 First of all, we want to make healthy choices in Ramadan and I'd like you to notice in the picture there's a beautiful table there of Iftar foods and I'm guessing it's Turkish because of the tea that particular kind of teacup is typical of Turkey But next to it is a beautiful glass of water in front. There's a bowl of soup very common in many parts of the Muslim world different kinds of soup and Behind the soup is a salad and then we see bread and we see olives and Other veggies from the Middle East and other kind of bread on the right all kinds of wonderful things to break fast One of the most wonderful things about Ramadan as it brings us together I know we see our friends and Family more during Ramadan than the rest of the year because everyone's inviting you to an iftar You're inviting everyone to an iftar and so on But the picture on the upper left who's ever gone for umrah or for hajj knows that's masjid and nabawi Can you imagine the masjid and nabawi being just full of people breaking fast? During Ramadan and I saw other pictures outside the whole patio area Whatever the outside is called filled with people as well And there's so much baraka also in feeding people for iftar. So if you're able to and you invite people That's a wonderful thing But in addition Consider doing a potluck where everyone brings a dish So you don't have to do much more than get the kitchen ready and maybe make the main dish and as in the photo at the bottom Bring invite non-Muslim friends as well as Muslim friends It's so important for people to know us and to know about Ramadan and to know about Islam and It breaks down barriers and it may make people curious about this religion inshallah But sorry learning how to use this So we need to thank Allah for the food and sometimes we don't think about All the people that Allah has put in our path who bring us the food like the woman who is planting the Rice seedlings and the rice patty or the people in California who are Picking our crops and of course the bee without the bee We would not have 80% of the foods that we have the bees pollinate 80% of the Fruits and the vegetables and we know there's a lot of colony loss because of the modern chemical agriculture they're spraying herbicides and Pesticides and they may consider the bee a pest But we know that Allah has put the bee there for so many important reasons and the surah and now Talks about the bee as well So I want to think about some things about food It's it's a blessing from Allah and when we think of it However, the very first sin was Adam and Eve disobeying and eating something that Allah said don't eat So there's probably a lot of depth and we need some scholars to give us some good insights about that But I was thinking isn't that interesting Allah blesses us with the food but on the the first thing we did wrong was to eat what we were told not to eat and So food connects us to Allah and also to In many ways and also to people The prophet salam said to eat and drink but not in excess and the question is What are we doing when we hear of people eating from when the time they get up until the time they go to bed? And that's really a source of a lot of the poor health and the epidemic of chronic illnesses that we see around us the prophet salam also Recommended not to eat fill our stomachs with meat to the to excess and in fact he ate meat about once every 40 days Maybe we want to eat meat more often than that, but do we need to eat meat every day? Do we need to eat meat every other day? Let's see if we can't cut down on that and increase the vegetarian foods instead So the question is is meat really healthy for us and are we is it healthy for us to eat it every day and Then are we allowing Allah's guidance? Are we following Allah's guidance on what to eat? So I've included some ayahs from Quran because I think it's important as a beginning Oh you who believe eat what is wholesome and from what we have provided you and express your gratitude to Allah If you worship and serve none other than him Say waffle on to you are all things good and pure Tayyab and what you have taught your hunting animals to catch in the manner directed to you by God This day all things good and pure are made lawful to you and The earth has he shaped for the living creatures in it There are fruit and date palms of many varieties with sheath clusters and grains With husks and herbs that with scent then which of the bounties of your rub? Do you deny? Oh humans and Jim and we bring forth from it crops of which you eat and We make in it gardens of dates and grapes and we cause springs to gush forth from it so that they eat the fruits thereof Low this is I purposely put this in bold It is not their hands that produce them Allah is telling us therefore will they not be thankful and Of the fruit dates and grapes you make sweets Sakara of them and healthful food indeed in that are signs for a people who reason Eat what is good Tayyab and in the few of the eyes the word pure or wholesome was translated And Tayyab refers to things that are pure clean wholesome and nourishing So I'm asking could this be said about processed food factory made food fast food junk food Is there anything Tayyab about it and what food has barakah in it because when we eat we want that barakah as well And so when cooking think about saying duwaz even just a simple Bismillah as you're stirring the pot Which we have to do once in a while when we're cooking and when we sit down to eat and of course remember Allah That has has provided us with everything we need in life Including good food to be healthy So we have to start asking ourselves if we have any illness Problems if we have signs of any disease or if we even have Beginnings of a chronic illness What is it we can eat to get healthy again? Now some people think they can neglect so who are but that means going almost 24 hours or 22 hours in a day During Ramadan without food or water or drinking So first this is a prophet Ibrahim's words that Allah Wants us to learn from he who created me and he who guides me and he who feeds me and quenches my thirst And when I am sick he heals me. So Allah is always the healer We have to do the work To change what we're eating if we're not eating things that we know are not if we're not eating things that are Tyab, but Allah is the one who is actually going to do the healing for us Oh, you who believe fasting is prescribed for you as it was prescribed for those before you so that you may learn Self-restraint and taqwa and eat and drink and this is the I've highlighted these words specifically and eat and drink until The white thread of dawn becomes distinct to you from the black thread of night Then complete the fast until the sunset and the the unfortunate thing is were many years ago There were many new Muslims in America who didn't know about sahur and they would basically be fasting having iftar and then fasting until the next iftar and people would actually be collapsing and fainting on the street and Partly also because if you have a breakfast with sugar, whether it's donuts Pastries cake cookies sugar and tea or coffee any of these things will immediately raise your blood sugar The insulin is produced. It takes that blood sugar and forces the The glucose into the cells and now suddenly our energy goes down and our hunger goes up and Insulin is the hunger enzyme so people are eating any kind of sugar for sahur This Ramadan try not to at all and you will find that number one you feel full for many more hours and Two you will not feel lightheaded and you'll actually be much healthier So three special words hydrate hydrate hydrate here are some examples soup juices or smoothies Fruit salad all of these are foods with lots of fluid, which is the first thing we want to replace when we We break our fast and also we can have any of these in the morning as well for sahur I know a lot of friends like to have especially Indian Pakistani community Pakora and Samosa Maybe cut down to one piece Maybe cut down to just a couple of times a week because what is that? It's fried food and we'll have to talk about good fats and bad fats a little later And it's flour especially if it's samosa and if it's filled with potato And maybe a few green peas scattered about That's really not the way to break a fast at all And then the next three special words are fiber fiber fiber a Piece of broiled chicken lots of veggies and you're getting a lot of fiber because the fiber is not in the animal foods The fiber is only in the fruits and vegetables and in beans in seeds in nuts Fresh fruit dried fruit and the picture on the right basically does it the back of the picture shows lots of fruit You can see some broccoli on either side of the picture and in the front all kinds of seeds and nuts Things you can have at the beginning of your meal or at the end of the meal Excuse me, please wait until I finish because then I'll have to comment to you And yeah, we'll have plenty of time for question and answer So I mentioned about fats we want to eat good fats and avoid the bad fats the bad fats are what you find in processed food The ideal is to have a one-to-one ratio of Omega 3 omega 3 fats to omega 6 fats the good fats to the bad fats a little bit of omega 6 is not a bad thing But the American diet is particularly over balanced Anything from 16 to 1 to 25 to 1 of bad to good ratio and the processed food and junk foods Use only the bad fats which leads to disease down the road What are the bad fats? We're talking about things that are called vegetable oils and some of them aren't even from vegetables Cotton seed oil is coming from cotton. Nobody eats that right? No one eats cotton and Sunflower and safflower all those are coming from flowers again not a vegetable and the other ones the corn the soybean and The is it on there? Canola oil right up on top those three are typically genetically modified So they're also causing a lot of damage to every organ of our body and what are the good fats? butter and ghee and ghee is clarified butter Coconut oil avocado oil Olive oil fish oil is omega 3's if you get it in a capsule you're taking it as a supplement I wouldn't fry food with fish oil, but as a supplement. It's certainly okay and eggs are here, but I think of that more as a protein and Allah is the one that heals us to just remember I thought the the concern of a father for a child or a mother for a child is Is something that we can't really always put into words But you want to see your child healthy you want to see your child grow up to be normal and So once again Allah's surah I have from surah 26 he who created me and he who guides me and he who feeds me and Quenches my thirst and when I am sick he heals me This is the most important. I had to remember that when we're sick It's Allah that we ask for healing and Allah is the one that does the healing the doctor is working for Allah Not for himself. He may think he's working for or she working for herself But the doctor is basically doing the work for Allah and natural foods have multiple healing benefits However, if you eat the standard American diet, which initials are S. A. D. You get the standard American diseases This is all 20th century 21st century Truths the sad diet is inflammatory and now all the research coming out is showing that the basis of all the chronic Illnesses is inflammation in our body Process food the fast food the junk food the bad fats Lots of sugary things all the things that are creating inflammation in our body are the basis then for diabetes Which could eventually lead to cancer or heart disease or Alzheimer's? And certainly all the autoimmune diseases That's because the sad diet is acidic creates an acidic environment in our body Which lets the bad bacteria grow in our intestinal tract? So there's no space left for the good bacteria and what happens then is it leads to all kinds of chronic illnesses as are listed on the slide The sad diet destroys our health while the food industry makes profit and that's the real reason of why don't they do? Take those things out if they know that the those things are unhealthy You can't make money if you're the food industry If everything is healthy And then of course we may not need as many doctors as many operations as many Pills to take as many painkillers all those things will just pretty much start going away So process foods make a sick but notice how colorful they are and it's those colors. They've done research studies to find out What are the colors that most attract people? We know those bright colors are something children love They have those crayons or nowadays they have markers all those bright colors clothes should have bright colors paint your walls bright colors But artificial colors should not be something we're putting in our body Unless food also has beautiful colors and those are the ones we should get used to and raise our children with Now we used to think food was just calories if you eat enough food you get enough calories That's fine But now we know food is information and it turns the genes on in the body good genes Or it can turn the good genes off and turn the bad genes on so what we eat is actually directly affecting our health Only five percent of diseases are actually genetic and origin So we can heal our body and I've seen many people heal from very serious chronic illnesses We tend to eat what we grew up with so the question is are we ready to change to healthy? eating Oh, sorry So watch out for things called health foods that have genetically modified ingredients or GMOs Genetically modified organisms is what the O stands for Anytime you see a label on a box or a jar or any food Or food like substance that says health food or natural ingredients. You know, it's a lie It's a lie because what they put in there they want mothers to think oh, this is healthy or children say Oh, this candy mommy. Look it says it's healthy for me It's a way of twisting our arms to buy what the kids want us to buy when we know they're really not healthy So we've got to watch out for this message on the food labels. That is really the opposite of the truth salad dressing veggie burgers protein shakes even whole wheat bread as have many genealogy modified ingredients, especially the artificial sugars or um Like aspartame which is it used in low sugar foods. I forgot if it's the little blue or the little pink Thing, but it's actually known to cause cancer so We have to think about what we're eating and most of or 80% of The processed food of the factory made food has either corn Corn oil or corn syrup solids where they've chemically changed the corn from a starch to a sugar because it's cheap or It has oil usually either corn oil or soybean oil or canola oil and those are things that are typically genetically modified So these processed foods are all leading to disease, but they're leading to huge profits So someone is getting an economic benefit and other people are getting the health problems, which is most of us Processed foods with GMO's a bet as I said about 80% of all processed food have GMO's ingredients All commercial baked goods whether you go to the supermarket or to the most expensive bakery It's still going to be the same thing. They have GMO sugar and the sugar beets. There are nine major crops Right now in the US that are genetically modified and they're working on more but When you see something like sugar If you go to the supermarket and you see a bag of a bag of sugar That says 100% pure sugar and then there's another bag next to it and it says 100% cane sugar. So why is the cane sugar more? They're both 100% Cane sugar is coming from sugar cane The other one that says pure sugar is pure beet sugar from sugar beets and that's all genetically modified So if you're going to have sugar at all in tea or coffee or in making desserts You at least want to be sure it's coming from cane sugar and not something. That's 100% pure sugar because that's not what you're really getting so Candy bars ice cream the snack foods. They all are loaded with the GMO sugar the GMO oils additives Artificial flavors and something called natural flavors are also artificial if it's a real natural flavor It will tell you what what it is like it may say Peppermint oil that's coming from the peppermint plants and the oil has been extracted That's different than saying a natural flavor, which is also artificial But there's some some rule where you can get away with calling things natural So remember you want to watch out for natural and and healthy on the labels of food products So do you know what's in your pizza your hamburger buns your favorite processed foods and snacks? Can you find the GMO ingredients? I've got a couple of samples We're going to look at in a minute and a lot of the ingredients on the list You can't even pronounce the question is if you can't pronounce it. Could it even be food? Of course not Those are chemicals for all kinds of reasons because if the food is really boring and taste by adding these various Chemicals they can fool our taste buds. We think oh, this tastes really good But it's actually a chemical So the best is to buy the organic version of a prepared food and even better cook it at home There's nothing as good as home cooking for many reasons including the barricade that you put into it Now Most of us want to have halal meat, but what about feedlot meat? What is that? Most of the animals that are raised for slaughter whether it's beef lamb goat Everyone talk about the ones that are fed on but They're basically raised in what are called factory farms If the picture here is very typical. They're basically caged Cows are supposed to graze on grasses instead. They're being fed corn, which is genetically modified traditionally Cattle would be raised for about five years before slaughter now They're about a year and a half or under two years of age and They're also they need a lot of antibiotics because corn is not natural for them And there's so much antibiotics put into the animal feed to keep them from dying and to keep them from infecting one another that many people are now becoming allergic To antibiotics that they may need when they have a bacterial infection. It doesn't seem to work And then the other question is so what do we mean by halal? So there are a lot of benefits on the other hand of eating vegetarian foods and every Muslim cuisine has lots of very Varied and delicious vegetarian dishes whether they're made from beans or lentils things with Veggies sauces made by grinding up nuts People have been very creative over many centuries and we have the benefit not only that if we don't even have a cookbook There's always the internet to find out recipes for whatever thing we just bought at the store that we're trying out So some of the other benefits of vegetarian food There's there's a lot of fiber in them and they're nutrient rich Well, there's a lot of fiber you feel full for a long time So you naturally lose weight and you're never feeling really hungry and then we can enjoy the tremendous variety of plant foods That Allah has has put here on the earth for us to eat Did you know there's no human requirement for sugar if you read what Dr. Mark Hyman has said on On the left side that sugar is eight times as addictive as cocaine It is very hard to get off of eating sugar. So the question is How many of us are sugar addicts? Ramadhan is a wonderful time to break the habit Because we're not eating all day and it takes about four or five days to be completely sugar-free 100% sugar-free not a few little bits of it in a cup of tea or coffee or wherever or a little taste of something We can actually get off the sugar and I've been off of sugar for a number of years But I know if I taste some it's very hard. You have to go through this whole detoxification to get off the sugar once again and About a hundred years ago, this may not be true of India where We know Ghana sugar cane is is a native crop But about a hundred years ago people in America consumed about five pounds of sugar a year and now people are consuming at least 150 pounds of sugar a year a can of soda has 12 teaspoons of sugar one can how many teenagers do you see drinking? More than one can several cans or people sitting Working on a computer all day and they've got a soda next to them and without thinking they finish that one and get another one Or inviting people for an iftar and serving soda. I used to serve soda. I grew up with it And then I thought we're not eating soda. We're not drinking soda anymore. Why would I serve my guests? Something that I know is so unhealthy. We're not eating it. I can't mistreat my guests. So that was the end of soda It's just the thinking process. It's not always easy to give up something that we've made a habit Or growing up with the habit no less. There was water in my mother's kitchen, but somehow it was always soda at dinner time I have no idea why Okay, so the GMO sugar beets and the GMO corn syrup solids have replaced sugar in many foods and The damage is to every organ of the body with the genetically modified food now I did mention before but I'll say it again No sugar for Sephora. Absolutely not a drop of sugar into your coffee either Otherwise you will feel hungry in a couple of hours. You'll think oh, I ate all that biryani that was left over from last night It was so good. Maybe I didn't eat enough because two hours later Why do I feel hungry and the rest of the day? It's a challenging fast. Whereas if you eat something made with beans Even a lentil soup some kind of an oatmeal dish or other cook cereal, but oatmeal in particular is low on the glycemic index It doesn't raise your blood sugar very high. All these things are very filling and They're wonderful for so long along with fruit which again has a lot of fiber or leftover veggies Maybe with some sauce on it But it's all a matter of starting to think about how to change what we eat and our children are very important I'm glad we have some young people here who are learning How to eat really healthy? So here is a list which you can't really read because it's too small About 75 different names for sugar So if you look at an ice cream container and you see all these things I don't know what this means Most of these things you don't even know aside for the real chemicals down below But the ones at the upper half of the ingredient list are various forms of sugar that are disguised with different names If they all said sugar then the sugar would be higher than the cream and the ice cream And we'd say oh, we're eating a little cream with our sugar and it's cold So we're going to read some labels in a minute. Do you know what's in cool whip? Do you know what's in cream aura? Do you know what's in the cakes that you buy from the supermarket? Unfortunately, we don't have an ingredient list when we go to the bakery, but most people buy things from the supermarket And so I call these food-like substances that we're eating and more likely than not The food-like substances are going to result in a chronic illness when I hear someone After Juma prayer saying please pray for someone so he's going into for surgery for double bypass triple bypass quadruple bypass and the man is in his 40s. This is horrible This is eating the wrong way for all those years That should be something that happens at the end of life or never if people are eating healthy. They shouldn't have these problems Okay, so here's the cream aura label it has the word cream in the name of the product So it's so attractive, but when you read the label The first thing it says on the three lines is non dairy no milk Right non dairy, but it's called cream more to put in your coffee. What's the first ingredient? That's a form of sugar, right? But it's the genetically modified corn syrup solids and you know what happens with corn syrup solids The body says well, this isn't sugar and it's not corn which is a starch. So what is it? Well, we'll just stuff it away in the closet until we figure out what to do with it And you know what the closet in the body is the fat cells and the fat cells keep growing because the closet got a hide all that stuff somewhere and This is what's happening to the epidemic of obesity in our country Then we've got hydrogenated coconut or palm and or palm kernel Hydrogenated means when you put the hydrogen back in you take a liquid oil and you make it a solid fat and that is something that is Very damaging to the body as well and again once again It gets stored away in the closet Then there's something called sodium caseinate casein is actually milk protein But sodium caseinate they're calling it a milk derivative You know, it's like someone says well cocaine. It's actually from a plant. What could be bad? so we have to think about how words are being used to manipulate us and And most people don't even read these labels anyone who knows what the other things are on that label and There's the natural and artificial flavors and Artificial colors of course Ice cream now. This is Dreyer's home office College Avenue in Oakland and you see it in all the supermarkets But when we look at the ingredient list, I wonder how many sugars are on there? How about hydrogenated oils? GMO ingredients artificial ingredients Titanium dioxide which is also even in toothpaste and it's put in a lot of things to make them very white and bright It's now shown to be a possible carcinogen causing cancer. This is really dangerous so You can buy an ice cream machine for people that love ice cream You can buy it as an e-gift for families that have a lot of children and they want ice cream now and again You just put in about five ingredients. That's all that's needed to make ice cream not this big long list of things Okay, there's I think it's the next one That has another thing I want to show you Cerealy cake and what does the cake say on to Cerealy all butter pound cake that sounds wonderful and Maybe it was originally all butter everything It's called a pound cake because it was a pound of flour pound of sugar a pound of butter and whatever else when it was a pound A pound a pound that's how it got its name So the first thing is enriched bleached flour and in parenthesis are certain B vitamins that will be moved and Then they had to enrich it but never the same as what it originally was the the wheat that Allah Provided us Then we see sugar But doesn't tell us what kind of sugar if it says cane sugar, you know, it's from sugar cane But if it says sugar, what is it corn or? sugar beets But genality modified and again the body doesn't know what to do it So do with it so it continues to get stored in the closet Then we have high fructose corn syrup another form of sugar Then we have mono and dichlycerides which are chemicals not natural and Let's see Modified corn starts as corn starch isn't bad enough into the GMO, but they've modified it in the factory So one more chemical thing going into our body There's the artificial flavor now the artificial flavor looks like the word vanilla, but it's actually vanilla in It's spelled just a little differently vanilla in is actually a chemical that you make in the laboratory It smells and tastes like vanilla. It's cheap and it's a highly toxic Chemical for the brain and if you see children at a birthday party in the beginning they're really calm They can't wait to eat everything by the end of the party if they've had things with vanilla in the cake or in the Ice cream, they're really running around. You see these kids are really just Flipping out. This is exactly what's happening. This is a very dangerous chemical and it should be banned from food, but it's not So here's the result of GMO foods disease is the bottom line the GMO crops were first introduced in the 1990s Because of the money of big ag They got pushed through without being any any testing on people to find out are they safe are they not safe? So there's a this was taken from a study of about 22 different diseases that they looked at what you see it starts with 1980 and about 1994 It suddenly starts to climb rapidly The red line is the genetically modified corn and soy I'm sorry the blue line and the red line is the glyphosate. That's the chemical one of the active chemicals in roundup Now the green line on the bottom shows Had there not been the GMO foods it would have continued to rise the prevalence of diabetes But very slowly because there are other things in our American diet that are really not that healthy But this sudden rise and you'll see in the next few slides as well the sudden rise of the genetically modified of Diseases because of genetically modified foods along with the glyphosate. What's in the roundup chemical? We see this rapid increase in disease These are a few more slides just showing some of the other diseases everything started to change around 1994-95 the green line and I'm sorry the two on the bottom are actually the same slide which I corrected later, but These are different kinds of cancer the same as For hypertension and that's deaths from hypertension This is what is happening to our diet even so the green line on the bottom shows it was still progressing Rather rapidly, but there are a lot of other reasons for hypertension as well And the saddest thing is the slide on the right the number of children with autism I never even heard of the word autism as a child. We never saw anybody with autism It was an unheard of thing and now it's ubiquitous and more boys than girls seem to get it and African-American boys seem to get it in even higher Levels so it's a serious problem We need to avoid genetically modified foods And we need to also watch out for the bad fats and think about Substituting the good fats So this is what rounds up looks like when you go to the store whether it's Home Depot or some other Store gardening shop, and it's actually patented as an antibiotic and here's the problem This has been a huge increase in food allergies food intolerances and people allergic to foods That previously they could eat without a problem and mothers who said to me I don't know my child seems to be allergic to just everything Then glyphosate, which is the main chemical around it and there are many other chemicals as well It destroys the good bacteria in our gut and it leaves the disease causing bacteria to overgrow Which leads to the steep rise in the chronic illnesses we saw in those charts Many people are now resistant to antibiotics need to take cure bacterial infection Why the animals have had 80% of the antibiotics are used for the animals So they don't die from being in close quarters and because they're not supposed to be eating corn to start with and The allergic reactions with children is is also connected With the the GMO foods another thing I want to mention if you buy food read the label I was looking once garlic, you know grows down a little in Hollister, right south of San Jose Lots of garlic, but if you're not careful you might buy I saw this at the store garlic coming from China Unfortunately because they've been so eager to economically progress rapidly and catch up and get ahead of everyone else They've paid no attention to how much they polluted the air the water and the land and a number of years ago The Department of Agriculture in the US said no more food from China unless it's organic so the Chinese fit fine So they relabel the same food or organic and it still comes into America We don't want to feed these things to our children if whatever you see a product And it says look for it see if it says made in China because there's a law that requires a product out produced outside the US to say what country it's coming from and So this is a very serious thing because in such a polluted country nothing could possibly be organic And I have nothing against Chinese food either or China, but the food is my concern So the thing is bottom line we want to eat a healthy diet and most of our health problems If they don't totally disappear will make tremendous inroads on reversing those diseases We've got a whole month that Allah gives us and while we're reading Quran while we're coming for prayers We also need to think about what we're putting in our body because a portion of one hadith is that Allah wants or to us to be What is it a healthy Muslim is better than a sick Muslim? We don't want any sick Muslims. We don't need any sick Muslims We only want healthy Muslims and certainly we don't want to be praying for someone who goes for a double triple quadruple bypass When he could have known or she could have known about eating healthy and never getting sick And when you eat healthy we actually the research is showing that people who are healthy their hearts are actually younger Their brains are actually younger than other people their age younger by 15 or more years This is dramatic. No one has to get Alzheimer's as an old person It has so much to do with our lifestyle, but particularly what we're eating So we want to avoid the GMO ingredients. We want to avoid additives and preservatives. We can't even pronounce them Artificial ingredients and eat organic instead So here are the main crops Alfalfa which is fed to the cattle and The problem with alfalfa also just like the corn because it's genetically modified If the animal is eating something that's making it sick making its body unhealthy How do we expect an unhealthy animal to give us health? We have to think about that when we get food from the store if that's halal We know think about how was the animal raised? What was it fed? Was it in a factory farm? Was it basically in a cage all of its life? This is not Tayib. We're not supposed to torture animals and yet because we don't see the animals We don't live near farms. We live in Cities pretty much. We don't know what's going on So here are some examples of common foods of corn if you buy the organic version Some of these things are organic you can get organic corn flakes and pay more but corn flakes cornstarch Then modified corn syrup solids that cannot be made organic corn chips You can get organic a Trader Joe's high fructose corn syrup. That's a no-no Corn oil. I haven't seen any organic corn oil, but cornmeal corn flour you can get Non-GMO you can get organic and soy all the non-organic soy products whether it's soy milk soy bean oil soy protein isolate Which is typically used in most of the veggie burgers soy lecithin soy sauce, and I left out tofu and tempi From the slide, but all of these things so when we go any Chinese food We say oh this the tofu is okay because we know it's it's halal, but it may be GMO most likely it is GMO So we have issues we need to learn if we want if we love Chinese food We have to learn how to make it at home or take a course in how to make Chinese food Authentically and then start cooking it if that's what you love canola oil most all of it is GMO and sugar beets as I mentioned before So spraying toxic chemicals on food it has to make food toxic what else could it be? and we know that spraying all those Pesticides on the bees are what's led to the the colony the bee colony loss So organic food is free of pesticides and herbicides is free of GMO's and it's what our ancestors Maybe our grandparents and certainly our great-grandparents just used to call food Organic wasn't needed because everything was organic and it doesn't make us sick but sometimes If we eat only organic well, it's a lot of money if someone is sick with a chronic illness Organic food isn't very very important But if they're basically healthy the most you want to avoid or what's called the dirty dozen the EWG.org you should get that on on an app or on your on your email And they have lots of lists of also other products Beauty products cleaning products and so on EWG org They come out every year with a dirty dozen It's changes a little bit each year the list is updated based on the current data of crops provided by the Department of Agriculture These are herbicides and pesticides you can't wash off you can't scrub them off You can't put them in soapy water these vegetables or fruits will not get Healthy Now kale has been on the list since the year 2020 and everyone here's kale is a health food If it's organic, it's a health food like a lot of other foods if it's not organic It's deadly. So in the order the worst one is strawberries. There are more than 30 different Chemicals that are sprayed on strawberries, but then there's spinach and then this kale collards and mustard greens nectarines apples grapes Bell peppers and all the hot chili peppers cherries peaches pears Celery and tomatoes and this year in 2023 list just came out this week. I don't have a pretty photo They haven't come up with that yet blueberries and green beans are now on the list as well so You can eat other things that are not organic and it's not I'm talking about fruits and vegetables It's not going to cause a lot of you're not going to be eating a lot of pesticides and herbicides But these particularly are the worst ones that really should be organic So the question is how many changes are you willing to make this Ramadan? Are you willing to reverse your age? Internally, are you willing to eat healthier? Are you willing to remember Allah and thank Allah for giving us good wholesome food food? That's Tayyib that we can eat that will give us the strength To enjoy the fasting every day and have more energy by the end of the month That's pretty important So here are some simple substitutes we can make if you're having a sugary drink as part of your iftar Or if you're having fruit drink fruit drink is only 10% juice and the rest is sugar and water So you can drink water or you can juice drink pure juice You could even take watermelon get rid of get the ones without the pits and make a watermelon Drink or a lessee with watermelon. It may be some yogurt You can increase the number of vegetarian dishes at each meal or the freak and the frequency how often you say We won't have meat tonight. We're just gonna have some wonderful vegetarian dishes and there are umpteen recipes available everywhere and Reducing meat consumption meaning when you eat meat how about cutting in half eating half what? We used to eat and not eating it as many times a week Maybe just on the weekend maybe just when we invite friends for an iftar and then the sweet desserts We can always have fruit. We can always have more dates. We can make a smoothie banana is a good base for a sweetening of the Of a smoothie and then adding other fruits in with it And the most important thing as I said before avoiding any kind of sugar at all at so for Oh, sorry one more. Well, we just did that So Retruses food versus processed food. Are you choosing health or disease this Ramadan? There's that line between the two of them And so are you going to go for the food on the left the food on the right or just reduce the food on the right? Gradually because if we trained our family to like Process food it may not be that easy to get rid of it all at once So sometimes small changes Mean permanent changes and doing things all at once sometimes mean you get a lot of resistance in the family So you know your family, you know your cooking style, you know the ages of your children and of your spouse and It's up to you to decide what you want to do to change But this is these little changes will make a big difference in our lives and keep us healthier. Insha'Allah As-salamu alaykum. Thank you so much Now I'll entertain any questions there are And there's a microphone coming around Salam alaykum, I have one question regarding oil as you mentioned like we cannot use Canola oil. So which oil is good for cooking? Usually I'm just using olive oil But is there any other option for us, please? So olive oil actually has a much lower smoking temperature It's not good for high heat cooking. You certainly can't The best thing is to use it with salads Cooking oil some of the best ones are avocado oil and there are two good brands some of them are corrupted But one is called chosen and The other one is new Tiva new Tiva is actually made in the Bay area And then there's coconut oil, you know in the summertime coconut oil is the liquid and when it gets to be cold in the winter time in the house We don't keep our house at 80 degrees in the winter. I don't think anyone could afford the bill the heating bill So coconut oil is a wonderful thing to cook with and these things you can get organic very easily. There's also ghee But that's a little expensive, but you know you're making a biryani and you will put a little bit on top Who's to say? No, thank you. So these are the the best ones And there's the other oils would not be for cooking like the fish oil would be for supplements There's also flaxseed oil, but again, that's a supplement because it's it's a very powerful Oil for healing our body, but I don't think anyone cooks with that Good question. Thank you. Thank you so much You know sometime you talk about Extra virgin olive oil is that different from Olive oil Okay olive oil that we buy in the store should say extra virgin But there was a 2020 or 60 minute program years ago Which showed that 95% of the olive oil coming in from Italy is controlled by the mafia And it may not even be virgin olive oil And it may only be 5% olive oil with cheap oil thrown in and sometimes they even have food coloring to make it look like olive oil So I know a trader Joe's you can get oil from the Kalamata Olive oil from Greece. I've seen some from North Africa I don't know where we can get Turkish olive oil. We were recently when we went for umrah We got some Turkish olive oil on Turkish Airlines I Don't know what other what other countries of certainly, California California has a lot of olive oil. So the extra virgin is what we want for cooking and it's really should be not for heat cooking But for salad cooking any other questions? Are there any questions coming in from the live stream? Not yet. Okay. I Always thought key is bad bad means, you know, it has butter in it You know, like it's made out of butter the key Can hear me. Oh, you can always cook with the the the whole reason the key exists is because in a hot country like in the Subcontinent, you can't keep butter you without refrigeration and before the 20th century. There was no refrigeration So with key you evaporate off by heating it You evaporate off the water and you remove the milk solids, right as the sediment and the key will keep for months and months and months No, that's true. I'm just worried about the calories from the key Okay, all fat has approximately the same calories for the same quantity So a tablespoon of every fat has about the same Okay, thank you One sec one sec Sometimes we when we buy milk, so they have already have some sweets like sugars So that one is good for our body or no like that can't Milk oh canned milk. You're talking about not evaporated milk, but sweetened condensed milk. Yes. Oh, it's loaded with sugar You mean condensed milk. Yeah it's it's Concentrated sugar basically it's kind of thick because it's really a sugar syrup So in case if you drink a cup of one glass per day is fine for our body or no My god, no, you're gonna be so overloaded with sugar. You'll fall asleep in the middle of the afternoon and if you're at work You're gonna be in real trouble No, another thing I want to say about milk because Yeah Let me just say one thing and then we want to hear from this young man Well, I know his can't wait to get his question out So when you really think of it, there's no other mammal besides humans that drinks milk after it's been weaned No mammal drinks milk after it's been weaned and I don't know what it is now But the dairy industry is very powerful powerful lobby and So I know when I was a child they said children should drink four cups of milk every day an adult should drink two cups of milk every day Well, I don't know what the quality of the milk was then but I can tell you what the quality of the milk is now If you're gonna drink milk, it should be organic For people that have are lactose intolerant, which is typical of many people in the subcontinent and African-Americans and Africans also You want to get lactose free organic? If it's not organic, you've got a whole bunch of problems. These are coming from animals That are fed high love the the cows Are fed high levels of estrogen so they produce milk all year long including all through their pregnancy Because normally mammals if they're nursing a baby or a young animal, whatever as the pregnancy proceeds They produce so little milk that the animal or for humans the baby naturally weans. So instead by flooding Estrogen female hormones into the cows. They produce all the time because the dairy industry is an industry They don't love the cows. They see it as a source of income And so what is all that estrogen doing estrogen doing to the young boys? What is that doing to men is that I don't know but there seems to be indications and I've heard from other nutritionists the feminization of men and We talk about Gay men. So, you know, there are a lot of things that have to still be researched. So Having milk occasionally is fine I don't think it's good even for boys to be given much milk after they're three or four years old or maybe When they're weaned but milk occasionally In tea or coffee Used in recipes and so on. I don't see that as a problem, but that's occasionally and Also the countries with the highest consumption of dairy products, which also includes cheeses and yogurt And this is England the US and a couple of the Scandinavian countries. They have the highest rate of broken bones and Broken hips in older people, especially women. So all that milk is not the calcium. We need it's the vitamin D. We need Rather than the calcium because that's not the form of calcium We want unless we want a bunch of broken bones when we're old and then It's another kind of a problem. Now. We have this young man with a good question. Hold the microphone so we can hear so like What if there's like a juice brand that says it what when what if there is a juice brand that says It's 100% Organic juice and I'm not you want to know what juices are 100% juice It said it said it said that it was a 100% juice but when I looked at the Ingredients is said Like it said that it included a high-factose corn syrup Yeah, I'm having trouble hearing so I'm gonna ask your mommy to tell me what you just asked So he said when I looked into when I looked into the ingredient list of the typical hundred percent organic juice So it says that it didn't say it was Or get a hundred percent organic, but he said it was 100% juice But said it was 100% juice, but what was it when you look carefully when I looked into the ingredients He said it had High fructose, you know high fractose corn syrup high fructose corn syrup. Well, that's not really good. Is it right? It's pretty dangerous for our body. So we've got to read labels And so when you go shopping with your mom if you go shopping with her ever you can be a great helper by reading labels Right, what grade are you in? Third grade great. You can read labels, too. Yeah Okay, well it looks like that's it on the questions has one come in from live stream one question online should we limit our cheese intake? Should we limit our cheese intake intake? Absolutely cheese, believe it or not is one of the most addictive foods after sugar Most cheeses are high fat They're concentrated forms of milk when you think of how much milk you have to all the liquid in the milk to make the cheese And the high fat cheeses in particular are a problem We want to reduce that to as little as as infrequently as possible. I have nothing against cheese. It's delicious But if people are already sick If they are heading in the direction of heart disease Hardening of the arteries, etc. That cheese is not very helpful. And if they're heading in the direction of cancer Milk actually is a growth kind of food and cheese is a concentrated version of milk So we want to limit the amount of cheese a lot of people have allergic reactions a lot of congestion in their nose and They don't know what it's from and they get a medicine from the doctor for the congestion where it's actually it's too much cheese We have cheese all the time. It's not just on pizza. It's on the spaghetti and it's on It's ubiquitous and it's quesadillas, you know cheese and a burrito or and so on So we really want to limit and I think there's another young man with a question, but you'll have to hold the mic so I can hear you Yeah, so Yeah, like what milk is actually that you can drink that's actually organic and not part of the factory industry You're asking it or you're making a statement, right that organic milk is Different from regular milk Which milk is good to drink when you want to drink milk that's organic But there are also other milks. There's almond milk Which is good. There's coconut milk which has a lot of other amazing health benefits So it doesn't just have to be cows milk and you might want to try some of that in your Cereal if you're having cereal in the morning You might want to try some of those in making a dessert instead of regular milk Because they have a lot of benefits that the cows milk may not have Okay, got it. Thank you But organic is better Okay, I think that's it on the questions. Thanks everyone for coming Ramadan Mubarak to you. I know they're gonna be siding the moon here in the parking lot on Wednesday night and The they're gonna have big Telescopes but the food trucks come first and I told my husband guess what the food trucks are coming early and he laughed And we said yeah because the Muslims come out when the food is there. He said you think they're giving it for you I said no, it's the food trucks, but they'll probably be good food So so it's halal amigos and halal bite of Chicago's halal amigos and halal what? Bite of Chicago halal bite of Chicago. Yeah and MCC always Encourages all the different Muslim restaurants all the different Muslim Food sellers of whatever kind to to participate. We want everyone to To come and be successful in their business and give us good food so thank you once again for coming and Insha'Allah will be fasting on Thursday morning. Assalamu alaikum. You have another question Okay Come over here so I can hear you Grab the microphone So why are you excited if the food is like not healthy? Why am I excited what? If the food is not healthy, why are we excited? No, we are excited to eat healthy food What we could do if we go to a restaurant we could ask them Could you have some organic things on the label on on the on the menu the next time because I like to eat organic? My mommy makes organic food for me and Then tell them what your favorite food is. Okay, okay? Because restaurants like to serve food that people want to eat Right Okay Thank you