Did you know it’s “Fruits and Veggies – More Matters” month?
I’m doing a media spot this month and decided to focus on sneaking in more vegetables by using them to create desserts. My first adventure in the kitchen was red velvet cupcakes made with beets. I’m happy to report no red stains anywhere in my kitchen from the beets!
The recipe is from: http://www.dominosugar.com/recipe/beet-red-velvet-cake-7560 with no alterations. I did add store-bought cream cheese icing because making these cupcakes – which is more like making cake than muffins – was enough for one day.
Lab coat, check. Hair back, check. Hands washed, check. All ingredients on hand and measured, check. And we are ready to go!
Ready to Bake!
Step 1: Cream sugar and butter. Note that a husband with strong hands is helpful for this step!
Creaming Butter and Sugar is Easiest with a Fork
Step 2: Add eggs
Egg in Creamed Butter and Sugar
Other bowls of goodness ready. Note that if you don’t have a sifter, you can use a wire mesh strainer. I did this and it sifted beautifully. Top left: flour mixture. Top right: sugar, butter, eggs mixture. Bottom left: buttermilk mixture. Bottom right: pureed beets – pretty!
Ingredients for Red Velvet Beet Cupcakes Ready for Mixing!
Once mixed together = big bowl of batter and a wooden spoon that will probably always be slightly reddish…
Red Velvet Beet Cupcake Batter
The recipe does indeed make 24 cupcakes
Ready to go in the oven
These have a nice moistness and grain but are not as red as conventional red velvet cake (even with sneaking a few drops of red food coloring in the batter…shhh!)
Cooked Cupcake – Look at that Grain!!
And the final product with the icing, which I will be bringing into work tomorrow to share!
Red Velvet Beet Cupcake with Icing
These are husband-approved, so you know they must be good, and they sneak in a vegetable that many people dislike in it’s pure form. Simply by making the vegetable into a puree, you can add beets to your diet! Next is the nutrition information as compared to a store-bought mix for red velvet cupcakes. The rows in pink are where the biggest nutritional changes are seen.
I interned and now work part-time with a private practice that specializes in eating disorders. We all have that voice inside our heads that sends us positive and negative messages about our bodies, our food intake, our ability to control these things. Eating disorders, like any psychological illnesses, are normal thought patterns taken to the extreme. Those with eating disorders battle with that voice in their heads and that voice begins to win.
I have also worked briefly at a bariatric surgeon’s office who specialized in lapband surgery. I had ethical issues with his post-surgery diet so it wasn’t a good fit. In the time I worked there, however, I saw another form of disordered eating in both the pre- and post-surgery patients.
Both of these populations had lost touch with or flat out ignored their body’s hunger and satiety cues and I, in no way, endorse this.
If you are hungry, eat. If you are not hungry, don’t eat.
Yes, that is simplistic and much easier said than done; but that’s the premise for a healthy relationship with food.
I also do not believe in “dieting” per se. The research shows time and time again that dieting does not work. No matter the method (low carb, low fat, high protein, shakes, meal plans, or simple calorie restriction), the weight comes off (duh), the dieting stops, and the weight comes back on. The diet mentality is not effective.
One can go “off” a diet and therein lies the problem.
I’ll step off my soapbox now to share a recipe and picture. I’m working on my food photography skills. Here is a version of a recipe I found in Clean Eating Magazine.
Quinoa Bowl: 1/2 cup quinoa, 1/2 cup rinsed black beans, 7 grape tomatoes halved, chopped red onion to taste, 1/4 avocado chopped, red wine vinegar to taste, lime juice, and cilantro. YUM!
I admit it. I watched part of The Doctors television show the other day. I caught a segment on how Americans eat and one of the doctors was working at a fast food drive-through window attempting to get customers to choose a healthy meal over the unhealthy meal they were ordering. It did not go that well for him. Only one person on the segment out of four changed their meal after he told them how unhealthy their selection was in terms of calories, fat, and sodium levels.
What stuck with me was that one woman said that a cheeseburger was kind of like a salad. Her point was that salads have vegetables and cheeseburgers have vegetables. Therefore, they are similar. The audience laughed good-heartedly and I groaned and laughed.
Then I got to thinking… Is a fast-food salad really that much better of an option than a fast-food cheeseburger? I turned to the restaurant’s Web sites to make some comparisons.
Let me start by saying that there are other choices than what I have compared below. If the Wendy’s Garden Side Salad with no croutons and low-fat dressing (70 calories, 0 g fat, 190 mg sodium) or the ¾-pound Dave’s Hot ‘N Juicy Triple Burger (1060 calories, 67 g fat, 2020 mg sodium) are your choices then yes, the salad is much healthier. However, I have tried to pick middle of the road choices that I think people would make in these examples.
First, I compared a regular McDonald’s Cheeseburger to their Premium Southwest Salad with Grilled Chicken (with and without the creamy southwest dressing). As the table below shows, the salad with dressing, which is how most people would order it, has 90 more calories, 2 more grams of fat, and 240 more milligrams of sodium than the cheeseburger. If you can go without the dressing for the salad, you are only saving 10 calories, 4 grams of fat, and 100 milligrams of sodium versus the cheeseburger. That is not a huge difference.
Food
Calories
Fat
Sodium
Cheeseburger
300
12
750
Salad
290
8
650
Salad with dressing
390
14
990
Next, I moved to Wendy’s to compare the Jr. Cheeseburger Deluxe to their Apple Pecan Chicken Salad (with and without the pomegranate vinaigrette dressing). Again, the cheeseburger is the healthiest option in terms of calories, fat, and sodium. The salad with dressing has 210 more calories, 8 more grams of fat, and nearly 700 more milligrams of sodium. If you can go without the dressing, you will still have 100 more calories and 3 more grams of fat than the cheeseburger; but you will save almost 300 milligrams of sodium.
Food
Calories
Fat
Sodium
Jr. Cheeseburger Deluxe
350
19
850
Salad
450
21
580
Salad with dressing
560
27
1540
I could continue; but I think the pattern is clear. The salad is not always the healthier choice at a fast food restaurant. We are still operating under the assumption that the salad is always healthier, or at least that audience and I were, and that is just not true! Now, there is a lot to consider when deciding which choice is healthier, such as the types of fats, cholesterol, and other nutrients such as the vitamins and minerals. But if I included all of that, you would have stopped reading by now…
My advice?
1. – Avoid the fast food places altogether. You can make a yummy salad or a healthier cheeseburger at home using a small portion of lean grass-fed beef, low-fat cheese, and lots of vegetables.
2. – If you cannot avoid the fast food restaurant, ask for the nutrition information before you order (many have handouts) or look at their Web site before you go. Most importantly, make your choice before you order at the register (where you can see the pictures and smell the food).
3. – Realize that what you think may be an unhealthy choice, may not be the unhealthiest choice on the menu. Sometimes, the cheeseburger may be better than the salad.
I typically do not leave the house without two things: a snack and my water bottle. Snacking used to have a bad reputation. The standard American diet consisted of three square meals a day, not snacks. Snacking was linked in people’s minds with overeating and weight gain. It was a bad thing to do.
Oh how things have changed. Snacking is no longer the exception, it is now the norm and it may help people to lose or maintain their weight.
I got to thinking about this because I came across an article entitled “Frequent Snacking Linked to Healthier Diet” (1). This article reports on a five-year study of over 11,000 people aged 20 and over which found that snackers consume more healthy foods such as whole grains, fruits, and milk products and less high-sodium foods. Well, it sounds like snackers do have healthier diets! As one reads on, the study also reported that snackers also consumed more sugar, solid fats, and alcohol along with fewer vegetables. Hmmm. Finally, the article reports on another study in a younger population (teenagers) that found that teen snackers also consumed more fruit and dairy products.
Another study on snacking from the November 2011 issue of the Journal of the American Dietetic Association (2) looked at women in the 30-60 age range and grouped them by BMI. The study found that normal weight women had the highest number of snacks (2.3 snacks/day), followed by those who had lost weight and were maintaining that loss (1.9 snacks/day), followed by those who were overweight (1.5 snacks/day).
This all seems to point to the fact that snacking may actually be beneficial in terms of BMI as long as we choose healthy snacks.
But is there a downside?
Let’s say that we eat a snack that includes carbohydrate-containing foods, such as fruit, milk, or grains. For most people, it takes 1 to 2 hours for all consumed food to move through the stomach and reach the small intestine where nutrients are absorbed. Absorption of glucose (blood sugar) from the carbohydrate-containing foods triggers the hormone insulin, which is needed move glucose into our cells for use.
If we graze all day or have large snacks of carbohydrate-containing foods in between meals, we are asking our bodies to continue to release insulin and our insulin levels do not have time to go back down in between meals. On the flip side, if we eat three big meals a day, we see a big spike of glucose after that big meal and we may overload insulin’s ability to be effective. Both overloading our insulin with high levels of glucose at one time and having constantly elevated insulin levels can lead to insulin resistance and potentially to type 2 diabetes. Insulin also promotes energy storage – in other words, it makes our bodies store fat.
What’s a snacker to do?
It sounds like moderation and balance are the keys. I think we have heard that somewhere before. Here are some guidelines to help you keep your snacking healthy.
1. – Respect your body and eat when you are physically hungry. If your stomach is grumbling and you have been drinking your water, then it is time to eat something.
2. – Pick your snacks wisely. Focus on healthy foods such as fruits and vegetables, low-fat dairy, whole grains, and lean proteins. If you decide to have a “fun food” for a snack, then pay attention to the next point!
3. – Watch your portion size. A snack should not be the same as a meal in size or calories.
March is National Nutrition Month and what better way to celebrate than with a plateful of colors?
The Academy of Nurtition and Dietetics’s (formerly theAmerican Dietetic Association) theme for the 2011 National Nutrition Month is “eat right with color” to emphasize the importance of choosing a variety of foods to promote optimal health. Since different colors of food contain different types of nutrients, incorporating a variety colors provides a wide range of nutrients that our bodies need to function at their best.
Other guidelines for healthy eating include:
Enjoy 2-3 servings of fruit every day. These provide many vitamins and minerals in the form of phytochemicals along with fiber. Eat the skins when you can! Fresh fruits make a great snack food, frozen fruits add thickness to homemade smoothies, and fruits can be pureed to use in place of fats in baking.
Sneak in 5-7 servings of vegetables every day. It’s important to eat vegetables from all five categories – dark green, orange/deep yellow, starchy, legumes (peas and beans), and others such as onions, mushrooms, tomatoes, okra, green beans, and cucumbers. Vegetables provide many nutrients and fiber. Pile vegetables on sandwiches, add to sauces and frozen entrees, and puree to add to soups. Just be sure to not add on calorie-laden sauces!
Aim for making half of your grain selections whole. Whole grains provide fiber and carbohydrates necessary for energy and brain power. Replace processed, refined, white products with whole grain products when choosing rice, pasta, and bread. Not all brands taste the same, so don’t give up if you don’t like the first one you try.
Lean meats and dairy are good choices for protein. Proteins are the building blocks of our bodies; they are the basis for our enzymes and hormones and build muscle that enables us to move. Proteins are typically high in fat. The healthiest options are to choose lean cuts of meat, to remove visible fat and grease when cooking, and to look for low-fat or non-fat dairy products.
Last but not least are the fats. Fats are a major component of our cell membranes, they provide padding for our internal organs, and they help with absorption of the fat-soluble vitamins. Just be sure to choose the healthier mono- and poly-unsaturated fats found in avocado, almonds, walnuts, fatty fish, and canola, safflower, or olive oils.
Fill your plate with a variety of colors while following the above guidelines and you are taking a big step towards good health.
By the way… March 9th is Registered Dietitian Day. Have you hugged your RD lately?
Research is now showing that how people choose to live (lifestyle habits) can, in effect, turn on or turn off genes.
That’s right. If you consistently put down the donut during snack-time and reach instead for a cup of yogurt with blueberries, you could literally change the course of your life!
There is no denying that your genes play a pretty big part in who you become. They lay down the code for how you look and for what medical conditions you are predisposed to developing. The key word here is predisposed. The Free Dictionary online defines predisposed as “to make (someone) inclined to something in advance” (1).
Predisposition does not determine your future health path; it just tells you which of the possible paths you are more likely to walk down.
A simple example of this is found in the transcription of genes that produce lactase, an enzyme needed to digest lactose which is found primarily in milk. If a person stops drinking milk, the body doesn’t take the steps needed to produce lactase because it is wasted energy and eventually the person loses the ability to digest milk resulting in a lactose intolerance. However, if that same person doesn’t stop drinking milk, or even begins to drink very small amounts of milk again, the body will spend the extra energy needed to keep making lactase and be able to digest milk (2). Same person. If they drink milk regularly, they can digest it. If they don’t drink milk regularly, they develop a lactose intolerance.
Pretty neat stuff.
The point of this discussion is an article (3) discussing lifestyle habits and cardiovascular disease (CVD). This article covers two studies. One of these studies suggests that developing healthy lifestyle habits can have more of an impact on a person’s predisposition to develop CVD than their genetics. The authors list five habits:
· Do not smoke
· Drink little, if any, alcohol
· Maintain a healthy body weight
· Be physically active
· Consume a healthy diet
Sounds familiar, doesn’t it?
One of the studies this is based on had nearly 2,400 participants and spanned 20 years. It found that 60% of the participants who had all five lifestyle habits had a low-risk for CVD. The picture is not nearly as pretty for those who had one or none of those lifestyle habits – only 6% had a low-risk profile. 60% or 6%. That’s a pretty big difference when it comes to your heart health.
The other study reviewed data from the famous Framingham Heart Study and included nearly 16,500 people who were either 40 or 50 years old. This study found that genetics plays a small role in CVD when compared to lifestyle habits. Even scarier, it found that only 8% of Americans have “ideal levels of all the risk factors for cardiovascular health at middle age.” 8%! That’s a pretty low number!
So, what does this tell us?
It tells me a couple of things. One is that our population is falling short when it comes to practicing these healthy lifestyle habits and this concerns me. The other is that genetics does not absolutely determine our fate. We have some control over our fate.
Our future health is literally in our hands. It is determined by whether we reach for the donut or the yogurt. It is determined by whether we reach for our sneakers or the remote control.
My name is Alexia Lewis and I am a Registered and Licensed Dietitian.
To learn more about me and what I hope to accomplish with this Web site, please take a look at the “About Me” page, the “Media” page, and read some of my posts.
I hope you enjoy reading as much as I enjoy writing and sharing my ideas about nutrition!
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