| Get With the Program! Basics |
|
 |
|
|
|
|
 |
| The healthiest vegetables are always green. Greens are undoubtedly healthy, but vegetables and fruits in other colors—red, orange, yellow, blue, and purple—all bring different nutrients to the table. You’ll get the most antioxidants, vitamins and minerals if you keep your plate colorful. |
|
|
|
You know the basics when it comes to making healthy choices, but I want to help you further by putting different kinds of foods, and even specific products, on your radar screen. These shopping tips will allow you to find foods that are not just nutritious but delicious—and that’s key. If the healthy foods you buy aren’t appealing, you’re not going to bother with them. To make eating well a lifelong habit, you have to get satisfaction, not just nutrients, from food.
 Finding Great Fruits and Vegetables
• Venturing outside the box. One reason people don’t have enough fruits and vegetables in their diets has to do with the boredom factor—they limit themselves to a very small range of options (fruit is an apple or orange, vegetables lettuce and tomatoes). I urge you to branch out. Tired of having carrots and celery for snacks? Why not keep sliced bell peppers on hand? Spinach is not the only green that makes a good side dish. You may find that the earthier flavors of kale and Swiss chard appeal to you. Have you ever tried kiwi or papaya for breakfast instead of half a cantaloupe? Fruits and vegetables are relatively inexpensive so experimenting isn’t too costly.
• Getting the most intense flavors. If you’ve ever bought a peach in the middle of winter only to be disappointed by how flavorless it was, you’ll understand the value of eating seasonally. That peach was probably grown somewhere in the Southern Hemisphere where it’s summer, then shipped north. Trouble is, in order for the peach to withstand all that traveling time, it has to be picked before it ripens (fruits soften after they’re picked, but they don’t get sweeter—that only happens on the vine). That means you’re going to get a piece of fruit that tastes lousy.
Eating seasonally—that is, consuming what the farmers in your part of the country are harvesting at that time of year—will insure that you get produce that tastes as good as it should. Besides, there is something wonderful about waiting all year for tomatoes to come into season--the anticipation makes the taste that much better.
• Take advantage of “convenience” foods. You have probably noticed that many grocery stores now carry bags of pre-cut and pre-washed fruits and vegetables. When I first saw them, I thought they were a little too extravagant—they are, after all, more costly than the regular produce. But I began to realize that it really pays off in the end. If your spinach goes bad in the crisper because you don’t feel like triple washing it, or the zucchini gets tossed because you’re not up for chopping, then you’re money is going to waste anyway.
Some of these bagged products may even inspire you to try something new. I’ve seen bags of three kinds of Swiss chard (red, green and yellow) and mixes of collard and beet greens. Emptying the bags into a pan with a little olive oil and garlic or adding them to a pot of soup is a great way to get more super healthy greens into your diet.
Exploring Whole Grains
• Cereals you may like. If you don’t typically eat whole-grain cereals, why don’t you give oatmeal a try; it’s the perfect introduction. A lot of people, aren’t aware that oatmeal is a whole grain or that there are different kinds. One delicious brand is McCann’s Irish oatmeal, which is made with oats in their original nugget-like form and is very nutty and chewy. Quaker Oats Old-Fashioned Oats are rolled so they’re not as chewy. Both take over a half hour to cook, so they’re a good choice when you’ve got some time on your hands. If you’re in a rush, there’s quick cooking and instant oatmeal, which you can even microwave. If you do buy instant oatmeal packets, choose the unflavored kind and sweeten yourself (a few drops of maple syrup might do the trick), since flavored instant oatmeal typically contains a lot of sugar.
Granola is another oat-based cereal that typically contains a lot of flavor and is wonderful—but store-bought kinds can be packed with fat and sugar. Try making your own granola instead. Click here for the recipe.
Even whole-grain commercial ready-to-eat cereals contain preservatives (not to mention a lot of sugar!) so I prefer the natural ones. And they’re not that hard to find these days in supermarkets as well as health food stores. When you buy a cereal, look at the ingredients listing to make sure that it contains whole grains.
 • The best breads. Many confirmed white-bread eaters have made the switch to whole-grain bread. There are so many variations on the theme now—seven-grain bread, sprouted wheat bread, flaxseed bread—and manufacturers have refined their baking techniques to make them enticing. When you buy these loaves, make sure the first ingredient on the list is a whole-grain flour. Whole-wheat flour is a whole grain. Wheat flour is not.
What’s often hard to give up are white French and Italian breads, those crusty loaves that go so well with soups and salads and lift sandwiches out of the ordinary. But whole-grain versions of these breads are out there, and the good ones are delicious. Introduce yourself to crusty whole-grain breads by going to a bakery rather than a supermarket and buying loaves that have come out of the oven.
• Good substitutes for white rice. Most of us have had a lifetime of eating white rice, but it’s not difficult to acquire a taste for whole grains like brown rice, which comes in many delicious varieties; bulgur wheat; quinoa, a light, but chewy southwestern grain; or whole-wheat couscous. There’s even whole-wheat pasta. Try different brands until you find one you like, and experiment with different ways of spicing up the dishes you make. Polenta with Swiss chard and portabella mushrooms, for instance, is delicious (most people don’t even realize that polenta is a whole grain). Click here for the recipe.
There are also some great grain mixes on the market that are worth trying. Near East and Fantastic Foods package things like tabouleh mix (a Mideastern dish made with bulgur wheat) that are both convenient and tasty. I think the best way to try different whole grains is to visit a market that sells grains from bins that make it easy to buy small samples. (No use getting stuck with a pound of quinoa if you find you don’t like it.) Sometimes the markets will have cooking instructions, which you can copy and keep in a jar with the grain.
 Buying Meat, Poultry and Fish
• At the meat counter. When it comes to buying meats, poultry and fish, it’s a given that you should select lean cuts. I also recommend that you seek out organic meats and poultry, which means that the animals have been raised on organic feed and have not received antibiotics and other medications. What an animal eats matters, because whatever it is, it will eventually end up in your system. Buying food from free-range animals is a good choice, too. Free range means that the animal is not kept in a pen but is allowed to roam and eat grass. If you care about the treatment of animals, which I do, this is important. Unfortunately, you have to pay a price for being environmentally conscious.
• Fish facts. Buy the freshest fish possible; it will taste better and you’ll be more likely to enjoy it. Frozen fish simply isn’t as good, with the exception of shrimp (great to have on hand in your freezer to throw into pasta or to cook in curry sauce and serve over brown rice). Another convenient form of seafood is tuna in the can and, even better now in re-sealable packets. This is a recent innovation that makes it easy to tote to work (spoon it into your take-out salad).
There’s been quite a bit of uncertainty and controversy over which fish is really healthy to eat, and exactly how much of it you should eat. Click here for some of the latest news and guidelines on eating fish.
When choosing seafood, you may also want to note that some types of fish are endangered. To find out what’s in trouble, and what’s not, check out the Monterey Bay Aquarium’s Seafood Watch page.
For more details check out my books Get With the Program! and The Get With the Program! Guide to Good Eating.
top |
