20120930 Grit, Nutrition, and Chris Masterjohn, PhD

This episode begins with an explanation of why Jesus calls a desperate woman a “dog” and a discourse on the need for spiritual “grit”; but the vast bulk of the show is given over to a wonderful interview with Chris Masterjohn, a PhD post-doc in nutrition who talks to us about eating real, eating ancestral, and how Orthodoxy and nutrition can combine to make us really healthy.  Enjoy!

Shownotes:

Homily on the Canaanite woman “dog”

Interview with Chris Masterjohn, PhD

 

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Comments

  1. This is the finest interview I’ve yet heard w/Chris Masterjohn. I Thank You!
    – Bryan

    p.s. Cannot hear your voice during the interview, when plying the file in browser, I listened via iTunes on my iPhone, and this wasn’t as much of a problem.

    • Thanks, Bryan! I don’t know what is up with the recording. I’m using skype, but I must be skipping a step in pulling it over to garageband. Hope things are going well there in Cleveland. After a break, I have my kombucha production going again. I’m using a different system – quart mason jars (the pitcher and continuous brew made more than I drink). I was worried that I had hurt my mother/scoby – after one week there was no/very little change, but now it’s kickin’ into full gear.

  2. Skype now has a built in recorder, great as a backup at minimum, could possibly be a recording solution as well. I use Audio Hijack Pro to capture Skype calls, also works to grab any audio you want to capture.
    Best of luck with the kombucha.
    As I learned this past weekend: Compost & Mulch (verbs)

  3. Father Anthony:
    Thanks so much for such an interesting interview with Dr. Masterjohn. I have transformed my diet over the past year and a half, and I have used some of the principles of Paleo eating. The changes have helped quite a bit with my ADHD symptoms (exectuive function in the pre-frontal lobe of the brain), and I’ve lost a good bit of weight.
    I am a cradle Catholic with plenty of love and respect for my Orthodox brethren. Will leave you with a quote from St. Irenaeus, an early Church Father: “The glory of God is man fully alive.” I think it’s a great quote for this topic.
    pax tibi,
    Matt

  4. My experience of severe illness and dramatic healing by following a diet developed to be “Biblical” makes me take issue with the assertion that a paleo diet has any merit.

    The faulty assumption is this: In order to be healthy, one ought to eat like healthy people ate in the past. Sounds great and makes sense, but it doesn’t cash out in reality for a very simple reason. The way healthy people ate in the past varied greatly around the world. Some ate potatoes and cabbage with a little meat. Some ate spices and beans and rice. Some ate mutton and haggis. But what they all ate were minerals. Abundant, life-giving, minerals. Especially loads of calcium.

    Almost all modern food is mineral deficient. Chemical farming is not the cause, but rather the band-aid that permits the farmer to grow food without minerals and still have a crop to harvest in the end. The cause is irresponsibility regarding the treatment of the soil and the subsequent effects in the human beings who eat the food that comes from it.

    I am alive today because this truth about diet was spelled for me and the solution taught to me. The solution is unfortunately more complicated than just eating more minerals, because the body chemistry that results from eating mineral poor food also prevents our bodies from properly taking up and using whatever minerals we happen to consume. It is a severe downward spiral and results in cancer, heart disease, all manner of digestive problems, diabetes, obesity, etc, etc.

    It is not hard to grow food right or to heal the body chemistry, but it is an act of faith and is tied to a major shift in perspective and worldview.

    Email if you have questions. It’s really amazing stuff.

    • Thanks, Nicole. Great points – an ancestral diet won’t cut it if the neo-ancestral food is deficient. So where do we start? Diagnosis of body chemistry? I’ve been supplementing minerals more or (mostly) less per Dave Asprey & Paul Jaminet, but really need to get my stuff measured. Til then, seems to be mostly stumbling around.