including daily captagons, the pill that makes a violent terrorist feel invincible for 24 hours.

To a macro, you’re not really vegan if you’re eating sugar or taking drugs.

Drugs. Here’s where Hitler (50-80 million killed in WWII) and Adam Lanza (who gunned down 20 first-graders and six adults at Newtown's Sandy Hook Elementary School on Dec. 14, 2012) both of whom claimed to be vegan, come in. I remember seeing a vegan video once in which a young woman went through a super-market pointing out all the stuff that was ok for vegans. Most of it was not real food at all, especially the boxes of breakfast cereal she zeroed in on and exclaimed, “Vegan!” No, sorry, not animal, but certainly not vegetable either.

Balance. Please don’t try to be vegan while taking drugs. Macros consider all drugs to be drugs, including the medications Adam Lanza was prescribed – I can see it in his eyes, no need to deny it – or the bowls of pills Hitler gobbled up.  

And don’t consume huge amounts of sugar. And chemicals. You’ll wind up as stable as an inverted triangle.

And, hopefully, not with a gun or nuclear weapons of your own. At home, we wonder about what drugs Trump is on, and his buddy, Kim Jong-un.

Right now, desert terrorists seem to favor a diet of chicken nuggets, Jolt Cola and captagons. I’ll close with an example of the violence chicken nuggets can provoke:

For more on violence and diet, please see my post, Crime and Diet. (Click here.)

©Patricia Goodwin, 2018

Patricia Goodwin is the author of When Two Women Die, about Marblehead legends and true crime and its sequel, Dreamwater, about the Salem witch trials and the vicious 11-year-old pirate Ned Low. Holy Days is her third novel, about the sexual, psychological seduction of Gloria Wisher and her subsequent transformation. Her newest book is Telling Time By Apples, And Other Poems About Life On The Remnants of Olde Humphrey Farme, illustrated by the author.