Cob

I've been thinking a lot about natural building lately. Here in the US, we are practically forced into occupying homes that are expensive and destructive to the environment. I met a woman last weekend who lives in a yurt and has an outdoor composting toilet. She paid $3,000 for the yurt, making it a dignified way to live on a low income. She's worried because what she's doing on her own property is illegal. She's living in a safe, efficient, inexpensive structure that is extremely light on the land, an it's illegal under her county building codes.

A conventional home that costs $200,000 may end up costing $400,000- $600,000 including interest paid to the bank and all fees. If you can save money and cut out the bank, you might be able to build your own code-compliant house for $100,000 or less, including the land. It isn't difficult to see the financial advantage of building yourself.

Conventional homes are also highly destructive to the environment, partly due to materials and partly due to inefficiency of the completed structure. As usual, I'm looking for alternatives.

One possibility that has caught my imagination is a material called cob. It's made of sand, clay and straw that's mixed together and allowed to harden into a durable monolithic structure. It's a traditional form of construction throughout the world, but the word comes from the UK, where thousands of cob buildings are still standing after up to 500 years. It's similar to adobe, except bricks are not used.

Cob uses inexpensive materials that can typically be gathered on-site or nearby, and have a low embodied energy. The straw is an agricultural waste product and is very inexpensive. Building with cob doesn't require much skill or strength. It can produce highly efficient structures in appropriate climates due to its high thermal mass. It's also extremely durable if cared for properly. Cob has all the attributes of an effective vernacular building technique.

It's also not code-compliant in most places in the US, but that may change as it becomes more familiar. That's also a reason why I'm considering alternatives like strawbale and timberframe construction. It's possible to build code-compliant cob houses in the UK.

Last weekend I went to a "Basics of Cob" workshop at the Ancient Earth school of natural building on Whidbey island. We learned how to mix cob and then we built a bench out of it. The bench will eventually be coated in a smooth earthen or lime plaster. Cob is an amazing material. It's sculptable when wet, but becomes very hard when it dries. It's compatible with a number of other natural building techniques like strawbale and light straw-clay. It really is at the intersection of construction and sculpting. When you build with cob, you aren't limited to straight lines and right angles, so you can create spaces that are highly functional and aesthetic, while also being space-efficient. Here are some photos from the workshop:

Real Food VI: Liver

Liver was a highly regarded food among many hunter-gatherer and traditional agricultural societies. It's not surprising once you realize it's quite literally the most nutritious food in the world. It's because the liver is a storage depot, into which important nutrients are deposited in case of later need. A modest 4-oz serving of calf's liver contains 690% of your RDA of B12, 610% of preformed vitamin A, 215% of folate, 129% of B2, 24.5 g protein, and the list goes on. The nutrients found in liver are particularly important for development, but are also helpful for continued health in adulthood.

Preformed vitamin A is one of the nutrients Weston Price suggested was responsible for the glowing health of the cultures he studied in his book Nutrition and Physical Degeneration. It's an essential nutrient, but it's different from most vitamins (except D) because it acts like a hormone, entering cells and altering gene transcription. Thus, it has its hand in many important bodily processes.

"Vitamin A" from plant sources such as carrots is actually a group of vitamin A precursors called carotenes, which the body inefficiently converts to actual vitamin A. The efficiency of conversion varies around 10%, depending on the carotene and how much fat is ingested along with it. Nutrition labels in the US do not reflect this. When a nutrition label on a plant-based product says "30% vitamin A", you can assume you will get about 3% of your RDA from it. This doesn't apply to eggs, dairy and liver, which contain preformed vitamin A.

I'm not sure how this happened, but somewhere along the line we decided in the US that muscle is the only proper animal tissue to eat. We are missing out on the most nutritious parts of the animal, and our health is suffering.

I recommend purchasing organic calf's liver, 100% grass-fed if possible. Chicken livers are also nutritious but ruminant livers are the most concentrated in vitamins by far.

Here is a recipe for a liver pate. I recognize that many people don't like the taste of liver, which is why I chose this recipe because it is very mild.

Ingredients

• 1/2 to 1 lb calf's liver, chopped into 1-in strips
  
• 3 eggs
• 1/2 stick butter
• 1/2 onion
• 1-2 carrots (optional)
• Sage and/or rosemary (optional)
• Salt to taste
  

Recipe

1. Saute the onions and carrots in 1 tbsp butter until they're soft.
2. Add liver and herbs and cook until the liver is just done.
3. Crack the eggs right into the pan and stir them until they're cooked.
4. Turn off the heat, add the remaining butter.
5. Blend until smooth.

Enjoy!

More Liver

It's time to celebrate your liver. It's a hard-working organ and it deserves some credit.

One of the liver's most important overall functions is maintaining nutrient homeostasis. It controls the blood level of a number of macro- and micronutrients, and attempts to keep them all at optimal levels.

Here's a list of some of the liver's functions I'm aware of:

• Buffers blood glucose by taking it up or releasing it when needed
• A major storage site for glycogen (a glucose polymer)
  
• Clears insulin from the blood
• Synthesizes triglycerides
• Secretes and absorbs lipoprotein particles ("cholesterol")
• Stores important vitamins: B12, folate, A, D, E, K (that's why it's so nutritious to eat!)
• Stores minerals: copper and iron
  
• Detoxifies the blood
• Produces ketone bodies when glucose is running low
• Secretes blood proteins
• Secretes bile
• Converts thyroid hormones
• Converts vitamin D (D3 --> 25(OH)D3)
  

The liver is an all-purpose metabolic powerhouse and storage depot. In the next post, I'll give you a recipe for it...

The Liver: Your Metabolic Gatekeeper

As I've been learning more about the different blood markers of metabolic dysfunction, something suddenly occurred to me. Most of them reflect liver function! Elevated fasting glucose, low HDL cholesterol, high LDL cholesterol, high triglycerides and high fasting insulin all reflect (at least in part) liver function. The liver is the "Grand Central Station" of cholesterol and fatty acid metabolism, to quote Philip A. Wood from How Fat Works. It's also critical for insulin and glucose control, as I'll explain shortly. When we look at our blood lipid profile, fasting glucose, or insulin, what we're seeing is largely a snapshot of our liver function. Does no one talk about this or am I just late to the party here?!

I read a paper today from the lab of C. Ronald Kahn that really drove home the point. They created a liver-specific insulin receptor knockout (LIRKO) mouse, which is a model of severe insulin resistance in the liver. The mouse ends up developing severe whole-body insulin resistance, dramatically elevated post-meal insulin levels (20-fold!), impaired glucose tolerance, and elevated post-meal and fasting glucose. Keep in mind that this all resulted from nothing more than an insulin resistant liver.

LIRKO mice had elevated post-meal blood glucose due to the liver's unresponsiveness to insulin's command to take up sugar. Apparently the liver can dispose of one third of the glucose from a meal, turning it into glycogen and triglycerides. The elevated fasting glucose was caused by insulin not suppressing gluconeogenesis (glucose synthesis) by the liver. In other words, the liver has no way to know that there's already enough glucose in the blood so it keeps on pumping it out. This is highly relevant to diabetics because fasting hyperglycemia comes mostly from increased glucose output by the liver. This can be due to liver insulin resistance or insufficient insulin production by the pancreas.

One of the interesting things about LIRKO mice is their dramatically elevated insulin level. Their pancreases are enlarged and swollen with insulin. It's as if the pancreas is screaming at the body to pick up the slack and take up the post-meal glucose the liver isn't disposing of. The elevated insulin isn't just due to increased output by the pancreas, however. It's also due to decreased disposal by the liver. According to the paper, the liver is responsible for 75% of insulin clearance from the blood in mice. The hyperinsulinemia they observed was both due to increased secretion and decreased clearance. Interestingly, they noted no decline in beta cell (the cells that secrete insulin) function even under such a high load.

Something that's interesting to note about these mice is they have very low blood triglyceride. It makes sense since insulin is what tells the liver to produce it. Could this have something to do with their lack of beta cell dysfunction?

The really strange thing about LIRKO mice is that their blood glucose becomes more normal with age. Strange until you see the reason: their livers are degenerating so they can't keep up glucose production!

LIRKO mice reproduce many of the characteristics of type II diabetes, without degenerating completely into beta cell death. So insulin resistance in the liver appears to reproduce some elements of diabetes and the metabolic syndrome, but the full-blown disorders require other tissues as well. As a side note, this group also has a skeletal muscle-specific insulin receptor knockout which is basically normal. Interesting considering muscle tissue seems to be one of the first tissues to become insulin resistant during diabetes onset.

So if you want to end up like your good pal LIRKO, remember to drink high-fructose corn syrup with every meal! You'll have fatty liver and insulin resistance in no time!

I have a lot more to say about the liver, but I'll continue it in another post.

Makanan Yang dipantang dan dianjurkan dikonsumsi oleh Penderita Kanker, khususnya Kanker Payudara.

Larangan atau Pantangan Penderita Kanker Payudara.
Jika kita sudah terserang kanker payudara, kita harus menghindari atau mengurangi asupan konsumsi beberapa jenis makanan. Karena ada kalanya makanan atau minuman tertentu akan memacu pertumbuhan sel abnormal, termasuk kanker payudara. Ada diantaranya yang mengandung zat tumbuh yang jika diasup akan merangsang pembesaran kanker. Ada pula yang mengandung karsinogenik akibat proses pengawetan. Dan ada pula yang jika dikonsumsi akan mengurangi efek kerja obat dalam tubuh.

Beberapa makanan dan minuman yang dianjurkan untuk menghindari atau dikurangi konsumsinya:
1. Tauge
2. Vetsin
3. Tape
4. Es
5. Cabai
6. Kurangi garam
7. Lengkeng
8. Alkohol
9. Nenas
10. Sawi putih
11. Daging merah
12. Rokok
13. Nangka
14. Durian
15. Soft drink
16. Kangkung
17. Ikan asin

Anjuran dalam Masa Pengobatan Kanker Payudara.
Terdapat beberapa bahan makanan yang dianjurkan untuk dikonsumsi secara rutin. Konsumsinya boleh hanya satu jenis bahan saja atau campuran dari beberapa bahan. Jika kita sedang terserang kanker payudara, dianjurkan untuk meminum jus bahan-bahan makanan berikut, lakukan dua kali satu gelas setiap hari.
1. Wortel
2. Lobak
3. Pisang raja
4. Belimbing manis
5. Seledri
6. Brokoli
7. Kubis
8. Apel
9. Bawang putih

Minum juga susu kedelai setengah gelas, lakukan dua kali sehari, atau konsumsi selalu 100 gram tempe setiap hari.
Aneka Sayuran Hijau Pencegah Kanker:
1. Buncis
2. Daun singkong
3. Kacang panjang
4. Daun pepaya
Menurut Dr. Vivi K. Tjahjadi, dari Karyasari, obot untuk kanker payudara adalah rebusan sambiloto, kunir putih, rumput mutiara dan keladi tikus, diminum pagi siang dan sore. Ramuan ini jika diminum 12 hari, lambat laun rasa nyeri akan berangsur hilang dan benjolan juga hilang. Payudara akan kembali seperti semula tanpa rasa sakit. Dengan minum ramuan ini kanker payudara berpeluang benar-benar sembuh.
(Sumber :http://bima.ipb.ac.id/~anita/kanker_payudara.html)