Loving Legumes

The quick answer:  Legumes are the best-kept secret in nutrition.  Americans need to eat about ten-fold more legumes, about one serving daily.  Learn how to do it and you’ll save your health as well as the pocketbook.

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Forget About Calories

It’s been a week since the last post.  Sorry about that.  I made the mistake of starting two home projects while trying to keep up with the Olympics.  Now it’s catch-up time.  But first a quick lesson from a conversation with one of the heroes of our time—a family practice doctor. 

The good doctor and I weren’t acquainted; we met at a wedding.  Waiting for the ceremony to start, I begin asking questions.  In medicine, family practice docs do the heavy lifting but the specialists make the big bucks.  So I have a lot of sympathy for these doctors—I see them as the good guys in medicine. 

Our chat turned to the problem of getting people to change ingrained habits.  Too many people ignore basic problems when they can be easily resolved:  Prediabetics don’t reduce their sugar intake or improve their diet; hypertensives don’t monitor their blood pressure; overweight folks blame their problem on their thyroid, or their genes, rather than what’s on their plate.  It’s a common problem for the docs.

Regarding overweight, the doctor said something that made me sit up straight:  “I tell overweight people to eat less calories and get more exercise,” he said, “but they don’t do it.”

“Oh golly,” I said to myself, “how do I tell this good doctor that calories aren’t the issue, nor is exercise?”  In case you wondered, my logic goes like this:

1. Eating less calories isn’t the answer to overweight.  There’s a lot of sad history that this doesn’t work.  Hunger is a powerful force.  People will deny themselves food for the few weeks or months of a diet.  But over the years, we’re going to eat until the hunger goes away.  In the long run, hunger always wins and lost weight is regained, plus a little more.
2. Exercise, though vital to health, isn’t the answer either.  You have to walk a crazy distance just to work off the 400 calories in a 32-oz. soft drink—about six miles.  That’s two hours of walking for a 5-minute snack.  Then there’s the snack you eat after you return home famished.
3. The key is to eat food that fills us up—turns off the hunger signal—before we eat too many calories.  You can do this by choosing food high in nutrients, including fiber, and low in calories.  Fiber-rich food is very filling.
4. Which are the high-nutrient, low-calorie, filling foods?  Just about everything that grows on this good earth.  Check the produce section of your local grocery—there are hundreds of choices. 
5. Sadly, the modern American diet (MAD) is the opposite:  Factory food is high in calories and low in filling nutrients.  It’s easy to eat 1000 calories or more in a fast food meal, for instance.  The Big Mac Value Meal from McDonald’s weights in at 1170 calories but most other factory foods are also calorie dense.
6. You have to cook if you want to eat real food—or be on good terms with a cook.  If you cook with a variety of plants, adding a little meat for flavor, you’ll fill up before grossing out on calories.  Just remember to avoid the white stuff: sugar, white flour, polished rice, or whatever has the color refined out of it.  For most of us, it’s that simple.

Was I able to explain this to the doctor?  Sadly, no.  Doctors receive little or no nutrition training and because they’re supposed to know everything, it’s awkward for most to admit ignorance.  I started to respond but could see his eyes glazing over.  So I fear he’ll go on, advising patients to eat fewer calories and move more.

Legumes 

I failed with the doc, but the chat does make a good segue to our topic: legumes (including beans, peas, and lentils).  Among the foods high in filling fiber but low in calories, legumes are champions.  Legumes are also champs for value.

Dietary Guidelines for Americans

The 2005 edition of the USDA’s DGA recommended 3 cups of (cooked) legumes a week.  Later it was revealed that we’re only eating about 1/3 cup per week.  Based on the gap between ideal and real, the 2010 DGA backed down to 1½ cup.  No reason was given for the change so our own goal is to shoot for 3 cups, or about one serving daily.  Here’s a summary of the reasons to eat legumes daily:

1. Value:  Legumes are flat out the best nutrition buy for the buck. I walked through the bulk bins of the local Sprouts and saw these bargains:  10-bean mix, $1.29/lb; pinto beans $1.49/lb; black beans, $.99/lb; and green split peas, $.99/lb.  Remember these are dry weight so the cost per pound cooked is a fraction, as low as $.30/lb. 
2. Fiber:  Legumes are a rich source of fiber.  We should get 25-38 grams of fiber daily, depending on age and size.  A ½ cup serving of legumes may contain 7-9 grams of fiber, or about 1/3 of the daily recommendation.
3. Minerals: Legumes are a good source of minerals, including calcium and magnesium needed for bone health.
4. Vitamins:  Legumes are a good source for the B complex vitamins, especially folate (folic acid, or B9) which is vital to reducing NTD birth defects.
5. Shelf life:   A lot of toxic stuff is added to factory food to improve the shelf life.  Good stuff, like omega-3 fats, is removed.  But traditional dried legumes enjoy a naturally long shelf life and are a good way to store food and avoid preservatives.
6. Your own shelf life:  In the “Food Habits in Later Life Study,” legumes were the only food group with a proven longevity benefit.  For each 20 gram daily intake (about 1/3 of a serving), the risk of death was reduced 6% (for people 70 or older). 

Well, you get the picture.  Legumes, whatever the type, are high in nutrients and low in calories.  Toss some garbanzo or kidney beans in your salads, or enjoy humus on whole grain crackers.  Or try our recipe for Split Pea Soup with Hambone.  If you want to get fancy, try this recipe for Roasted Salmon with Black Bean-Quinoa Salad, from The Bean Institute.  How about that—the humble bean gets its own institute.

Healthy Change #32:  Include a serving of legumes in your five daily vegetables.

Please comment:  How do you eat legumes?  Share a recipe.

Menu, Week 31

The Sound of Music

A reminder of the Healthy Change for the past week:  “Be muscular; add strength (resistance) exercises to your workout plan.”  In the last post we discussed how the Industrial Revolution flooded us with processed and fast foods, and also with laborsaving devices.  Both of these have become part of our culture so are not easy to change.  But change we must, if we wish to reduce our risk for chronic disease and enjoy health, beauty, and longevity.  The purpose of this blog is to facilitate that cultural transformation, in 52 Healthy Changes.

Remember Maria von Trapp of The Sound of Music?  Maria was a young, music-loving, want-to-be nun who was just too exuberant for life in an abbey.  So she left monastic life and found her happiness with the von Trapp family.  It’s a great story.

Well, we have a delightful woman much like Maria in our community—with a similar name, Ana—a music lover too full of life to remain a nun.  In Ana’s case she surrendered her vows, married a professor of physiology (exercise science), and became a piano teacher to the local children.  I used to meet this woman occasionally on walks and she told of how her husband had done a landmark study of how to take 20 or 30 years off the life of elderly people (as measured by fitness) simply through exercise. 

The study was done with people at a nearby retirement community known at the time as Leisure World (but called “seizure world” by the high school kids).  These were retired people, the oldest 86.  Intrigued, I found a copy of the book, titled Fitness after 50: An Exercise Prescription for Lifelong Health.  The book is out of print and the author, Dr. Herb de Vries, recently passed away (in his 92^nd year), so perhaps I could summarize his exercise program.

Four Basic Exercises

To regain their youth, after a preliminary physical exam, the older people started a 5-day-a-week program combining walking/jogging, stretching, and four basic exercises.  After six weeks they markedly improved in measures of blood pressure, body fat, arm strength, nervous tension, and oxygen capacity.  Within 42 weeks they had regained the physical fitness of people 20-30 years younger.  Now who wouldn’t want that?

Now it’s easy to start walking and, if you choose, you can move on to jogging.  But it’s not as easy to start exercising.  The author suggested four basic in-the-comfort-of-your-home exercises, no equipment required, done three days a week.  Do a comfortable number of repetitions, just a few in the beginning, exhaling and inhaling with muscle contraction and relaxation, repeating this sequence three times:

1. Benders—start in a standing position and reach for your toes, without forcing.  Then raise your hand high and bend back, arching your back a little, but without forcing or falling over backwards.
2. Easy push-ups—start by lying down and using your arms to raise your body, but keeping your knees on the floor.  Later, when you’re stronger, you can do traditional pushups with just your toes on the floor.
3. Flutter kicks—still lying face down, raise one leg off the floor without forcing, pause, and return.  Now repeat, lifting the other leg.
4. Easy sit-ups—lying on your back with your hands beneath your lower back, raise your upper body off the floor as much as you can without forcing.  Pause and return to the floor. 

Dr. de Vries also wrote an exercise textbook still in use, now in the 5^th edition, Physiology of Exercise for Physical Education and Athletics.  But for me, his best contribution was a study showing how exercise is possible and beneficial at any age.  Older and not exercising?  Give Dr. de Vries’ method a try.

Menu for Week #31

Monday

• We were supposed to cook an eggplant and I had an interesting N. Y. Times recipe, “Eggplant and Tomato Gratin,” but we were tired and just had cantaloupe and watermelon with some homemade bread and cheese.  

Tuesday  (We had guests, a former colleague and his wife, we hadn’t seen in 20 years, so a special dinner was in order.)

• Cantaloupe and melon appetizer
• Shrimp salad
• Homemade bread
• Skip’s Apple-Bread Pudding http://www.wordofwisdomliving.com/home/skips-apple-bread-pudding.html

Wednesday

• Greek Lima Beans (leftovers from last week)
• Cantaloupe (more leftovers)

Thursday  (This planned meal didn’t happen, I was in the middle of a project, so we’ll have it next week.)

• Poached salmon
• Rice
• Green salad

Sunday  (Watching the Olympics with family.)

• Poppyseed chicken with rice
• Green salad
• Skip’s Apple-Bread Pudding (Yes, one more time, with a new audience.)

Be Muscular

The Olympics

I’ve been looking at the bodies of the Olympic athletes, impressed with their beauty and grace.  In our society there’s an emphasis on big, bulky muscles.  But the Olympic athletes, excepting a few sports like weight lifting, are elegantly lean.  They’re strong, but their muscles are for function rather than show.  I see them as a model for the rest of us.  You don't have to be an Olympic athlete to be physically fit.

Muscle, Bone, and Fat

Take a long look at the legs in the picture below, shown in cross-section.  The white on the perimeter is fat, at the center it’s bone marrow.  The medium gray stuff is muscle.  The dark annular area is bone.  Do you see how little bone mass the sedentary person has?  That person has way more fat than muscle and is headed for osteoporosis. 

Both 74-year olds—one sedentary, the other a triathlete—have legs about the same size.  But one is mostly fat and the other mainly muscle.  There's a big physiological difference between what fat does to your body and what muscle does, including hormonal function.  You need both, but a healthy person has much more muscle than fat.

Now look at the triathlete of the same age—big difference.  The triathlete has lots of muscle and bone mass and just a little fat.  We don't all need to be that lean; we're not all the same.  What’s remarkable is how similar the 72 year old triathlete is to the top one, who’s 40.  There’s a giant lesson here about how to age well:  Just use your muscles!  We talked about the interaction of bones and muscles in this post.

Dying from Resting

Coordinated to the Olympics, Lancet, the prestigious British medical journal, has an article about physical activity and disease.  Bottom line, physical inactivity has about the same impact on your health as smoking.  If you’re not physically active (a minimum of three hours per week) you have a 9% greater risk of dying from diabetes, heart disease, and certain cancers.  Worldwide, this is about 5 million premature deaths per year.  Imagine—5 million premature deaths.

Labor Saving Devices

The Industrial Revolution brought us many laborsaving devices, but we’ve enjoyed too much of a good thing.  In the way that we’re reexamining how the Industrial Revolution changed food—returning to eating food the way it was first created—we also need to reconsider those laborsaving devices.  We've gone a little crazy here with things like car doors that close themselves.  That really is a little crazy but it raises a good question:

When does it make sense to save labor, and when should we ignore modern devices and labor on in the olden way?  Here are a few examples from our home:

• We grind wheat by hand; it’s hard, takes about 30 minutes to make flour for bread.  An electric grinder would save a lot of swea but I like doing this the way my Dad did.
• I’m touching up the paint on the house this week and that requires a lot of sanding.  I use an electric sander; it’s about three times faster than sanding by hand and it does a more consistent job.
• In our little community, people have golf carts for getting their stuff down to the beach, or for just riding around.  The grandchildren would love a cart, the beautiful wife noted, and some friends have one to sell at a good price.  But we persist in walking, carrying our stuff, though sometimes people offer us a ride. 
• I'm thinking about adding a pull-up bar over our garage.  The BW isn't sure this will look good, but it's a great exercise.  Maybe I could paint it to be less conspicuous.

You see what’s happening—we’re revisiting all those laborsaving devices and questioning their usefulness.  For me, I need a functional advantage to use a machine rather than my muscles.  Otherwise I'll keep things simple and go manual.  But one thing is for sure:  To live a long, healthy life we relearn where and when to use our muscles.  This is a change of direction for our society but leads us to this week’s post:

Please comment:  What do you do to maintain—and build—muscles.  Have you discarded any laborsaving devices?  Do you feel differently now when you do physical work?

A Menu with Lima Beans

Discovering Lima Beans

Here’s the key to the food reformation:  When you eat healthy food, your tastes begin to change—for the better.  The sugary, salty treats you used to enjoy become almost repulsive.  Ditto for the stuff from the deep fat fryer.  In the grocery store you hurry past the aisles of packaged food but linger longingly in the produce section. 

Saturday night the beautiful wife and I joined friends at Taco Rosa in fashionable Newport Beach.  Rosa offers really good food, mostly tacos, Mexico City style.  I was short on seafood for the week so had a lobster taco and a salmon taco.  The BW had the portabello mushroom taco.  On the way out I inspected the hot line, the part of the kitchen where the cooking and heating is done.  I recoiled at the sight of a deep fat fryer—was my crispy lobster taco cooked in that?  You’ve got to be careful when you eat out—the modern restaurant is the no man’s land of nutrition.

On Sunday I wanted to use some dried lima beans, long time residents of our pantry.  Lima beans are a real nutrition bargain, rich in fiber, folate (protective of birth defects), tryptophan (the essential amino acid that improves your mood, regulates appetite, and helps you sleep better), and the essential trace element, molybdenum. 

The BW wife wasn’t excited but I found a N. Y. Times article, “Who Says You Can’t Love Lima Beans?”  The article suggested five recipes and I realized that a Greek style recipe could use the spinach and feta cheese aging in our fridge. A recipe that cleans out leftovers soon to be throwaways—who could resist?

Later, as the BW took her second helping of my concoction, I wondered whether the dish was good enough to post as a recipe.  At first we were doubtful—“Would a child eat this?” she wondered—but the more I ate, the more I liked it.  This led to a discussion of how your taste changes as you eat healthier food and how you write recipes to catch this moving target.  “Look,” I said, “this is a good way to use spinach too wilted for salad (a common problem for us); you can slip in a little squash (I added an aging chayote squash); plus it has lima beans, a great nutrition value. 

All this caused us to realize that our tastes have been in transition and a recipe we wouldn’t have liked a year ago is okay now, and might even be tasty next year.  Perhaps we should have different versions of recipes, depending where you are in the taste transition.  Anyway, I think we’ll post Skip’s Greek Lima Bean Recipe after a little more tinkering.  Would it help to add some eggplant?  Does it need more spinach?  How about some olives?  Stay tuned.

Menu for Week #30

Monday

• Skip’s Turkey Rice Pilaf (we had smoked turkey in the freezer and some wild rice to use)
• Green salad
• Dessert:  Watermelon.  (So tasty, and so easy.)

Tuesday

• Pasta salad (leftover from last week, made from whole grain pasta, grapes, pineapple, cashews, and the last of the BBQ chicken)
• Sliced tomatoes (we actually forgot the tomatoes and just enjoyed the salad)

Wednesday—this was a surprisingly tasty mix of very healthy vegetables and less healthy hot dogs.

• Roasted vegetables (sweet potato and russet potato fries, sweet onion, red pepper)
• Roasted hot dogs (left over from the 4^th of July barbecue)

Thursday  (We took care of very young grandchildren and had breakfast cereal for dinner—don't frown, the grandkids loved it.)

Friday  (Watched the opening ceremony for the Olympics and snacked.)

Saturday (Ate out at Rosa’s Tacos.)

Sunday   

• Skip’s Greek Lima Beans (with spinach, chayote squash, leftover pork tenderloin, and feta cheese—super healthy)
• Watermelon

About That Lunch

The Will to Choose

Eat this, not that.  That’s how I saw nutrition in the beginning—just make better choices.  Now I see it’s more.  Good nutrition is a cultural shift, a new paradigm, a brave new world that rejects Food Inc’s heavily advertised processed foods.  It’s a return to cooking the traditional foods of our ancestors, though with more choices.  It’s about conscious choices rather than drifting with the fads of the day.

The growth in choice is the big change.  I walked through the produce section of the local grocery store and counted over one hundred different fruits and vegetables.  In the bulk section of the local health food store there are another hundred choices, ranging from whole grains to seeds, nuts and legumes. 

An incredible variety of healthy foods can be made from these two hundred or so natural and inexpensive ingredients.  All you need is a menu, shopping list, a basic kitchen, and some recipes.  Welcome to the food reformation.

The Four Meals

If you take a step back, there are four meal types: breakfast, lunch, dinner, and snacks.  We’ve been addressing these meals, one by one in our Healthy Changes:

• HC #4 advocated eating breakfast, with more grams of fiber than sugar in your cereal.  Breakfast is the easiest meal to make healthy and a good place to start your food reformation.  Sometimes I think the double whammy of hot drinks like coffee, banned by the Word of Wisdom, was how they boosted the use of sugar on one hand and became a substitute for a breakfast of real food on the other.  Eat real food, like our Breakfast Compote with fruit.
• HC #8 provided a way to control impulse snacking:  Enjoy a healthy mix of snacks by making a daily snack plate.  We talked about this in the post, The Joy of Snacking, and readers shared ideas in the post titled, The Snack Plate. 
• HC #17 advised eating dinner as a family.  We shared ideas in the post titled, Family Dinner.  Dinner is about more than the food; the dinner table is where people become families.  The post gave 10 benefits for your family from dining together.
• HC #30 is this weeks subject and it addresses the overlooked meal, lunch.

Lunch

Many working people combine eating out with brown bagging, though there are more creative options now than the brown bag of my youth.  In my working years I tried to eat healthy but was totally unaware of what to eat and what to avoid.  Example:  a common lunch was a hamburger with fries and a soft drink in the company cafeteria.  In retrospect, that was pretty bad.

Lunch Choices

Your lunch options are both reduced and enhanced by past Healthy Changes:

• HC #1 slashed sugary drinks to one (12 oz.) serving per week.
• HC #2 outlawed deep fat fried foods.
• HC #6 laid the groundwork for increasing vegetable intake to five servings daily.  To make this USDA goal, you need at least one veggie at lunch.
• HCs #3 and #10 called for more fiber than sugar in cereal and bread products.  These five healthy changes pretty much destroy the typical fast food menu.
• HC #12 suggested eating a green salad most days and lunch is a good time to start.
• HC #15 recommended including foods with omega-3 fat in each meal.
• HC #25 advised eating foods rich in vitamin K-2, like Gouda cheese, liver (or liverwurst), as well as eggs and meat from pastured animals.

Eating Out?

The Healthy Changes severely limit the menu options of most fast food joints, but not completely: 

Wendy’s serves surprisingly good green salads.  The tuna-on-wheat at the Subway provides whole grains plus omega-3 fats, and you can load it with vegetables (but skip the bag of chips). 

A few casual fast food restaurants feature healthy options:

Chipotle’s Mexican Grill features burritos and tacos made with organic rather than CAFCO meat, which means it’s pasture fed with restricted antibiotic use.  Their burrito has been criticized for its 1000+ calories but you can order it in a bowl, replacing the flour tortilla and white rice with more beans and veggies. 

Panera offers plenty of bad food but there are also healthy salad, soup and sandwich combinations available.  Panera reportedly teams up with Chipotle in buying healthy meat.

Brown Bagging?

Take the time to prepare a lunch from whole ingredients, rather than packaged processed foods.  Use the Healthy Changes to guide your food selections.  This is a great way to use leftovers. 

Smart moms borrow a good idea from the Japanese with bento boxes, which allows a variety of small servings, including fruits and vegetables.  For ideas see here and here.

Reader Rill has a blog titled Bree’s Lunch Box that offers wholesome, affordable lunch ideas.  Rill gets the food reformation; she’s a voice for healthier and more creative lunch choices.

School Lunch

It’s summer now but September will be here in a minute.  For ideas on school lunches, check last year’s blog  The Good Lunch and look over the reader suggestions.

Please comment:  Share your best lunch ideas, the favorite lunch treats that leave you feeling happy for what you just ate.

Regaining Our Balance

Happy Birthday to the BW

The beautiful wife starts her day walking with a few dear friends.  Depending on who’s there, they get in up to 10,000 steps.  They call it pavement therapy.  Their tongues must be tied to their quadriceps for they talk non-stop, chattering like the birds in the forest.  It’s a happy sound heard by many as they tirelessly circle the neighborhood.  It's amazing to me, how they never run out of words.    

The walk doesn’t tire her; in fact, she returns recharged, especially if they catch a pretty sunrise or someone has exciting news to share.  In contrast, I take my exercise at midday—hiking or cycling—for the vitamin D.  (The BW sunbathes on the patio for her "D".)  I do my workout alone, head bowed, deep in thought.  I stop here and there to do exercises.  When I return I’m sweaty, exhausted, and quiet.  See how different we are from each other?

Some years ago I read a short story that has stayed with me—The Visionary Maid and the Illusionless Man.  It’s about a girl who dances into the life of a rather dull boy.  The fellow is a steady and practical soul—a realist whose glass hovers below half-empty.  The girl is a joyful song who dreams a world of possibilities.  Her glass, of course, runneth over. 

The boy falls in love and they marry.  After the honeymoon the husband begins to puncture her dreams, one by one.  This isn’t done out of meanness; it’s just important, he feels, to be realistic about life.   Over the years this negativism takes its toll and one day the wife announces that as he doesn’t seem to appreciate or enjoy her, she’ll be leaving.  The husband, confronted by a world without her daily sunshine, begs her to stay and promises to change.  Funny thing, I can't remember how the story ended—whether it was, or wasn't, too late for him to change. 

You can appreciate why that story has stayed with me, can’t you?  It’s the beautiful wife’s birthday today and I’m on my best behavior.  Yes, that's her, the mom in the pix above.  The four children were joined by two more and all have their own families now but the BW remains remarkably unchanged. 

Catching Your Balance

Remember Eric Hoffer?  Hoffer was blind in his youth so missed the conventional education most of us suffer.  As a consequence, he spent his life in manual labor when his vision returned, working as a migrant farm worker, and then longshoreman in San Francisco.  Though he worked at menial tasks, his thoughts were large.  Here’s one that fits us today:

Action is at bottom a swinging and flailing of the arms to regain one’s balance and keep afloat.

We lost our food balance this last week, overtaken by events.  A grandson was born and we cared for his siblings for two days.  Rather than follow our menu, we ate what the grandkids would like and that started a week of drifting.  So this menu puts two weeks together and ignores some improvised meals.  There’s a lesson here:  You’ll lose your food balance now and them—that’s life, it happens—but it ‘s important to swing and flail about until order is restored.  This morning we wrote a good menu for the coming week—order's restored.

Past Menu (We started with a Costco BBQ chicken, with the idea to spread it over three meals.)

Monday

• Roast chicken (We made 3 quarts of stock from the carcass.)
• Roast potatoes.
• Green salad

Tuesday

• Chicken rice pilaf  (a meal in one dish using leftover chicken and vegetables—recipe to follow)
• Dessert:  Cantaloupe. 

Wednesday

• Chicken salad (last of the chicken)
• Asparagus
• Watermelon

Thursday

• Beth’s Vegetarian Enchiladas (from the freezer)
• Green salad
• Dessert:  Cantaloupe. 

Sunday (A family birthday dinner)

• Roast pork tenderloin (yes, Costco)
• Pasta salad
• Mixed greens salad with pears, cranberries, and feta cheese.
• Orange Jello salad (a birthday request—tasty but pretty unhealthy)
• Skip’s Homemade Applesauce
• Apple pie with ice cream (I should have baked a cake)

Better Menus

The Creative Force

Most of you know of our daughter Brooke, who writes the popular blog Inchmark.  (If you go to Inchmark and scroll down a bit, you can see a picture of the beautiful wife, taken back in the day.)  It was Brooke, when I noted the need for a good book on living the Mormon health code known as the Word of Wisdom, who suggested I first write a blog.  “A blog,” she promised, “will start a dialogue that tell you what readers actually want to know.”  So we started this blog, and she was right—we’ve learned a lot from reader comments and suggestions. 

Brooke, who polished her graphic design skills as an art director at Martha Stewart Living, has also guided the design of this blog.  She provides the artwork for the Healthy Changes and regularly pushes for better design in my posts.  Another daughter is a photographer and up to the birth of her second child, provided many of the pictures.  There’s a big difference between her pictures and mine, so I get some pushing on that also. I don't mind the pushing; I'm pleased by all my children's competence.

So this Monday, when Brooke was about to leave her house, I asked if she couldn’t post my photos for the recipe post on Apple-Bread Pudding, before she left.  She gave me a look I remember from her teen years—not quite a roll of the eyes, and a little short of an exasperated sigh, but definitely a “look.”  But she posted the photos and hurried out the door.  Where was she headed?  To the hospital—she delivered a baby boy a few hours later.  He’s really cute.

A New Food Culture

To escape the 20^th century way of dying—the tragic tendency to premature death—we first have to change the way we live.  It’s pretty hard to change one’s lifestyle.  In fact, based on how people continue to live after some dangers are known, it’s darn near impossible.  But if we divide that change into 52 weekly steps that any motivated person could do, and provide supporting information and encouragement, then nearly impossible, becomes very doable. 

One of our early insights was that unhealthy living is the default consequence of failing to live with purpose.  If you don’t swim upstream, societal currents, cleverly promoted by Food Inc, will carry you downstream.  It’s like we’re playing in the water just above Niagara Falls—there’s real danger downstream.

So planning and organizing is key to living with purpose; they keep us—and our families—from being swept downstream. 

In Healthy Change #3 we invited you to “Write a weekly dinner menu.”

In Healthy Change #16 we said, “Shop with a menu-based grocery list.”

These are the two keys to taking control of your cuisine:  Write a menu and use a shopping list.

Dealing with Complexity

A couple of years ago I was at the annual meeting for anesthesiologists, sitting in on a doctor’s session about reducing the unacceptable death toll from accidents and mistakes by healthcare providers.  These avoidable deaths, the speaker claimed, just in the U.S., are equivalent to a 747 airliner crashing every single day of the year.  There was a collective gasp from the assembled doctors; this was a new look at an old problem. 

It’s rare for an airliner to crash, so the airline industry is doing something very smart.  The speaker suggested that healthcare people could learn from what the airlines had done, and proposed procedural tools such as the required use of a pre-flight, or pre-operation, checklist.

Well the recent Healthy Change Report Card is a form of checklist.  When I graded myself with the mid-year Healthy Change Report Card, my score fell short of perfection (I scored 110 of 130 possible).  The year’s just half over, but it’s hard to juggle even 26 Healthy Changes.  So, thinking of how pilots manage complexity, I decided to add a checklist to my menu.  The menu is basically for dinner planning, but these Healthy Changes apply to dinner:

• Include omega-3 fats in each meal.  We do pretty well with breakfast because we include fresh-ground flaxseed.  But we don’t always make another omega-3 goal: 2 weekly servings of fish.  So I’m adding this to my menu form.
• Eat a big green salad most days.  This suggests at least four salads per week and adds to omega-3 intake.  We eat a lot of green salads, but sometimes we wander out of the habit.  So I’m adding this to my menu form.
• Eat orange fruits and vegetables each day.  I’m not sure how if I make this every day so I’m adding it to the menu form too.
• Eat eggs from healthy chickens, in moderation.
• Enjoy a variety of whole grains.  We do well at this with our breakfast, but we can do better with our dinners, so another item for the list.

When Brooke has settled in with her new baby, we’ll share a menu planning form with a checklist included.  In the meantime I’ll practice with an improvised list.

Please comment:  Share your menu writing ideas and resources.  What works best for you?

Skip's Apple-Bread Pudding

A New Food Culture

In response to reader demand, we made a goal to publish 52 recipes to support the 52 Healthy Changes.  Because the recipes support the new food culture—the transformation from factory food-like stuff to natural foods—we call them breakthrough recipes.  The breakthrough recipes aren't new—they're just healthier versions of traditional dishes.  They maximize natural ingredients and minimize refined stuff, like sugar.  Here are the recipes by category:

• Breakfast, 4
• Drinks, 1 (Green Smoothie)
• Breads, 4
• Salads, 5
• Dips, 2
• Fish, 2
• Meat, 3
• Soups, stews, and legume dishes, 10 (The best value in dining.)
• Vegetables, 9 (This is the critical issue—eating more vegetables.)
• Grain, 1 (Skip’s Chicken Rice Pilaf)
• Casseroles, 3
• Desserts, 4 (We look for flavors that depend on natural ingredients rather than sugar.)
• Miscellaneous, 4

Sometimes I’m surprised by how hard it is to improve a recipe, even though it’s based on a traditional food, so I fall behind.  I work hard on this but may need to borrow a few favorite recipes from readers to complete the year.  This week’s recipe goes with Healthy Change 27: Enjoy your candy a piece at a time; never bring a bag or box into the home. 

Bread Pudding

Las Brisas is a popular seaside restaurant in Laguna Beach and they serve a great buffet brunch.  I always finish with their bread pudding, a dish my Mom used to make, which includes a sweet sauce.  I like it but I have to admit it’s pretty sugary.  So my challenge here is a healthy bread pudding—meaning it doesn’t rely on sugar for flavor and has whole ingredients.

Bread pudding is a traditional recipe, so I looked in my Fanny Farmer 1896 Cook Book.  Sure enough Ms Farmer had a recipe and it used only 1/3 cup of sugar, though the Vanilla Sauce added ½ cup. 

To make a bread pudding from natural ingredients instead of refined sugar I included fruit—apples and raisins.  Apples and raisins also go with the spices common to bread puddings—vanilla, cinnamon, and nutmeg.  I added walnuts because I'm a Californian; if I lived in Georgia I'd use pecans.

Because bread pudding is custard, it’s sometimes cooked immersed in water to avoid over heating the eggs.  Fanny Farmer used a “slow” oven.  It seemed simpler to follow Ms. Farmer, so I set my oven at 275 F.

The result of my experiments was an easy-to-make healthy pudding. There’s no sugary sauce but I do like it with a little vanilla ice cream, Greek yogurt, cream, or whipped cream.  The beautiful wife liked the result—she prefers it with a dollop of Greek yogurt, seen below—but thought the pudding tasted more like an apple pie, so we called it Apple-Bread Pudding.

Skip’s Apple-Bread Pudding

Ingredients: (Feeds 8)

• 3-4 slices of whole wheat bread (bread can be stale, but not moldy)
• 2 apples, peeled and sliced or diced
• 1 C chopped walnuts
• 1 C raisins
• 2 C milk
• 2+4 T butter
• 4-6 eggs (for more of a custard texture, increase the eggs)
• Optional: ½ C brown sugar or turbinado
• 1 tsp vanilla
• 1 rounded tsp cinnamon
• ½ tsp fresh nutmeg
• ½ tsp salt (or less if butter is salted)

Directions:  (Preparation: 30 minutes.  Baking time: 50-60 minutes.)

1. Turn oven on to 275 F.  Warm milk in a saucepan just enough to melt butter.
2. Peel apples, remove core, and thinly slice or chop.  In a warm frying pan, sauté apples in 2 T butter about 10 minutes, stirring occasionally, to soften and caramelize.
3. While apples are cooking, break bread into crumbs and mix with raisins and nuts in a 2-qt. baking dish.  Stir sautéed apples into baking dish.
4. Prepare custard mix by melting 3 T butter in warmed milk and beat in eggs, adding optional sugar, and spices. (Note: I forgot to add the sugar once and nobody noticed, though we all had a little Greek yogurt or ice cream with the pudding, so I made the sugar optional.)
5. Pour custard mix over bread mixture in baking dish; press crumbs down as needed to moisten. 
6. Bake in a warm oven (275 F), 50-60 minutes, until top layer is nicely done but not dry.

Comments:  Do you have a favorite dessert that isn’t too sweet and uses natural ingredients, like fruit?  Please share it.

Report Card

A Quarter of Change

The beautiful wife was out shopping the other day and decided to get a treat, some guilty pleasure.  "It was terrible," she wailed.  "All the treats I used to like don't look good anymore."  I couldn't tell if she was sad or glad that her tastes had improved, but it was clear that I was to blame.  I didn't dare say it, but her woeful tale brought to mind the biblical story about Lot's wife, and her longing look back at Babylon.  Or was it Sodom?  Whatever, it was an encouraging sign of change for Skip's wife, who remains more sweet than salty. 

We’ve said it before in this blog, but it’s worth saying again: Talk is easy—Change is hard.  The purpose of this blog isn’t only to entertain, but more to guide the reformation of your diet.  The tragedy of the 20^th century wasn’t just the adulteration of our food supply by Food Inc, but the confusion about what to do next.  The purpose of the 52 Healthy Changes is to provide a roadmap to a better diet, based on an ordinary man's common sense use of science, food tradition, and scripture. 

We provided the Scorecard below at the end of the first quarter, to help you measure your progress.   We even offered a prize for the best score. 

Another Quarter of Change

Since then we’ve introduced 13 more Healthy Changes, listed below in brackets, following the title of the post, beginning with #14:

14.  Eggs and Fertility  (Enjoy eggs from healthy chickens, in moderation.)

15.  Omega-3 Essential Fats  (Include omega-3 fats in each meal.)

16.  Your Choice: Chaos or Order  (Shop with a menu-based grocery list.)

17.  Family Dinner  (Eat dinner together as a family.)

18.  Stretching  (Include stretching in your exercise regime.)

19.  Vitamin A  (Eat orange fruits and vegetables each day.)

20.  Vitamins From Food  (Get your vitamins the traditional way, with a whole food diet of vegetables, legumes, fruits, nuts, whole grains, and a little meat—plus a little noontime sun for vitamin D.)

21.  The Joy of Fasting  (Consult your doctor about the wisdom of fasting for a day each month—being sure to drink adequate water.)

22.  The Milk Wars  (Until better milk is available, protect your health by drinking sparingly, if at all.)

23.  In Praise of Whole Grains  (Eat a variety of whole grains.)

24.  A Family Heritage  (Preserve your family recipes.)

25.  Animals Need Vegetables Too  (Include foods rich in vitamin K-2 in your diet.)

26.  Sleep, Blessed Sleep  (Get adequate sleep, 8-9 hours depending on the season, in the dark.)

Mid-Year Report Card

We've put together a report card (PDF format), listing all the Healthy Changes of the 1st and 2nd quarters. Print the card and give yourself a grade on how well you're doing (with a score of 1 to 5 points per Healthy Change). Once again, we'll have a prize for the reader with the best score. (In the next post I'll share my score, and confess to my shortcomings.)

Please comment:  Share your score for the first 26 Healthy Changes with a comment on how you've been helped by eating and living better.  Once again, the prize for the best score will be a copy of Mike Pollan's In Defense of Food. 

The Lowdown on Chips

 

Food Gone Bad

We believe in American exceptionalism, the idea that our nation should be a “shining city on a hill” to the world.  Pilgrim leader John Winthrop coined this phrase in a famous speech aboard the Mayflower.  Today the evidence rests with the millions of people around the world who want nothing more than to come to America.  I also believe in the free enterprise system, but with a dreadful caveat:  In the last century it ruined the American diet.

I don’t see this—the way Food Inc ruined the American diet—as a criminal act, though some might.  I see it more as an act of ignorance, committed by our most capable people—the CEOs of Food Inc, elected officials, food scientists, and other coconspirators. 

The goal of the food reformation is to restore healthy food to the American dietary.  It’s a good thing, how the Industrial Revolution freed us from backbreaking labor.  But the way it adulterated natural food is a bad thing that people of good will must now reform.  We outline this reformation with our 52 Healthy Changes.

Healthy Fats

As you know, the Healthy Changes follow 13 themes that repeat each quarter.  The theme of this week is healthy fats.  Our goal is to help you replace unhealthy fats with less-processed healthy fats.  The nation has been on a foolish crusade against fat.  Experts who should have known better told us to minimize traditional, less processed fats like butter.  Saturated fats, eaten safely for millennia, were declared villains.  Highly processed, hydrogenated fats were ignorantly recommended.  This is the kind of craziness that happens with Food Inc. 

Here are our four Healthy Changes for fat:

Never buy deep fat fried foods:  This is so important we made it out 2^nd Healthy Change of 2012.  By now just about everyone knows that hydrogenated trans fats—introduced with unwarranted and unproven health claims in the form of Crisco, margarine, and vegetable oils—are unhealthy and should be avoided.  But it’s not advertised or generally known that hydrogenated fats are still widely used for deep fat frying.  This Healthy Change means no French fries, corn dogs, donuts, or most fried fast foods, like fish chips or chicken.  I consider the oils used for deep fat frying to be toxic, not only because of the trans fats, but also because they’re solvent-refined vegetable oils that are highly oxidized due to high-temperature extended exposure to air while in the fryer.   

Include omega-3 fats in each meal:  Certain vital fats are considered essential—for good health you must get them in your diet.  The essential fats come in two groups: Omega-3 and omega-6.  Basically, we eat too much omega-6 (found in refined seed oils) and too little omega-3.  The ratio matters.  The crazy thing about our omega-3 deficiency is that it’s the most abundant fat on the planet.  The short-chain form is found in green plants, including algae.  The long-chain forms are found in the fat of pastured animals and cold-water fish.  Your body needs these—your brain, for example, is 25% omega-3.  Getting regular omega-3, especially long-chain, makes you smarter and reduces any later risk of dementia.

Limit chips to national holidays, or for scooping healthy dips or salsas:  This week’s healthy change goes after the next biggest source of unhealthy fats.  We’ll talk more about it below.

Eat traditional fats (olive oil, butter, lard, etc.) in moderation:  This is our final fat topic and will come in the 41^st week.  For a long time we’ve heard that fat is bad and were told that reduced-fat, or low fat, was good.  But there’s growing evidence that the French have it right:  Enjoy healthy, traditional fats in moderation.

The Problem with Chips

I started my working career, fresh out of engineering school, with the venerable firm of Procter & Gamble.  P&G had a food division; the most famous product was Crisco shortening.  Crisco, we know now, was a really unhealthy idea, though it did make a lot of money.  P&G has since sold Crisco.

The wise men at P&G, in search of more money, studied the chip market.  At the time it was a regional business; lots of companies made chips, especially potato chips.  P&G thought they could take over that market with an engineered food product called Pringles.  Most of us at P&G were engineers so it made perfect sense to “engineer” raw materials into new food products.  It was a classic case of smart people collectively doing a dumb thing.

It’s been 40 years since Pringles was introduced with a marketing blitz.  The history didn’t turn out well; the product had limited success and was recently sold by P&G in an admission of failure.  During those 40 years another company came to dominate the once-regional chip business—PepsiCo’s Frito-Lay brand.  We discussed chips and Frito-Lay’s dominance in the food aisle visit reported here.

So what’s the problem with chips?  Regardless of the type, they’re simply the starchy portion of a grain or vegetalbe (whether corn, potatoes, or wheat) fried in refined oils.  Chips are a processed factory food.  Sometimes they’re baked, or “popped” but they’re still processed starch cooked with refined oil and salt.  Based on location, chips are a big money maker for grocery stores.  But there’s nothing wholesome about chips—it’s best to eat your grains or vegetables minimally processed, not fried into chips.  Here’s a better idea for potatoes:  Try our Oven Roasted Fries recipe.

We don’t stock chips in our pantry, though we do enjoy them with healthy dips (recipe to follow) on special occasions, like national holidays.  Whether made of corn, wheat, or potatoes, chips are basically the starchy portion, salted and fried in refined oils.  

Please comment:  Got a favorite, healthy recipe for a dip of salsa?  Please share.