Eating Well

Over the years, I've come up with some "healthier" truths that I use for my own eating and for cooking for my family and that inform my recipes here on the blog. As is obvious on the "pages" here, I'm not into extremes or completely omitting entire food groups, but I try to cover many bases of health while maintaining flavor and enjoyment. I favor a mixed/balanced approach, loosely based on the NIH created DASH diet and a love of Mediterranean cooking of all sorts, along with a little portion control and some exercise.

Many have provided rules for healthier eating that I like and adopt:

Of course, Michael Pollan: "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants."

Marion Nestle (Nutritionist and Professor at NYU): "My guess: If you balance food intake with physical activity and are not overeating, the specific proportion of fat, carbohydrate, and protein won’t matter nearly as much."

and

"While the arguments about fat v. sugar go on and on:  Eat your veggies, vary the foods you eat, don’t gorge, and enjoy what you eat."

David Katz (Yale University Prevention Research Center): "A diet of minimally processed foods close to nature, predominately plants, is decisively associated with health promotion and disease prevention."

Now, Eating Well magazine has just come out with a list of 10 ways to cook healthier.  I'm linking it here, but please be warned that although I like the magazine itself, its online presence is quite annoyingly littered with pop ups and ads and forces you to see their list in slide show format rather than as one article, which I can not stand and seems to be the norm for these magazine lists.

But this list is pretty similar to what I've been saying here for years, though other than in my "Why I'm Here" piece, haven't set out so concretely and perhaps should have.  So here, with my usual caveat that I am not a doctor or nutritionist and don't even play one on tv, is my list of top things to do for eating healthier:

Thanks, food52!

Nothing like a James Ransom photo to make your food look amazing!

Just saw yesterday that food52 selected one of my recipes, for a Community Pick, the best part of which is that the recipe now sports a fabulous photo taken by Ransom - much better than anything I could hope to take. Very excited and thrilled for the nod!

It's still a little early for local corn in most places, but keep this group of Community Picks in your pocket for when it starts making its appearance.  My recipe is right up top, Sauteed Corn, Green Onions and Shitake Mushrooms. If you click either on the name of the recipe or the picture, you can click right through to the recipe on food52. Or, you can go directly to the recipe from here.

And while you're there, check out the other great corn recipes, including the two that are finalists this week!

Memorial Day Weekend Cooking Ideas

I guess it's pretty lazy and cheesy to repost my Memorial Day Weekend roundup from 2011, but really, all the recipes I wanted to put in this are already there!

So accept my apologies for the quick and easy approach and check out some ideas here.

Have a great weekend and take a moment out of the festivities to remember our fallen.

Healthier Veg

The Environmental Working Group (EWG) has released its annual list of vegetables and fruits with the most and least pesticide residue. The list is based on pesticide residue testing data from the USDA and FDA. These federal agencies produce the data, but don't collate it for the consumer, so the EWG provides this service for us.

Organic produce can be expensive, so it's helpful to know which items are more likely to have high levels of pesticides.  That way, we can pick and choose which ones, if any, we prefer to buy organic.  In many cases, produce sold at farm stands, grown on small farms, is grown using organic principles and little or no pesticides even if not certified as organic.  It's worth asking.

As in the past, strawberries and apples are at the top of the list of high pesticide residue. If concerned about pesticides in your food, simply buy organic for those items, even if you don't buy everything organic. The EWG refers to the top 12 items as "the dirty dozen" and recommends purchasing those organic if possible.  For the last few years, they've also added two more items to watch out for: leafy greens such as kale and collards and hot peppers. While these don't meet their usual criteria for the dirty dozen, they do show pesticides that are highly toxic to humans.  They recommend that if you eat a lot of these items, to purchase organic.

Check Your Sugar

Here's a brief update to my last blog entry, Sugar, Sugar, now that I've seen the movie Fed Up! and had a chance to process some of my thoughts.

This movie is an important public service because all of us need the smack in the head about sugar. Even those of us, like me, who are hyper conscious of what we're  eating, can learn from this movie. I appreciated the very simplified (almost dumbed down) scientific explanation of our bodies on sugar.  It made the reason to limit sugar much more clear.  The stories of the morbidly obese teens and families featured are compelling and heartbreaking, bringing me to tears more than once. I'm glad Paul saw it with me and I will take both my grown kids to see it when they're in town.

The experts interviewed are highly respected doctors, nutritionists, scientists and journalists. They are people who have been fighting this fight for many years. People like Margo Wootan of Center for Science in the Public Interest, Dr. David Kessler, a former head of the FDA who wrote The End of Overeating, Michael Pollan, Mark Bittman, the list goes on.