Happy New Year — the time of year when we make New Year’s resolutions. These often involve some version of: Eat less. Exercise more. Go on a diet. Start going to the gym. This is especially true in the covid era, during which time many people ate too much and didn’t get enough exercise.

The trouble with New Year’s resolutions is this: We make them from a place of inspiration. But inspiration never lasts.

Whatever your resolution, consider what happens after your initial surge of motivation. What happens in February? What happens the day after your first fast or Spartan reboot? What happens when you go OFF your diet? Gym business models depend in large measure on people signing up for the gym but never going.

New Year’s resolutions are notoriously short-lived. But this year, resolve to make them stick. Here are a few ideas for making permanent change to your life and health.

1. Make resolutions for new habits and new limits, not for outcomes. Make resolutions to develop the practice of forming and sticking to new habits. In other words, instead of resolving to lose 35 pounds, resolve to change your lifestyle in a way that will give you optimal health, including optimal weight. Dieting to lose a certain amount of weight almost always results in gaining weight again after the goal has been temporarily achieved. But permanent lifestyle changes are forever. Embrace the Spartan Diet Principles and cultivate new habits.

2. Throw things in the trash. Decluttering expert Marie Kondo famously said: “Discard anything that doesn't spark joy.” Instead, in the coming week, discard anything that doesn't spark total health. Go through your fridge and pantry, getting rid of industrial foods: packaged foods, fried foods, ingredients you use to make unhealthy foods, sugar, non-organic foods, distilled alcohol, store-bought salad dressing, anything in plastic bottles and containers and other items not on the Spartan Diet. Also: Get rid of appliances and kitchen items that are enablers of junk food — deep fryers, microwave ovens, teflon pans and other objects that make it easy to eat unhealthy foods.

3. Set recurring reminders. Use the reminders app you’re currently using, the one that came with your phone, or download the app of your choice. But form the habit of using an app to determine each day’s to-do list. On this list add recurring reminders for health — when to do yoga, walk or run, exercise and fasting. Also put reminders to avoid restaurants, shop at better stores and markets, and to make food health Spartan Diet foods from scratch. And when the reminders come, don’t ignore them. Form the habit of the daily ritual of following your reminders.

4. Embrace “atomic” habits. Author of “Atomic Habits,” James Clear, points out that if your resolution is to do, say, at least 1 pushup per day, you’ll not only do more than one pushup, you’ll probably do a lot of them. Form the habit of walking 10 minutes a day outside or do 10 minutes of yoga everyday. The low goal gets you to actually do the thing, and once you’re doing it you might as well go all the way each time.

5. Make fermented foods right away. I find that fermenting foods at home is so rewarding that, once you start, you never want to stop. Make or get a sourdough starter. Get kefir grains. Make and maintain vinegar. Make a huge batch of sauerkraut. Once you have happy microbes in your kitchen actively transforming your food into healthier, more delicious versions — and you commit to maintaining them — you’ll find that home-fermented food inspires better eating all around.

6. Read previously published issues of this newsletter. Every word of this newsletter is “evergreen,” meaning its value is high not just when we publish a new issue, but for all time. Most people read only new editions of the newsletters they subscribe to, but I encourage you to systematically go back and start from the beginning. (Set a recurring reminder to do so.) And if you’re a paid subscriber, remind yourself to cook at least one recipe once a week. Once you’ve cooked them all, you’ll have a vastly better handle on cooking with total health, even for making things without a recipe.

The point is that New Year’s resolutions shouldn’t just exist just as an idea in your head. The resolutions should be accompanied by a commitment to make permanent changes and action now that will enable the keeping of those self-promises.

Happy New Year — and healthy rest of your life!

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Recipe: Salvadoran Pan con Pavo

This turkey sandwich from El Salvador is unlike any sandwich you’ve ever tried. It has sumptuous and out-of-this-world flavors and textures in one lusciously messy sandwich that everyone will love. My Spartanized version is super healthy and super delicious.

It’s made with ciabatta or a French bread, filled or stuffed with homemade baked turkey meat drenched in a delicious tomato base sauce and garnished with watercress, tomatoes, cucumber, cabbage and radishes.

You’ve got to try this — and make it your go-to sandwich for all future turkey leftovers!

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One of my fondest childhood memories growing up in El Salvador is the celebration of Christmas Eve and New Year’s Eve.

We had full-on fiestas with lots of food, dancing and dangerous fireworks to blow up at midnight. (And when I say blow up, it’s really what Salvadorans do, they buy heavy-duty fireworks, pretty close to dynamite, strong enough to set of…

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We make food choices every day — where to shop, what to buy, how much to buy, what to order in a restaurant and what to make for dinner. Why do we make the choices we make?

I've identified 13 common criteria that people base their food choices on: pleasure, habit, boredom, addiction, status, vanity, convenience, group affiliation, availability, nostalgia, low price, morality and health.

Most people aren't fully aware of their own criteria for food choices, which tend to be short-term and impulsive, rather than long-term and deliberate.

The Spartan Diet approach to food choices is: quality above all. The best choice is not just any healthy choice, but the healthiest possible choice available in every situation.

Conventional nutrition advice focuses on categorical differences between foods: Eat apples, not French fries. Vegetables are good for you. These are categorical distinctions that ignore the quality of food. Fad diets tend to go back and forth on the question of carbs vs. fats. Some diets are low-fat. Other diets are low-carb. Where is the concern over the quality of carbs and the quality of fats? Are the carbs in question sweet potatoes or Wonder Bread? Are the fats in the form of avocados or Crisco shortening? Quality is everything.

For example, the claim "cherries are good for you," isn’t a useful claim. Cherries, like most foods, exist on a qualitative spectrum. Freshly picked local, organic cherries exist on the healthiest end of the spectrum, while maraschino cherries — those artificially almond-flavored cherries preserved in a jar of sulfur dioxide, food coloring and corn syrup you find on top of ice cream sundaes — sit at the unhealthiest end. The first one helps protect against cancer, the other contains ingredients linked to a higher risk of cancer. Between these two extremes you'll find a full range of quality in the cherry category. Fresh cherries are better than frozen, and organic cherries are better than conventionally grown. Whole cherries are generally better for you than cherries chopped up and left in the refrigerator for a few days. Local cherries in season are better than organic frozen ones. And organic cherries grown locally sold at the local Farmer’s Market are better than organic cherries imported from other countries for the simple fact that fresher cherries picked later tend to be higher in nutrients. (The moment cherries are picked, they start losing nutrients and when they have to travel thousands of miles to a store near you, a lot of time transpires and time translates into decay or at least decrease in nutrients.)

For cherries, as with most foods, the categorical distinction is almost meaningless as a predictor of healthfulness, while the qualitative distinction is everything. To be on the Spartan Diet is to pay attention to differences in food quality, and to always choose the highest available to you.

When you're at a restaurant, open the menu and ask yourself: "Which options are healthiest?" Not, "what do I feel like having?" Use the same criteria in the store, at the market, and in the mess hall, school cafeteria and at home when preparing meals.

Here in the Spartan Diet Journal and in the upcoming book, The Spartan Diet, I’ll be going into great detail on food quality and how you can maximize the quality of food, enabling you to cherry-pick, so to speak, only the highest-quality of food for health, taste and for a better life.

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Recipe: Spartan Diet Banana Bread

Get ready to enjoy the most sumptuous banana bread ever! If cake is your thing (it’s definitely my thing), you'll love this banana bread. It has the wonderful lusciousness and pillowy softness of cake. And the frosting on the cake, pun intended, is the fact that the batter is fermented and will be the healthiest cake you've ever had.

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Necessity is the mother of invention. And most of my recipes are inspired by the seasons. But I also love the challenge of creating recipes from food on hand. In the process, I like to turn something ordinary into something extraordinary!

I also have an obsession with avoiding food waste. I try to come up with creative ways to make the most of ingredient…

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I love the tangy, delicious flavor, creamy consistency and confirmed health benefits of live, probiotic-rich fermented beverages like kefir milk. 

Unfortunately, the kefir milk typically found at grocery stores tends to be an expensive, less healthy and fake version of the real thing. 

That’s one of many reasons why I recommend that you get and keep live kefir grains.

No, kefir grains are not grains like wheat grains — they’re a specific collective of friendly microorganisms that, when added to milk or just about any drink containing sugar, initiates a natural fermentation process. 

In other words, kefir grains are like a sourdough starter, kombucha scoby or vinegar mother. They’re used, cultivated and shared for the purpose of fermenting foods. 

Kefir grains are especially valuable in an industrialized food context, because they enable us to make fermented dairy products using pasteurized milk. 

What’s wrong with industrial milk?

For many thousands of years, all uncooked dairy was both raw and fermented. Pasteurized and unfermented dairy is historically new to the human diet. 

You can see sad echoes of the glorious past of cultured dairy in the supermarket dairy case, most commonly in the existence of product categories like “sour cream” and “buttermilk.”  

Have you ever wondered why buttermilk is “cultured” and butter is not? After all, fermented buttermilk is a byproduct of fermented butter. So how is one fermented and the other is not? 

In fact, supermarket buttermilk isn’t buttermilk at all — it’s not the byproduct of the butter-making process. When you see “cultured buttermilk” on the container, it’s skim milk inoculated with isolated starter culture bacteria and yeast to simulate buttermilk. “Sweet cream buttermilk” is a similar product, but with pasteurized cream used instead of skim milk. 

Supermarket buttermilk is “fermented” in the same way that yeast-leavened bread is “fermented.” A particular and limited subset of microbes is applied to obtain a specific outcome. Yeast is used for bread to make it rise, but it’s an incomplete fermentation and doesn’t transform the dough into something amazing. Likewise, cultures are added to milk to result in a sour taste, but the resulting product doesn’t taste like buttermilk.

Store “buttermilk” also tends to contain flavorings, gums, thickeners, stabilizers, preservatives and artificial colors. The result is a lousy drink that isn’t buttermilk, doesn’t taste good and isn’t all that good for you.

Here’s how your great, great, great grandparents did milk. They milked the cow, goat or sheep. To separate milk from cream, the milk was allowed to sit at room temperature for a few hours, during which time the cream rose to the top, the milk sank to the bottom, and all of it fermented thanks to the microbes naturally present in fresh milk. (Fresh milk is loaded with massive quantities of healthy microbes designed to boost the immune system of calves with instant perfect gut flora.)

They might have kept some of the cultured cream for making other foods. Or they would use the cream to make butter, a process that involved agitating the cream until butter separated from buttermilk.

The raw milk, already fermented, might be consumed immediately. Whatever wasn’t consumed or made into butter, buttermilk, yogurt or cheese, would become “clabbered,” which means it was allowed to continue fermenting. When eaten as a dish, clabbered milk was called clabber. American farmers, especially in the South, used to eat clabber with brown sugar, molasses, nutmeg or cinnamon, or fruit. It occupied a similar place in the diet as yogurt.

The introduction of pasteurization, however, killed clabber and now this once-common food is essentially lost to history.

It’s not so much that our ancestors fermented milk. It’s that they had no way to stop it from fermenting. And they welcomed that fermentation because it preserved their milk in the absence of refrigeration and transformed milk into a dozen other foods.

Until refrigeration and pasteurization, all dairy was raw and fermented, from Ancient Rome 2,000 years ago to Ancient India 3,000 years ago and long before that.

Pasteurized and unfermented dairy foods are far less tasty and healthy than the real thing. 

And that’s why kefir is so beneficial. Kefir is wonderful, because it enables us to ferment pasteurized milk and cream, making it similar to the dairy humans consumed for thousands of years.

Kefir grains enable you to easily make crème fraîche, cultured sour cream, cultured butter and cultured milk that are free of the additives you’ll find in supermarket “cultured” dairy. 

In addition to enjoying kefir’s substantial health benefits, I love to keep my own cultivation of kefir grains because that allows me to make a variety of fermented foods, which are staples in my kitchen. Making my own fermented European style butter, for example, is more nutritious and delicious than regular organic butter. (That amazing butter from Normandy, France, is tastier because it’s fermented.) Natural fermented butter is typically made with raw cream from cows that are 100% grass fed their whole life. Grass fed raw cream is naturally rich in probiotics and other nutrients. 

Sadly, finding raw cream is not always easy or simple, as raw foods are banned from sale in some parts of the United States and in many countries around the world.

When I can’t get my hands on grass fed raw heavy cream, I buy the best high quality organic heavy cream I can find (that comes in a glass bottle) and use kefir grains to ferment it. This process not only basically “unpasteurizes” the cream by fermenting it with cultures, a process that results in flavors and health benefits akin to what’s typically found in raw, lightly clabbered cream, but it will also allow you to make crème fraîche and sour cream. I can also use it as a starter in cheesemaking with rennet. And, of course, I use kefir to make probiotic-rich beverages including kefir milk. 

Why homemade?

The kefir you make at home is healthier and less expensive than any kefir product you can buy readymade. You can also avoid the plastic bottles that kefir tends to come in. 

Store-bought kefir drinks also have more liquid and less strain varieties of kefir cultures. Homemade kefir is more nutritionally dense, and has 40 to 60 different strains of probiotics compared to roughly 10 in commercially produced ones. You control exactly what goes into your kefir so you can choose the highest quality milk possible and make as small or as large a quantity you wish, making sure none goes to waste. And you can ferment it more or less to match your taste and what you’re making with it. 

Additionally, when you keep kefir grains at home, you have the option to quickly make butter when you need it if you have some heavy cream in your refrigerator. You can make sour cream cultured with kefir as well. Even coconut milk and nut milks can be cultured with kefir making them far healthier and more nutrient rich for consumption. 

What is kefir and where does it come from?

Kefir cultures probably emerged in nature somehow, were captured by humans, then disappeared from nature. It may have emerged in China, but has been cultivated in the Caucasus region (populated by people renowned for their longevity), later spreading into Russia, Turkey and then across the world. Now, kefir has been passed from person to person over thousands of years, and that’s how it survives. 

Kefir grains are remarkable microorganisms consisting of bacteria and yeast that cluster together into a grain-like form. When larger clusters form they look like tiny cauliflower pieces. Kefir grains are made up of over thirty species of bacteria and at least one species of yeast that support one another symbiotically. And all we need to do to keep kefir alive is to feed it with milk or cream. 

The human species enjoys a wonderful, mutually beneficial symbiotic relationship with kefir. We sustain and cultivate kefir microorganisms, ensuring their reproductive survival; kefir improves human health. 

Kefir grains feed on the lactose sugars in milk and transform them into lactic acid. The bacteria and yeast ferment the sugars in different ways. The yeasts convert simple milk sugars into alcohol and carbon dioxide, which is what gives kefir that mild effervescent taste. Whereas the bacteria causes the cultured milk to become more sour as it converts the sugars into lactic acid. 

We’ve grown suspicious as a culture about foods like bread and milk, and the industrialized versions of those foods caused health problems, leading to widespread gluten- and lactose-intolerance. Many people falsely believe that bread and milk is bad for you. But it’s just the unfermented, industrial versions that harm health. 

Lactose-intolerant people can safely drink kefir dairy because the lactose is transformed, just as it is in natural raw fermented dairy. Evolution never prepared us to drink pasteurized unfermented dairy.

That’s why pasteurized, unfermented dairy is not part of The Spartan Diet, but raw and fermented dairy is. 

One important note about raw dairy: We can’t offer a blanket recommendation for raw milk, unfortunately, because we can’t know your source. 

Because raw milk can’t be industrialized, the industrialized dairy industry has made sure that raw milk is illegal in most places. That turns buying raw milk into a kind of shady drug deal in countries and US states where raw milk has been outlawed. If you can find quality raw milk that’s tested and regulated for safety, then we recommend that. If not, kefir milk is the next best thing. (Using kefir with raw milk is also great.)

Like other naturally fermented foods, kefir beverages have a tangy sour taste that doesn’t appeal to everyone, especially at first. Other kefir foods, especially kefir-fermented butter, however, would be preferred to conventional industrial butter in a blind taste-test by most people. 

Either way, kefir helps protect against lifestyle illnesses because of kefir’s anticarcinogenic, anti-inflammatory and anti-pathogenic effects. Kefir is so powerful in fixing what makes certain foods intolerable for people to consume that those sensitive to the effects of certain foods such as lactose intolerant could slowly introduce kefir cultured dairy back into their diets again. Kefir even helps reduce high cholesterol.

On the care and feeding of kefir

If you’ve got a friend with kefir grains, ask for some. They’re self-replicating and easy to grow, so your friend will be happy to share. Otherwise, you can buy kefir grains on Amazon, Cultures for Health, Etsy, Yemoos or any of hundreds of online stores available through a Google search. 

If you order kefir grains online, they’ll be exhausted from the trip. Just place the grains in a glass jar of fresh milk, and change the milk every day for 3 to 5 days, or until the grains are successfully making strong milk kefir within that 24-hour period. 

If you’d like to slow down the growth of your kefir grains, place your grains with fresh milk in the refrigerator and feed them every month or so. 

I always keep kefir grains in a whole pint of cream. That way, I’m always just a few minutes away from fermented butter, fermented whipped cream, crème fraîche (cultured cream), Mexican crema espesa (cream fermented with buttermilk). It’s also ready to go for baking or hot chocolate. 

I’ve kept kefir grains in refrigerated cream for up to two months without feeding and it’s always great. (The larger the volume of milk or cream, the longer they can go without feeding.)

No Spartan Diet kitchen is complete without wonderful kefir grains working their magic on whatever dairy foods and drinks you enjoy.

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Recipe: Homemade Fermented Butter

Butter is delicious. Adding a dollop of it on warm, home-made, ancient-grain sourdough bread right out of the oven is a heavenly treat. And real butter — traditional butter — is cultured, as it was for thousands of years before pasteurization and refrigeration came along. 

Since it’s difficult for most of us to get our hands on raw and cultured cream, I’m sharing a wonderful way of making probiotic-rich cultured butter at home using kefir grains.

Get the recipe!

Truly great butter is nearly impossible to find in grocery stores. And that’s why you should make your own fermented butter. It’s fun, easy, delicious and much healthier than conventional butter.

There are three basic ways to make butter. The first is the old-fashioned way: With a butter churning device purpose built for making butter. You can still fin…

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The best thing to eat is… food. Sounds obvious. But people eat all kinds of things that aren't food.

In fact, almost everything that comes in a box, bag, bottle, carton, can and almost every pre-prepared food product that you buy in the supermarket contains things that aren't food.

In order to keep the product from spoiling, separating, showing its age, or revealing itself as the bland, stale industrial factory product that it is, manufacturers add preservatives, emulsifiers, stabilizers, thickeners, artificial flavors, flavor enhancers and artificial colors to create the illusion of quality and freshness. Examples from common bottled salad dressing include Xanthan gum, polysorbate 60, Yellow #5, disodium guanylate and disodium inosinate.

That’s what you’ll find on the label. What you won’t find on the label are all the non-food ingredients manufacturers are allowed by law to add without putting them on the label. They’re considered “manufacturing aids.” They’re not on the list of ingredients. But they’re in the package. And they’ll go into your body if you eat the food.

Sometimes literally in the actual package. The boxes, bags and cans that contain packaged foods are often permeated with all kinds of non-food chemicals. This is especially problematic because packaging itself is unlabeled, so it’s hard for consumers to choose less harmful packaging alternatives.

Canned food doesn’t just come in a can. That can is usually lined with acrylic, polyester or a lining that contains bisphenol A (BPA), which is an endocrine disruptor linked to cancer, reproductive and metabolic disorders. Produce wrapped in plastic or in plastic containers might also contain endocrine disrupting chemicals. Paper cups, like the kind you get with your to-go coffee, also tend to have plastic linings.

Takeout containers used by restaurants and supermarkets typically contain fluorine, which means they were treated with a group of chemicals called PFAS, known to cause reproductive and organ problems in lab animals.

And one of the biggest and fastest growing non-food substances in our diets is collectively known as micro-plastics. Because of humanity’s irresponsible use and handling of plastics, tiny particles of plastic are now everywhere — in the air we breath, the water we drink and the food we eat. Some people eat the equivalent of a credit card worth of micro plastic each week.

It comes in drinks sold in plastic bottles, including bottled water.

One of the biggest sources of mircoplastics is bottom-feeding seafood: mussels, oysters and scallops, and to lesser extent shrimps and crabs. These bottom feeders are getting second-hand plastic garbage that has sunk to the ocean floor, and collect it in their bodies throughout their lives. The oceans contain millions of tons of microplastics. Around 80% of ocean litter is plastic.

Microplastics damage cell health throughout the body, and can even pass through the blood-brain barrier. They’ve recently been correlated to inflammatory bowel disease.

Over the months and years and decades, we ingest an enormous quantity and variety of non-food chemicals and substances that nature never anticipated and that our bodies doesn't know what to do with.

The only solution is to make the effort to consume only food. Avoid packaged foods. Avoid food in containers. Avoid bottled drinks. Avoid consuming bottom-feeding seafood.

Here’s an example: Instead of buying bottled salad dressing, make your dressing in a ceramic or glass bowl using, say, organic extra-virgin olive oil; fresh squeezed organic lime juice; freshly pressed garlic; fresh dill, oregano and thyme; freshly ground pepper and salt. Now that's food.

Not only does a dressing made from such ingredients taste vastly better than any bottled dressing, it also nourishes and strengthens the body.

Why? Because it's food!

Recipe: Sopa de Borrego (Lamb Loin Chop Soup)

When I was a little girl, my favorite dish was my Mom’s Sopa de Res, which translates as “beef soup.” I grew up in El Salvador. Different versions of Sopa de Res are common throughout Latin America and the Caribbean.

Ingredients vary slightly, and the name changes from place to place. In Mexico it’s named Caldo de Res (beef broth), for example.

My recipe is made with lamb instead of beef (Sopa de Borrego). But it’s still based on my Mom’s recipe.

I cherish this recipe. And there’s no other like it. It has been passed on for generations in my family. And now I’m sharing it with my Spartan Diet family. It’s a heart-felt demonstration of my gratitude for your support.

Get the recipe!

Sopa de Borrego, based on the popular Latin American dish Sopa de Res, warms my soul like no other food does. It’s the most comforting of comfort foods. I’ve spartanized it, of course, by replacing beef shanks and oxtail with lamb loin chops and or shanks.

I think it tastes better with lamb than beef. The truth is that you can use any meat such as bison…

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The industrial revolution turned food into a product. So it’s marketed as a product. And it’s product marketing that primarily shapes public beliefs about food.

The sole purpose of food marketing is to change perceptions in a way that affects choices. If marketers were unsuccessful at influencing purchase decisions, they wouldn't spend the money. As a result of this relentless marketing, our culture is awash with myths, false beliefs and manufactured desires. "Advertising makes food taste better," said advertising legend George Lois in the 2009 documentary, Art & Copy. "It changes the perception of everything." 

The worst effects is the marketing directed at children. The most heavily advertised children's products are incredibly unhealthy foods. The average child is bombarded by thousands of ads per year designed to imprint on them a strong desire to eat packaged breakfast cereals (some of which are more than 40 percent sugar), snacks, candy, soda, and fast food containing ingredients proved to promote cancer, heart disease, hyperactivity, obesity and a long list of other maladies. 

According to a study commissioned by the Henry J. Kaiser Foundation, American children between the ages of 2 and 7 see an average of 12 food-related ads per day, or 4,427 per year. For kids aged 8-12, the number of daily food ads averages 21 per day, or 7,609 per year. According to the study, 34% of the ads are for candy and snacks, 28% for breakfast cereals, 10% for fast food, 4% for dairy products, 1% for fruit juices and none for fresh fruits and vegetables.

And that's just the ads. A Michigan State University study found constant references to fast food in children's TV shows — some 2.6 references per hour of programming on children's shows. The whole time children are watching TV, they're being immersed in the culture of processed, unhealthy food products. When these foods lead to childhood behavioral problems, diabetes and obesity, doctors tend to put them on drugs and often leave their toxic diets unmodified.

Look at the result of this lifelong, ubiquitous cultural conditioning: When you confront an adult with the idea of eating fresh, whole, raw, wild foods that are as close as possible to their natural state — and abstaining from the foods known to cause disease — the notion is sometimes dismissed as outlandish, extreme and bizarre.

A lifetime of bad information about food and health has transformed not only our attitudes and beliefs but changed who and what we are. We have been transformed from human beings who eat the natural human diet into to consumers who eat food products. We have been modified to the point where we now feel incapable of eating the foods that we were designed by nature to eat, foods our ancestors have eaten for thousands of years.

It’s time to turn that around. Let’s stop listening to marketing. Let’s ignore the advertising. And let’s start listening to nature, to history, to traditional cultures and to our own bodies.

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Recipe: Spartan Sourdough Pizza

Pizza reigns supreme as the most comforting of comfort foods and probably the most popular food in the world. And what's not to love? It's like a symphony of scrumptious flavors created by the melding flavors of tomato sauce and melting cheese over what is, essentially, bread.

As much as we love it, pizza is far too often bastardized into a junk food, typically made with un-fermented commercial wheat, low-quality industrial cheese, canned tomato sauce and other canned toppings.

Pizza tends to leave us feeling bloated, foggy and sluggish — mainly because of the amount of unfermented dough — but also because it tends to be too greasy and because the ingredients are often canned, and therefore old and containing chemicals, including synthetic estrogen (I'll go into detail about the many problems canned food and other food packaging in an upcoming edition). 

Low-quality pizza makes us feel lousy. But high-quality pizza makes us feel energetic, mentally clear and happy. And it’s super good for you!

Here’s the secret to making the most delicious — and the healthiest — pizza in the world!

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Pizza reigns supreme as the most comforting of comfort foods and probably the most popular food in the world. And what's not to love? It's like a symphony of scrumptious flavors created by the melding flavors of tomato sauce and melting cheese over what is, essentially, bread.

As much as we love it, pizza is far too often bastardized into a junk food, ty…

Read more

The conventional wisdom on protecting skin from the ravages of the sun go something like this: In the past few decades, the atmospheric effects of air pollution have made the sun's rays more damaging to the skin, so it's more important than ever to use plenty of sunscreen, wear a shady hat and take other measures to, among other things, avoid skin cancer. 

The American Cancer Society's website offers a long, sensible list of good measures for protecting skin from the sun. But they're ignoring the dietary science. 

In fact, ultraviolet exposure has increased slightly in the past few decades (due mainly to decreasing levels of stratospheric ozone), especially in the higher latitudes of the southern hemisphere. The good news is that the ozone is coming back slowly over the years.

But what has also changed in the past few decades is the nutritional content of our food. 

It's unclear whether increasing skin cancer in recent decades is caused more by a thinner ozone layer or a huge reduction in the nutritional quality of produce due to the rise in intensive industrial agriculture and the rise in farmed fish, which lacks key skin-protecting properties found in wild fish.

In the past 20 years, it's become clear that certain foods have strong protective qualities against skin damage, skin cancer and even sunburn itself!

In 2008, for example, researchers at the University of Newcastle found that eating tomatoes helps prevent sunburn. The effect is caused by an antioxidant called lycopene, which is concentrated in tomatoes, and present in other food. 

In fact, antioxidant- and vitamin-rich foods like red wine and grapes, broccoli, green tea, pomegranates, onions, peppers, red kidney beans, blueberries, cranberries, blackberries, raspberries, strawberries, apples, pecans, almonds, cherries, plums, black beans, turmeric, sweet potatoes, sunflower seeds, avocados, dark chocolate, guava, spinach, kale, carrots, wild salmon, sardines, herring, seaweed, flax, hemp and chia seeds (every single one of them a Spartan Diet superfood) have all been found to contain compounds that protect against skin cancer.

The single most powerful component for skin protection is a rare keto-carotenoid called astaxanthin. Not many foods contain this compound, but salmon does (as does a few other species of fish and other seafoods). In fact, it's what makes salmon orange. Wild Pacific sockeye salmon has the world's highest concentration of astaxanthin, several times higher even than Atlantic salmon. Farmed salmon contains none, because farmed fish don’t eat the natural diet that contains astaxanthin. (Astaxanthin is also available in supplement form.)

And speaking of antioxidant-rich food, extra virgin olive oil is another great protector of skin. Ancient Spartans routinely applied olive oil to their skin to protect against all-day exposure. Some 2,600 years later, scientists are discovering why this was such a good idea. Applying olive oil to the skin after sun exposure reduces the likelihood of skin cancer. 

But when olive oil is a big part of the diet, it offers further skin-protecting effects. It turns out extra virgin olive oil contains high amounts of a compound called squalene, which has been found to protect against cancer and skin damage. 

So my advice to you is: Wear sunscreen. Wear a hat. Avoid prolonged exposure when the UV index is very high. But don't avoid the sunshine. It's good for you. 

And above all, eat the Spartan Diet, which is the most skin-protecting diet on the planet. 

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Recipe: Spartan Diet Pesto

Perfect for homemade pasta, buffalo mozzarella sandwiches, pizza, roasted veggies and pesto-based veggie salads and so much more, pesto is something that should always be made at home. And what better time than summer time to keep making large batches of this delicious Italian sauce and condiment to eat now and to keep frozen so you can enjoy it through the winter. 

Good homemade pesto brings meals to life! It’s also the perfect way to pack in some super nutrients into your diet. And Spartan Diet Pesto takes flavor, texture and health qualities to the next level.

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Perfect for homemade pasta, buffalo mozzarella sandwiches, pizza, roasted veggies and pesto-based veggie salads, pesto Caesar salad and so much more, pesto is something that should always be made at home. And what better time than summer time to keep making large batches of this delicious Italian sauce and condiment to eat now and to keep frozen so you …

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A friend of ours in Mexico City named Fernando Dávila is an expert in chilis, which of course originated in Mexico and permeates the food of that delicious country.

His theory is that the reason Mexican people are happy and friendly is that they eat chilis every day, usually several times a day.

Wait, what?

This theory is based on two claims:

1. Chilis make you happy

2. Mexicans eat huge quantities of chilis

Are these claims true?

Chilis are spicy. This chemical burning sensation in the mouth is caused by capsaicin, found in tiny glands in the chilli's "placenta" — that white spongy stuff surrounding the chili's seeds. There's no actual burning. Capsaicin tricks the burn-detection hardware in the mouth into believing that burning is going on. But it’s perfectly harmless.

Capsaicin receptors in the mouth (quantity and sensitivity of which is partly genetic) determines how "hot" chilis feel.

The pain of this capsaicin "heat" causes the the production of a neurotransmitter called substance P, which tells the brain that the mouth is experiencing pain from burning. The brain responds with neurotransmitters designed to reduce the pain, including endorphins, specifically dopamine, which makes you feel good and gives you an overall sense of wellbeing.

So, yes, chilis make you happy.

(As a bonus, chilis are high in vitamin C (double what you find in citrus fruits), vitamin A, and b-carotene. They have antibacterial qualities, and contain bioflavonoids and antioxidants.)

There's literally no downside to eating chilis, and everything about them contributes to health and happiness.

Botanically, chilis originated in South American jungles. Spread through the Americas by both birds and humans, they made their way to Mexico, where ancient Mexicans began to domesticate and cultivate them, and, in the process, integrate them into their food culture. After the Spanish colonized what we now call “Latin America,” the seafaring colonizers spread chilis worldwide. Today, the chilis that make Thai food, Korean food, Indian food and other spicy foods “hot,” all originate in Mexico. All the chilis used in all cuisines throughout the world are Mexican chilis.

Chilis are a Mexican ingredient. But do Mexicans really eat more chilis than others?

Again, the answer is: yes. Mexicans eat way more chilis than anybody else.

The average Mexican eats up to nine kilograms of chiles a year — far more than the average citizen of any other country.

So it looks like our friend Fernando is really onto something. Mexicans eat chilis for breakfast, lunch and dinner. Mexico is a happy nation high on dopamine.

As a bonus, chilis may help you live longer, too.

So pack your diet with chilis. And make yourself happy the Mexican way.

Wishing you a deliciously healthy and joyful life!

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Recipe: Spartan Fermented Spicy Garlic Chili Oil

My Spartan Fermented Spicy Garlic Chili Oil is something my family cannot eat without — or maybe even live without! It’s going to transform your meals into something quite stimulating to not only your body but also to all your senses. It’s crazy delicious and nutritious!

All the basic ingredients in the recipe — cold pressed extra virgin olive oil, chili flakes, turmeric, oregano and sauerkraut juice — are superfoods that are incredibly healing and nourishing: Mixed together into this condiment, it becomes what you might call a super duper food! So much so that it’s actually a medicine.

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My Spartan Fermented Spicy Garlic Chili Oil is something my family cannot eat without — or maybe even live without! It’s going to transform your meals into something quite stimulating to not only your body but also to all your senses. It’s crazy delicious and nutritious!

All the basic ingredients in the recipe — cold pressed extra virgin olive oil, chil…

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Modern industrial food is literally killing us.

In the United States, 42.5% of the adult population suffers from obesity. Nearly three-quarters (73.6%) is overweight. Six out of the top seven leading causes of death are diet-related. 

Our food is ruining our lives, and then ending our lives early. But why?

The catastrophic decline in food quality began more than 200 years ago with breathtaking improvement.

The Industrial Revolution, which would transform the lives of billions, was really a series of smaller, mutually reinforcing revolutions: The industrial energy revolution, the industrial transportation revolution, the industrial chemicals revolution, and so on. One of these was the industrial food revolution.

From around 1800 to about 1950, all of the major food problems that had plagued mankind for centuries were largely solved by industrialization, at least for people in the minority of countries that industrialized during this period. Famine, food-borne illness, lack of food variety, basic nutritional deficiencies among the poor and other problems were largely eliminated for millions.

Agriculture machinery, chemicals, railroads and trucks, factory assembly lines, refrigeration, pasteurization, homogenization, sterilization and other industrial-revolution innovations drove down the cost of food, and increased nutritional safety and variety. Lower food costs, plus supermarkets and household appliances meant people no longer had to spend most of their time paying for, acquiring or preparing food. Combined with advances in medicine, lives became longer, healthier and better. 

What happened to the food industry between 1950 and today?

From the beginning, the industrial food revolution turned food into a product. Like all consumer products, food now had to constantly evolve into a better product: cheaper, safer, more reliable, and more long-lasting. This evolution involved gradual changes in the actual biochemistry of what we're putting in our mouths. But while the food keeps changing, our bodies don't. With each passing year, the food supply becomes less compatible with human biology.

We define industrial food as food modified for factory farming, factory processing, mass distribution or mass marketing. Industrial foods are those that have been changed to satisfy the demands of the consumer marketplace.

One of the many false assumptions about industrial food is that, well, food is food, and it doesn't matter if a computer-controlled machine mixes the raw ingredients together in a factory or a cook does in a kitchen. What's the difference? The difference is not the mixing, but the myriad changes made to the food to optimize it for the overall industrial process, changes that are largely unknown by consumers. 

Most foods are "modified" or "processed" at some point. The question that separates industrial from traditional foods is the purpose of those modifications. Traditional modifications (for example, pre-industrial domestication) tend to improve the taste, health qualities, digestibility and long-term storage of foods. Grains are modified to make bread, for example. Olives are processed into olive oil. The food is altered to make it more edible, nutritious and desirable, as well as storable. Foods have been "processed" for millennia. 

Before the industrial revolution, the purpose of food processing was to improve the quality of the food. But the highest purpose of industrial processing is to lower the cost of food. 

Food companies want to maximize profits. Food consumers want to minimize costs. Food manufacturers are in an endless, hotly contested race with other companies to make more money by offering cheaper food. 

Just like computer software or cars or any other industrial product sold in the competitive marketplace, there has been constant innovation in industrial food processing to drive down costs. Low cost is achieved by optimizing absolutely every aspect of food manufacturing, including seeds, soil, farm equipment, harvest schedules, trucks, factories, additives, processes, packaging and more. Another strategy for lowering costs is to offshore the production and processing of foods to China or other countries with low production costs and lax food-safety regulations, or simply buy the ingredients from companies in countries where the prices are lower.

Modifications to food begins before seeds are even planted. The first part of the industrial-food process is the selection of raw ingredients. Almost every food type originated with massive variety -- literally thousands of species of, say, apples or wheat. But industrial processing tends to favor only one or a small number of species, which have been heavily hybridized, cultivated or genetically modified to make them better for modern food processing systems. If you buy an apple pie at the store, it's made from single modern species of apples and wheat that didn't even exist 200 years ago.

Industrial processing and mass marketing dictates ingredient selection choices. Modern wheat is favored for bread-making over other grains because of its higher yield, machine thresh-ability, super high gluten content and other reasons. Specially bred dairy cows are favored over, say, goats, because they produce a lot more milk and can be feasibly kept in pens and a host of other reasons amenable to mass industrial processing, even though goat milk is far more compatible with the human digestive system. Corn and soy are chosen as the universal "fillers" for processed foods, because they're super cheap to grow, in part because US growers receive government subsidies to grow them.

The most extreme modifications are made in the lab. Biotech company scientists custom-tailor the genetics of seeds in ways that used to be only science fiction. Fish genes are grafted into strawberry DNA to reduce crop loss from frost, for example. Corn and potatoes are altered to manufacture their own toxic pesticides. Many of these designer crops are created to be wholly dependent upon a specific brand of herbicide or insecticide. Produce has also been hybridized and genetically modified for uniformity, blemishlessness, durability for transportation and other qualities that boost the salability of food. As with all industrial food innovations, these crops have been transformed into a better product to sell, and not a better food to eat. And they look better to the uninformed consumer than organic produce, with its blemishes and variable shapes and sizes. Despite looking better, they are far inferior, nutritionally. Since the 1950s, the vitamin and mineral content of produce generally has declined markedly. 

The cause in this decline in the nutritional quality of fruits and vegetables, according to one article in Scientific American, is the "preponderance of agricultural practices designed to improve traits (size, growth rate, pest resistance) other than nutrition."

As the product gets better, the food gets worse. 

GM technology is great for the companies that create them. Genetically modified foods are patentable, for example, which confers a marketplace advantage on the r holder. And seeds genetically modified to require specific brands of herbicide or pesticide lock in customers for those products.

Genetically modified crops have been aggressively introduced into our diet only in the past 25 years or so. According to the USDA, the percentage of soybean acreage devoted to GM soy rose from less than 10% in 1996 to more than 90% in 2010. GM corn acreage rose from almost zero to more than 2/3 of all acres. The vast majority of processed packaged foods contains one or both of these GM crops. Farm animals are usually fed GM feed. Vitamin pills are often made from GM crops. GM foods have pervaded the entire industrial food supply, at least in the United States where they are legal and unlabeled. 

Adults today are feeding their children foods that didn't exist when they themselves were children.

Once the particular type, species or "brand" of seed has been planted, the growing or raising of industrial foods is typically done in a way that optimizes the ingredients for industrial processing. Just a century ago, farms involved the raising of a variety of crops and animals in a symbiotic ecosystem where the waste from animals fertilized the crops, and some of the crops fed the animals. Crops were rotated to maintain soil health.

Industrial farming involves plots of land growing a single crop or monoculture — often genetically modified and crop-dusted with an airplane spraying hundreds of gallons of poison all over the food and the soil. The soil becomes depleted and over time and becomes lifeless and the process, the ecosystems become imbalanced or completely broken. These practices are not done for healthier or better-tasting food, but because that's how the agribusiness industry get the maximum weight of produce out of each acre of land at the lowest cost. But while this is how factory farming maximizes their profit margins, there is an enormous and irreparable cost to the environment, which comes also at the expense of farm workers’ and consumers’ health.

Fruits and vegetables destined for industrial processing are typically harvested well before ripening, so the food can survive the long journey to the factory, where it may be ripened with ethylene gas. The same goes for a lot of the produce sent to supermarkets.

Before produce even gets to the factory or supermarket, it has already been modified aggressively. As a result, according to several studies, the overall concentration of nutrients in foods has declined dramatically in the past 50 years. The protein concentration of wheat, barley and corn is way down. The mineral content of wheat and many vegetables is down. This general trend makes intuitive sense. As producers successfully find new ways to get more pounds of food out of the same acre of land, you might expect the nutritional quality to decline with rising yields.

But it's at the food processing and packaging plant that the deep modifications take place. Of course, different kinds of foods undergo different modifications, alterations and transformations in the manufacturing process. One nearly universal outcome is that food usually has to be sterilized or nearly sterilized before leaving the factory.

A typical food manufacturing facility involves pipes and vats, bins and kettles of such size and complexity that it's impossible to keep these things clean. Because food is processed in mass quantities, bacterial contamination can spoil huge amounts of food. And because industrial food will usually be stored for long periods of time, any bacteria would have weeks or months to develop into a full-blown pathogenic danger. That's why many industrial processes require the pasteurization or sterilization of food before, during or after the bottling, canning or packaging stage.

Food sterilization can be problematic for health in two ways. First, it changes the food, destroying or altering the chemical structure of nutrients. Second, it turns out that human health needs the bacteria, fungi and other microorganisms that live on natural whole foods. Eating a diet of primarily processed foods can leave you with a compromised gut environment, which can lead to susceptibility to illness, allergies and other problems.

Because industrial food will be eaten when old, rather than fresh, food processors have to employ a wide range of tricks to "embalm" the food and prevent it from decomposing, as it naturally would.

We all know that when food gets old, it "goes bad." Food is transformed by bacteria, molds and enzymes, causing it to lose flavor, texture and color. Liquids and semi-liquids separate. The shape, structure and texture of food degrades. Because industrial food products will be shipped, handled roughly, kept at unpredictable temperatures and placed on shelves for weeks or months, all the potential damage to the product must be countered with additives. The food industry employs thousands of chemicals and compounds that act as preservatives, emulsifiers, stabilizers, anti-caking and anti-foaming agents, thickeners, color enhancers, flavor enhancers and others. Some of the unpronounceable ingredients on food labels are chemicals and additives that make old, stale food look fresher. Other additives don't have to be listed on the label at all. For example, cottage cheese, non-fat milk, sour cream and some ice cream brands are whitened with a potentially toxic substance called titanium dioxide. But you won't find that on the label because of a loophole in the regulations that enable its classification as a "manufacturing aid" rather than a food ingredient. Other loopholes allow companies to hide a huge number of ingredients single umbrella terms like "artificial flavors," even if the ingredient is not used to affect the flavor. The list of ingredients that can be legally added to wine without being disclosed on the label runs six pages.

Food products need containers, which are constantly being upgraded for lower cost shipping and storage, and increasingly made from plastic or plastic-lined cans. Plastic is cheaper than glass, less breakable and lighter, too, which brings down shipping costs. As with many industrial food innovations, plastic containers improve the product but degrade the food.

It turns out that chemicals in plastic containers can leach into the foods they contain. In the past few years, consumers have become aware of the dangers of substance in many plastics called Bisphenol A, or BPA. BPA is used in many plastic containers, and also in the plastic lining of many canned foods.

When BPA gets into food, and then into the body, the human endocrine system mistakes it for estrogen. Such anti-androgens, or anti-male hormone compounds, harm the health of women as well as men. Researchers are still working on how all this fake estrogen affects health, but it could be partly to blame for declining sperm counts in men, as well as have some link to cancer, diabetes and heart disease.

BPA isn't the only problem. Many different kinds of plastics have many other different chemicals and compounds that also disrupt the endocrine system.

Container makers often use a class of substances called phthalates, which make plastic containers soft and flexible. Phthalates leach easily into foods from containers because they're not strongly bonded to plastics. As the plastic containers age, they break away from the container and blend into the food, onto the surface of the outside of the container and even into the air we breath. These also disrupt the hormonal system, and have been linked to all kinds of health issues, from birth defects to obesity and even insulin resistance.

Both BPA and phthalates can be detected in the urine of just about every adult in America. Our bodies are saturated with these anti-androgen hormone disruptors.

Other types of industrial-food containers have similar problems. Swiss scientists discovered, for example, that the recycled cardboard used for factory-made breakfast cereal boxes contain enormous quantities of toxic chemicals that can leach into the food.

The differences between industrial and traditional foods are profound and many. Because industrial food has been so thoroughly modified, it bears almost no resemblance from a nutritional perspective to traditional foods.

Nearly all the foods available to consumers, from grocery stores, to restaurants, to vending machines to company cafeterias are industrial foods. Even cooking at home from scratch can involve industrial foods, in the form of modern wheat, industrially sourced and processed oils, pasteurized ingredients and other foods from the supermarket. Likewise, it's possible to make traditionally processed food products in factories – what matters is the degree to which foods have been modified for reasons other than taste and health.

Confusion about the difference between industrial and non-industrial food has led to mistaken conclusions about which foods are healthy, and which are not. In recent years, various food categories have been vilified as unhealthy. Meat, milk, grains, sugar and so on have been vilified by various health experts as categorically bad for you. But it turns out that only the industrial versions of these foods are bad. Wild fish and game, raw goat milk, ancient grains, raw honey – the traditional versions of these foods are super healthy in moderate quantities.

As I said previously, I define industrial food as food modified for factory farming, factory processing, mass distribution or mass marketing. Industrial foods are those that have been changed to satisfy the demands of the consumer marketplace. It's not the industrial processing that matters, but the modification of biochemistry specifically for that processing.

Industrial food doesn't taste good. It doesn't look good or smell good. It doesn't promote health. It doesn't make you feel good. 

Industrial food is just cheap. 

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Recipe: Oaxacan Provencal Lentil Soup

As a Gastronomad (a nomad who travels for the love of food), my lifestyle is driven by passion for learning from and experiencing how others live, cook and eat around the world. All the different places I travel to influence the recipes I create.

My recipes are healthy and eclectic and can be described as a fusion of world cuisines. In the last 15 years, I’ve been inspired by the many cooks and chefs I’ve met around the world. 

One of the things I believe sets the Spartan Diet apart is that cooking and eating is about maximizing flavor, quality of food and nutrition density. As you embrace this point of view, cooking is more joyful, adventurous and exciting in the kitchen exercising a sense of freedom and not being bound by the rules of conventional cooking. What’s the point of charred meat, blackened fish and burned brown butter when in the process you create carcinogens in food? Why do tomatoes have to be blanched and peeled before making a pizza or pasta sauce? There’s no need to do extra work to rob ourselves of the extra fiber. Cooking in a way that maximizes the health and nutritional content of food is better for our bodies. Food is necessary for providing us with sustenance with its nutrients. Our goal in the kitchen when we cook should be to keep food as fresh, flavorful and nourishing as possible. 

As a cook, I’m very much influenced and fascinated by the many spices and herbs used in Mexican cuisine, and especially, Oaxaca cuisine; and by the rustic style and fresh ingredients of French country cooking or Provencal Cuisine. I also love Italian cooking -- making pizza and pasta from scratch is incredibly rewarding. 

The most influential diet in my cooking is the Mediterranean diet. Having lived extensively in Greece, Spain, France, Italy, Turkey and Morocco have provided a greater understanding about the power of eating a widely diverse diet that includes more naturally fermented foods and meats, fresh sardines, nuts and seeds, goat and sheep cheeses and, of course, exquisite extra virgin olive oil. 

Although a vegan diet does not provide sufficient nutrients to be optimally healthy, having been vegan for two decades taught me the power of eating more plant foods and the skills to prepare vegan food in a spectacularly tasty and crowd-pleasing way. It's an understatement to say that The Spartan Diet is a plant-forward diet. High-quality animal protein, though important for total health, takes a back seat to the world’s most nutritious plant foods — nuts, seeds, whole fruits, legumes, herbs, vegetables and more.

Since we’re currently living in Oaxaca, I’ve been cooking with Oaxacan ingredients and eating mostly Oaxacan food. But this week’s recipe brings together two continents.

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We recently had some local friends over for dinner and I wanted to cook something a little different for them. After going to a small organic farmer’s market to shop for seasonal ingredients, I had plenty of ingredients for a healthy and delicious green salad and a quinoa dish with mushrooms and fava beans.

For the main dish, I cooked a French Provencal…

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Let’s start with nutrition. Wild salmon is super high in protein and both omega-3 fatty acids and omega-6 fatty acids (which our bodies cannot make on their own and must get from food).

Technically, you can get supplements containing omega-3 fatty acids. But finding unadulterated, high-quality supplements is nearly impossible. And the most complete way to metabolize nutrients is from whole and unprocessed foods, not single ingredients and nutrients that have been processed and denatured.

Human biology thrives on a diet that includes wild fish — salmon, sardines, herring and mackerel — all rich in omega 3s and other important nutrients. (Note that I’m referring to mackerel and not king mackerel, which should be avoided due to excessive mercury levels.)

The only "downside" to wild salmon you'll hear is: "It's expensive." But is it, really? The Spartan Diet calls for smaller quantities and higher quality, especially in animal-based proteins. A conventional diet, what's considered a normal diet, involves huge quantities of low-quality beef, pork and chicken, plus empty calorie foods that provide little nutrition, but still add up to high costs. 

Tragically, some seafood has become risky because of mercury concentration resulting mostly from human activities or manmade pollution. Mercury harms the nervous system and the brain because it gets attached to selenium in the body, preventing selenium from acting as natural defense as part of antioxidant enzymes that offer protection to the brain against free radicals. Mercury in your diet is bad.

Low levels of mercury consumed by some fish species are concentrated in the predators that eat those fish every day. Tuna, for example, would be an amazing food for the human diet. The problem is that tuna is a super-predator, gobbling up huge quantities of other fish and accumulating mercury in its system. That's why the Spartan Diet favors low-mercury fish like salmon, sardines, mackerel and herring. 

As a member of the Spartan Diet community, you should know how your food came into existence and what happens to your food before it becomes part of your body. 

We are quite literally what we eat. It’s therefore imperative that we educate ourselves about the growth, cultivation and production of everything we eat and drink. 

What's wrong with farmed salmon?

Some of the world's best wild salmon comes from the Pacific Northwest. These magnificent creatures have incredible prowess and olfactory memory. Those that make it to maturity and overcome the enormous challenges of swimming back from the ocean and up streams and rivers to spawn back at their birth place are nothing short of formidable. Wild salmon is a fascinating fish and it plays a crucial role in the ocean waters of the Pacific Northwest ecology. 

Farmed and wild salmon are not the same. Farmed salmon is an industrial food and therefore not part of the Spartan Diet. Farmed fish are confined in underwater "cages" and aqua pens and are not able to exercise their basic instincts. They’re fed an unnatural diet and can also be given antibiotics. Because of the unnatural conditions they're raised in, their color is unnatural. Fish farmers add orange artificial color to their feed because consumers expect salmon to be orange. Farmed salmon also contain unnaturally high levels of omega-6 fats not in balance with their levels of omega-3, which makes the fish an inflammatory food that negatively impacts the cardiovascular system when consumed.

Fish farms are extremely unhealthful environments not only for the fish that are being raised in the underwater pens, but also for other wild fish. Lice and diseases can infect the environment in the areas beyond the pens. To pay for farmed fish is to support an industry that harms the ocean ecology.

Atlantic salmon is farm-raised in many other countries including Ireland, Chile, Scotland, Norway and British Columbia in Canada. In some instances but to a lesser degree, Pacific king (chinook) and silver (coho) salmon are also farm-raised indoors in Washington State, Chile and New Zealand. 

Alaska’s State constitution does not allow salmon farms, so all salmon from Alaska is wild. Moreover, mining and logging operations that cause contamination of salmon rivers are prohibited. Salmon rely on olfactory memory to return to the springs or rivers they hatched to spawn new life or reproduction, but the slightest water contamination can prevent salmon from finding their way back.

Many people eat farmed salmon and don't know or care about the difference between wild fish and farmed fish and how this can impact their health.

The additional challenge is that between the high demand of certain foods and the increasing food costs, there is a lot of food alteration and contraband that is affecting our food system and most people are unaware of this occurrence.

Many restaurants list wild salmon on their menus, but actually serve farmed salmon. Some stores also do the same, although it’s less common than in restaurants. Most consumers can't tell the difference between farmed salmon and wild salmon. 

When we were living in Kenya, I once bought “wild salmon” at a small fish market in Nairobi. As I was preparing it, I noticed that the white paper the salmon was wrapped in had absorbed orange color, which was an obvious sign that the fish had been given orange color dye. I’m not sure how the color was applied but whatever process was used, it caused the fish to give off orange color and it stained the paper. Needless to say, we didn’t eat that particular fish.

The more you know about your food, the better you can judge for yourself the quality just by looking at it and tasting the difference.

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Eating wild-caught salmon means you’re eating salmon that has never been confined in a fish farm and has been caught in nature. The key to eating wild-caught salmon healthfully and affordably (like everything else) is moderation, which is also important for a well balanced diet and for the environment as well as the planet in general. Between global warming, overfishing, mining, logging and salmon farms, wild salmon faces many threats.

It’s also important to note that paying for wild-caught salmon is good for the environment. What you choose to spend your money on is a good indication for what your local and federal governments as well as businesses should also promote and protect. Because wild salmon is an important industry, their habitats are protected. To protect salmon is to protect oceans, wetlands and rivers. 

Wild salmon is an anadromous fish, which means they migrate from their freshwater birthplace to the ocean, where they live for two to six years (depending on the species) and then return to their birth stream or river to spawn or reproduce. 

The fat content of salmon correlates to the length of their fresh-water migration as salmon stop feeding after they start their upstream journey.

Some salmon such as the Yukon and Copper River king can swim hundreds of miles upriver to spawn. To prepare for their long upstream journey, they put on high amounts of fat including omega-3s.

Once they arrive at the spawning ground, the female salmon creates a shallow nest as a signal to the male salmon to fight for the privilege to spread their sperm over her eggs while she gives birth. 

The fertilized eggs take three to four months to hatch and the baby salmon or "fry" are born with some attached yolk as immediately available food. Then they eat almost everything around them, grow to just about one inch long and then begin swimming downstream to the sea to start the cycle all over again. 

Salmon’s diets depend on the region they inhabit, however, young salmon rely on mostly zooplankton and invertebrates. 

Once in the depths of the Pacific Northwest Ocean, salmon eat smaller fish, including herring and also krill and pelagic amphipods.

Wild salmon have many predators. In addition to humans, wild salmon are preyed upon by larger salmon, birds, snakes, as well as whales, seals, sea lions and dolphins when out in the ocean. And upon their dangerous return journey upstream, salmon have to make it past hungry bears and birds.

Wild salmon in the ocean look mostly silver, with dark blue highlights. When salmon begin their journey upriver to reproduce, they undergo the changes in color and shape that help them attract mates.

Wild Pacific salmon (especially sockeye salmon) offers more vitamin D than any other food, including farmed salmon.

Wild salmon also provides the highest and richest food source of astaxanthin (as-tuh-zan-thin), which is a carotene-class red-orange pigment with powerful antioxidant and anti-inflammatory properties.

Wild salmon is a cold-water fish that provides our bodies with a wealth of omega-3 essential fatty acids. As one of the richest sources of omega-3 fatty acids, wild salmon provides a host of benefits including lowering the risk of heart disease as  omega-3s help reduce triglycerides, lower inflammation and increase beneficial HDL (the good cholesterol).

But nutrients aside, wild salmon is an incredibly versatile protein to prepare by sautéing, roasting, steaming, smoking, braising, and my favorite: slow baking! The versatility of salmon goes beyond its preparation for ways to eat it. Salmon is delicious in the form of main dishes, salads, tacos, soup, pasta and many other ways in endless combinations. Make extra and enjoy the leftovers.

The world of salmon

There are a few varieties of wild salmon. Each tastes different from the others, and has different textures and offers different nutrition. For example, the levels of omega-3s they provide varies according to variety. Personally, I enjoy king, sockeye and coho salmon. But I’m grateful to have any type of fresh wild salmon I can manage to get during salmon season. Ultimately, it’s all a matter of personal preference. 

Fresh wild salmon is the best quality salmon you can eat — and the best quality animal protein on the planet. But even if you have access only to frozen wild salmon, it's a good idea to eat salmon at least once or twice per week. At the very minimum, three to six ounces per person once a week will do you and your family a world of good. 

The bottom line is that it's important to know about the food we eat, how it lives, exists and how it’s sourced, grown and produced and what has transpired before it makes it to your home and goes into your mouth.

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Recipe: Slow Baked Salmon with Dill and Turmeric

For this week’s recipe, I created a salmon recipe during my recent lightning fast trip to the San Francisco Bay Area, where we traveled to get our first Pfizer covid vaccine. And while we were there for only six days, we got to enjoy wonderful wild salmon dinners and multiple wild salmon leftover lunches.

Perfectly cooked fish makes for a delicious and nourishing meal. But it’s a little tricky cooking salmon for the best flavors, textures and nutrients. (Never, ever overcook fish.)

My Slow Baked Salmon with Dill and Turmeric recipe is designed to keep the salmon’s nutrients intact while bringing out the best flavors.

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This baked salmon is wonderful served with salad or my garlic lemon quinoa with kale and also with my Caper Parsley Pesto recipe, which I will share with you in future issues.

Also, while the recipe calls for fresh dill, you can use fresh cilantro or parsley to add some variation. And in the absence of fresh herbs, just adding a teaspoon of dried herbs …

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A cursory glance at the restrictions, limitations and bans in the Spartan diet may lead some to conclude that this is a diet that sacrifices taste for health. But this is not the case. I fully reject the "deprivation cuisine" of yesterday's health food movement -- I believe every meal should be spectacularly delicious!

It's true that many common "comfort foods," junk foods, and mass-market food ingredients are not on the Spartan Diet. Gourmands may be horrified by my rejection of domesticated beef, pork, farmed fish or farmed seafood, sugar, deep-fried foods and unfermented dairy. Others may find the Spartan Diet rejection of industrialized processed foods and most store-bought prepared foods hard to swallow. There is no industrial ice cream on the Spartan Diet. There's no chicken, candy bars or fast food. But the Spartan Diet doesn't simply ban. We offer superior options that we believe are far more delicious, more deeply satisfying and more nourishing than the foods you may be eating now. 

It turns out that the world's most healthy foods are also the world's most delicious. Healthy food by definition uses superior ingredients. Lamb, wild fish, venison, bison, goat, elk, rabbit and duck as well as sheep and goat raw cheeses, cultured butter and fermented milk foods and drinks are part of the Spartan Diet, for example, and they’re more delicious and healthy than their conventional counterparts.

The freshest organic extra-virgin olive oil is also the tastiest cooking oil you can buy, for example (you’ll need to avoid high heat to avoid burning the oil but cooking at low to medium heat in general is healthier). Properly and naturally leavened whole-grain bread (which most Americans have never even tried), tastes far better than white bread leavened with industrial yeast. Fresh fruits and vegetables are tastier than canned or processed, or industrially preserved foods. The highest-quality spices are both the healthiest kind and by far the best tasting. And as you’ll discover from all my recipes, Spartan Diet foods are spectacularly flavorful. 

Tragically, "health food" has generally a bad reputation. Just about everyone has encountered the universally bland, off-putting, weird-tasting foods that are supposed to be good for you. When people think of "health food," the mind conjures things like grey-green smoothies, questionable veggie burgers with alfalfa sprouts, cardboard-textured cold cereals, meat alternatives like veggie sausages, fake cheese, flavorless salads, rice cakes, protein shakes and so on. If you think most common “health food” is unpalatable, I agree. 

The problem is that the people who emphasize ingredient freshness and quality tend to be different people from those who emphasize health. So the gourmand foodies obsessed with flavor and presentation might buy the best olive oil, heirloom tomatoes and meat, then prepare those ingredients with unhealthy cooking methods, deep fry or fry it at high temperature and add unhealthy ingredients to achieve the desired taste at any cost. Meanwhile, the decades-long health food movement involves people who have developed a great deal of knowledge about vegetarian protein, sprouting grains and other techniques that enhance health, but they tend to put most of their emphasis on health, rather than flavor. The sports nutrition industry has cultivated knowledge on the links between fitness and recovery, but they also tend to lack skill with both taste and overall, long-term health.

The Spartan Diet is the first system ever that brings the best information from all these food approaches together into a single system. Spartan Diet recipes excel at using the world's healthiest ingredients in the world's most delicious meals.

The Spartan Diet is shockingly delicious and the most gratifying and happiness inducing food you can possibly eat. But, unlike junk food, its exquisite flavors, textures and enticing aromas come not from excess fat, salt or sugar. Spartan Diet foods taste good because they are genuinely good and they’re genuinely good for you and you’ll feel beyond great when you eat them. 

Broadly speaking, the overall transition to a Spartan diet will involve a radical upgrade in the deliciousness of your food. You will have a new standard that will turn you into a true food snob (in a good way!).

And speaking of exquisite flavors, textures and enticing aromas, here comes this week’s recipe!

Recipe: Fermented Jalapeño Escabeche

Make your own naturally fermented jalapeño escabeche packed with super deliciousness and nourishment. It’s the tastiest and easiest way to bring more “culture” into your life!

This fermented jalapeños escabeche recipe is made with carrots, onions and garlic, making a wonderful and healthful addition to your meals. Delicious with pretty much everything savory, jalapeños in escabeche go especially well with Mexican food including tacos and quesadillas. I even love them over pizza, and, of course, they’re perfect for your homemade nachos. 

Get the recipe!

Forget canned jalapeños in escabeche. There’s no need for sad and lifeless food. Ever.

I grew up eating canned jalapeños in escabeche. As a child, I thought they were delicious. And then I grew up and started making them with natural fermentation. The fermented variety is vastly superior in both taste and healthfulness. 

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