Be Thankful! (in Moderation...)

Being thankful is not something that you should limit on any day, especially on Thanksgiving. However, when consuming the celebratory meal that reflects that thankfulness, you may want to consider practicing that lovely word that you may be tired of hearing so often these days: moderation.

It's true that there are ways to make a traditional Thanksgiving meal healthier. You can make green beans without condensed soup. You can make the mashed potatoes with skim milk and garlic instead of cream and butter. You can eat the white turkey meat instead of the dark. You can make stuffing from scratch with whole grain bread, mushrooms, celery, and cranberries instead of from a box (basically refined flour and salt). You can eat pumpkin or sweet potato pie instead of warm, gooey, delicious pecan pie.

But the reality is that Thanksgiving comes but once a year and many people don't want to do Thanksgiving 'lite'. They want all the fixings from the creamy gravy to the browned marshmallow crust on the sweet potatoes. And that's OK to have! That is, as long as you have it in moderation. But don't just take my word for it. Let's look at a possible scenario...

You wake up on Thanksgiving morning and eat breakfast. Then you watch the parade and cook for several hours (tasting dishes along the way or snacking on appetizers). Then you sit and eat dinner for a couple of hours and then sit and watch football for another several hours. Then you either go to sleep or head for the mall to sit in line waiting for black Friday sales to begin.

The person that I've described probably burned around 2,000 calories that day being mostly sedentary. The Calorie Control Council estimates that the average Thanksgiving dinner contains 3,000 calories. First of all, eating that much in one sitting is going to make you feel very uncomfortable (if you've ever felt like you were going to explode after eating, you know what I mean). Plus, that is 1,000 extra calories that their body does not need and cannot use at the moment. Assuming that the extra calories are a mixture of carbohydrates, protein, and fat, guess what it will all turn into once you've eaten it? FAT. Extra fat stored in the body equals extra weight which is a heck of a lot harder to get rid of than it was to put on.

This Thanksgiving, the choice is yours: healthy portion control even if the dishes aren't as healthy as they could be, or reckless abandon complete with stomach ache and more fat stores. Whatever your choice, I hope you're able to spend the holiday relaxing with family or loved ones. And don't forget (after you've done all of the eating and drinking) to be active!

I'll leave you with a scene from my family's Thanksgiving morning five years ago:

Decoding DRIs

In the world of nutrition it can be hard to remember how much of what you need to be eating on a daily basis. Add to that confusing abbreviations and the whole absorption issue and many are left scratching their heads. If you’re one of those people, you’re not alone. It can even be hard for those of us in (or soon to be in) the profession of nutrition to keep track of it all!

Here’s a quick guide to some abbreviations you may see for suggested intakes of nutrients, vitamins, and minerals:

DRI – Dietary Reference Intake. This is based on gender and age group for people living in North America. The following abbreviations all fall under the category of DRIs.

EAR – Estimated Average Requirement. By figuring out the EAR for a nutrient, half of the population will be getting enough of it and half won’t be getting enough. That’s why this is rarely used as a recommendation and is instead used to figure out the RDA.

RDA – Recommended Dietary Allowance. This is the EAR plus 2 standard deviations, which makes it so that 98% of people will be getting enough of the nutrient.

AI – Adequate Intake. This is used as a measure for nutrients when there is no known EAR and is based on known amounts that people can handle of a specific nutrient.

UL – Upper Tolerable Limit. Most people will have adverse affects when consuming a nutrient above this amount. There is an UL set for some vitamins (for example) when a large amount could cause toxicity, but many others have no UL because excess amounts will have no effect.

So let's look at calcium. The recommendation for adults is 1,000 mg/day. That means that your body needs 1,000 mg of calcium each day in order to do important things like rebuild bone which helps prevent osteoporosis. Right? Wrong. The recommendation takes into account a little thing called absorption. Your body does not treat all nutrients equally; some are absorbed better than others. Your body actually only needs 300 mg of calcium each day. But the rate of calcium absorption is around 30% (this is called the bioavailability) so the recommendation accounts for that, saving us all from doing lots and lots of math each time we plan a meal! And what happens to the other 700 mg of calcium that you're consuming each day? In one end, out the other...

Whole Grains for Life

If you pay attention to current nutrition recommendations, you may have heard that you should be eating more whole grains. The 2010 Dietary Guidelines for Americans, released this past winter, say that at least half of the grains that you eat should be whole. I personally attempt to do this by cooking and eating only whole grains when I'm at home. It can be such a challenge to find whole grains in a restaurant (save for the occasional offer of brown rice, which will often cost you extra money) that I figure whole grains at home is a good attempt to balance that out. My friend and teammate Stephanie recently passed along this article where Michael Pollan answers reader's questions. Someone asked "what is the single best food we all should be eating every day?" and he responded (in more words than this): "whole grains." So why should you want to eat more whole grains? In brief, they're less processed than refined grains and contain healthy fiber, vitamins, and minerals. They've been shown to help with weight maintenance and provide a lowered risk of diabetes, heart disease, and stroke.

A few years ago I had the pleasure of attending a gluten-free culinary summit where a woman from the Whole Grains Council spoke. I was surprised to hear that there was such a thing, and even more surprised to learn about a bunch of whole grains I'd never even heard of! (Teff anyone?) The council has lots of information and recipes on their website, and they make it easier for consumers to purchase products that contain whole grains by putting this stamp onto products:

Yes, there are products out there that are whole grain that don't have the stamp, but it's a good place to start if you're unsure (click here for a full list of stamped products). Also, when purchasing wheat products, be careful - it needs to say in the ingredient list "whole wheat flour" not just "wheat flour." It might be brown and it might say "wheat bread" but if the first ingredient is "unbleached enriched wheat flour" then it's not made from whole grains.

Lest you think that whole grains are limited to brown rice and whole-wheat flour, here's a list of whole grains (the gluten-free grains have an *):
Amaranth*
Barley
Buckwheat*
Bulgur
Corn*
Farro
Kamut
Millet*
Oats* (gluten-free when certified that they have not been cross-contaminated)
Quinoa*
Rice (brown)*
Rye
Sorghum*
Spelt
Teff*
Triticale
Wheat
Wild Rice*

So, go whip up a batch of buckwheat pancakes, have a snack of rye crackers with low-fat cheese, enjoy a lunch of quinoa salad with beets and goat cheese, and finish the day off with a bowl of mushroom barley soup and a berry crumble made with oats and you'll be well on your way to living a healthy, whole-grain lifestyle!

Happy Halloween!

While hosting my annual pumpkin carving party the other night, one of the guests inquired about the nutritional value of the delicious toasted pumpkin seeds that I was serving. I made an educated guess that they're high in fiber (when you eat them whole with the white part still on, not the green pepitas that you can buy at a grocery store) and protein, but wasn't exactly sure about the nutritional breakdown.

Delicious toasted pumpkin seeds!

Questions like that are a great reason to do some research! Turns out that I was definitely right about the protein; a quarter cup of seeds has almost 8.5 grams of protein, which is 17% of your daily value (approximately). However, I wouldn't necessarily recommend eating a quarter cup of pumpkin seeds on a daily basis (first of all, that would be a lot of pumpkins to carve, even for those of us who love to carve pumpkins) because they are pretty high in fat. That quarter cup contains 25% of your daily fat allotment (again, approximately) which is a mix of saturated, monounsaturated, and polyunsaturated, with most of the polyunsaturated comprised of omega-6 (rather than omega-3s which you may have heard are super duper good for you). BUT! It's not all bad news. In addition to being little protein power houses and a decent source of dietary fiber, pumpkin seeds contain healthy doses of magnesium, manganese, phosphorus, and vitamin K. So as with all tasty treats this holiday season, enjoy them, just do it in moderation.

Kat's Protein Powerhouse Pumpkin Seeds
At least 3 pumpkins
Olive oil
Salt

1. Preheat oven to 350°F. Carve several pumpkins. This works best if you have a party! Or a family.
2. Separate the "guts" from the seeds. Discard guts. Rinse seeds in a colander.
3. Spread seeds on a cookie sheet and place in the oven for around 10 minutes to dry off a bit from the rinsing.
4. Remove from oven and douse in olive oil. Sprinkle with salt.
5. Return to oven. Cooking time will vary depending on how wet they are and how crowded the seeds are on the pan, so check them every 5 or 10 minutes and remove them when they're slightly brown and look dry (see photo above). Enjoy!

Source of nutritional info: http://www.whfoods.com/genpage.php?tname=nutrientprofile&dbid=117

Today is FOOD DAY!

But you knew that already, right? Maybe not. Well, it appears that 2011 marks the inaugural national Food Day, which is sponsored by the Center for Science in the Public Interest. Here is the blurb from the website:

Food Day seeks to bring together Americans from all walks of life—parents, teachers, and students; health professionals, community organizers, and local officials; chefs, school lunch providers, and eaters of all stripes—to push for healthy, affordable food produced in a sustainable, humane way. We will work with people around the country to create thousands of events in homes, schools, churches, farmers markets, city halls, and state capitals.

Healthy affordable food produced in a sustainable humane way?? Sign me up! Visit the website, www.foodday.org, to find out what Food Day events are happening in your community. Not the organized get-together type? Celebrate on your own by making sure that all of your meals today are made from "real" food. It'll taste better, be better for the environment, and make you feel better in the long run. Happy Food Day 2011!

Has Vegan Gone Mainstream?

I'll be honest, it's getting harder and harder to pick topics to write about - not for lack of topics, but because I am constantly being bombarded with new information and studies; in school, in my inbox, and in the mainstream news. Every day I see at least a couple of things that I think to myself "I should blog about that!" but then something else takes my attention away and much as I try to make a mental note to come back to it, sometimes that doesn't happen.

I think it's best to just sit back and absorb all of the information and then let topics align themselves into a posting.... sort of like today when I realized that I'd been immersed in information about veganism.

Being vegan is like, totally hip now.

Last week I finally got a chance to watch the documentary Forks Over Knives which details how a vegetable-focused diet can prevent (and improve) many chronic diseases. The next night I went to an upscale vegan restaurant in Somerville, True Bistro and at my roommate's suggestion tried the delicious cornmeal-crusted oyster mushrooms with horseradish and dill aoli. Today I spent time researching whether or not children can benefit from a vegetarian diet for a lab report (they can).

Yet, when I read on CNN.com just now that veganism is "officially mainstream" I had to stop and think. To me, a health conscious, active, nutrition student, a vegan diet is something that I'm extremely familiar with (though I don't follow it myself). But is it really possible that cutting out meat and dairy products has become mainstream? Would you be able to find a single restaurant in say, Alabama, that would be happy, willing, and able to provide a nutritious vegan meal? I'm doubtful, but hopefully nonetheless.

What do you think? Will we see the day when a vegan has not one, but several options on the menus of restaurants across the globe?

Denmark's New Fat Tax

You may have heard the news that Denmark recently imposed a "fat tax" where they will be taxing foods which contain more than 2.3% saturated fat. That means a tax on every single food item that contains saturated fat, including meat and butter and milk. According to one article, the money raised will fund obesity-fighting measures. (For two British viewpoints check out this Guardian article and this Telegraph article.)

When I first heard about this, my initial thought was 'why Denmark?' Danish people tend to be pretty healthy in general. When I was there this summer I was talking about nutrition with our friend who is a doctor. I mentioned that the US had the 5-a-day campaign for fruits and vegetables - and she mentioned Denmark's 6-a-day suggestion. Cities around the US are just now starting to have bike sharing programs and hyping the importance of sharing the road with bikes. In Denmark you're hard pressed to find a street that doesn't have a bike lane and most towns have at least one enormous bike parking area complete with free air pumps for your tires. According to Telegraph article, less than 10% of Danes are obese. According to the CDC, 33.8% of American adults and 17% of American children are obese.

While there are likely a slew of political reasons why Denmark of all countries has decided to impose this tax, it feels a little bit like they're taking one for the team (the team in this case being all other countries that have an obesity issue). Other European countries are definitely taking note, and perhaps America should as well. I'm often frustrated by the fact that there doesn't seem to be one logical place to start solving this problem in the states (especially since a lot of unhealthy foods are subsidized by the government and backed by lobbyists). However, I think that taxing saturated fat would at least a more logical place to start than taxing soda as has been suggested by various people and publications. At least putting a tax on something like saturated fat indicates to the public that they should be consuming less of that specific nutrient. Picking a specific product like soda could send the message that as long as you're not drinking soda, you're being healthy. With processed foods full of chemical additives lining grocery store shelves, soda is just one of many products that people would be healthier living without.