Thursday, June 25, 2009

Brigitta's Rules of How to Eat (For Brigitta)

For those of your reading these blog posts, I thought I might share with you what goes through my mind when I think of food.

First of all, food is nutrition. Many people think they eat for energy. Yes, we do eat for energy, but think of plants. They get their energy from the sun and they still need nutrients from the soil. 40% of the calories we consume are used in the maintenance of our bones. 40% is HUGE. Osteoporosis is a disease of malnutrition. Many women in this country - one of the richest in the world - are suffering from a disease of malnutrition! There is not much if any nutrition in junk food and fast food and even most chain restaurant food. There is lots of energy (calories) but very little nutrition.

Please understand that I am human. I eat candy, cookies, ice cream - you name it, I've eaten it. Not much, not often. I'm sharing these "rules" with you in order to help you think about food and the role that food plays in your health. We are what we eat. What else could we be?

The rules:

Don't eat food from packages that crinkle. Don't eat food from packages.

Eat food that has been processed the least or not at all. I used to buy ShopRite's Natural Peanut Butter. (Ingredients: Peanuts, Salt) Last Saturday, I went to a health food store in Teaneck and bought peanut butter that was ground right in front of my eyes and contained just ground peanuts. It is tasty, but not so tasty that I am likely to overindulge. Do you know that the Jiff and the Skippy people have decided that peanuts need to be enhanced with sugar, salt and shortening? A cut up apple is better than a cup of applesauce or a glass of apple juice. An orange is better than a glass of orange juice. You get the point?

Look at the ingredients on your food. If there are ingredients that you can't pronounce or that you don't have in the cupboard, take a pass. I just pulled out a loaf of cinnamon bread that I bought for my husband. (He doesn't follow my rules - ever.) It has mono and diglycerides, palm oil and/or palm kernel oil, sodium stearyl lactylate, polysorbate 60. What are those things? I bake but I have never seen a recipe for home made anything calls for any of those ingredients.

Eat out very little. A chef or a restaurant has one motivation. Make the food so tasty that you'll come back. Your nourishment doesn't even enter the equation. We need about 2 or 3 ounces of protein a day. What's up with the 20 ounce Prime Rib? The portions of everything are too big. Study after study has shown that the more food is on your plate, the more you will eat.

Eat plenty of vegetables and fruit. We went out for lunch last week at a BBQ place. No vegetables were brought with our meal. None. French fries are not a vegetable. They are a shortcut for heart disease and a weight problem.

If you would like to weigh less, eat your dinner off smaller plates. This one trick will help you a lot.

Eat soup. It is so easy to put a ton of vegetables into a pot of soup. Soup is particularly satisfying to eat.

I love to look up the nutrients and calories in various foods. The more nutrients the better the food. http://www.calorieking.com/ is a particularly good website for nutrition information. If a food doesn't have much nutrition, I take a pass. Why waste the calories? Whole wheat flour has way more nutrition than white flour. Brown rice beats white rice. Beans are amazing nutritionally. All vegetables and fruits are powerhouses.

I bake my own bread. My bread has whole wheat flour, kosher salt, organic safflower oil, molasses, water, yeast, powdered milk and gluten. It is delicious and I highly recommend a bread machine. The space it takes up is worth having bread that is good for you.

Energy bars. You are doing something wrong if you need energy bars to get through the day. I ride my bike 10 miles, go for a one hour paddle in my kayak and go for a swim in the lake all in one day and do not need an energy bar. Eat an apple or have a banana. (Besides, energy bars come in a crinkly package. An energy bar is a candy bar in disguise, they are not that good to eat.) Actually, many people over estimate the amount of calories burned in an activity and underestimate the amount of calories in the food they eat. Do you know you have to walk a mile and a half to burn off a 150 calorie energy bar?

Eat breakfast, lunch and dinner. Every day. Skipping meals is a bad idea. You are just setting yourself up to overeat at your next meal.

Time for all this. I have many clients that tell me they don't have time to cook or prepare food. Really? I can have a simple dinner on the table in 20 minutes. No way could you drive to a restaurant, get a table, order, get your food, eat it, wait for the check, drive home in less than 20 minutes.

So in a nutshell I eat: Vegetables, fruits, beans, nuts, whole grains, a little protein from fish, chicken or turkey and a little dairy. It may sound boring but my clothes fit and I feel good. Can you say the same?

Books I've Recently Read (That Have Had An Impact On Me)

I thought it might be useful for some of you to see a list of books that I thought were interesting and enlightening. I feel it is my responsibility to my clients to stay informed about nutrition, health and fitness.

"Animal, Vegetable, Miracle" Barbara Kingsolver
Ms. Kingsolver writes books that are very enjoyable to read. This book is not a novel. It is about the year the whole family moved from Nevada (I think) to Virginia (I think) and tried to live almost completely on what they grew. After reading about peanut butter killing more than one nursing home inmate and sickening scores of people around the country the idea sounds better than ever.

"Younger Next Year" Chris Crowley and Henry Lodge, M.D.
This very readable book gives you the science behind the reason you want to exercise. Did you know that the inflammation you feel when you have sore muscles from a workout is a necessary signal for your bones and muscles to make more bone and muscle cells? Having plenty of bone and muscle cells is in your best interest. The book is loaded with little gems like that. I'm willing to trade a little soreness for health and vitality.

"Spark: The Revolutionary New Science of Exercise and The Brain" John J. Ratey
Exercise is the best treatment for depression. The effects of exercise "kick in" faster then drugs and a year later, the exercisers are better off than the people given drugs for their depression. I've had a nurse tell me a half hour walk is equal to a Prozac. Any neurotransmitter secreted by your brain is secreted better after a bout of cardiovascular exercise. Exercise is good for ADD/ADHD, Parkinson's Disease. Studying for a test? Exercise will make your brain perform better!

"The Omnivore's Dilemma" Michael Pollan
More information on food and how much of it in this country is grown and manufactured. Very, very good information. It is enough to get you to eat organically raised meat or become a vegetarian.

"The End of Overeating. Taking Control of the Insatiable American Appetite"
David A. Kessler, MD
I am half-way through this book and for me it is a page-turner. I see people all day long that are struggling with their weight. I tell them all to stay away from food that comes in crinkly packages and learn how to cook at home. This book points out that the people who sell us prepared food - Kraft, Nabisco, Chilis, Outback Steakhouse, Starbucks - pay people who lie awake at night thinking of new ways to get you to buy more of their junk that masquerades as food. They do not have your best interest at heart, they don't care about your health. Their goals are to make a product that is addictively tasty with a terrific profit margin. There isn't a lot of money in selling potatoes, but there is a ton of profit in selling French fries or potato chips. Guess what? A lot of the stuff you are eating isn't even food. It is chemicals masquerading as food. They have chemicals that taste like bacon, blue cheese, cinnamon. They are cheaper to use than the real thing.

The last thing I'm going to mention is not a book, it is a documentary available on video that is very watchable. It is called, "King Corn" by Ian Cheney and Curt Ellis. Recently graduated from college, Ian and Curt decide to go to Iowa and follow an acre of corn that they plant. Our misguided farm subsidy policies seem to have caused a glut of genetically modified corn on the market. The outfits mentioned above are only too happy to take all that corn in the form of cheap meat and high fructose corn syrup and turn it into fast food. You will learn a lot about food by watching this video. One fact that Ian and Curt point out is that this generation growing up now is likely to be the first generation in the U.S. that is expected to have a shorter life span than their parents. That is a sobering thought. We live in a country where medical care is at the most advanced it has ever been and our kids are going to die at a younger age than their parents.

An aside: Years ago, there was a disease called Adult Onset Diabetes, so called to differentiate it from Juvenile Diabetes. Juvenile Diabetes is an autoimmune disease that strikes young people. There are a bunch of theories, but no one knows for sure why it strikes the kids that it strikes. Adult onset diabetes is another story. After years and years of abusing your body with lots and lots of sugary foods, you either wear out your pancreas or your develop an insensitivity to the insulin that your pancreas is churning out. Anyway, the name of that disease had to be changed from Adult Onset Diabetes (because you really only saw it in people over 50) to Type II Diabetes because more and more children are developing this disease. Guess what? You can completely control Type II Diabetes with diet and exercise. No one wants to. It is so much easier to take a drug to artificially lower your blood sugar and get to keep eating the crap that got you into this medical mess in the first place. Researchers estimate that one out of three children living today will develop Type II Diabetes.