SmarterFitter Blog Less diet, more brain

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In case you haven’t seen this already, the New York Times discloses the modern paradox of the wondrous Mediterranean Diet - wondrous for anyone not living in the Mediterranean, that is:

The fact is that the Mediterranean diet, which has been associated with longer life spans and lower rates of heart disease and cancer, is in retreat in its home region. Today it is more likely to be found in the upscale restaurants of London and New York than among the young generation in places like Greece, where two-thirds of children are now overweight and the health effects are mounting, health officials say.

“This is a place where you’d see people who lived to 100, where people were all fit and trim,” says [Dr. Michalis Stagourakis]. “Now you see kids whose longevity is less than their parents’. That’s really scaring people.”

Fast Food Hits Mediterranean; a Diet Succumbs

Despite increased awareness about the benefits of health and fitness, Americans still have poor diets and the obesity rate continues to rise. According to a 2008 survey by the Trust For America’s Health, obesity rates increased significantly in 37 states since last year, and declined only in the District of Columbia.

What’s going wrong? A recent research report by the USDA points to, well, modern life as the culprit.

The report presents a “consumer demand model” which shows how long-term health goals and external factors can drive a person’s food choices. Turns out, knowledge is nothing compared to “visceral factors” like work and stress which contribute to more meals away from home, more time between meals, and in the end, more calories. Here are some of the key findings:

• Individuals are more likely to consume more calories when they extend the time between meals or consume more of their food away from home. For example, going 5 hours between meals instead of 4 adds about 52 calories for someone on a diet of 2,000 calories per day.
• Unsurprisingly, the location at which someone eats affects what and how much is consumed. People are estimated to cosume about 107 more calories when eating foods from a restaurant compared with foods prepared at home.
• People who work more hours are also more influenced by the interval between meals. At 4 hours between meals, an individual who works 40 hours a week is estimated to eat about 20 percent more calories than someone who is not employed. At 8 hours between meals, the calorie discrepancy jumps to nearly 40 percent.

There are no huge surprises here, but it serves to illustrate the challenge of modern life to anyone wanting to establish healthy habits. Work is a real problem. The obesity issue seems to reflect a need for a national shift in attitude away from work and consumption and more towards, well, fun. Why is life so stressful? Why do we have such a problem taking lunch breaks? Stopping for a snack? Packing lunch instead of eating out? Finding time to take a walk?

In my last job at a big bank, I worked with a bunch of analysts who were constantly overworked, yet unwilling to push back on their duties. One girl spoke to me about her former running habits, and how she hasn’t put on her running shoes in months and it makes her so sad, but “I must finish this report!” she said as she settled into her screen with a tray of take-away sushi, not to leave the office until 10pm.

I suppose my inability to accept tasks when I knew they would cause me to work overtime is one of the reasons I no longer work at a bank. One of my goals is to be healthy in body AND mind, and since quitting the bank and working for myself, I’ve never been happier or healthier. And when I think about the rest of the fitness bloggers I know, many of them work at home or own their own businesses - I wonder if their fitness success is connected with this kind of freedom?

Unfortunately, most of us can’t just up and quit our jobs. So then what? Who out there works the 9-5 but manages (or at least tries to manage) to work fitness into the mix? I bet there’s a lot to learn from people who manage to keep a job without turning into a stress-ball. If you’re out there, let us know how you do it!

Is Dietary Knowledge Enough? Hunger, Stress, and Other Roadblocks to Healthy Eating [thanks Rory!]

We all know that protein is important, especially for active folks trying to put on a little muscle. For vegetarians like me, this is a little tricky - many of the foods we eat don’t contain complete proteins. That is, beans and whole grains may contain lots of amino acids, but on their own, they don’t contain enough of the right amino acids to form a complete protein (you can read more about this in Nutrition by The American Dietetic Association). As a result, I usually try to balance my meals with grains and beans so I’m sure to maximize the protein punch!

Most recently, I’ve been doing this with pasta. There’s no meal like a pasta meal that cries CARB FEST. But you can easily turn pasta into a more well-rounded meal by simply adding a few beans. Pasta is actually high in the amino acids methionine and cysteine, but low in lysine. Legumes such as kidney beans, however, are low in methionine and cysteine, but high in lysine. Put the two together and you get a complete protein. Science!

Adding beans to pasta is as easy as, well, simply adding beans to pasta. Beans compliment most sauces just as well as pasta, but some combinations work better than others. Here are my preferences:

• Chickpeas or kidney beans with tomato sauce
• White beans or chickpeas with pesto sauce
• White beans or broad beans with garlic and olive oil

I’m not even going to touch alfredo (some foods you just shouldn’t mess with).

Here’s the recipe for the meal I had this evening (pictured above - it inspired me to write this post). Pesto linguine with chickpeas and arugula. YUM! I served this with a tomato, cucumber and red onion salad with balsamic vinaigrette. Bliss, I tell you. Pure comfort.

Omega-3 fatty acids are supposed to be the business, right? Since I don’t eat fish, I’ve been supplementing my diet with flax oil, the richest plant source of omega-3s. But after reading the World’s Healthiest Foods’ take on flax oil, I’m not sure that this is the way forward:

Flaxseed oil is a processed food product in which most of the whole, natural food has been eliminated. We treat flax oil like a dietary supplement, and we do not include it in the World’s Healthiest Foods like we do flaxseeds. You can buy high-quality flax oil that includes many of the nutrients contained in the seeds, including some of the fiber. But you cannot find any flax oil that contains the full nutritional value of flaxseeds.

The word “processed” always gets my attention. Michael Pollan of In Defense of Food would say that this is a classic case of “nutritionism”, our modern ideology that deals with food by breaking it down into its constituent parts and trying to decipher what’s important. True, I try to make a point to eat whole, natural foods wherever possible, making the occasional exception for spaghetti (Tim has mastered the arrabiatta sauce as of late). But I eat spaghetti because it tastes good, whereas I eat flax oil to get omega-3’s. Wouldn’t it make more sense to just eat whole flax seeds, and all of the great fiber and nutrients that come with it?

What do flax seeds have that the oil lacks?

Flax seed oil has omega-3 fatty acids and vitamin E. That’s it. Whole flax seeds, however are full of nutrients, including high concentrations of manganese, fiber, magnesium, folate, copper, phosphorus and vitamin B6.

Nutrient concentration per 100g of flax seeds and flax oil
Source: USDA food database

Then why am I not eating more flax seeds?

Honestly, they are a pain in the ass. As WHF agrees, “one problem with flaxseeds, however, involves their chewing and digestion. Flaxseeds are very small and can pass through the body without becoming digested and absorbed.” Basically, our bodies don’t have the enzymes to break through the hard fibrous outer shell of the flax seed. So away they go, nutrients all, literally right down the pooper.

How can I get the benefits of the whole seed?

Flax seeds can be ground or soaked overnight to improve their digestibility. WHF recommends using a coffee grinder; mine do just fine in a blender.

But what do I DO with flax seeds once I’ve ground or soaked them?

It’s true, flax seeds on their own are kind of bland. Here are a few suggestions from me and WHF:

I’m still new to this but I’m sure you guys have some more great ideas. Please share in the comments!

What is the difference between flaxseed and flaxseed oil?

This afternoon I thought I’d whip together a quick lunch of the Guardian’s “fairly easy” tabbouleh salad with a few chickpeas. The plan seemed quick and painless: while I cooked my soaked chickpeas and soaked the bulgar wheat, I could let the food processor chop the parsley, and hand chop a tomato and some green onion. It should only take a few minutes (cooking time aside). But while I had chickpeas and the food processor going, I thought “why not make hummus“? This would require slicing veggies, which involved washing carrots, celery and cucumber. Tim added that we needed pita bread if we’re having hummus, so off he went to the store. Finally, after dirtying all the dishes in the house, I went to assemble the toubbuleh only to find that I had been soaking couscous, not bulgar wheat, all along. Disaster!

Yesterday I said to Tim, “now that working from home, I don’t imagine lunch will be more involved than what I did for work” (typically a salad I made the night before or leftover dal re-heated in the microwave). It didn’t take me long for me to get trapped in the kitchen.

Here’s the bottom line: I love cooking. Chopping vegetables relaxes me. I think it’s fun to think about different combinations of ingredients and spices. It’s almost an obsession (to which Tim would likely respond, “almost?”). The thing is, there isn’t always enough time in the day to cook elaborate gourmet meals for breakfast, lunch and dinner (and don’t forget about second breakfast). But I don’t have the money or the appetite for fast food or frozen pizza (though I do have a soft spot for the thin crust variety, but again, I can’t hold back from adding fresh-sliced onion and green pepper before putting the pizza into the oven).

John at Pick the Brain probably didn’t have me in mind when he wrote his post How to Prepare Healthy Meals Faster Than You Can Order Takeout. But just like the anti-chef can learn how to cook, food-obsessed folks like me can also learn that it’s okay to NOT cook fancy meals all the time.

For John, meat is a big part of his “slow carb” cooking regime; however, vegetarians can also just as easily learn from these three basic tenets:

• Stock up on food, such as frozen and canned foods that aren’t nasty, like frozen peas and tinned beans
• Prepare foods efficiently by learning a routine, cooking simple meals, and learning to multitask
• Embrace the microwave for defrosting frozen food, heating up beans, and cooking vegetables

Our freezer is a treasure trove of easy meals: I make big batches of dal and veggie chili and cornbread then freeze them in meal-sized portions.

Another great formula for a quick and healthy meal is beans + grains + vegetables. We often do puy lentils, which take about 30 minutes and are delicious enough just cooked with veggie stock. While those boil away, whip up some rice, quinoa or boiled potatoes (~10 mins) and steam some greens (~10 minutes to chop, wash and steam).

What are your quick and health cooking tips?

How to Prepare Healthy Meals Faster Than You Can Order Takeout

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

The package claims that this loaf of bread is “enriched”, “whole-grain”, and “high fiber”, and yet the media keeps saying that bread is bad for me. So what’s the story? Is bread healthy or not?

That all depend on the bread.

World’s Healthiest Food has a compact article on grains, specifically those related to bread. It’s worth a quick read if you’re at all confused about the difference between whole grains and refined grains. Here’s an even quicker read:

Whole Grains

Imagine a grain of brown rice, barley or oats. A “whole grain” still has its “germ” and “bran”, the parts of the seed where nutrients are stored.

Refined Grains

Imagine stock standard white flour. This stuff has been processed (read: pulverised) to remove the bran and germ. The reason most packaged breads are “enriched” is because manufacturers synthetically put nutrients lost from the germ back into the bread.

What is the point of refining?

Whole grains are refined because the bran and germ can go rancid over time. This complicates storage and transport for food manufacturers.

How can I tell if I’m eating the healthy bread?

The easiest way is to bake your own bread using whole grain flour. If that is impractical, read the package closely, and look out for these dubious claims:

NOT Whole Grain

• “whole grain”
• “contains whole grain”
• “100% wheat”
• “made with whole wheat”
• “multigrain”
• “pumpernickel”
• “stone-ground”

My personal favourite for packaged whole grain bread is Food For Life’s Ezekial 4:9 Sprouted Grain Bread (look for it in the freezer section).

• Link to whole grain bread recipes
• Link to more information on whole grains at Wikipedia
• Link to the Effects of Refining and Enrichment on Wheat and Rice on Wikipedia
• Link to Grain Storage Guide at Recipe Tips
• Link to I’m confused as to whether grains are good or bad for your health at World’s Healthiest Foods

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

Blood oranges are in season! How I wish I could package their juicy essence and enjoy the ruby sweet pulp all year round, but that would defeat the purpose: these sublime beauties deserve to be eaten raw.

Blood oranges also deserve the attention they’ve been getting around the the interweb. At World’s Healthiest Foods, there’s this post on their superior nutritional profile:

These anthocyanins are flavonoid pigments that provide blood oranges with their crimson color. Blood oranges also contain vitamin C in more concentrated amounts than conventional oranges. These fruits-native to Italy and Spain-can typically provide between 150-200 milligrams of vitamin C per cup of juice. The amount of vitamin C in a cup of juice from conventional oranges is typically between 75-125 milligrams.

That’s interesting and all, but the best thing about blood oranges is their flavor - sweet, ripe and ready for a recipe extravaganza! Here are a few that have cropped up in recent weeks:

Blood orange recipes

• Tamarind, Orange and Mint dressing from Veggie Meal Plans
• Mini Coconut Blood Orange Bundt Cakes (say that 5 times fast) from VeganYumYum
• Blood Orange Sorbet by David Lebovitz (does not require an ice cream maker!)
• Blood Orange Margarita
• Roasted Beet and Blood Orange Salad from Heidi at 101 Cookbooks
• Blood Orange Salsa from Kim O’Donnel of The Washington Post

I’ve been meaning to try the mint dressing, but I keep eating all of the oranges before I get around to making it. If only all of life’s problems were this good…