Don't buy rice or ramen, buy THIS!

This Picture shows SPLIT 'moong beans' which
do not sprout. Don't buy this kind for sprouting.
I bought WHOLE 'moong beans'
from Spicy World.

When finances or food supply are tough, many people think it’s a smart idea to buy carb-filled rice or ramen noodles. But carb-foods just end up making you hungrier, causing you to eat more carb-foods and gaining more weight you don’t want.

The Keto * Low-Carb solution— a low-cost food that can be stocked up on, that can sit on your shelves for a while, is mung beans. I have Spicy World brand mung beans (moong dal)— bought on Amazon— and I sprout them into mung bean sprouts regularly. They sprout just as well as mung beans sold for sprouting!

Mung bean sprouts are a low-carb food allowed even on strict Atkins levels as a vegetable or even a salad ingredient. If you enjoy things like Rice-a-roni or ramen noodles, you can just use the seasonings and flavors found in your favorite rice-or-ramen foods on your cooked mung bean sprouts. 

You can cook your bean sprouts in a pot of boiling water and add your seasonings, soy-sauce, bouillon powder, garam masala, seasoned salt to the cooking water. Then drain it in a colander, add some butter or ghee or coconut oil, especially if you love butter noodles, and have the flavors you love without the carbs.

You can also stir fry your bean sprouts in a frying pan or wok. You can add other vegetables that are on hand for variety, and also meats— canned meats work— and perhaps some pecan or walnut pieces to add crunch. You can stir-fry in an egg if you like, as is done in Chinese Fried Rice. 

Stir-fried or cooked bean sprouts can stand in for rice or noodles in most recipes. Since they are wetter, some of my old favorite casserole recipes have become stir-fry recipes because the casserole version got too soggy. 

My little trick this week is that I am sprouting enough mung beans for one serving every day and trying to do it a little different each time. 

Can’t get mung beans at your grocery store? Lentils are more widely available— they had some at my food bank once— and I’ve sprouted lentils that were ten years old successfully. They are a little more carb-y, and aren’t as nice for stir-fry. Get green or black lentils— the orange ones are split lentils and don’t sprout.

THE MAGIC OF SPROUTING:

Dried mung beans: 22g carbs per 35 grams   Dried lentils: 30g carbs per 1/4 cup, dry

Mung bean sprouts, 1 cup: 6g carbs    Lentil sprouts: 100 g (2 cups?) 22 g carbs

Mung bean sprouts should be sprouted in a dark place. Can be sprouted in jars or in a Victorio sprouter. Lentils sprouts for similar use can be sprouted the same way, perhaps in a mix with mung beans.

Here’s to your health,

Nissa Annakindt

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Things to Have on Hand when you are Keto

It doesn’t have to be a special occasion. EVERYONE needs to keep a supply of non-perishable food and certain other items in their home. These things are useful if money is short one month, or if you get an ‘ordinary’ flu and don’t want to share your germs, or if you are just staying home for a bit to get things done. 

But it does us Ketonians no good to buy a batch of ramen noodles or frozen pizza-like substance that we can’t use anyway. Eating these things in an ‘emergency’ will just make you feel sick and non-energetic and who wants that?

We need to have the food we CAN eat available. If we have become good at eating ‘real food’ which is usually quite perishable, we need to learn about other kinds of things to have on hand in the home.

1. CANNED TUNA/SALMON - Fish is healthy food, and you can have it even during Lent. My favorite canned tuna is the kind canned in olive oil which I can’t get since I can no longer drive to a local Walmart, so I buy cheap packed-in-water tuna, drain it well, and add a bit of EVOO (extra-virgin olive oil.)

2. SALAD SPROUTING SEEDS - If you can’t get fresh salad veggies for a bit, sprouting seeds— alfalfa, clover or a salad mix— will let you make salad greens in your home from seed that lasts for a long time. I use 2 tsp. of seed for one tray of a Victorio sprouter, and start a new tray each day.  These seeds take seven days to sprout, so you will need two Victorio sprouter sets for each person in your family that eats 2 daily sprout salads.

3. BULLETPROOF COFFEE/TEA SUPPLIES - A supply of instant coffee, regular coffee or teabags will provide you with hot drinks for a while. To make it bulletproof, you will need butter, home-made ghee, coconut oil, MCT oil, or EVOO. You might also add a touch of heavy whipping cream or coconut milk if you have it. Be sure and have decaf coffee in the house if caffeine bothers you or you want coffee later in the day.

4. FROZEN MEATS — Yes, if your electricity is prone to go out from time to time you may end up with spoiled meat. But in other circumstances you can preserve meat from family packs or whole sides of beef or venison or whatever you can get in quantity. If you live alone, be sure and freeze your meat in smaller portions. You probably don’t eat 8 pork chops in one meal. Remember that even if you are observing Lent you can eat meat on Sundays.

5. EGGS — It’s good to have eggs on hand. They are a quick low-carb meal and they are a ‘free food’ on Atkins, even on Atkins Induction. I used to make deviled eggs a lot, but now I am more likely to just hard-boil some eggs, slice them in half, and sprinkle on some Vege-Sal or Salt-Free Spike. 

6. CHEESE — Good to put on eggs in a scramble or omelet. Cheese doesn’t last forever in your refrigerator, so use it up fast. Pre-shredded cheese has something in it that makes it last quite a while before going moldy, but some premium brands don’t add this. So— trust me— CHECK your shredded cheese for mold before sprinkling on an omelet! Just slices of cheese can also be nice, by themselves or in a roll-up with sliced ham or beef.

7. BONE BROTH —- Learn to make your own bone broth— save bones from chicken you eat and the bone broth is free. If you are going to fast for a while, bone broth is allowed during fasting according to Dr. Jason Fung. I freeze my excess bone broth in the big freezer. Thaw out frozen bone broth overnight in your refrigerator.

8. MUNG BEANS & LENTILS FOR SPROUTING — You can make your own mung bean or lentil sprouts at home in your Victorio sprouter or a canning jar. I use 1/8 cup of mung beans to sprout about 1 cup of sprouts, which is one serving. You can steam or boil sprouts, eat with a low-carb cheese sauce for ‘mac & cheese’ or with a low-carb tomato sauce for ‘spaghetti.’  It takes about 4 days to sprout mung beans or lentils. Lentil sprouts have a higher carb content than mung bean sprouts. 100 grams of mung bean sprouts (3 cups) are 5.93 g carbs, 100 grams of pea sprouts (2 cups) are 28.26 grams of carbs and 100 grams of lentil sprouts are 22.14 g carbs. So it’s better to mix in smaller amounts of lentil and pea sprouts with mung beans. I have read a carb count for pea shoots which is a lot less carbs than pea sprouts, so if you want a low-carb sprouted pea soup you might want to use shoots instead, and mix in some mung bean sprouts.  The great thing about lentils, though, is that I have successfully sprouted grocery-store lentils that were around 10 years old. By contrast, broccoli seed that is only a little old sprouts less well. 

I hope I have given you a few ideas of what to buy when you stock up on staple supplies. Do you have any good ideas? Please share them!

Nissa Annakindt

Do Militant Vegans Want Global Mass Starvation?

Militant vegans say they want everybody to go vegan. They also seem to want laws passed against animal agriculture so non-vegan food is less accessible.

What would be the consequences if the world went vegan, either by choice or because of outlawing animal agriculture? Mass starvation.

You see, there are two kinds of farmland out there. One kind is the kind of land that can be plowed up and planted to ‘plant-based’ crops like soybeans and grains to be processed into the kind of food that vegans can eat.

The other kind is the farmland that can be used to graze animals. There are federal lands leased for cattle grazing that is too delicate ecologically to be grazed every year. Other grazing lands are tougher than that.

What happens when you plow up grazing land to grow plant-based crops on it? Well, it could end up like Oklahoma in the Dust Bowl— your topsoil can pack up and hitch a ride on the nearest wind out-of-state. 

What happens if the vegans get their way and no one any longer uses grazing lands to produce human food? There is that much less food in a hungry world! You just can’t grow more soy for soymilk & tofu on grazing land. So the global food supply gets shorter and the less powerful people in the world won’t get to eat.

There is, of course, the vegan myth that all meat is produced only by grain feeding. But what is the most trendy, desirable and healthy form of meat? Grass-fed and grass-finished meat! And this meat is actually shown to be healthier and richer in Omega-3s than grain-fed meat.

Of course the vegan militants, if they are aware of the mass death their plans would cause, probably have some high-minded propaganda about saving the planet through population shrinkage. But the sad fact is, many members of the globe’s threatened population will not be ‘shrunk’ to death quietly. Why should they starve while the vegan elites shout ‘let them eat tofu’ even though tofu will be in short supply? 

There have been human-caused deliberate famines in history, as in the Ukrainian genocide-by-hunger perpetrated by Stalin, that have not lead to violent revolts, but that’s because the famines were geographically limited and the people that started them had power over the people that were meant to die.

The globe currently has many independent nations. Will the third world ones willingly agree to be starved out to please elite first-world militant vegans? Somehow I don’t think so.

Yours in Keto * Low-Carb,

Nissa Annakindt

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They are Out to Sabotage Your Keto * Low-Carb!

Everyone on the Keto * Low-Carb way of life will experience sabotage— from friends and family members, from medical people, from food corporations….

It works something like this— you go to aunt Mabel’s house and she knows you are on lowcarb. So she serves you brown rice instead of the white rice she usually makes, and a big banana instead of ice cream for dessert. Because brown rice is good for you, and banana is a fruit and the carbs in fruits don’t count. And because your Aunt Mabel thinks she knows more about healthy foods than you do.

Dr. Atkins in his first book explained how the diet saboteurs work. In his day, most people didn’t know about lowcarb diets and thought all diets were low-calorie diets. So if a food was perceived as low in calories, any dieter could have it regardless of the carb count.

Today more people have heard of lowcarb, but they may have weird, wrong ideas of what it is. Maybe they think you can’t have regular bread but can have unlimited pita bread. Or that you can’t have regular noodles but can have whole wheat noodles. And they may think that the carbs in fruit or in vegetables or in whole grain products do not count.

We know better. We know that all carbs count. But you can’t tell other people that, in many cases. If you are or have been fat and they are not fat or less fat, nothing you say counts as much as what thin people say. 

Emotional issues may be used to make you eat more carbs than you should. A relative fixes a special cake or special cookies just for you, and you will be a bad person if you don’t eat them.

But if you had a deadly allergy to peanut butter, would you eat a food with peanut butter to please someone else? You know you wouldn’t. Well, you likely have a deadly ‘allergy’ to carbohydrates which can cause your early death if you don’t take care of it. 

Sometimes people urge us to go out to restaurants which don’t have a single menu item we can have. Just to be sociable. And you go and order something you shouldn’t have, resolving to eat just half— and often you eat more than half.

Fast-food restaurants train their employees to tempt you to buy more carbs than you want. You go in to order a small burger— you don’t intend to eat the bun— and a side salad, no dressing. And they push you to order French fries and a soda to go with that— carb-filled foods, and foods you may have had an addiction to. You may need to avoid eating out when the local restaurants all push carbs and your lowcarb meal at their hands is likely to be dismal. (When you are eating your burgers without the buns, you may find that your favorite burger joint becomes your least favorite, because their actual burgers are dry and nasty, but they cover it up with buns and condiments.)

Married couples can have problems— when she needs to be on keto for health reasons and he wants to continue with the high carb foods he always eats. There is no easy answer. You cannot demand that someone else change what they eat to accommodate you, or not keep the foods they like in the house because they tempt you. But on the other hand you need to take care of your own health, and certain temptations may be too much to bear in your own home.

A compromise might be to ask the carb-eater to refrain from keeping the most tempting carb foods around, and concentrate on the ones that you wouldn’t touch. I don’t care for those ‘kettle’ potato chips or that circus peanut candy. Bring peanut butter cups in the house, though, and you will have to keep me off them with a machete.

I would not recommend you break off important relationships over the carb issue. But your health is important, too. Don’t be ashamed if carbs tempt you. They tempt a lot of people. But if you were a recovering alcoholic, people would be more respectful and not invite you to barrooms or insist on keeping alcohol in a shared household. If you were a recovering drug addict, they would understand not to bring their own heroin stash to your house to tempt you. Others need to treat your recovery from carbohydrate addiction as a serious thing. And if they don’t, ignore them. 

High Blood Pressure & Keto * Low-Carb

High blood pressure, or hypertension, is a serious symptom which can lead to strokes and heart attacks, so we don’t want to have high blood pressure.

I have had that problem for a number of years, but mostly ignored it which you should not do. 

The Keto * Low-Carb eating plan of itself usually lowers your blood pressure just fine, to the point that experienced doctors often advise high blood pressure patients starting lowcarb to cut their blood pressure medication dose in half to prevent overly low blood pressures. 

But what if you still have high blood pressure, or develop it later into your Keto life? You may have to go with a prescription medication. You will probably find that your medication does its job best when you are ALSO faithful to your lowcarb plan.

I have a home blood pressure machine which measures at the wrist. I measure my blood pressure every morning when I measure my blood sugar (T2 diabetes) and check my state of ketosis with a Ketonix breath ketone analyzer. I write these measurements down in a notebook.

When I go for an appointment with my PA, I copy down about a week's worth of blood pressure and blood sugar readings to give to her. 

I have been on the medication amlodipine since my stroke last February. My PA thought my blood pressure was still too high, so doubled my dose recently. It really helped.

Another thing that really helped is garlic. I had purchased Kyolic garlic capsules and took them until I ran out. When I ran out, my blood pressures went a little higher. I tried eating garlic cloves, but I couldn’t face another raw garlic clove and tried roasted garlic cloves. I could actually face eating these, but they didn’t have as nice an effect on my blood pressure.

I estimate that the Kyolic garlic lowered my blood pressure by about the same amount as the earlier, 5mg dose of amlodipine did. Since I have been taking garlic in some form all this time, I don’t know for sure whether the numbers I get now on the 10mg amlodipine are just from the amlodipine or from the amlodipine plus garlic, but the evidence would seem to support that it is both. 

Since I don’t care to be on more medication than I have to be, I’m looking to buy a new bottle of Kyolic once I have the money to do so. Sadly, Medicaid does not pay for a supplement, even if recommended by a doctor, like it pays for prescription drugs. 

I also want to keep up eating my roasted garlic cloves. I am going to roast them for a shorter time the next time, to preserve the medicinal elements. One reason for doing this is that I like doing things in a natural way or a home-made way. The second reason is that my Food Stamp benefits can be used on garlic, and in addition when spring comes I plan to plant some garlic and grow my own. 

For practical reasons I also want to keep taking the Kyolic garlic. I can take that even if my health deteriorates to the point where regularly roasting garlic is a chore. 

I also plan to keep taking my amlodipine even though taking prescription meds chains me to the medical-industrial complex. My stroke showed me that high blood pressure is nothing to ignore.

Healthy days to you,

Nissa Annakindt

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