The Spartan Table

18/08/2022

First published on the private page of The Spartan Table (www.facebook.com/groups/226134305478939/).

August 2, 2022 - Cold water?

This week I should like to look into the health benefits of cold and hot water.

If you're unlike me you prefer to drink your water rather cold. And mind you most people in the Western world drink their water rather cold.

Our body is composed mainly of water. Depending on the literature water makes up between 70 to 80% of our body weight.

As we transpire and sweat we require a constant supply of water to keep our body functioning.

Failing constantly replenishing our body's water contents our body is set to malfunction and we start to become ill.

One can survive quite a long time without food and one dies without water after a few days.

But what do we require replenishing water for?

- cushioning and lubricating our skeleton's joints
- moisturizing our skin
- keeping our blood liquid and pulsating around the network of vessels
- aiding digestion of food and preventing constipation
- flushing our bacteria from our bladder
- detoxifying our body in general by enabling built-up stores of toxins to be flushed out from our kidneys and at the same time transport more waster materials to them through a more liquid blood
- improving our mood in general. Just watch how grumpy most people get if they are denied water for a few hours!

The beauty of cold water is that it may be helping better in replenishing our body's water level than hot water as studies have shown at Columbia University.

Cold water helps to regulate our body's temperature faster when we exercise or work hard.

And as strange as it sounds cold water is absorbed more readily by the body than warmer water. It seems our stomach lining let it pass into the blood stream faster.

Cold water has also shown to be a better in helping to get rid of adrenaline and pain.

And it jump-starts our metabolism to the extent that drinking two large glasses of water can increase our rate of metabolism by 30%!

As cold water requires to be warmed to body temperature to be completely absorbed by our body the warming-up burns some 60 – 60 calories if you drink between 4 to 6 large glasses of colder water per day. On a yearly basis this means some 17,000 additional calories are burned off heating the water or a whopping 10 days of daily calorific intake. Not bad, isn't it?

So for those of you preferring your water cold go on science is on your side:

But what about those of us preferring our water at least at room temperature or even slightly warmer?

Water and burning calories – review article: https://tinyurl.com/y6p8oe6b
Some general remarks on water from the Mayo Clinic: https://tinyurl.com/y2dh9h4a

03/06/2022

Frist published on the private page of The Spartan Table (www.facebook.com/groups/226134305478939/).

May 30, 2022 - Cleaning Your Teeth The Ancient Way

Greeks and Romans have been voracious eaters and both cultures were rather strict when it comes to cleaning one's teeth.

I guess the Greeks kept the upper hand in the dentistry and caring for one's teeth over the Romans. They had a secret weapon unique to Greece.

You might have heard about the Greek island with the lovely name Chios. Chios is the fifth largest island and its history stretches back to more than 8,000 years when the first humans set foot on the island.

Chios is home to a particularly well endowed flora and fauna. Many plants found there are unique to the island.

It seems that humans have quite early on discovered the medicinal properties of a tree that was back than unique to the island. It comes with the nice Latin name Pistacia lentiscus or in modern language Mastic Tree.

It's the resin of the tree that harbours the medicinal ingredients of Pistacia lentiscus.

Many people have taken to calling the resin of the tree the Tears of Chios.

The many mastic trees on the island had their bark slightly opened and a small ceramic bowl was hung below the opening to let a few drops of the tree's resin fall into it.

It was a laborious and very time consuming process as the resin is not very liquid quite the contrary the Mastic resin is even harder than the resins from other trees like pine for example.

The Mastic resin was then packaged into leather pouches and the locals chewed two or three small dollops of this resin after their meal.

Because the resin had to be chewed thoroughly the tree got its name from the Latin word 'masticare' meaning to chew.

Studies have shown that mastic resin is highly anti-septic, anti-microbial, astringent, diuretic and anti-spasmodic.

By mixing the resin with saliva bacteria and germs are killed of and even inflamed gums are healed.

Mastic resin is so potent that it kills of the dreaded bacteria helicobacter pylori thus inhibits the growth of ulcers and other gastric ailments.

And since the added amount of saliva is swallowed the mastic resins astringent properties help digestion along as well.

Quite rapidly mastic resin started to be chewed by most of the Greeks and Romans and the resin trade made Chios become a wealthy place.

Contrarily to what the islanders want the world to believe the mastic tree has spread all over the Mediterranean over time.

Mastic resin is found in many toothpastes and tooth powders till this day.

The pure resin, however, is what you would want to use. It has shown to be at its most effective as pure resin.

In Greece you can buy a local soft drink named Mastiqua Water. It has a tiny amount of resin in it to give it it's distinct flavour. I like it quite a bit. It can not be used to cleanse your teeth however as it contains sugar.

To this day the Island of Chios is referred to as the home of Mastica and the only source of Mastica. I was told that it's quite beautiful and I hope to be able to visit Chios in one of my future trips to Greece.

02/05/2022

First published on our private The Spartan Table Group (https://www.facebook.com/groups/226134305478939)

April 29, 2022 - How Patatoules Got To Greece

As strange as it sounds potatoes or in plain Greek patatoules have been introduced fairly late to Greece and to the Greeks' palate.

Potatoes were introduced to Greece by the first president of the newly independent Greece the nobleman Count Ioannis Kapodistrias.

The saying goes that Kapodistrias had learned all about potatoes when he was sent by Tsar Alexander I to Switzerland in 1813 to save Switzerland's independence following the armed tussles the Swiss had with Napoleon and amongst themselves.

It was Kapodistrias who drafted Switzerland's new constitution and who ensured adherence to it from all the Cantons.

In return the Swiss shared with him the secret about potatoes.

Kapodistrias then went on to lead the Greek struggle for independence from the Ottomans in the 1820s.

In 1828 he was named the first prime minister of the newly independent Greece.

At the end of the struggle the Greeks were going hungry and Kapodistrias remembered the protein-rich vegetable he had come across in Switzerland.

The Greeks were not very enthusiastic about the new vegetable and shunned it initially fervently.

Count Kapodistrias desperately wanted his fellow Greeks to recover and get healthy again. And being Greek he knew a few things about the Greek character.

He had the potatoes that the Swiss had sent over put in a large heap behind solid walls and had them guarded by heavily armed soldiers.

And bingo, the Greeks started to steal the potatoes and slowly, slowly they were planted all over the country.

The rest is history or in the case of patatoules fertile grounds.

To this day the Greek feast on the same potatoes the Swiss do and in both countries potatoes or in the case of the Greeks patatoules are considered to be the national vegetable.

Ioannis Kapodistrias: https://tinyurl.com/y9d956cg

08/04/2022

Our dear friend and long-time mentor James has published a new book!

The Secret World of Honey – Unmasked

or like it a was named by one of the many honey-people he talked to during his research

'The Ultimate Guide to Nature's Most Precious Gift'.

I'm especially proud that James has written the book during his last stay with our family here in Sparta.

The book is now available on Amazon's various websites

USA and International https://tinyurl.com/yb4llb6s

UK and Ireland https://tinyurl.com/yblx8x3r

Germany https://tinyurl.com/y8re2k8n

France https://tinyurl.com/y7qywvmf

Italy https://tinyurl.com/y7cd9cop

I'm thankful for your spreading the word and sharing the news about James's latest book with your family and friends far and wide.

You not only help him to get the word out but you help beekeepers raise awareness for the great work they do.

06/04/2022

April 5, 2022 - Polyphenols?

Many discussions amongst food professionals have at their centre polyphenols. Or more precise the contents of and the kind of polyphenols a food contains.

But what are these polyphenols?

Polyphenols are naturally occurring compounds in plants.

They are usually expressed in mg per 100 g.

More than 8,000 different types of polyphenols have been identified and there are more than 100 different foods containing a minimum of one milligram of a polyphenol per 100 gram or 100 millilitre.

Polyphenols can be found in fruits, vegetables, whole grains and even seeds.

Polyphenols restore the health of our gut bacteria and thereby help in reducing the risk of heart problems, help to lower blood pressure, help to decrease the risk of diabetes, are reckoned to lower the risk for dementia and other cognitive ailments and have shown to be beneficial to people suffering from cancer, too.

There are thousands of studies about the health benefits of a diet rich in food with a lot of polyphenols.

On top of that polyphenols are often at the basis of taste of a given food. Tannins for instance are the polyphenols responsible for a food to be astringent. They are found in grapes and therefore in wines as well as in many other fruit juices like olive oil or orange juice.

Another polyphenol having a heavy influence on taste is oleuropein which makes olive oil taste bitter. Oleuropein is also found in chocolate or in coffee.

And the polyphenol oleocanthal is what makes chilli peppers or fresh olive oil sting the throat.

Common to all polyphenols is their fast breaking down through oxidation. Hence fresh products having a lot more polyphenols than stored or processed foods.

Often polyphenols are used as a seal of healthiness by food producers. Many olive oil producers are therefore obsessed with the contents of polyphenols of their oils.

When it comes to olive oils and polyphenols single variety oils from the cultivars Coratina and Picual excel, followed by the Greek cultivar Koroneiki.

Due to the rapid oxidation of polyphenols the freshness of the oil, however, is even more important than the cultivar it comes from.

So watch out for the harvest date and not the bottling date.

The French food industry is particularly keen on polyphenols. Hence the French government has set up a polyphenols data base in 2015.

Phenol-Explorer list the various polyphenols found in hundreds of different foods and can be accessed for free (http://phenol-explorer.eu/).

The page on the polyphenol count of the average olive oil is http://phenol-explorer.eu/contents/food/822

Mind you, many of the naturally occurring polyphenols can be chemically reproduced these days. And of course they are and then added into processed foods. However, these polyphenols are reckoned to be poorly absorbed by the human body. That's why so many processed food is nothing more than empty calories.

Enjoy exploring the Phenol-Explorer database.

Database on Polyphenols in Foods

13/01/2022

A few interesting facts about Greece's history and about the increasing tension with its neighbour Turkey.

Enjoy reading what has been recently published on Armstrong Economics' Website.

Another January 6th, 2022 important geopolitical event was the rising tension between Turkey and Greece. There has been an arms race between the two which escalated going into the end of 2021. Turkey intensified the arms race when it asked Biden to buy 40 F-16 fighter jets to upgrade its Air Force. The move coincides with the recent deal struck by Greece to acquire France Rafale jets and frigates.

These two nations hate each other since when Xerces invaded Greece and was defeated and then Alexander the Great conquered Babylon. The tensions go back thousands of years but then Turkey became Muslim and now the clash remains also between Christianity and Islam.

Hulusi Akar, the Turkish Defense Minister, among other things, also said on January 8th, that Turkey wanted to resolve disputes with its neighbour and fellow NATO member, Greece, through dialogue and turn the Aegean into a “sea of friendship.” However, that was followed by the “but” where he accused Athens of pressing ahead with what he said were provocative actions, including militarizing islands close to mainland Turkey, in breach of international agreements. Hulusi Akar made incendiary statements to media representatives in Ankara and threatened NATO through Greece. He said that defense and security issues should be kept away from everyday politics and should not be the subject of war and that in his country, the issue of defense and security is a matter of 84 million people.

In 1453, the Ottoman Turks captured the Byzantine capital of Constantinople ending the Roman Empire for good. That completed their conquest of this once mighty empire and today we call what was Anatolia Turkey. That established the Ottoman Empire. For the next 400 years, Greece was ruled by the Turks, but Greece always resented their occupation given the history back to Xerxes and Alexander the Great. There were many failed uprisings against Turkish rule over the centuries.

In fact, it took just 28 years for the Greeks to stage their first revolt in 1481. The first uprising took place on the Mani peninsula in 1481, when Korkodeilos Kladas and the fierce Mani fighters rose up against the Ottomans. In 1711, the all-powerful Tsar of Russia, Peter the Great, issued a proclamation calling upon the Greek people to revolt. In truth, the Greeks took up arms against the Ottomans 123 separate times before 1821 and the great war.

It was 1821 when the Greeks launched a rebellion that would develop into the Greek War of Independence. With the help of Britain, France, and Russia, the Greeks gained their independence from the Turks in 1832. However, the new Greek nation only included a relatively small part of European Greek lands. There remained a large Greek population in mainland Turkey, former Anatolia from ancient times. This fact led Greece to constantly seek to re-take more land from the Ottoman Turks. Multiple wars between Greece and Turkey unfolded, and local Greek rebellions with the support of the Greek government were becoming the norm.

Greek Epirus Revolt of 1854, in which Greek military officers aided the rebels in the Ottoman province of Epirus. This was also part of the larger Crimean War, and the Turks defeated these rebels. The Greek population of the large island of Crete launched many revolts against Turkish rule. There were the Greek Cretan Revolts of 1841, 1858, 1866-1868, 1875-1878, and 1889. All were defeated by the Turks.

A new revolt on Crete broke out in 1896 which led to the Second Greco-Turkish War which is also called the “Thirty Days’ War” of 1897. The Ottoman army re-organized with the help of German advisors. That enabled them to easily defeat the unprepared Greek military. Greece had to surrender some border areas in the peace treaty and were forced to pay heavy reparations to the Turks.
Nevertheless, there was the Cretan revolt, which continued until 1898. That at least forced the Turks to remove their military from the island and set up an autonomous Cretan State, which, while still under Ottoman rule, but was nominally self-governing.

Next came the First Balkan War (October, 1912-May 30, 1913), in which Greece, Serbia, Bulgaria, and Montenegro all combined forces to defeat the Turks. They almost conquered all of the Ottoman Empire’s remaining lands in Europe. This is when Crete became officially part of Greece ending the Third Greco-Turkish War.

This was followed by the Fourth Greco-Turkish War (1921-1922) which defeated the Ottoman Empire in World War One. Greek troops participated in the Allied occupation of large parts of Ottoman Turkey. This is when with the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, Greece launched a full invasion of Turkey. The goal was to re-establish all the former Greek-speaking lands into the modern Green nation.

51.6 years later, the tension rose again this time forming the Greek-Turkish Conflict Over Cyprus in 1974. This became a full-scale war between Greece and Turkey. In 1974, the island-nation of Cyprus was engulfed in conflict when a coup overthrew the government with the goal of joining Cyprus with its Greek majority population with Greece. Turkey invaded northern Cyprus and set up a separate Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus, a “nation” that only Turkey recognizes.

Tensions began to rise with the 2020.05 turning point on the Economic Confidence Model. These tensions are at their highest since 1974 and it looks like war is inevitable once again. Turkish President Erdogan’s re-conversion of the Hagia Sophia to a place of Muslim worship enraged many Greeks, which only exacerbated the economic competition for the oil and gas in the seabed near Cyprus. As the Greek and Turkish militaries face off at sea and in the air on a routine basis.

Here we also have a convergence of many cycles. The next 51.6-year cycle from 1974 events brings us directly to the period of rising risk of international war starting in 2025-2027 time period. This insane climate change policy that is deliberately driving up fuel prices around the world is crushing the third world and there people have far less risk in the face of war compared to the developed industrial nations.

The problem we have is as the economy turns down and has wiped out tourism, a major income source for Greece and Turkey, hotels are closing and people are unemployed. This increases the tensions for war.

Published on January 6, 2022 on

Spread the lovemore Another January 6th, 2022 important geopolitical event was the rising tension between Turkey and Greece. There has been an arms race between the two which escalated going into the end of 2021. Turkey intensified the arms race when it asked Biden to buy 40 F-16 fighter jets to upg...

24/12/2021

December 24, 2021 - Alexandros of Sparta Goes Maniatis Hotel Sparta written by Jean-Pierre James Elsener

Many of you know that I've been furthering the career of the young Spartan artist, Alexandros of Sparta for quite some time now.

I simply love the way he goes about creating his sculptures from steel scrap.

Over time he has built a considerable following in the USA, Canada and the United Arab Emirates where his works are coveted far and wide.

The saying 'A prophet is not without honour save in his own country' applied perfectly to Alexandros and his artistic work.

Even though he's a true Spartan and has very deep roots here his artistic work is unknown to most of the town.

We had planned and set up an event with a few other artists to be held on January 2, 2022. However, the draconian measures taken by the Greek government trying to curb Omicron had put paid to the idea yesterday.

A door closes and another one opens to even greener pastures as the saying goes.

Our friend George Kannelakos aka Sparta's Most Famous Taxi Driver chatted last night with his long time friend George Dimitropoulos the co-owner of Sparta's premier hotel Maniatis about art and told him about the awesome works Alexandros creates.

George Dimitropoulos is a big, big art lover himself. He had heard every now and then about Alexandros and never gotten round to pay a visit to the young artist's workshop at the outskirts of the town.

Making a long story short, Sparta's Most Famous Taxi Driver called Alexandros on the spot and handed his phone to his friend Dimitropoulos. Alexandros and the owner of the Maniatis Hotel seemed to have hit it off right away.

The two of them agreed on Alexandros to loan the hotel his latest master piece inspired by the famous myth of Zeus' abduction of the beautiful Phoenician princess Europa over Christmas and New Year.

No mean feat as the size and weight of the art work requires a truck equipped with a crane to transport it from Alexandros's workshop to the hotel. Remember it's Christmas Eve today.

The Dimitropoulos brothers liberated a generous part of their heated outdoor dining area to let Zeus and Europa enjoy the view of Sparta's main roads junctions for the Christmas holidays.

It is mind-boggling to see the attention the massive sculpture draws.

Cars stop dead in their tracks and drivers jump out to take a picture; proud mothers and fathers ask their offspring to pose in front of the bull and tell them about the myth; young ladies beg their companions to take a picture of them with the sculpture; in short Zeus and Europa have become the stars of this Christmas to the Spartans.

Again and again people passing by asked Alexandros about what inspired him to make this beautiful piece of art.

And suddenly Alexandros' mobile chirped and at the other end was a distinguished gentleman who introduced himself as Panos.

He said he wanted to meet with Alexandros right away as he happened to be in town only for a few hours passing by and saying hello to a friend who had told him about what was going on at Maniatis Hotel.

As it turned out Panos is a respected figure in the small world of serious art collectors in Greece and I've reasons to believe that the saying about the prophet not being valued in the lands he hails from is on the way of becoming a thing of the past in the case of my friend Alexandros of Sparta.

Enjoy the pictures and if you happen to be in Sparta pass by at Maniatis Hotel and say hello to Zeus and Europa before they ride off into lovers' heaven again.

And please share the post as widely as you can. Thank you.

Merry Christmas and a Happy and Prosperous New Year to you and your families.

of sparta hotel and Europa art artist

14/10/2021

The first olive oil of the new crop!

I‘m able to report it‘s taste is very delicate, the consistency is velvety and pleasing the palate.

It makes for a perfect condiment and shall play tribute to all of your dishes enhancing the dish‘s very own flavour without being overly present with its own flavours.

We do not know how much oil we will have as the harvest is still underway and will be considerably less than in previous years due to the adverse weather conditions with excessive heat and wildfires. Currently the weather's rather wet and cold for this time of the year.

Please drop us a line here or a private message if you would like to get some of this year's outstanding oil.

Pricing is not yet know as we do not know the volumes of olives the mill is going to process. We pay by the hour of mill time and the lower the number of hours the higher the price because of the fixed costs of the mill.

Due to the low quantity we shall ship on a who has first ordered basis.