The Hemp Connection:
antioxidants

Someone on our Facebook page recently asked how you cook kale. And she asked at a perfect time, since we've been getting it almost weekly at Chow Locally, and I've been the one who's been curating recipes and techniques to keep our customers excited!

First of all, a bit about kale. It is actually a type of cabbage that never gets around to forming into a head. In this photo you see curly kale, which is one of the more popular kinds, what you often see used to make kale chips. It comes in a variety of colors and leaf shapes, all of which can be enjoyed!

Here are some of the great things kale can do for you.

1. It can lower your cholesterol.
2. It can lower your risk of cancer.
3. It is a great food for detoxification.
4. It is extremely high in antioxidants — over 45 have already been identified.
5. One cup cooked kale has 1328% of your RDA's for vitamin K, 354% for vitamin A, and 89% of vitamin C. And only 36 calories.

Now that is what I call nutrient dense!

For the longest time, I thought kale was just the pretty gray-green curly stuff you used to decorate party platters, but didn't really eat. Then antioxidants were discovered, and kale topped the charts, and people started deciding, maybe they should figure out how to eat it. It can be a bit of a challenge because it is bitter. Unless you are Kitty, who loves raw kale (this is white peacock kale here), it's best to know a few cooking techniques!

Here are some of the easiest ways to enjoy kale.

1. Juice it. There are a bazillion recipes for juicing kale on the Internet. I am linking you to just one here.

2. Massage it and eat it raw. Interestingly, kale's bitter flavor dials back a bit if you chop it, and massage it with some type of oil until the color pops green. Here is a great blog post with three massaged kale salad recipes, along with more ideas (colcannon, which is mashed potatoes and kale, is a recipe I sent to our customers with this week's box.)

3. Saute it. Super easy, as you can see in this recipe!

4. Make pesto with it. One week we got gorgeous purple peacock kale in our boxes, and it intimidated some of our customers. It's the same vegetable, just a different color, and to demonstrate, I made a purple pesto. You can make this exact same pesto with any kind of kale…curly, dinosaur, peacock, Toscano…because it's still kale!

5. Steam/wilt it. This is one of my all time favorite kale recipes, by Rachel Ray, steamed kale with portobello mushrooms. I often make this dinner!

6. Kale chips. This is all the rage right now. I'm giving you the recipe and I encourage you to try this with any sturdy greens you might have available — kohlrabi and beet have worked very well in my kitchen.
7. Braise it. Braising is a way to slow cook and infuse the flavor of a wine, vinegar, alcohol, broth, or other liquid. I just found this great salsa-braised kale recipe while surfing for this post…it is on my list to try!
I hope this gets you started! Let us know how you end up cooking yours!

Sorry, I couldn't resist that…the slogan"kale is the new beef" has always made me laugh, knowing as soon as the next superfood on the horizon…and its marketers…figure out a way to bump kale out of its current favored superfood slot, it will be pushed to the last word in that slogan!

I was so interested to read a new study this week about a favorite"diet" food, popcorn, that we sometimes think of as being pretty empty nutritionally but something to satisfy the need to crunch. Turns out, popcorn is more than a pretty face, it's got some great antioxidant power!

Some scientist, and I'm guessing someone who's not so fond of green food, decided to run popcorn through antioxidant testing and it scored pretty well! In fact, because the water in fruits and vegetables dilutes the concentration of polyphenols (the type of antioxidant popcorn contains), ounce for ounce, the antioxidant content of dryer popcorn is even higher.

Remember, however, that the way you fix popcorn can quickly detract from this nutritional potential. We're not talking kettle corn here, and we're not talking pre-prepared microwave envelopes, and we're certainly not talking movie popcorn. Here are three ways you can take advantage of popcorn and keep it focused on the good part.

1. Air pop it. Simple enough.

2. Make your own microwave popcorn. Here's a great set of instructions from the Snack Girl blog.

3. Trader Joe's sells a bagged popcorn cooked in olive oil, which I will go for in a pinch.

There you have it, a whole grain, low fat, high fiber, low glycemic, anti-oxidant snack. Enjoy!

American Chemical Society (ACS) (2012, March 25). Popcorn: The snack with even higher antioxidants levels than fruits and vegetables. ScienceDaily. Retrieved March 26, 2012, from http://www.sciencedaily.com­ /releases/2012/03/120325173008.htm#.T3CJEqUT3-M.mailto

At Expo West, I am always as interested in the beauty care section as I am foods. I have come home with lots of great information that I've shared with all of you about how to have the healthiest skin you can. However, Expo West has also taught me that the hype in the beauty industry is as bad, if not worse than, what I work with daily in the food industry.

We are an appearance-based culture, and as a culture we fear aging. That gives the beauty industry a lot of ammunition to work with. A simple promise of younger skin, a suggestion, and magical thinking takes over.

The booths for these products are all beautiful, and the claims sound reasonable. It is only when you get home, away from the lights and the pictures of someone else's flawless skin, that logical questions start to have a chance.

For example, I was very taken by the beautiful orange and white booth of a company called Sibu Beauty. They were selling a product line based on the ingredient"sea buckthorn". This is a berry native to Tibet, with a high anti-oxidant content that helps it to survive the harsh mountain climate.

The big claim of this product line, though, is its high contents of all of the omegas — 3, 6, 9, and 7. Not real fond of omega-6…as you know, it's pro-inflammatory.

Omega-7? Yes, 7. Never heard of it, so I took as much information as I could so I could come home and research more.

Went to the company's website, clicked on the"science" link, found no links to studies specifically supporting their claims, no clinical studies, no before-after pictures.

I did see a photo of a beautiful young woman who likely had yet to see a mark of aging hit her flawless skin and who very likely couldn't point out Tibet on a map if you asked her to.

Here's what bothers me about these companies selling anti-aging programs using ingredients from exotic places like Tibet and the Amazon. If you Google Image pictures of women from these countries, you see beautiful faces like the one to the left, with the history of the elements carved into their expressions. Why do these companies who sell these supplements from these exotic places like Tibet and the Amazon, never show the faces of real people who live there. Shouldn't they be the real testimonials for how these products work?

The site proudly shared that it had been promoted on Dr. Oz. Do you know what it takes to get your product on Dr. Oz? A good PR agent, mostly.

Out of fairness to the man, however, I did watch one of the videos from his sea buckthorn segment. He didn't really talk much about skin, but rather focused on two rats, both who had eaten a high fat diet, one of which managed to stay thin because it had also been given sea buckthorn. So my takeaway here was that Dr. Oz was promoting the concept that you can eat crap as long as you can get your hands on some exotic foreign berry extract. (C'mon, Mehmet, really? I could give you a laundry list of exciting nutritional angles for your show…teaching people who to eat junk and stay thin is not one of them.) I digress. The truth is, Dr. Oz spoke about sea buckthorn in general, not the brand promoting the fact that Dr. Oz promoted the product.

Went to my favorite resource, PubMed, and looked up sea buckthorn. I did see some studies with regard to wound healing, a lot about anti-inflammatory action, and even more about it being therapeutic for ulcers. But no rave reviews for the product as an anti-aging agent. And I even found one study suggesting that skin fatty acid content did NOT respond to sea buckthorn supplementation.

Finally, contacted a good friend in the beauty industry, who has a background in library science and who deconstructs cosmetics labels like I deconstruct food labels. She'd heard of the product, even tried it herself, wasn't impressed.
So here we have a product with proven therapeutic benefit that is not being promoted, being promoted for something completely wacky by a celebrity who knows when he talks miracle weight loss his ratings stay where the advertisers want them, being sold to do something completely unrelated to either by its manufacturer and unproven in clinical studies.
If your head is spinning, it should be. This is an awful lot of smoke and mirrors. If it gets to be this confusing, your hype and fraud radars should be going crazy.

Save your money.

Yang B, Kalimo KO, Tahvonen RL, Mattila LM, Katajisto JK, Kallio HP. Effect of dietary supplementation with sea buckthorn (Hippophaë rhamnoides) seed and pulp oils on the fatty acid composition of skin glycerophospholipids of patients with atopic dermatitis. J Nutr Biochem. 2000 Jun;11(6):338-40.

Sarah Jones and I taught Antioxidant University yesterday. What a blast! Did you know certain yoga poses have been shown to increase your body's antioxidant levels? That's what we practiced with Sarah.

I talked about antioxidants a bit.

Thought I'd share all the antioxidants I found in my own backyard, while walking over to the yoga studio.

With all this at my fingertips… who needs goji and acai?

Rosehips

Pomegranate 

Grapefruit 

Nuts 

Pears

Sunflowers 

Rosemary

Fig 

Kumquats

Eucalyptus 

Dates

When you hear the word"antioxidant", it's likely the word association is there with the following"acai","pomegranate","cherries".

Do you know what your best choices for locally-sourced antioxidants are? Despite what the supplement guys will tell you, you really don't need to get them from ambidextrous Mongolian monks, you know.

Did you know there are non-nutritional antioxidants?

Or behaviorial antioxidants?

What the heck is an antioxidant, anyway?

Come spend a couple of hours with us at our new Santa Monica office, and learn how to equip yourself with an armory of antioxidant power that doesn't break your budget.

We'll even bring you lunch from Veggie Grill.

This is the first installation in our new series,"Traiing Your Mental Athlete", specially designed for high-energy creative types looking to maximize their focus, concentration, and overall creative productivity.

Presenter: Monika M. Woolsey, MS, RD, CEO, inCYST Institute for Hormone Health
Sponsor: BLANKSPACES Coworking Community
Location: 1450 Second Street, Santa Monica, CA
When: Saturday, October 22, 11 am to 1 pm (combine it with a trip to the farmer's market!)

Click here for information on registering to reserve your space. It's limited, so you will want to grab yours ASAP!

After posting yesterday's article one of our Trinidadian readers asked about sorrel…and gave me my research project for the day.

Sorrel is popular in many other places, too, including: Nigeria, Romania, Russia, Hungary, Belgium, and Greece…so hopefully this will put some on more than a few island plates!

Because sorrel is so popular in the Caribbean, it's been studied by the Scientific Research Council of Jamaica and they've found out some interesting things:

-The leaves are high in flavonoids, which means there are antioxidants there! (It's those flavonoids that give sorrel those beautiful red veins you see in the photo.)
-There is some thought that sorrel leaves may have some potent cancer-fighting ability.
-Sorrel tea, popular in many cultures, may help to reduce triglycerides.

I've never even seen it in a store or farmer's market in my part of the world so I've never had an opportunity to experiment with it. Apparently the leaves taste a little bit like strawberry or kiwi fruit. I may have to schedule a reseach trip for this one! In the recipes I've found it's a green that is available primarily in the spring, so I'm a little late in that respect. But I wanted to answer the question while it was being discussed.

Here's a recipe from the Two Small Farms blog that uses a popular favorite, pesto, as a place to include sorrel. Enjoy!

Sorrel Pesto: great as an interesting pasta coating or a thick sauce for fish.

2 cups coarsely chopped fresh sorrel, ribs removed
1/3 cup packed fresh parsley leaves
2 garlic cloves, roughly chopped
1/3 cup freshly grated parmesan
1/4 cup pine nuts
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/4 cup olive oil

In a food processor or blender puree the sorrel, the parsley, the garlic, the parmesan, the pine nuts and the oil, transfer the pesto to a jar with a tight fitting lid and chill it, covered. The pesto keeps, covered and chilled, for 2 weeks. Makes about 1 cup.

To use the pesto: For every pound of dried pasta cooking in a kettle of boiling water, stir together in a heated serving bowl 3/4 cup of the pesto and 2/3 cup of the hot cooking water. When the pasta is al dente, drain it in a colander, add it to the pesto mixture, and toss the mixture until the pasta is coated well. Vermicelli works very well with this recipe.