You are currently browsing the daily archive for March 5th, 2010.
pig and lard by wwritter, on Flickr
I loved seeing this article from the Boston Globe: What does saturated fat cause? Arguments.
Especially helpful was the conclusion of the article, merely one example of straight-up comparison that sheds so much light on what can be, for some, a confusing issue:
Here are some breakfast comparisons: 1 cup nonfat fruit-flavored yogurt usually contains 233 calories and 46 grams of sugar. An alternative is to top 1 cup whole-milk yogurt with 1 cup unsweetened frozen berries. You still get 230 calories, but the sugar drops to 24 grams. That extra bit of fat in whole milk yogurt tastes good and provides a lot of satiety. It might just keep you from grabbing a muffin (about 440 calories, 30 grams of sugar) at midmorning.
Without going into the whole good fat/bad fat issue, this article skips over the surface of a very important point. Our bodies are wired to seek out filling, tasty foods. If you’ve ever tried to survive on a diet of rice cakes, non-fat cottage cheese and boiled chicken breast for any length of time (I have, I’m sorry to say) you will most likely admit: that’s one hard row to hoe. The food is bland and tasteless, leaving your taste buds screaming for FLAVOR, and no matter how full your tummy is, you often go searching for food with substance soon after eating.
It doesn’t take a lot of fat to satisfy, or to feed your body with the essential nutrients fat contains and helps your body assimilate. But it is just not something we need to fear any longer. Having grown up in a fat-phobic home during the fat-terrified 1970s and 1980s, it hasn’t been an easy gear for me to shift. But going from being constantly hungry, yet hating the food I was eating to not even thinking about wanting a snack and really enjoying every bite of a meal: that has really told the story for me. My portion sizes are down and I really look forward to creating and eating meals with my family.
Yeah, it can still get interesting when I talk to some people. But that’s okay. I’m not here to convince anyone of anything, just to share what’s been working in my life. For me, this works. In spades.
This post is part of Fight Back Fridays, hosted by Food Renegade.
38/365- Hello, My Name Is Haley, and I'm an Orange Juice Addict by PhotographyPhilosophy, on Flickr
Sometimes it’s the little things that get my back up. (It’s a Southern phrase meaning to raise one’s ire.) Take this article in the New York Times Health Section:
Kidney stones strike more than a million Americans every year, sometimes causing enough pain to bring them literally to their knees.
Along with medication to discourage the formation of kidney stones, sufferers are often encouraged to make dietary changes, among them drinking more citrus juices. Citrate in the fruit reduces the formation of calcium oxalate stones (the most common type) and lowers urine acidity, much like the kidney stone medication potassium citrate.
But not all juices have the same effect. Lemonade or diluted lemon juice is the usual recommendation for people with calcium stones. But a study financed by the National Institutes of Health in 2006 compared lemonade with orange juice in patients with calcium stones and found that three cups of orange juice a day — along with other standard dietary changes for kidney stone patients — did a better job of raising citrate levels and decreasing urine acidity than lemonade or distilled water.
Then there are cranberry and apple juices, which, according to studies. are good for some stones and bad for others. They raise the recurrence risk of calcium stones, but help prevent a far less common subset of kidney stones called brushite. Grapefruit juice, in contrast, raises the risk across the board. One large study in The Annals of Internal Medicine found that a daily cup of grapefruit juice raised the risk of stone formation as much as 44 percent.
Wow, sounds like an ad for the Florida Orange Grower’s Association, doesn’t it? But let’s break it down a little before we start drinking up.
Three cups of orange juice is 24 ounces. That’s a lot of anything to drink, other than water or milk.
Three cups of orange juice contains
- 330 calories
- 75 grams of carbohydrate
- 63 grams of sugar
- no fiber
- no protein
So, get a kidney stone and rush to add more than 300 calories to your daily intake? 63 grams of sugar may not mean much to some people, and it’s juice, so it’s healthy, right? 63 grams of sugar is about 18 sugar cubes. Does that help bring the picture into focus? The USDA recommends a person who consumes 2000 calories a day consume no more than 32 grams of sugars per day. Even before consuming a single other food item, three cups of orange juice a day almost doubles the already generous USDA recommendation.
But a glass of OJ on my table is so…American! Is it, really? Most orange juice sold in the United States comes from Brazil. But if it’s not from concentrate, it’s just juice like I’d get from juicing an orange! No, it really isn’t. Even “not from concentrate” orange juice is heated, stripped of flavor, stored for up to a year, and then reflavored before it is put in cartons or plastic jugs and sold. All of this happens without any indication of processing on the label, thanks to corporate string-pulling. For these and other facts that will send you screaming from the OJ case at the store, you need to pick up a copy of Squeezed by Alissa Hamilton.
Let’s talk for just a minute about kidney stones. Yes, they are very, very painful. But, since prevention is better than cure, can we keep an eye on our diet to avoid them? There are several kinds of stones, and the causes can be elusive, but the main causes of kidney stones are dehydration and mineral imbalance in the body. Dehydration is an easy fix: drink water. Not a water drinker? There are tricks you can try. Back before I started this particular foodstyle, I would “pay forward” for a treat with an 8 ounce glass of water. Water first, then treat. But, I’m a water-lover and rarely a day goes by I don’t drink a gallon quite happily.
Vitamin K2 deficiency is a good place to start looking when kidney stones begin forming. If you’re not familiar with Vitamin K2, it is found in grassfed meat and pastured dairy and is created in the intestine when you consume fermented foods. The modern American diet is nearly bereft of these beneficial foods, but heavy on antibiotics which prevent the gut from making its own K2. Soy is a major culprit, because its oxalates bind with calcium and can create stones. Sub-optimal vitamin A intake might be a cause of stone formation. All these dietary deficiencies are so easy to correct.
Of course, your doctor can tell you specifically the kind of stone you have, if you are suffering from them. Your research from there can help you avoid future stone formation. But, as healthy, real food eaters, let’s not run to the processed carton of flavored sugar water orange juice cooler first for treatment or prevention.
This post is part of Prevention, Not Prescriptions.
