Recipe Corner
Kale Crisps
This is a great recipe I was told about on a flight from Tucson to Toronto by a lovely young woman named Tanya who believes in eating healthy snacks.
- Wash Kale leaves and spread on a cookie sheet in a single layer.
- Heat in the oven at a low heat until crispy.
- Salt with Norwegian sea salt and enjoy a crispy, healthy snack.
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Vitamin D Revisited
When I was in medical school, I was explicitly taught that Vitamin D was potentially dangerous and that only very tiny doses were safe. Research over the last 15-20 years has shown how wrong that information was. I have had the opportunity to meet with authorities in nutritional research and ask them about the evidence supporting these alarmist statements about the dangers of vitamin D. The answer astounded me: there never was any evidence to support these teachings.
I still have colleagues who find it difficult to catch up to the truth that we are grossly deficient in vitamin D. They ask for the evidence. There are now hundreds of well done studies documenting the need to supplement for, and test for, vitamin D and how even very high doses are safe. What puzzles me is that they never revisit the original teachings or the evidence for the risks of vitamin D.
I can only call it a prejudice: "beliefs (without knowledge of the facts) and includes 'any unreasonable attitude that is unusually resistant to rational influence'"* (Wikipedia).
As fall approaches and the sun gets lower in the sky, those of us in the Northern Hemishpere need to pay attention to our vitamin D levels. From September onwards, we cannot make sufficient vitamin D from our skin. The only way to know if your level is adequate is to have a blood test for 25OH vitamin D. Often doctors will tell patients if they take 1000iu a day they do not need the test. This is, however, just a matter of training and habit. Doctors would not make the assumption that your blood count or hemoglobin are normal without testing. But the vitamin D testing was not mentioned in medical schools until recently and so doctors often have not been trained to test for it. You need an initial test and, if you are deficient, you need to be retested after a few months of taking a higher dose of the supplement to make sure you are on an adequate dose.
