Is That Acrylamide in Your Coffee?

Now that I've talked you off coffee, let's dive deeper into some of the badness of the stuff. Do you recall the debate that surfaced in 2002 about a potential carcinogen found in fried foods, called acrylamide? There was much sound and fury when the discovery landed on front pages nine years ago, and like Japan's nuclear crisis, it all died down rather fast. Initially, acrylamide was thought to be mostly a problem in French fries (the most commonly eaten food in the US... um, how sad is that?) and potato chips, but it turns out to be present in both regular and decaffeinated coffee too. In fact, 20-40% of your acrylamide consumption appears to be from coffee. Yikers.

Who cares? I care. One study showed greater risk in women of uterine and ovarian cancer with increased acrylamide consumption. Not good.

Problem is this: proving carcinogenicity as causal in humans takes a long, long, long time, and more sinisterly, allows the big Agricultural complex lots of time to administer disinformation and quell fears. The Grocery Manufacturer's Association is one example of this type of campaign. and popped up as the top promoted site on my google search today. They are quick to quote talking heads with credentials (and on their payroll?) that there is no proven risk of acrylamides to humans.

Creepy. When this happens, when a deep-pocketed powerful lobby has a conflict of interest and the science is not fully formed, I favor the Precautionary Principle. In other words,  if an action or policy has a suspected risk of causing harm to the public or to the environment, in the absence of scientific consensus that the action or policy is harmful, the burden of proof that it is not harmful falls on those taking the action, as offered up by Wikipedia.

I also favor the Swedish National Food Authority who first made the discovery of acrylamide in our food when carbs are heated with oil back in 2002. Here's a list of their publications and citations.

While data on human risk is mixed, I'm not so sure we've settled the issue. Even the erstwhile conservative National Institutes of Health states it is  ''reasonably anticipated'' that acrylamide is a human carcinogen. And the Environmental Protection Agency, considers acrylamide, which does cause cancer in test animals, a probable human carcinogen.

I tend to trust European sisters and brothers to uphold the precautionary principle to protect their people more than the US. For instance, they don't import cotton laced with DDT, another known carcinogen, but here in the US, we do. No surprise then that the European Chemicals Agency added acrylamide to the list of substances of very high concern in March 2010.

With thanks to my dear friend, brilliant psychiatrist Seth Robbins MD, who talked over a yummy, hopefully low-acrylamide meal last weekend at Plum about the acrylamide story with me.

Here's the chemical formula of acrylamide for my friends, the science geeks: C3H5NO.

I'll be writing more about acrylamide as I learn more about it, in the meantime, rethink that cup of Joe. And, as always, share with me your insights, concerns, knowledge, delicious coffee suggestions that are acrylamide-free, and general love. xoxox

Cravings 101: Fight the Saboteur

Your saboteur (or as Annie Lamott aptly calls it: KFKD radio) is the one telling you that dumping the junk is a waste of time. Why bother? Who cares? Who does that quack doctor think she is?

The key to counter your saboteur is to get empowered both to recognize and to talk back. Or send your saboteur my way and I'll handle him/her. Your saboteur has no power over me.

Here are some other techniques, from 12-Step food programs, that work for me when the saboteur is after me to just have one bite of chocolate or just a little bite of croissant or a cup of coffee while cleansing.

• Think it through to the bitter end. (This is from 12-Step literature). Rather than indulging in the fantasy and romance of what special food/wine you're craving and how it will taste, think through where your food trip has taken you in the past. Recall the injury. Recall the morning after - the remorse, the bloating, fatigue, hopelessness and shame. For some of us, the morning after includes struggling to zip the jeans.
• HALT: Hungry, Angry, Lonely, Tired. Eat every 4-6 hours so that you don't become hypoglycemic and cranky. If you're angry or lonely, write it out or call someone to talk it through. Sleep more while cleansing - that is when all of your cells reparative work is performed.
• Take action. What's the opposite of eating for you? Leave the scene of previous crimes (the kitch), make a gratitude or joy list (proven to raise your energy vibration), take a bath (I take up to two per day while cleansing with generous scoops of Epsom Salt), take a walk, call a friend.

I wrote yesterday about the physiology of craving, that they tend to last 15-20 minutes, and so I recommend setting a time for 20 minutes, drinking a large glass of water and having instead a small 1oz protein snack such as nuts or seeds or fruit. In other words, set the intention to use your knowledge of physiology to combat your craving and saboteur.

I'm also fascinated by the phenomenon of craving and how it separates temperate or normal eaters from problem eaters (of which I am one - I'm a sometimes compulsive eater). Do you know some normal eaters? Are you one? I have a friend who is a normal eater. She'll eat one small piece of cheese on bread, and stops. No message like crack goes to her brain (like cheese does in my brain - most contain morphine). Here's how Alcoholics Anonymous lays it out, which I believe applies to food, particularly gluten, dairy and sugar (that would include chocolate) items:

• cravings become a habit, usually to soothe restlessness, irritability, malcontent
• one cannot break the habit and it becomes more entrenched
• creates remorse -> bargaining -> craving -> sometimes binge cycle
• erodes self confidence
• we become more reliant on self will which often doesn't work
• problems pile up
• finally, it becomes astonishingly difficult to solve the problem; psychic change, as Jung stated, may be the only solution

Another way to look at psychic change is to borrow a concept from the buddhists: when faced with difficulty and suffering, seek refuge in the Buddha (or Higher Power, of your own understanding in the 12-step literature). If that doesn't work, seek refuge in the Dharma (or sacred texts, some literature which speaks to you and your suffering, offers a solution). If that doesn't work, seek refuge in the Sangha.

We are a Sangha, our sweet group of Cleansers.

Those are just a few ideas to work with as we march closer to our first official day of smoothies twice per day. In many ways, the 7-day pre-cleanse is the hardest part of the 21-day cleanse because you are navigating 3 meals per day while dumping gluten, dairy, caffeine, sugar and alcohol.

Are you skin brushing? Drinking your hot water with lemon and cayenne? Taking your detox packets twice/day? Stocking up on seasonal vegetables? Stepping away from the microwave?

Keep up the awesome work, and share with me in the Comments section what's working well, what's hard, what's neutral, what's charged.

On Cleansing, D#0

A Hindu Scholar named Swami Adiswarananda once said that we must renounce what we've been doing for something that feels better. None of us renounces what feels good for something that feels worse.

His words frame my entry into the official start of our Gottfried Cleanse tomorrow, which is designed to balance your hormones and reduce your toxic load. You can join us via webinar at any time up to March 30. 2011 by clicking right here. I am going to post daily, Monday-Friday, on what is happening while I cleanse for the next 21 days: what comes up, what I'm working with, what about my relationship to food (and self-realization) is shifting, what I'm learning as I transcend the desire for food that makes me ill.

Today I asked our cleansers to start with an inventory of their relationship to food. Here are some questions to consider (please let us know your responses in our comments section!):

• POWER What makes you feel most powerful when reviewing how you eat and your relationship to food? When do you shine with food; what best serves you?
• HARM What is chronic, charged, repetitively not serving you in how you feed yourself?
• STOP What would you like to stop eating or doing with food? Examples: eating standing up, eating in the car while speeding to school to get your kids there on time, drinking 2 glasses of wine when 1 would have been fine.
• FEEL How do you want to feel with food?

Meanwhile, we talked about many fun and practical things that I wanted to share, for instance:

• For getting off caffeine over the next 7 days, meet or re-introduce yourself to the many detoxifying benefits of skin brushing. One cleanser from Oregon tells me there's no Whole Foods Market near her, so could I help a girlfriend out and give a link to where to obtain one. Here you go. Today on our webinar, I demonstrated how to dry skin brush, but my tiny little video didn't quite do it justice - so here's another video on it.
• Eat lotsa greens! Here's a favorite recipe from an old post on massaged greens. Share other fave recipes in our comments section!
• Breakfast ideas. When I'm cleansing, I eat 1 oz dry of quinoa flakes or gluten-free oats (when "wet" they usually weigh 5-6 oz) with 6oz of berries, 10 almonds and 2-3T of flax seeds. I add 2 poached eggs.
• There are significant risks from eating off food cooked on teflon-coated pans. Much better alternative: Scan Pan. Here's a link to scan pans at Sur La Table.

Some come back and join the dialogue as we transform your relationship to food, which I believe is foundational to both hormone organization and self-realization!

MOTHS-R-US: Addiction as Initiation

Love this one-liner from Pema Chodron, about how we're insanely, wildly, immaturely, naively, passionately drawn to things that harm us just as a moth is to flame. All of us are addicts in one way or another, whether the object is sugar, our favorite TV show, struggle, excess carbon footprint, negative thinking, anger, violence, cabernet savignon, fashionable clothing, fantastically taut skin, scones, or any escape of your choice.

Here's a common scene in my life 5-10 years ago: It's Friday night. I'm hungry. I get home from a hard day of work. Kids screaming, irritable from a long week at school. Husband not home yet. I deserve a glass of wine. "I'll stop at one glass," I tell myself. I pour a glass while I made dinner and cajole kids into setting the table. I munch on the food I'm making while I cook dinner. I drown the glass of wine. I pour another. I eat an entire meal "tasting" the food I'm cooking. Husband comes home. He's stressed out and wants to transition. Glass of wine for him. We sit down to eat. I eat my second dinner with my husband and kids. I finish my second glass of wine. The bottle is nearly empty. I stop there. I eat dessert instead, perhaps two servings. "I'll diet tomorrow!" I tell myself cheerfully!

I wake up the next morning: hung over from the alcohol and the excess food and the dessert. I'm cranky, but worse than that, I'm full of remorse, frustration, even despair.

Ultimately, we want peace, happiness and joy, right? Yet our goal and methods often don't jive. We often find ourselves, very humanly, unable to say "no" to something harmful. We figure out with time that willpower, fear and the forced march of the latest diet fail us.

How do get our goal for peace and method to align better? How do we transmute our addictions into initiation?

Marianne Williamson would say that our addictions are from disengaging from "Divine Mind," which she defines as reconnection to your spiritual reality, achieved through force of Divine Mind, It's a gift from the Divine to return you to your sanity. She writes in A Course In Weight Loss that our goal is to remember the Divine Truth, which is that love is who you are, and this is the key to your healing. In this latest book from Marianne, famous for her translation and thought around A Course in Miracles (ACIM), her focus is on food, as in: it "is not about your relationship to food, it is about your relationship with love."

Why bother with cultivating "Divine Mind?" Because it is energizing. Inauthenticity and addiction are draining. Triage your energy elsewhere, toward the things that are enlivening for you.

Marianne would say that "unless your subconscious mind is involved in your weight loss efforts, it will find a way to reconstitute the excess weight, regardless of what you do. Excess weight is not caused by your lousy diet or lack of exercise - "mind is cause, body is effect."

I didn't learn much about addictive eating while in medical school. Sure, I learned how to screen for advertizing, and how to talk about drugs so I didn't sound like a total square (but really, I am a square, so why pretend otherwise? There's a whole lot of training in pretending in medical school!). I learned a bit about anorexia and bulimia but the more common affliction of compulsive overeating? No way.

It took me until age 40 to figure out that I was a compulsive overeater. While it's true that I'm rather highly compensated and don't vere too far off from my goal weight, I have the common Western-woman disease of obsessing over weight, checking out my visage in photos compulsively, thinking way too much about my butt and mid-section. I use up too much precious brain power on this. I want peace. I want a raincheck on the whole dreadful business of weight management.

Fortunately, and with a ton of therapy, self-experimenting, calibrating and compulsive nutritional and psychological study, I've found my happy place with food. I'm no longer a slave to sugar and flour. I've healed my gut and gotten rid of yeast and parasites that drove cravings and a tendency toward overweight. How about you?

And that feels delicious. As Geneen Roth says, "We don't want to eat an ice cream sundae, we want our lives to be an ice cream sundae." My life is an ice cream sundae, now, in this moment. Maybe not in two hours when my daughter wants to back some muffins, but for now, all is well. In this moment, I have the opportunity to re-connect to the inner bliss that's always there, just buried.

If you want more of this, and a 21-day jump start to changing your relationship to food (and love), join our upcoming CLEANSE via WEBINAR with Dr. Sara Gottfried MD: BALANCE HORMONES, GET OFF TOXINS. Premiers March 24, 2011 at noon Pacific Standard Time. Call 510.893.3907 or toll-free 888.893.6586 or visit us online. Remember the forgotten ways that food best serves you.

Out with the Old, In with the New

We are still cleansing here at the Gottfried Center. One helpful strategy as we near the final 5 days of the cleanse is what we need to release, what is no longer serving us. And what may replace it? What new habit, belief, system would better serve you in its place?

For me, I am releasing my inner critic, the radio station KFKD as described by Annie Lamott, The Voice as described by Geneen Roth. Just wrote about this a few days ago if you are trying to figure out WTF I'm talking about. Every day I'm writing down what my inner critic, whom I call my "Inner Authoritarian," as a way of recognizing and disengaging from this voice.

I am replacing it with regular, quiet time every morning. Or when I can catch it with two kids and a busy husband. Regular meditation. Not sitting completely still, as that does not work so well for me, but the form of meditation that most speaks to me in the moment. Usually sitting for 5-10 min with a focus on my breath, followed by 15 min of yin yoga poses (my fave is Supta Virasana), and ending in the most delicious and integrating sivasana.

You know quiet time is good for you. Recently it's been shown to improve the expression of over 500 genes, to make your brain bigger, and to increase telomere length (a major marker of accelerated aging).

What do you need to give up that no longer serves? What will you replace it with?

Cleanse Success Story

Just a quick note to tell you how much I appreciate your offering of the cleanse. I’m getting so much out of it, physically, emotionally and educationally. I feel like the timing of doing this fits so well for me after a year of being your patient and getting my PMS under control. I never thought I could give up all of the foods/toxins that were such a regular part of my diet, but through the support of the cleanse I’ve found it to be almost easy!  The discussions and information that you and Beth provide are so crucial in helping us to understand the details of why we are doing this, and the benefits.

    Your unique approach to your patients’ health is such a gift. Please know that I feel so much gratitude toward you for seeing beyond tests and medications, encouraging diet change and lifestyle change, and then actually providing a way for us to make those changes in a supportive environment. And somehow you do it all with compassion, wisdom, humility, and humor!

Thank you -
Debra of Oakland

Insomnia in Perimenopause

There are very few things more important than sleep. You know that, especially if you're not getting enough.

Unfortunately, many of my fellow perimenopausal travelers in their 40s and 50s are not getting enough. Suddenly you're 44 and your sleep is disrupted by awakenings at 2am, 3am, 4am. The most common patterns fall into one of two categories of altered sleep architecture: poor sleep maintenance (the afore-mentioned awakenings, often with the mind racing and the editor telling you all the ways in which you fall short of expectations) or poor sleep latency (e.g., they have adrenal dysregulation and get a second wind at night, which keeps them up late and unable to fall asleep).

The short version for perimenopausal seekers of a good night's sleep is the following.
1. Stop all caffeine
2. Get regular cardiovascular exercise, preferably 5-6 days per week for 45 min at moderate to high effort
3. Stop all wine
4. Sleep in a room at 64 degrees F or cooler
5. Consider daily estrogen and progesterone. Micronized progesterone has been shown to be the most effective.

These simple 5 steps are non negotiables if sleep is elusive. I've had many patients retort that they just have one cup of black or green tea in the morning, or just one glass of wine at dinner. Yes, even one serving makes a difference.


Artificial lights put us out of sync with nature. Limit your exposure at night. Get all LEDs out of the bedroom. Sleep in a very, very dark room at 64 degrees. For more data on how to eat, the effect of carbs, and best ways to game sleep, consider reading TS Wiley's Lights Out. Or join our next Gottfried Center Cleanse -- it's amazing how the group structure assists us with getting off of toxins such as caffeine, sugar and alcohol, and deeply benefits your sleep.

And if you're part of our current Cleanse-in-Progress, let us know how you're sleeping!

D3 Group Cleanse: What to Eat?

Thought I'd share my menu with you all. Hope it helps and please share in the comments section any great menu ideas!

BTW, day 3 of cleansing and I'm more than a little irritable. You? Irritable but cleaning up my body!

Breakfast:
1.5 oz quinoa flakes mixed with boiling water
6oz blueberries
3T flax seeds
10 almonds
1 poached egg

Lunch:
1 apple
6oz chopped, roasted carrots + 1T extra-virgin olive oil
4oz wild Alaskan salmon, roasted
2 oz quinoa

Dinner:
6oz roasted acorn squash
6oz black beans
8 oz mixed salad + 2T dressing (Ani's marinade from 2 days ago!)

D2 Cleanse: Mango Breakfast Cobbler

Mango Breakfast Cobbler
adapted from p 215 of Ani’s Raw Food Kitchen
(serves 4)

CRUST

1 1/4 cup almonds
1 vanilla bean, scraped
1/2 teaspoon sea salt
1  cup pitted and packed medjool dates
2 Tablespoons coconut oil or butter
FILLING

4 cups Mango, pitted and diced
1/4 cup agave syrup

To make crust, place almonds, vanilla, and salt into food processor. Lightly process into small pieces. Add dates and coconut butter, process to mix well.

Sprinkle half of the crust onto bottom of a loaf pan.

To make filling, toss together all ingredients. Scoop onto crust. Top with remaining crust.

D1 of Group Cleanse: Lessons from Raw Masta

We are thrilled to embark on another Gottfried Cleanse starting today. Join us: take the next 7 days to remove gradually gluten, caffeine, sugar, alcohol and dairy.

What makes it easier is delicious, such as this amazing marinade over raw kale. Ani's marinade softens the kale and is so flavorful, you'll forget how good it is for you. Thank you to my dear friend from high school who made this for me on Monday night!

Here's Ani Phyo's Sunflower Thyme Marinade
    2 T thyme
    1 clove garlic
    1 cup extra virgin olive oil
    1/2 cup sunflower seeds soaked an hour or more and then drained
    1 T apple cider vinegar
    1 t sea salt
    (2 T lemon juice--my friend's addition)

    Blend all ingredients until smooth. Marinade will keep for three to four days and makes enough for a few salads.

From her book, "Ani's Raw Food Kitchen".