SmarterFitter Blog Less diet, more brain

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Dal with Roasted Cauliflower, Aloo Gobi, and Basmati Rice

I’ve been meaning to write about packed lunches for months. Thankfully, Kris at Cheap Healthy Good has beaten me to it. In her One-Stop Shop for Work Lunch Ideas, Kris provides seven invaluable tips for brown-bagging it:

Plan ahead. This is where your grocery list comes in handy.

Prepare your food the night before.

No one wants to wake 20 minutes early so they can half-assedly slap a bologna sandwich together before the 8am train. Assembling an simple lunch in the evening will let you sleep longer AND increase the likelihood of a meal you’ll enjoy. If those nightly 10 minutes are too inconvenient, you can always …

Prepare your food in bulk. I’m a fan of freezing individual portions of dal, veggie chili, soup, and cornbread.

Don’t settle for sandwiches. Amen. Have I mentioned the joys of dal?

Use leftovers wisely. Hmm, dal anyone?

Pack snacks. I’m all over this: raw veggies, fruit, nuts, hummus, beans. And if you’re doing this to save money…

Avoid the 100-calorie packs, though, as they are the biggest ripoff, ever.

Invest in reusable lunchboxes and utensils. Good tupperware that does not leak is key. I’m sad to report that the Laptop Lunchbox, though cute, is a big sloppy mess if you pack anything liquid. Check out JustBento for an awesome supply of container ideas.

I can’t hold back - I’m a star when it comes to packed lunches. But I guess it depends on your perspective. I had one workmate who once looked at what I was eating and said, to no one in particular, “Huh, life of a vegetarian, I guess?” I think he was confused, but I was too happy in my bowl of chili to care. I hope you don’t mind me showing off a few of my favorite lunches from this past year:

Veggie sushi with Carrot & Hijiki Salad, Marinated Tofu Steaks, and Spinach Gomae

Veggie Chili with Roasted Okra, Cornbread, No Knead Bread, and Banana

Dal with Roasted Cauliflower, Aloo Gobi, and Basmati Rice

Marinated Tofu Steaks with Soy Dipping Sauce, Pearl Barley, Carrot & Hijiji Salad, Rocket Salad

Amaranthy/Quinoa Timbales with Green Salad, Roasted Veggies, and Shredded Beetroot, Pinenut and Cilantro Salad

Pasta Arrabiata with No Knead Bread, Cannelini Bean Puree, and Tomato, Rocket, Cucumber and Asparagus Salad

What are your favorite brown-bag lunches? Please share in the comments below!

One-Stop Shop for Work Lunch Ideas [Cheap Healthy Good]

Thanks to Crabby for enlightening me to the latest drama around vitamins. Guess what: they might do us more harm than good.

The folks at Chochrane Systemic Review scrutinised 67 randomised trials but could “find no evidence to support taking antioxidant supplements to reduce the risk of dying earlier in healthy people or patients with various diseases.”

No wonder all that vitamin C I’ve been taking to squash my spring sniffles seems to be doing no good.

Says Chochran researcher, Goran Bjelakovic: ““The findings of our review show that if anything, people in trial groups given the antioxidants beta-carotene, vitamin A, and vitamin E showed increased rates of mortality. There was no indication that vitamin C and selenium may have positive or negative effects…The bottom line is that current evidence does not support the use of antioxidant supplements in the general healthy population or in patients with certain diseases.”

The news has sparked the expected outrage from the supplement industry, but journalists, too, are raising an eyebrow. The Times was quick to point out that studying the effect of antioxidants is incredibly hard due to our ever-changing diet patterns and unreliability as witnesses.

So what does this latest review mean for us? It certainly doesn’t mean that those of us taking multivitamins are going to suffer an early death - they were not covered in the review. For those of us who take supplements of individual antioxidants, the picture is still far from clear. What we can say is that if there are benefits in taking single antioxidant supplements, they are very small indeed.

I agree with the Guardian’s Sarah Boseley:

In the end, maybe the safest thing is just to eat a better diet.

I’m not about to give up my daily multivitamin, but it does make me think twice about all the £££’s I’ve spent on vitamin C. Next time I’ll spend my money on cauliflower and oranges, which are far more pleasant to eat than nasty pills!

No evidence that antioxidant supplements prolong life, News from the Cochrane Library
The truth about Vitamins, The Times
Hard to swallow, The Guardian

I usually like Mark’s Daily Apple, but I was really disappointed in his recent post on beans. He really gave these wondrous morsels a bad wrap!

Legumes aren’t, by any means, the worst thing you can eat, but they don’t make the ideal meal either. In my estimation, legumes fall into the “O.K.” category with wine, chocolate, cheese and other dairy, etc.

What the hell? Beans are awesome. Like it or not, we humans have been eating beans for ages. They’ve been found in 5,000 year-old settlements in the Mediterranean and Mesopotamia, and even in Egyptian pyramids. Pyramids, people - you think these wonders of the world were built on lousy nutrition?

If you subscribe to the notion that you need a high protein, low carb diet to get fit, then fine - beans are not ideal. But neither is this lifestyle (in my opinion). Beans supply an awesome balance of protein and complex carbs, plus loads of vitamins and minerals. And they’re not pumped with nasty chemicals or raised in manure on a factory farm. And unlike most meats, beans have been shown to be awesome for your heart.

• They are a good source of potassium, which may help reduce your risk of high blood pressure and stroke.
• Dry beans are a good source of folic acid, which protects against heart disease by breaking down an amino acid called homocysteine.
• In a large study of almost 10,000 men and women, those who ate beans four or more times a week cut their risk of coronary heart disease by about 20 percent, compared with those who ate beans less than once a week.
• Other studies show that within two to three weeks, diets high in either canned or dry beans (3 to 4 ounces per day) reduce blood cholesterol levels by 10 percent or more: an effect that can result in a 20 percent decrease in the risk of coronary heart disease.
• Beans and lentils have the same potent anti-inflammatory antioxidants—flavonoids and flavonals—found in tea, fruits, grapes, red wine and cocoa beans.
• Beans are among the richest food sources of saponins, chemicals that help prevent undesirable genetic mutations.

So that’s my little rant. Hope you don’t mind.

Here’s more information on beans. Maybe Mark should have a read!

Beans for Health
Superfood: Beans and Lentils
Beans and other legumes: Types and tasty tips

Dr. Atkins left his mark on the world by making protein one of the most debated diet topics of our time. Thanks, doc, no we’re really confused. What is protein? And how much protein do we need?

Lauren, a personal trainer, tackles these questions and more in her post Protein: Why? How Much? When? Though aimed at strength trainers, her post easily applies to the rest of us normally-muscled folk (especially those of us who’d like to put a bit more Arnold in our biceps). She explains in simple terms what protein is and why we need it, and also has a good tip to help you figure out what’s best for you

Check what level of protein you are eating now. Just for one day, write down everything you eat, and then figure out how many grams of protein it was…

If you are strength training regularly and are aiming to build muscle and lose fat, build mass, lose fat and maintain muscle, or you are participating in heavy exercise and your protein intake is currently low, try to get between 1.5-2grams/ kg to start with. Up that intake to around 2.2 grams/kg. If you aren’t strength training…start. There are too many benefits for you to avoid this kind of exercise.

Another way to look at it to start, is to consume at least 30% of your daily calorie needs from protein. I prefer to look at grams/kg however this will also give you a decent number to aim for, and simply another way to look at it.

If you don’t want to count the amount of protein you eat, make a conscious effort to get some quality protein at every meal,

By the way, you don’t need supplements to get enough protein. And if she seems hell-bent on strength training, there’s lots of good reasons for this, but I’ll save that for another post!

Link to Protein: Why? How Much? When?

Time’s photo essay, “What the World Eats”, made me wonder what my typical food week looks like. So as of last Monday, I’ve been writing down everything I eat and when. For example, today’s log so far looks like

• 6:15am: Two glasses of filtered water
• 6:30am: Earl Gray Tea with organic semi-skimmed milk
• 7:00am: Organic porridge oats with an organic Gala apple, organic raisins and organic un-sweetened soy milk

This started as a simple project, but it’s given me so much more to think about than just my week in food:

• I eat a lot. And often.
• It’s much more fun to track my diet this way than to tediously count calories.
• The diary is growing in detail. For instance, on February 25th I wrote “Coffee with milk”. On February 29th, I wrote “Clipper Assam tea and Tesco Organic Un-sweetened soy milk”. Today I started noting which foods were organic.
• I am still fighting an addiction to Diet Soda, which has only grown worse by my discovery of Pepsi Max, a beverage I shamefully find delicious.
• Food is much more than a sum of its protein, fat and carbohydrate calories.

Calorie tracking is useful - this is how I painstakingly learned portion control. But I wonder if this could have been achieved by tracking food on this level instead? After all, isn’t our foods’ variety, origin, and quality just as important to our health as our foods’ calories?

This has been such a fun and fascinating exercise that I think I’ll keep it up. Until now, I’ve logged everything in a Google document but have moved it over to the forums under a new topic, “Food Diaries” (an idea stolen from the FatFree Vegan Board - I hope she doesn’t mind; non-vegans need a place to log their food, too!).

If you’re interested in joining in, feel free to start a new thread with your diary. I’d love to see what other people’s food week/month/year looks like. And I’d also love to hear your ideas on food tracking in general. What works? What matters? What’s easiest?

If so, you’re not the only one. The article “I Love You, but You Love Meat” in today’s New York Times illustrates how fundamental food is to our relationships. We want to have our cake, and eat it, too, and share in the enjoyment of that cake with the people we love. If a couple can’t share a meal, the relationship suffers:

“I went out with one guy who said I seemed really great but he liked bread too much to date me,” said Ms. James, 41, a writer in Seattle who cannot eat gluten, a protein found in wheat, barley and rye.

In our household, Tim’s an omnivore while I’m a vegetarian. I don’t mind him cooking meat while I’m around, but he doesn’t because it means we can’t share in the enjoyment of the same food. I appreciate this. He has meat fests when I’m not around, much like Ms. Benson, whose husband is vegetarian:

She cooks vegetarian dinners and makes lunches for herself and her daughter that include meat. She and her daughter have “meat parties” when Mr. Benson goes out of town.

I was warmed by the quote from omnivorous chef, Daniel Ahern, who considers his is gluten-averse wife a “professional challenge”:

“As a chef, it has given me the opportunity to experiment with new ingredients to create things she can eat,” said Mr. Ahern, 39, who works at Impromptu Wine Bar Cafe in Seattle. Ms. James said she fell in love with him after he made her a gluten-free salad of frisée, poached egg and bacon. They married in September.

The article focussed on couples whose dietary needs were dictated by religious or philosophical beliefs. But what about people trying to lose weight? Or training for a marathon? It’s here where I find dietary restrictions can be most taxing, though I struggle to articulate why. If I say to someone “I’m vegetarian”, there’s no question that I won’t be ordering steak for dinner. But if “I’m training for a 10k”, my motivation to avoid high fat foods and alcohol seems somehow less strict in comparison. I know a competitive marathon runner who says his wife gets very frustrated when he’s training because he’s far less social (i.e. he sleeps more and drinks less). This must be quite a difficult situation for his wife, who wants to be supportive but also wants to have fun with her husband.Happy valentines day, everyone!Link to I Love You, But You Love Meat

Two years ago I attempted to go 30-days straight eating only raw food. I only lasted three, but hold out more hope for productivity guru Steve Pavlina, who kicked off his 30-day raw vegan diet trial on January 1st.

His diary is compelling: he’s tracking his weight (5.4 pounds lost), workout routine (six days per week), meals (mostly fruit), and the inevitable ups and downs of change:

Have you ever had that grossed-out feeling from eating too much of the same food, like too much chocolate, and you can feel this greasy puddle in your stomach? I started feeling a sensation similar to that, like I ate way too much of something that didn’t agree with me. Maybe it was the 11 bananas I ate this morning.

I glean some comfort in the fact that Steve also only lasted three days when he first attempted to go raw ten years ago. Since then, he’s completed two successful trials, both of which left him feeling so elated that he’s starting again. In this trial, he’s hoping the results will convince him to keep eating raw after the 30-days are up.

My fascination with the raw food diet reminds me of the Dr. Soran character from the movie Star Trek: Generations. Once he experienced the bliss of the Nexus, he wanted nothing more than to return to it. After I experienced the incredible energy and vitality of my first 30-day raw trial, I’ve always wanted to return to it.

In addition to his daily progress, he’s also posting articles and information about raw food in general. For example, did you know that Steve Jobs was a fruitarian during the 1970s? Hence the name, Apple (and Macintosh).

More interesting are the commentaries on his research:

There’s very compelling biological evidence that a high fruit diet is optimal for human beings…one of the more convincing points is that the nearest animal species to human beings, including gorillas, chimpanzees, orangutans, and bonobos all naturally favor a high fruit diet, meaning that when fresh fruit is readily available, they’ll get the vast majority of their calories from fruit… Another clue is that when people do eat a high fruit diet, they tend to reach their optimal weight, get sick much less often, and feel fantastic. Even I’ve noticed that when I have an all fruit breakfast, I feel much more energetic, assuming I eat enough calories.

Like all science, his should be taken with a grain of salt. Still, it’s food for thought that makes me want to learn more about raw food and human nutrition (though I’ve suddenly lost my appetite for bananas).

To read more, I suggest starting with these two posts: 30 Days Raw and Raw Foods.

Additionally, you can read his daily progress on his blog.

Link

Did you know there’s 1.42 milligrams of Riboflavin in Cheerios? And 1,917 milligrams of Selenium of brazil nuts?

Yes, our food database is full of intricate details about your favorite foods, and yet, where’s the much hyped glycemic index!?

We’re working on it.

“The Home of the Glycemic Index” at the University of Sydney has a vast searchable database, but a full list isn’t available for download (which is a shame, because we could do such a better job than their search tool!).

The National Cancer Institute is far more generous. Their Dietary History Questionaire has its own food database which they’ve made available to the public. The database includes a list of GI values for a set of foods. The next challenge is to incorporate this data into our database.

Like I said, we’re working on it! Stay tuned.