Tag: whole foods

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More Vegetables for Better Health and Wellness

The bulk of any Primal/Paleo meal should be vegetables. As stated in my article about the Primal Blueprint Food Pyramid, your vegetables should be diverse and of many different colors. You want to “eat the rainbow,” as they say. These various colors of fruits and vegetables are a result of the chemicals held within them. They give us an array of nutrients with high antioxidant values. So each day, we want to provide our bodies with a “rainbow” of micronutrients! What follows are 5 ways to eat more vegetables every day, as explained in How to Be Well, by Dr. Frank Lipman.

Shop and Prep your Vegetables

After buying your vegetables, set some time aside to wash and chop/slice them up for the week ahead. That way you can make colorful salads and stir-fry veggies in no time, and have a variety of healthy snacks on hand every day.

Roast your Vegetables

On your prep day, you can make one or two batches of roasted vegetables (sweet potatoes, beets, squash, cauliflower, broccoli, etc.) with a healthy fat for the days ahead.

Make a Soup

Blend steamed vegetables with your homemade broth and have that in the fridge for the week.

Replace Pasta with Spirals and Strands

Dr. Frank Lipman explains: “Make noodles from spiralized zucchini, winter squash, sweet potato, and more….You can also roast a spaghetti squash and scoop out the strands….While you’re at it, replace rice with the cauliflower kind – it also stands in as the basis for pizza crust.”

Stock your Freezer

It is easy to have different bags of frozen organic vegetables in your freezer, ready to be used. If you make a large batch of vegetable soup, you can freeze some of it too.

In Summary

Keep in mind that some vegetables may not work well for everyone. It is up to you to experiment and see how your body responds to each food you eat. It is better to buy locally grown fresh produce and organic. To know exactly how to pick vegetables, you can check my blog post on What to Buy Organic. A great book to read on how to select and prepare vegetables (and fruits) is Eating on the Wild Side: The Missing Link to Optimum Health, by Jo Robinson. How (& Why) to Eat More Vegetables, by Dr. Thomas Cowan is an awesome read too!

Happy 4th of July!

Reference

Lipman, Frank M D. How to Be Well: The 6 Keys to a Happy and Healthy Life. Houghton Mifflin, 2019, pp. 58–9.

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How about limiting our sugar intake for the new year?

If limiting the amount of sugar in your diet is your New Year’s resolution, then this post is for you! “Hidden” sugars are in most processed products. If undetected, hidden sugars can easily impact your blood sugar even when you might think your diet is reasonably healthy. Reading labels is really important. There are numerous names for sugar in processed foods, so being familiar with those names is helpful to stay away from all this unwanted added sugar. Getting rid of foods containing hidden sugars might be the best first step in your step-by-step approach to getting rid of foods that do not contribute to sustaining your health and wellness.

How to spot “hidden” sugars in labels

What follows is a list of most of the various names for sugar in processed foods, as stated in Feeding You Lies, by Vani Hari:

  • Agave nectar                                                     
  • Barbados sugar                                                 
  • Barley malt                                                        
  • Beet sugar                                                         
  • Blackstrap molasses                                         
  • Brown sugar                                                      
  • Buttered syrup                                       
  • Cane juice crystals                                          
  • Cane sugar                                                        
  • Caramel                                                           
  • Carob syrup                                                       
  • Castor sugar                                                      
  • Confectioner’s sugar                                          
  • Corn syrup                                                        
  • Corn syrup solids                                              
  • Crystalline fructose                                             
  • Date sugar                                                        
  • Demerara sugar                                              
  • Dextrane                                                          
  • Dextrose                                                            
  • Diastase                                                            
  • Diastatic malt                                                       
  • Ethyl maltol                                                      
  • Evaporated cane juice                                   
  • Fructose                                                             
  • Fruit juice                                                       
  • Fruit juice concentrate                                  
  • Galactose                                                     
  • Glucose
  • Glucose solids
  • Golden sugar
  • Golden syrup
  • Granulated sugar
  • Grape sugar
  • High-fructose corn syrup
  • Honey
  • Icing sugar
  • Invert sugar
  • Lactose
  • Malt syrup
  • Maltodextrin
  • Maltose
  • Maple syrup
  • Molasses
  • Muscovado sugar
  • Raw sugar
  • Refiner’s sugar
  • Rice syrup
  • Sorbitol
  • Sorghum syrup 
  • Sucrose
  • Sugar
  • Syrup
  • Treacle
  • Turbinado sugar 
  • Yellow sugar                                                                                                            

What about “sugar-free” products?

Beyond this helpful list that can allow us to spot “hidden” sugars much more easily, another thing to stay away from are “sugar-free” processed foods. Why? Here’s an example of why, as explained in Keto Answers, by Dr. Anthony Gustin and Chris Irvin:  “[W]e have tested a lot of “sugar-free” snacks and have seen huge increases in blood sugar. A notable brand here is SmartSweets, which provides gummy versions of our favorite candies and markets them as only having 3 grams of sugar per serving. The catch? They use 30 grams of low-quality fiber syrups that they can label as fiber on the nutrition facts but act just like sugar in your bloodstream.”

In summary

If cutting down your sugar intake is one of your top priorities for the new year, becoming familiar with the various types of sugar and staying away from “sugar-free” processed foods are two major steps to take. Of course, this leads to eating whole foods. Whenever you want to use sugar in a recipe (beverage, dessert, or other), make sure you use healthy sugar substitutes instead of the traditional refined sugar. 

Have a Wonderful New Year!

References

Gustin, Anthony, and Chris Irvin. Keto Answers : Simplifying Everything You Need to Know about the World’s Most Confusing Diet. Middletown, De, Four Pillar Health, 2019, p. 396.

Vani Hari. FEEDING YOU LIES : How to Unravel the Food Industry’s Playbook and Reclaim Your Health. Carlsbad, California, Hay House, Inc., 2019, p. 101.

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Nowadays

In today’s world, convenience foods are everywhere and cooking from scratch has become quite rare. Who has the time to prepare home-cooked meals on a daily basis? We are always on the go, and weekends can be just as busy as the rest of the week. What we don’t realize, though, is that when we reach for convenience foods and on-the-go meal options, we do not fuel ourselves with real food – with nutrient-dense food. We fuel ourselves with processed foods that are filled with toxic chemicals, labeled or not labeled. Only home-cooked meals made with whole foods can give us the right nutrients required for proper metabolic function. Home-cooked meals are the meals that sustain health and wellness.

What cooking at home can lead to

In a recent Bulletproof podcast, “What the heck should I cook, Dr. Hyman?”, Dr. Mark Hyman states, “If people just got off the crap and started eating real food, and literally unplugged from the industrial food system, their health would dramatically improve.” He adds, “We would reverse climate change. We would end social injustice and poverty. We’d have money enough for free education, and free healthcare for everybody, and can support the neediest among us with no effort, and have lots of money left over to do cool stuff and create new science, and solve all the world’s problems just by cooking at home.” These are strong statements and I encourage you to listen to this podcast which highlights so many truths we have become oblivious to.

What to use in simple home-cooked meals

Home-cooked meals imply cooking with whole foods, which means using nutrient-dense ingredients that have not been tampered with. To find out what to buy to prepare home-cooked meals, you can check several of my previous blog posts: What to Buy Organic, Which Fish are Okay to Buy, How to Source Beef, Why Eating the Egg Yolk is Perfectly Fine. In What are Ketones? I list several healthy fat options that can be consumed as snacks, as well as which oils to use for cooking. My article on The Primal Blueprint Food Pyramid sums up this list of nutrient-dense foods to use in home-cooked meals.

Strategies

You don’t have to cook every single day in order to obtain an optimal level of health and wellness. Most of us have busy schedules and aren’t able to set that time aside each day. Instead, you can implement a few different strategies into your weekly routine in order to obtain the same goal. One strategy you can implement is to set some time aside on the weekend to prep several dishes for the week. You can store these in the fridge or freezer, as required. Also, something that I was doing a lot when my children were growing up, is to cook a meal big enough to cover at least two dinners. Like that, when there are after school activities to attend, dinner doesn’t have to be an end-of-the-day ordeal.

In summary

It may seem impossible at first to change the way we have approached cooking in our day-to-day life. But if we take it one step at a time, we can enjoy home-cooked meals every day. As Dr. Hyman highlights, not only are home-cooked meals made with whole foods better for our health, but they are also better for a host of other issues we are dealing with in today’s world. Home-cooked meals sustain health and wellness in so many ways!

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