I bought an interesting little book recently called "The Supermarket
Handbook", in which there are zillions of little tips and helps to
help you pick the best foods for you and your family.

   I will be, from time to time, enter some excerpts from the book.
including some of the recipes. Hopefully this will help everyone
and not just me. 

for openers:
  "offcials of the FDA comfirmed that, although the limit for
meat and fish content of nitrate is 200 part per million, it
permitted up to 260 ppm before siezing the products as harmful.
   A cancer specialist to the same subcommitee yesterday that the
nitrate limit should be no more than 20 ppm because the chemical
-- a curing and coloring agent--may combine in the stomach with amino
acids and cause cancer.
                             -- New York Times 3/17/71

 ok so that IS 20 odd years old, but I am sure that the standard is 
still there, but I think it is still relevent.

14 responses total.

Is the author of the article still alive? ...the "cancer specialist?"

  I really don`t know, but that figure made me think.

heh.

Excuse me, while I pry my face off the stove platform.

Questions on whole foods.
1.  Phytins (found in the outer layer of seeds, including beans, wheat, and
they bind minerals and make them unavailable during digestion).  I read that
they are broken down by yeasts in risen breads, and somewhere else I read that
they are broken down just be letting dough sit for an hour, which I have been
doing for noodle dough (to make sure I get calcium and zinc).  I also heard
that sprouting will remove them.  Are any or all of these true?  People who
eat unleavened breads are said to have zinc deficiences.
2.  Beans.  Flatulence is caused by complex sugars (disaccharides raffinose
and stachyose), which can be digested by an enzyme sold as Beano and called
alpha-galactosidase, and is obtained from Aspergillus species of mold.  The
same mold is used in making miso and soy sauce.  Will these also help in
digesting beans?  Will they work if you cook with them (does the heat destroy
the enzyme).  Avocados turn brown due to the action of the same enzyme, will
they prevent flatulence?  It is also said to help to add ginger, asafetida,
or kelp.  How do these work?  Should they also be raw?
3.  The outside of sesame seeds has phytins and lots of calcium.  The phytins
bind the calcium.  Do you have a net gain or a net loss from eating whole
rather than hulled sesame seeds?  Do you get more nutrients out of whole or
even hulled seeds or from tahini (where the cells are broken open, but the
contents may be oxidized)?
4.  Any helpful suggestions for a vegan diet other than vitamin pills?

No idea on most of those, except for the tiniest answer: heat does deactivate
Beano, so I would think it would deactivate that enzyme when it's found in
other foods too.  Most enzymes are very easily denatured by heat.

The main suggestion one hears for a vegan diet is "nutritional yeast".  But
I already passed that one along earlier.  Other than that, I suggest doing
a lot of reading about nutrition, but clearly you already are doing that. :)

Thanks again, Valerie.  Fireside Store on Huron carries the Red Star
nutritional yeast with B6, labelled just plain nutritional yeast but the large
box it comes in said B12 (not B6, cancel that, don't know how to delete). 
We have started sprinkling it on rice and potatoes.  I will try putting the
kelp in the bean-soaking water.  In Belgrade I was taught to bring the soaked
beans to a boil and then throw out the cooking water, which makes sense if
the indigestible sugars are mainly in the husk, which is all that would get
affected by a quick boil, and that way you don't lose nutrients from the rest
of the bean.  I will check the Internet for phytins (courtesy of Grex for
accessing it).

(You can change B6 to B12 in a response by typing :/B6/B12/ at the beginning
of a new line.)

thanks for the typing lesson, I should read my new Grex beginner's manual,
but my computer-addict roommate got hold of it.  He said my email address was
not keesan@grex.cyberspace.org but keesan@cyberspace.org.

re phytates (or phytins?).  Don't know if I wrote in about this yet, but it
may not be the yeast-rising that eliminates them in risen bread, but the fact
that it is cooked at a lower temperature.  When things are cooked at high
temperatures, such as flat breads on hot stones, or popcorn, or fried breads,
the protein combines with the sugars, making an indigestible complex that also
grabs onto B-vitamins and minerals.  Therefore steamed bread, like the Chinese
make, yeasted-risen-steamed, should be healthiest.  Seems like the Chinese
have figured out the healthiest cooking methods, perhaps as a response to
centuries of famine.  Only those that cooked best survived.  But the  yeast
also helps by breaking down starches to sugars, and creating vitamins.  Can
anyone recommend a good book on nutritional biochemistry and microbiology?
To revise my second line, it is not the phytates that are grabbing the
minerals in unrisen bread, but the protein-sugar complexes.  Phytates can be
reduced by sprouting the grain, but that makes it hard to grind into flour.
Letting the dough sit for an hour or longer also seems to deactivate the
phytates.  Sprouted wheat can be baked and ground into bulgur.  Same for
sprouted beans, but I have not tried these yet.  Sprouted lentils make nice
soup.  Time to go make soup.

(You can receive email as keesan@cyberspace.org, keesan@grex.org, and
keesan@grex.cyberspace.org -- all three will work, and all the mail will end
up in your regular inbox.
The :/B6/B12/ substitution isn't actually in the Grex beginner's manual.
It's a cool feature of an add-on program called Gate that almost everybody
on Grex uses, but which most people don't know they're using.)

Hm.  I wonder if bagels would also be very healthy, since they're yeasted,
risen, and boiled.

I've heard that when seeds sprout, they generally give off toxins that prevent
other seeds from sprouting nearby.  The idea is to ensure that the new plant
will have enough space and nutrients to grow, without being crowded to death.
I've read this in a couple of places, but none of them has ever discussed what
kind of toxins are released.  I get the impression that you can counteract
this problem by rinsing your sprouts right before using them, to rinse off
the toxins.

Weird that entire cultures would use types of bread that are unhealthy, for
example the Indian flatbreads that are eaten with every meal there.

I just read that in India they sift out the coarsest bran before making the
flatbread out of it, which probably eliminates the phytic acid problem, since
the phytic acid is mostly in the bran.
Thanks for the choice of addresses. 
When you sprout seeds, you are supposed to rinse them off daily.  I wonder
if that has anything to do with removing the toxins so that all the seeds will
grow better.  Thanks for the info.  I am trying to sprout some of the 50
pounds of rye a friend gave us.  It is tiring to grind it all into flour. 
We will try to sprout it, then bake it at low temperature, then grind it to
a coarse meal, then add to hot water, and report on the results, but I think
my apartment may be too cold for sprouting seeds.  Is 60 okay?  We tried
making corn tortillas - the soaking in lime to remove the husk also converts
some precursor to niacin.  Excellent results but makes a mess out of our flour
grinder.  First soak overnight, then boil for an hour, then rinse thoroughly
(keep your hands out of the lime solution first few rinses), then grind in
a flour grinder (unless you happen to have a stone metate), then bake on a
hot stone (or a greased frying pan) after forming the sticky mush into flat
cakes.  Eat at once.  A real hit, but it seems like we put in more energy than
we got out.   Can anyone suggest how to make pancakes without yeast, other
than the traditional Ethiopian recipe which requires several days of
fermentation (teff, or pastry wheat flour).  When we presoaked rye flour
overnight and tried to fry it, it stuck to the pan, too much sugar.  Actually
I meant without eggs and milk, I forgot that trick of how to correct an error.
Was it /yeast/:milk and eggs/ ?  I will look again.  Can anyone suggest good
recipes for how to use whole rye and soft wheat other than making them into
flour first?  I wrecked my arm grinding the flour already.

For a warmer place to sprout things, try using a light bulb in a box.  That
can get as warm as you want and beyond.  Maybe a big picnic cooler, and some
kind of thermostat rig.  (Be careful about shocks and fires!)

The thing about rinsing seeds as you're sprouting them is that the seeds give
off toxins as they sprout, and the toxins are supposedly bad for people as
well as bad for other seeds.  So you'd want to rinse the sprouts before eating
them.

I made eggless pancakes a year or two ago, as an experiment.  They came out
okay but a little tough.  I *think* all I did was leave the eggs out of a
regular pancake recipe.  But it's been a while, so I might be remembering
wrong (sorry).  Another option would be the "Egg Replacer" product that they
sell at the co-op.  It's made out of potato starches and stuff.  I made a few
batches of pancakes with egg replacer, decided that I didn't think the egg
replacer made much difference, and tried some pancakes without it.  Indeed,
there wasn't a lot of difference.

For milk, you could substitute soymilk, oat milk, or a lot of other non-dairy
milks.

(To change "yeast" to "milk and eggs", type   :/yeast/milk and eggs/
-- but by the time you do that, you may want to type   :e   instead, to go
into your editor, since changing a short word to a much longer word is going
to do weird things to the word wrap in your response.  In an editor, you can
fix word wrap and suchlike.  Your editor is pico, which should take care of
word wrap automatically.)

thanks, will try the eggless pancakes.  The problem with ours sticking may
have been the overnight soaking which made the starch into sticky sugar, or
possibly the pan was not hot enough.  I will definitely rinse any sprouts
before eating.  I wonder if an insulated (self-cleaning) oven which lets you
turn on the light with a switch would work for sprouts?  Mine has no light.
I am trying it because is it dark and there is no space in any other dark
spot.  Maybe I can run a lamp into it somehow, or try a hot water bottle
refilled every day when I wash the sprouts.  I just read that barley takes
21 days to sprout properly when you are making malt for beer.  Any guesses
how long wheat or rye should be sprouted before baking and then cracking to
bulgur?

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