RAW GOAT'S MILK FOR KEFIR!!!

I have found a great supplier of RAW goat's milk for making kefir.  This company is a very small family farm and there may be a waiting list for their products.  In our opinion this only makes it all the more precious.  We owe it to small family farms like these to keep them in business and give them our support and appreciation.  This is where integrity meets quality and the outcome surely can only be health and happiness for all concerned.
see:  www.chucklinggoat.co.uk

Chuckling Goat
2012 Janey Lee Grace Platinum Award Winner
Rated 9 out of 10 by the Daily Mail
As featured in the Western Mail
www.chucklinggoat.co.uk
tel: 01239 654 672
mob: 07967 212 942

Another gain for Kefir

Yesterday's (13th February 2013) Institute of Food Technology (IFT) Newsletter discusses how the previously clear lines between mainstream foods and "speciality" foods is becoming increasingly blurred.  It appears that the Yoghurt/Kefir group is the fastest growing food sector in the US.  As we all know, what the US does today the UK does tomorrow, so ride the wave and learn more about Kefir; Nature's Little Miracle from Doctor Enid.

See the whole article here:  http://www.ift.org/newsroom/news-releases/2013/february/13/foodie.aspx

Live, Fresh Kefir grains are now available on eBay:  

 eBay item=111012398434

...or from the clinic shop as before (undergoing a little renovation, so if you can't find them on the shop, go to the ebay item instead).

Quick Cheat's Green Smoothie Recipe

For those of you with busy lives and no time to juice fresh fruit in the morning, try this super-easy and super-healthy quick green smoothie recipe.

400 mls Innocent or Supermarkets' Own brand Mango Smoothie
250 mls fresh filtered cold water
couple of ice cubes
half a fresh mango (wrap the other half up for tomorrow) or half a banana
Great BIG handful of spinach leaf or baby spinach

Blend thoroughly with a high-speed blender until nice and smooth.  Water down again if necessary and add a little honey or Sweet Freedom or Agave to make it nice and mouth-watering to taste.

This might not be all raw and fresh (the smoothies in the shops are all pasteurised), but I have found this makes taking the green drink daily SO much easier and quicker;  a green smoothie made with commercial fruit smoothie as a base, teaming with live enzymes from the spinach and the mango is better than a bowl of cornflakes, a cereal bar .... or practically anything else you could buy.

Remember, it is not the Food in Your Life that matters, it is the Life in Your Food!
The spinach is the message, the smoothie is just the messenger!

Right!  We're back!! Couldn't believe how long since the last post but hey, we are trying to get modern, here!

Super Yogurt

Yogurt for Super Heroes?

Why buy silly little yogurty-pot things from the supermarkets when you could have SUPER-YOGURT...?

 THIS Super-Yogurt Mix is Billions of times more effective than anything you can buy:

Stage 1:  Each day, we strain off our lovely creamy and mild kefir (my particular favourite method is to not culture it for too long or too warm and it stays lovely and thick and mild;  we use organic whole milk at the moment because the unpasteurised milk farm is not producing), and we add it to the most incredible home-brewed yogurts (more below).  If you want to buy some kefir grains, just pop into the Taymount online shop:  Taymount Online Shop and place your order there.

Stage 2: We make a yogurt out of Mutaflor - which is a brand name of a strain of Escherichia Coli (E.Coli) sub-type Nissle 1917.  We have found that the tests for Gut Profile Analysis for many people suffering from IBD, IBS and other gut disturbances show alarming co-variances with low or undetectable levels of the beneficial members of the E.Coli family.  So we toss that into the mix as a great preventative.  

We buy our Mutaflor from Berlinde Apoteke in Germany (mail order) and we brew up our own yogurts using UHT organic whole milk, fruit sugar and pop it in the the dehydrator in 100 ml pots from ebay.  Works quite well after about 20 hours incubating.

Stage 3: We make another type of yogurt from the clinical-grade super-probiotic called VSL3.  One single-dose sachet contains 450 BILLION live organisms so we take one sachet and cultivate it with a whole litre of milk so it makes one packet go a very long way (good economy here) and activates the freeze-dried microbes right up front, so they get to work as soon as you swallow them, helping the mouth and oesophageal membranes (yes, we need helpful bacteria on all our mucus membranes) and hopefully enough survive the stomach conditions to spread their goodness into the lower regions of the digestive tract where they are so very needed.

Stage 4 - The MIX: So our daily yogurt super-blend is one or two 100 ml pot of home-brewed Mutaflor yogurt, 1 or 2 x 100 ml pot of home-brewed VSL3 yogurt, mixed into about 600 mls of creamy kefir.  Then the combination is enhanced (fed) with an extra spoonful or two of FOS - Fructo-oligo-saccharides, which feed the probiotic yeasts and bacteria further;  I like my yogurts nice and mild and sweet - and so we also add a little commercial drinking yogurt like Activia or Supermarkets' own drinking yogurt JUST TO MAKE IT TASTE NICE!  Being healthy doesn't have to mean being miserable and so we add a little bit of what we fancy just to make sure that we want to come back tomorrow and have some more.  You could also use a fruit smoothie to add a little flavour and sweetness if you didn't want to use commercial drinking yogurts. 

This is what I call SUPER-YOGURT.  It tastes superb, nice and cool and mild and creamy and I know it is so chock full of the biggest range of probiotics I can get into a single glassful.

 Be warned:  As soon as you mix this formula, you may get secondary fermentation from the fruit sugars in the commercial yogurt or the smoothie and the FOS, so mix and drink fairly promptly, or make sure the cap is strong, you will get a little exhale of CO2 if you leave it for any length of time after mixing.  They do sit for the best part of the day in the fridge without incident, but you might get that little sparkle on the tongue if it does a secondary fermentation (and personally, I don't like that sparkle in yogurts, but I love it in Kefir D'Uva which is kefir made in red grape juice, and it is like red champagne!). 

If you would like more information about kefir or anything mentioned on this page, you could buy the Kefir Book downloadable from the new Taymount website - coming soon.  Drop an email to Dr. Enid if you want to place an order for the book when it is ready - should be less than a month away.  Price is expected to be around £4.95.

I have tried culturing Symprove but it doesn't work in milk.  So sometimes I throw in a capful of Symprove into the MIX just for good measure, but it doesn't seem to add anything to the whole, so I would take Symprove separately on a completely empty stomach, as directed.

If there are any more strains or combinations of probiotics that anybody knows about, we are willing to try culturing them to add to the mix, so please add your comments.  Our kefir is a micro-community and we are also a community on a slightly bigger scale, our strength is increased when we work together in a symbiosis, just like the kefir microbes.  So the more we share our information, the better THE SUPER YOGURT can become.

NOTE:  Always sterilise any and all objects that come into contact with any culturing for yogurts - the exception to this is the wonderful Kefir, which is self-regulating and annihilates any foreign microbes that stray into the kefir colony, but the others are incubated in warm (38-40ºC) conditions so if you are not sterlising everything, you could be culturing some harmful microbes.  I use Milton steriliser tablets for baby feeding bottles and do EVERYTHING that might come into contact with the milk and yogurt starter solution.  Just to be sure.

Yours in Health

Dr. Enid

Recipe for delicious Green Sunshine Juice

Green Sunshine Juice (formerly called Shrek Juice!)

- the top of the morning to you!

¼ to ½ cucumber

1 stick of celery (more if you like it – I hate it (!) but it is a good source of mineral salts)

¼ to ½ lemon

¼ to ½ lime

2-3 apples

1" slice of pineapple (if fruit sugars are not contra-indicated for you)

a large handful of spinach, kale, green lettuce, cabbage, Brussels sprouts, beet tops – anything green and leafy – or a mixture of whatever you have in the fridge as long as it is green and leafy (and edible!)

If your greens are very dark and strong, you may need more lemon, lime and apple. The whole point of this juice is to get the green chlorophyll plant juice in the green leaves into your body in a readily accessible form – fresh living juice. We need to sweeten it and cut the green taste and the citrus fruits and the apples do this beautifully. If you have some pineapple to hand, that goes in well also.

We take ½ to 1 pint each of this every day and it forms a wonderful foundation of nutrition to keep you going during the day. If you have an early start, make it the night before and put it in a vacuum flask in the fridge. It is better fresh, but better old than none!

Shrek Juice = Nutritional Insurance

1 pint of this everyday will give you loads of energy, clear your skin and make you feel more inclined to take healthier options for food choices, almost without thinking.

3 of these per week and you have a 76% reduced chance of developing Alzheimer’s – which is a huge benefit. That was just from one 10-year study on juicing.

Best juicer?

Breville Café Style Juicer (JE4) Sturdy machine, lots of stainless steel makes it a strong machine. Efficient and very quick.

Philips HR1861 Pro Aluminium Juicer Good value – easy to use but not quite as durable as the JE4.

To find the cheapest seller of these machines, do your internet searches through the shopping genie - free application backed by google, yahoo and ebay: download absolutely FREE from: www.comparethebargains.com

Do the normal search and then use the "compare" button on your shopping genie toolbar and it will sort ALL your search results into the cheapest.

Probiotics can help behaviour, ADD and Asthma

We have a small sample of case studies which have shown us that just giving broad spectrum, good quality probiotics can help a range of conditions not instinctively linked to the gut.

One case was a 10 year old child with asthma. It was suggested that the dysbiosis in his gut was alerting the immune system to potential invaders, in lay terms, it had the immune system on "amber alert" as a baseline state. This meant that anything that came into his system was reacted to instead of tolerated, e.g. pollen, pet hairs etc.

After two months on daily probiotics (between 4 bn and 20 bn), his asthma attacks had dropped from two to three per week down to two to three per month. This was a very encouraging result but as a side effect, his behaviour was also much calmer and his attention span had increased.

His temper outbursts had dropped drastically and his mother reported that he did not "kick off" anywhere near as much as he had been doing prior to the probiotic treatment regime.

It is suggested by this treatment that the level of dysbiosis can greatly influence the state of reactivity generally of the whole body, physically, emotionally and mentally. With the less favourable kinds of bacteria colonising the bowel, the level of irritation and toxicity is greatly increased and the body is highly reactive to any other potential irritant.

Extrapolating from this, anybody experiencing any kind of intolerance, allergic reaction and behavioural disturbance (and this can include depression, anxiety, stress) should try a course of good quality high strength probiotics before they restort to other medicines to suppress the symptoms.

It is suggested that the seat of many problems is the gut flora - at the Taymount Clinic we have many good results from initially attending to the level of good bacteria in the gut. It is worthy of further study that some serious conditions like Crohn's disease and Ulcerative Colitis can be affected positively by making sure the gut flora are the beneficial kind rather than the pathogenic strains.

Sometimes the simplest solutions are the most elegant and efficient.

Juicing - Why should we juice?

JUICING? - WHY DO IT?


Why Juice? Why not just eat the stuff?

Loads of good reasons, here are just a few to chew on...

1. Juicing is a way of mechanically chewing up your food before you eat it. Your body is like a juice extractor, you chew the foods up so that your body can extract the nutrient-rich juice and then reject the fibre. Juicing saves your body time and energy – it is like nature’s fast food, healthy fast food. Most of us are too busy to chew properly and this has bad effects like bloating, wind, reflux etc. Juicing gets nourishment into your body in a form it can absorb quickly and easily.

2. You would not sit down to a big plate of greens and fruit for breakfast – so you would not just eat the stuff. Also, we need to eat more fruits and veggies to get the same nutrients that we used to get in our fresh food; intensive farming and long journeys to market, vast storage barns where the produce is stored, all mean that our food has lost a lot of its nutrients but the time we get them home. We should try to eat more seasonally and more locally produced foods to get more nutrients.

3. Juicing enables you to “wrap up” the less attractive taste of nutrient-rich greens and veggies in the sweet and flavourful juices of fruits making the whole thing palatable and getting nutrients inside you that you would not normally have ingested.

4. Because we don’t just eat the stuff!

But don’t we need the fibre?

Yes we do need fibre, we are not suggesting that you replace all your meals with fruit and veggie juices – just ADD the juices to your diet and eat nice high fibre meals as well. People who go on juice-only fasts often have a lot of problems with constipation so we acknowledge fully that we need fibre, probiotics and prebiotics to maintain a healthy colon. So drink your juice and eat your high fibre complex carbohydrates (wholegrain cereals and salads) too!

How much juice should we drink every day?

Studies over 10 years in Israel have shown that just one half-litre glass of green juice taken three times per week can reduce your chances of Alzheimer’s by an astonishing 76%. Think what a daily drink could do! If you get into the habit of taking a large glassful (think of a pint glass) every day and then a refreshing carroty or beetrooty or fruity cocktail for the fun of it any other time of the day, then you are boosting your daily nutrient intake way beyond what most people have in a week. 30 days on that and you will feel the energy and health improvement.

I don’t have time in the mornings to make a juice, can I do it the night before?

Yes, if you can get the juice nice and cold with some ice, put it in a flask and fill it right to the top to avoid air oxidation and keep it in the fridge until you need it, you won’t lose too many nutrients and the quality will be ok. An old juice is still better than no juice!

Which juicer is the best one to buy?

The best juicer on the market is the one that you would use every day. It is no good buying the top of the range technically brilliant machine if it doesn’t suit your lifestyle and spends most of its expensive life in the cupboard – I have been there, done that! A cheaper, less-efficient juicer that is a pleasure to use and one that you keep on the table top and use every day is a far better buy than the gleaming stainless steel beauty that costs you a month’s salary and is too complicated to clean up afterwards.

Great starter models are shown on the “Shrek Juice” leaflet. Other models of juicer are designed for multi-purpose and more advanced kitchen usage and we cover some of those in the demonstration.

Should we only juice organic foods?

In a perfect world, all produce would be organic and yes, that is the best type to buy and juice. But this is not a perfect world and organic foods cost a lot more than conventionally farmed produce. A juice made with conventional fruits and veggies is still better than no juice at all. If you have to compromise, consider that any green leafy vegetable is going to have been sprayed at least once (sometimes many times), so where you have a choice, buy green leafy veggies organically if you can and wash thoroughly all the other produce that you may have to buy conventionally grown. Make the spinach, lettuce, cabbage and kale the first choice for organic if you can; it is much easier to wash the other produce and remove pesticides and chemicals, much harder to get them off crinkly lettuce and kale leaves.

Things like avocados, bananas, oranges and coconuts etc., have thick skins so they should be ok to eat non-organic. Make choices where you can, but don’t worry about it if you can’t. It is still good to juice even if it is not organic.

I’ve got a smoothie maker – can’t I use that? What is the difference between a smoothie and a juice anyway?

Smoothies are blended fruits and vegetables with none of the fibre taken away – it is the whole fruit or veggie blended to a fine pulp and sometimes watered down with fruit juice or water to make it drinkable.

Blenders are the same thing as smoothie makers and neither one is a juicer. You really need a juicer AND a blender in the kitchen.

Stay Juicy - Stay LIVE!

For more ideas on juicing, join in one of the Juicy Workshops at Taymount Clinic - see www.taymount.com for details of the next one. Fun, information, juicy samples and take-home recipe sheet and a chance to try out various juicing machines.