Fresh Home-grown Basil Tops Home-made Wheatless Pizza

Home-grown basil grows beside tomatoes and petunias in thriving urban garden

Home-grown herbs and vegetables in your balcony garden

My fresh basil plant grew indoors for awhile, until I could tell it was time to put it outside. So I created a combined herb and vegetable garden in one of my long balcony planters this year, planting basil beside a tomato plant, and even planting a hanging petunia plant beside them for color. Everything grew together comfortably and each species seemed to thrive without killing off any of the other. A truly model ethos for an  urban garden!

Home-made gluten-free pizza with fresh red pepper, cheese, and fresh herbs

Home-made gluten-free pizza made with brown rice flour

Home-made gluten-free pizza, made without wheat, is made with about 2 cups of a combination of brown rice flour, potato flour, and sorghum flour; then 1 package of yeast, 1 tsp of sea salt, and 1 tsp of xantham gum - and that's pretty much it. You just add 2 eggs (or 2 egg-replacements, as I did), 1 1/2 cup warm water, 2 tbsp olive oil to the yeast, stir, and then mix it all together with the different flours and other dry products. Mix it well. Roll the dough into 2 balls, cover and let stand in a warm place for 1/2 hour to let it rise. 

Afterwards, flatten each into greased pizza pans, and cook just the pizza dough for 5 to 7 minutes. Then bring it out of the oven, spread tomato spread for pizza on the dough, cut red peppers, cheese, fresh sage and basil, and put on top. Bake the pizza for another 20 minutes. Makes two 12-inch pizzas.

The Importance of Mental and Emotional Balance

Emotional and Mental Strength Needed to Handle the Death of People Close to You

Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking discusses cognitive loss after trauma

After reading the book "The Year of Magical Thinking" by Joan Didion, I wasn't sure whether to be glad she
had the mental acuity to reflect so deeply on the loss of her husband, or whether to feel sorry for her for being so emotionally dependent on one person during her whole life. Didion is a New Yorker Magazine essayist who documented the various levels of pain and loss she experienced after the death of her husband.

One of the themes of the book is the cognitive effects of experiencing a trauma such as the death of a loved one. Didion states that the brain simply stops functioning for a fairly long period of time while you heal from the emotional loss. Another thing she points out in the book is how death-averse we are as a culture, and that  current social norms do not condone mourning - essential as it is to overcome a close person's death. Learning to cope with the repercussions of death is something that everyone over 40 experiences sooner or later, and the greater mental & emotional balance we have in our lives, the better we will be equipped to handle it.

Chemical-Free Skincare Enhances Wellness

Imagine knowing that everything that you wash with and put onto your body was chemical-free! Recently while searching for affordable soaps, shampoos and skin moisturizers that don't have harmful chemicals in them, I found that they were neither plentiful, affordable, nor easy to get. Some health food stores carry products that are advertised as chemical-free and healthy, but when I looked up their ingredients at the Skin Deep Cosmetic Database, they were rated as harmful in many cases.

Many chemical-free products are advertised online, but most of the ones I found that were rated as safe at Skin Deep were made in limited quantities by small operations in the United States that did not deliver outside of the U.S.A. Since I live in Canada, I decided to search for Canadian-made chemical-free skincare products. And I found Consonant Body Organic Skincare, a manufacturer of 100% natural products that have "no parabens, no sulfates, no petroleum ingredients, and certainly no phthalates." The way I found Consonant was by walking down Yonge Street in Toronto one day and seeing a sign that stuck in my mind for days. It said:

What Goes On Your Body Goes In Your Body

Chemical-free skin care products at Consonant Body Organic Skincare

A few days later, I went into Consonant's store to investigate the prices.  I met Kristina, who did a wonderful job of explaining the features and benefits of their product line, and gave me some samples. I was surprised to find how affordable their skin care products were.

A chemical-free skin care product for eyes

Ultra Firming Organic Eye Cream from Consonant Body Organic Skincare

Eventually I purchased

an Ultra Moisturizing Organic Eye Creme product for $35 CAD.

I thought the price was good, and I have been using it daily for 3 months now.

Compared to Mary Cohr and Yonka products that I recently reviewed and also use daily, this chemical-free skincare product is much more affordable - as well as being organic.

The Best Dill Pickes

Health Benefits of Cucumbers

Cucumbers are a fantastic source of hydration in the summer months. According to Natural News, they are good for the skin, for your hair, for fighting cancer, for fighting bad breath, for curing a hangover, aiding in weight loss, and curing diabetes. Whether this is all true or not, they make great pickles.

Baba's Garlic and Dill Pickles

This is my grandmother's dill pickle recipe as told to my brother, John Pohran:

For 1 quart of dill pickles (these are "quick-eating" pickles)

1 tablespoon salt
1 tablespoon brown sugar
4-5 cups of cold tap water
garlic and dill...

Cut garlic and dill and stuff into jars. Put as many cucumbers into jars as possible. Fill with salt brine and cover all cucumbers. Let sit for 4-5 days until "fermentation" has changed the color of pickles. Refrigerate jars.

How to Avoid Preservatives in Food and Products

Preservatives can be avoided by reading labels, researching online, and finding suppliers who sell food and products without them.

BHA in Food

If you eat potato chips, lard, butter, cereal, instant mashed potatoes, preserved meat, beer, baked goods, dry beverage and dessert mixes, chewing gum and many other foods, you are eating butylated hydroxyanisole (BHA) - a preservative that prevents food from going rotten. The latest environmental research reports that "the International Agency for Research on Cancer classifies BHA as a possible human carcinogen, and the European Commission on Endocrine Disruption has listed BHA as a Category 1 priority substance, based on evidence that it interferes with hormone function."

You can avoid BHA by buying fresh food, cooking and baking yourself, and even making your own beer.

BHA in Skin Products

BHA is also in skin products, and is often recommended for aging skin since it has many of the same effects that estrogen does.  On Skin Deep, a cosmetic database, BHA is rated "highly hazardous" (9-10 out of 10).

Avoid BHA by reading labels

Wellness and Wheat

Anyone concerned with wellness is now concerned with wheat

There are many ways that wheat affects wellness - from weight gain, to raised blood sugar and many other adverse health effects including heart disease.

One-third of my family are celiac, or disturbed by eating gluten, or allergic to wheat - that's 6 out of a group of 18 counting my mother, my three sisters, my two brothers, and our combined 11 children.

But none of us were remotely affected by wheat over thirty years ago when we used to gather at family celebrations and eat a wheat-based delicacy called "kutia". Most of our family's symptoms have since included stomach problems and breathing problems (kind of like hay fever).


Ways that wheat affect wellness are:

• increased appetite
• formation of small LDL particles, which combined with increased appetite, creates belly fat
• belly fat causes inflammation, higher blood sugar/higher blood pressure = risk of heart disease
• mood swings
• depression
• joint pain and swelling
• acid reflux
• irritated bowel
• peripheral neuropathy (numbness in hands and legs)

Eating fresh food, or real food that has not been processed in any way, is the best way to stay healthy. But for those days when I feel like making dough, I have a good supply of brown rice flour and soy flour. Home-made pizza was a hit at our house when I made this gluten-free home-made pizza.

Buy Fresh Food and Fast Track to Wellness

Buying fresh food and cooking it will put you onto a fast track to wellness. Buying fresh can be a little more expensive than buying canned or frozen foods, but with a little comparison shopping you can keep your costs down, and it's worth it. Not only do you eliminate many preservatives and chemicals from your diet, it tastes better and you get more protein for your buck.

My 89-year old mother is an inspiring role model for wellness 

I also come from a family of fantastic cooks who all cook real food and buy fresh.

In the past year my mother has sent me three wonderful books on diet, Wheat Belly Cookbook, Moosewood Restaurant, and Moosewood Restaurants Cooks at Home. I don't know if other families are like this, but may of my family's emails, phone conversations and visits have some discussion of great recipes in them.

And it has paid off - at 89 my mother looks about 70, is extremely sharp, has the energy of a 50-year old, and is a great role model for Wellness Over 40.

Back in the 1970s no-one in our family was allergic to wheat

On the other side of the family, my Ukrainian grandmother was another great role model and lived into her mid-90s.

Not only did she buy fresh and cook real food, she grew most of it herself in her legendary garden.

When our family celebrated Ukrainian Christmas Eve on January 6 each year, all of the 12 meatless dishes were home-cooked by my grandmother.

Back in the 70s when this picture was taken, no-one in the family had wheat allergies yet. Was wheat different back then?

Education About Food & Nutrition Increases Wellness

Many people I see in underground fast food malls at lunch in the financial center of Toronto are eating sushi, chicken salads with grains, or healthy full-course dinners with a salad. I noticed this as early as the 80s (except for the sushi) while enjoying my favorite hamburgers and cheese danishes at lunch each day. But over the decades, I became better educated about food. Other boomer friends seemed to know that 'we are what we eat', intrinsically, but I did not. I never ate healthy, and I rarely cooked.

I simply chose unhealthy food once I was on my own because it tasted so good - and it was cheap. For many years it didn't seem to register with me that what I ate had an effect on everything else in my life and how I felt about it.

Later, it wasn't Jamie Kennedy or any other celebrity who finally got me on the track to healthy eating. It was an allergy clinic! After years of suffering from allergies as a teen, my son was treated at The Allergy Clinic in 2006 when they looked at his diet rather than give him allergy injections. Our family went through intense nutritional counselling as a result and I now don't touch bread or wheat. My recommended diet now consists of 4-day rotations of chicken, shellfish, meat or legume, fish. With these 4 dinners go the following grains & vegetables: brown rice, buckwheat, sweet potato, quinoa. Then all kinds of vegetables and fruits are added like spinach, collard greens, romaine lettuce, lemons, apples, pears, bananas, blueberries, carrots, parsnips, etc. My son's allergies were corrected after 2 years on this diet.

I realized that there are a lot of resources about nutrition out there. Some of the ones I rely on are:

• http://www.drweil.com/
• http://www.wheatbellyblog.com/
• http://www.moosewoodcooks.com/cookbook-store/

How To Maintain Wellness Over 40

As a boomer, I am healthier now than I was at any point between age 17 (when I left home to attend university) and my mid-40's. When I recently summed up the reasons why, I realized that they all revolved around diet, exercise, stress management, yoga/meditation/therapeutic massage, mental stimulation, emotional connectedness/satisfaction, and finances. In fact, I would even put them in that order. And here's why:

1. What we eat seems to dictate how well we feel and how well we handle things - never mind all of the other associations connected to diet.
2. Exercise also has equal weight to food when it comes to being well - and this seems to increase with age.
3. Stress, or over-stress, is a wellness-killer. It eats up all of the mileage we get from eating well and exercising, so it has to be managed and kept in check.
4. Yoga, meditation, massage, dance, tai chi, and other forms of spiritual physicality are all tools to connect the mind and body and they all increase wellness.
5. Mental stimulation is not talked about much, but it's pretty well "use it or lose it" (use it and be well, or lose it and don't). Mental stimulation is more important for wellness than we think.
6. Emotional connectedness and satisfaction with oneself and others doesn't keep us well without the other 6 factors, but it plays a key role in keeping us well-balanced.
7. Finances are talked about a lot in this part of the world as an elixer to all troubles, but you can be a wealthy, top performing, emotionally connected individual who is positively challenged by your job and interests, but if you don't take time to unwind, exercise, keep your stress in check and eat right, these unattended elements will catch up with you. That's not to say finances aren't important, they are. But over age 40 the other key points start to matter just as much when it comes to wellness.

Stay tuned to Wellness Over 40 - we'll be discussing each of the 7 elements from the personal point of view of someone who found meaning and value in all of them. We will be telling stories of fantastic people and resources for achieving and keeping your own wellness, your own way.