Here is a super easy recipe for your Super Bowl Sunday enjoyment. Since we are not having our Super Bowl party this year, we can still eat in a festive manner. Pandemics do not stop me from eating well! In fact, I'm eating better. I started following The Freese Method during the pandemic and feel so much better thanks to Hannah Freese, RD. This recipe falls right into the plan so why not? I eat a lot of nuts following The Freese Method and a lot of dark chocolate...since sugar is off the menu. (The plan allows dark chocolate that is >70% cocao which is easy for me to eat and totally satisfies my sugar craving.) There are a lot of spiced nut recipes but I think this recipe has just the right amount of spiciness. My sister has been serving these nuts at family gatherings for at least 20 years and I am finally posting it. She doesn't even remember where she got the recipe! I buy the nuts from Trader Joe's and even though the recipe says "dry roasted, unsalted", I buy the "dry roasted, salted" and the recipe still works. On The Freese Method, salt is not restricted at all; in fact, she encourages us to add salt, another easy thing for me to do. The basis of the diet is to lower insulin secretion that causes our body's to store fat. A low salt diet will promote insulin secretion to stimulate the kidneys to release more electrolytes into your system because you are low in sodium. I know this sounds contrary to everything they say about "eating healthy" but in actuality, cardiac disease, diabetes and obesity are caused by inflammation in the body with the #1 culprit being sugar and toxic oils. Saturated fat is not a toxic oil and neither are eggs. I've been searching for an anti-inflammatory diet for a long time and The Freese Method is the closest I've ever come. Turns out, it is also a cardiac diet, a diabetic diet and a weight loss diet. But not the kind we were taught in dietetics, even though Hannah is also a registered dietitian. And not the kind doctors are taught. How many doctors do you know who would tell you not to restrict salt, eggs, or saturated fat. But Hannah follows research and there are plenty of studies that prove her diet plan. She bases her research on legitimate studies that aren't funded by Big Food. Who is Big Food? Michael Pollan explains it best:
Simply put, it (Big Food) is the $1.5 trillion industry that grows, rears, slaughters, processes, imports, packages and retails most of the food Americans eat. Actually, there are at least four distinct levels to this towering food pyramid. At its base stands Big Ag, which consists primarily of the corn-and-soybean-industrial complex in the Farm Belt, as well as the growers of the other so-called commodity crops and the small handful of companies that supply these farmers with seeds and chemicals. Big Ag in turn supplies the feed grain for Big Meat — all the animals funneled into the tiny number of companies that ultimately process most of the meat we eat — and the raw ingredients for the packaged-food sector, which transforms those commodity crops into the building blocks of processed food: the corn into high-fructose corn syrup and all the other chemical novelties on the processed-food ingredient label, and the soy into the oil in which much of fast food is fried. At the top of the Big Food pyramid sit the supermarket retailers and fast-food franchises.
Each industry sector is represented in Washington by one or more powerful lobbying organizations. The Grocery Manufacturers Association (G.M.A.) represents the household brand names, like General Mills, Campbell’s, PepsiCo, Nestlé, that make and market the packaged foods and beverages in the supermarket. The North American Meat Institute represents Big Meat, working alongside each animal’s dedicated trade association (the National Pork Producers Council, the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association and the National Chicken Council). The American Farm Bureau Federation ostensibly speaks for the growers of the commodity crops. The National Restaurant Association is the voice of the fast-food chains. The euphemistically named CropLife America speaks for the pesticide industry.
I love reading Michael Pollan. He has a lot to say about the pandemic, too, and you can read some here: The Sickness of Our Food Supply. Here is a small portion of what he has to say:
It’s long been understood that an industrial food system built upon a foundation of commodity crops like corn and soybeans leads to a diet dominated by meat and highly processed food. Most of what we grow in this country is not food exactly, but rather feed for animals and the building blocks from which fast food, snacks, soda, and all the other wonders of food processing, such as high-fructose corn syrup, are manufactured. While some sectors of agriculture are struggling during the pandemic, we can expect the corn and soybean crop to escape more or less unscathed. That’s because it takes remarkably little labor—typically a single farmer on a tractor, working alone—to plant and harvest thousands of acres of these crops. So processed foods should be the last kind to disappear from supermarket shelves.
Unfortunately, a diet dominated by such foods (as well as lots of meat and little in the way of vegetables or fruit—the so-called Western diet) predisposes us to obesity and chronic diseases such as hypertension and type-2 diabetes. These “underlying conditions” happen to be among the strongest predictors that an individual infected with Covid-19 will end up in the hospital with a severe case of the disease; the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have reported that 49 percent of the people hospitalized for Covid-19 had preexisting hypertension, 48 percent were obese, and 28 percent had diabetes.9
Why these particular conditions should worsen Covid-19 infections might be explained by the fact that all three are symptoms of chronic inflammation, which is a disorder of the body’s immune system. (The Western diet is by itself inflammatory.)
I've always known that our Western diet was a poor diet, or what I call SAD - Standard American Diet. I've worked in hospitals and I've seen what it does to people. We have choices, of course, but you must have a strong will-power to eat healthy and you must be able to resist the strong influences that SAD dominates in our everyday life and most people just can't do that. It wasn't until we started traveling to Japan that I really opened my eyes to it. There are no obese people there or people with arthritis, another inflammatory disease. They eat refined white rice, white bread and they have McDonald's and other fast foods just like in America. The bottom line is this: our country has the whole "what is healthy and what is unhealthy" totally screwed up because of Big Food. And I am so done with it. After a hip replacement, a knee replacement and weight problems for the past 15 years, I am SO DONE with it! Along with a lot of veggies, I am now eating a lot of saturated fat, eggs and salt and I am loving every minute it. Here's another big misnomer: It's not about calories, it's about hormones. It's not about "calories in, calories out". I am so done with that, too. Beating yourself up because you need to exercise more, more more! "But nuts are so fattening!" Be done with it. I tell you, it's not worth stressing yourself out over what Big Food has lead us to believe. Make these Herbed Spiced Nuts and eat to your heart's content (and because your heart will love it!) This pandemic has taken a lot away from us but we can still enjoy good food and this recipe falls into that category, so enjoy. It will not cause you any harm and the high fat calories are actually good for you. Now, go digest that while you watch the big game.
2 tsp. dried thyme, crumbled
1/4 cup oil (I used avocado oil)
1 tsp. sea salt
1 tsp. cayenne
4 cups assorted unsalted raw or dry roasted mixed nuts - (they should not be roasted with soybean oil or other toxic oil.)
1. Preheat oven to 350 degree F.
2. In a bowl whisk together oil, thyme, salt, and cayenne.
3. Add nuts and toss to coat well.
4. Spread nuts in a shallow baking pan and roast in middle of the oven for 10 minutes.
5. Remove from oven and let cool on paper towels to soak up excess oil.
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