Category: Nutrition and eating

Salad Bowls

I’m exploring Boston for a week.  I’ve been coming across these eateries where you pick the ingredients for a large and interesting salad — a place called Sprouts on Huntington Avenue, another called energize (lc “e”) on Massachusetts Avenue, a third called sweetgreen (lc “s” and first “e” inverted) on Boylston Street, and a fourth called honeygrow (lc “h”) also on Boylston but further out, near Fenway Park.  (I guess the culinary world in Boston is fascinated by e.e. cummings!)

All four salad bowls were spectacular…and off the chart as far as nutrition goes.  Verde in Charleston, S.C., was another eatery with this kind of approach to wonderful salad bowls and powerful nutrition.

The ironic thing about these places is that for 12 bucks or so you get a very original and imaginative hearty salad that’s packed with a crazy level of nutrients (leafy greens being the all stars compared to other foods in general), but you could go to a pricey restaurant — I call them the “cloth napkin” type restaurants — and pay through the nose for the meal, but end up with a fraction of the nutrition and way more calories.

And then there was the salad bar in the Whole Foods in Atlanta, Ga., which was in a class by itself.  Some of the plant-based ingredients and combinations completely original, at least to me.  Droves of people showed up there every day at lunch and make themselves wonderful salads.  While the WF salad bar in Atlanta was at a different level, the WF salad bar in Boston was rather pathetic in comparison.  Go figure.

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Fat

Twenty years or so ago, it was the low-fat craze — they demonized fat.  Then we discovered the body needs fat, and was especially low in Omega 3 fats, so the mantra was eat the right fats.  But now the pendulum has swung all the way over to the over consumption of fat — the Keto diet recommends that 70% of what you eat should be fat.  The Keto people are even now apologists for how “healthy” saturated fat is.  Crazy.

But don’t let it upset you.  Just wait another 20 years and fats will be all bad again.

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Sugar Addicts

I’m on vacation in Charleston, and every morning I go to a bakery selling “gourmet donuts.”  I buy a cup of coffee there, not a donut.  But every morning, without fail, I see a parent come in with their children, and they excitedly buy these donuts that have an incredible amount of sugar and unhealthy fat — just way over the top, yet the parents feed their kids this stuff without a thought in the world, no hesitation at all.

I just have to think that the parents are really just completely clueless about nutrition and food to be doing this, for clearly they would not intentionally harm their own children, would they?  They simply must have no idea at all how really bad refined sugar is for health, for each one of these donuts is like a sugar nuke — the sugary frosting is so incredibly thick (that’s the “gourmet” part, I guess), and so must be an intense explosion for the taste buds as well as an incredible surge of dopamine.  All this a strong reinforcement for a food that could not be worse for health.  Makes one wonder about how reprehensible these parents really are — or does ignorance excuse them?

I also see the same people show up every morning at the donut shop — sugar addicts, whether they know it or not.

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Enzymes

The book I’m reading about enzymes makes the argument that, if you supplement with a digestive enzyme pill, this relieves some of the pressure on the pancreas to create digestive enzymes, so that the body can then make a fuller complement of metabolic enzymes, which are critical to your health: Enzyme Nutrition by Dr. Edward Howells.

He argues that you should take a digestive enzyme supplement, but also eat more raw food because the enzymes in raw food have not been destroyed by heat.  Again, the enzymes in raw food take the pressure off the pancreas to create digestive enzymes and so you get a boost to your metabolic enzymes.

In other words, he sees an inverse relationship between digestive enzymes and metabolic enzymes.  Eat a lot of cooked and/or processed foods without any enzymes, and your pancreas will be doing double time, and your metabolic enzymes will be that much weaker, which leads to serious illnesses.

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More Plant Food

Anyone else like the taste of fennel?  I find it very unique and interesting.

Just discovered that you can eat snow peas raw, and added them to my last salad.  Snow peas might be an interesting way to eat a dip — use them to scoop some hummus.

The rage is to make your own salad dressing so that you avoid all that oil (a processed food really, with 120 calories per teaspoon that you can avoid) in commercial salad dressings.  Not that hard to do.  Check out the site below for ideas.

No Oil Salad Dressings

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Veggan

I am an ovo-vegetarian.  I eat a plant-based diet, but I also eat eggs.  I don’t eat eggs because I’m concerned with protein deficiency in a plant-based diet, although, unlike plants, an egg does provide a “complete” protein, i.e., all the essential amino acids.  If you eat a half-way decently diversified plant-based diet, you will also get all the essential amino acids.  That’s a non-issue to me.

I eat one hard-boiled egg every other day because of the known B12 deficiency in a vegetarian diet, but also because of the possible choline deficiency.  Choline is vital for several key metabolic processes in the body.

The recommended daily amount of choline for males is 550 mg, although some nutritionists argue this is an arbitrary number and should be higher.  I’m not at all sure a vegetarian diet provides 550 mg daily.  The problem is that, while many planted-based foods do contain choline, none contain it in a large quantity.  Not true of eggs — an egg is packed with choline.

I buy only Pete and Gerry’s free-range, organic, humane eggs.  In 10 days, I will have eaten exactly 5 hard-boiled eggs sprinkled with pepper.  Not a huge part of my diet, but a very strategic one.

Pete and Gerry’s Organic Eggs

Choline

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