SmarterFitter Blog Less diet, more brain

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The Advisory Committee on Novel Foods and Processes is holding an open Workshop on Novel Foods in London on 2 April 2008. Anyone can attend, including members of the public.

“Novel food” is food that does not have a significant history of consumption within the EU before May 1997. The workshop could be interesting, providing an inside look at the novel food and genetic modification from the regulator’s perspective.

Link to Invitation to novel foods workshop

Some lentils play hard to get. Take the yellow lentil, for instance: even after an hour of cooking she’s still tough on the teeth. But the green lentil, well, she’s a bit of a slut.

Green lentils are fast and easy: they require no soaking, take just 20 minutes to cook, and will go with about any vegetable you throw at it. Better still, they’re high protein, low fat, and full of fiber. Not to mention cheap: according to Cheap Healthy Good, a serving of a similar soup costs just $0.69.

Because they’re so easy to cook, green lentils are ideal for quick soups on cold days. This soup doesn’t really need a recipe: just throw in whatever veggies you have on hand. Carrots and tomato are especially good, as is parsley.

Fast and Easy Lentil Soup

Ingredients

• 250g green lentils
• 1 tin of tomatoes
• 1 carrot, sliced
• 2 ribs of celery, sliced
• 1 onion, diced
• 3 cloves of garlic, sliced
• 2 bay leaves
• A handful of parsley
• Enough vegetable stock to cover (or more if you desire a soupy soup)
• Ground black pepper

Directions

Put everything together in a pot and bring to a boil. Turn the heat down and simmer for 20 minutes. Optional: At the end, freshen the soup with a splash of vinegar or squeeze of lemon.
Serve with crusty bread.

Serves 4.
Per serving: 282 Calories (kcal); 1g Total Fat; 18g Protein; 51g Carbohydrate

Nutrition information derived from the USDA food database.

Link to other high protein vegan foods

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?

When I made the list of High Protein Vegan Foods, tempeh stood out as most mysterious. I mean, what is it? The dense speckled brick looks more like a diseased internal organ than food. But in fact, tempeh IS food, and a highly nutritious, protein-rich food at that.

Like tofu, tempeh is made from soybeans. However, unlike tofu, which is made from soy milk, tempeh is made from whole soybeans, fermented through a natural culturing process that binds the beans into a cake. Because tempeh retains the whole bean, it is higher in protein and fiber than tofu.

My easy tempeh recipe is an evolution of my Auntie Jo’s sloppy joes, a quintessential American food for sure, traditionally made with ground beef, onions, tomato sauce, and bbq seasoning, then slopped on a bun and eaten with lots of napkins. You don’t need to make this with tempeh - my mom makes hers with MorningStar Farms soy crumbles. I tend to prefer cooking with unadulterated whole ingredients and the tempeh does a nice job of crumbling into the sauce and soaking in the flavors.

The hardest part about this recipe is finding vegan bbq sauce; many sauces contain Worchestershire sauce (i.e. anchovies), honey, and dubious processed ingredients. The only bottled vegan bbq sauce I’m aware of is Annie’s Naturals BBQ Sauce. Of course, you can always make your own, which would make this recipe less easy, but probably much tastier!

Tempeh Sloppy Joes

serves 4

200g tempeh, roughly crumbled
100g bbq sauce
1 tbsp olive oil
2 sticks celery, finely chopped
1/2 green bell pepper, finely chopped
1 onion, finely chopped
1/2 can of stewed tomatoes
A dash or two of liquid smoke
salt to taste

1. Heat the olive oil in a large saucepan
2. Add the onion, celery and green pepper and sauté until tender
3. Add remaining ingredients and simmer for 15 minutes or more (the longer the better, the tempeh will crumble more as it cooks)
4. Serve on hamburger buns with lettuce, tomato and sliced onion (if desired). Or, for a tidier sandwich, stuff it in a pita, or wrap it in a tortilla!

Per serving: 200 Calories (kcal); 9g Total Fat; 11g Protein; 22g Carbohydrate
Per serving (with whole grain bun): 310 Calories; 12g Total Fat; 15g Protein; 41g Carbohydrates

Approximate total cost of preparation, including buns: £6.30 (£1.60 per serving)

Nutrition information derived from the USDA food database.

• Link to all High protein vegan foods
• The Flickr photos tagged with “tempeh” are lookin’ mighty tasty
• Lots of information at Tempeh.info

Ecuador: The Ayme family of Tingo
Food expenditure for one week: $31.55
Family recipe: Potato soup with cabbage

United States: The Revis family of North Carolina
Food expenditure for one week: $341.98
Favorite foods: spaghetti, potatoes, sesame chicken

I discovered Time’s Photo Essay, “What the World Eats” on Mark’s Daily Apple. I agree with Mark: these photos are a fascinating window into the world’s food cultures:

From a traditional MDA perspective, we were struck by not only what the collective grocery items say about each culture’s diet, but also by the relative cost and what we choose to pay for in each society. Finally, some photos were all too telling with the comparative “volume” of food that feeds each family.

From a not-so-typical MDA stance (if you’ll allow us the liberty), we found ourselves fascinated by this photo essay’s window into the cultural and, well, simply human experience of food – in its traditional significance and regional roots, its healthfulness and indulgence, its necessity and scarcity. It’s a view that is, at once, intimate and universal.

The photos are part of a larger book, Hungry Planet: What the World Eats, by Peter Menzel and Faith D’Alusio.

• Link to We Are What We Eat? on Mark’s Daily Apple
• Link to Hungry Planet: What the World Eats on Amazon

This is kind of a neat idea: Foodsel is a food database, similar to ours, with added visualisations of calories, sugar and fat. For example, a large serving of McDonald’s French fries has the fat equivalent to 0.4 sticks of butter!

The website also shows you how much exercise you need to do to burn off those french fries (over two hours running for me, no thanks I’d rather skip the fries!).

This visualisations are a neat idea, which can certainly provide an interesting perspective on foods we eat. However, the butter analogy can be somewhat misleading for fatty foods that are actually good for you, like olive oil and avocado.

Link to Foodsel (via Lifehacker)

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