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I used to spent hours poring over vacation rental listings on sites like Airbnb and VRBO looking for places that were comfortable and kid-friendly for my family of four. It’s completely possible, as long as you know what to look for, but it’s also time-consuming.
Then I discovered Kid & Coe, a website dedicated to family-friendly vacation rentals around the world.
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Stir-fries are in my regular dinner rotation because they’re fast and I can cook veggies and proteins together all in one pan. One day I spotted the bag of frozen Asian dumplings that I always stock for quick lunches and an idea percolated in my head: What about using dumplings instead of meat or tofu in a stir-fry instead? And then a one-pan meal was born. Crunchy on the outside, juicy on the inside, pan-fried dumplings are tossed with crisp-tender veggies and a savory, vinegary sauce that coats everything to glossy perfection. No need to make rice or noodles to go with this stir-fry — with the dumpling wrappers, there’s already a starch included!
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Many cuisines have a bread salad made from peak produce and stale or toasted bread, all tossed together for a meal made of what’s in season and what’s around. Fattoush is no different, except that the addition of toasted pita and loads of fresh herbs make fresh summer produce — think juicy tomatoes and cool, crunchy radishes and cucumber — blush with flavor.
I recently had friends over for a cookout and served this fattoush alongside a grilled flank steak. Not a single morsel of this salad was left. Even my husband, a salad skeptic, said this salad was game-changing.
Incorporating some wisdom from Samin Norsat, of Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat fame, this version of fattoush is sublime, easy-to-make, and likely to be your new go-to summer salad. In this recipe, you’ll get some guidance on choosing the best produce for the job, a lesson in seasoning from Samin, and the secret to adding the element of heat in raw salads. Let’s get started.
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While the internet offers plenty of recipes (ahem, our site included), nothing quite beats the feeling a real, live cookbook in your grasp. That’s especially true when you’re diving into the wide world of homemade ice cream and in search of serious guidance to get you on your way. Having something tactile in your grasp is like having a floatie to reach for once you’ve splashed in. Luckily, there are a slew of solid ice cream cookbooks out there just waiting to be added to your collection. Here are eight that we at Kitchn love the most and lean on whenever the craving for ice cream hits.
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“Fa-what?” my friend joked when I explained what we were having alongside our flank steak at a cookout recently, “Fattoush! You’ll love it; it’s like panzanella, but better.” After dinner was cleaned up, I wondered how many people might not appreciate the greatness of fattoush simply because they don’t know what it is.
Fattoush is your basic bread salad, like panzanella, which partners pita with fresh produce and a juicy vinaigrette. Hailing from the Middle East and loaded with fresh herbs and tart sumac, fattoush is actually far from basic. In fact, I’d argue that fattoush is better than panzanella, especially if the softened bread of most bread salads leaves you sad.
Here’s my love letter to fattoush. I hope that you’ll try this Middle Eastern bread salad this summer. I promise you won’t forget it.
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It’s fair to say that I gravitate towards tangible, actionable subject matter when it comes to improving my own and others’ health. Things like nutrition, fitness, sleep, hormonal responses, and supplement science may seem like a lot to chew on for the layperson, but these are my personal passions as well as my long-time profession.
And while these are certainly the big, actionable players in the game of health, I fully acknowledge there may be more lurking behind the scenes than we realize. A body that refuses to heal no matter how Primal you eat. Stubborn health conditions that simply refuse to fully go away, despite all the changes you make in your life. A propensity for disease that defies everything you’ve learned about ancestral nutrition and wellness. An intriguing new angle in the health sphere suggests the hurdle for some people may be embedded deeper than outer changes can access.
Oddly enough, it all began with a weight loss program. Working out of Kaiser Permanente in Oakland, CA, Dr. Vincent Felitti was on a mission to get to the bottom of obesity. The problem was, the patients in his program kept dropping out, and he had no idea why. After a series of rather awkward and unintended questions, an interview with one obese woman provided the answer: Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs).
It turned out that the woman had been sexually abused as a kid, and her weight gain was a way of disappearing; of minimizing her risk of further sexual assault. Felitti dug deeper, and discovered that of the hundreds in his weight loss program, at least half of his patients had suffered from some form of ACE. What those people had experienced in their childhoods was somehow systematically preventing them from losing weight. If they did manage to lose weight, they regained all of it in short order.
The findings couldn’t be ignored, and Felitti soon teamed up with Dr. Robert Anda from the CDC to delve deeper. Beginning in 1995 and running until 1997, the resulting ACE study was one of the largest of its kind, encompassing a whopping 17,000+ participants. What Felitti and Anda found not only verified the earlier links between obesity and ACEs, but amplified them exponentially. Adverse Childhood Experiences were a pivotal factor for many of the most common major diseases and health conditions of our time.
The findings were simple yet far-reaching. Through the use of an uncomplicated questionnaire and scoring system, each participant was assigned an ACE score. Each traumatic experience during their childhood would give them a point, with more adverse experiences equating to a higher score. These experiences included sexual, verbal and physical abuse, five forms of family dysfunction (alcoholism, violence, incarceration, divorce, or abandonment), and 2 forms of neglect. Someone who had been verbally abused and had an alcoholic mother, for example, would get an ACE of 2. Those fortunate souls without any adverse experiences sailed through the survey with 0.
Our heroes at Kaiser Permanente found that, perhaps unsurprisingly, the higher the ACE score, the greater the propensity for certain diseases. But it was the extent to which those ACEs affected the health of participants that had me doing a double take. Compared with people who achieved an ACE score of 0, those who ticked 4 ACE boxes were found to be at a 240% greater risk of hepatitis, and a 390% higher risk of developing chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. As the score went up, Felitti and Anda noted that people were more prone to violence, more broken marriages, more broken bones, more drug prescriptions, more depression, and more auto-immune disease. Thanks a lot, childhood.
As Felitti and a host of other researchers dug deeper in the following years, the picture became even more ominous. In short order, a higher ACE score was linked to greater risk of ischemic heart disease, chronic and frequent headaches, lung cancer and other forms of cancer, and liver disease. Whichever disease or health condition researchers homed in on, inevitably a link was found to Adverse Childhood Experiences. More “minor” but broadly influential conditions like sleep disturbance corresponded with ACEs as well with those people who had an ACE score of 5 or more being up to 2.4 times more likely to have trouble falling or staying asleep. As the ACE count went down, the sleep quality slowly improved.
Taking a step back, it became apparent that ACEs were impacting all areas of health. People with an ACE score of 5 or more had a nearly threefold increase in rates of psychotropic drug subscriptions, while a 2009 study conducted by Felitti and company found that risk of autoimmune disease in general went up significantly with increasing adverse experiences during the childhood or teen years. Breaking it down, they demonstrated that an ACE score at or above 2 meant a 70% increased risk of idiopathic myocarditis (a cardiovascular disease), 80% greater risk for myasthenia gravis (a chronic autoimmune neuromuscular disease), and 100% increased risk for rheumatic diseases. I don’t like those odds.
As Felitti and his team began to piece together the links between current-day health and past adverse experiences, a certain trend started to emerge. That trend is as follows:
It looks like a decidedly morbid take on something that happened many years ago during childhood, but if the numbers are anything to go by it’s a very accurate synopsis. This progression, known as the ACE Pyramid, was observed and documented in thousands upon thousands of people.
Demographically speaking, in the original study of 17,000 participants, nearly 75% were white. Almost 40% had a college or graduate degree. Another 36% had some college.
In a 2009 commentary posted in the Journal of Academic Pediatrics, the Godfather (aka Felitti) himself noted that the pathway from ACE to early death isn’t always linear. ACEs can work their destructive ways via two feedbacks: first, disease and early death is the consequence of various trauma-coping mechanisms like smoking, overeating and drug use. In this scenario, the maladaptive behavior brought on by the trauma of childhood could lead to excessive eating and poor diet, for example, which then leads to type 2 diabetes, the culmination of which is coronary artery disease.
Second, chronic stress generated by the trauma (and the brain’s inability to let go of the incident) directly leads to impairment of immunity and chronically elevated inflammation, which in turn paves the way for disease. Even worse, both of these mechanisms can work in tandem, further sealing the fate of the person in their grip.
Where things get interesting indeed is with regards to neurobiology. The trauma of Adverse Childhood Experiences can literally rewire and re-form the brain, changing the way a person develops neurologically for the rest of his/her life without intervention. As this study noted, “the risk of every outcome in the affective, somatic, substance abuse, memory, sexual, and aggression-related domains [of the brain] increased in a graded fashion as the ACE score increased.” The result of a single ACE, then, could be permanent impairment of multiple brain structures and functions.
Put simply, the stress of a traumatic childhood event, such as being beaten or constantly belittled, releases hormones that physically damage a child’s developing brain. These children live their lives in a constant state of fight or flight, as the brain begins to perceive everyday places and situations as potentially dangerous. Thus, an adaptation to danger becomes a maladaptation in its permanency.
With the world either promising danger around every corner or heaping guilt on the developing child, they begin to find solace in diversions. Food, alcohol, drugs, sex, high-risk sports—anything to get their minds off the trauma that is set on rerun in the back of their minds.
But while this is easy to compute in theory, it’s much harder to diagnose in practice. A neurobiological response to an ACE may remain dormant for years, perhaps not even emerging until much later on in a person’s adult life. A triggering event or phase hits, and latent dysfunction goes haywire, developing into mental illness or morbid obesity, or ruining their marriage (take your pick). So, was it really a midlife crisis gone horribly wrong, or an ACE finally rearing its ugly head?
Add to this the fact that trauma, like many factors, interacts with genetic susceptibility, and we’ve got a very confusing picture indeed. Two people in the same household can go through the exact same experiences but be affected in very different ways, depending on an innate dimension of resilience.
It’s generally assumed that neurobiological markers for PTSD are acquired following a traumatic event. What researchers are finding, however, is that certain PTSD symptoms in a patient may in fact represent pre-existing “upstream” pathological functions that remain dormant until released by trauma. Meaning some of us were hard-wired for obesity, but just needed a supremely unpleasant event to unlock that unhealthy potential.
Rather than trying too hard to convince you why these findings are so important, I’ll refer you to Nadine Burke Harris and her excellent TED Talk. She paints a vivid picture from a practitioner’s perspective, explaining that ACEs essentially provide the missing link to solving head-scratching health cases in many patients.
But if we’re looking for cold, hard facts, it’s hard to ignore the economic viability of integrating ACEs into healthcare. According to a CDC study published in 2012, a single year of trauma during childhood can add up to $124 billion in costs over the lifetime of those children. Of those costs, healthcare and productivity loses account for the lion’s share. If recognizing and treating ACEs could cut those costs by even a quarter, we’re talking astronomical savings down the line.
But what’s the entry point for action here?
In this case, I’d say it starts with knowledge as power—recognition, self-reflection, and support as needed. Just because someone is consciously healthy now, doesn’t mean they’re living their best life. It doesn’t mean they’re immune to the effects of any latent traumatic childhood events they’ve been unwittingly carrying around. These factors might be responsible for any number of unexplainable things that have and continue to happen in a person’s life, including stubborn health anomalies.
For this reason, the true importance of ACEs lies with you. Recognizing any ACE influence from your own history can provide Burke’s missing link for your own self-diagnosis, enabling you to direct your healing inwards, finally accessing the potential undercurrent of chronic stress and correcting coping behaviors that have been set on repeat. Maybe a strong innate resilience protected you from lasting effects. Maybe that isn’t the case. Unpacking the question may just open up the possibility for a better life, and improved long-term health.
It might seem a bit cliche, but recognizing that you might be harboring a traumatic event or experience from your childhood can be an incredibly productive, even “freeing” step. There’s plenty of people within the Primal community who have had to work ridiculously hard to get their health back on track—harder than the average person should have to work, it seems. They might occasionally wonder why eating this way or living that way promotes healing in others but doesn’t have any effect on them, or why they always seem to gain weight with but the slightest of dietary tweaks. Or why the penchant for self-sabotage is so powerful….
With this in mind, maybe you’d be interested in taking the quiz. It’ll force you to cast your mind back and analyze your childhood from an objective viewpoint, highlighting experiences that you might formerly have brushed over. Take it seriously—this might just change your life.
The amygdala part of your brain can be relaxed, the hippocampus can restore proper memory function, and the nervous system can rewire itself back to a semblance of normalcy. Ever-present stress can be banished, and widespread inflammation can dissipate.
There’s also a link between gut dysbiosis and stress, and even a single traumatic event can shift your micro biome. We’re familiar with this by now, and recognize a that a healthy gut microbiome and a healthy intestinal lining is critical to both physical and mental health. Use this knowledge—it’s a powerful weapon against PTSD and other accumulated symptoms from buried ACEs.
But this is just the start. Your pathway will need to be one of calm consideration and deep inflection. Here’s a quick set of suggestions for moving through it.
Developments in ACEs represent one of the rare forays of “mainstream” medical thinking into something resembling a more holistic, less reactive style of healthcare. Clearly, it’s only one small offshoot, and as the CDC has virtually cut all funding to this area of research it’s got many roadblocks ahead of it, but it shows some serious promise.
More importantly, it forces us to examine our history in a different light. We are the culmination of a lifetime of experiences, and not all of those experiences are positive. A Primal approach to health should be open-minded and even fearless. In treading where we’re wary to go, we may discover the circumstances that got us stuck in the first place. Loosening old burdens means a freer life and more expansive health.
Thanks for reading, everyone. I’d love to hear your thoughts on this one. Take care.
The post ACEs and Primal Health appeared first on Mark’s Daily Apple.
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It’s no secret that we’re skeptical of unitaskers around here. If you’re going to spend the money on a gadget (and devote some storage space to it), it better be able to make your life easier, better, or faster in a bunch of ways.
We make very few exceptions for unitaskers (this lemon sprayer happens to be one of them), so it may come as no surprise to learn that not a single one of the staffers on our food team owns a strawberry huller — because they’ve decided they don’t need one.
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Summer BBQs are my favorite way to entertain throughout the season. Adults can mingle, drink in hand, while the kids can run around burning off energy before dinner. Plus, barbecuing feels more effortless — no need to stress over a super-clean house or real napkins when you’re grilling out. The menu is also up for grabs, although you can’t go wrong with the classics. Who doesn’t love burgers paired with creamy coleslaw?
From sweet and tangy barbecue sauce to buttermilk ranch potato salad to finger-lickin’ grilled chicken, here are 35 essential BBQ dishes for all your backyard soirées.
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Not sure how much you can actually spend on your dad (or any dad in your life)? Of course, you’d love to spend all the money in the world to show him how much you appreciate everything he’s done over the past year, but that’s just not in the cards. Perhaps you’ve got $25, though?
Any of the presents on this list will make him feel like a million bucks. And they’ll make you feel a little better about the state of your current budget.
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