Animal Writings

• Artfully arrange some fresh fruit in a bowl on the kitchen table, or wherever you're most likely to eat meals or snacks. If you make the fruit more inviting and accessible, you may find yourself reaching for it more often.


• Always add fruit to cereal. Second choice: buy cereal with fruit already in it. The two choices aren't mutually exclusive. Add fruit to oatmeal and other hot cereal as well as to cold cereal. One option to consider here, which may give you more flexibility, is dried fruit.


• Fruit makes a nice topping for pancakes, waffles, and French toast. You can still use maple syrup and other toppings along with the fruit. One nice variation is escalloped apples or apple pie filling with a little cinnamon sprinkled on top.


• Fruit works surprisingly well in salads. Sections of mandarin oranges or red grapefruit (or both) go great on a spinach salad. Dried cherries or cranberries go well with most green salads. Try other combinations.


• Dried fruit mixes are a nice "pop a handful in the mouth" snack. They last a long time, and they often include fruits like papaya and apricot that I'm guessing you don't buy fresh very often.


• Bring some fruit to work. If you forget, and you work in a city, you can buy a piece of fruit from the street vendor or the little shop in the ground floor of your building. You can even buy a fruit cup at many Starbucks or other coffee shops.


• Bring fruit on trips and on hikes. Dried fruit may work better than fresh if you're going a long distance.


• Although it's not the cheapest or most environmentally responsible route, consider buying fruit for which the manual work—peeling, slicing, and so forth—has already been done, to make eating fruit easier. There are lots of choices here, such as orange and/or grapefruit sections, apple slices, and canned fruit. Most grocery stores now sell a variety of cut-up fruit, including watermelon, cantaloupe, honeydew melon, pineapple, kiwi, and strawberries. They typically sell combinations as well, which may include slices of larger fruit like melons and pineapple mixed with blueberries, raspberries, or other berries. Although you pay a little extra, you sort of get the best of both worlds here: Fresh fruit and zero preparation. Don't buy more than you'll eat in the next two days.


• Stop at farm stands. There's something about the freshness and color of the fruit on the stand that makes them more irresistible. In autumn, there's nothing like the burst of flavor you get from a crisp red, gold, or green apple right off the farm. But other fruit from farm stands, at any time of year, tastes great also. Like peaches in summer. OMG. Plus you'll be helping out a local farmer.


• Pretty much everything in the last bullet point also applies to farmers markets. Most areas have them.


• The easiest fruit salad in the world: Slice some bananas, slice some strawberries, add a drained can of Mandarin orange sections. Optional: Drizzle with agave nectar (a low-glycemic alternative to honey) and/or a bit of cinnamon. If you have any grapes or dried fruit around, they'll probably blend in fine. If this is dessert we're talking about, you can mix in some sweetened coconut shreds that you buy in the baking section.


• Consider smoothies. Make them or buy them. Go for the non-dairy versions. I prefer straight juice smoothies. But at some chains that sell dairy smoothies, such as Robek's, you can specify non-dairy and they'll substitute soy sherbet for the dairy product—and neither you nor anyone for whom you buy them will notice the difference.


• A lot of products have fruit in them, some more than others. Applesauce comes in a dozen different varieties these days, including Granny Smith, cinnamon, unsweetened, pear-apple, strawberry-apple, and peach-apple. Fruit pies are often loaded with fruit. Cranberry sauce is mostly cranberries. Well, with a lot of sugar, too, to offset the tartness. There's always fruitcake. These products aren't a substitute for fresh fruit, and some are loaded with unhealthy ingredients, but you get partial credit.


• At many sit-down restaurants, you can ask for a fruit dessert if it's not on the menu. If you're at an upscale place, see if you can get fresh berries with some liqueur like Irish Mist or Cointreau. Delectable. In general, a fruit dessert (and maybe a cup of coffee or tea) is a nice ending to a sumptuous repast that won't make you feel bloated or regretful.

Later in the series, I'll present a few super-simple recipes for green salads, fruit salads, and other dishes that incorporate fruit.

To be continued...

Labels: diet, fruit, salads

Not every suggestion here will please, or be relevant to, everybody. We each have individual tastes and unique time, budget, and accessibility constraints. What I'm going to try do, for most of this series, is present suggestions and recommendations that will be applicable to most people, most of the time.

Every reader is going to already know some of what I say here. My hope, and my goal, is that there is enough new—and usable—information in this series to make it worth your while.

Feel free to comment (or email me) on this series. I try to answer all non-spam correspondence.

For the most part, and within reason, I'm going to ignore cost. In general, you can feed yourself with nutritious food and be perfectly satisfied more cheaply on a vegetarian diet than on a meat-heavy diet. And that's before you get into the long term costs from increased risk of obesity and deteriorating cardiovascular function when you eat too much meat and cheese—heart bypass surgery and lifetime prescriptions are expensive.

But there's something to said for convenience, for which you usually pay a premium, so I'm not going to overlook items such as takeout meals, frozen dinners, and prepared dishes from the deli.

There are a few general rules for saving money on food purchases:

• Eat at home more. Even instant meals are cheaper than most restaurant meals.


• Eat more of these foods: Fruits, vegetables, whole grains, legumes, and nuts. With few exceptions, these are extraordinary values.


• Use up what you buy. A giant bag of mixed greens may look like a great bargain, but not if you end up throwing half of it out. I'll provide hints later in the series on how to easily prevent waste.


• If you never cook, reconsider. You may enjoy it and have an aptitude for it. Also, the more you do it, the better—and more efficient—you get at it. There are additional potential advantages to cooking, which I'll get into later.

• Watch less TV. At least change the channel or get up and do something when commercials air. TV food advertising during prime-time and sporting events is dominated by fatty, unhealthy products. (There are also lots of advertisements for heartburn medications and erectile dysfunction medications, to partially offset the effects of eating too many bacon cheeseburgers and pepperoni pizzas.)
  
  The advertisers use every technique possible in TV commercials—including camera angles, lighting, backgrounds, facial expressions, use of likeable personalities, music, carefully crafted dialog, and excruciating attention to detail in how the food is presented—to draw you in. McDonald's, Burger King, KFC, and other corporations spend huge sums on TV advertising because it works; it increases demand. You may not be as immune to these schemes as you think.


• Start each dinner with a salad. A healthy salad, that is, with lots of greens and other vegetables. Aim for a pleasing variety of colors, flavors, and textures.
  
  The fiber from the salad fills you up and is a hedge against gorging later in the meal.
  
  The bag-o-prewashed-salad products that have become popular in recent years may be a godsend to salads. Just pull the stuff out of the bag and you're ready to go. You don't have to eat a huge salad, but please eat something bigger than a dinky "side salad." For one thing, you're more likely to use up the salad ingredients before they go bad that way.
  
  You can add all sorts of healthy ingredients to salads that work really well: walnuts, dried cherries, steamed asparagus, orange and grapefruit sections, avocado slices, olives stuffed with pimientos—you name it. I'll go into more detail on salads further down.
  
  If you're pressed for time, use the salad bar at your local grocery store. In fact, shop around; some salad bars have much more healthy variety than others. Resist the temptation to add mayo-saturated options to your salad; that nearly defeats the purpose. On the other hand, the salad bar is a great place to try new food selections, or partake of foods that you like only in small doses or on an occasional basis. You can add one beet to your salad, or one cube of fried tofu.
  
  At restaurants, order a salad and, if need be, ask that it come out before the main course. Pass on the parmesan cheese and ranch or blue cheese dressing. While we're on the subject, try not to fill up on bread, either. However, at a Mexican restaurant, you could do a lot worse than eating a bowlful of chips and salsa that they typically give you as soon as you sit down. The chips tend to be fried and fairly limited in nutritional value, but salsa is actually very healthy.


• Where feasible, hang out with people who eat better than you do, especially at mealtimes or at events where food is involved. The influence rubs off.


• Prefer, or at least try out, restaurants with more than the average proportion of vegetarian selections. Ethnic restaurants, especially Asian or Indian, are often a good bet. Greek and Mideast restaurants will usually have a range of vegetarian offerings, including falafels, hummus, and babaganoush—all of which I'll explain later. You can always get pasta with marinara sauce, and sometimes other meatless tomato-based sauces, at Italian restaurants. A couple of chain Mexican restaurants that come to mind that make mighty good burritos free of animal ingredients are Baja Fresh and Chipotle.
  
  If you live in a large metropolitan area or college town, you probably have access to one or more restaurants that cater to vegetarians. Please consider these. In some cases, they are real eye-openers. You may be able to try vegan versions of quiche, General Tso's chicken, steak and cheese subs, cheesecake, and a thousand other dishes that may or may not have a meat and/or dairy counterpart. Some areas of the country, such as DC , Baltimore, Illinois, and Ohio, have guides to veg-friendly eateries, markets, and bakeries in that area. Often you can order a free or cheap printed version of the guide. These are really handy to have in your car, brief case, or coat pocket. Highly recommended.
  
  If you live or are traveling elsewhere, just search on the web for "vegetarian restaurant" and the name of the city or region in which you're interested, and you're almost certain to get back results that point you in the right direction. Frequently—especially for establishments in larger cities—you'll be able to read reviews as well.
  
  If you're not used to dining at vegetarian restaurants, feel free to tell your server that you're new to this, and you like such-and-such types of foods, and ask what he or she would recommend.

Next: Overall tips to increase the amount of fruit, vegetables, whole grains, and legumes, respectively, in your diet.

To be continued...

Labels: cooking, diet, food, fruit, legumes, meat, restaurants, vegetables, whole-grains

These next few posts are for meat-eaters and (to a lesser extent) cheese-eating vegetarians who don't cook much—because they don't like to or don't have time, or for other reasons.

The main theme is replacing meat in your diet but—to the fullest extent possible—not giving up your comfort foods, not changing your routine, not having to transition to a completely new cuisine. It's a big topic, so it will require multiple posts. In fact, I may write individual posts piecemeal. If I do, the end of the post will say "More to follow..." until the post is complete. Posts will end with "To be continued..." until the series is through.

Now, down the road, I heartily recommend expanding your diet to include a wide range of new tastes, including some of the world's magnificent ethnic flavors. And toward the end of this series, I'll give some tips on how to ease into that. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

Why drop meat from your diet?

First, there are the health considerations. The data is in—in spades: A meat- and cheese-heavy diet is unhealthy; a vegetarian diet that focuses on fruits, vegetables, whole grains, legumes, and a moderate amount of plant-based fats is healthy. When I say "unhealthy" I mean it can debilitate and kill you—slowly, through chronic diseases that start as early as pre-teens and develop and worsen as you age.

Granted, there are exceptions. There are some people who can eat Big Macs every day, and never eat vegetables, and their cholesterol is perfect and they're hearty and vigorous at 70. Just like there are heavy smokers who never get lung cancer or emphysema. But those are the exceptions. The problem is, you don't know in advance if you're going to be an exception. But don't bet on it.

In general, a meat-heavy diet has too much of the bad stuff and not enough of the good stuff. Probably the best-known villain in meat and dairy is saturated fat. Hundreds if not thousands of peer-reviewed clinical and epidemiological studies in mainstream scientific journals show that animal fat intake correlates with heart disease, diabetes, several cancers, and other deadly diseases. But fat isn't the only bad guy in animal products. You also have to worry about cholesterol, chemicals released during cooking, hormones and toxins that accumulate in animal tissue, and bacteria such as salmonella, campylobacter, and e coli.

The good stuff that meat and dairy pushes out include: fiber, vitamin C, folic acid, and about a million micro-nutrients that seem to fight off cancer, heart attacks, and other chronic, debilitating, deadly conditions.

Please note: You may have heard a lot about cutting back on fat in your diet. Be aware that in terms of your health, there is a difference between animal fat and plant fat. Perhaps this is best illustrated by example: In a 2003 study of nearly a hundred thousand women, Harvard researchers found that intake of animal fat, especially from red meat and high-fat dairy products, during premenopausal years had a significantly greater risk of developing breast cancer. There was no relationship between the consumption of vegetable fats and breast cancer found. (Here's the original study: Cho E, Spiegelman D, Hunter DJ, et al. Premenopausal fat intake and risk of breast cancer. J Natl Cancer Inst. 2003;95:1079-85.)

There's more where that came from.

(By the way, relatively healthy plant sources of fat include olive oil, canola oil, peanut oil, flax seeds, sesame seeds, walnuts, almonds, avocados, and coconuts. There are many more; these are just a few of the best known and most widely available ones.)

In sharp contrast to the ton of data affirming the harmful effects of meat and dairy, controlled studies (again, published in leading peer-reviewed scientific journals) show that diets free of animal products may reverse heart disease, prostate cancer, and diabetes. That's powerful. Where on the spectrum do you want to be?

One more thing. There are vegan ultramarathon, triathlon, weightlifting, and Olympic champions. Throw out misconceptions of vegetarians as weak. As a rule, they're healthy and virile.

Yes, you can mess up a vegetarian diet by eating nothing but potato chips, saltines, and frosted flakes. But with a decent balance of whole grains, legumes, fruits, vegetables, and "good fats," you will probably be much healthier than the rest of the population, and stay fit well into old age, unless you are very unlucky. Get some exercise, employ some stress-reduction techniques of your choice, be kind to others, rotate your tires, take in an occasional monster truck rally, and you'll likely have a satisfying and meaningful life.

OK, that's health.

To be continued...

Labels: comfort foods, diet, disease, fruit, grains, health, legumes, meat, vegetables