July 11, 2011 | 1:58 pm

Diets are a “Berry” Bad Idea!

Posted by Sima Cohen

Acai berries (pronounced “ah-sigh-ee”) are hotter than Robert Pattinson half-naked washing your dishes. If you get your health advice from mainstream media, you think the only way to be thin is to overdose on protein, avoid carbs, inhale acai, and do yoga all day. Manufacturers claim that acai will help you shed pounds, flatten your tummy, cleanse your colon, enhance sexual drive and desire, prevent wrinkles, and that it can cure obesity, cancer and even baldness. The berry has only been available to Americans since the 1990s, but Amazon natives have been consuming it for hundreds of years, and if you were to eat the fruit, you’d reap multiple health and anti-aging benefits. But guess what? Unless you’re flying every morning to the Amazon basin for breakfast, you’re not eating the fruit.

It’s easy to be duped and distracted by companies selling fake acai products that contain fillers that give you NONE of the benefits of the authentic berry itself. Acai berry that has been spray dried has gone through a process which kills off much of the nutrients of the fruit and uses a carrier agent such as maltodextrin to dry the berry, so that in the end, 40% of the product is carrier agent and not authentic acai. P.S. Bitches: maltodextrin, when consumed in high amounts, leads to weight gain. It’s also added in the manufacturing process and, due to a loophole in the labeling laws, isn’t required by the FDA to be listed on the label!

For your information, the health value of acai berry comes from the entire fruit, so an extract isn’t worth a damn either. The process of “extracting” to create a supplement involves isolating one element of the fruit. And get this: almost all extracts of acai are made from spray dried acai! In the rainforest, the natives consume the skin and the pulp of the berry and discard the seed, so a product with acai seed is junk too. The only way to retain all of the nutrients of the fruit and steer clear of carry agents is to freeze dry the berry. Earthfruits Freeze Dried Acai is the purest I can find.

The 80’s weren’t just about new wave music and spandex. Between 1985 and 1989 the frozen yogurt business erupted, and the American public became convinced that it was a healthier choice for dessert than ice cream. Soon, chains began popping up on every corner, marketing all-natural, probiotic packed, healthy nonfat frozen treats as if they were the best thing that ever happened to dessert. Brilliant! They got us good.

First of all, human beings have managed without these live cultures for centuries, but since the 80’s a large number of us have been screwed by the food industry into believing that we need them for the sake of our health. In fact, a clinical trial aimed at reducing childhood allergies was published in 2008. In the trial, 178 infants were given either a probiotic or a placebo for the first six months of their life. The children who were given the probiotic were found to be more likely to develop a sensitivity to allergens. So the jury is still out on the specific health effects of probiotics and how many of them are needed to provide a beneficial effect.

Every single flavor of TCBY’s soft serve and hand scooped frozen yogurts contains a chemical called carrageenan. Consuming carrageenan is linked to bloating, farting, and inflammatory bowel disease. Kinda neutralizes the work all those probiotics are supposed to be doing, huh? Second, TCBY (which stands for “The Country’s Best Yogurt”) doesn’t put any actual yogurt in their frozen yogurt. It should just be called frozen sugarmilk. They’re made with whole milk, and while the nutrition facts might show 0g of total fat in a few of the flavors, they all contain twice the amount or more of daily recommended sugar. If you’ve learned only one thing from us it should be that sugar = fat.

Pinkberry claims to have reinvented the US frozen yogurt category, starting with California. Here we go again. “The company initially touted its product as healthy, nonfat and all-natural, but did not say what was in it.” (Julia Moskin, New York Times) Any company or corporation that only reveals the ingredients in their product after a grueling lawsuit, can’t be trusted. The original flavor contains 23 ingredients, the first two of which are skim milk and nonfat yogurt, followed by three types of sugar, at least five additives, acidifiers, a preservative, a starch and maltodextrin. The two latter ingredients are both lab-produced and extracted from corn syrup. Your love affair with chilly bliss just got FATTER! They still call their toppings “all natural”, but a lot of them contain chemicals. After the lawsuit Pinkberry stopped calling itself “frozen yogurt”. Maybe because it never was.

I know you get off on having a frozen treat every now and again, and I’m not the ice cream police. (Although I do have handcuffs and I know how to use them!) Haagen Dazs makes a one-serving size cup, which is built-in portion control, in 10 euphoric flavors. Our favorite flavor is Mint. The best part is, they abide by my ingredient philosophy that if you can pronounce it, you can eat it.

By now you probably get that diets don’t work. I believe the opposite is true - dieting actually leads to weight gain! The only way to effectively lose weight and keep it off forever is to eat REAL food with ingredients you can pronounce every three to four hours, and don’t be scared of things like fat and carbs. (They’re actually good for you.) For more information visit http://www.meetsima.com

Peace and Dessert,
Sima

July 4, 2011 | 1:29 pm

It’s Monday again. Time to start your new diet, right? Wrong!

Posted by Sima Cohen

If you wear a red string because Madonna does it, you adopted 12 kids from a small African village, or you’re keeping up with the Kardashian’s, you’ve probably thought about being Vegan. Veganism is a lifestyle philosophy that excludes the use of animals for food, clothing or any other purpose. Atkins says that carbs are the reason you’re fat, and Veganism suggests that meat is the culprit. Bouncing from one extreme to another is why you’re fat!

I have found a Vegan diet to be incredibly limiting and difficult, and most Americans can’t and won’t do it. If you take out meat, what do you put in its place? Most Americans aren’t inclined to start shoving broccoli and spinach down their throats instead. And I don’t blame them! Americans suck at eating vegetables and vegetables are the cornerstone of a Vegan diet.

Okay, but you really want to be Vegan. You sold your junky Ford and got a Hybrid Prius. You ditched all your leather, put on your Hemp shoes and went to the market. Yesterday you were in the drive thru at In-n-Out, so you need to get your protein. You go to the freezer section and start tossing fake meat into your cart with the biggest, baddest arrogant attitude. You’re saving the planet! You don’t eat animals! But all that fake meat is highly processed and loaded with chemicals, preservatives and the devil: SPI (Soy Protein Isolate).

SPI is the key ingredient in most soy foods that imitate meat and dairy products. 99% of the time, the soybeans are genetically modified, processed in harsh chemicals, and contain one of the highest percentages of contamination by pesticides of any food. In feeding experiments, the use of SPI increased requirements for vitamins E, K, D and B12 and created deficiency symptoms of calcium, magnesium, manganese, molybdenum, copper, iron and zinc. SPI stimulates more allergic reactions than any other kind of soy, and is the only soy product associated with cancer. Additionally, these highly processed soy products contain high levels of aluminum, which is toxic to the kidneys, nervous system, and the brain. Soy also contains goitrogens. Goitrogens depress thyroid function, which contributes to slow metabolism. Welcome to the dark side of soy.

But Asians eat soy and they live longer, healthier lives than Americans, right? Yes and no. Four out of the top five longest-lived places in the world are in Asia. However, a 1998 survey found that the average daily amount of soy protein consumed in Japan was about eight grams for men and seven for women. That’s less than two teaspoons a day. Except in times of famine, Asians consume soy products only in small amounts, as condiments, and not as a replacement for animal products. With one exception: celibate monks living in monasteries and leading a Vegetarian lifestyle find soy foods quite helpful because they dampen libido. Now your vagina is Vegan too. No more meat!

Don’t get your libido tied in a knot. Have a little soy! Edamame with your sushi, tofu if you like the taste. But eating microwaveable, processed, frozen, dehydrated, preservative and chemical laden fake meat as a replacement for the real thing is like selling your car because the horn doesn’t work. If you want to lose weight, don’t cut off your leg. There are 30 listed ingredients in Morningstar Farms Vegan Chik’n Strips, many of which we can’t pronounce. The first ingredient listed is water and the second is SPI. There are 3 ingredients in one of my orgasmic chicken recipes: Chicken breast, saffron and lemon juice. Assuming you got your libido back, which one turns you on?

Speaking of being turned on, nothing gives me more pleasure than crackin’ off a couple of bricks or dropping the kids off at the pool. (Okay, I can think of one thing that’s better.) But pooping is more than just shit, wipe and flush. It’s the last “hoorah!” in a long process of eliminating waste and detoxifying the body.

Proper detoxification has an impact on almost all of the body’s systems and can have a beneficial effect on most chronic illnesses and weight loss. Being that our bodies are perfect machines, detoxification should happen naturally when the machine is functioning at optimal levels. But considering that most Americans put shit into their mouths before their shit comes out, going on a detox or cleanse is a band-aid on a broken bone. Everything you put in your mouth every single day should aid your body in the natural detox process. If it did, you probably wouldn’t be dealing with chronic conditions such as headaches, acne/skin problems, allergies, low energy, fatigue, poor sleep quality/insomnia, respiratory difficulties, stiff and aching joints/muscles, digestive problems, depression, moodiness, and impaired liver function. And you sure as hell wouldn’t be carrying around 15 or more pounds of extra fat.

Probably the most famous detox is The Master Cleanse or the Lemonade Diet. Beyonce Knowles admits to using this cleanse to drop 20 pounds in 2 weeks for her role in Dreamgirls. She also claims, “As soon as it was over, I gained the weight back.” 14 days of suffering, depriving and shitting her brains out to be thin for one day. When people think about losing weight, they think about losing fat. But this is nothing more than water lost and water gained.

If you want to detox, fine. If you want to detox to lose lots of weight? Houston, we have a problem! Lifetime weight loss has to be earned. You can’t just poop it out and be done. So go ahead… squeeze some lemons into maple syrup and water, pepper it and drink for 10 days straight, no cheating. And then when your cleanse is over, you’ll go back to your drive-thru and get your fix.

You know there’s more where this came from. Visit http://www.meetsima.com for the anti-diet, and stay tuned for Part 3!

Peace + Hamburgers,
Sima

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