Lots of people are talking these days about lifestyle change. What is a healthy lifestyle? For me, it was yesterday. Literally.

I need to preface this week’s post with a caveat: Not enough of my days are like yesterday. In general, I spend way too many hours seated at my desk with my face stuck to the computer screen. I spend too much time worrying about what’s next instead of appreciating what’s now. And although I follow my own advice carefully with regard to eating real food and avoiding most manufactured calories, I eat too many meals quickly, and with only myself for company.

But yesterday was a winner. Lifestyle-wise, it was a great day! Here’s what a great day looks like in my book. Very importantly, I went to bed at a reasonable hour the previous evening, so when I awoke just before 8 a.m., I was exceedingly well rested. I dressed, poked around in the refrigerator, identified some cold salmon (leftovers) and cucumber slices as likely candidates for breakfast, and enjoyed them with a cup of coffee as I stared out the window into my backyard at the oak, spruce, and chicken coop. All was quiet, and all looked well. This I followed with a long walk in the cool morning, planned to avoid being hit with the heat and humidity of the day.

I enjoyed reading, sang a little, and then met up with a group of friends for lunch. We had tilapia sprinkled with paprika, hummus with celery sticks, homemade tomato- vegetable soup steaming in the crock pot, a bee-yoo-ti-ful green salad with fresh peas, parsley, romaine, and other greens, and fresh grapes and cherries set out on the table for dessert. We laughed and told stories, we discussed a book we’d all read, and, very importantly, we took a long time to eat lunch.

I got home late in the afternoon, just in time for a short walk in the neighborhood with a friend. I’m not sure what I did after that, but I do know that I spent some time reading up on some knitting stitches I’d been wanting to learn.

I ended the day by cuddling up with Chief-cook-and-bottle-washer plus a large bowl of popcorn (fresh popped in olive oil, and sprinkled with turmeric) to watch Cinema Paradiso, a 1990 Oscar-winning movie, which I highly recommend even if you don’t care for foreign films. If you’ve never seen it, you’re really missing something.

Yesterday contained all the components of a healthy life:  physical activity, nourishing food, companionship, rest and relaxation.   

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 Fats, as I like to say, are not the bad guy.  Our brains are made of fat, and our nerves are insulated by fat.  Our cell membranes are composed of fat, which makes sense when you think about it.  After all, we’re made mostly of water, and we know that fat [or oil, which you may use interchangeably in this post] and water don’t mix.  

When Nature needed to figure out a solution that would keep our water component from leaking onto the floor whenever we stood up, fat was the answer.  When Nature needed to figure out how to keep the contents of our acidic stomach from mixing with the contents of our basic intestines, which would neutralize everything and prevent our digestion from working right, again it turned to fats.  Fats are an ideal way to keep various water solutions separate from one another.

Because oil and water don’t mix, Nature used fats to make cell membranes.  These cell membranes serve as envelopes to keep their watery worlds inside.  That’s an essential job, so it isn’t a stretch to say that fats are essential to life.  

In addition to that, fats carry all the fat-soluble vitamins (all of them, except Vitamin C and the B vitamins, which are water-soluble).  So if you eat a diet that is deficient in fat, there is a good chance that you will also be deficient in fat-soluble vitamins.  I see this frequently in the office. 

Here is some information about fats to give you insight into the structure of fats.  I am sharing this information because I think that the better we understand what fats are, the less susceptible we will be to the industrial vilification that influences consumers to purchase more products that are made of stripped carbohydrates and industrially-modified fats.

At a molecular level, fats consist of a backbone with three tails.  Think of the letter E.  The fat molecule’s backbone is a sugar-like compound called a glycerol.  The tails are fatty acids.  A fatty acid is a chain of carbon molecules.  Some chains are very short and others are long, from just a few carbons to more than 20 in length. Sometimes two are the same fatty acid and one is different; sometimes all three are different.  Occasionally all three are identical.  

Because each fatty acid in a fat molecule is different, it is usually more accurate to say that each fatty acid has a particular property than to describe the entire fat with one word.  Describing a fat as having a particular property can be misleading.  It’s better to describe each fatty acid in the fat, since they are often different.  That way it’s like describing each of three triplets by their individual characteristics [He likes dinosaurs, she is taking gymnastics, and he’s in a size 8 shoe.] as opposed to describing them all in a single blanket statement [They’re almost 5.].  You get a lot more information.

Most fats, as I’ve said, are composed of a mix of fatty acids.  For example, the fat molecules in cocoa butter are composed of approximately 1/3 monounsaturated and&nb
sp;2/3 saturated fatty acids.  Olive oil is composed of approximately 33% monounsaturated and 16% saturated fatty acids.  The rest is a mix of fatty acid types.  Almond oil is approximately 10% monounsaturated, 30% saturated and 60% polyunsaturated.  Chicken fat is approximately 42% monounsaturated, 21% polyunsaturated and 35% saturated fatty acids.  There’s a significant amount of variability, which accounts for the fact that it doesn’t add up to 100%.

Ready for more?  Omega 3’s and omega 6’s are two different kinds of polyunsaturated fats.  Omega 9’s are a type of monounsaturated fat.  Counting from the tail of the fatty acid molecule, the number (3, 6 or 9) corresponds to the first double bond encountered in the chain.  Sometimes the entire chain has only one double bond.  We call this a monounsaturated fatty acid.  Sometimes it has no double bonds.  We call this a saturated fatty acid.  Sometimes it has two or more double bonds, in which case it’s called a polyunsaturated fatty acid.

It’s counterintuitive, but double bonds are not twice as strong as single bonds.  They are much less strong, which makes them much more reactive.  The more reactive a bond, the less stable it is.  More on this another time.  

Why is this important?  Because the better we understand it, the better we’ll be at choosing foods that nourish us.  And no advertising strategy will change our minds.  If you’d like to read more about fats right now, click here.  

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This past week, one of my children came home for a long and lovely visit.  After years living several states away, and many months since his last visit, this time he had brought a friend.  In contrast to previous visits, however, the cupboard was unfortunately and embarrassingly bare.  We went shopping.

It was when we arrived home that we realized there had been an important change in the way we unpacked our groceries in recent years.  This was a change that had had a significant, though virtually invisible, effect on the way we ate.

As my son opened the refrigerator door and began to slide food onto the shelves and into the drawers, I lifted away the bags of fruit and began to spread them out all over the kitchen counters.  We had bought a beautiful assortment that included plums, kiwis, melons, mangos, peaches, and even a coconut.

That’s when I realized that I rarely put fruit in the refrigerator anymore.  Instead, I spread it out, often on a dish towel, to give each piece enough space to breath while keeping it from causing all the other fruit to ripen too fast.

It’s counterintuitive, but it works.  In contrast to what you might think, much less is wasted because you can always see what’s ripe, what’s good, and what’s left.  It greatly increases the likelihood of eating fruit for breakfast, for a snack, for dessert.  It guarantees that little or nothing gets forgotten in the back corner of a drawer.  It allows us to pick the ripest, readiest, sweetest-looking peach as soon as we walk through the kitchen.  The food on the counter turns out to be so appealing that folks engage in less of what I call “cruising the cabinets.”

In a way, it’s similar to the layout of a grocery store.  Produce first.  No supermarket puts the produce in a back corner.  Not a chance!  Each and every shopper is actually required to walk straight through the produce section on their way to the rest of the store, and it’s pretty much the same everywhere.  

Berries get eaten especially quickly of course, and if I soak them briefly in water with a bit of vinegar like I described in a previous post, they will last a few days no matter where I put them.   

Of course we put the melon in the refrigerator when we’re ready to cut it up and eat it.  We’ll move fruit into the refrigerator if we’re going out of town for a couple of days.  And I’ve been known to put a very ripe peach (sliced in half) or banana (peeled) into the freezer for use later in a smoothie.  Sometimes I also collect a few ripe pears and boil them down into pear sauce with an apple or two.  But those are the exceptions. In general, you can count on being able to find something sweet and delicious on our kitchen counters.  In fact, I haven’t heard any complaints this week.

If you’ve never visited “Your Health is on Your Plate” before, visit Lets Start at the Very Beginning to get a jumpstart protecting the health and well-being of the ones you love!!

It was amazing, heart-warming, and deeply satisfying to see the joy on the faces of Olympic gymnast Gabby Douglas and her family as they realized that her scores had made her the best gymnast in the entire world.  She worked for it, she sacrificed for it, and she earned it.  The medal, I mean.  

Now Gabby Douglas can look forward to millions of dollars in endorsements to support her training, both past and future, and to pay back her mother for the commitment she made to this extraordinary child’s extraordinary career.  Gabby worked, she sacrificed, and she earned it.  I have no objection to endorsements by athletes of cars, jewelry, hotel chains and, especially, sports equipment.  That is not the subject of this post.  The subject of this post is endorsements of manufactured calories.  

Usain Bolt’s (track & field, Jamaica) representatives have him endorsing Gatorade, and Jessica Ennis’s (track & field, England) have made similar deals with Powerade (owned by Coca-Cola).  These drinks, both of which contain large amounts of high fructose corn syrup, may or may not be an acceptable choice for people training at the Olympic level.  The answer is much more clear for the rest of us — no way.  

It’s been reported that Kellogg’s Corn Flakes has already printed up boxes that sport Gabby’s smiling face.  The rapidity with which Kellogg’s scooped up this endorsement makes me a little queasy.  Not for Gabby, but for the rest of us.  What’s the not-so-subliminal message?  “Eat the stuff in this box if you’d like to be healthy and fit and beautiful.”  What are the facts?  There’s no connection; if anything, it’s probably the opposite.

What do you suppose it costs to become an “exclusive partner” of the Olympics?  Of the three exclusive partners of the 2012 Olympics (Coca-Cola, McDonald’s, and Visa), two are built on stripped carbohydrates.  They cause diabetes and obesity, not athleticism.  This is why it’s so important to Kellogg’s, McDonalds, and Coke to support the Olympics and to get those endorsements as fast as they can.  They are working to reinforce a set of assumptions that has become so deeply ingrained that we cannot see it.

For more information, check out The Controversial Science of Sports Drinks, published July 20, 2012, in the Atlantic.  This link was provided by the indomitable Judy Wilken, the energy and fire behind starchildscience.org. 

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If you’ve never visited “Your Health is on Your Plate” before, and you’re not sure where to start, visit Lets Start at the Very Beginning to get a jumpstart on preventing diabetes and obesity in yourself and the ones you love!!

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