If I had just ten seconds to share advice on improving your nutrition, this is what I would say: Eat more fruits and vegetables. And I don’t think that would surprise anyone. We all know these are nutritional powerhouses, and we all know that it’s a good idea to eat more of them, especially since most of us probably don’t eat enough produce to begin with. Continue reading
Category Archives: Nutrition
YOUR HEALTHY PLATE: Stuffed Pumpkin & Braised Onions
My kitchen counter is once again covered with pumpkins and onions, so it must be getting close to November! Here are two unusual and extraordinary recipes to use up your pumpkins and onions. If you have time, try to make the onions the day before, because as good as they are, they taste even better the next day! And they are great recipes for holiday celebrations, too. Continue reading
Insulin: A Very Good Place to Start
Here is why it’s important to use less insulin: The fact is that insulin is not your friend. You need it to live, but you want to use as little as possible. You want the levels of insulin in your bloodstream to stay as low as possible. Like sugar. The lower the better (within reason, say 80 to 99 for fasting blood sugars). When it comes to insulin, you want your levels to remain as low as necessary to do the job, not zero of course, but on the low side. Why is that? There are a number of reasons. Continue reading
One Step At a Time
Some time ago, Gene [not his real name] the computer guy showed up at my office for the first time in a while. Right away, I knew something had changed. I said, “You’re looking very well! How are you doing, Gene?” He responded with an uncharacteristic grin, and answered with an observation that all of us know, but few believe (despite numerous confirmatory personal experiences!). I sat up fast when he said, “Diets don’t work.” Continue reading
Is Obesity an Overindulged State? NO
I want to speak once again about a massive misconception, namely that obesity is an overindulged state. It is not. If obesity were an overindulged state, then diets would work. The reason that your appetite increases right along with your waistline is that the bigger you are, the more malnourished you become. And the more malnourished you are, the hungrier you get. Obesity is caused by malnutrition.
Have you ever said to yourself, “Why, oh why, did I drink so much olive oil?” Have you ever heard someone say, “Wow, I shouldn’t have eaten so much fruit salad!”? Of course not. Foods that are nutritious send signals to our brains to put the brakes on automatically when we’ve had enough.
In contrast, items without nutritional value send no such signal. So it’s easy to eat too much candy, too many potato chips, half a pan of brownies, a sleeve of Thin Mints, and two full orders of deep-fried whatever. Even on the same day.
That’s why the solution to overweight is not to eat less but to eat better. It’s why I want a lot of peanuts (or edamame or walnuts or almonds or chickpeas) in my salad. Because that salad is going to fill me up and stick to my ribs a lot more if I add plenty of nutritious oils and protein to that gorgeous, colorful salad. And I also want the salad dressing to be made with something rich and nourishing like olive oil or tahini, either of which will make the salad taste fabulous and satisfy me for hours. Fat-free salad dressing is not food. Neither is anything else made with corn syrup.
Portion control is a separate issue from nutritional density. Eat more nutritious food, and there is a good chance that your portions will begin, slowly, to take care of themselves. This means that portion control is not a solution, but rather a consequence of improving your nutrition. It happens by itself when you begin to eat in a way that supports your good health. The more nutritious food you eat, the better nourished you become, the more weight you “release,” the better your pants fit, and the more reasonable your appetite gets. What you weigh is a reflection of the choices you make. You don’t get to choose your weight. You don’t get to dial in what you want to weigh every morning. But if you begin to improve the nutritional value of the things you choose to eat, your weight begins to reflect the new choices.
Stripped Carbs: The Emperor’s New Clothes
I promised a friend that I would write another post about stripped carbs and processed edibles. Sometimes stripped carbs are called simple carbs, but there’s nothing simple about them. Stripped carbs include white flour, white rice, corn starch, corn syrup, sugar, fruit juice, and beer. It’s not that you can’t eat them at all; it’s that Americans are drowning in them. Continue reading
What’s for Breakfast?
I really love snow, and last weekend Northeast Ohio finally got its first real snowstorm of the year. As you might guess, I spent a lot of time last weekend shoveling snow, so I needed a breakfast that provided a lot of fuel. That’s what I want to talk about today. Breakfast. So what’s for breakfast? In a word? Protein. In two words? Nourishing fat. In three words? No stripped carbohydrates. I’m going to share some of my favorite ideas for breakfast, but first I’ll tell you about some of the ways I learned to nourish myself when I was younger and traveling. Continue reading
Food with a Capital F
I am thinking about how to refer to real food, as opposed to the “not-food” that is driving the epidemic of chronic disease that doctors see in our offices day after day. You can approach this problem from any number of angles. Continue reading
What’s the Best Way to Eat?
An article entitled Can We Say What Diet is Best for Health? by David Katz and Stephanie Meller, from Yale’s School of Public Health, was published in the Annual Review of Public Health a few years ago. A story about the article was published in the Atlantic by James Hamblin, who called it Science Compared Every Diet, and the Winner is Real Food. I would have edited out the word “Real” and simply called it “Food.” Then I might have presented a review of the differences between Food (With a Capital F) and manufactured calories. Continue reading
How Low-Carb Can You Go?
What does low-carb mean? Well, the first thing it means is that something else has more carb. So what are you comparing it to? Breakfast cereal? Fast food? Angel food cake? The standard American diet? Anything would be low-carb compared to those. Continue reading