'Paleo' Nutrition Blogger Will Go to Jail if He Does Not Recant

By GaryNorth

Freedom of speech? Surely, you jest.

This man got diabetes. He started a blog on treating diabetes. He broke the law by doing this. He is not licensed to promote such opinions.

He promotes the so-called “paleo” diet: low carbohydrates. (The diet is not “paleo.” It’s capitalist. I have explained this here.)

He criticizes the establishment’s “carbs are OK” Party Line. That called down the wrath of the government on him.

Chapter 90, Article 25 of the North Carolina General Statutes makes it a misdemeanor to “practice dietetics or nutrition” without a license. According to the law, “practicing” nutrition includes “assessing the nutritional needs of individuals and groups” and “providing nutrition counseling.”

If he does not rewrite 3 years of posts, he must take down his site. If he refuses, and if he is convicted (after an expensive legal fight), he will go to jail.

When he was hospitalized with diabetes in February 2009, he decided to avoid the fate of his grandmother, who eventually died of the disease. He embraced the low-carb, high-protein Paleo diet, also known as the “caveman” or “hunter-gatherer” diet. The diet, he said, made him drug- and insulin-free within 30 days. By May of that year, he had lost 45 pounds and decided to start a blog about his success.

But this past January the state diatetics and nutrition board decided Cooksey’s blog – Diabetes-Warrior.net – violated state law. The nutritional advice Cooksey provides on the site amounts to “practicing nutrition,” the board’s director says, and in North Carolina that’s something you need a license to do.

Unless Cooksey completely rewrites his 3-year-old blog, he could be sued by the licensing board. If he loses the lawsuit and refuses to take down the blog, he could face up to 120 days in jail.

The board’s director says Cooksey has a First Amendment right to blog about his diet, but he can’t encourage others to adopt it unless the state has certified him as a dietitian or nutritionist.
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Read the rest of the article here. At Lew Rockwell. One of the best and most interesting sites on the Web.

Well, folks, looks like every blogger who has written about actual, real-live nutrition will have to rewrite their blogs or recant or face jail in this land of the sniveling slaves.

When my brother moved here a few years ago he was insulin-dependent Type 2 diabetic. We live a basically low-carb lifestyle (except for my love for potatoes), and within a few months he was insulin-free. Bingo. Easy. Probably would work for MOST Type 2 diabetics.

But NOOOOOOOOOOOOOO. Can't talk about it. Can't recommend it. Why? Because we don't  have the permission of the State to discuss something as elemental and common sense as diet and nutrition. Without a permission slip from the State. What utter crap.

I don't know if Indiana has this same law as North Carolina, but I expect I'll find out one of these days. In the meantime, forage for summer's feast of wild greens and eat REAL food. :)

Onwards,
HM

High Food Prices? Look Around Outside...

The cost of food just keeps going up and up. Just the other day we heard about peanut butter going up by 40%! (A national catastrophe! as my brother says.)

I was heading out on my normal afternoon's walk and took a look around. From where I stood outside the door, I could see plantain, dandelion, lady's thumb (pictured), a few remaining lambsquarters, now gone to seed, a bunch of some kind of mint, a really nice healthy looking mullein plant, lots of mugwort, some curly dock plants, a few red clovers, and a bit of wood sorrel.

Walking down the road, I saw walnuts galore from the black walnut tree, and some Queen Anne's Lace. And persimmons from the persimmon tree. And pine trees across the road.

While the cost of grocery store foods have surged ever upward, all of the food plants mentioned above are still free and available for the harvest with a wee bit of work on my part.

While I find plantain a bit too fibrous to eat, if I needed or wanted its nutritional value, I'd add it to a pot of water for a vegetable broth. Ditto with all the plants I just mentioned. If you're feeling run down and sickly, pick a bunch of these wild vegetables and green and make yourself some healing broth with them.

Some of these plants are greens for eating, some have medicinal uses, but all have a lot of nutritional value, full of vitamins and minerals.

It can take a while when you're new to identifying plants in the wild. But I will tell you this--I first starting learning this stuff about 5 years ago. While there's still zillions of plants I don't know, there's now a lot of them that I recognize easily. Once you're had that EUREKA moment and identify a plant--you'll then see it everywhere for a while. And you'll know it from then on, like a good buddy.

With grocery costs spiraling higher, consider learning to forage some of these green plants, nuts, berries. Learn which have edible roots (like Queen Anne's Lace--but be careful, there's some toxic lookalikes of Queen Anne's lace, so leave this one to experts). Learn which greens are better at what times of year. When you learn some of this, you can start harvesting and cut your grocery bills.

We all love lambsquarters here. It's a spinach like green and quite tasty. Highly nutritious--better for you than spinach, actually. So when it is flourishing, growing wildly everywhere, I harvest it, blanch it, freeze it, and we eat this lucious green instead of the $1.70 package of frozen spinach or $1.99 to $2.99 bags of fresh spinach from the store. See what I mean? That's money I don't have to spend, I can keep it (or more likely, spend it on something else...)

I gotta go, but I'll be back. I think for a while, I will focus on various plants ...

HM

Kimchi Soup

I wrote about making kimchi a few posts ago and the kimchi has now fermented into its hot, tangy, spicy, lovely self. Sauerkraut it isn't--but I love the mix of the hot, the garlic, the ginger with the cabbage, onion, and scallion. It is now part of our "flu protocol" which we'll start today (more on the flu protocol later) because of its reported action against SARS and respiratory illnesses.

It has gotten cold here, at least, chilly in the mornings. And there is nothing nicer on a cold day than hot soup. So I made kimchi soup--not an authentic Korean recipe, although you can find those with google. I knew what I wanted: something hot and tangy, spicy, a touch sour and brothy. I figured the kimchi I made last week would work great as a base.

I used four or five BIG tablespoons of kimchi and sauteed that with some more garlic and onions. Then I added some chicken broth and tossed in some other veggies, celery and carrots and a tiny potato. Got all that to a boil, then backed off to simmer. Added some hot pepper flakes and sea salt. Ummmmm, now we're talking. Then--and this may sound as awful to you as it did to me when I first thought of it: sardines. Yes, a can of sardines. It was a total surprise--and very, very good. I recall thinking I could always toss the soup on the compost if it was awful because of the sardines, but man, I wish I'd been doing this for years. The sardines work great in a soup. They stay firm, add a lot of flavor, and are mild in the midst of hot garlicky pepper broth. I added some noodles to it and voila, a wonderful kimchi soup!

For me, this soup is a winner, and a very pleasant way to eat the kimchi. See, food IS medicine. Your body requires nutrients--and doesn't require synthetic chemicals, which is what all drugs and most processed foods are. Give your body the nutrients it needs and you'll feel good and healthy. Deprive your body of nutrients (by taking drugs and eating processed foods) and you'll get sicker and sicker. Simple. More simple than it is, of course, but that is how I think about foods and medicine.
Onwards,
HM