Chilkat Valley News - Serving Haines and Klukwan, Alaska since 1966

It's harvest time and our northern fruit offers a wonderful balance of sweet and tart. Folks are rightly concerned about keeping bears away from their apple trees. Some pick the fruit early and press the juice, but there is a more healthful strategy. Full nutrition is available by slicing then drying the fruit with a dehydrator or woodstove. Drying fruit requires more time and physical activity. It’s a family adventure that will have you eating nutritious apples and fiber all year.

Pressing the juice then discarding or composting the pulp fails in a fundamental principle of nutrition. Our gut microbes need fiber and they convert “non-digestible” fiber into nutrients that we now know actually feed the colon’s epithelium—its lining. America’s exploding rates of chronic disease, which have no precedent in the long story of human-kind, are often linked to high-carb/low-fiber eating and “leaky gut.” The colon lining gets sick, starts breaking down, then microbes leak through and raise hell—switching on both inflammatory and hormonal responses—aka anxiety, depression, auto-immune disorders, and more. American agri-business has misled America to believe that no-fiber fruit juice for breakfast is a “great start.” It ain’t so. Sweetened mostly with fructose, (only metabolized in the liver) it's often converted directly to liver fat. Savor whole fruit fresh, frozen or dried. Junk the juice.

Burl Sheldon