Wear pants, speak English, Eat cow and last but not least, get a gun!

No.. no Jon Stewart style monologues today. Just a few "bullet points"  to put down given my current frame of mind. When you are tired, grieving and a bunch of random things come together in your brain early in the morning, there is a collision of thoughts, of worlds, where you think "did I accidentally ingest some drugs?"

First, the Church shooting that has left a lot of us disturbed for various reasons. Some because we feel that peace may not be the option, especially if you are the one dying for peace, and others because they have to start the "we have a right to our guns" propaganda machinery all over again after the 24 hour period where they let the victims grieve (it used to be 72 hours.. now it is only 24 hours before the FB feed starts seeing posts on why one's right to even having opinions on guns is subject to conditions!)

I have not owned a gun, but have shot one with ball bearings in it. It was a good toy, as long as I was shooting at  piece of paper with a turkey /bullseye drawn on it some 100 feet away. If you love physics, you will love guns. It is like loving rockets. They are good when used for space travel, but bad when used as missiles.

Also understand why my friends living in downtowns or crime filled areas have a gun in a holster while they walk alone. However, having guns consistantly land in the hands of people with an evil intent or a deranged mind is beating the odds in the US by a wide margin. These are no "random accidents". They are systematic. 

On a tangential note, we still have no pavements or lights in our street. The guy who came to my door for my vote many years ago, spoke to me for 30 mintues. It was shortly after my bike accident. Told him that the whole "village of cupertino" thing being implemented only on our street does NOT make sense. All other streets in our area have lights and pavements. Our street is exempt because some old folks who have lived here forever are insisting on keeping it that way. These guys are clearly living in the past. we now have Teslas that are quiet and fast zipping through the street and our house is a blind turn. The danger is there for sure. He promised to fix it and I voted for him. 

The now elected city councilman, did not do anything. Instead he sent me a form and asked me to pay $700 to submit it, after getting it signed by everyone in the street. Common sense does not prevail. I would have had better odds suing the city. Anyways the whole reason for this tangential rant was that, we can change the rules to adapt to changing times, if as a collective we choose to. In this case some anti street light guy cost me a lot of money in medical bills, and one hell of an experience trying to get my life back on track. The only bright side of the whole thing was I found Bikram Yoga when physiotherapy could do no more. Over the years, I have become a "cup half full" kind of guy. 

Someday, someday, during this lifetime, I will see some sanity with gun ownership and regulation, where guns are mostly safely stored in shooting ranges and no one is able to give automatic weapons as birthday gifts to their deranged kids. 

To my gun owning friends, please understand. I am not for taking your guns away and I say this, not out of respect for your feelings, but for fear of those guns you have!

As for the bozos who are in Congress and the Senate who shamelessly "grill" airbag and automobile companies for a few deaths on a product that malfunctioned (on a normalized % of product use vs. damage these are orders of magnitude lower than guns), show some balls and do the same "grilling" when it comes to guns which have repeatedly caused tragedies. If I see you one more time on some C-Span hearing preaching about safety and consequences, while you voted NO on meaningful gun legislation (background checks), will not be voting for you again. I have a large stock of photographs of sunsets, flowers, birds, kittens and cute puppies as well as a decent version of Photoshop! Can do a lot of "inspirational" messaging that will go against you. Thankfully I have a day job and a family to take care of. Don't turn me into an activist. You are not ready for it.

Then came the "eat dog"  sorry "eat cow" thought.  Received a petition to sign saying, "stop the chinese from eating dogs".

This is a topic close to my heart. No, not the dog eating. Love dogs, although I am allergic to them. Here is the thing. When I was a kid and growing up in India, most of the households had a cow in the backyard. We would go feed them hay or balls of cooked rice. Everytime there was a prayer for our dead ancestors, my brother and me would be tasked with feeding the cow with the honorary food. We would pet the cows, see them smile. We bonded with them. We were taught that the cow was to be treated like your mother. After all, you drank its milk! 

When in elementary school, my mom or grandma would send me to the local milkman  with vessels to get milk  Think his name was Jai Ganesh at the corner of St. Mary's road and Devanathan Street in Mandaveli. He along with his team, would milk the cows in front of us and give us milk. Not sure if they are still around, now that they have door delivery of packet milk. Where was I going with this?

When I came to the US more than two decades ago, it was shocking to see so much meat in peoples plates. It was difficult to digest the scale of animal slaughter that was going on in this country. Kind of got used to it, what with the fact that you never see a live cow or chicken on a day to day basis. 

The hypocracy of asking the Chinese to stop eating dogs really got to me. One mans dog is another mans cow. Have said this before many times. If folks in the US can treat cows (or chickens or pigs) in the most inhumane way, and eat them with total apathy, why cannot another race of people treat dogs the same way? The dogs don't mean anything to them. So when they see a dog, they think "delicious" much the same way a picture of a cow might bring thoughts of "juicy and delicious steaks" to folks in the US. 

It is bad if you are a cow and are born in the States. It is bad if you are a dog and are born in China. If you are a cow and want refugee status, go to India. If you are a dog and want refugee status, go to US. I know my friends in the animal kingdom cannot speak for themselves, but that is where we have to step in. If you want to be fair, stop eating animals. If you cannot give up your "medium rare steaks", stop preaching to others on what they can and cannot eat.

Over the last twenty plus years, do you know how many times a friend or co-worker has joked "you get sick a lot and are puny.. a steak or two is what you need". They don't even realize how much it might offend someone. For the record, I became immune to this in two years. Even tasted meat for three years on and off during grad school days and found it to be "meh". There was nothing delicious and the meat did not make the food tastier.  Nothing to beat my mothers potato curry roast, my grandma's Vaththa Kozhambu or munna's Malai Kofta. As for the "protein", I definitely did not need that much protein. Have been vegetarian for the last 16 years and I am not missing anything.

We are all the product of our experiences and upbringing. So I am definitely not suggesting the world go vegetarian.

Just remember, one man's dog is another man's cow! 

What does China have to do with Thachchi Mammu!

After almost a year, bought a book! Yes, this is a big deal now for a guy who used to buy books while going on walks near Pondy Bazaar or Luz Corner in Madras or Rittenhouse square in Philadelphia.. 

The book is "The China Study" and it was a recommended read from at least 12 of my friends who saw my rants on corn syrup, the difficulty in projecting the value of what good food is to our kids and my occasional fights with San where we have basic disagreements that typically goes like this..

I come back from Yoga class wearing a small shorts (dubbed Jigina Jetty by the little one and Jr.) and the little one says "Appa, your legs and hands look like horsies appa!"

Me : (on cloud nine) Really! See Sangeetha, while I don't have much body fat and cannot adapt to cold weather these days, the kids can see that I am all toned muscles now!

San : Naalukku naal nee skeletonaa aayindu vare! (day by day you are becoming a skeleton). You should be eating more protein. You come take 3 hour naps in the afternoon on weekends. all you do is Yoga and sleep these days.  etc. etc. etc. 

There were a lot of protein recommendations from friends as well and most of them also recommended that this book be read, ASAP!

Have finished only 64 pages so far and the summary seems to be .. 

1. Protein in excess of 12% in diet is bad

2. Milk based Casein protein is the worst offender

3. Vegetable based protein like Soy and fruits/veggies is okay 

4. Meat is totally off the table 

In order of badness Meat >>> Milk >>Plants

Now the last three weeks has been a study in Labels for typical foods that we eat. This is not easy because most of the lentils etc. we buy from Indian store just have a small sticker on them which show weight and price. With some more internet research have found the following % for stuff we eat most of the time:

Dal (lentils we eat with rice) 23% , Milk (20%), Buttermilk (20%), occasional ensure milshake for breakfast (19%), Sago (0% if label is to be believed), Sona Masoori rice (7%), Atta from which we make Roti (12%), Almonds which I eat raw almost every day (40%), eggo waffles (6%), popcorn (4%), Aunt Jemima Original Syrup (0% if the label is to be believed), Zico Coconut water (0% if the label is to be believed), Dry roasted Edamame which we buy from Costco and use as a time pass snack at work (40%), Potato as a sample vegetable? (9%).. Most of the green vegetables are ~5% if you compare by grams and if you compare ratio of Protein calories to total calories a lot of these numbers change. Maggi Noodles, which is part of the staple diet comes in at 9%!

Now, going by this book, a few things are obvious :

1. I am already getting way too much protein compared to what is required even with the original diet (without the extra lentils)

2. The good news is most of this is from Vegetable sources (given Lentils, Edamame and Almonds go in this category)

3. The bad news is I drink two glasses of Chai a day (50% milk) and eat lots of Rice with Yogurt (Thachchi mammu). That is all 20% milk protein. Don't know if cutting that back is even an option.

4. Corn is not a bad deal w.r.t. protein intake. 

All this only after first few chapters. Will keep reading to see what the authors say..

My feeling tired could simply be a combination of exercise and work or travel pressures and have nothing to do with Protein intake. 

Have not yet read the part about the Study in China.

One interesting thing that keeps coming up in my mind. These studies were all done with milk from American cows that are not exactly vegetarian holy cows that are fed better than the humans that feed them. The American cows are fed ground meat as part of their diet. 

Would a study of milk protein derived from Holy Indian vegetarian cows vs. Non Vegetarian body building American cows show a difference in instances of cancers? 

Just like all proteins are not equal, maybe all milk based proteins are not equal? 

I now have to go research if the Yogis in the Himalayas actually gave up Milk! The Yogis and the Shaolin Monks seem to have figured out all this stuff already?! Maybe all we had to do was listen to our elders instead of having to kill a few thousand rats to figure out the obvious?!

It has been an interesting read and it is not going to be easy to take recommendations that come in this book and put it to practice. Not because we are just fighting a food industry and its marketing dollars, but because we are trained on a diet from the time we are kids and those preconceived notions are hard to change!

From Madras to Monsanto...

When we were young, the tradition in South Indian brahmin families was to give newborn kids something called "Urai Marundhu". Urai is grinding and Marundhu is medicine. The recipe for this medicine was handed down from generation to generation and it was not something that was written down as far as I know. 

Pretty sure that with the modern generation of "all knowing" women who simply dismiss tradition thanks to their Westernization and belief that Google has all the answers you need to raise a child, these recipes will be gone. Even if the recipes survive, the select roots and seeds that one needs to make this medicine will disappear from the planet. 

Now coming to the details of said medicine, it is a combination of 7-8 seeds, dried fruit pods and rhizomes that are ground into a paste, then put in a bath of cow dung (that is the best way to describe it and the Tamil term they use is "padam pannaradhu"), and finally a small part of this paste is given to newborns along with mothers milk.

Grandmas will say "this will help the babies with digestion for the rest of their life". They also have another quick fix recipe for babies with gas problems using "Omam sorasam" which is an extract of a seed that is similar to Thyme called Ajwain or Omam.

Modern mothers will prefer to give drops of Mylecon or Woodwards gripe water. I am reasonably sure that the mechanism for instant gas relief is similar in the store bought medicine and the natural remedy if you study it using the typical western scientific method. 

Now if you pop quiz grandma on the details of why the medicine has to be kept surrounded by cow dung, they will tell you that the cow dung imparts certain digestive qualities that come from the cow's intestines to the babies and it is essential for the kid to help digest food, in this case mostly plant food!

Maybe the term for bacteria didn't exist in their vocabulary! You can go ask your doctor and it is a fact that folks who are vegetarian all their life will have issues when they suddenly try eating meat as they might not have the bacteria to digest meat in their gut.  It is also true ( I don't need to publish a study to prove this) that antibiotics do a number on vegetarian stomachs as they kill good and bad bacteria in the process. My family doctor used to prescribe a "only thachi mammu" (rice with home made yogurt.. read bacteria!) diet when we were on antibiotics to bring our digestion back to normal. I am not sure how much these antibiotics affect folks who eat a predominantly meat based diet or how their sensitivity to a bacterial imbalance is different from vegetarians. If you know of studies, do let me know. If you are a predominant meat eater and you get a loose stomach when you take antibiotics, that is enough of  a study!

Why bring this all up and why drag Monsanto into this? I do not hate Monsanto, but don't love them either. Now, I don't hate Monsanto because they did come up with many new technologies that help feed more people in a planet where the resource distribution is screwed up (a man made problem that was not Monsanto's creation).

However, with the amount of money and influence they have, they do get away with experiments that affect the entire planet, with little or no oversight. This is not just Monsanto.

Take Novartis for example. They came up with Dichlofenac. There are eagles and vultures that are considered holy (as scavengers for dead bodies in certain communities) and as gods representatives in other communities and they are all now on the endangered species list because dichlofenac which goes from dead cow carcases to these birds causes renal failure in the birds. Would they have predicted this? would they have been required to study the effect of dichlofenac containing meat on scavenging birds? Probably not. Should they? 

Monsanto is now synonymous with "Genetically modified" crops. This whole modification seems to be a loose term. The devil is in the details. What exactly is the modification? How does that affect the end product? How do these modifications impact things downstream? On who in which way? Will the "studies" that are required to make these products available to the public be required to test these and to what level of detail? You have to be fair to the Monsanto guys as well. You cannot say "test this on every human genotype and only then we will approve". The world is supposed to work with the greatest good for the greatest many principle. 

That said, just like all crops are not created equal, all people are not created equal either! Our genes are different. A big part of what makes our body is millions of bacteria that have a symbiotic relationship with us. So while it is not possible to test the effect of a Genetically modified crop on "all humans" one has to do enough work to understand what goes downstream. 

Will specifically bring up corn, which is a topic close to my heart. When I came to this country 20 years ago (yes it has been that long in the US), corn was a new thing to me. We did not have corn as a staple food in India. It was something we ate as a treat when we visited the beach in the form of roasted corn. Later we got introduced to "popcorn" which again was not that popular compared to sandwitches, samosas, vada pavs and chai when we went to the movies!  Over the years have seen a proliferation of corn here that we can call it corniferation!

Twenty years ago when you got a cup of Hot Cocoa or Hot chocolate you would assume it contained Milk (or milk powder) and chocolate, and you would be right! Today open up any brand of Hot chocolate and it will have a label which goes something like "As much calcium as a glass of milk" or some such thing to mislead you into thinking that it is comparable to milk. Most of these packets will not list ingredients. If you do get your hands on the big carton itself, the ingredients will show "Corn Syrup, Sugar, etc. etc. and as the fifth or sixth ingredient Whey Protein(some will say from Milk, others won't say from where)! In other words, the hot chocolate of today is nothing but flavored corn syrup. The issue is that over time the messaging and the obfuscation get you to let your guard down in a very systematic way. 

Take Yogurt. Go read the ingredients. Corn starch is now a major part of Yogurt. Why bother feeding corn to the cows, let them convert that to milk, take the time to make cultured yogurt out of it when you can just take corn starch and make that more than 50% of the yogurt?! Now the thing that upsets me is that if this is the logic for economics of scale, then why feed a lot more corn to the cows to get meat! Make corn taste like meat and have it as 50% of sausages or hot dogs. I will bet you money that there will be a revolution in this country if that happens. 

In my opinion, next to guns, the second thing that Americans in general defend as part of their way of life to the outside world, is their right to eat meat and lots of it! Used to think that it is probably part of the amendments because getting veggie food on the highways was a lot more difficult than getting meat of some kind in my early days here.

That meant french fries and milk shakes at McDonalds or Burger King when traveling.  Guess what? Go to the fast food places today and you will see a "subtle" change in the menu board. The Milk Shake with Vanilla, chocolate or strawberry has quietly been replaced with Shakes. I am guessing that these shakes are not milk based anymore and my second guess is that it is also more than 50% corn syrup. There is no ingredient list for this that I can get my hands on, so if you know I am right or way off base, do drop in a note.

Being a vegetarian, my main source of protein is Milk, lentils, the vegetable(singular by intent) that is part of lunch and dinner and the occasional fruit and fruit juice from the local Jamba. The milk that was part of the diet at places outside the house has been replaced by corn. As long as that corn does not have any side effects and the product folks come out and are honest about what is there in the ingredients, then one gets to control the intake. 

Too much of anything is not good for the body. They say in Tamil "Alavukku minjinaal amirthamum visham!" which translates to "When taken in excess, even the nectar of the gods becomes poison!". It is one thing to have corn as part of your diet. It is another thing altogether to have it as almost all of your diet. 

It is just a question of time before my wine drinking friends will find out that their wine is now replaced slowly with 80% corn syrup, 15% paint thinner, 3% grape extract and 2% of other unmentionables! Then you will be buying Organic wine at $2,999 a bottle!

Going back to the topic of Urai Marundhus, not sure how many other communities do something like that. For the record, we did give both our kids the marundhu. Chances are they are more immune to "overcorning" (I should copyright that term) as they were born and raised here but one never knows.

What is more interesting is that western research is slowly catching up to some of this stuff..

Here are some recent links..

a. oral bacteria

b. Dicholfenac causing vulture extinction and why watching the birds at Thirukazhugukundram might be history (My grandpa took me and my brother to see the pair of birds come feed when I was about 9 and still remember it! the photo in wiki is from 1906.. guess it is true that they have been coming for 100's of years. It is always 2 birds and that still makes me think how. there, I have digressed on a reference thread. No wonder I get lost on freeways!)

b. Pacifiers that transfer bacteria from parents to children

c. a study on gut bacteria to which I am ready to go become a specimen

d. Trillions of bacteria that make up human bodies and more on them

e. want to know about "fecal transplants" that might save your life? Well, looks like these guys don't know about Urai Marundhu and Padam parthufying! 

My grandmother would be worth many Ph.D.'s if one tenth of the stuff she knew that was passed on from generation to generation was translated in western scientific jargon! 

I do not expect Monsanto to do a study on the effect of Genetically modified corn( don't know which of those modifications passes on a natural herbicide to the corn itself) on a south Indian vegetarian gut. Even if this thing is extremely hazardous to a very small population, don't think the world would care. It will be collateral damage because that is how the world works these days. For now, if they at least say they have done something drastically different, can at least reduce the intake of the new stuff, see how the body reacts and make a decision to avoid it.

As a person who is allergic to peanuts and sesame seeds and who watches the ingredient list on anything and everything, the new corn variants could have an impact. I do not know for sure, but the only way to protect myself is to do a controlled study (on myself) and then decide!

On yet another side note, Omam (mentioned earlier in this post) contains 50% Thymol, which is a bacteria killer! Apparently european scientists started talking to Egyptian, Iranian and desi grandmas in the late 1700's and finally isolated Thymol as a chemical compound in 1800's and promptly patented it, and found applications to use it as a cure for gum disease, preserve paper, be added to cigarettes for a great flavor and even make shit smell nicer!

Sarcasm apart, the regulatory bodies that allow these modifications can only go so far. The rest is left to the users as a buyer beware. This buyer wants more information to be aware! That is all...