SoulVeggie

"The Vegan Culinary Experience" - Magazine Now Available (free)

 

The Pizza Issue of The Vegan Culinary Experience is here!

"It's nearly 200 pages of vegan pizza goodness. Thanks to all our contributors for this issue: Madelyn Pryor, Bryanna Clark Grogan, Jill Nussinow, Robin Robertson, Sharon Gordon, Mark Sutton aka Heart HealthyPizza, Elizabeth Lonetti, Angelina Elliott, Mindy Kursban, and Amber Shea Ford."

- Chef Jason Wyrick

Download free PDF: www.veganculinaryexperience.com

 

So honored to be in the company of such great chefs and to have my article "Creating a Heart Healthy Pizza" published along with their great works!

"Plant-Strong by the Numbers" - Heart Disease, Fat, Sugar, & Salt

"Although a knowledge of numbers isn’t critical to successfully navigating the journeyto a plant-strong lifestyle, recognizing important signals on the trip can be very useful for helping in deciding what to eat and what to avoid.  They can also be additional encouragement to help us stay on the road less traveled by and not get lost in false needs."

There are various numbers and statistics that are suggested as being useful to remember to encourage optimatl personal health. A discussion and distillation of these metrics on daily intake requirements for fat, sugar, and salt, as well as their content and measurements in certain foods, can be found in my guest blog post for the "Engine2 Diet" website."

The Experimental G-BOMBS V-12 Pizza Prototype

A buzzer sounds at the heavily secured massive steel door.

"What's the pass-phrase?" asks the Head Chef in gruff tones.

"Anthony Bourdain Eats Tofu," came the quick response from the other side of the door. A moment of silence before the door slowly opens, and Dr. S. quickly takes his seat.  Surrounding the Conference Room table are several austere and serious looking men and women in lab coats with a picture of a pizza shaped like a heart sewn on the front of each jacket.

"You're late, S." growls HC from the table's power seat.

"Sorry, sir," came the response, "An emergency in in the Iron Chef kitchen."

"So I've heard... I take it matters are under control?"

"Er, yes sir.  Dr. Psymon has been dismissed, per your orders."

"Nasty business, S.  Dr. Psymon knows the rules.  No oil.  I don't care if he's also on "The Chew."  It's no excuse.  People's health is at stake.  Chef Battleitaly has obviously been a bad influence on him."

"Undoubtedly, sir."

"Alright, enough of the pleasantries, S.  Report!"

The lights dim, a very large flat screen rises up from the far end of the table, the heart-shaped logo upper center on the screen pulsing.  Dr. S. hands dart quickly dart over his iPizza pad.  The monitor comes alive with light and color.  "I'm pleased to say, sir, that we've had a major breakthrough on Project Super Heart Healthy Pizza.  This is a photo collage of the Super Secret Experimental V-12 Pizza Prototype."

©2102 by Mark Sutton, topping sauce recipe from "Heart Healthy Pizza." Click to see larger image.

There are gasps from around the room. The chefs whisper excitedly to each other in panic, and one yells out:  "it's not possible! That's... that is... you've... OH MY GOD!"

"Quiet down everyone," demands HC, standing up and leaning across the table forcefully. "S., you can't be serious.  What you're showing us can't be done.  It breaks the dish of every foundational theory we've developed in over 100 years of covert culinary research.  How many?  What on Earth did you do, man?"

"Well, ah...."

"Dammitt, S., I'm a Food Physicist and Head Chef, not a Psychic.  In the Name of T. Colin Campbell, tell us, HOW MANY?"

"12, sir."

"TWELVE!!" exclaims HC, leaning back in his chair.  Pandemonium breaks out around the table, people are yelling and screaming at each other, pounding the table.  "But 11 was considered the highest level?" "It violates the Laws of Nature." "What if the New York Times Food Critic finds out?" "Is it stable, are we in danger?" "It can't be, he's lying."

Dr. S. stands up, and waves his right arm theatrically.  "Ladies and gentlemen, it IS possible."  The Team Members quiet down.  "Yes, this is a heart healthy pizza with twelve distinct vegetables as added ingredients."

"But, but... why, S., why? Why risk the potential structural collapse in the oven? We know that 11 is as high as you can go before the entire internal stability of the pizza resolves as an unedible avalanche of disconnected veggies, no matter how much topping sauce is used as an adherent agent.  Complete culinary collapse at the Julia Child Curve with a corresponding Emeril Explosion making "bam" look like "pop"."

S. chuckled. "I used to think this too, my friends.  I used to believe in that limitation. However, I had to think out of the pizza box. There had to be a way, a safe way, to safely exceed these limits.  I surmised that the key problem was the size of the individual veggies and where they were co-located in the PPCS, the Physical Pizza Collective Structure."

"Incredible... IF it works" says HC, his voice heavy with admiration yet caution, "I take it that you figured out that you could reduce the size of the Barnardian Vegetable Components and through a careful Morimotto Scatter Algorithm, avoid overloading the Ozian weight/pressure ratios of crust and sauce."

"Exactly, sir.  I wanted to increase the McDougall Ratio of vegetables to bite, while maintaining a reasonable Alton Brownian Mass to Gravity Failure Comparitive."

"Honor us, Dr., please describe to us your prototype."

"Delighted to, sir."  S. walks around the side of the table with his laser pointer.

"We start with a basic pizza crust base.  I was going to initiate construction with a gluten-free crust, but felt I'd reduce the unknown variables for this round to that which was a bit more clear in terms of loading stress capabilities.  A whole wheat crust is topped with chopped tender kale, followed by thinly sliced tomatoes, and sprinkled with freshly diced basil."

The young intern at the back of the room smiled and whispered loudly, "You had me at kale."  There were quiet giggles around the room.  "Hush up," admonished HC.

S. continued: "at this point, I added diced mushrooms as kind of shock absorbers to the next layer with a sprinkle of garlic powder and red pepper chili flakes.  I like it spicy, " he winked at the intern, "...then, using a Trader Joe's mixture of chopped vegetables..."

"Trader Joe's?" queried HC.

"Yes sir.  Due to time and budget constraints (how often do I have so many raw vegetables in the refrigerators?) I used Trader Joe's 8 Raw Chopped Vegetables, available for under $3 at most stores.  They were scattered and placed lightly across the pizza with enough space between individual veggies to allow for eventual topping sauce penetration. I also spread the carrots and purple cabbage bits around a bit to provide a pleasing visual appearance."

"Clever, S.  And yet you still stayed on budget."

"Yes sir... now, at this point I took a fundamental risk.  Onions or no onions?  I decided to go for it.  Slices of onions were draped on top of the lightly scattered veggies."

There was appreciative sounds of agreement and admiration from around the table.

"Of course, the decision of what type of cheese-like topping sauce to use was difficult.  I wanted not only good texture and taste, but one that would really kick the nutritional quality of the pizza into a Fuhrman Zone intersection with the Esselstyn No-Oil Barrier."

Gasps from around the room.

"Yes, my skeptical friends, a no-added oil Fuhrman G-BOMBS* without berries (which you could easily have in a dressing on a side salad).  To make this work, I went with a "Millet, White Kidney Beans, Sunflower Seeds, Sirarcha Sauce" topping, sprinkled with ground pepper. You can see the final results on the screen."

"Count, count, count!" came the collective cry from the other Chefs.  "Count, count, count!"

"Okay, here we go: (1) kale, (2) tomatoes, (3) mushrooms, (4) celery, (5) carrots, (6) jicama, (7) green cabbage, (8) purple cabbage, (9) green peppers, (10) radish, and (11) broccoli."

"Twelve, twelve, twelve..." came the demand from the screaming Chefs, some standing on the table, others writhing on the conference room floor.

"And, to complete our V-12 Prototype Pizza..." (pausing for effect), "ONIONS!!"  S. smiled proudly, while around him the Chefs were throwing their iDevices into the air, slapping themselves on their backs, hugging, and wiping the tears flowing from their eyes.  It was an historic moment, and even HC's own eye was misty with the realization of what had been shown here today.

"Praise Lyman! This is a momentous, S. You've done us proud.  Generations will remember this event and be healthier as a result.  Now, my good friends, time to celebrate.  I'll order in a vegan lunch for all of us from "The Millenium Restaurant", my treat."

"But sir," notes the young intern, "that's across the country in San Francisco."

"No problem, m'dear," chuckled HC, "I have our Trans-Orbital on standby."

As the Team Members exited the conference room, each shaking S.'s hand before leaving, they knew inside that the battle for healthy diets wasn't over, but yet that a major victory had been achieved.  New challenges awaited them, and their dedicated efforts to help people eat better food would continue unabated.

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AUTHOR'S NOTES:

1) *“G-BOMBS” is an acronym you can use to remember the most nutrient-dense, health-promoting foods on the planet. These are the foods you should eat every day, and they should make up a significant proportion of your diet — these foods are extremely effective at preventing chronic disease and promoting health and longevity." [Source]

2) the original topping sauce recipe, from my cookbook, HEART HEALTHY PIZZA, used cashews.  1/3 cup sunflower seeds were substituted for the cashews to give the sauce a lighter fluffiness and to lower the fat content a bit.  Easily enough sauce was made for both the V-12, and who knows? Maybe a V-13...

Neil Armstrong, Paper Tigers, & a "Giant Dietary Leap for All Mankind"

When but a young fetus, I watched Neil Armstrong walk on the moon.  I'll never forget the rippling horizontal lines of greys on a small television set showcasing a grainy techno-ghost bouncing around the lunar surface like the Pillsbury Dough Boy on acid.

Still, it was awe inspiring trying to wrap one's cerebrum around the significance of what was then happening in real-time. No screenwriter could have written the script any better.  The "Spam in a Can" team on Apollo and the team on the ground supporting them were all true heroes in every sense of the word. People throw up the term "epic" haphazardly a lot in media these days, but that first landing on the moon literally defined the word "epic."

How sad and angry I was a few days ago to find out that Neil just had a "cardiac bypass operation."  That's the sanitized syntax used to describe a quadruple bypass in which the patient is put on a heart-lung machine, chest cut open, blood vessels removed from a pig or the patient, and re-attached surgically to reconnect proper blood flow through the heart, chest sinkhole sown up, heart put back in the body's blood loop, and the comatose human hopefully revived.  The doctors called this procedure on/for/in/on Armstrong a "success."

Oh really? That just means he survived the operation alive. Overall, it's a delaying tactic folks, as not only is there the risk of many after-surgery physical or mental complications (including dropping several I.Q. points because of taking the heart off-line), the "procedure" doesn't "cure" anything. The underlying causes of having four of your arteries to your heart blocked have not been eliminated. This surgery just keeps the human alive a little longer as long as he can tolerate (and accept) the quality of life experienced afterwards. Usually leads up to early death, or a heart transplant, then a slightly later death.

"In most people who have heart bypass surgery, the grafts stay open and work well for many years...This surgery does not prevent the coronary artery blockage from coming back." [Source]

Putting this in a larger perspective: around 500,000 bypass surgeries are performed in the United States each year, each costing anywhere from $50,000 to well above $100,000 each.  That's $50 billion a year. Not an insignificant amount of health expenditures.

Ironic for me was that I had been watching "Forks Over Knives" online [here] when I happened to get word of Armstrong's surgery.  I'd just watched world-class surgeon and clinician Dr. Caldwell Esselstyn talk about bypass surgery not being any solution, the cost of the operation(s), and how many unfortunate people will go through the onerous and misguided (my words) attempts to slow the progression to the inevitable death, totally ignorant of a real and tested alternative: a no-added oil/fat plant-based diet.

You see, if Neil had followed a no-added oil plant-based diet, the odds are extremely high that he wouldn't have had to have the surgery, that even if there were severe symptoms indicating, Dr. Esselstyn's 20+ years of peer-reviewed research (and to a similar degree, Dr. Ornish's) have shown heart disease can be reversed, and in theory, prevented.  Esselstyn has successfully treated over 250 patients.  Armstrong might easily have been (or be) one of them. 

Heart Disease is the #1 killer of people in our country as well as the world.  Some 800,000 people in the United States died of cardiovascular disease (CVD) in 2008, according to the recent 2012 study by the American Heart Association. Every 39 seconds, someone in this country has a stroke. Some fifty percent of those who have heart attacks showed NO symptoms beforehand that they had a physiological problem indicating that they were potentially in serious trouble.

As a nation, we are spending incredible numbers of billions of dollars NOT trying to cure heart disease, but slow it down. Yet, it's been established that through changes in diet and lifestyle, heart disease can be reversed, something the surgeons and cardiac specialists have not been able to do.

How sad.  I remember John F. Kennedy challenging this Nation to the goal of putting a man (well, person) on the Moon by the end of the decade. There was this collective thrill and spirit amongst the populace, even through the turbulent late 1960s, that we can do this, and that we will. It wasn't a question of "would we," but "when." We'd find a way, it was important. That goal, that challenge worthy of a Nation's attention and resources was met, and it took a special vision of and trust in human tenacity, spirit, and resourcefulness, that it could and would be met.

So, why haven't we done the same thing regarding cardiovascular heart disease?  We've spent billions defending ourselves against illusionary terrorist attacks, yet so little in fighting an enemy we know fully well how to defeat.

"Neil's pioneering spirit will surely serve him well in this challenging time, and the entire NASA Family is holding the Armstrong family in our thoughts and prayers..." [NASA Administrator]

In my opinion, his pioneering spirit would serve the entire world much better in these challenging times if he were to adopt Dr. Esselstyn's lifestyle recommendations as has former President Bill Clinton, and help set an example of what must be done on a larger scale if we as a population are to survive this unnecessary epidemic.  He could encourage a "new vision" of health predicated upon a truly healthy dietary lifestyle, one that would contribute to not only reversing Heart Disease, but Type II Diabetes, Obesity, Alzheimer's Disease, and a host of other degenerative disorders that are primarily lifestyle-based.  There could be a new national goal of getting really really serious about dealing with this needless biological degradation of our health on a national level.

Why not a full-on collective and honest effort on the part of government, institutions, and our general populace, to beat down these paper tigers, these avoidable "food borne illnesses" as many believe they are, with realistic and proven approaches to true health?  A heartfelt and honest National Health Dialogue might take place as to what needs to be done.  We could marshall our best talent and resources with the goal of untangling the financial, political, and corporate gordian knots that are killing us in increasing numbers.

We are capable of collectively striving towards and achieving a true "giant dietary leap for mankind." How sad it would be to have reached so high as a society only to trip over our own dietary myopia, ignorance, and political apathy, and die like lemmings jumping off a known clift.

Let's tell the politicos running for office this year that although Medicare, the Deficit, and Taxes are serious issues, our Health is the most important.  What do they propose to do to help further our ability to life longer and healthier lives, and eliminate these Paper Tigers? How will they help us eliminate these lifestyle diseases instead of continuing to get money from Corporate Lobbyists to look the other way?  When will they take into account the incredible financial burden our nutritionally dysfunctional ways is imposing on Health Care and engage in the real debates regarding government expenditures?

Social media is much more powerful than is generally recognized, and it's time to put those resources to a greater good then following some media manufactured pop icon.  

Vote with your dollar, your voice, your Facebook Wall, your tweets, your texting, and demand realistic discussions of the situation, what must be done, and actions to see it happen.  We can all be heroes and manifest the real pioneering spirit that would usher in a true "giant leap for all mankind."

Contact your representatives, the media, those in power, and demand attention to the real problems threatening our existence. We need to take control of our "Dietary Destiny," both as individuals and as a society.  We need to do it now.