Peppers; They're Not Just For Breakfast Anymore!

Since I started this diet at the beginning of 2010, I have not had a full blown stay-in-bed cold yet!  I have felt a little sick though from time to time, but through proper eating, I've been able to keep the cold at bay until the feeling passes.  So what are the right foods?  Traditionally, if you're Jewish, chicken soup.  I'll skip that, it takes me a month to make caveman chicken soup, and another month to eat it all by myself.  What else?  O.J.!  Okay, let's explore that.  Oranges have 116% of your daily vitamin C requirements.  But next time you're feeling a little sick, don't reach for a glass of orange juice, reach for a bell pepper instead!  Sounds crazy right?  Well, did you know that green bell peppers have twice as much vitamin C as an orange?!  A red bell pepper has THREE TIMES AS MUCH!

Let's also take a closer look at our old friend, the glass of orange juice, being marketed towards you since forever by an advertising firm hired by orange growers.  First of all, let's assume, for the sake of a caveman discussion, that you're drinking ORGANIC orange juice, so I can't argue with you about any growth hormones, or pesticides, or genetically engineered seeds, etc, that are probably in your glass (you don't have to pay extra for that stuff, in fact you pay less for non-organics, they're practically giving the hormones and pesticides away!).  Even so, think about how many oranges you'd have to squeeze, just to drink one glass of orange juice.  Maybe three, four, seven, eight?  Not unheard of, depending on the size of the glass.  Well, could you sit down and EAT eight oranges?  Probably not.  You probably couldn't even eat three without getting sick of it.  But you'd have no problem guzzling down it's juice.  Well, that juice is full of sugar, and even though it's an acceptable sugar, it's way too much for your body to use, and eventually, it will get stored as body fat (see: thighs).

But our little buddy, the pepper?  Not many sugars at all, and LOADED with vitamin C, as well as many other great things for your health!  There are even some spicy peppers that have FIVE times as much vitamin C as oranges.  So next time you want some vitamin C, skip the juice, and EAT an orange!  Or better yet, eat a pepper!  Chili peppers are great for you too, but not everyone can handle the heat, so I won't give you grief if you're not a spice nut like me.  Trust me, when I was younger, I couldn't handle the heat either, but I've grown to adapt and now I love it!

Anyway, why am I bringing all this up (Yeah, why, get to the pictures already!)?  Calm down, I will.  It's because I had a little tickle in my throat and a runny nose the other day, so I reached for the peppers!  I usually always have a handful of them in the fridge for cooking, because the farmers market I go to always has a great selection.  You have to be careful when cooking peppers though, if you're going strictly for their vitamin C, because cooking kills a lot of vitamin C out of food.  So if you're eating them for medicinal purposes like me, you want to eat them RAW!

So for breakfast yesterday, I sliced some spicy red serrano chili pepper and threw it on top of some sunny side eggs I cooked in olive oil.  I'm really sorry I didn't take a photo of this, because it looked beautiful!  I promise I'll make it again, and make it look even yummier by putting the whole thing on top of rosemary walnut bread!  THEN, I'll take some pics.  The hot spice also helps unclog your sinuses naturally, so if you're not a big medicine taker like me, then this stuff is better than Sudafed!

For lunch I diced up a red and a green jalapeno into some fresh guacamole that I whipped up (see blog entitled "Caveman Cannot Live On Bread Alone" for recipe), and ate it with red and green bell pepper  slices as a corn chip replacement.  It was yummy, delicious, filling, and above all, loaded with vitamin C, one of the best known antioxidants on the planet.  Sorry, again, I didn't take a photo.

Then for dinner (yes, a photo is coming), I sliced up another red jalapeno, and cooked it this time (yes some vitamin C gets cooked out, but there was still probably more left in it than in a raw orange) in a pasta dish.

(Hold on, did you say pasta?)  Yes, pasta, now what I did was... (HOLD THE F--- ON!  HOW COULD YOU NAME THIS BLOG ABOUT A FRIGGIN' PEPPER WHEN YOU FIGURED OUT HOW TO MAKE CAVEMAN PASTA WITH NO WHEAT!!!!????)

You're really developing quite the temper, you know that?  The answer is because, if you're a regular reader, you know I've been experimenting for some time with using zucchini as a pasta substitute, and although I'm getting closer, I'm not quite there yet, and it's still not blog worthy.  But I'm trying.  For you, the fat bastards of America.

Now, as I was saying before you rudely interrupted, for dinner I put some olive oil in a pan, sauteed some garlic, and some red jalapeno, and then threw in some shrimp (see blog "Replacing Rice" for this same cooking technique), and then some lemon juice (also filled with vitamin C, but the cooking probably killed it all).  Finally I threw in some zucchini that I sliced with a peeler into long-ish fake fettucini.  Served it up, threw some fresh cilantro on top because I didn't have any parsley, some fresh ground black pepper (all ingredients, all organic, all the time), and it was done.  Here's what it looked like:

Not a bad looking pasta dish, now that I see it.  But it didn't have that satisfying pasta taste, bite, and all around yumminess.  Still, my sinuses dripped happily.  This morning, I made a variation of an old Brooklyn favorite, peppers and eggs!  Usually you eat it in a hero sandwich (or as we pronounced it in Brooklyn, "sangwich"), but I had this nice big poblano green pepper (mild, and about the same vitamin C as an orange, with none of the sugar), so I cut it lengthwise, and filled it with eggs and onions (see blog named "Caveman Dinner, Wednesday, 8/11/10"), then ate the pepper raw, like an open face sangwich.  Take a look:

So after about two days of eating peppers, as well as drinking antioxidant rich green tea, any signs of a cold are gone!  Another success story.  I love NOT being sick!  And there's a nasty bug going around right now that too many of my friends are catching.  But their immune systems are not as boosted as mine because of all the caveman food I've been eating.  Another buddy, unfortunately was just diagnosed with prostate cancer, and his doctors first prescription was, "Change your diet."  I believe it.  I think I've told you before, we all have these cancer cells slowly building up in us from eating things like wheat, legumes, potatoes, pesticides, and other toxin carrying foods.  After about 50, 60, 70 years of this diet, the cancer cells keep feeding on these toxins until they get big enough and decide to finally show up.  But if you stop eating things that feed the cancer cells, the cancer cells stop growing and stay the size they are forever.  Hopefully, I stopped feeding mine in time, and I'll lead a long healthy life.

A few years ago, I dated this real whacko who told me she can read into the future, and took a look at my palm.  I told her I always had a weird feeling I would die young, but she said, "No, you're going to live a very long, healthy life."  I blew it off thinking she was full of it, but now that I'm on this diet, and I see the amazing health results I achieved in only a few months, I think I owe her an apology.  Let's see, what was her number?  Oh here it is, 1-800-FREAKAZOID.  Okay, maybe I won't call her, besides that's too many numbers, and there's no Z on the phone.  But I'm starting to think she wasn't so full of it after all.  I now think I will live a long healthy life.  Someone actually thought I was in my 20's the other day.  Yes, she was blind and feeling my face at the time, but who am I to judge?!