Health and nutrition can be confusing. We are bombarded with marketing messages, inundated with confusing food labels, and assailed with scientific research and multi-syllabic names for compounds and nutrients.
The Wild About Health Made Simple Series explains health and nutrition as simply as possible. The easier it is to understand, the easier it is to have a longer, healthier life.
Nutrition: Good vs. Bad
Q: Are you eating well?
We’re told by our doctors, by our leaders, and by countless talking heads to eat well and maintain our health; we’re urged to “get healthy” in order to maintain our weight, our heart, our brain, and our longevity. It sounds simple, and in some ways, it is. But how do we accomplish it?
Here, we dump the science and the complex guidelines and strategies, and break down good nutrition in simple terms so you can start today moving the needle toward healthy.
Eating Well: 5 Simple Steps
1. Fruits & Vegetables, Every Day
A healthy diet emphasizes fruits and vegetables. Need a visual? Use the MyPlate guidelines. The new “plate” version of the old pyramid presents the general guideline of how much of each food group we should be eating.
You can eat seasonal food, organic food, or local food – if it’s available and affordable, then that’s great. You can eat across the rainbow and make an effort to get important phytochemicals that provide some fruits’ deep color. But the most important principle is this: fill you plate to half with fruits and vegetables every time you eat.
2. Know the Basics
Keeping nutrition simple means knowing about a few hot button healthy eating issues. Good nutrition emphasizes dietary fiber and cuts salt, saturated and trans fats, and added sugar. Unless you are dealing with specific dietary needs, as a general rule, you can maintain a healthier diet by doing the following:
Reducing sodium
Getting more fiber
Drinking more water
Reducing saturated fat
3. Shrink Your Portions
In order to maintain a healthy diet, many Americans must cut calories. Our health is often associated with our weight. Being overweight contributes to diabetes and heart disease and can shorten our life, and it’s as simple as that.
According to the Lempert Report, portion size is linked to plate size. (Surprisingly, it is also linked to plate color!) If you love numbers, counting calories might help. (Realizing that a bowl or chips and french onion dip will take up at least half your day’s calories helps their importance sink in.) But the easiest thing you can do is shrink your meal. Get a smaller plate, cut portions in half to eat later, or get rid of family-style eating. Whatever you do, aim to get the most nutrition you can from the calories you eat, and eat only the calories you need.
4. Cook For Yourself
Why cook for yourself? It’s simple: You’ll know what’s in your food. You’ll eat more whole, unprocessed ingredients. You’ll be better able to control your sodium, sugar, and fat. It’s more economical. It’s tastier. And, cooking your own meals is almost always lighter. Start cooking: it’s one of the best things you can do for your health.
Is your goal to eat better? Get these four simple principles under you belt. You can start understanding the benefits or pterostilebene and the best superfoods for optimum disease prevention later – it will come naturally. For now, start simple, and change the way you eat and how much. Then, if someone asks if you have a healthy diet, the answer will be simple: Yes.
More on the Web
What is a healthy diet? Get a simple definition at Choosemyplate.gov.
Give your diet some digital help. This article has 5 Apps for Eating Better that will help you find fruits and veggies, locate local, seasonal foods, and give you a fun way to track of your servings.
Break it down.Fruits & Veggies More Matters takes the confusion out of healthy eating and provides nuts and bolts advice about calories, food groups, and what you should know.
More oatmeal is eaten in January than in any other time of the year. As this month comes to a close, it’s the perfect time to squeeze in a little healthy celebration of National Oatmeal Month. That’s right: January is officially the month when this heart healthy food gets its due. Warm, healthy, filling and the perfect foil for an array of favorite tastes, this versatile food is as good in a bowl as it is a in a bar.
Oatmeal is the broad term for ground, steel-cut, crushed or rolled oats, and it is known for its many health advantages, including being a source for omega-3s, manganese and soluble fiber. It plays a serious role in lowering cholesterol, and reducing blood pressure, especially as an alternative to less healthy breakfast bowls. Other benefits, of course, include that stick-to-your-ribs feeling that helps you feel full until lunch, and it provides a necessary warmth on a cold winter morning.
But as National Oatmeal Month helps illustrate, oatmeal is not just for breakfast. This popular food is also a windfall for cookies, bars, and breads, adding nutrition and texture to all it comes in contact with. It gives new meaning to “oatmeal bar” by enhancing beer, it thickens soups and chili, and it even has less edible uses, including facial scrubs and shampoo.
You’re the Top
For all its uses, oatmeal’s Oscar-worthy role might be as the perfect foundation for a daily serving of fruit. It shines when combined with healthy berries – wild blueberries, raspberries, strawberries, apples and bananas all work well, but favorite toppings are a matter of personal taste. Some favorites include raisins, nuts of all varieties (try walnuts for additional serving of good fat), butter, brown sugar, milk, syrup, currants, cinnamon, cranberries, pumpkin puree, shredded coconut, citrus zest, and fresh ginger. Some oatmeal lovers have even been known to splurge with M&M’s, cream, and bacon!
A “Smothering” Boon
Top health professionals agree about the mysterious benefit of combining foods. It’s called synergy – it’s nature’s way of increasing our health benefits naturally. Food synergy occurs when components within the same food, or components between different foods, work together in a way that is more powerful than their effects would be separately. Evidence suggests that the components in the foods we consume interact with each other to give our bodies extra disease protection and a higher level of health. It may be why can’t yet seem to achieve similar health benefits from supplements – they are missing out on food combinations that provide healthy synergy.
Oatmeal provides the basis for perfect synergistic meal. According to Superfood doc Steven Pratt, there is synergy between wild blueberries and almost every other food, making smothering a bowl of oatmeal with beneficial berries a nutritionally smart move. Find more synergistic combinations for health and taste, such as berries and walnuts, an ideal oatmeal topping.
The Perfect Bowl
While instant oatmeal can be a preferred method for some, once you start making oatmeal from “scratch”, you’ll wonder why you ever to opted for instant. Simply use equal parts oats and liquid (milk or water) in a pot and stir for about five minutes until the desired consistency is achieved. For one portion, start with 2/3 cup of oatmeal and 3/4 cup of whole milk, then decide what texture you like best. Opinions on making the perfect bowl do differ – here’s Ehow.com’s recipe for perfect bowl. Or, try this Quintessential Blueberry Oatmeal from NYTimes.com. (That purple hue means nutrition!)
Why Confusing Life with Football Could Be Killing Your Wellness Efforts by pinguinoWe live in a culture that is devoted to sports – we love the excitement and the competition, we feel satisfied by its clear wins and finite season, and we invest ourselves fully in our affection for our team. Looking forward to kick-off is healthy.Trouble is, we can often attack other goals – like disease prevention and good health – as if they are just another showdown on the field. But not everything is like football, including our personal health and wellness, and thinking that it is can set us up for failure.
Are you treating your health like a Patriots playoff game? It’s time for an interception. You can still wear you lucky socks when Tom Brady’s on the field, but throwing around that sports analogy doesn’t always makes sense.
Is Your Personal Health & Wellness Like Football?
Why It Is
You’re running offense and defense.
You’re getting aggressive when it comes to nutrition—you’ve armed your kitchen with frozen fruits, you’ve shopped the perimeter of your grocery store, and you’re playing AC/DC’s Thunderstruck – you’re ready. But if your defensive line is benched, you’re in big trouble. The snack table at work, the vending machine you pass midday, and the late-night food commercials during Top Chef all require a strong defensive line to keep you in the game. Being a nutritional Neon Deion is the only way to stay alive in the scrimmage for good health.
You’re as good as your last touchdown.
Go ahead and spike the ball when you cross the finish line—it’s those little glories that make the game worth playing. But it’s only the first quarter, and there’s and lot of maneuvering to go. A fumble, a bad pass or a difficult sack, and all that kiss-blowing and moonwalking in the end zone is ancient history. It’s the same with your health and nutrition efforts. You had kale salad for dinner? Nice work. But breakfast is around the corner and your choices – eggs Benedict or oatmeal with ½ cup of wild blueberries – start all over again, and that salad is just last season’s highlight reel.
You can get slowed by injury.
Bronco receiver Erik Decker’s knee injury may keep him off the field this weekend, providing a potential windfall for the New England Patriots. The health game is riddled with similar hiccups. Times of stress can sabotage efforts at good nutrition; the holidays, with its cookie swaps and parties, can act like injuries and bench your best nutrition intentions; even actual injuries like illness or hospitalization can put nutrition and exercise on the back burner. Life is a nutritional gridiron, and as everyone who’s headed for the car a little too early knows, one quarter is never the same as the last.
Why it Isn’t
You can’t depend on your superstar quarterback.
Football can seem like a battle of the quarterbacks. When Tebow and Brady face off, it’s nearly a two-man game: it’s all about the two helmeted suns surrounded by their luminous satellites. But in the battle for good nutrition, you are your own quarterback. And your own offensive line, your own runner, and your own field-goal kicker. You can’t rely on your star to get you through the season, and your latest hair style makes nary a difference to your heart, your brain, or your cells.
There’s no coach calling the shots.
If only Bill Belichick could talk us through the right nutritional moves. While keeping nutritional goals can be supported by community, peers, and sometimes even a fitness trainer or nutritionist, most of our life does not come complete with a coach calling the shots from the sidelines. When you open your refrigerator, no one is yelling into their headphones, guiding your choice to chop up some vegetables instead of grabbing the leftover pizza. Instead, understanding dietary needs, learning new strategies for getting high antioxidant foods, and cooking with health in mind is completely up to us.
There’s no Superbowl.
Football season is about taking it all the way, and that’s one of the reasons we love it: we are always looking toward the final ticker tape parade. But there’s no clear goal when it comes to health. You might be counting down pounds, or tracking your cholesterol and blood pressure. But most of the time, living a healthy, disease-free life is a continuum with no gold ring, and no Vince Lombardi trophy. But the good news is that there’s no heartbreak about a blocked field goal that tanks the playoff. When the season’s never over, you’re always in the game.
The stands are empty.
Cook a meal four times out of seven this week? Choose a wild blueberry smoothie instead of a monkey bun this morning? These small accomplishments can have a huge cumulative effect – and yet, the stands are quiet, and the foam fingers aren’t waving. What gives? As nice as it would be, no one cheers your small health accomplishments. Good health and nutrition choices are usually private wins that don’t get the fanfare. When you realize no one’s going to slap you on the backside for yards run, then the next time you bite into a fresh salad and take a pass on the processed dessert, you’ve only to showboat a little on your own, and keep on.
There is no next year.
When it comes to living a healthy lifestyle, there is no training season and there is no next time. Your health depends on what you do every day, year in and year out. Want a healthy heart? Make small changes in your diet like curbing salt and saturated fat. Concerned with cancer prevention? Maintain a diet that battles free radicals with foods high in antioxidants. Warding off the symptoms of metabolic syndrome? Eat your servings of fruits and vegetables every day for the advantages they provide to your well-being today and your longevity tomorrow.
The bottom line? No Monday morning quarterbacking – get a game plan for good health and start holding the line. Good health and longevity isn’t just sport, and you can bet it’s going to be a fight to the finish.
According to a Consumer Reports survey, of those of us who are trying to lose weight – and there are many – 74% eat more fruits and vegetables. Eating more fruit and veggie servings is effective for weight maintenance and it’s the very best way to tackle poor health as well. No wonder it’s catching on for those with weight concerns. Other strategies from the survey included portion control (71%) cutting back on sugar (69%) and replacing a snack with an activity (45%).
Fruits and vegetables don’t just provide vital nutrients, they are full of satisfying fiber and provide more food volume for fewer calories. They also take up space on your plate where less nutritious, more caloric food would be. Eating fruits and vegetables doesn’t just help weight: it contributes to disease prevention and longevity. If you are taking a hard look at your health in the coming year, scrutinizing your fruit and veggie intake is the way to begin.
Are you resolving to be healthier in 2012? Here are our five all-time best strategies for achieving your goals once and for all. It’s no surprise that fruit and vegetable servings are at the heart of each one.
Our 5 Best Healthy Eating Resolutions for 2012
1) Cook. Bad eating habits can be tied directly back to the food we don’t cook ourselves. Less than 60% of us make our meals in our kitchens even though we know it’s the key to healthy eating. This year, resolve to learn the basics and put them into practice. Fruits & Veggies More Matters has 10 healthy ways to cook with fruits and veggies to get you started.
2) Take advantage of frozen. For those relying on the availability of fresh, nutritious food to keep their diet healthy, frozen is the savior of modern culture. Why? It’s whole, nutritious food that’s there any time of year. Keep your freezer stocked along with your pantry so good food is always at the ready.
3) Add color. Healthy eating means putting a rainbow on your plate. Eating across the color spectrum means you are naturally getting the variety of nutrients your body needs. And, foods with concentrated color are foods with high amounts of powerful phytonutrients. Eat dark leafy greens, red tomatoes, purple cabbage, blue blueberries, orange carrots, and yellow squashes, and you’ve conquered the color spectrum.
4) Add one. This year, add one serving of a fruit or vegetable to every meal. Here’s a post from 2010 that will help you add a serving every day for an entire month. F&V has a similar pledge you can take to promise yourself just one extra fruit or veggie a day: one small step that delivers a giant step for the health of humankind.
5) Less processed, more whole. Populations with diets based on whole foods tend to see lower rates of diabetes, heart disease, cancer, and other health problems. The more we stay away from processed food and eat food with no labels, no claims, and under three ingredients on their ingredients list (or better yet, with no list at all) the healthier we’ll be, and the longer we’ll live.
Resolve to be Healthy in 2012! Fruits and Veggies More Matters has more Realistic Resolutions for healthy eating.
While some of us usher in the holiday season with joy, others will be lamenting its inevitable companion, cold and flu season. Colder air means sealed up windows, recirculated air, and closed spaces where germs flourish, and there seems to be little escape from them when they arrive.
But while germs are falling on us like a Christmas Eve snow, they are more apt to cling to some and bypass others. What makes the difference? Food. It’s our best defense against poor health, and that translates directly into our day-to-day susceptibility to viruses. Healthy eating is our armor against life-threatening disease, just as it is against the pesky cold, and fruits and vegetables top the list of cold and flu resisters.
Here are some guidelines for armoring up for the coming season.
Boost Your Immune System. A consistent intake of high nutrition means you are getting vitamins, minerals, fiber and antioxidants, which offers tremendous help in fighting off viruses. Start by getting 4-5 servings of fruits and veggies every day. It will help you resist colds and flu, and if they come, your body fights them off quicker and gets you back on your feet in days, not weeks.
Go Frozen. It may be the best thing that has ever happened to nutrition. Today, freezing fruits and vegetables when they are at their peak preserves taste and nutrition – as much as if they were fresh, and possible more. There’s no reason not to eat frozen any time of year. Fruits like berries are sky-high it immune-boosting nutrition and antioxidants. It’s like your own daily flu shot against winter germs.
Choose Phyto Foods. Dr. James Sears, a regular on NBC’s The Doctors, and friend of Wild About Health, offers this advice in Parenting for cold and flu season: eat foods packed with phytonutrients. Phytos are found in deep-colored fruits and veggies such as blueberries, tomatoes and spinach. The color intensity signals immune-boosting power. Try these phyto-intense recipes that combine phytonutreint-rich wild blueberries with an array of favorites.
Eat Citrus. Oranges and grapefruits are not only available all winter long, but they are less expensive in the winter months. These fruits are notoriously high in vitamin C, and while the research into the vitamin C-cold connection is inconsistent, what is certain is that these fruits offer a wide variety of phytonutrient compounds, and they have antioxidant and immune boosting properties.
Opt for Real. We tend to reach for supplements to maintain our health in the winter, but remember that foods with vitamins and nutrients will trump vitamins in pill form every time. Why? It may have to do with synergy. Fruits, for example, offer combinations of nutrients – including not just vitamins, but minerals, flavonoids, and anitoxidants. These nutritional components work together and work with other foods to provide the immune system boost that provides the prevention.
Lean on Greens. The irony is that we eat less of the foods we need most in the winter. Colder months mean less fruit and vegetable intake. It may be the desire for comfort food combined with holiday eating, which often translates into lots of meaty, sweet, high-fat dishes. But that doesn’t have to be the case. Regularly eating a dinner that has leafy greens like spinach and kale as the primary ingredient will boost your defenses. Leafies are full of the vitamins and antioxidants your body pines for during cold and flu season. Try these 10 get-your-greens recipes from BlissTree.
More To Cure
Want more foods that will have you striding confidently through flu season? Check out this list of foods that prevent cold and flu from Livestrong.com. You can also view this slideshow from WebMD that breaks down the basics about how to fight flu with food.
Have you ever looked down at the food you’re eating and thought, “Where did you come from?”
It’s no space age phenomenon – it can happen right here in 1873…er, 2011. You can get the feeling a spaceship arrived in your kitchen and took over what you thought was a decent, healthy meal. Sometimes even the good guys – that is, the healthy, disease-preventing foods that provide antioxidants, vitamins and nutrients – can’t battle the forces that have brought your dinner plate to its knees.
That’s when you know you’ve entered a culinary battle royal coming to a kitchen near you: Cowboys and Aliens.
The Cowboys
Whether you consider your eats as urban as Sissy’s line-dancing Bud, or as free as a galloping horse carrying Alan Ladd, your culinary cowboys will always be characterized as foods that roamed the West when America was young. The cowboy foods are the good guys. They are the mainstays of your health: the foods that crusade against disease, fight cancer, maintain a healthy heart, and prevent obesity-related illness. They slap the dust off their boots and get to the work of dusting free radical from your cells.
Feeling like it’s your first rodeo? Here are some examples of culinary cowboys that will tip their Stetson to your well-being and longevity.
Caveman food. They pre-date cowboys by a smidge, but eating like a caveman isn’t that different from eating like a cowboy. Follow suit, and you’ve got a start on battling gastronomical evil forces. According to Superfood originator Steven Pratt, our genetic makeup remains the same as our cave dwelling (or ranch-roaming) ancestors’, but our lifestyle does not. The more modern our lifestyle and food choices, the more we need foods that cavemen used to get their nutrition in order to counteract our choices. That means eating berries, nuts, and foods that grow on trees and from the ground.
Food without labels. Food that requires no packaging and no ingredient label should serve as the basis of our cowboy diet. These cowboy-friendly foods – usually found at the perimeter of the supermarket or at farmer’s markets – are sold just as nature intended them to be, and they are the foods that do the most to keep us healthy as we traverse the frontier.
Local food. They may roam far and wide on their trusted steed in movies, but real cowboys were too busy handling things at home to stray far from the pasture. They ate food made and grown locally that was native to their surroundings. Taking advantage of local food means eating what local farmers grow. And, cooking with indigenous ingredients is often indicative of someone eating real, whole, healthy food. Not to mention, when you are eating locally, your dollars are kept close to home, and that means your helping your own, Pilgrim.
Clear origins. Cowboys brand their cattle so if they stray, there’s no question where they came from. Can you trace the origin of what you’re eating? What does that origin look like? Is it a farm or a factory? Is it a kitchen or a plant? Is it made by many hands or none? Could you tour the facility that made it? Is it far away or close to home? Tracing the origins of what’s on your plate can be a great way to discover the real roots or the wicked source of the food you’re colluding with.
Eating with the Posse. Eating together is the cowboy way. What does that have to do with your plate? A lot, actually. Research shows that making and eating family meals is a key element in eating well and staying healthy. Cowboys also eat as much as they are hungry for, and they eat mindfully – they don’t scarf a bag of chips while they on a perilous journey into the sun. They slow down and enjoy the victuals.
The Aliens
No food is bad. But some are just not of this world. Now that you know the cowboys, the aliens are easier to identify. Sometimes these advanced organisms are straight out of a Spielberg film, sporting one eye and two antennas, but sometimes they walk stealthily among us, their true identity hidden by an earthling-like smile that charms our eyes and our stomachs.
Extraterrestrials. Food activist Michael Pollan cautions against foods your “grandmother wouldn’t recognize as food”. That usual means, in true alien style, that it doesn’t come from the earth. If your food comes in a tube or a carton, is sprinkled with colored sugar or iridescent cheese powder, Rooster Cogburn might have sauntered right by it without even realizing it’s food – and so should we.
Alien names. Do the ingredients in your food seem, well, alien? Unpronounceable, multi-syllabic words on your ingredient list is a sign clearer than a crop circle that there is something unearthly in your lunch. It could be hurting your health, or at least taking up calories that could be spent on those that improve it. Instead, throw your lasso around foods that have four ingredients or less, and when you can, those that have just one.
Alien claims. Whether they are “light”, “enriched” or “heart healthy”, alien foods try hard to assimilate, but if they require a label, it means they are trying a little too hard. The best foods come in their own packages (with the exception of frozen, which require packaging – the good ones have just one ingredient) and make claims from nutritionists and scientists, not marketers.
Ageless food. According to the Lempert Report, shoppers are making more trips to the supermarket and spending less money per trip. These “narrow missions” could be part of avoiding aliens – that is, food that keeps forever. If your food doesn’t go bad, there’s a reason (see above). Frozen fruits and veggies or unfrozen foods that decompose like a giant parasitic egg bent on attacking Sigourney Weaver are foods that are real, whole, natural, and healthy. Keeping fresh, vulnerable foods around might require more frequent trips to the store, but you’ll be free to buy what you want without worrying it won’t get eaten.
Fight the Good (Food) Fight
Sure, sometimes we’re all itching for a good fight (or have a soft spot for Harrison Ford riding a horse), but if you’re interested in doing the best thing you can do for your health and longevity, give the food aliens a boot back into orbit. Knowledge and a few good cooking tools will serve as your magic bracelet – that’s all you need to saddle up and get yourself some colorful, antioxidant, nutrient-rich fixins that aren’t from a galaxy far, far away.
Grills have been firing up around the country this long weekend, and we’ve found plenty examples of ways outdoor cooks are combining cook-out staples, healthy food, and patriotism.
Ann Arbor’s Peggy Lampman puts her passion for the burger on the line with this Grilled Blueberry Burger and isn’t disappointed. The blueberries provide the juiciness to a leaner burger that’s good for your heart. Get the ingenious recipe!
The Cranberry Patch offers up their patriotic mojito as a way to add the “blue” to the red, white, and blue at your picnic. Here’s the rundown: For 1 gallon of blueberry mojitos, take a ½ pint of pureed blueberries and add 1 quart of Bacardi rum. Add 3 quarts of Sprite and 6 chopped mint leaves. Mix together and add crushed ice and garnish with a lime.
Finally, The Stir has 10 Memorial Day Recipes that include unique last minute ideas like Red, White & Blueberry Skewers — these colorful fruit-laden kabobs are utterly appealing to everyone (especially the kids) and an ideal way to forgo the pies and cakes. Bravo!
Have a happy and healthy holiday and enjoy this day of remembrance.
Something fishy happened recently to a Wild About Health reader.
On a quest to buy fish in the midcoast Maine area, he found swordfish from a local monger. It had just come in that day – from Uruguay. “Why am I buying fish from that far away when I live in midcoast Maine?” lamented local food aficionado D. Speer. “And,” he added, “it may have been ‘just in’, but when was this fish actually caught?”
It’s the irony of global food commerce. Lisa Turner, owner of Freeport Maine’s Laughing Stock Farm reasons in her new book The Eat Local Cookbook that while it’s a wonderful thing that crops like wild blueberries from our state can be enjoyed by others around the world in the same way she enjoys imported foods like coffee, what doesn’t make sense is buying imported apple juice when cider is available down the street. Her book – a cookbook of seasonal recipes – is based on making meals that take advantage of local treasures that actually are down the street, with a heavy slant toward vegetables and unprocessed foods.
So, how did the swordfish turn out? Speer was frank: “It was mushy.”
Small Growers
A benefit of living in the state of Maine is that local growers are everywhere. There are over 160 farms and over 6500 “shares” in Maine – some are big, some are small, some harvest herbs, some mushrooms; some grow veggies, while some offer milk and cheese. Community residents commit themselves to buying local, and farmers reciprocate by providing the best product they can. As a result, thousands of dollars remain within communities rather than being distributed around the globe.
More than ever, Maine communities are embracing the local food movement. One notable model exists in Washington County, where the Machias Marketplace provides a local buying club for residents.
One day each week, fresh, local food straight from farmers is brought to about 100 families and to the local co-op, providing residents with access to fruits and veggies, milk, meat and baked goods.
Another hint that local, seasonal eating is a growing passion in the state can be found in the trove of seasonal cooking classes and books that focus on seasonal cooking. As a complement to books like Turner’s, a series of classes taking place this spring and summer at the Portland Public Market in southern Maine adopts a hands-on approach. As part of the series, sponsored by the Maine Real Food Project, local chef Frank Giglio teaches attendees how to cook directly from the state’s bounty – both land and sea.
Reasons to Eat Local
Perhaps the best reason to eat local is that your health will benefit. You’ll get plenty of whole, unprocessed foods as well as a cornucopia of fruits and vegetables. But there are plenty of reasons in addition to health to start eating primarily food in your proximity.
If you are experiencing meal-making ennui, eating local can throw a wrench into your cooking, in a good way. You’ll be forced to do new things and get inspiration from new ingredients.
It’s all about flavor. Plain and simple, local foods are given a chance to ripen longer, and that means better taste. Foods that travel to get to your local store are usually picked prematurely so they keep longer. Those foods rate high on looks but low on flavor. (That’s why IQF, or individually quick frozen foods, are a great alternative in winter, or any season when fresh isn’t accessible.) And, when food travels less, that’s better for the environment.
Another reason that local foods shine in health? Because the nutrients of prematurely picked foods suffer, too. Farmers also make efforts to use nutrient-rich soil and reduce the use of chemicals. Ask a local farmer about their growing methods.
Eating local is good for the local economy, and it supports local land development. In addition to supporting your neighborhood farmer, it keeps dollars close to home.
Finally, eating local is fun. Picking up local foods means you are making a connection with the earth, with your community, and with local farmers. You get to make colorful choices, and pick from a variety of options. And that will make you feel not just healthier, but happier.
5 Ways to Start
Inspired to start eating local? It’s the perfect time! Here’s five great ways to start:
1. Find a farm. If you are in Maine, you can use the MOFGA website’s food map to find the closest farm near you, or head over to Eat Maine Foods for a map of your closest CSAs. Then, get to know the ropes of local farms so you feel at home there. You can use our tips for shopping farmer’s markets.
2. Commit to spending a set amount of your grocery budget on local food. Try one-third to one-half to start. In the summer, depending on you accessibility, there is often no reason to purchase non-local produce, and local meats are available from farms and some markets.
3. Join those who eat only food grown in a 100-mile radius of wherever they live. Or, start smaller by deciding to make one meal a day out of strictly local foods.
4. Try one new local/seasonal fruit or vegetable each time you shop.
5. Buy a cookbook that provides recipes based on the season like Turner’s Eat Local, or take a class on eating local, seasonal foods.
What’s your community doing to foster healthy eating through local food? Give us a comment or email us at editor(at)wildblueberries.com and let us know!
Watching your weight? If “calories-in, calories-out” is your mantra, try changing up your food routine and start repeating the real secret to maintaining a healthy weight: Eat more.
Truth is, you gotta snack in order to feel full.
According to Skinny Cook Allison Fishman, “Eat more!” is the best advice you can get when it comes to weight loss. Why? Because we’re usually packing on pounds not because our breakfast is too big, but because we overeat after 5:00.
If you’re snacking on anything that fits effectively into your mouth when the clock strikes the dinner hour, it’s probably because you didn’t get an adequate amount of calories during the day.
Fishman recommends adding a do-not-miss mid-afternoon snack to your day – 200 calories or so – and if you need it, one mid-morning as well. The key is eliminating blood sugar crashes, providing yourself with consistent energy, and not inhaling food after five out of pure starvation.
Eating small portions throughout the day also helps increase metabolism, keeps the brain out of the late-day fog, and helps us avoid temptation for things we would ordinarily shun (think donuts in the snack room) if we were properly fed.
So start a brand new weight loss mantra: Never go hungry. You may see the pounds start to fall off. Plus, you won’t be distracted by that annoying rumbling sound anymore.
6 Tips for Vigorous Snacking for the Skinny-to-be:
1. Get a serving. Maybe it’s a fruit or veggie serving, maybe it’s a healthy fish serving. Either way, snacking is a ready-made way to fill the gaps in your nutrition. Fishman keeps crisp bread with smoked salmon and herbs around for a mini gourmet snack that replaces a bulky bagel – under and buck and 45 calories.
2. Eat brain food. If you’re having a snack, choose one that’s good for your brain. Berries, for example, improve blood flow and keep small blood vessels working efficiently, allowing for better brain health and performance. Studies show that rats that eat blueberries get through their mazes quicker and have a higher level of regenerating cells in their brains – just what we need to combat mid-day human slumps.
3. Pack your own. Buying those 100 calorie snacks that come in mini packages is a sure way to hike up your food bill. Forget the packages: make you own by cutting fresh veggies, bringing yogurt or packaging your own leftovers in your own moderate size bag, box or wrap. Keeping full throughout the day requires some planning ahead, so do the 3-step snack shuffle – shop, prepare, and package – every day.
4. Combine it. Combining foods that work well together can make your snack life more interesting and more satisfying. Carrots and hummus or apples and a cheese wedge or teaspoon of peanut butter can keep you from chewing bare celery all day and feeling deprived as a result. Having herbs at the ready (dill, basil, cilantro), using citrus (a squeeze of lemon or lime on salads, fruits and proteins), and sprinkling coarse salt on your homemade snacks can rev up your taste buds and turn boring into gourmet.
5. Get creative. Step away from the bird seed, and get yourself an eating well handbook to enrich your meal planning ideas and jazz up your snacking. In You Can Trust a Skinny Cook, Allison Fishman offers up yummy Parmesan Twists for 97 calories per serving, and fabulous Stuffed Mushrooms for 107. Check out her “Something to Munch” section for tons of easy recipes that turn deprivation into a thing of the past.
6. Check your portions. It’s an equation that works: eating during the day means cutting portions at the end of the day. And whether it’s a mid-day snack or dinner blow out, you may not have to eat as much as you currently are. Gimmicks like smaller plates, putting you main course on your salad plate (and your salad on your entrée plate) or immediately cutting your meal in half and saving it for tomorrow’s lunch can provide the crutch you need to understand what your stomach really needs…and what it doesn’t so much. Life, like lunch, is long…you can always eat later.
The “Skinny” Cook Finds the Recipe for Healthy, Shameless Eating
The author of You Can Trust a Skinny Cook talked exclusively to Wild About Health about the myth of the microwave, how to maximize servings, and why wild blueberries make her happy.
Allison Fishman admits she kind of loves the fruit and vegetable serving requirements. When she’s away from home working, she leaves those picking up fast food sandwiches to their own devices, and insists on yogurt and berries instead. Recently, while working on a shoot at the Cooking Light offices where she is a contributor, Fishman was delighted to discover the cafeteria stocked with yogurt parfaits with a layer of blueberries. “It’s kind of fun on the road when you can get those things,” she says. “If my goal is to have those six to nine servings, then OK, bacon, you’re going to have to wait.”
You have to trust someone who has that sort of commitment. And about the rest of the servings? No problem. One of her recent on-the-road meals at a Alabama steakhouse started with a celery and carrot appetizer with dressing (one to two servings) followed by a salad (another serving or two), roasted cauliflower (serving), and creamed spinach (serving). Then, she ate half of her steak. “That’s the way to eat,” she says.
“After a lifetime of trying to diet, suddenly there it was. There was the solution.”
Fishman knows how to eat – even at a steakhouse on the road – from experience. She may be the author of You Can Trust a Skinny Cook, but she doesn’t consider herself skinny. “I’m not a naturally skinny person. I don’t come from skinny people. I’m 5’6″, 135 pounds. I’m curvy, and that’s they way it’s going to be,” she says. But she has been bigger. After working a corporate job for ten years, she had been eating out and traveling a lot, and she had gained a lot of weight.
“I was going out to Boston and Manhattan and having wonderful meals and then cooking at home and having bad food. I was microwaving frozen diet dinners or having diet snacks. And I was getting heavier,” Fishman says. “It was this weird, sort of sad space I was in.” When she finally tired of the corporate world, she did something surprising. She went to culinary school – not because she aspired to be a professional chef, but because she wanted to learn how to cook.
“I thought, I can’t be the only woman suffering in the kitchen,” she said of her culinary ineptitude. “There’s an assumption that women are domestic and have these kitchen skills, and quite frankly, they are not things you are born with.” At culinary school, she cooked and ate more than she had in her life, and she shrank. “I remember my sister-in-law saying, ‘We need to go to Nordstrom’s. Your clothes don’t fit’. I realized that I was suddenly learning good cooking techniques, I was cooking vegetables and grains for the first time, and making taste and flavor the priority. Through doing that, I was naturally making better food that was better for me.”
It was a message that resonated. Fishman went on to co-author the bestselling book Cook Yourself Thin, and to serve as the co-host of Lifetime’s Cook Yourself Thin and TLC’s Home Made Simple. You Can Trust a Skinny Cook is her latest book, and it includes recipes and cooking techniques for home cooks who want to eat well and maybe get a little skinnier in the process. Recipes accompany nutritional information as well as a complement of tips for taking in fewer calories without giving up flavor, taste, and satisfaction.
“We are defrosting, we are reheating…we are in a culture of 20 minute meals.”
One of Fishman’s goals is to debunk the notion that eating can be effortless. She says that we tend to buy into a myth that might have been born with the microwave: that if we’re spending time doing something, there must be something wrong with us. “Cooking has gone from something that we have to do to take care of ourselves to something that’s optional,” she says. She likens it to any daily activity like snow shoveling to get the car out in the winter, or showering. “When people brag about not cooking, I think, do people brag about not showering? ‘I don’t shower, showering takes so much time…what a pain!’ But it’s a part of taking care of yourself. And cooking to me is one of those things.”
At the same time, her recipes are by no means difficult. They were tested by novice cooks and chosen based on their ease, as well their very high standards of flavor and quotient of fun. She includes a gazpacho that takes 10 minutes, for example, and an nearly effortless a Creamy Cucumber Soup. But if making a meal takes more than 20 minutes, Fishman says that’s not a bad thing: “I’d rather spend one hour three nights a week and have delicious leftovers.”
It’s no surprise that Fishman included recipes that feature a lot of fruits and vegetables. While she doesn’t care for fruit and veggie “sneaking”, she uses them to both enhance and enlarge servings. “I put them in so you know about it, and you enjoy it,” she emphasizes. She acknowledges that Americans are used to chewing (“and chewing, and chewing”) and her recipes warrant plenty. In fact, many of the inclusions in You Can Trust a Skinny Cook are favorites in lower calorie versions. But calories aren’t diminished through low-cal methods and fake-food substitutions. They disappear through cutting portions – a flourless chocolate cake that could extravagantly serve eight, actually generously serves 12 – or through Fishman’s version of portion “stretching” that actually adds to the flavor.
One tasty example is Fishman’s Spicy Peanut Noodle recipe which incorporates eight cups of Napa cabbage in addition to the noodles. Rather than a skimpy cup of peanut noodles, families can linger over two-cup servings instead, savoring the spicy sauce along with generous amounts of red pepper, jicama, and cabbage. In a recent cooking demo for Wild Blueberry and Peach Bread Pudding, the resulting servings simply heaped with fruit. The only ingredient that could be considered a lower calorie replacement was from a more caloric bread such as a brioche to an Italian bread. She explains, “I’m cutting out the calories that you don’t taste anyway.”
“I want to have the whole fruit – the whole berry.”
“It makes me smile to have them,” Fishman says of using berries as an ingredient in her cooking. “I know I’m doing something good for myself.” Flavor is always the priority for her, and berries are put to delicious work in this regard. Wild blueberries serve a calorie-saving purpose that only enlivens flavor. Her Blueberry Banana Bread uses frozen blueberries as a replacement for chocolate chips, for instance – a decision that turned 600 calories (in a cup of chips) into 60. And when the result is Blueberry Banana Bread, well, that’s a pretty painless sacrifice.
Fishman is also a persuasive proponent of keeping the pantry full – she has to be. She also works as a personal coach helping clients achieve healthier ways of eating. (For Cooking Light she works with a different reader every month to help them adopt a new healthy habit.) They must eat well and eat heartily, so they need easy access to good food.
She considers a stocked freezer a crucial part of a stocked kitchen. She effuses about frozen peas, frozen corn, and frozen wild blueberries. “Your freezer should be full of frozen fruit and frozen vegetables so that when you go to make a meal they are right there,” she says. She avoids “drinking” her calories in health drinks and juices, opting instead for the whole fruit, saying, “I want to have the skin, and I want to have the fiber.”
Having frozen is her ideal method, because, she says, “it’s they best way to get the whole berry.” She also likes the cost savings of frozen, and uses frozen wild blueberries in all of her recipes that call for blueberries, with the rare exception of those used to garnish lemon tarts, where she opts for fresh.
While wild blues have a strong showing in Fishman’s book, it also features fabulously tasty dishes from soup to dessert, including 352 calorie Salmon with Dill Sauce, and a 221 calorie New England Clam Chowder. There’s no stronger evidence that this is a delicious marriage of love for health and love for food. Ready to find your own inner skinny?
