This drink is delicous and very healthy. A great drink to take on the road or if your backpacking and need some extra energy.

5 cups spring water
2 tablespoons chia seeds
1 fresh lemon juiced
1 fresh lime juiced
1 tablespoon raw honey
1/4 teaspoon vanilla powder (optional)

Add everything into a large mason jar before bedtime. Stir or shake it up and place in the fridge or on your counter top (if you don’t care for cold beverages)
In the morning enjoy a nice refreshing drink to take to work and sip through out the day to stay hydrated.

So What Really Is In A
McDonald’s Chicken McNugget?
Chicken McPoison
Author unknown
5-14-7

The Omnivore’s Dilemma by Michael Pollan is a fascinating book that details the changing eating habits of Americans. I can’t recommend it highly enough. It explains how, over the last 30 years, we have become a nation that eats vast quantities of corn ­ much more so than Mexicans, the original “corn people.”

Most folks assume that a chicken nugget is just a piece of fried chicken, right? Wrong! Did you know, for example, that a McDonald’s Chicken McNugget is 56% corn?

What else is in a McDonald’s Chicken McNugget? Besides corn, and to a lesser extent, chicken, The Omnivore’s Dilemma describes all of the thirty-eight ingredients that make up a McNugget ­ one of which I’ll bet you’ll never guess. During this part of the book, the author has just ordered a meal from McDonald’s with his family and taken one of the flyers available at McDonald’s called “A Full Serving of Nutrition Facts: Choose the Best Meal for You.”

These two paragraphs are taken directly from The Omnivore’s Dilemma:

“The ingredients listed in the flyer suggest a lot of thought goes into a nugget, that and a lot of corn. Of the thirty-eight ingredients it takes to make a McNugget, I counted thirteen that can be derived from corn: the corn-fed chicken itself; modified cornstarch (to bind the pulverized chicken meat); mono-, tri-, and diglycerides (emulsifiers, which keep the fats and water from separating); dextrose; lecithin (another emulsifier); chicken broth (to restore some of the flavor that processing leeches out); yellow corn flour and more modified cornstarch (for the batter); cornstarch (a filler); vegetable shortening; partially hydrogenated corn oil; and citric acid as a preservative. A couple of other plants take part in the nugget: There’s some wheat in the batter, and on any given day the hydrogenated oil could come from soybeans, canola, or cotton rather than corn, depending on the market price and availability.

According to the handout, McNuggets also contain several completely synthetic ingredients, quasiedible substances that ultimately come not from a corn or soybean field but form a petroleum refinery or chemical plant. These chemicals are what make modern processed food possible, by keeping the organic materials in them from going bad or looking strange after months in the freezer or on the road. Listed first are the “leavening agents”: sodium aluminum phosphate, mono-calcium phosphate, sodium acid pyrophosphate, and calcium lactate. These are antioxidants added to keep the various animal and vegetable fats involved in a nugget from turning rancid. Then there are “anti-foaming agents” like dimethylpolysiloxene, added to the cooking oil to keep the starches from binding to air molecules, so as to produce foam during the fry. The problem is evidently grave enough to warrant adding a toxic chemical to the food: According to the Handbook of Food Additives, dimethylpolysiloxene is a suspected carcinogen and an established mutagen, tumorigen, and reproductive effector; it’s also flammable.

But perhaps the most alarming ingredient in a Chicken McNugget is tertiary butylhydroquinone, or TBHQ, an antioxidant derived from petroleum that is either sprayed directly on the nugget or the inside of the box it comes in to “help preserve freshness.” According to A Consumer’s Dictionary of Food Additives, TBHQ is a form of butane (i.e. lighter fluid) the FDA allows processors to use sparingly in our food: It can comprise no more than 0.02 percent of the oil in a nugget. Which is probably just as well, considering that ingesting a single gram of TBHQ can cause “nausea, vomiting, ringing in the ears, delirium, a sense of suffocation, and collapse.” Ingesting five grams of TBHQ can kill.”

Bet you never thought that was in your chicken McNuggets!

Ask Dr. Coconut TM

Published Fall, 2011

Published by Piccadilly Books, Ltd., www.piccadillybooks.com.

Bruce Fife, N.D., Publisher, www.coconutresearchcenter.org

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Is Drinking Fresh Young Coconut Water Dangerous?

I was told drinking the water from young white coconuts is dangerous. On the Internet I read that the young, white coconuts that are sold in the U.S., and perhaps other non-tropical countries, are dipped in formaldehyde before they are shipped overseas. If this is true, does the formaldehyde seep into the coconut and contaminate the water?

In recent years a controversy has arisen regarding whether or not the water from young coconuts is fit to drink because of the possibility of formaldehyde contamination during processing. Many people have contacted me about this issue and a number of health conscious individuals have stopped drinking coconut water for fear of consuming formaldehyde.

Coconut water is the liquid found inside coconuts. It is the most popular beverage in the tropics and in recent years has been gaining popularity in the US, Europe, and Australia.

While you can drink the water from the brown hairy coconuts you buy at the grocery store, the water is best when it comes from an immature or green coconut. These are often called young coconuts. Young coconuts are sold primarily for drinking. The young coconuts you are likely to see being sold in your local grocery or health food store do not look like the mature brown nuts you are most familiar with. When growing on the tree, coconuts are surrounded by a thick fibrous husk. After harvesting, the husk of a mature nut is completely removed. So all you see in the store is the brown shell with a few straggling hairs from the husk. Young coconuts, on the other hand, are not completely de-husked. Instead the husk is trimmed and shaped. The final product has a flat bottom and round body with a pyramid top. Because the trimmed husk is white in color, they are sometimes referred to as white coconuts.

Trimmed Thai Coconut
The controversy surrounds only the young coconuts, not the brown hairy ones since they are processed differently. Rumor has it that after the young coconuts are trimmed they are soaked in formaldehyde to keep them from spoiling as they are shipped to markets around the word.

A search on the Internet will give you a variety of opinions and claims, but few hard facts. I don’t know where this rumor got its start, but after reading a number of websites, I can venture a guess. Remember, just because someone on the Internet makes a statement, that does not make it true, even if it is stated by a respected company or individual. An interesting thing that I noticed was that those companies and individuals who are selling competing products (commercially packaged coconut water) appear to be among the loudest critics. They are quick to claim that fresh young coconuts are dangerous to drink and then direct readers to choose a safer option. Of course, that option would be their own products.

I have nothing against bottled coconut water. I drink it myself. But obviously, fresh young coconut water is vastly superior to commercially bottled, pasteurized coconut water. It’s no surprise that those that sell packaged coconut water would be quick to jump on any gimmick to discredit the competition in order to boost sales.

On further investigation, I discovered that there was some truth to the rumor, but it was grossly distorted. A detailed description of the processing procedure can be found in the technical publication titled “Postharvest Handling of Tender Coconut” published in the ASEAN Food Journal. The article explains that after the husk of young coconuts are trimmed, in preparation for shipping to market, they are dipped in a vat of water, not formaldehyde. However, the water does contain a very small amount, between 1-3 percent, of sodium metabisulfite.

Sodium metabisulfite is nothing like formaldehyde, which is a poison even in very small amounts. Sodium metabisulfite is a food grade antioxidant and preservative used to prevent oxidation (browning) of the husk and to retard mold. It is also used on dried fruits and vegetables for the same reason. If you buy dried apricots, apples, bananas, and other fruit, it has likely been treated with sodium metabisulfite or similar sulfite. It is also found in some fruit juices, baked goods, and other products. Sodium metabisulfite is used in the making of wine and beer. You will also find it in vinegars. When vinegar and wine are fermented sodium metabisulfite is produced naturally. Technically, it is a natural preservative. Food scientists say that sodium metabisulfite is metabolized in the liver to harmless sulfate and excreted in the urine; normally it produces no adverse side effects. However, some people are allergic to sulfites. Respiratory problems are a common allergic reaction in those who are sensitive.

If you are a food purest, you would probably prefer not to eat foods containing this or any other unnecessary additive. I agree. Pure foods are best. It makes me wonder if those people who are spreading this rumor are purposely trying to mislead because formaldehyde is far more scary.

The ASEAN Food Journal article explains that the young coconuts are soaked for only 2 to 5 minutes in the water solution, then removed, dried, and wrapped. This short amount of time does not allow any of the diluted sodium metabisulfite solution to penetrate into the coconut.

There is a YouTube video of a blog interview where the guest is speaking about this issue. She says that some people dismiss this issue because even if the rumor were true, the chemicals could not penetrate through both the dense fibrous husk and the hard shell to contaminate the water inside, so the water is safe. She says this is not true and claims that she tested this theory by soaking some young coconuts in dye. When she opened the coconuts, water inside was tainted by the dye, proving that the young coconuts were not impervious. She never stated how long she soaked the coconut in her experiment. Obviously there is a difference between soaking for 5 minutes and soaking for 5 days. The host asked her how long it took for the dye to soak through the coconut. She replied that the process was “almost instantaneous.” That means that to reach the water, the dye would have penetrated all the way through the husk as well as the shell in just a few seconds. She made it sound very scary.

However, her description sounded highly unlikely and very suspicious. She was so enthusiastic about the whole ordeal, it made me wonder if she had some vested interest in discouraging the consumption of fresh young coconuts. It made me wonder if she had some financial connection to the bottled coconut water industry.

I decided to test her results and repeat the experiment. I purchased several young Thai coconuts from Whole Foods. I took one of the coconuts and covered it in concentrated dark blue food coloring and let it soak in for 10 minutes.

I then cut out a segment of the dyed husk and examined it. Remarkably, none of the dye penetrated the surface at all.

I repeated the experiment with another coconut. This time I used concentrated clothes dye and increased the soaking time. I took a bucket, filled it half way with black clothes dye, and soaked a young coconut for three hours. Normally, young coconuts are only soaked for 3-5 minutes, so three hours was very excessive. If there was going to be any penetration, I would expect to see it this time.

The coconut was removed and dried. I then cut open a section of the husk to examine how deeply the dye had penetrated. To my surprise there was absolutely no penetration of the dye. The dye remained almost entirely on the surface.

I cracked open the shell, poured out the water, and drank it. There was no contamination, it was as clear and as good as any coconut water.

Soaking the coconut for three hours showed no more penetration than 10 minutes. Obviously, soaking for just 3-5 minutes will have absolutely no effect.

It is apparent that the husk and shell provide ample barriers to the solution. So there is no justification for concern about “chemicals” contaminating young coconut water. This myth has been busted. ■

Source: Tongdee, S.C. Postharvest handling of tender coconut. ASEAN Food J 1991;6:74-75.