QUINOA It’s considered a grain but is actually related to leafy green vegetables like spinach and Swiss chard. Unlike other grains, it’s a complete protein, which means it contains all nine essential amino acids. Quinoa (pronounced “KEE-no-ah”) has a nice nutty flavor and an interesting texture that’s both chewy and crunchy. It’s also gluten free. The ancient Incas considered quinoa a sacred food; they called it chisaya mama, or “the mother of all grains.”
KOMBUCHA On paper, kombucha (“kom-BOO-cha”) sounds nasty: a culture of yeast and bacteria that’s mixed with black tea and sugar and then fermented. In reality, the end result is a tart (but great tasting), slightly effervescent, low-calorie, high-nutrient drink that energizes and detoxifies your body, balances your internal pH, and curbs your appetite. It’s all natural with zero preservatives and comes in various brands and flavors. It’s becoming wildly popular, so your local health food store is likely to carry it.
HEMP MILK Yes, the hemp plant is related to marijuana. No, hemp is not illegal, and it won’t get you high. Here’s what hemp is: one kick-ass plant. It’s been cultivated for more than 10,000 years and can be used for everything from fabric to biofuel to lotion to paper to food—and in this case, a superior alternative to milk. Hemp has the most potent source and the highest content of essential fatty acids (omega-3 and omega-6) of any plant, and it’s rich in calcium, amino acids, B vitamins, and fiber. Hemp milk is a relatively new product, better tasting and better for you than soy milk, and it’s not full of bovine growth hormone or pasteurized like cow’s milk. You can find it at good natural foods stores, including Whole Foods.
AGAVE NECTAR This comes from the agave plant, which is also the source for tequila. It’s the natural sweetener with the lowest glycemic index, which means your body doesn’t process it like a simple sugar. And yet it’s 75 percent stronger than sugar—so sweet that you never need more than a tiny amount.
IN PRAISE OF THE WEIRD
I like to try strange fruits and vegetables, things like lychee nut or durian fruit. Variety is key; if you eat colorful, interesting foods, you’ll expose yourself to new worlds of flavors. And if you think about it, that’s what makes eating fun.
AÇAI Native to the Brazilian Amazon (but widely available in the US now), the purple açai (pronounced “ah-sigh-EE”) palm fruit has 30 times the amount of antioxidants of red wine and also contains a large dose of essential fatty acids. In other words, these berries, which taste nutty with hints of chocolate, are nature’s own vitamin pills. I like to mix up a bowl of açai, bananas, and granola for breakfast.
SEAWEED Any sea vegetable, I’m into. There are hundreds of edible seaweeds. My favorite is one the Hawaiians call limu kohu, and it’s a delicacy. I also like nori and the seaweed salads you’ll find at a good Japanese restaurant. They all contain minerals and elements you won’t get anywhere else, straight from the source. Talk about your basic nutrition—sea vegetables are like primordial nutrition.
LILIKOI Lilikoi is a type of passion fruit that grows wild in Hawaii. It’s an egg-shaped yellow fruit with a tough shell that contains a translucent pulp. This pulp and its seeds are the edible parts. A friend of ours strains lilikoi and makes juice, and people often add it to desserts as a flavoring, but my favorite way to eat it is right off the vine.
DROPPING IN
PAUL CHEK
To say that this man has strong ideas is an understatement. I met Paul Chek at his C.H.E.K. (Corrective Holistic Exercise Kinesiology) Institute in Encinitas, where he teaches athletes and trainers from every corner of the planet how to maximize their potential—rather than working against themselves, as we all do from time to time. Talking to Paul, you quickly realize that he’s forgotten more about health and fitness than other experts knew in the first place. His philosophy blends body, mind, and soul in cuttingedge ways. In particular, his insights about food and eating have resonated with me. Here, he shares that wisdom.
I was a boxer on the army boxing team, then I became the trainer. For 2 years I did all the sports massage, wrote all the nutritional programs and all the exercise programs for 30 of the best boxers in the world.
I’m constantly amazed—perplexed, actually—at how all these people with master’s degrees and PhDs in health and medicine can’t even keep themselves healthy. They don’t eat right, and they don’t know how to take care of themselves. Some of the sickest people in the world are at nutrition conferences. Blows my mind.
Every 6 months, the army athletes had to see a nutritionist—it was mandatory. And they hated it because the nutritionist was about 5'4" and weighed 230 pounds. She’d sit there and tell them their diets should be 70 percent carbohydrates and that eating sugar was fine. She endorsed low-fat and artificially sweetened products—and that was the opposite of what I was telling them. I told them to eat living foods.
I do a very comprehensive analysis. It takes people about 4 hours just to fill out the paperwork. I look at you physically, emotionally, mentally, and spiritually, and I have an elaborate system of analyzing where you’re stuck in your life: where you’re not moving, where your problems are coming from, or where you’re likely to get them. I can see energy building up in your body or in your emotional, mental, or spiritual energy fields. I can see it and I can feel it.
The toughest people to treat are the ones who think they’re healthy, but they’re really unhealthy. Like nutritionists.
Laird was what I call unconflicted. Energy moves through him efficiently. There’s no blockage. Laird doesn’t need somebody’s approval to be Laird. I didn’t have to do a lot with him. I only had to fine-tune. Like most athletes, he was just working too much.
The “right diet” is different for everybody. You’re the biological product of the mix of your genes. So if your father was an inland aboriginal, an ideal diet for him would have been about 90 percent carbohydrate and 10 percent animal food. But if your mother was an Eskimo, her ideal ratio was 90 percent fats and proteins and only 10 percent carbohydrates. So if an aboriginal marries an Eskimo, you’ve got two extreme opposites of diet—and their children can be anywhere in between.
Fat is critical in your diet. We need it. But it has to be clean fat. If you eat commercially raised animals, it can be very poisonous because fat is where toxins accumulate. And they allow the feeding of things like manure, plastic chips, sawdust, antibiotics, and heavy steroids—the load is so heavy that the animal has to keep making more fat to store the toxins in. And then they sell the meat by the pound!
Always go out of your way to purchase organic, free-range meat. It’s far more nutritious, and it’s pesticide, hormone, and antibiotic free. If that’s not available, the next best choice is grass-fed meat. At least the animals were free to roam, getting exercise and eating what they were designed to eat.
Every molecule of everything you eat affects your physiology, your endocrinology, and your psychology as long as it remains in your body.
The fact is, if you eat anything that’s less alive than you, to the degree that it’s less alive than you, you have to spend your own life force to turn it into human tissue. The longer anything lasts on the shelf, the more dead it is. Remember, you’re turning over two million blood cells per second. The question I ask people is: What’d you make them out of? Doughnuts? Coca-Cola? Kelloggs’ Frosted Flakes? That’s all garbage.
The average American eats his body weight in food additives each year, or approximately 150 pounds. Always look at the label: If there are words you don’t understand there, chances are good your body won’t like whatever it is, either.
When people eat incorrectly, they get tired. When they get tired, they drink coffee and eat more sugar. And that shuts the immune system down. One teaspoon of sugar shuts the immune system down for approximately 6 hours.
On the weekend, don’t take any supplements, so your body doesn’t forget to absorb nutrients out of your food. You want the body to reach for them, not to get lazy.
I drink no alcohol. I don’t even like it. It makes me sick. But I teach my students the 80/20 rule: Live right 80 percent of the time; party 20 percent of the time. If you do what I teach you 80 percent of the time, you can stand a binge.
DROPPING IN
ED STEWART
In the small town of Paia on Maui’s north shore, you’ll find a coffee shop called Anthony’s that’s run by my friends Ed and Keri Stewart. When it comes to breakfast—and especially to shots of their hand-roasted Italian espresso—Anthony’s is like my second home when I’m on the island. Here, Ed shares the backstory.
Keri and I moved from the Seattle area. We came to Maui to look at a business on the other side of Lahaina. We wanted to open a coffee shop, but when we saw the space, next door to it was a Harley-Davidson store. I said, “Well, we’re here. There’s this cute little town, Paia. We might as well go have a look over there.” So we did. And we walked by this building and saw some guy installing a coffee roaster. We came in and started talking to him. His name was Anthony Campbell. The place wasn’t even open yet. We told him, “Well, here’s our card; if you ever want to sell it, call us.”
When we got home, there was a message that Anthony had called. I called him back. “You want to buy my business?” he said. “I’ve been open 3 days. I hate the public.”
We did the deal on a handshake, and 3 weeks later we were running the place. Anthony taught us how to roast coffee. That was 12 years ago.
I didn’t know who Laird was when he first came in. He loved coffee; he always wanted shots of espresso, which was different because the surfing community was usually lighter in their morning habits, like tea or cold drinks. And one day he asked Keri if she could make him a tuna melt. It was 7:00 a.m. And I’m thinking, Who in the world is eating a tuna melt at this time of the day? But Laird always knew his diet. The only healthy thing we had at that time was tuna. So I got this little toaster oven out, made him an open-faced tuna melt.
We became friends because he’s just a very generous man. Laird is Hawaiian in his heart. He respects other people. When he’s gone, everyone’s bored! When he and Gabby and the kids come back in the fall, everybody’s happy. He brings a party to the table.
Since the tuna-fish sandwiches years ago, we’ve put in a kitchen. So now Laird has a selection. We keep New York steaks on hand and fresh ahi.
One day his breakfast might be a New York steak with four poached eggs and a green salad with tomatoes and avocados. The next day it’ll be an ahi steak. He’s eating a dinner in the morning; his day has been going since the sun came up.
Our cook, Val Akana, grills the steak with Montreal Steak Seasoning. For the fish, it’s just a little light seasoning on both sides. Laird is pretty straightforward in his eating habits—fish should taste like fish. He’s not smothering things with hollandaise sauce or anything like that.
In Hawaii, we have avocados that are as big as footballs. They don’t ship them to the rest of the US. There are various kinds, but the butter avocado is what we use. It’s a lighter green outside, and when you slice it, it’s just real smooth. It also has a very full-bodied flavor.
From top to bottom, we’re making our own coffee. We even print the labels ourselves. This year we started Anthony’s Estate coffee. We’re growing the beans on a hillside in Kula. It’s all organic and we handpick it, mill it, and roast it.
This shop has been really great for us. We didn’t think we’d be doing it this long. At the end of the day I can’t think of anything else I’d rather do—except maybe live Laird’s life.
THE ESSENTIALS
ON ESPRESSO VERSUS DRIP
I love everything about espresso—the smell, the taste, the ritual of grinding the beans. On an average day, I’ll drink between four and eight shots over the course of the morning, either straight up or as an Americano (with more water). While some coffees give you a jittery feeling, espresso doesn’t affect me like that. It revs up my body in a low-impact way; the energy I get from it is steadier. I attribute that difference to the way espresso is processed. It’s the darkest of all roasts, which means they’ve burned out most of the impurities—the chemicals, fertilizer, pesticides, sulfites, anything absorbed by the plant where it’s being grown. By contrast, I think the worst coffee is that clear-looking stuff you see sitting around on burners in restaurants. Those kinds of beans usually aren’t dark roast, so they’re slightly green to begin with; then, through the drip process, the coffee sits in water for a longer time, allowing impurities to leach into the liquid. With espresso, the water is heated, then quickly steamed through the beans. A shot of espresso has less caffeine than drip coffee while delivering more antioxidants. And though it has a stronger flavor than lighter coffees, espresso is less acidic, so it doesn’t upset your stomach. The Europeans have it right. They’re coffee connoisseurs and won’t touch the drip stuff. You’ll have a hard time finding a Bunn-o-Matic in Italy.
THE ESSENTIALS
WATER
In many parts of America we have surprisingly good tap water, but people shy away from it. It’s true that minerals are added to our water supply, but sometimes I wonder if it’s better to drink chlorinated water out of the tap than it is to drink pure spring water out of plastic bottles. Sure, you’re drinking something pristine—but it’s in a plastic bottle. The list of chemicals used to make a plastic bottle is like something out of The Twilight Zone and includes some of the scariest substances out there. Phthalates and bisphenol A, two of the most common plasticizing chemicals (used to make the material soft, shatterproof, inflammable, etc.), are both known to cause reproductive and endocrine system problems.
Plastic bottles are also a massive environmental scourge, especially in the ocean. Ninety percent of floating marine debris is plastic, and once a wayward water or soda bottle gets in there, it becomes more than a blight on the scenery and a hazard to sea creatures; the bottle’s mix of petroleum and toxic chemicals becomes part of the food chain. If you don’t trust tap water, then consider putting a filtration system in your house. If you feel you must buy bottled water (or any other bottled drinks), go for glass containers.