Co-op offers Passover foods

Many  Jews find it challenging to prepare meals for the Passover holiday, beginning March 29, because of the temporary dietary restrictions Passover creates.

Last year members of the Chapel Hill Kehillah Synagogue found a solution, and they are bringing it back with their second annual "Passover Ko-oP."

They have worked with national vendors to bring a wide variety of reasonably priced Passover items to the Triangle while helping needy families and raising money for their religious school.

For a Ko-oP joining fee that is 18 percent of the order up to $36, community members can select kosher Passover items from a catalog featuring a variety of candies, desserts, matzo, teas, cake mixes, jams, gefilte fish and wine. Most are below retail price.

Included on the order form is an option to donate a basket of Passover food or a monetary amount to a needy Jewish family through Jewish Family Services of Durham-Chapel Hill or Jewish Family Services of Raleigh-Cary. Every year, both organizations distribute Passover baskets to local families so that everyone will be able to celebrate the holiday.

Friday is the deadline for placing orders that can be picked up March 21.

The reason Passover food is different from all other foods lies in the story of the biblical exodus of the Jewish people from slavery in Egypt. Because they had so little time to prepare for their leaving, bread had no time to rise, resulting in a flat, crackerlike food called matzo. To commemorate the eight-day festival of Passover, Jews eat matzo and avoid leavened foods, grains and other foods that have historically been used to make bread products.

These temporary dietary restrictions leave  Jews searching for special food for the holiday.

Whole Wheat Matzo

Look what I found!  Whole Foods Market Kosher for Pesach-
Whole Foods Market grocery and meat purchasing teams have been hard at work making our stores a Passover destination. We know that many of our customers are looking for kosher for Passover products that meet our strict quality standards for packaged foods that are free of artificial preservatives, colors, flavors, sweeteners and hydrogenated fats. We also know you are looking for kosher poultry that weren�t given antibiotics in their feed and were raised with plenty of room to roam around. Meeting all of these requirements can be quite a challenge, but we persevered and made it happen for you!


Did you know that many kosher suppliers still use artificial preservatives and other ingredients that we do not allow in our products? Our grocery buyers partnered with kosher food producers to help them reformulate their products and then our stores and customers provide a market for their natural products. In December, we blogged about our partnership with Streit�s, the only family owned and operated Matzo producer in the U.S, who have now removed the artificial additives and preservatives from many of their products. Our partnership with Streit�s is having a nice ripple effect on the kosher food industry as a whole. Andrew Lansman, head of kosher distributor A&L Foods, says: �Five years ago, kosher manufacturers didn�t even care about being all natural. Now, most are trying to reformulate their product line so they can be all natural. Many new items have been developed because of Whole Foods Market�s influence, including many whole grain and organic products.�


Aviv Organic Matzo


Certified organic, this traditional recipe is crafted with organic whole wheat flour and water. Exclusively available at Whole Foods Market.

Yehuda Organic and Whole Wheat Matzo




Yehuda Matzo is a favorite for Passover. With a great flavor and a crisp crunch it�s also good for matzo brei! Choose from Organic, Whole Wheat, Minis and egg. Exclusively available at Whole Foods Market.

Are you Smarter than a 10 year old Passover Dilemma

Pesach and Diabetes - What to Do?

Pesach (Passover) is coming and I was  so sure that it will be impossible to get through the very popular matzo, potato and egg holiday.I have decided to start looking for solutions and substitutions for traditional ingredients. Living a Torah Observant lifestyle does not have to mean living unhealthy�in fact, quite the opposite. We have a Torah commandment to "take very good care of ourselves" (Deuteronomy 4:15).  We do not live the life that was lived one hundred years ago so we cannot expect to get away with eating many of the foods that they ate�most of theirs got worked off throughout the day�we hardly move and our present day foods are terribly refined.

Our eating requirements are intimately bound up with our religion, culture, and ethnic identity. Food is the focus of Passover, especially the Seder, which is the ceremonial meal eaten on the first two nights of Passover to commemorate the exodus of the Jews from Egypt. The issues at Passover for people with diabetes are the amounts and different foods and the change in schedule, eating late at night. A Torah Observant person with diabetes needs to learn how to navigate their way through all these eating opportunities, and stay in control of their blood sugar levels.

Go and try to explain to a doctor why you absolutely have to have 4 cups of wine at one meal and a given amount of matzah. Do you know what havoc FOUR CUPS of WINE will do to a diabetics glucose levels?

Not to mention the Matzah that we must eat throughout the 7 days of the feast. OH MY, what a challendge! But Elohim is merciful and I am on a quest to find the healthy alternatives that my family and I will use this year. I will post my finds for you to enjoy.

Jewish Diabetes Association  Pesach Newsletter Version (PDF) � 19 pages

Vitamin D May Prevent Flu and Asthma

The AJCN just published a new controlled trial evaluating the effectiveness of vitamin D supplements on flu and asthma (1). Dr. Hiroyuki Ida's group gave Japanese schoolchildren (10 years average age) 1,200 IU of vitamin D3 or placebo per day from December through March. They found that children taking vitamin D had a significantly lower incidence of influenza A but not influenza B. These are two strains of flu that each accounted for roughly half the flu incidence in this population. Sadly, if you add the total flu incidence for A and B together (which the authors don't do in their tables), vitamin D supplementation didn't reduce total flu incidence significantly.

They also found that in the subset of children not already taking vitamin D supplements, the effect was greater, with unsupplemented children contracting nearly three times as many influenza A infections as children receiving vitamin D. They didn't analyze the influenza B or total influenza incidence in that way, so we don't know if prior supplementation makes a difference there.

The most striking finding of the paper is that the vitamin D group suffered from 6 times fewer asthma attacks than the placebo group. This needs to be repeated but it's consistent with other data and I find it very encouraging.

The paper did have some limitations. They didn't measure vitamin D status so they have no way to know exactly how effective their pill-based supplements were.

Another problem is that they began collecting data immediately after beginning supplementation. Vitamin D is a fat-soluble vitamin that can take 3 months to reach maximum concentration in the body following supplementation. By the time the children were reaching their maximum serum concentration of vitamin D, the trial was over. It would be nice to see the next trial begin supplementation in the fall and look at flu incidence in the winter.

This paper comes on the heels of another showing that vitamin D is necessary for the activation of an immune cell called the killer T cell (2). These are important for resistance to infections and cancer. Overall, these papers add to the accumulating evidence that vitamin D is important for the proper functioning of the human immune system. However, mice may not be the best model for use in studying vitamin D biology. From the first paper:

The evolution of different mechanisms for the regulation of PLC-?1 activity in human and mouse T cells parallels the development of divergent VDR-dependent and VDR-independent antimicrobial pathways in human and mouse macrophages31, respectively, and may reflect the fact that mice are nocturnal animals with fur and humans are daytime creatures that synthesize vitamin D in the skin after exposure to ultraviolet light.

In other words, mice don't use vitamin D in the same way as humans because they have a different evolutionary relationship to it.

Diabetes attacked my family!

Recently my husband fell very, very ill. We did not know what was wrong with him. Brother B (as he is affectionately known) is a Personal Fitness Trainer, who exercises daily and has always been in great shape. Never sick with anything more than an occasional cold or maybe sinus problem, he is a picture of health. Over the past few months he had gained weight, but no one thought anything about it.

Then, it began... He was feeling tire and excessively thirsty. His appetite went away and he lost 30 pounds in about two weeks. There was a foul odor on his breathe and my wonderful mother decided to come over and take his blood glucose level. It was over 600! We went to the doctor the next morning and of course, it was the Big "D" - Type 1 Diabetes.

He was put on four insulin shots per day and an oral medication. His diet had to change and all the family as well. It took two weeks after the initial diagnosis to regain a sense of normalcy and to balance his glucose level.

All "white" foods had to be iliminated, including our weekly Shabbat Challah! Oh my, what that did to our Torah observant, shabbat keeping, bread eating family. I went on a quest to find an alternative whole wheat Challah that I could make in my bread machine. HalleluYAH, I found an alternative.

Join our "Bread from Heaven" group

All of our pasta is now whole wheat and we love it. My children enjoy eating in our new manner and I feel as if I am giving everyone the best that I can. The Torah gives us a blue print for healthy eating and I am following it.

In my research I found several natural herbs that are historically used for the treatment of diabetes. Gymnema Sylvestre is the one that I started my husband on immediately and now he is down to one insulin shot per day. I say Todah to YHWH daily for His mercy and insight into the herbs of the field.

(Psa 104:14) He causeth the grass to grow for the cattle, and herb for the service of man: that he may bring forth food out of the earth;

A False Dichotomy

In the discussion section of the last post, the eternal argument about non-industrial people arose: were their lives (a) "nasty, brutish and short" (Hobbes), or were they (b) "noble savages" (Shaftesbury) living in Eden? The former argument states that they had awful lives, and we should be glad we're living int he 21st century. The latter argument implies that we should emulate them as much as possible. Each side is bursting with anecdotes to support their position.

Any time the discussion reaches this point, it stops providing us anything useful. The argument is a false dichotomy, one in which neither answer is correct. The correct answer is (c): none of the above. Some aspects of hunter-gatherer life are preferable to ours, and some aspects of our lives are preferable to theirs. Understanding that we spent a lot of evolutionary time as hunter-gatherers, as well as a few thousand years in small, tightly knit agricultural communities, may be useful in understanding how to work constructively with our own bodies and minds in the modern world.

So please, let's leave behind the false dichotomy and foster a more nuanced understanding of hunter-gatherer life.