When I grow up

I want to be this girl when I grow up. She sounds really neat. SUCH a hippy chick!

Here is an article that Rebecca just emailed to me about replacing refined flours and sugars. I thought it was helpful.

Be warned! I am thinking about making Easter brunch gluten and sugar free. 8-)

REFINED SUGARS and REFINED FLOURS

The average individual consumes 180 lbs a year of sugar. The “white menace” transformed the health of traditional societies introduced to the western diet. It is not just sugar. Refined sugars, white flour, pasta, various breads, soft drinks, alcohol… Did you know that the glycemic index of white bread is higher than glucose!

Refined flours and sugars are stripped of their nutrients and deplete the body of nutrition to process them particularly much needed minerals. Ingesting the calories devoid of nutrition confuses our body. Our body gets all juiced up, ready for action, without the payoff. Sally Fallon states in Nourishing Traditions, “Being almost 100 percent ‘pure’ this high calorie dynamite bombs the pancreas and pituitary gland into gushing forth a hypersecretion of hormones comparable in intensity to that artificially produced in laboratory animals with drugs and hormones.” It is a phenomenon more recently experienced in the human race and may be a culprit in a variety of endocrine, mood, digestive, and immune disorders. It is a legal drug.

You can read labels to see if refined sugars are in processed foods. Words to look for include corn syrup or sweetener, maltodextrin, dextrin, dextrose, lactose, fructose, sucrose, maltose, glucose, and high-fructose corn syrup.

The alternative may be worse! According to Mark Hyman, author of Ultrametabolism, 92% of non-industry funded studies have concluded that artificial sweeteners cause adverse health effects. You can’t trick the body!

Substituting White Flour with Whole Grains
Most flours can be substituted 1:1 for wheat flour or white flour. Quinoa makes a good substitute. Amaranth, millet and buckwheat are better when combined with rice flour or other milder tasting grain.

When substituting rice flour you need to increase moisture, use 4 parts rice flour and 1 part arrowroot to thicken it a bit. Also consider adding more eggs to the recipe to reduce crumbling baked goods. When substituting spelt, decrease the liquids by 25%. Bean flours can be substituted at the ratio 2 tblsp per 1 cup wheat flour.

When making breads, non gluten flours need additives like xanthan gum to promote leavening, due to the low gluten.

Substituting Sugar With Natural Sweeteners
This process needs some forethought when baking. You can experiment with recipes such as puddings, smoothies, buying plain yogurt and sweetening yourself.

Blue Agave Nectar (BAN): For each cup of white sugar use 2/3 of a cup of BAN and reduce other liquids by 1/3 cup. For each cup of brown sugar replaced, use 2/3 of a cup of BAN and reduce other liquids by 1/4 cup. This may not work for all baked recipes as you are altering the liquid and solid proportions. You may want to start by replacing half the sugar in the recipe first before replacing all the sugar. Reduce the oven temperature by 15-20 degrees F when baking with BAN

Honey: For each cup of sugar, use ¾ cup honey. You will need to reduce the liquids in the recipe by ¼ cup for every cup honey added to the recipe. To counter honey’s acidity add ½ tsp baking soda for every cup of honey in the recipe. When baking with honey, reduce the temperature of the oven by 25 degrees F.

Stevia: For each cup of sugar in a recipe, use 1 tsp of ground dried stevia leaf. Stevia is green and will color the recipe. Greater alterations need to be made because you are losing bulk from the recipe. http://www.sweetleaf.com/ for recipes