Entries in healthy change (81)

Friday
May172013

My Father's Garden

 

The quick answer:  Want to understand the mystery of (your) life?  Plant and tend a garden.

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My Father’s Garden

My father grew a beautiful vegetable garden in the deep lot behind our home.  He had always done this; he had a garden in his 90th year, before he left.  There were fruit trees on one side, a shaded area for berry vines, a trellis to grow sweet peas for my Mother, wire cages for tomato plants, and raised beds for vegetables like carrots, onions, squash, and cantaloupes.  In the spring he would plant corn, one section each week to extend the time of ripening.   He loved fresh corn-on-the-cob but it had to be fresh; he wouldn’t pick the corn until Mother had the water boiling.  Do you know how at the end of summer, the tomato plants are full of almost ripe tomatoes that aren’t going to fully ripen?  With those we would make a family favorite, Aunt Kate’s Chili Sauce.  I’ll share the recipe with you one day.

Unlike myself, my Father had a beautiful voice.  One song was a love ballad of his time—I love You Truly—that he would sing to Mother when they were getting ready to go out.  When I wrote our family memoir I titled it, I Love You Truly: The Lessons of Our Lives.  Those lessons covered the gamut of our joys and sorrows.  Our family paid a high price for some of those lessons so I thought it important they be saved for our descents in a book. 

When I wrote the memoir I asked Father the “why question.”  Here’s his thoughtful response:  Why do I garden?  Why do you breathe?  I find peace from life’s cares in my garden.  A person needs a place for deep thinking, the kind of on-your-knees, hands-in-the-dirt pondering where life’s lessons are best learned.  I think about my children and the decisions they’ve made, about the people I’ve known, places I’ve been, the dances I took Nina (our Mother) to.  But mostly I think about my life, teaching myself from the pulpit of my memory.  My garden really isn’t work, for while I toil the birds fly about singing, the wind makes comforting sounds as it blows through the trees, and the sun warms my back.  Later, when the plants sprout in their rows it’s very satisfying.

Over the years the ten children grew up and left home.  It became a ritual when we returned to greet whoever was in the house and then go to the backyard and admire the garden.  Often Father would be there, ready to hear the news of your life.  Once I wrote a silly story for children, about a visiting grandchild who wakes up in the night and hears noises coming from Father’s garden.  The child ventures out to the garden and discovers that on moon-lit nights the various vegetables leave their beds to form a marching band, led by the gnarled old apricot tree that looks surprisingly like Father.  I’ll share one verse of the song that vegetable marching band played; you’ll know the melody so sing along:

Seventy-six cornstalks led the big parade,

With a hundred-and-ten cantaloupes close at hand,

They were followed by rows and rows of the finest vegetables,

The cream of Father’s marching band.

Well, I said it was a silly children’s story but it does touch on the magic every garden offers.  The grandchildren loved Father’s garden and delighted in vegetables eaten directly from the vine.  It’s an American tragedy that children grow up hating vegetables, but I could see these kids loved the vegetables they picked and ate.  Gardens, of course are about more than the harvest, though they do yield the healthiest food you can eat.  And they’re good exercise.  But even more, they teach reverence for food in the way it was originally created.  Which brings us to this week’s Healthy Change:

Comment:  Please comment on your gardening experience.  Whether you do it for truly local and organic food, to save money, or just for the joy of gardening, a garden is one of the best uses of your time.

Friday
Nov232012

Herbs and Spices

The quick answer:  Improve the taste of wholesome foods by mastering the use of spices.

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Spice Traditions

It’s not necessarily a good thing, but the food companies are quite inventive.  Walk the aisles of your grocery store and you’ll find many new food-like concoctions.  The rate at which new foods appear is a phenomenon of our time.  But there’s one aisle that for millennia is little changed—the spice aisle. 

The spice aisle fascinates me.  It brings to mind caravans of camels treading the ancient trails of the Silk Road.  Most everything in the spice aisle meets our century rule:  Avoid processed food products that haven’t been around at least a century.

There’s a book, The Flavor Bible where the spice affinities of famous chefs have been summarized.  I turn to it when composing recipes.  Want to bake pears for dinner?  The book suggests these complementary flavors:  almonds, blue cheese, cinnamon/cloves, dark chocolate, honey, or orange. 

As a novice cook, spice combinations fascinate me:  You can’t make a bad soup with bay leaf, thyme, and parsley.  Curry (a blend of cumin, coriander, ginger, and turmeric) is the dominant spice mixture for Asian cooking.  The French have their Herbs de Provence (marjoram, basil, rosemary, fennel, sage and savory).  How about our use of vanilla, cinnamon and nutmeg for desserts?  We’re going beyond salt and pepper here. 

The use of spices is one measure of a cook’s skill.  It’s easy to flavor food with sugar, salt, or a hunk of meat.  But it’s the exceptional cook who can create flavors by combining spices.  The goal of this post is to encourage you to expand your use of spices. 

McCormick’s Folly

McCormick won the spice war but they got too greedy.  Walk through the spice aisle of any supermarket and it’s all McCormick.  I suspect their dominance is due to the practice of “slotting fees,” where the stores basically rent their shelf space.  Little guys can’t afford to play this game so the big guys win and when that happens, prices start rising.

But visit Trader Joe’s, Sprouts, or Whole Foods.  You won’t find McCormick.  It’s a new world, there are different brands, and spices are much cheaper.  So buy your spices at the alternate markets.  Or if you want a lot of cinnamon, like 10.7 oz worth, try Costco.  We talked about spices in this aisle visit.

Benefits of Spices

Spices are rich in antioxidants and anti-inflammatory compounds beneficial to health.  The spices with the most proven health benefits include cinnamon, chili peppers, turmeric, garlic, oregano, basil, thyme, and rosemary.  Though the health benefits are not fully researched, it seems a wise thing to include a variety of spices in your diet.  For one thing, they can make vegetables tastier and one of the challenges of healthy eating is to consume more veggies. 

Healthy Change

Please comment:  Share your experience with adding spices to your diet.  Have a favorite spice?  Let us know about what you’re doing.

 

Friday
Nov232012

Nuts To You

The quick answer:  They cost more per pound than most foods but nuts are a nutrition bargain.

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Walnut Harvest

I apologize that our posts of menus and recipes have been sparse of late (though I did come up with a Bran Nut Muffin Recipe).  We’ve had a few distractions that have kept us moving between home and northern California.

We did manage, however, to stock up on freshly harvested walnuts while up north.  We bought 100 lbs, in the shell.  We ran out of walnuts a few months ago so I bought some at the local health food store.  They were so old and rancid we could hardly eat them.  The fact is that you have to keep walnuts (and most other nuts) refrigerated, especially if they’re out of the shell.  At the health food store it’s best if you sniff the bin (for any rancid odor) before buying nuts.

So I’ve been cracking walnuts in my spare time and stacking them in the freezer.  They make a nice Christmas offering; you can’t buy fresh walnuts in the store.  We’re running out of space so the BW suggested we finally break down and buy a freezer.  I’ve resisted this because we struggle to rotate the stock in the freezer section of our refrigerator.  Is our food discipline up to managing a freezer too?  Maybe it’s time.

Did I mention the walnuts only cost $4/lb if I do the shelling?  They cost much more in the store and aren’t half as good. 

Nut Benefits

One of the premises of Word of Wisdom Living is that it’s cheaper to cook healthy food than buy the prepared (and less healthy) stuff.  If you want to enjoy good health, you must either cook or be on good terms with a cook.  We’ve no problem with occasional take-our when things get crazy, in fact we encourage that one meal a week can be whatever you crave.  But we also believe that people who regularly read this blog are unlikely to want the most toxic stuff—like deep fat fried corndogs.

Value is always a consideration in our posts but this blog is about one of the more expensive food groups: nuts.  It’s reported that only 5% of Americans regularly eat nuts.  That’s a shame because nuts have a lot of benefits:

  • Nuts are rich in antioxidant and anti-inflammatory nutrients.  We talked about these important topics here and here.  A 2005 study found those who eat the most nuts have the lowest level of inflammation markers.  For almonds, the anti-inflammatory effect is as strong as the statin drugs, without all the nasty side effects.  
  • Nuts are a good source of essential minerals, like magnesium and selenium.  Americans are widely deficient in magnesium.  The Nurses’ Health Study found women with the highest magnesium serum level had 77% less risk of heart attack than those with the lowest level.  Magnesium is also critical to bone health and prevention of calcification.  Multiple studies evidence that selenium plays an important but undefined role in preventing cancer. .  A 1996 U. of Arizona study, for example, found those taking doses of selenium had 40% less cancer than the placebo (no selenium) group.  Brazil nuts are rich in selenium.
  • Nuts make a great non-sugary snack, one that won’t cause you to gain weight.  Though dense in calories (and nutrients), studies show a significant advantage in weight loss for nut eaters.  (Though the nuts are high in calorie-dense fats, they are also very filling which offsets the calorie risk.)

Healthy Change

Please Comment: Our favorite nuts include walnuts (especially in baked goods), almonds (we like them with dark chocolate chips), pecans (they’re good alone, or with apples and dried fruit), Brazil nuts, and cashews.  Do you have a good source, or a favorite recipe to share?  Please comment.

Saturday
Nov172012

Taking Stock

The quick answer:  If you’re not cooking with homemade stock, maybe it’s time to start.  You can’t find a better, or healthier value. 

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Falling for Soup

The leaves are falling as the evening air turns cooler, so this week the beautiful wife yearned for soup.   We started with my Potato Onion Soup (recipe to follow), and moved on to Split Pea Soup with Ham Bone (I providently had some stashed in the freezer). 

Soups are traditionally made with stock, but when you cook with a bone, you don’t need to add stock.  My Split Pea Soup recipe starts with a ham bone and includes the stock ingredients of mire poix (carrot, celery, and onion) plus the traditional flavors (bay leaves, thyme, parsley). 

Through fall and winter, you can build a simple but delicious meal around a pot of homemade soup.  Anyone can cook delicious soup.  Soup fits perfectly with the values of Word of Wisdom Living:  It makes an inexpensive meal, has only healthy ingredients, is delicious, and makes everyone smile when they enter your kitchen and sniff the fragrance.  It takes a little work to make soup, but if you make extra you can freeze some for that night when you’re too busy to cook.

Taking Stock

Stock is the base for many soups and because you’re likely to have a turkey carcass sitting on your counter after Thanksgiving dinner, this is a good time to talk about making your own stock.  Homemade stock is cheaper than the stuff in the store and tastes lots better.  It’s also way healthier—you get a lot of nutrients out of cooked bones.  We try to keep some in the freezer, from Thanksgiving into the spring.

The famed French chef Auguste Escoffier claimed that stock was everything in cooking.  By tradition, soup made from stock will heal whatever ails you.  Chicken soup is the only remedy proven to shorten the duration of a head cold.  Stock is rich in nutrients and low in calories. 

Stock is rich in minerals from the bone, amino acids, gelatin from the cartilage, and other nutrients.  Gelatin has a long tradition in healing and also serves as a thickener; my stock was surprisingly thick.  The minerals extracted from the bone, mainly calcium, are believed to aid bone building.  In addition to all the nutrients, stock makes sauces, soups, and stews tasty.  For more about stock (broth), see here.

Several years ago the beautiful wife had a sore hip joint that persisted for months.  She finally saw an orthopedic doc who found nothing visibly wrong but suggested that glucosamine and chondroitin supplements were helpful to some.  This wasn’t proven science, the doctor pointed out, but thought it worth a try.  She tried it and within a matter of weeks the pain went away.  Bone broths are natural sources of chondroitin and glucosamine so there may something to the claimed benefit of stock for bone health.

Healthy Change #45

This week’s Healthy Change is simple and delicious (and a recipe is included below):

Please comment:  Got a favorite soup recipe, perhaps a family treasure?  Share your best soup recipe.

Making Stock

It’s ridiculous to put my name on this recipe because people have been making stock from bones since the Stone Age.  But I did.  You can use any kind of bones, but we mostly use cooked poultry.  This recipe is based on the carcass of a Costco rotisserie chicken with most, but not all, meat removed. 

At Thanksgiving, we scale this up to make use of our turkey carcass (crushed or broken to fit the pot), limited only by the size of our biggest pot. 

Skip’s Stock Recipe

Ingredients:

  • 1 chicken carcass (try the Costco rotisserie chicken)
  • 4 qt. water (Enough to cover the carcass; about 1 qt. per pound of chicken, original weight)
  • 1 yellow onion, sliced
  • 2 carrots, chopped in ½” slices
  • 2 celery stalks, roughly chopped
  • 2 bay leaf
  • 1 tsp thyme, or equivalent of fresh thyme
  • 3-4 sprigs of parsley (optional)

Directions:

  1. Place carcass in pot and cover with water.  Bring to a boil and simmer gently 1 hour.
  2. While carcass is cooking, prepare mire poix (onion, carrots, celery stalks).  Add to pot when hour is up, along with bay leaf, thyme, and optional parsley.  Cook one more hour.  (Note:  Salt or pepper is not added to stock; it’s best to add seasoning when the stock is made into soup.)
  3. Remove and discard the carcass.  Pour the liquid through a strainer to remove cooked ingredients. 
  4. Pour the stock into 1-qt. plastic freezer containers, or 1-qt. zip-lock freezer bags.  (I used glass bottles previously but couldn’t keep them from cracking in the freezer.) 
  5. Refrigerate if used within 2 days, or freeze up to 2 months.  When stock is refrigerated it will become thick, almost like gelatin. 
Sunday
Sep232012

The Peace Within

The quick answer:  Worried sick?  Better take control of your stress.
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A Cabin in the Woods

Way back in the ‘30s, my grandfather had the brilliant idea to build a cabin in the woods.  I loved its rough-sawn exterior and knotty pine interior.  To get to it you left the highway, crossed over a wooden bridge, and took a narrow dirt road through the forest.  The cabin had a large shady porch perfect for sitting and reading.  For 75 years that cabin—shown above—was a gathering place for our family.  Though our means were modest, our little cabin in the woods made us children rich as any king. 

My fondest childhood memories revolve around that cabin.  I remember climbing upstairs to bed, a little frightened to be alone, and going to sleep while the flame from a kerosene lamp flickered on the walls.  I awoke in the morning to the sound and smell of wood crackling downstairs in the fireplace.  The morning sun, shining through the trees, replaced the darkness of the night.  I had survived the night to enjoy another heavenly day at the cabin.

Life can be stressful, even for kids, but at our cabin I never felt anything but peace. 

Dr Dean Ornish

A current N. Y. Times article, “Dieting for Health, Not Weight” by Dr. Dean Ornish—famous for advocating prevention of heart disease through lifestyle improvement—supports the position of Word of Wisdom Living:

“In 35 years of medical research . . . we have seen that patients who ate mostly plant-based meal . . . engaged in moderate exercise and stress-management techniques . . . . [enjoyed]improved blood flow and significantly less inflammation which matters because chronic inflammation is an underlying cause of heart disease and many forms of cancer. We found that this program may also slow, stop or reverse the progression of early stage prostate cancer, as well as reverse the progression of Type 2 diabetes.”

That’s a lot but Dr. Ornish found additional health benefits for his plant-based, low-meat program, including:

  1. In just three months of healthful living, the expression of over 500 genes that protect against disease was activated,
  2. Telomerase length (indicative of gene health and longevity) improved,
  3. Weight loss (loss of 24 pounds in a year and 12 lbs of net weight loss maintained after five years.

Dr. Ornish’s program, as noted above is based on a whole foods diet, exercise, and management of stress.  This post is about stress.

Stress

There may be shortages of some things in life, but there’s always enough stress to go around.  But stress, though a bit is necessary to get us moving in the morning, is toxic in excess.  Most of our Healthy Changes are about eating right, four support exercise, but just one addresses stress.  So, for your own good, please take some time to ponder this Healthy Change.

We discussed stress in a post last year.  We talked about Hans Selye (1907-1982) the doctor best known for linking chronic stress with disease.  We discussed the role chronic stress plays in premature aging (the meanest cut), cancer, and heart disease. The list goes on.

There’s a ratchet quality to stress—after a stress episode, we often don’t return to the relaxed state.  Rather there is a residue that remains so that in the next bout—and there’ll always be another episode—we’re driven to higher and higher levels of stress.  When caught in these chronic stress cycles, we take it as the new “normal.”  Like fish in water, we can be quite unaware of a toxic stress level.  This is very common when the economy is bad, like right now.

Finding Peace

The key is not to run faster but to step out of the stress cycle.   Here are seven ways from the prior post:

  1. Family: The supporting love of family can be a great comfort.  Who hasn’t come home from work, carrying all the troubles of the day on their shoulders, and found instant relief by getting down and wrestling with the kids?
  2. Best friends:  A study of English children found being with their best friend gave the best relief from stress.  Cortisol, the stress hormone produced by the adrenal glands, was most effectively relieved for children by best friends.  Who’s your best friend?
  3. Music: The beautiful wife just saw a bumper sticker for the classical music station:  “Less stress, more Strauss.”
  4. Exercise:  Strengthening the body helps it to relax and stimulates a similar process for the mind.
  5. Worship:  Don’t you find, in the rhythm of church ritual, clarification of what’s really important?  Whatever your faith, the God who orders the universe knows your name and proffers His peace. 
  6. Meditation:  Thinking more deeply about whatever troubles you can lead to new insights, and better paths to follow. 
  7. Laugh:  Remember Ferris Bueller?  Life goes by pretty fast; if you don’t stop and have a little fun, you just might miss out

Please Comment:  Too much  stress for comfort?  Share your best stress reduction experiences.   Been worried sick?  It happens.  How do you get well?  Stress is one ailment where you can be your own best doctor.

Wednesday
Aug222012

Fruit in Season

The quick answer:  The average American eats one serving of fruit daily.  The Dietary Guidelines for Americans recommends four servings.  Get the picture?

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Small town Gothic

We drove to Utah yesterday, to visit little Midway in time for Swiss Days.  I’ll follow with a post on Swiss Days—it fascinates me.  The Beautiful Wife, as you’ll recall, is half-Swiss.

Along the way I left the freeway for a small country road.  The BW, dozing, was instantly awake.  “Where are we going?” she queried.  “An adventure,” I responded.  We visited a tiny farm town—Levan—that had hardly changed in a century.  We drove by fields with the local crops, alfalfa and cattle.  There were quaint homes built a century or more ago, and some that were new.  Lovely old barns, many filled with hay, decorated the town. 

We didn’t know a soul in Levan, but these are friendly people and soon we were seated in a kitchen, visiting with a spry couple in their 90s.  Their home—clean, neat, and simple—was an old brick farmhouse, though it had been remodeled several times.  A little ways off was an old barn; nearby a much-used pick-up truck, and tractor.  The husband had been picking apples from an ancient tree in the yard.  Jars of canned applesauce sat on the counter. 

These good people had reared their family farming and raising cattle.  They had the lean, fit appearance of people who had worked hard for many years.  “We raised cattle on our farm,” the man said, “but we’re older and the land is leased out now.”  They still kept chickens for I saw eggs and egg cartons in a niche of the kitchen.  I wondered if I had found a source for free-range eggs.  “Oh,” she noted, “we just raise enough for ourselves and some to give away.”  I remembered the farmer’s custom of giving away something from their bounty.

As we visited the wife would step away from time to time to stir a pot on the stove.  “Blueberries,” she informed us, “just enough for three cups of jam.”  I had noticed a chest freezer nearby.  “Well,” the husband reminisced, “we always fattened up a cow to butcher in the fall for our own use.  We didn't know what it was to buy meat in a store.”

When our business was done they sent us off with a gracious farewell, but for a long time after I pondered the visit.  What would it be like, I wondered, to live so close to the land?  To be in one town, one house, one job, your whole life? To have tradition be so much a part of your existence?  There was something wholesome and reassuring about the couple we visited.  And the apples, applesauce, blueberries, and jam cooking on the stove are the perfect segue to this week’s subject: fruit.

10 Healthiest Fruits

Want to know which are the 10 healthiest fruits?  Forget about it.  We see those lists, but given the giant amount we don’t know about nutrition, it’s foolish to try and rank fruits by this or that benefit.  They’re all healthy and variety is important.  I suspect there's a reason for every fruit that exists on our planet.

The tradition of eating an apple a day has actually been confirmed.  Recent research has added an orange, and a banana to the daily list.  And the small colored berries are intensely full of antioxidants and other phytonutrients. 

In fact, the Word of Wisdom simply recommends we eat “fruit in the season.”  Now the Industrial Revolution brought a lot of bad stuff, but it also brought us longer seasons for fruit and other foods.  You can buy apples, bananas, berries, and some type of orange, about every month of the year.  Count it a tender mercy.

As I drove away from Levan, I thought about the bottles of canned applesauce in the kitchen.  My parent’s generation canned fruit.  My generation bought it canned, but we also were able to buy it fresh more months of the year.  The current generation can buy affordable fresh fruit year around.  Because sugar inhibits bacterial growth, canned fruit was traditionally sweetened.  So, in our home, with the exception of freezer jam, we simply eat seasonal fresh fruit and don't try to preserve it, though I miss the comfort against famine that a cellar of bottled fruit offers.  One compensation is to store dried fruits like dates, plums (okay, prunes), raisins, and mangos—this is an ancient practice and dried fruits store well.

Four-a-day

The USDA guidance is a good place to start:  four daily servings of fruit (shown in the pix above).  How are we doing?  Americans, on average, eat just one daily fruit serving.  Ouch.

That’s the same as vegetables, where the goal is 5 daily servings, so you see the challenge.  But fruit is fun to eat, so once you get the idea four servings won’t be hard.  Vegetables, on the other hand, are more of a challenge.  That’s why we dedicate eight posts to eating vegetables and just this one to fruit. 

Last week I was enjoying the most delicious cantaloupe; it tasted so good.  And we’re currently in the best season for watermelons, peaches and apricots.  The key to eating fruit is to buy it—to have it in the house.  If your servings run 3-4 ounces, a week’s worth for two adults, allowing for a little waste, would be about 15 pounds.  You can adjust this for your family size.  Whatever your goal, just be sure to buy it weekly and if it isn’t getting eaten and it’s going to waste, have a family council on the subject.  Children love fruit for a snack.

That’s all I have to say about fruit:  Eat a variety of fruits in season, about four servings daily.  If you buy it, you’re likely to eat it.  It's easy in the summer, but takes a little effort in the winter.

Oh, one other thing.  Remember that dessert of orange-flavored Jello and Cool Whip treat your mom used to make?  That doesn’t count as a fruit.  But as you learn to appreciate fruit, you’ll find it makes a delicious dessert that’s healthful, inexpensive, and easy to prepare.  What could be better?

 

Please comment:  How do you get your family to eat fruit instead of sugary snack foods?  What are your favorite fruit desserts?  Share a recipe. 

Thursday
Jul122012

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 2nd 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 41st 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.

Wednesday
Jul042012

Our War on Sugar

Midterm Test

We’re at the midpoint of the year:  26 Healthy Changes delivered, 26 to go.  It’s a good time for reflection  I think we’re making progress in our modest goal of changing the world.  Last night I Googled the search term “Word of Wisdom.”  Thanks to you readers, of the 11 million results we were #2, a new high.  Only Wikipedia beat us.  To me it’s a big deal; in the Olympics that’s a silver medal. Now we just have to pass Wikipedia. 

Our stated goal is to change the world and according to Google, we’re doing just that.  But change is an action verb.  We write these charming posts not to entertain but to create change.  Talking is easy—doing is hard.  So we press on—in the next post we’ll ask you to score yourself on how many Healthy Changes you’re actually living.  Get ready.

A Public Dialog

Have you followed the recent discussion about calories and diet?  It involves three people—a physician/scientist, a chef turned food writer, and a serious journalist:

David Ludwig, MD, PhD:  Ludwig studies and treats child obesity.  A while back he made a controversial statement:  Severely obese children should be removed from the care of their parents.  One Ludwig study showed the risk of obesity jumped 60% with each daily soft drink.  

Ludwig’s most recent study evaluated three diets for their ability to keep weight off, once it has been lost.  This is important because in nearly all cases, when dieting loses weight, it is later regained.  The three diets were:

  1. The standard low-fat diet you often hear recommended,
  2. An ultra-low carb (Atkins) diet, and
  3. A low-glycemic diet of vegetables, fruit, legumes, and whole grains (basically, the WOWL diet).

The low-fat diet did the worst, so it’s time to move away from the bad advice of the last generation.  The Atkins diet did best but with the complication of higher inflammation (measured by c-reactive protein) and cortisol (the stress hormone).  The low-glycemic diet (basically, the WOWL dietary) offered the best combination of weight loss and freedom from side effects. 

Mark Bittman:  Is a chef turned author who writes for the N.Y. Times.  He gave his take on Ludwig’s study in an article titled, “Which Diet Works.”  Bittman said, “Over the long term, the low-glycemic (WOWL, or whole foods) diet appears to work best . . . . The message is pretty simple: unprocessed foods give you a better chance of idealizing your weight—and your health.”  I like the simplicity of this; if you eat healthy you’ll have a healthy weight.  We won’t all look the same, that would be boring and unnatural, but we’ll be our healthiest.

Gary Taubes:  A serious researcher and journalist, author of Good Calories, Bad Calories, the definitive work linking sugar and highly processed foods to obesity, diabetes (type 2, not type 1 which afflicts some children for unknown reasons), and chronic disease, weighed in next.  His N.Y Times article, titled “What Really Makes Us Fat” attacked our fascination with calories and calorie counting. 

Taubes doesn’t believe in the equality of calories—some are good and some, in his view, are bad for you.  He spent six years researching his book, an attack on America’s sugar addiction, and he’s pretty convinced the first step to improving our nation’s health is to eat less sugar.  So am I—counting calories won't take the place of eating real whole foods.  

The Inequality of Calories

When America’s overweight problem is discussed the calorie truism, based on the 1st Law of Thermodynamics—which speaks to the conservation of energy—is usually mentioned.  "A calorie is a calorie," you hear that a lot.  Sometimes so-called experts simply say, “Calories in, calories out.”  They mean overweight is the simple result of eating more calories than you burn.  Or you hear this guidance: “Eat less, move more.”  But is it that simple?  If you’re a regular reader of this blog you know better. 

I took thermodynamics in college—taught by Dr. Milton Willie, a brilliant and caring teacher—and I believe in the first law.  But, because of the complexity of nutrition, I’ve never believed in the equality of calories.  Think about it:  Will a calorie from a carrot have the same effect in your body as a calorie from a soft drink?  Of course not—so stop counting calories and focus on your daily servings of vegetables, fruits, legumes, nuts, whole grains, and a little meat. 

Our War on Sugar

As a young man I remember standing by the railroad track of a small town in rural Guatemala.  Lumbering past were car after car overflowing with sugar cane.  It was the time of the sugar cane harvest.  The harvest seemed a good thing, a blessing for the local economy.  Before that I remember watching long trains loaded with sugar beets in Davis, California.  And years later watching trucks load an Illinois corn harvest into massive tanks labeled, "high fructose."  These were all about the same thing: supplying our growing sugar gluttony.  Now we know that more and more sugar isn’t a good thing.  Our annual intake of about 100 lbs of sugar should be slashed to at least 20-30 lbs, per the AHA, to reduce our risk of overweight, diabetes, heart problems, and other chronic diseases. 

Of the 52 Healthy Changes, four have the goal of reducing our intake of sugar.  Here are the four strategies for reducing sugar intake:

  • Our first Healthy Change went after soft drinks, the leading source of refined and artificial sugar: If you consume sugary drinks, real or diet, limit yourself to one (12 oz.) serving per week. 
  • Healthy Change #10 was about grains and attacked the practice of removing natural fiber and adding sugar to grain products, beginning with bread but including breakfast cereal also:  Your daily bread must be whole grain with more natural fiber (see the nutrition panel) than added sugar. The mantra "more fiber than added sugar," drives us to eat whole foods.
  • This week’s Healthy Change goes after the American love for candy: Enjoy your candy a piece at a time; never bring a bag or box into the home.  I like candy as a treat, but it should be a treat, not a habit.
  • The final sugar strategy suggests a way to enjoy chocolate without gorging on sugar: Enjoy dark (70%) chocolate, with fruit and nuts. 

 
Please comment:  How do you manage sugar in your life?  How have you gotten past the false belief that artificial sweeteners like those in “diet” drinks—such a sad, pathetic name—are somehow healthier than real food?  Oh yes, happy 4th of July.  It's a great country but eating right would make it way better.

Tuesday
Jun262012

Sleep, Blessed Sleep

The quick answer:  To eat better, sleep better.  If you get adequate sleep in the dark, you’ll crave wholesome nutrients more than sugary stimulants.

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How Will You Measure Your Life?

We had lunch with old friends in a mountain town of enduring charm.  Guests included a young couple, recently graduated from college, about to head east for a Wall Street position.  They’re small-town kids, unusually bright, blessed with solid values, eager to be tested in the Big Apple.  The bottom of an economic cycle seemed an auspicious time to enter the world of high finance, I thought. 

The conversation turned to the unusual demands of such a job, which included sixteen-hour work days.  The Biblical warning against serving both God and Mammon was noted.  The world admires ambition, but the usual measures are material in nature and there’s that Biblical warning about coveting, you know.

Another recalled a man who, in similar circumstances, had purposely chosen to underachieve financially—judging time with wife and family to be of greater worth.  Well, I thought, there’s a guy who’s got his feet under him. 

Someone recalled Dr. Clayton Christensen’s 2010 Harvard commencement speech, “How Will You Measure Your Life?”  The table was silent for a moment as we reflected on the metrics that had governed our own lives.

Driving home, another metric important to life came to mind—sleep time.  Americans are hard workers but there’s a price—we generally don’t get enough sleep.  I’m not speaking of the new mother in those first months before baby has sorted out day and night.  I’m talking about all of us who think missed sleep reflects meritorious ambition. 

Sleep

This blog rotates through 13 themes each quarter of the year.  Thirteen weeks ago we discussed sunshine, the natural source of vitamin D.  Vitamin D from sunshine is reported to last twice as long in our body as vitamin D from pills—so it seems there is a physiological difference with sunshine that may be beneficial.  The full spectrum light from sunshine was addressed last year in the post, Let There Be Light

This time we address the opposite theme—the importance of time in the dark, sleeping.  I’m surprised how often we find guidance on how to live by the Creation account in Genesis:

“And God said, ‘Let there be light; and there was light.  And God saw that the light was good; and God divided the light from the darkness.  And the evening and the morning were the first day.”  (Genesis 1:3,4)

The division of light from darkness was important, I believe, but in our time, with electric lighting, true darkness has been much reduced and the division compromised. 

Melatonin

 Melatonin is the master hormone of the night, a blessing of adequate sleep.  When we close our eyes in a darkened room the pineal gland, a sort of third eye, is triggered by darkness to produce melatonin.  The production of melatonin peaks in the fourth hour of sleep, which then produces other beneficial hormones that restore and prepare us for the coming day.  Basically, you make melatonin for 4 hours; the other hormones do their work the next 4 hours.  (In infants, melatonin production stabilizes in the 3rd month, enabling them to sleep through the night, at last.)

Melatonin is also a potent antioxidant, a protection for your DNA.  Though our understanding of melatonin is incomplete, it seems important to health to not shortchange the body through insufficient sleep, in a darkened room.  The division of dark from light in the Creation is important today also.

Sleep Deficiency

Scientists have linked some chronic diseases to insufficient sleep, as discussed in the post, Blessed Sleep.  These include depression, hypertension, type 2 diabetes and overweight, heart disease and cancer.  There are also mental effects including dementia and impaired judgment. 

Losing Fat

I connect the growing dependence of stimulants like caffeine and sugary drinks in the last century to our decline of adequate sleep in a darkened room.  If sleep is not fully refreshing we crave stimulants to get going, more than nutrients.  A sugary breakfast cereal, a mid-morning soft drink, and candy snacks during the day will seem the right answer.  If you get adequate sleep, 8-9 hours per night, you’ll need less sugar and this will lower your insulin level thus allowing your body to release and consume fat for energy.  When insulin is high, sugar is stored as fat; when it’s low, fat is released for consumption.

A 2010 University of Chicago study of dieters found that those who got the most sleep lost twice as much fat as those with the least sleep (8.5 Hrs. vs. 5.5 Hrs.).  As excess fat is a widespread problem in America, adequate sleep in the dark may be the cheapest health aid available.  A prior post, The Skinny On Overweight, argued that rather than the pain of repeated dieting, it would be better to first try eating a wholesome diet combined with exercise. 

Please comment:  Are you able to get adequate sleep?  How much do you need?  Have you experienced sleep-related health issues?  Do you eat better if your sleep better?  What did you do to improve your sleep habits.

Monday
Jun182012

Animals Need Vegetables Too

The quick answer:  A vitamin you haven’t heard much about, K-2, is essential to bone health.  (Yes, this is linked to animals eating vegetables.)

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First an Apology

Yes, I'm sorry to say this post is a little long, but the subject is complex: bone health.  There's much still unknown about building bones, hence we get conflicting advice.  Here's my take on the subject in three steps:

  1. Vegetables are vital to humans, but also to the animals that feed us, in the form of green grass.
  2. The four essentials for bone health include the little-discussed vitamin K-2.  A connection between osteoporosis and atherosclerosis (calcification) is also noted.
  3. Over the last 50 years we inadvertently reduced the K-2 in animal products by moving animals away from green grasses as a major feed.  Eating food from pastured animals, rich in vitamin K-2, is critical to bone health.

Vegetable Overview

It’s not hard to eat the recommended 3-4 daily servings of fruit—fruit is sweet and delicious.  However, for most Americans, eating 4-5 daily portions of vegetables is a challenge.  The evidence supports this:  If you exclude French fries and ketchup, the average American averages just one daily vegetable serving.  Our distain for vegetalbes gives those French food snobs one more reason to look down on us

For this reason, of our 52 Healthy Changes, eight are dedicated to the food group kids love least—vegetables:

#6   Set a family shopping goal for pounds vegetables.

#12 Eat green salads most days.

#19 Eat orange vegetables and fruits.

#25  Choose products of animals fed on vegetables (pasture grass).

#32 Add stock-based vegetable soups to your weekly menu.

#38 Eat cruciferous vegetables most days.

#45 Eat a serving of legumes most days.

#51 Add tubers to your menu.

Curiously, this post is about the vegetables eaten by the animals that supply us with food.  As it turns out, your health is linked to their health, and that includes vitamin K-2.

Vegetables for Animals

The early colonists in America brought an important farming tradition—the common pasture.  Families could leave their sheep, cows, and goats in the common pasture and a single herdsman would ensure the animal’s safety.  At least one of these still exists, though as a park—the Boston Common. 

Following WWII pastured animals, accustomed to eating green grass much of the year, became victims of a well-intentioned but misguided efficiency drive.  The new idea was the CAFO (concentrated animal feeding operation).  Cattle spent six months in a feedlot eating grains, industrial wastes, and the bare minimum of hay, before going to market.  The last thing you’ll see in a feedlot is green grass.  Milk cows were taken from the pasture and tied to stanchions; energy used walking around now went into making milk.  Chickens were confined to henhouse cages.  Hogs were similarly caged and fed. 

In every case, the natural vegetable of the animals, pasture grass, was replaced with the cheapest feed available—commodity grains and industrial waste. The CAFO was cost effective but inhumane and bad for the animals’ health.  Because mankind eats the meat, eggs, and dairy products of these animals, healthy animal products were replaced by less healthy versions. 

Remember the Creation account in Genesis, how man was given dominion—a responsibility of stewardship—over the beasts?  There’s a hook in that relationship—we control their diet but our health depends on their health. 

What Your Doctor Didn’t Have Time to Tell You About Bone Health

In a recent post we took a fresh look at the factors for strong bones.  Your bone health began with what your mom ate during your fetal period.  Now it depends on what you eat—whole foods are the source of needed minerals (calcium, and a balance between magnesium and phosphorous).  Exercise matters.  Strong muscles go with strong bones—use them or lose them.  Vitamins matter too, especially D and K-2.  In a prior post we discussed vitamin D.  Today’s post is about K-2.

Vitamin K is a little like the essential omega-3 fats.  The short-chain omega-3 fats are found in green plants, whether grass or algae.  The animals that eat those greens produce essential long-chain omega-3 fats.  So cold-water fish and eggs from free-range chickens, for example, are good sources.  Our body makes the long-chain omega-3 fats but not enough; we need to get the rest from fish or animal products.

Vitamin K works the same.  We get the K-1 form essential to blood clotting from green plants.  Vitamin K-2 (menaquinone) is created in mammals that eat those green plants, during digestion, by bacteria acting upon the K-1.  In the last 50 years, when we were moving animals from pastures to CAFOS, we unknowingly removed vitamin K-2 from our diet.  The human body can make K-2 from K-1 via bacteria in our gut, but (like the long-chain omega-3) it’s not enough.  Good bone health requires sufficient K-2 in our diet and that’s another reason to eat pastured meat and dairy products, sparingly.

To summarize, for good bone health do these things:

  1. Eat vegetables, fruits, and grains rather than processed foods for proper mineral balance.
  2. Make strong bones by building muscles through exercise (for more go here).
  3. Get a little noonday sun on your skin to make vitamin D (read more here.)
  4. Eat animal products from pastured animals rich in vitamin K-2.  The less you eat, the more important the K-2 level is.

Osteoporosis and Calcification

Everyone knows about osteoporosis but few know about calcification.  Calcification is the other side of the osteoporosis coin.  If you don’t have the vitamins and minerals needed to move calcium into your bones, your body may deposit excess calcium in your soft tissue.  This is called calcification—though little discussed it’s a big problem.  Calcium, for example, is deposited in the plaque that coats your main arteries so plays a role in heart disease.  Plaque consistently contains about 20% calcium; calcification makes your arteries rigid and inflexible. 

Vitamin K-2

The next big thing in healthy foods, I think, will be foods rich in vitamin K-2 from pastured animals.  We have insufficient information about the K-2 levels of different foods; it’s not even listed in the nutrition panel on packaged foods.  The Japanese food natto is rich in K-2, but smelly and inedible to most.  Liver is a good source for K-2, especially if from grass fed mammals.  Eggs from free-range chickens are another source.  Mutton and lamb is not currently CAFO fed, to my knowledge, so should contain K-2. 

Bottom line:  try to include pastured animal products in your diet.  If you have a concern about calcification or osteoporosis, talk to your doctor about your vitamin K-2 level.  Some doctors may be unaware, but they're usually caring enough to do some research.

Please comment:  Share your experience with bone health, or with osteoporosis/calcification.  What works for you?  Have you a source for vitamin K-2?

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.