Title: The Master Your Metabolism Cookbook
Author: Jillian Michaels
Author’s web page: www.jillianmichaels.com
Date: 2010
Publisher: Crown / Random House
ISBN: 978-0-307-71822-8
Length: 276 pages
Illustrations: one-color drawings, not credited; black-and-white photo page at the back
Quote: “While [medication] may be an effective short-term aid to bring things under control, it fails to address the need to reverse and eliminate the most frequent underlying cause of chronically high insulin: poor diet.”
First, for the guys: More photos of the body underneath that too-big T-shirt in the back of the book, along with information about how to buy full-color videos showing the body in action.
Now let’s dispel any illusions: The thing to remember about all those cookbooks and exercise programs featuring sleek, beautiful young people is that, if you’re not between the ages of 18 and 25, you’re not going to look like that. If you want your mature body to look like Jane Fonda’s or Jack LaLanne’s, or even like your own body before you settled down in a desk job, however, this new book just might help you.
Maybe. The trouble with all discussions of "healthy food" today is that people keep on repeating what they learned about the nutrients found in food, and ignore the fact that those nutrients are altogether irrelevant if the food contains glyphosate, since the body will reject the food violently in any case. If it looks like it just came from Old MacDonald's farm, bursting with natural wholesome goodness, and it's found in a supermarket and it doesn't have a hard shell you throw away, it is probably a glyphosate bomb and you'd probably be healthier not even walking through the "produce" section and breathing the fumes off it. Unless you know for sure that they were not exposed to "pesticide" vapor drift, don't even touch blueberries, raspberries, green leafy vegetables, apples, carrots, grapes, tomatoes, or any of your old childhood favorites. Also avoid anything that is sold or used in a hard, dry, seedlike condition--nuts, wheat or other grains, seeds, flour--unless you know for sure. Rice and wild rice are usually safe, but not guaranteed. The allium family (onions, garlic, etc.) are usually safe.
To test foods like hard-shelled tree nuts sold in their shells, oranges, melons, beans, coconuts, etc., eat one teaspoonful and wait for the early symptoms of your typical glyphosate and/or other "pesticide" reactions. If they appear, take a charcoal capsule and throw away the rest of the food.
The Master Your Metabolism Cookbook is loaded with fun facts about recent discoveries about the effects different foods typically have on our metabolism, plus trendy recipes that...well...some of them are on the granola side, but most of them will disappear fast if you take them to a potluck dinner. A short summary of what Michaels learned about foods that affect metabolism appears on pages 3-41, with key facts repeated as sidebars next to recipes that use the recommended foods. Most of them are not on the safe list. Briefly, metabolism-boosting foods include fish, Brazil nuts, whole grains, pumpkin seed, sesame seed, almonds, spinach and other greens, whole grains, olive oil, hazelnuts, barley, beans, oats, brown rice, onions, apples, pomegranates, cooked broccoli, carrots, molasses, apples, raspberries, blueberries, grapes, rosemary, cooked tomatoes, sweet potatoes, oranges, turkey, walnuts, and yogurt. Meats can have mixed effects on metabolism and are used sparingly in this cookbook.
People on restricted diets can use this book if and when we get the bans we need; plenty of recipes are “free” from whatever natural food you’re trying to avoid, and when farmers stop spraying poison on food you may find that you can enjoy that natural food again anyway. If you’re serving these dishes to people outside the family, it’s a good idea to list the ingredients, since many of them do contain stealth allergy triggers like coconut oil and orange juice in unexpected places. There’s a good-sized section of vegan entrees. Several sauces are thickened with fruit or vegetable purees rather than simple starches. A majority of recipes are lactose-free, gluten-free, and/or casein-free, or can be made whichever of those things you require. When Michaels does use a dairy product, it’s usually yogurt, usually offered as a topping.
Vintage granola-period recipes substituted honey for sugar. In the 1980s efforts were made to debunk the myth that honey had any special nutritional benefits over sugar; both are basically sucrose, only honey has more calories, is much messier, and usually costs more. “Loaded with vitamins, minerals, amino acids, and antioxidants”? Not exactly; it contains traces of nutrients—enough to make a difference to an insect, but probably not to a human. Bees store honey made from different kinds of flowers separately and even humans can see and taste differences. Unfortunately, today nearly all honey is loaded with glyphosate and should not even be handled.
The Master Your Metabolism Cookbook suggests agave syrup as an alternative to honey or maple syrup. Agave syrup is fairly new even to the health food market; I personally don’t live where it’s made, so I’ve never tasted it.
More can be said for real maple syrup. It does not have to be made in Vermont. Sugar maples will grow in most of the United States (and in Canada); you just tap them at a different time of year. Maple trees that are native to areas other than Vermont also produce syrup. “Invasive” Norway maples are excellent sources of syrup—we used to construct a little “syrup camp” and boil down sap from the Norway maple in the yard, and other maples in the woodlot, right in the shade of the tree, and it would become sweet and maple-y enough that a spoonful turned pancakes into dessert before it even became syrupy. As Noel PERRIN observed, federal standards for grading maple syrup were created at a time when the blandest, sweetest, most sugar-like syrup was considered the finest. If you’re after the more distinctive flavor and trace nutrients that help preserve male reproductive health—oh, what the heck, let’s stuff in a few keywords, real maple syrup may help prevent prostate enlargement and thus extend men’s sex lives and fertility—local maple syrup may actually be better than Vermont’s Finest. So if you like and can afford to pour maple syrup over your organic corn or buckwheat pancakes, enjoy it. (Women can safely enjoy real maple syrup too—if living with men under the influence of Jillian Michaels we may need it.) If you’re cooking or baking, however, read on.
If you’re trying to reduce the amount of sugar children eat, however, forget about the “honey is better because you use less of it in cooking” argument. What grainy, bready desserts partly sweetened with honey do for children is to activate sugar cravings without satisfying them. Mothers who cook with honey raise sugar junkies who beg, borrow, smuggle, and steal candy and sugar-saturated junkfood. I was one of the lucky little sugar junkies who found that, as an adult, exercising my legal right to eat sugary junk in front of Mother brought my sugar craving under control. I’ve known other sugar junkies who managed to ingest enough of Mom’s “healthy treats” and smuggle enough sugar to be hypoglycemic, diabetic, and/or depressed before age twenty-five.
What I’d recommend for kids is letting them fill up on plenty of raw organic vegetables before exposing them to sugar—natural or unnatural. Kids hate vegetables the way adults in our culture are typically taught to serve them—cooked limp and/or smothered in oil and vinegar. Kids love vegetables fresh from the garden and will happily snack on raw carrots, asparagus, peas, celery, cucumbers, tomatoes, spinach, and almost anything else in the organic garden. The natural sugars in raw veg satisfy children’s sugar cravings, provide plenty of fibre, and are easier for children to digest than some adults would have believed. I would let a child snack on anything I tolerated in the garden, and insist on cooking a vegetable only if the child became flatulent or complained of tummy-aches after eating it raw. If this plan didn’t keep the child from gobbling up candy and commercial desserts when those were available, I’d calm myself with the knowledge that the child was well exercised and supplied with fibre anyway.
Personally, I think vinegar works best as a cleaning product because it motivates me to keep rinsing and scrubbing away all traces of that disgusting odor, so I think there’s far too much vinegar in these recipes, but the idea of serving fruit with lemon juice instead of sugar or honey, as a salad dressing, is definitely an improvement over serving mayonnaise with added sugar.
I’d heard about the mixed benefits of raw broccoli for people with thyroid problems, and about the mixed benefits of eating phytoestrogen-rich soy products, but that millet, peaches, strawberries, pine nuts, bamboo, and peanuts “have been shown to create thyroid problems” was news to me. How does that work? Well, one thing those foods have in common is that in 2010 all of them were likely to have been "ripened" with glyphosate, which does seem to cause thyroid problems, up to and including thyroid cancer. If you have a serious thyroid or ovarian disorder, you’ll want to read the recent findings Michaels reports in this book, but bear in mind that the research was done by a process of wilfully ignoring the elephant in the room. Foods that have not caused diseases for thousands of years have started to cause diseases only when and as they've been sprayed with chemicals that have been intentionally not tested, despise evidence that their use is correlated with those diseases.
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