the snack plate

A few years ago I was offered a position at a medical device start-up with an improved syringe for performing epidurals.  Mothers are experts on the blessed relief from labor pain given by epidural anesthesia, but often have stories about a complication they or a friend may have suffered.  We thought that our device could reduce the risk of certain complications but what we learned was that doctors are reluctant to switch away from whichever epidural method they were first trained to use. 

Introducing a new medical device is a tedious process so like many start-ups, this company offered a pantry of free snacks.  To keep us near the office, they also provided a free lunch brought in from local take-out restaurants.  The dishes were ordered from a stack of menus and were typically fried foods.  In the beginning I limited myself to salad for lunch, avoided the free snacks, and mostly drank water.  In time I tired of lunching on poorly made salads and began to order cooked dishes—fried in low-cost oils, I suspect.  I also began to snack on the chips, candies and soft drinks offered.  Just an occasional snack in the beginning, but without really noticing my addiction grew.  Within a year I suffered an increase in weight and a troubling decline in health. 

Have you or your spouse had this experience?  The first thing I did was start bringing my own snacks to eat during work breaks.  After I left this company I began to read about healthier eating.  I was continually being surprised—about sugar, trans fats, etc.—by things that I didn’t know, or had forgotten, that were essential to healthy living.  Two years and perhaps a hundred books later I started this blog.  Today’s post is about the snacks we eat—the best indicator of our addiction to unhealthy food.  Here are a couple of reports:

• This N.Y. Times article about classic junk snacks has a list that includes Cracker Jacks, Tootsie Rolls, Double Bubble, Twinkies and the Big Gulp/Double Gulp.  Read it and weep.

• Breakfast sets up the snacks:  Dr. David Ludwig of Tufts University and Children’s Hospital Boston reported that a healthy (low G.I.) breakfast results in 81% less snacking calories during the day, compared to a sugary (high G.I.) breakfast.

• The AJCN article “Does hunger and satiety drive eating anymore?” found in the 30 years from the mid-‘70s to 2006, adult snack calories grew from 200 daily to 470; children increased from 240 to 500 calories.  You know where those calories wind up.

• Another N.Y. Times article, discussed how parental guilt and the decline of planned meals add up to giving in to kids on their favorite snacks (typically the worst food available).

• Factoid:  this year we’ll average about a dollar spent each day on snacks—redirecting this money to healthy food is the best opportunity to improve your diet on a fixed budget.

Snacks are an enormous business in our society.  Take a walk through your grocery store, down the candy aisle, the chip section, the cookie row, and through the cracker area.  (You can remember these as the four “C’s”.)  If this made you thirsty wander by the aisle for sugary drinks—it’s the biggest section.  If there’s an in-store bakery check it out.  These are the most toxic section of the grocery store and it’s a big, profitable business.  People are starting to wise up on toxic snacks and this makes Food Inc. nervous.  They monitor us through research like “Mintel’s Healthy Snacking Report”.  Some recent observations:

• The snack market is divided into 20 snack categories:  cereal, cheese, crackers, cookies, fruit, ice cream, meat snacks, dried fruit/fruit snacks, trail mix, popcorn, chips, pretzels, raw veggies, rice cakes, snack bars, yogurt, bagels/bialys (a flat bread), canned soup, chocolate candy bar, nuts/seeds.

• Food Inc’s big question:  How much taste will we give up for our health?

• Consumers want healthy but they also want tasty.  Corn and potato chips are an example of our bipolar behavior:  72% of consumers eat them but only 4% think they’re healthy.  Ditto for packaged cookies.

• At the other end of the spectrum are nuts and seeds:  79% of us eat them and 87% think they’re healthy.  More expensive, but you get both taste and health.  Add fresh fruit: though just 66% partake regularly, 96% see them as healthy.  (What is the other 4% thinking?)

A high dependence on snacks is an indicator of poor health.  But even healthy people need a mid-morning or mid-afternoon refresher.  Just remember, the more sugar in the snack, the sooner you’ll crave more.  So what to eat?  Here are our favorites:

• Raw vegetables like carrots and celery.  Actually these aren’t my favorites, but it’s hard to get five vegetable servings a day if you don’t get at least one snacking.

• Fruit.  We all have our favorites but cantaloupe and watermelon are underrated.

• Nuts and seeds—not the cheapest snack but a good health value.

• I like nut/dried fruit mixtures: dates with walnuts, or dried mangos with pecans. 

• Popcorn, but not the sugared or microwave products.  Is there a better mix of taste and value than homemade popcorn?

• Yogurt—buy the brand with the least added sugar and add your own fruit.

• Dark chocolate.  I like dark chocolate chips with almonds or walnuts.

• Granola or its cousin, trail mix—purchased or homemade.

• Crackers that meet the grain rule (whole grains; more grams of natural fiber than added sugar).  Yes, I’ll visit the cracker aisle and give a list in a future post. 

Children naturally understand healthy snacks.  A mom told of overhearing her children playing a made-up game: create a healthy snack.  The daughter was the judge of her brother’s entries.  The first brother’s snack was slices of carrot on a Graham cracker.  The next entry was a child’s multivitamin covered with honey.  They have much to learn, but children are teachable and more observant than we realize.

Impulse often drives our snacking and the lack of planning makes for less healthy snacks.  We can also lose track of how much we nibble on in a day.  The solution: Make a snack plate about mid-morning, or whenever you can.  Lay out a healthy mix of snacks for the day and enjoy.  (When I forget to do this, I regret it.)

(Or a snack bag instead of a plate if you work away from home.)

Please comment on your favorite healthy snacks.  (I’m expecting a LOT of comments, please.)

Need a reminder? Download our Healthy Change reminder card. Print and fold, then place in your kitchen or on your bathroom mirror to help you remember the Healthy Change of the week.

the end of diets

We awoke this morning to a wonderland of white, from snow falling quietly in the night.  We live near the beach in California but traveled Saturday to the small town high in the Wasatch Mountains of Utah where my wife’s father, John Huber, grew up in the years between the World Wars.  This home has been in the family for over a century; we are its keeper now.  Built in the Victorian farmhouse style, its thick stone walls are a storehouse of family tradition.  The Hubers had been farmers for as long as anyone could remember.  John’s grandparents brought their farming traditions when they emigrated from Switzerland in the 1860s.  Here, they planted apple and pear orchards, and built a creamery cooled by water from a mountain spring.  The males of the family kept cows and planted wheat, oats, potatoes and onions.  The women tended a large kitchen garden, helped in the fields when needed, and baked bread twice a week using their own wheat (ground at the local mill).  This was the life of the traditional farming family.

You’ve heard of the roaring ‘20s?  Not so for the farmers—those were hard times.  In the post-WWI recession, crop prices were terribly low.  In the ‘30s, recession turned to Depression and prices fell even lower.  There was seldom any money in the Huber home; they raised what they ate or bartered with the person who made it.  The Johnson family kept the local mill for grinding wheat; Uncle Cooney across the way smoked their hams.  (My wife has a childhood memory of him yodeling as he called his cows from pasture.)

Did I say hard times?  I wrote John’s memoir just before his passing.  The childhood he recalled had a warm and golden glow.  His grandparents were founders of his town and his closest neighbors were all related.  Forty-three first cousins lived within shouting distance of his home.  At the end of his life, John still missed the breakfast groats his mother cooked (a hot cereal of oats and wheat with unpasteurized cream from their cow), the hearty homemade breads, and the fried trout that the boys caught in the creek by their farm.  He remembered the comforting sight of the root cellar packed full in the fall with the crops that would carry them through the winter.  They worked long days in the summer but in the winter they spent quiet evenings around the wood-burning stove that cooked their food, heated the water, and warmed the house.  It was a treat, he recalled, to get an apple out of the root cellar, dip it in the teakettle to warm it, and then remove the peel in a single piece with his pocketknife.    

John was the last in his line to grow up on a farm; when he came of age he sought his fortune in the city.  It was the modern thing to do; the world was changing and ambitious young men didn’t want to get left behind.  If there was one dish that marked the shift from traditional farm food to the modern diet, perhaps it was the Angel Food cake.   The Angel Food cake, in contrast to the whole-grain breads John had grown up on, was light, white, and ever so sweet.  The ingredients came from distant factories not the local mill, so had to be purchased.  The cake required equal amounts of powdered sugar, granulated sugar, white refined cake flour, plus an eggbeater to whip the egg whites.  Welcome to the modern diet.  

John, in his lifetime, saw all the phases of the modern diet: cheap sugar and refined flour; hydrogenated shortenings, margarines, and vegetable oils; processed foods easily prepared in your kitchen; and finally, take-out and fast foods that made your kitchen redundant.   Setting aside chronic disease, there is another result of modern food—we gain weight.  From weight gain, a new fad evolved—the diet.  The word now meant a temporary deprivation where you lost enough fat for your friends to notice, before returning to what you were eating before.  You could write a book about all the diets that have come and gone.  As noted in the post The Skinny on Being Overweight, eating less refined carbs lowers both blood glucose and insulin, which reduces stored fat.  From this concept came the Atkins Diet, which was a redo of England’s Banting Diet of the 1800s.

The French have a different approach to food.  Though they enjoy sweet buttery sauces and pastries, they are blessed with trim figures and a low rate of heart disease.  This is called the French paradox.  What was missed in our understanding of their diet was a strong discipline about food:  The French eat multiple courses but small servings; they don’t have the American disdain for whole foods like vegetables; and there is little between-meal snacking.  Well that has been changing—there is now a McDonald’s on the Champ-Elysees in Paris and the French are gaining weight and resorting to a most American mistake: le diet.

Last week the N.Y. Times wrote about the French take on the Atkins Diet—the Dukan Diet, the creation of the latest diet millionaire, Dr. Pierre Dukan.  The article was pimping a new book about Dukan’s diet.  What I found most fascinating about the story (“The French Diet You’ve Never Heard Of”) was the reader’s contempt, as shown in their comments.  The Times readers, at least the ones writing, are totally done with diets.  They recognize the absurdity of a temporary change to solve a long-term problem.  They were angry—with the N.Y. Times for recycling a discredited concept—and were calling, I thought, for a return to wiser food traditions. 

This brings us back to the Huber home, and their food tradition.  The table where I write is in the old parlor.  Before me (because of the thick walls) is a beautifully trimmed window.  Still standing in the distance, under a mantle of snow, are the sheds where they kept the milk cow and chickens.  In the foreground is the area where the kitchen garden once grew.  Close by is the root cellar.  Writing John Huber’s memoir was hard because it was my first book.  But there was a hidden blessing:  He shared with me all the charming details of how people ate before food was made in factories.  As noted, the source for Word of Wisdom Living is the three-legged stool of science, food tradition, and scripture.  Our quest is not a diet to lose weight, but each reader’s discovery of how to eat and be well.  This is a journey best made together, though our answers will vary as we do.

Please comment and share your best healthy food discoveries.

the butter aisle

Have you watched the TV program “Amazing Race” where teams race from city to city?  Same deal here, but we’re inside a supermarket.  We started in the cereal aisle and then moved to the bread aisle, searching for foods that met our health criteria of whole grains plus more natural fiber than added sugar.  Unfortunately, only a few products passed our test.  Finding healthy foods outside the produce department isn’t that easy.

Today we’re in the butter aisle.  At least I think of it as the butter aisle, but it’s mostly soybean oil.  It’s a strange world, not as simple as I thought: there are 72 different products offered.  This seems like marketing trickery: instead of offering a few healthy products at good value, there is a confusing jumble of stuff of unknown healthiness.  Butter and hydrogenated margarine products are at opposite ends of the aisle, glaring at each other over the tubs of “spreads”.  Spreads?  Spreads are the new name for what we used to call soft margarine. 

Butter:  There's a good feeling to the butter section.  The companies are old, venerable.  Challenge Dairy Products has been in business since 1911; their Danish Creamery brand has been around since 1895.  Things are simpler here; butter is mainly sold salted in cubes.  You can also buy it unsalted, whipped, or organic (Horizon Organic, or Wild Harvest).  The ingredient list is refreshingly short for butter.  Prices range from $4.49 for the store brand to $8.78 for Plugra European Style Butter, but most brands are around $5.00 a pound.  This could be all you need except some are allergic to milk products or are avoiding saturated fats (a topic for another day).  Land O’ Lakes is a cooperative offering butter but also blends it with olive oil, or canola oil (which gives an omega-3 label claim).  Life’s good in the butter section; the local Henry's even has natural cream from pasture-fed cows.

Margarine:  Margarine was a bad idea that hung around for a century.  The soft margarines were highest in trans fats and they have pretty much disappeared.  The hard margarines have trans fats too, but less, so they are still sold.  How much trans fat?  It ranges from 1.5 to 3.0 grams per serving.  Several brands claimed “zero” as allowed by the FDA but the ingredient list said “hydrogenated” so this suggests they just have less than 0.5 grams.  The Institute of Medicine recommends that we eat no trans fats so why are these products still offered?  Because some poor person will buy them—they sell at rock bottom prices, as low as $.99 per pound for the store brand.  Some day we’ll address why the supermarkets stopped caring about their customers.

Spreads in Tubs:  The old margarines are called spreads now.  In recent years a product called Smart Balance made life difficult for the bully of the spread market—the British company Unilever.  (Unilever dominates with brands like Imperial, Shedd’s Spread Country Crock, I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter, Promise, and upmarket Brummel & Brown.)  What Smart Balance did was to develop a patented method to make an oil emulsion (using soybean, palm, canola and olive oils) that didn’t have trans fats and then make a big noise about their lack of trans fats.  This put pressure on Unilever and forced them to abandon their hydrogenated products in 2010.  They replaced them with a new process that uses interesterification to blend soybean and palm oils.  Is this a healthy product?  Good question; it was good enough to pass FDA requirements, but we don’t know what the long-term effects might be.  On the other hand, I don’t have any information that the Smart Balance product is better—it has a long ingredient list too.  Prices range from $1.39 to $3.79 for a 15 oz. container.  The higher priced brands have canola or olive oil plus some synthetic vitamins added.  There’s some marketing trickery in the tub products: some use terms like “buttery” or “butter taste” but they don’t contain butter. 

The bottom line?  I’m going to enjoy butter in moderation.  If you have a milk allergy and can’t eat butter, what do you do?  I don’t have an answer because I’m uncomfortable with soybean oils.  Many of the soybeans grown are GMOs, most oils are extracted using the toxic chemical hexane, and there are concerns about thermal damage to the oils during processing.  The industry has not been open about how they process oils, perhaps to protect trade secrets, so we don’t know enough to choose their products.  Wouldn’t it be better to inform more and market less?

Question for comment:  What do you use besides butter?

Is fat a four-Letter word?

It’s confusing about fats—what’s in, what’s out, and what’s okay today.  Want some lasting advice?  Eat what your great-grandmother ate.  Butter, olive oil, and lard—that’s likely what she had in her pantry.  For millennia butter was churned from the cream of pasture-fed cows.  The French not only enjoyed rich buttery sauces, they also had low rates of heart disease.  Butter makes everything taste better.

Olive oil, much mentioned in the scriptures, is another ancient food.   Unlike vegetable oils, which are chemically extracted from seeds, olive oil is pressed from the flesh surrounding the seed. The trees that provide olives may live for centuries and a branch is traditionally used as sign of goodwill.

Lard is also a traditional cooking fat.  After a century of slander, top chefs have rediscovered its merits especially as a shortening, and public interest is spreading.  Maybe your great-grandmother left piecrust tips behind, or a recipe for her lard-roasted potatoes.  Butter, olive oil, and lard—what more do you need?

In the last century each of these traditional fats fell from favor and then was rediscovered.  How did we go so wrong?  Well, when food becomes a big business, the consumer can get lost in the process.  It makes me think of the bon mot, “’Every man for himself’, called the elephant as he danced among the chickens.”  

Take soybean oil, for example.  Soybean oil is our #1 food oil; it accounts for 2/3 of the vegetable-sourced oil we eat.  It’s an ingredient in just about every processed food.  We eat more than we think, about 25 lbs. a year, or an ounce each day.   For years essentially all soybean oil was hydrogenated to remove the omega-3 fats, which extended shelf life.  Hydrogenation creates trans fats and we all grew up unaware we were eating a toxic man-made fat (plus being deprived of needed omega-3s).  Voices of protest were raised—the work of Dr. Mary Enig comes to mind—but they were ignored and even harassed.

The evidence against trans fat finally became so impossible to ignore that the FDA—rather than simply ban them as the Institute of Medicine advised—required the industry to disclose trans fats on the nutrition panel, effective 2006.  (Though they gave them a little wiggle room by allowing food with less than 0.5 grams to be labeled as zero trans fats.  So in the way that language is misused in advertising, we don’t actually know if zero really means zero without searching for the word “hydrogenated” on the ingredient list.) 

Eliminating trans fats from our diet was the goal of our second Healthy Change. To remind, trans fats move LDL and HDL cholesterol and inflammation in the unhealthy direction and are a cause of heart disease, obesity and diabetes. 

The food industry, once the defender of trans fat, is now racing to replace them with some new man-made fat.  Genetically modified soybeans with reduced polyunsaturated oils (less omega-3) have been introduced.  If you check the chip aisle in your grocery store, you’ll find that most chips now claim, “zero trans fats”.  Are these genetically modified oils healthy?  We don’t know for sure.  Concerned scientists have voiced concern but it will take time before any harm can be proven.

Likewise with margarine and shortenings, new methods of processing soybean oil are being developed.  Hydrogenation is being replaced, for example, with the hard-to-pronounce process of interesterification.  Are products with these new man-made fats healthy?  Same answer: We don’t know for sure.  It will take time before any long-term harm can be proven. 

Here is a food rule to consider:  Allow a century of use before assuming a new man-made food is healthy.  All this brings us to this week’s change:

In a future post we’ll share what we learned on a walk through the butter and margarine aisle at the local grocery.  Please share your experience with fats.

Need a reminder? Download our Healthy Change reminder card. Print and fold, then place in your kitchen or on your bathroom mirror to help you remember the Healthy Change of the week.

what if there isn't a cure?

One of the things I admire most about women is the way you rush to support a friend (or a stranger, even) in distress.  Take breast cancer.  I’m moved when I see a picture of a woman who has lost her hair to chemotherapy surrounded by friends who have shaved their heads in support.  I think you would do anything for your sisters.  You walk, run, and ride bikes in the race for the cure. 

But what if there isn’t a cure? 

The portrait above was taken in the heroic style popular after World War II.  It’s a most American picture.  You see a young couple holding their children, framed against the sky in a way that makes them seem a little bigger than life, bravely striding into a promising future.  The Quonset hut (a low-cost portable building left over from the war) is their home.  Who are they?  I remember them as Uncle Glen and Aunt Adele; they’ve been gone a long time.

Glen was a war hero in my mind, a Marine who fought in the terrible WWII battle for Okinawa.  Adele was an unusually intelligent woman; her home was always extra nice.  She likely planted and cared for the sweet peas in the corner of the picture.  The children are my cousins Linda and Vicki; later there was a son, Rick. 

And the future they were striding into?  It was brief—each died in their early thirties.  Glen in an accident; Adele of breast cancer, an unusual case, given her youth.  Perhaps the sudden loss of her husband was a factor.  As a young boy I was a spectator to the tragedy of their deaths.  Their orphaned children, Linda, Vicki and Rick, were taken into our home, so I was also witness to how hard it is for young children to lose their parents. 

This childhood memory is my only qualification to write about breast cancer; maybe it’s enough.  So I repeat the question, “What if there isn’t a cure?”  In a caring way, I sometimes ask women, “What should you do to prevent breast cancer?”  The most frequent response is to get regular mammograms.  Then I point out that a mammogram is for when you already have cancer and repeat the question.  Most women are unsure; a few know a preventative measure or two.  But that’s about it. 

So in memory of my Aunt Adele, and with the hope of not adding to the burden of the breast cancer survivors in our audience, I offer ten steps to reduce a woman’s risk to breast cancer.  This is not my work; it is based on a 2007 meta-study done by experts working for the American Institute for Cancer Research.  I have added guidance from work by other scientists.  With time this list should get better, but it’s the best I could find. (If you've been following our weekly Healthy Changes since January, you'll see that you are already doing many of these steps.)

1. Avoid alcohol.  If you choose to drink, limit alcohol to one drink per day. (It’s presumed you are avoiding tobacco.)

2. Stay lean.  As lean as possible within the healthy weight range.  (Elevated body fat is a risk factor after the teen years.)

3. Be physically active.  Every day, for at least 30 minutes. 

4. Have children early (in your adult years) and as often as you choose.  Breast-feed infants at least six months.

5. Limit sugar to the AHA daily guideline of 6 tsp. for women and 9 for men.  Avoid sugary drinks and limit consumption of candy as well as sugary breakfast cereals and bread products.  Less is better.

6. Limit intake of red meats and dairy; avoid all processed meats. 

7. Eat a varied diet rich in fruits, vegetables, whole grains and legumes.  (These foods are an excellent source of protective antioxidants including vitamins A and C.)

8. Eat food, not pills (unless prescribed by your doctor).  Avoid the use of multivitamin pills, or supplements to reduce cancer risk.  (See AJCN March 24, 2010, “Multivitamin use and breast cancer incidence in a prospective cohort of Swedish women”.)  Hormone replacement therapy is also a risk factor for breast cancer.

9. Maintain a healthy level of vitamin D with moderate sunshine where possible.

10. Eat healthy fats.  Avoid all trans fats (noted by the word hydrogenated in the ingredient list).  Eat natural fats like olive oil and butter in moderation and minimize vegetable oil products.  (Limiting food with vegetable oils like chips, will improve the important ratio of omega-6 to omega-3 fats as well as reduce salt intake.)

The AICR recommends that cancer survivors—after receiving treatment—also follow their preventative steps.  Readers are invited to share their experience or any other guidance on how to prevent breast cancer.

Aging With Grace

If the body’s old cells are constantly being replaced with new cells, why do people get old?  In 1956 a brilliant scientist proposed an answer—the Free Radical Theory of Aging.  Free radicals are byproducts created when fuel and oxygen are burned within our cells to make energy.  Basically, the free radical is a molecule that lost an electron in the process and is aggressively seeking to replace it.  (This is referred to as oxidative stress.)  If the electron is not replaced within a certain time, damage is done to the cell and its DNA.  The accumulation of this damage ages the cell, as well as the replacement cell created with the damaged DNA.  Besides aging, free radical harm is linked to chronic illness like heart disease and cancer.

Nature offers a solution to the free radical problem:  Antioxidants in food supply the missing electron.  Therefore, the theory posits, a diet rich in antioxidants will slow down the aging process.  The ultimate expression of this is the girl who goes to her 50^th high school reunion and looks young enough to be the daughter of the other people.  They’ll hate you, but what could be more fun?

Natural foods are loaded with antioxidants.  There are thousands of types of antioxidants, which suggests they each may have a unique function.  The vitamins A (beta-carotene), C, and E are antioxidants.  Minerals like selenium are potent antioxidants.  Antioxidants have a function in plants also—they protect the plant from sunlight, a little like sunscreen.  It is important, therefore, to eat the edible skins of plants.  Because much of the mass is skin, the small, colorful berries are packed with antioxidants. 

Research indicates that different food groups provide different kinds of antioxidants.  Fruits, vegetables and whole grains each help, but in different ways.  There also seems to be a synergistic effect: eating a variety of foods gives a greater protection than just the sum of the ingredients.  There was unforeseen wisdom in the W of W guidance to eat from the varied herbs, fruits, and grains.

Besides the antioxidants in food, the body also produces antioxidants.  Melatonin is a powerful antioxidant and is produced when we sleep in the dark.  If you don’t sleep in a dark room, you reduce the production of protective melatonin.  Sometimes we think it a sign of our dedication if we get insufficient sleep—bad idea.  Prolong your youthfulness with adequate sleep.

The allure of eternal youthfulness is behind the recent fad of taking vitamin E supplements.  Scientists who encouraged this should have known better.  Because there are so many thousands of different antioxidants, it was highly unlikely that taking a concentrated dose of one would be healthful.  In fact, studies searching for a benefit from taking the antioxidant vitamins A, or C, or E in pill form, have each failed and some have found harm in this practice.  (See, for example, “The Antioxidant Myth: a medical fairy tale”, by L. Melton, 2006.)

The Breakfast Compote recipe provides a fabulous mix of antioxidants from berries, apples, orange juice, dried cranberries, whole grains, ground flaxseed, and pecans.  Salads, thanks to the synergy of variety, are also a good antioxidant source.  Meals that are rich in natural foods of different colors and varied food groups, slow aging, protect health, and comply with our next healthy change:

In closing, a word about cancer:  we noted above that free radical generation was linked to oxidative stress, which the body resolves with antioxidants.  Studies have linked low levels of antioxidants to a greater risk for cancer, including breast cancer.  For example a low blood level of vitamin A doubled the risk of breast cancer.  Women with low vitamin E had triple the risk.  In addition, elevated markers of oxidative stress are an independent risk factor for breast cancer.  In our next post on Thursday, we will address the tragedy of breast cancer. 

Please share what you do to provide adequate antioxidants in your diet.

Need a reminder? Download our Healthy Change reminder card. Print and fold, then place in your kitchen or on your bathroom mirror to help you remember the Healthy Change of the week.

Waking Up in the Bread Aisle

In the last post we promised to check our local supermarket for breads that met Healthy Change #9:  Your daily bread must be whole grain, with more grams of natural fiber than added sugar.  To do this we spent a Friday evening studying the labels of 70 different breads; the short answer is just two bakeries met the rule and one came close (their fiber wasn’t all natural):

• Food For Life offers their Ezekiel 4:9 sprouted-grain breads, named after the Bible scripture with a bread recipe.  A slice typically contains 3 grams of fiber and no sugar—the only company we found that doesn’t add sweeteners.  Price $4.49; on sale for $3.99.  (In some stores their bread is kept in the frozen food section to preserve freshness.)

• Oroweat offers bread at all the quality levels (but watch the sugar in some of their whole wheat breads, it's often equal to the fiber). Their Healthfull brand (Nutty Grain, 10-Grain, and Hearty Wheat) had 4 grams of fiber and 2 grams sugar.  Price $4.59; on sale for $2.99 

• Milton’s Whole Grain Plus had 5 grams of fiber and 3 grams of sugar per slice.  (Three grams of fiber are all you can usually get from a slice of whole wheat; breads offering more may not meet the natural fiber requirement.)  The sugar was a combination of brown sugar and honey, so give them a point for slightly better sugars.  Price $4.59; on sale for $3.49.

The bread companies are in a difficult place; people generally have a dim view of store-bought bread and the low-carb diet folks think bread is unhealthy.  The store manager approached me in one store (after all, I was standing there looking at his goods and making notes in a black notebook).  “I’m looking for your healthiest bread,” I told him.  His response was interesting: “Is any bread healthy?”  I laughed with him but answered, “Yes, a few are”. 

I asked him how they decide which breads get the best shelf space and he answered, “Simple, slotting fees.  I think we make more on renting out the shelf space than we do selling the bread”.   I looked down the aisle and saw Oroweat had the biggest space followed by the store brand and then Sara Lee.  There was a small section for Wonder bread on the lowest shelf, a sign of its fall from grace.

The bread aisle is a strange place.  First, it doesn’t smell like bread, it smells chemical, kind of like plastic.  Second, in a desperate attempt to get our attention over 70 different kinds of bread are offered, each with the most extravagant label claims the FDA will allow.  Labels that say “100% wheat” aren’t actually whole wheat.  And the label that says “With Whole Wheat” may only have a little whole grain mixed in with the refined grains.  Third, there is the issue of past fibs, like Wonder bread building strong bodies, 8, 10, then 12 different ways.  Is it any surprise the public is properly skeptical?

Here’s another issue:  Is there a premium for healthy bread?  The answer is “Yes”.  The healthiest breads were the highest priced, around $4.59 unless on sale, though the difference in ingredients only makes a slight difference in material costs.  Is the cheapest bread the least healthy?  Again, the answer is “Yes”.  The cheapest bread was sold under the Supervalu label, price $1.39 but on sale for $.99.  It’s not actually that much cheaper per pound because the loaf is lighter.  And it has the worst ingredients, including high fructose corn syrup.  (The store manager whispered in my ear that Supervalu was controlled by the store—they just didn’t want their name on the worst bread.) 

Would you want to eat 99-cent bread?  It’s a trick question, because you can bake your own perfectly healthful bread for about this price, not counting the cost of firing of the oven.  Yes, I know what you’re thinking—this presumes the cook isn’t getting paid for her hour of work.  But we know the answer to that—the pay she (or he) receives is dearer than money.  In a later post we’ll share our favorite of the bread recipes you submitted. 

For the times when it’s not possible to bake your own bread, here are my personal favorites, though they’re not available where I live:  One is Great Harvest, which sells through franchise stores.  Prairie Grain Bread Co. is the other.  The whole wheat breads meet the fiber rule and have just five or six ingredients.  (The typical store-bought breads have 12-20 ingredients, many of them chemicals.) 

A last comment from the store manager on slotting fees:  “If you really want to see how these fees work, visit the chip aisle.”  So on my way out I visited the chip aisle—I’ll save what I learned for the next (and last) post on converting our diet to whole grains. 

If this post is helpful, would you please share it with your friends?  It’s a way to thank my wife for spending her Friday night in the bread aisle.

A Few Good Women

Here’s an observation: Though men mainly invent and manufacture (unhealthy) factory foods, women most often protect us from the consequences.  I keep a list of heroines of nutrition—women who challenged the established but erroneous beliefs of their day.  (There are a few good men on the list also.)  Although science is about the search for knowledge, reformers fighting for a new truth must endure the wrath of those invested in the old truth.  So it’s good to remember those who struggled to improve the world of nutrition—like May Yates (1850-1938).  To appreciate the story of this good woman, we need a bit of history:

In the 1870s a new process for making flour that used steel rollers instead of the traditional millstone was invented.  This new method also separated the bran and germ from the endosperm, making flour that was finer and cheaper.  (The lost bran and germ was fed to farm animals, lucky creatures.)  The new flour, pleasingly white and modern, quickly dominated the market—out with the old, in with the new.  This was a critical change because grains provide more of mankind’s daily energy than any other food group.

Food innovations often have unintended consequences and this was the case with the roller mill.  It took time to understand what had been thrown out with the bran and germ.  Vitamins had not yet been discovered, that was a generation off.  The function of the missing minerals was unknown.  And the importance of fiber and antioxidants was also a mystery.  By the time these things became known eating habits had changed and we, like the sheep who lost their way, were caught in history’s biggest food experiment:  “What happens to a civilization if the vital nutrients in grains are removed from the diet?” 

The harm was hard to measure as it happened before public health data was kept, and modern flour was only one of three food disasters:

•  Cheap sugar following the Civil War,

•  Refined white flour in the late 1800s, and

•  Trans fats in the early 1900s (via hydrogenated margarine and shortenings like Crisco)

Now back to our heroine.  May Yates was a society artist who lived in England after the consumption of refined flour was well established.  She took a vacation trip to Sicily, where people were still eating traditional whole grains.  Yates noted the robust physical condition of the Italians and contrasted this to the poor health of the English.  It was concluded that a primary cause of England’s declining health was the use of modern refined flour.  Yates was so moved by this tragedy that she returned home determined to return whole grains to the diet.  She devoted her life to this new cause, selling her jewelry to finance her crusade, and founding the Bread Reform League.  In 1909 the league successfully established ”standard bread”—made with 80% whole grains—as the norm in England.

Americans eat their weight (more or less) in grains each year, but 90% of the grains are not whole.  That’s a lot of lost nutrients—our goal is to reverse that ratio.  We started with breakfast cereal, this post is about bread, a future post will address the other grains in our diet. 

The other night we went through the bread aisle of the local grocery store, comparing the healthiness of a confusing number of breads.  We’ll report the findings in our next post.  In the kitchen we’ve been experimenting with bread recipes using whole grains—do you have one you like?  Also, please share your ideas for restoring whole grains to the American diet.

Need a reminder? Download our Healthy Change reminder card. Print and fold, then place in your kitchen or on your bathroom mirror to help you remember the Healthy Change of the week.

The Skinny on Overweight

I’m moved by the genuineness of our readers.  A bit overweight?  Well, it’s right out there in your comments.  Summer is coming—school will be out in about 100 days and swimming suit season follows.  Thinking about dieting?  Forget it.  Diets are temporary and Word of Wisdom Living is about permanent, healthful change.  Fortunately, a healthy lifestyle usually leads to a healthy body.  I say usually because we’re all different, but eating right is the place to start.   

A heavy guilt trip has been put on the overweight and obese in our society.  This is counterproductive; it just doesn’t work, as evidenced by the continuing national weight gain.  So lets do something smarter.  The common wisdom says weight gain occurs because we eat too much and move too little—excess calories become excess fat.  So, shame on the overweight?  Maybe not.   

W of W Living suggests a different theory:

This theory removes self-starvation—but not a little self-discipline—from the cure for overweight.  The hunger impulse is too strong to ignore for long, so we need a better strategy.  Here’s a new plan, based on the sugar-insulin theory of weight control: Simply eat a reasonable amount of healthy food and you’re on your way to a good weight.  Real food is rich in nutrients and filling fiber, but low in calories.  And don’t forget to exercise, get plenty of sleep, enjoy a little sunshine, and deal with whatever stress is making you snack.

Lest you credit me with too much genius, I must acknowledge the sugar-insulin theory has been around for a while.  Unfortunately, society tends to solutions that place guilt rather than enlighten—so the worn-out “eat less, move more” mantra persists in the media.  We’ll deal more thoroughly with being overweight in a later post, but here are a couple of suggestions from the Word of Wisdom on eating:

1. Lower your blood sugar and insulin levels by avoiding factory food.  Factory food is high in refined carbs (the white stuff—sugar, flour, white rice, plus HFCS) that raise your blood sugar and insulin levels.  Insulin moves the excess blood sugar into our fat cells and keeps it there.  If you don’t significantly reduce the refined carbs in your diet your waistline will keep growing.

2. Farm food has a low glycemic index (G.I.)—a measure of its ability to spike your blood sugar level.  A diet with a low G.I. lowers your insulin level and results in smaller fat cells.  Smaller fat cells mean a smaller waistline.  So enjoy some fruit and nuts along with lots of vegetables, whole grains, legumes, with a little meat and dairy.

3. If you buy factory food you’ll eat it.  So avoid the center aisles in the grocery store that offer sugary drinks, cookies, candy, chips, and bakery goods.  (Ever noticed that the baked goods in stores don't even taste that good?  If you're really craving apple pie, make your own!)

4. Life is to be enjoyed, but get your guilty pleasures in the smallest possible dose.  I like See’s candy, but I follow Healthy Change #8.  If I see a store in the mall I get my favorite piece.  But we don’t bring boxes or bags of candy into the house.  Sad experience has taught that if it’s in the house it’ll get eaten.

5. Besides sugary drinks, avoid diet drinks too.  They’re less healthy than water for a number of reasons, but there is another problem:  Studies show that diet drinks DO NOT result in you eating less sugar.  In fact, they seem to reinforce the infantile desire for sugar so you get extra sugar in other forms (more to come on this topic).  Per Healthy Change #6, drink lots of water.

Lifestyle change works best if your friends join in, so pass the word.  And please share your weight loss experience by adding a comment, so we can learn together. 

Sugar: Love Gone Bad

Unless you live in a cave, you know about the diet-related surge in overweight and obesity in America.  What one thing has done the most damage to our diet?  After much pondering, my answer is “sugar”.  Better said, the problem is that sugar is the #1 additive in processed foods.  The experts don’t agree on how much sugar the average American is eating, but a good estimate is 30 teaspoons a day.  You don’t put that much sugar in your food?  You don’t have to; it’s already there.  A large bowl of ready-to-eat breakfast cereal, an 18 oz. soda and candy bar for snacks during the day, and a slice of cake after dinner adds up to 30 tsp of sugar.  And that’s just a fraction of what we eat in a day.  The foods in our diet are ever changing, but sugar is a constant.

My engineering career was in the medical device field.  During those years I gained an appreciation for the limits (and cost) of therapy for the chronic diseases.  I learned one big lesson:  Because these diseases generally aren’t curable, prevention is much better than treatment.  We were always looking for the next new application of technology for treatment.  I was fortunate to be part of a start-up company with a revolutionary treatment for brain aneurysms—for someone with a treatable aneurysm, this was a big deal.  If I were to invest in the next “big thing” today, I would put my money in companies working on diabetes.  

Although overweight and obesity are risk factors for diabertes, no one sets out to get diabetes—the diagnosis usually comes as a surprise.  Like high blood pressure, diabetes is a silent killer; a person is typically diabetic for seven years before the symptoms bring them to a doctor.  Some 24 million Americans are diabetic; six million don’t know they have the disease.  Most people have type 2 diabetes—mainly caused by too much sugar in the diet—which is usually preventable.  (Not so with Type 1, a tragic autoimmune disease typically diagnosed in childhood.) 

Our high sugar intake doesn’t just ruin our figure; it ruins our health.  Sugar is linked to a host of diseases besides diabetes, including atherosclerosis, high blood pressure, heart disease, stroke, some cancers (including breast and prostate cancer), autoimmune diseases like arthritis and Parkinson’s disease, kidney disease, and so on.  I forgot to mention dementia and Alzheimer’s disease.  And the meanest cut of all—accelerated aging. 

Later this week we’ll post a review of the best book about dietary sugar.  There’s also an upcoming post on Word of Wisdom Living as a protection against breast cancer.

Of the 52 Healthy Changes, five address the problem of too much sugar in our diet.   We previously addressed the problem of sugary drinks and candy-like breakfast cereals.  The next biggest source of sugar is candy.  Walk through your grocery store and observe the space dedicated to candy, including the treats conveniently located by the cash register.  Though this candy is sweet, have you noticed that much of it doesn’t even taste good?  We all enjoy an occasional treat; the goal of this change is focused on the word occasional:

This is a change you can live with.  Remember there isn’t a limit on the sugars in fruits and other natural foods, which come with a host of protective nutrients.  And if you’re baking a homemade chocolate cake, feel free to bring a piece by my house. 

There will be two more Healthy Changes about sugar; one will address diet drinks and how they actually cause us to eat more sugar.  The goal of these changes is to bring our intake below the American Heart Association recommendation of 6 teaspoons (25 grams) daily for women, and 9 tsp. (37 grams) for men.  Yes, the guys are allowed a little more; the rule is based on average body weight. 

Need a reminder? Download our Healthy Change reminder card. Print and fold, then place in your kitchen or on your bathroom mirror to help you remember the Healthy Change of the week.