My Family Health Blog

Committed Family Healer's Research

How to open live oysters

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Hah. Now I know how to open live oysters. My son’s request for live oysters paid off. 2 days ago we got live oysters and my cousin tried grilling them to open. I observed that it was hot stuff, hard stuff and it was cooking the oysters… not good… very bad technique.

After our first experiment with live oysters from Farmers Market my son asked me if I got a tummy ache, were the oysters safe? No, no tummy ache, oysters are safe to eat. This time I went to market and asked the market man to let me taste an oyster. He demonstrated and taught me how to open live oysters:

  1. Use your small knife and chip away at the edge of an oyster exposing its gap, opening.
  2. Use your small knife and jam it in and twist it to open the oyster.

Very very easy!

How to eat the live oyster.

You can leave it in the half shell and serve, some are still alive, you can see them moving.

You can slurp the half shell with your mouth like kissing it to suck at the juices and eventually eat the flesh of the oyster.

Oysters are very filling this way.  The bagged oysters have something lost in them.

You can also get a slice of lemon or calamansi and squeeze it on an oyster to disinfect it if you fear bacteria.

You can also use authentic vinegar like our sukang tuba (vinegar from coconuts) as the oysters can be dipped in for a minute and it will be “cooked” or disinfected by the vinegar.

Do not use those commercial fake manufactured vinegars.

Another good nutritious day of eating for my malnourished boy

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My 8 year old boy woke up late this morning.  He made it to class just in time.  But there was no time to play in the playground for some sun.  He had some light breakfast which his mom prepared, some papaya, some rambutan and a raw fertilized duck egg yolk.

* Note: the papaya is organic, the rambutan is organic, the raw fertilized duck egg is organic imported from a remote town in Palawan.

I know for his school packed lunch he has wild ocean tangigue fish which is pan seared on ghee / clarified butter.  To buffer his cooked meat he has an organic raw cucumber.

* Note that the tangigue fish is wild ocean, supposedly loaded with good omega 3 fats and the clarified butter is supposed to give good fats as well (albeight cooked).  Searing isn’t so bad, just some 5 seconds per side of the fish slice.

Upon reaching home, I was having my raw beef for lunch… I gave him the raw beef muscle blood to drink, maybe 20 ounces of the drippings.

* Note that the raw beef and raw beef blood is part of our zomotherapy… the answer to tuberculosis.

For an afternoon snack I don’t know what he had, I was out getting wild river turtles from my hunter.  Maybe he had fruit?

For dinner I fed the children personally.  They had raw tangigue prepared with slices of ginger, onions and cayenne pepper squeezed with calamansi… a dish called kinilaw.  The calamansi juices “cook” the raw tangigue meat for a few minutes and it is chilled in the refrigerator.  This was just the starter course.

* Note the same wild ocean tangigue fish.

The main dinner was lightly seared 2 inch thick grass fed sirloin batangas beef.  The chicken had fun watching and counting down the cook with their 10 second chants which actually seemed like 6 seconds as the kids are impatient and count fast.  I think they like the mere smell of seared but love the inside absolutely bloody raw.

* Note that we get only freshly killed authentic competitive batangas beef in Farmers Market in Cubao.

There was a beef fat shortage as the children gorged on the yummy yellow fat, I had to ask the cook for more fat from the refrigerator which was supposed to be for tomorrow’s packed lunch.

The kids appreciate beef fat with gusto.  In contrast with common filipino customary eating with lean cooked meat + loads of rice, these kids know that the beef fat is their rice.

I was using a brand new sharp carving knife I bought but with the frenzy of little fingers grabbing each slice of beef made it very dangerous so I switched to scissors for the rest of the dinner.

The kids chomped every bit of the fish and the beef we prepared.  I had warned the 2 younger kids that they need to stuff themselves with this dinner as there is absolutely no coming back to the kitchen just before bedtime to eat some fruit or to cook an egg.  And they did stuff themselves.

Then I tucked them in all to bed at around 8:15pm.  Mommy arrived a bit later.

top less at the sierra madre hotel August 28

top less at the sierra madre hotel August 28

My 8 year old was diagnosed a few months back with tuberculosis.  He’s not coughing, he has no cold, so there is no way to do a sputum test.  If he did have TB germs, they’re obliterated now after going on Beam Ray therapy.  He seems malnourished and has scratch marks on his arms.  Probably zinc deficiency as well.  I’m seeing to it that he gets the best raw food and the best cooked food.  This boy is now well adapted NOT EATING RICE AT ALL. I have banned rice to stop the most idiotic combination of meat + rice that makes it hard to digest food, especially for my son with a weak digestive fire.  Now he eats a lot of meat and a lot of fat. Tomorrow is wild turtle dinner day.

McDougall: Men Should Avoid Prostate Cancer PSA Screening

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Dr. McDougall points out that a popular US television talk show called the Larry King Show was used as an advertising platform to promote very harmful Prostate Cancer PSA Screening with the use of celebrity personalities John McEnroe, Michael Milken, and Dr. Christopher Rose. In that show they recommended that all men over the age of 40 years undergo PSA examinations in order to find prostate cancer. Business, profits, greed… harm.

Dr. McDougall exposed:

Follow the Money

By no coincidence the primary support for early detection of prostate cancer through PSA testing comes from medical trade organizations. The best example is the American Urological Association, representing the special interests of over 16,500 members (mostly people from areas of urology and oncology) and funded by industries such as GlaxoSmithKline, Lilly, Novartis, Pfizer, and many other companies that derive their income from men with prostate cancer.

What these business interests are doing is Disease Mongering

“…is the selling of sickness that widens the boundaries of illness and grows the markets for those who sell and deliver treatments. It is exemplified most explicitly by many pharmaceutical industry-funded disease-awareness campaigns—more often designed to sell drugs than to illuminate or to inform or educate about the prevention of illness or the maintenance of health…Disease mongering turns healthy people into patients, wastes precious resources, and causes iatrogenic (induced by a physician) harm.”

Ray Moynihan
Science writer for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation and the British Medical Journal

All this PSA testing and medical treatment is just plain junk, pointless, and useless.

On the surface it would appear that the early detection of cancer in the prostate by any means would result in a longer life for men with less risk of dying from prostate cancer. However, research finds otherwise. The first report from the Prostate, Lung, Colorectal, and Ovarian (PLCO) Cancer Screening Trial on the effect of screening with prostate specific antigen (PSA) testing and digital rectal examination (DRE) on the rate of death from prostate cancer was published in the New England Journal of Medicine, March 26, 2009—PSA and DRE saved no lives.8 The second landmark report, published in the same issue, was from Europe and it showed an absolute reduction of less than 1 death in every 1000 men getting PSA tests.9 There are two reasons why PSA testing fails to save lives: first, extremely few biopsy-proven cancers are life threatening, and second, early detection is a myth.

And the real harms of prostate diagnosis is:

When you agree to take a PSA test you are gambling for the possibility that the test will detect a cancer that can be successfully treated and give you more quality years of life. Think for a moment. You are placing your bet on an extremely small chance of a theoretical benefit that may occur in the far distant future. If your PSA test is positive (there is a 10% chance it will be) and the biopsy results reveal cancer (there is more than a 30% chance it will) then the harms that follow are immediate, real, life changing, and for all men discovered (100%).

Simply being diagnosed with cancer changes a person forever. New policies for health and life insurance are no longer available. Finding desirable employment is less likely. Once the diagnosis is made the label of “cancer victim” sticks for life. Daily reminders come from family, friends, doctor’s visits, and stories in the media about cancer. Worry and anxiety dominate the patient’s and his family’s life. His future becomes a question mark. Every body pain is interpreted as a recurrence. The cancer victim becomes isolated from the rest of the world.15

Then there are the side effects from the treatments. The Prostate Cancer Outcomes Study reported that urinary leakage (incontinence) was more common with radical prostatectomy (35%) than with radiation therapy (12%) or androgen deprivation (11%). Erectile dysfunction occurred frequently after all treatments (radical prostatectomy, 58%; radiation therapy, 43%; androgen deprivation, 86%).16 Incontinence means wet pants, diapers, and sometimes lifelong need for a catheter in the man’s bladder. The results of the Prostate Cancer Outcomes Study are conservative. Likely, more than 80% of prostate cancer patients develop erectile dysfunction, regardless of whether they have surgery or external radiation therapy. And these are only two of the many side effects that occur from the best that medicine has to offer the man with a positive PSA test.

Please read up on the full McDougall Newsletter Larry King Live on Prostate Cancer Screening (PSA)

Tuberculosis Fighting Diet of my 8 year old boy this 1st day of September

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This is a run down of my eldest boy’s food intake for the day.  This boy has been through the beam ray treatments so any tuberculosis germs should be obliterated.  He’s not coughing and he has no mucus no cold.  We got rid of all colds and coughs in the house when I clamped down on the diet to an almost paleo diet.

Today they left early for school and the boys were able to play for 20 minutes in the playground and exposed to sunlight.

Breakfast was rambutan fruit plus 1 fertilized raw duck egg yolk.

In school my boy had for lunch lightly seared in ghee (3 seconds per side) – tanguige fish filet from a 5 kilo whole fish I bought yesterday.

Strange he said he ate no merienda.  We ran out of rambutan.  The kids did drink some freshly squeezed maasim (sour?) dalandan juice plus water when I got home around 5:30pm.

Dinner was a feast of oysters in several disinfecting dips: freshly squeezed lemon + some sea salt, sukang tuba (coconut vinegar), sukang iloko (sugar cane vinegar from ilokos)

I supplemented his dinner with freshly killed raw beef bone marrow and freshly killed raw beef sirloin.

He ate mostly oysters.  He loves oysters.  I remember gorging on a lot of oysters a few months ago until I hit my limit.  Seems my boy hasn’t hit his limit yet.  Maybe my boy is zinc deficient.  Zinc deficiency makes children fail to thrive.  Maybe this is why he likes oysters so much.  Now he wants me to buy live oysters in the shell instead of shelled oysters in a bag.

Last night he had halaan (clams) plus white rice with raw duck egg yolks on the rice.  Trying the high everything diet on him once a week.

I have been supervising his major meals every single day to the point of spoonfeeding him and me doing the marketing and food preparation / food preparation supervision.

Maybe every single day of nutritious meals will make him bounce up in weight.  Right now he is still slim, but I noticed he is very active and very strong and very playful.

Raw oysters, raw beef bone marrow, raw beef sirloin

Raw oysters, raw beef bone marrow, raw beef sirloin

2 Day Seminar on Intensive & Microbial Organic Farming by Gil Carandang: Sept 12-13, 2009

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Master organic farmer Gil Caranding of Herbana Farms will be holding a 2-day Seminar on Intensive & Microbial Organic Farming. Learn to grow your own microorganisms like Lacto bacilli. New technology trends like 10 day composting, 2 kilograms compost turn to tea fertilizes 1 hectare land. Make your own fertilizers & pesticides, including organic certification.

When: September 12-13, 2009
Where: Km 59 Barangay Burol, Calamba City.
Price: 4,000 pesos per person
Included: Board and Lodging

Contact: Gil Carandang +63-929-269-8602
Website: http://www.herbanafarm.com
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Santol Season in the mountains of Sierra Madre

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Yesterday we went up to the Sierra Madre mountain hotel and on the way back a few meters from the hotel was a fruit stand. The very first fruit stand. Fruits ought to be cheap here, and it was cheap!

Yummy santol… free taste… 10 pesos per kilo! 150 pesos for a whole sack of 40 kilos!

Of course we bought a whole sack!

These wild mountain santol are superior to the santol we have that grows in our own yard. These are delightfully tasty. It just so happened that while in the hotel grounds we picked our own 2 wild santols from a tree and it was good.

The vendors said they just asked their teens to pick fruit from the next mountain just nearby at even higher elevation… cool… I’d like to go there too.

What was even cooler was I asked the couple of they had accommodations for tourists like me in their little village and they said I could freely sleep over just for friendship. Whoa… nice invite. I think I’ll bite soon enough.

Lady bagging some santol. From wikipedia.

Lady bagging some santol. From wikipedia.

Rambutans in season July August and this September

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Freshly picked rambutan

Freshly picked rambutan

The whole family and just about every Filipino must be on a rambutan craze the past few weeks. Prices have gone down to 50 pesos per kilo or even less in the Metro Manila area. Rambutans have been in season since July, then this August and maybe until September. Yummy. If you haven’t had your fill of rambutan, get some today!Continue Reading