Food For Thought: Smorgasbord
Tuesday, September 01, 2009
Today’s entry in the week-long Food For Thought series is a veritable smorgasbord of assorted food-related topics:
- Finding locally-produced foods can sometimes be a bit difficult, especially if you don’t live in an agriculturally-diverse area. Two websites that can make locating local farmers & growers much easier are Local Harvest and Eat Well Guide. Both are online directories of sustainable food suppliers, searchable by location, where you can just enter your Zip Code and get a list for your area.
- Did you know that the crust is the best part of bread? It not only contains 8 times more antixodants, but is also rich in dietary fiber, which can help prevent colon cancer. So, don’t trim the crusts off of your kids’ sandwiches!
- The typical American breakfast of cereal, lowfat milk, & orange juice — often recommended by dietitians & doctors alike — is a nightmare! According to some, the processing involved with the manufacture of much of our food riddles it with oxidants known to cause degenerative diseases such as cancer, heart disease, brain dysfunction, and cataracts.
For example, naturally-occurring cholesterol in fresh dairy products is used by your body to build & strengthen cell membranes, muscles, brain & nerve tissue. But the drying process in making powdered milk — which is commonly used as a thickener in skim & lowfat milk — oxidizes the cholesterol which, once oxidized, can longer be used but instead collects along the walls of arteries. - If you cook, you’ll want to bookmark the Cook’s Thesaurus right now! It’s a kitchen encyclopedia that covers thousands of ingredients & tools with pictures, descriptions, synonyms, and pronunciations of each. But what’ll bring you back — and just may save a holiday meal — are the suggested substitutions.
(Who knew you could substitute 3 tbsp. mayonnaise, ¼ cup of applesauce, or half a mashed ripe banana plus ¼ tsp. baking powder for each egg in a recipe?) - Honey can be a surprisingly effective, easy, & inexpensive solution for some allergy sufferers. Ingesting small amounts of the airborne pollens that are also contained in the honey helps your body to build up a natural resistance to the allergens. So adding a couple of teaspoons of local, pure, wildflower honey into your daily diet can decrease (and possibly even prevent) seasonal allergies.
However, this is typically not what’s found in the cute little bear-shaped jars in the supermarket because mass-produced honey is stripped of its medicinal value via processing & heat sterilization. And commercial bees are often fed corn syrup rather than their own honey, which diminishes the health of the hive as in addition to decreasing the nutritive benefits of the honey. So look for locally-harvested (try within a 50 mile radius of your house), unpasteurized, unfiltered, 100% pure wildflower honey — the kind that you commonly find at farmers’ markets or produce stands. - For complete nutritional data on honey and a whole host of other health-promoting foods, visit the World’s Healthiest Foods. This website, run by The George Mateljan Foundation (a not-for-profit foundation with no commercial interests) aims to discover, develop, and share scientifically-proven information about the benefits of healthy eating.
- Foster Farms, a California poultry company, created the Say No To Plumping campaign. Plumping is the practice of needlessly injecting chickens with saltwater, stock, seaweed extract, or other fluids to radically increase sodium content, weight, and price — which the USDA estimates costs Americans up to $2 billion annually!
- High fructose corn syrup has become so abundant & incredibly cheap that manufacturers sneak it into practically everything. HFCS is used liberally even in foods that have no need for any sweetener in them.
But if it isn’t bad enough that so much of our foods are secretly loaded with the stuff, we now we find out that HFCS is contaminated with mercury. Two studies recently found significant traces of the toxic metal in 30-50% of sampled foods containing HFCS. So if you weren’t sufficiently convinced of the evils of HFCS before, it’s high time to reconsider!
Posted by Rob at 5:23 AM
6 Comments:
Another added benefit to buying locally is that you're keeping the resources in your area and supporting local business. We've started this practice not only with food-related items, but also with retail stores and restaurants as well.
Sodium nitrate is another hidden "gem" (<-- sarcasm!)that we've knocked out of our lunch meats. My kids LOVE lunchables- I make a homemade version with natural (no nitrate) turkey or ham (Oscar Mayer and Hormel both offer these in the prepackaged meats section of the grocer) cut with a small circle cookie cutter that I picked up from our local kitchen gadget store, cheese squares cut into 4's, and Back to Nature "Classic Rounds" (they're like Ritz). Paired with a homemade cookie and Minute Made Fruit Falls pouch, I've successfully cut out all of the nitrates, high-fructose crap, and hydrogenated junk (not to mention the extra fat and calories) AND allow my kids to still feel like the rest of the class assembling their little stacks of cracker sandwiches. Takes a little work, but in the kitchen all good things do, right?
To avoid the sugar as much as we can, we buy unsweetened milk (soy milk for Mark and I and almond milk for Diego) and add three drops of Stevia leaf extract.
I had heard about the honey to prevent allergies. I need to start giving that to Diego to help him overcome his current allergies and prevent some in the future! Rob, I love this health related series, please consider me for the book giveaway!
im stealing all your ideas...im sneaky like that.
honestly though i cant wait to try some of these things out, they're bound to help me with my diabetes and it's not like they're hard to prepare :)
good stuff! (as a fast food junkie i feel intimidated at this right now lol)
good post, rob--i hope lots of people take it to heart. or to stomach--
Banana and baking powder?? Who knew!! I'm going to try it. Seriously. And I promise to let you know :).
Great ideas, Jenn & Sinziana!
Sophie, you can also use ¼ cup of tofu to replace an egg in a recipe, but that's not something we'd ever be likely to have on-hand.
Replacing an egg in pancakes with applesauce makes for very moist flapjacks - and gives 'em a dash more fiber too!
We've also tried subbing a banana in a pinch when making pancakes but that result was a little gummy - although they tasted very good. Would probably work great for muffins...
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