Sondra Barrett:ILLUMINATING WINE & LIFE

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Garden inside the house - Sprouting
Eating green is a good choice for your health. Freshly grown local foods without pesticides or if you can grow your own are best. For those who don’t have garden space, hereʼs another option - grow sprouts. And as the seeds begin to sprout their protein and vitamin content increases.
 
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In the grocery store a hand full of sunflower sprouts can cost $5, yet you can grow your own for pennies. You may be familiar with alfalfa sprouts, not my favorite, but lots of seeds can be used for your ʻgarden in a jar.'  Download this file to learn and see more.

Download Sprouting file

SCHOOL GARDENS

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Hat's off and shovels down to Michelle Obama for setting the example for growing our own food.

What a concept for starting a health program.  Getting in touch with the beginnings - from seeds to something good to eat.

My own experience with a garden that schooled me, was at a small seaside town on the Left Coast where I apprenticed to an eccentric garden keeper and I fell in love.  In love with watering in tiny lettuce, digging beds, building 6-foot high compost beds.  I fell in love With the spirit of it all. Watching flowers dance in the wind, smelling succulent herbs and tasting the lettuce I grew myself, well, with everyone else.  For this city girl whose only connection with plants was an indoor potted palm, being in the garden and living in nature brought me to a deeper heart of life. and Spirit.boxoftomatoes.jpg

A new health plan that everyone should be able to agree upon starts with each school growing a garden, kids learning from the ground up about food and nourishment.  This goes into education and long-term prevention of obesity and other health-problems.  This is a preventive model, one step at a time., one seed at a time.

You can take a kid out of the city or the gangs, one garden at a time.  I have fantasized for years - what it - what if we could feed every child on the planet  - with food and love, then what?  So as I reach into my later years here I am committed to helping make that happen, one breath at a time.

The reality about gardens and schools -

 Sonoma County is a  wonderful model with their School Garden Network which has a whole curriculum developed and putting it into action.  I will post here and at my blog about the latest and greatest.  Please tell us what you are doing around school food.  

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Good FOOD tastes great. It provides nutrients we need for life. When its farmed without pesticides its likely to provide better nourishment for the land, the farmers,& us.
When it's shared with people we like, it tastes even better.

SHARING MEALS - Watch EDIBLE

While many of us enjoy meals with our families or friends, it's estimated that more than half the teens in the US eat most meals alone.

Studies indicate that the more meals children share with others, the less likely they will overindulge in food, drugs, cigarettes, or other unhealthy habits.

EDIBLE - a short film produced by filmmaker Kristi Moya, illustrates the reality of a teen eating alone and discovering the joy of fresh, local food.

How do you add more shared meals into your week?

Kristi, Allan Hogle, and I created a GUIDE to explore ways to share food and gardens for families and in the classroom. Feel free to download this guide and watch the film clip at www.bornofwomanfilms.com. We welcome your feedback.

Download EDIBLE Discussion Guide

Vitamin B12
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Vitamin B12

The RED vitamin is found in significant amounts ONLY in animal foods

FOODS that are good sources for it: meat, yogurt, eggs, fish, poultry, yeast, cheese and sea greens. Some foods are fortified with B12. Read labels.

B12's bright red color is due to the presence of the mineral cobalt which gives its other name, cobalmin. It is the vitamin required in the smallest amounts, micrograms = millionths of a gram.

Important for energy, genes and the nervous system.

Vitamin B12 partners with another B vitamin, folic acid, to support production of red blood cells, DNA, and the myelin sheath that insulates our nerve cells. B12, folic acid and B6 support the nervous system, so best to take these 3 together.


SWEET
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Table sugar, sucrose

What shapes our tastes?

Certainly our families, our heritage, our experience influence our likes and dislikes. So does our biology. The organ of taste, our tongue and mouth, can only detect 5 tastes.
  • sweet
  • sour
  • salty
  • savory umami
  • bitter
What we often call taste is actually FLAVOR which is the marriage of taste and smell. Where our taste is able to distinguish only five tastes, our smell abilities can detect thousands of aromas. Smell and taste, our called "chemical senses," are dependent on molecular interactions. And many scientists theorize that its the shape of the molecules that interact with our cells.  Others add on the concept of the vibration of the molecule influence how we detect specific aromas.
 
Through the microscope we can see the expressions of these molecules and may even imagine that some of our words about tastes actually reflect the molecule's shapes. Look at sweet and rounded sugar, prickly caffeine, and full bodied wine to tickle your imagination.  Read more in Chapter 3 of Wine's Hidden Beauty.
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SALTY
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Table salt, sodium chloride NaCl

BITTER
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Caffeine

People who see the photomicrograph of caffeine say,
“It looks like what it does.”

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We are a cellular universe and I'm not just talking phones. Each of us thrives because of the trillions of living cells that are us.  And what we do, think, eat influences their functioning and our survival.  

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wbc.jpgDid you know that the fats you eat influence how your cells respond and transmit information?  The more saturated and trans fats we put into our bodies, the more rigid our cell membranes become.
 
Our cell membranes need to be flexible and fluid for optimal health and cellular intelligence. To help them respond efficiently to the millions of bits of incoming information, we can avoid trans fats, lower our intake of saturated fat from animal products, and enjoy cold-water fish like salmon and sardines, olive oil, walnuts and avocados.

Eating good fats isn't only about helping our heart health, they help our cells first.