This week we are all about this summer salad, created by our very own Chickpea Chica! The Chickpea Chica has developed dozens of recipes that showcase bright flavors you would never have thought to combine. So we celebrate her talent and thank our lucky stars, which reminds me: It’s not too early to start collecting your recipes for July 4th! Continue reading
Category Archives: Real Food
Here’s Your Approach!
It suddenly occurred to me this week, right out of the blue, that stepping into the driver’s seat (and applying our understanding of the differences between real food and manufactured calories) looks different for each of the three major macronutrients: carbohydrate, protein, fat. The strategy for each is slightly different. Now, if you’re new to this, then it’s perfectly reasonable to try one at a time and, without a single second’s hesitation, I would start with carbohydrates. Continue reading
Does This Nourish Me?
Here are some questions to ask yourself as you choose your foods:
“What should I be buying, preparing, and eating?”
“What should I be making for my family, or co-workers?”
“Does this provide me with nutrients and building blocks?”
“Does it help my body to grow, to heal, to be strong and healthy?”
“Does it nourish me?”
To thrive or not to thrive, that is the question. Continue reading
What Thomas Friedman Said About Culture
This week I heard Thomas Friedman, the journalist, author, and Pulitzer prize winner who writes extensively on globalization (market), environmental issues (Mother Nature), and the Middle East. He shared his perspective on these and more, as you can see if you check out the twitter feed I generated while I listened. I’ve been thinking a lot about one particular thing he said, which was this: “Culture really matters. People, God bless ‘em, have bodies and souls.” Continue reading
On #Commodity and #Terroir
Today we’re going to talk about commodities. What is a commodity? When goods and services are traded on the grand scale for other goods and services, they become “commodities.” One characteristic of a commodity is that its price is determined not by quality, but by demand. The greater the demand, the greater the market. That’s what determines whether an item is a commodity. Continue reading
YOUR HEALTHY PLATE: Corn & Quinoa Salad
In case you’re wondering, THIS is what you should do with your roasted ears of corn! ‘Tis the season!! Continue reading
Milestone Celebration: Your Favorite Posts
This weekend, Your Health is on Your Plate (YHIOYP) passed 100,000 hits! Just two years old, the blog is being read and shared across the country and around the globe. To celebrate, today I am sharing the ten most popular posts. New readers, this is your chance to catch up, to read the best posts, and to share them with your friends and family. It’s not too late; it’s never too late.
Your favorite choices for best blog post (in no particular order) are these:
- Leaves, Stems, and Buds: Cruciferous Vegetables
- Instant Oatmeal, Steel-cut Oats, and Everything In Between
- Juice and Soda Increase Your Risk of Diabetes and Obesity
- Let’s Start at the Very Beginning
- Maybe Hillary Clinton Reads My Blog
- What the Vegan, Mayo Clinic, and Atkins Diets Have in Common
- Hospital Food
- How Low-Carb Can You Go?
- Don’t Eat Bread for Breakfast
- Coffee Whiteners (Go ahead and Google this phrase!)
I’m adding to this list with some of my own favorite posts as well. Maybe you’ll discover something that speaks to you, or maybe this post will offer more food for thought on an issue you’ve been thinking about, or maybe it will bring it all together. If you have additional questions, I hope you’ll share them and give me a chance to think about a response.
In no particular order once again, some of my own favorites are these:
Finally, speaking of favorites, many thanks to all of you for the great questions and recipes that have come our way, and thank you for reading YHIOYP.
Let’s Start at the Very Beginning
When people want to talk with me about the blog, these are the kinds of questions they usually ask: “I went to your website and saw a lot of interesting posts, but where should I start? What is the first thing I need to understand?”
First, there is a huge difference between real food and manufactured calories. Second, manufactured calories are a major factor in the epidemic of obesity and diabetes, as well as the rising rates of many other diseases, such as breast cancer, colon cancer, and prostate cancer.
Let’s take a field trip, out the back door, and into a field of growing wheat. Pick a single grain, and take a good look, and what do you see? Each grain contains a bran fiber coat; an endosperm (primarily starch); and a germ, which is rich in nourishing oils. Approximately 200 years ago, humans figured out how to strip away the coat and germ, so that only the pellet of white starch remained. Manufacturers call this “white flour.”
If you could look at a bit of white starch under a microscope, you would see a long chain of sugar molecules. We break the links between those sugar molecules so efficiently that eating white flour causes your blood sugar to rise as quickly — if not more so — as when you eat a spoonful of sugar. White flour and sugar both cause blood sugars to spike.
Manufacturers chose to call white flour and sugar refined carbohydrates. But to refine is to remove coarse impurities. The term refined was selected specifically to suggest that whole-grain flour was coarse, or unrefined. In nature, carbohydrates are almost always found in a fiber matrix. Consider dates and beets, both of which are used by industry as raw materials for the manufacture of sugar. In their original state, they are so rich in fiber and phytonutrients that they are classified as superfoods. With only rare exceptions (e.g., honey, maple syrup), refined carbohydrates are not found in nature.
After you eat, your gut breaks down food into sugar, which then gets absorbed into your bloodstream. White flour and sugar are broken down easily; they are rapidly absorbed, and they spike your blood sugars. Foods like produce (fruits and vegetables), nuts, whole grains, beans, eggs, and meats are absorbed slowly enough that blood sugars remain more or less stable.
Once food enters your bloodstream, your pancreas releases insulin to catch the incoming sugar and escort it to the cells of your body. The more quickly you absorb sugar, the more insulin you need. The more slowly you absorb the sugar, the less insulin you need. It works like a valet service. Imagine you were invited to a huge party. At exactly 7 p.m., one thousand cars show up at the party center. They’re going to need a lot of valet staff to park those cars.
But consider an alternate scenario. Imagine you receive an invitation to an open house for 3-9 p.m. At the end of the day, the party center will still park 1000 cars. But they won’t need nearly as many valet staff.
The sugar is the cars, and the insulin is the valet staff. If your sugar shows up all at once, you will need a lot of insulin. But if the sugar gets absorbed bit by bit, you won’t need nearly as much insulin. Insulin is a fat-storage hormone. The more you use, the more you need. This is called insulin resistance. The higher your insulin levels, the more fat you store in your belly. Insulin has many other deleterious effects on the body, and they begin decades earlier than we once thought.
Which nutrients are absorbed slowly? Fiber, protein, and fat. Foods like bulgur wheat, brown rice, buckwheat, quinoa, millet — all whole grains. Dates, beets, avocados, peanuts and tree nuts, seeds, eggs, beans, fruits, vegetables. All of these are absorbed slowly. Which items are absorbed quickly? Stripped carbs, like cake, sugar, breakfast cereals, doughnuts, bagels, cookies.
Please feel free to post questions.
The Cost of Your Burger and Fries
I had intended to write about crackers this week, but crackers will wait while I share the news that Food, Inc., an Academy-award nominee for Best Documentary, will be available on line, for free, now through April 29th only, at Food, Inc. Billed by Variety as a “civilized horror movie for the socially conscious, the nutritionally curious and the hungry,” I urge you to find 94 minutes this week to watch it.
This news about Food, Inc. comes at a good time for “Your Health is on Your Plate,” because it was just last week that a reader named Julia commented on the higher cost of meat from pastured and grass-fed chickens relative to lower-priced, mass-produced meats. She expressed the concerns of many when she said that it’s a difficult choice to make when you are purchasing and cooking for a large family. But is it really true that mass-produced meat is cheaper? It is not. Food, Inc. explains why.
The money that we remove from our wallets turns out to be just one small part of the total cost of mass-produced, manufactured food products. The actual costs, a great deal higher, are transferred to three other sectors: health, the environment, and society as a whole. As a physician with a background in environmental studies, I stand at the crossroads where the three arenas intersect, and I state with authority that the costs are unacceptable and unsustainable. Health effects are reflected in the absolutely unbelievable rates of obesity and diabetes, and the skyrocketing medical costs of caring for those with these diseases. Environmental effects are made visible in the rivers of animal waste spewing from feedlots. And the parallel between the inhumane treatment of animals that become our food and the workers (without whom these artificially suppressed prices are not possible) who process that food is not coincidental.
In Food, Inc., I heard a family choose dollar-menu sandwiches, fries, and shakes over fresh produce, all while spending $70/month on the father’s diabetes medication. I saw photographs of feed lots filled with thousands of animals knee deep in their own excrement. I learned that the number of slaughter houses in the United States has dropped from several thousand to just 13 over the past several decades, effectively concentrating and destabilizing the meat processing industry. I was introduced to a woman who has campaigned, so far unsuccessfully, for safer cattle feeding and butchering practices ever since her 2-year-old son contracted hemorrhagic colitis that was caused by the E. coli 0157:H7 bacteria in the burger he ate 10 days before he died. Feeding animals a grain-based diet, which they did not evolve to eat, increases the risk of illness to both the animals and the people who consume them.
Eating well doesn’t have to be expensive. Eating meat every day is expensive, but eating different things, such as lentils, chickpeas, salads, whole grains (especially when purchased in bulk), and greens, is not. A few years ago, one of my patients, a janitor in a local high school, dropped 50 pounds and half of his medications over the course of a year or so. “How did you do it?,” I asked. “Beans and greens,” he said with a grin as he pounded on his chest and then opened both arms wide. “It’s the secret to my success.”
Jamie Oliver, the cook who transformed England’s school lunch program, has now decided to tackle Huntington, WV, with the highest rates of obesity in the nation. His goal is to teach families to prepare meals in their own homes by using real ingredients in place of pre-processed, manufactured products. I’ve been watching episodes of “Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution” as he wins over school cafeteria workers, a local disc jockey, and the many obese residents of a town filled with optimistic families. Jamie Oliver understands that teaching people to enjoy and cherish their food is key to teaching them to prepare it. And learning to prepare one’s own meals with fresh ingredients is the crucial first step to preventing obesity and diabetes.
Simple-food guru Alice Waters says that good food is a good investment. “You either pay up front, or you pay out back…in your health and your way of life and the health of the planet…” Jamie Oliver says that Alice Waters’s books “…bring her recipes to everyone. There’s nothing elitist about that.” For more on affordability, check out Dawn Viola’s post at Wicked Good Dinner, voted one of the 10 best food blogs of 2009.
In the current environment, a burger has become a better buy than a bunch of broccoli. Chips are cheaper than carrots. Easy down-payment, lifetime to pay. It reminds me of subprime, variable-rate mortgages. The actual price is untenable, unthinkable, and, actually, unaffordable.
According to Michael Pollan, this is precisely why change is required at the policy level. The “Farm Bill,” ignored for decades by most of us who assumed that it was irrelevant to those who don’t farm, is actually the heart of the American food system, and we will become more familiar with its content as we begin to make the standard American diet our own business.
Here’s more good news: We remain complicit only as long as we continue to purchase cheaply manufactured calories. The fact is, our purchasing power is substantial. We vote each and every time we open our wallets. So let’s get out there and vote.
Grass-fed Beef, Wild Salmon, Organic Tomatoes, and Whole-grain Wheat
Our food supply has undergone an unprecedented change in the past century; the drive to decrease consumer costs while maximizing profits has compromised the quality of our food supply to an astonishing degree. This phenomenon is reflected in the actual words we use to talk about food. Words that describe food have come to mean something quite different than what they meant just a few generations ago.
Despite the country meadow scene on the cartons, you can be sure that the dozens of eggs for sale at conventional supermarkets were laid by chickens that never saw a sunny day. If you’re looking for eggs from chickens raised the old-fashioned way, you’re looking for “free-range” chickens. Inasmuch as our fragile, centralized food industry depends heavily on fertilizers and pesticides to increase crop yield and protect against insects and other predators, strawberries and potatoes grown without such interventions are “organic” or “pesticide-free.” “Wild” salmon are the kind that swim upstream and grow strong and healthy, not to mention nutritious, on what salmon have always eaten. Plain old milk, without any of the butterfat removed, is now “whole” milk.
The list goes on and on. Old-fashioned oats, pastured lamb, whole-wheat flour, hormone-free milk. These are retronyms, objects or concepts whose original names are now used for something else. If the more typical examples of retronyms (e.g., rotary phone, analog watch, black-and-white TV, cloth diaper, biological parent, tap water) reflect a century of explosive technological change, what are they doing in our food?
Steaks at conventional supermarkets come from steer raised in a feedlot, or confined animal feeding operation [CAFO], on grain, growth hormones, and antibiotics. If that’s not the kind of beef you want, you have to go to a different type of store and specify “grass-fed” beef. One hundred years ago my great-grandfather, who made his living as a butcher, had no reason to advertise his beef as grass-fed. All cows ate grass, and none of them received antibiotics or steroids. That’s what he meant when he advertised “Beef for Sale” in the front window of his store.
Although we continue to describe foods with the same words we have always used, the words no longer mean what they once did. “Wheat,” the staff of life, no longer refers to the entire grain, with its bran fiber coat, starch core, and wheat germ intact. Now it means only the starch core of the grain, the “endosperm.” The intact wheat, including its fiber and germ, is “whole-grain,” a retronym.
Before the industrial revolution changed the American landscape, most goats, cows, hogs and chickens lived in the barn, or alongside the house. Vegetables grew out back by the kitchen door. Families fertilized vegetables with compost, and leftover vegetables found themselves back in the animal feed. That world, in which people lived within an endless chain of recycled biomass, is virtually extinct in the United States. Our food supply has been redefined.