Category Archives: Real Food

A Menace to Satiety

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A member of my family texted me a few weeks ago: “Thinking of you as I’m watching CNN report on the effects of ultra processed foods… Followed by an ad on controlling diabetes numbers. (Did they consult you?)”. She knows how long I’ve been thinking about this.

So I decided to write about ultra processed “items” this week. The media has got to stop calling them food.

An old friend once came to visit, and she told me that she’d been discussing my dietary recommendations with her clever boyfriend. He spent some time mulling them over, and then said: “Processed food is a menace to satiety.” Indeed it is.

Have you ever given any thought to the fact that you might be able to eat your way through several pounds of potatoes in the form of potato chips, but never as baked potatoes? How many baked potatoes do you actually think you could eat? Remember to include the butter because, after all, most potato chips are fried. 

My husband and a bear-sized buddy of his from Athens, Ohio, used to joke that the best way to eat Girl Scouts Thin Mint Cookies was to open the cellophane and slide the entire sleeve right into your mouth all at once. Ouch. A sure sign of ultra processing.

What’s the record number of bowls of breakfast cereal — just name your brand — that you’ve ever eaten at one sitting? Three? Four? What about a whole box? Do you think you could eat that many bowls of oatmeal? I suspect not. That’s because real food nourishes, and whole oats are real food. Generally speaking, however, most breakfast cereals are manufactured calories; and manufactured calories do not nourish. They will never nourish you. They do something different. They entertain. Entertainment is fine, entertainment is fun, but entertainment is not food. Any time a manufacturer has to tell you when to use a particular product or product category (breakfast cereal, lunchables, TV dinners…), there’s a very good chance that it’s not really food.

Real food fills your belly. Real food tells you, “You’re full now. You can stop eating.” Highly processed manufactured edible products don’t do that. They bypass the exquisitely sensitive signaling systems that are designed to keep your body working right. They hijack your appetite. You can’t tell when you’re full. So you keep eating. You cruise the cabinets after dinner even though you JUST ate. 

When you’re hungry, it’s not a good idea to eat something that’s been processed or manufactured into a form that is no longer recognized by your body as real food. Instead, it’s a much better idea to eat something that your body recognizes as nourishing food. Maybe a slice of cheddar or Swiss cheese. Some leftover grilled asparagus. A cup of brown rice. Broccoli soup. A ripe avocado, or a slice or two of turkey breast. A cup of raspberries. An orange. A bunch of grapes. Celery sticks dipped in hummus. A homemade oatmeal-raisin cookie.

Real food is truly satisfying. 

YOUR HEALTHY PLATE: Wintertime Oatmeal with Apples & Walnuts

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In view of the fact that I’ve been asked once again to repost this recipe, and since it’s autumn (the most glorious autumn I can remember in years), I am reposting this recipe for Apple-Walnut Oatmeal. I’ve adjusted the proportions to make enough for two. 

Looking out the dining room window as I write this, all I can see are dozens of cool, grey-brown branches against a pale blue, sun-lit sky. It’s beautifully stark, and riveting, calling me to the outdoors while the sun is still low in the eastern sky. But before I venture out into this beautiful day, I’m going to make this oatmeal recipe to warm me from the inside out. This recipe has a lot of flavor, with all the right kinds of yummy. You will probably smile while you’re eating it. I know I do.

1 cup rolled oats
1 small apple, peeled, cored, and diced small
3 c. water
pinch of salt
1 1/2 tsp. vanilla extract
2 Tbsp. flax meal
3/4 tsp. cinnamon, scant
1 tsp. olive oil
2 Tbsp. toasted walnuts, chopped coarsely

In a medium saucepan, heat the oats, apple, water, and salt over medium heat. Heat 5-8 minutes until simmering, lower heat to medium-low, and cook 5 minutes more until the apple softens, stirring often.

Add the vanilla, olive oil, flax meal and cinnamon, and stir well. Pour into a serving bowl, top with nuts, and serve. I’ve also made this recipe with amaranth to replace the oats, and almonds instead of the walnuts. It comes out delicious! Feeds 2-3 very nicely.

Ultraprocessed Breakfast Cereal

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From time to time I take an opportunity to post an entry about my disdain for breakfast cereal or, perhaps more aptly, breakfast candy. It was in the 1970’s that concerns began to arise about the sugar content in breakfast cereals. From my point of view, once this was brought to our attention as consumers, a reasonable response would have been to lower the sugar content in breakfast cereal products. But that is not what happened. Continue reading →

There Is So Much You Can Do To Make It Better

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Sometimes I think this blog should have a category called “It’s worse than you think” or “I’m really not exaggerating,” or maybe just “More scary news.” Sometimes I even get the feeling that people think I may be overstating the urgency of the diabetes epidemic. So I gathered together a few statistics for you. Continue reading →

And the Winner is Real Food

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Years ago, the article Can We Say What Diet is Best for Health?, by David Katz and Stephanie Meller from Yale University School of Public Health, was published in the Annual Review of Public Health. A related essay by James Hamblin, Science Compared Every Diet, and the Winner is Real Food, was subsequently published in the Atlantic.  

Katz and Meller compared low-carb, low-fat, low-glycemic, Mediterranean, DASH, Paleolithic, and vegan diets, concluding that “A diet of minimally processed foods close to nature, predominantly plants, is decisively associated with health promotion and disease prevention.”  Michael Pollan said, “Eat food. Mostly plants. Not too much.” More recent research continues to confirm these findings. Continue reading →

Food for Thought

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I once saw a post that said “Eat organic food, or, as your grandparents called it, food.” Only a century ago, nourishing food did not require prefixes like real, whole-grain, pastured, free-range, wild, or grass-fed. That’s what food was. What is happening to the food supply? As you have probably surmised by now, I spend lots of time thinking about the differences between real food and manufactured calories.

One strategy I use is to avoid products invented in the 20th century, like cottonseed oil, or high-fructose corn syrup. Also, I stay away from products that tell me when to use them, like breakfast cereals, lunch meats, and TV dinners. No one needs to tell you when to eat a banana, or scrambled eggs, or oatmeal, or guacamole, or chicken noodle soup. Continue reading →

YOUR HEALTHY PLATE: Bob’s Red Mill Quinoa Salad

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You may or may not have heard, but last month, on February 10th, Bob Moore, a founder of Bob’s Red Mill Natural Foods, passed away at the age of 94. And I felt the need to write a post about this man who made such a remarkable difference in our food supply. Continue reading →

First Trimester Ideas for My New Friend at Verizon

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This week at the Verizon store I got a new phone and made a new friend. She was endlessly patient and kind through four interminable visits over the course of two weeks, and I appreciated her even more once I learned that she was also in the process of struggling through her first trimester.  When she told me that she’d been having a hard time figuring out what to eat that she could keep down, I promised to write a post about nourishing foods that would — hopefully — include something easy to digest. So here we go. Continue reading →

Colorful Meals (with a few recipes)

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In the past few days we’ve had vegetable-bean soup made with Moro beans from Rancho Gordo, fresh tomatoes on toast made from Simple Kneads’s sourdough bread, tossed green salads with peppers and radishes, pickled red onions, fresh guacamole, orange-grapefruit salad sprinkled with pistachios, green grapes, cherry tomatoes, and fresh blueberries. And there is almost always homemade bread made from my husband’s hands with King Arthur’s whole wheat flour. 

Our meals do not exactly have a theme, but they always have a lot going for them. It’s all about vegetables, and fruits, and color. On a regular basis we make our way through red, green (light, medium, and dark), white, yellow, brown, orange, purple and blue produce. That’s a lot of colors. And, as my mom taught me, the more colors at a meal, the better. Continue reading →

Gifts from my Family

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We receive many different kinds of gifts from our grandparents, whether the ability to identify all the trees in the backyard, or a beribboned stack of letters dating from the early 1900s, or a love of card games, baseball, or building castles on the beach. My family loved to cook and eat. This is certainly my inheritance, and a large part of the reason my family ate little or no ultraprocessed food. To use a product like “Shake ‘n’ Bake” bordered on heresy. I come by my love and celebration of good, real food in the most honest way possible.  Continue reading →