Nutrition

Oprah. An icon. Oprah Winfrey is the most successful talk show host ever, media mogul, philanthropist, award winning actress, and book critic – just to name a few. Everything Oprah does seems to become a success. She is smart and works hard. She also espouses eating healthfully and exercising. So why is she pushing 200 pounds?

According to an early snippet of the article “How Did I Let This Happen Again?” in the January issue of O Magazine, Oprah attributes her weight gain to thyroid problems, blood pressure, and a very hectic schedule. Based on this summary, she sounds like she’s got the same things to contend with as the rest of us. However, Oprah also has to deal with the embarrassment of being in front of the press all the time, and although this is her choice, it doesn’t make it any easier.

Despite Oprah’s list of successes, she continues to struggle with her weight. So if Oprah can control so many things around her, why not her weight? Well, if there were any easy answer to this, people wouldn’t have weight problems! Come back tomorrow for my plausible theory on weight gain and loss.

The new study, called Consumption of breakfast cereal is associated with positive health outcomes concluded that “cereal consumption as part of a healthy lifestyle may play a role in maintaining adequate nutrient intake and physical activity among girls”. The study reviewed data from the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute Growth and Health Study, which recruited a total of 2,379 girls aged between nine and 10 whose dietary data was collected from 1987 to 1997.

The report found that girls who ate cereal for breakfast were generally healthier than those that don’t. The positive health may be associated with the ingredients found in cereals that provide fiber and protein, along with the fact that most people have milk with their cereal which provides calcium and often Vitamin D. Cereal for breakfast also contains more healthful micro nutrients, less fat, less sugars and less total carbohydrates than non-cereal breakfasts.

Lastly, the study found that eating cereal for breakfast was related to healthier eating throughout the entire day, including more fiber and less fat consumed, less soda consumption, as well as greater physical activity.

So, have a bowl of cereal and start your day off right!

According to the Law of Attraction, whatever we think about we get – whether we think that we want something, or we don’t want it. If it’s part of our thoughts, it will happen in some shape or form.

If only I had known this years ago when I actually tried to go on a diet to lose a little bit of weight. If only I had understood that my great desire to lose weight only caused me to think about food more and actually gain a little weight! So when that diet didn’t work and I had resigned myself to being several pounds heavier – poof – I lost the weight in no time and only realized it when my pants were a lot looser.

So my theory on diets is this. Only go on the “no diet, diet.” If you want to be thin and fit, just start to believe and feel that you already are thin and fit. So when faced with food choices on the “no diet, diet,”  you will make good ones because you are already feeling “thin and fit” and once you feel better, you will not want to feel worse again.

With Thanksgiving almost here, people have started talking about food differently. It’s not just a holiday, it’s the holiday where we typically have our big meal at noon with the whole extended family. We all gorge ourselves on lots of delicious turkey, stuffing, green beans, sweet potatoes, pies, and cakes… If only we were bears preparing to hibernate and not eat again until spring!

This pattern of eating heavily from Thanksgiving through the end of the year conveniently leads into the next holiday as if Hallmark, the turkey farms, and all of the gyms dreamed up the idea of the New Year’s resolution to eat more healthfully, exercise, and lose the weight we had put on over the course of the last year.

I think it’s high time we reclaimed the holiday season to focus less on its commercial value and more on family and friends. So this Thursday, enjoy spending time with all of your extended family, and appreciate your family and all of the delicious food that you have to share this day and every day. By giving thanks for everything that you have received, and by this I mean to hold the thought lightly in your consciousness, you just might find that you are enjoying your meal even more, and not gorging yourself quite as much as you have in year’s past. So for your New Year’s Resolution this year, don’t worry about your diet, but rather pick something different that you’ve always wanted to achieve.

Most Americans consume too much sodium (i.e. salt) at an average of 4,000mg per day, almost twice as much as the recommended daily value of 2,500mg. Although the amount that each person can really consume depends upon the individual’s health and constitution, consuming less sodium will lower your blood pressure which can improve heart health.

In general, most people get 75% of their daily salt from prepared or processed foods. In order to cut back on the amount of salt you consume, try the following:

-    Use fresh and unprocessed foods instead of canned, frozen, or processed foods.
-    Read the nutrition facts label to find out the sodium content and select foods with less sodium than the alternatives.
-    Don’t add salt when cooking, try using more spices and herbs to add flavor instead.
-    Don’t add salt to your food once it is cooked.
-    When eating out, ask them not to add salt to your food when preparing it.

So how much salt is too much? If you are under 50 years old, your blood pressure is in a healthy range, and your overall health is good, you probably don’t have worry about how much salt you consume. However, if you are 50 years old or more, of African American descent, or have high blood pressure or diabetes, you should limit your sodium intake to no more than 2,300–2,400 mg a day. People with heart failure or kidney disease are advised to consumer less than 2,000mg sodium per day. (Source: Harvard Health Publications).

Although we do our best to control what our kids eat, the reality is that as soon as they’re about 4 years old, we start to lose that control. My daughter in Pre-K has lunch at school once a week, and my kindergartener daily. My girls eat what is offered since bringing a lunch from home is not an option at their school. The school tries to offer healthy alternatives and is continually working to make improvements, but that doesn’t change the fact that there are some things that are offered that I would only rarely let my kids eat, if at all. For example, if given the choice, I’d eliminate processed meats from my children’s school because I know they’re not good for you.

What I didn’t know until recently is, how bad for you processed meats really are. The World Cancer Research Fund and American Institute for Cancer Research’s “Second Expert Report” concludes that “processed meat is a convincing cause of colorectal cancer.”

The National School Lunch program, a federally funded program that often provides the best meal a child may get in a day, currently distributes and subsidizes processed meats like hot dogs to 30+ million children. Given the link between cancer and processed meats, it’s time to eliminate these meats from the National School Lunch program.

As a concerned parent who wants to make a difference, I’ve signed the petition to the Secretary of Agriculture requesting that the government halt the distribution and subsidization of processed meats like hot dogs through the National School Lunch program. Whether you have children or not, if you’re reading this blog you’re concerned about nutrition and health, please take a moment and click on the following link to sign the petition too. Thank you.
http://support.cancerproject.org/site/PageServer?pagename=usda_national_school_lunch_program_petition

Parents at my children’s school want to see the nutrition of snacks and lunches improved: hormone-free milk, no nitrates in the lunch meats, no deep fried food, no white bread or empty calories. No one would disagree with these goals as my husband and I work hard to teach our children to eat a variety of foods and make healthy choices. But teaching children to eat healthfully and providing them with healthy choices is only a small piece of a much larger puzzle that is important not to lose sight of.

We not only need to provide our children with healthy choices, but we need to teach them how and why we combine these healthy choices. Yet, the puzzle is still larger.

I believe we also need to teach our children to appreciate the wonderful choices that they have and the importance of not wasting food since it is a precious gift. When I was a child, my mom used to tell us that children were starving in Ethiopia and that we needed to finish the food that we had taken. As a child I don’t think I fully understood the implications of what she was saying, but it clearly made an impact on me since I recall her words 30 years later.

I am torn on this issue because I have been asked to participate in a group of concerned parents who want to improve the nutrition at my kids’ school. I would love to see my children have healthier choices with no fast or fried food. And yet spending my limited free time to help my children’s school is like tutoring a child who scored 90% on a test so that they can get 100% the next time. There are so many children who need much more help since they’ve only scored a 30%.

The National School Lunch Program provides $2.57 per lunch for over 30.5 million children, and for many of those children, that’s the best meal that they get. If I am to help my children’s school improve its nutrition, then at least I can make sure that my children learn that there are others less fortunate than themselves and that we all need to make an effort to help others less fortunate than ourselves in any way we can.

Well, there is some truth here.  One of my goals is to make a difference in nutrition education across the country – see my blog (http://www.zoefoods.com/blog/mommy-will-you-talk-to-the-chef-at-school/) Okay – I stated it publicly – the next day another mom in the class approached me about getting together a small group of parents’ whose goal is just that!

So, if it’s just that easy, here’s another goal… I’d like Zoe Foods to make a difference in people’s lives with great tasting natural products that are packed with nutrition. Zoe’s Granolas and Bars are distributed across the country and is a major player in the food industry!

The Secret is out - we’re working toward this goal and appreciate your helping to spread the word about Zoe’s so that we can make it happen.

Did you know that many of the mainstream kid’s cereals – ones that have been around from when we were little – can be likened to white bread with sugar and vitamins? This point was driven home by an article from Consumer Reports called “Some Cereals – More Than Half Sugar.”

“A serving of 11 popular cereals, including Kellogg’s Honey Smacks, carries as much sugar as a glazed doughnut, the consumer group found. Post Golden Crisp made by Kraft Foods Inc and Kellogg’s Honey Smacks are more than 50 percent sugar by weight, the group said, while nine brands are at least 40 percent sugar.” Hmmm, makes you think.

The article stated that Kellogg’s is in the process of “making its foods more nutritious.”

Unfortunately, it cannot happen too soon because Consumer Reports found that “91 children aged 6 to 16 poured their cereal and found they served themselves about 50 to 65 percent more on average than the suggested serving size for three of the four tested cereals.”

So what does all this really mean? It means that you must read the suggested serving size, nutrition facts, and ingredient label. Many of the cereals targeting children are what I’d call empty calories – calories that provide little to no nutrition because they consist primarily of sugar, white flower, food coloring, and some vitamins which are typically sprayed on right before the cereal goes into the colorful box.

Don’t lose hope because there is a lot of research that states that cereal can be really good for you (and delicious). Next time you’re at the market, consider these tips when reading the serving size, nutrition facts and ingredient list:

1. Total calories per serving only gives you a clue as to whether a product is good or not. Beware of small serving sizes! If you would typically eat twice as much as the recommended serving, remember that all the nutrition facts need to be doubled.

2. Look at the fat and make sure that there are zero trans fats. These are the really bad fats that most manufacturers have tried to eliminate from their foods. There is fat in food, and that’s not necessarily bad because we need certain types of fats in our diet. For example, your body needs Omega-3s which is an essential fatty acids that your body cannot produce but needs to be healthy. More on this topic next time.

3. Sodium – try to select a product that has relatively low sodium versus your alternatives. However, if there is something you love where the sodium is higher, try to pick other foods that are low in sodium and then don’t add salt to your food. It’s all about balance and moderation over the course of a day, week, and lifetime.

4. With the Atkins diet, people thought all carbohydrates were bad. However, our bodies need carbohydrates because they give us energy. However, look for complex carbohydrates because they contain fiber. Fiber helps promote healthy digestion and can help reduce the risk of heart disease. From less technical perspective, fiber keeps our digestive system moving which helps with weight management as part of an active lifestyle. Drink lots of water to keep from getting constipated, especially as you increase the fiber in your diet and your body adjusts.

5. Try to select products with a lower sugar content. Sugar, although also a carbohydrate, is one of those empty calories because it provides no nutritional value. If you have more sugar in one meal, make an effort to have less in the next. Remember, sugar turns to fat. So even if a product is low in fat, it may have a higher sugar content, so you’re not necessarily better off.

6. Protein is important for all ages. Although you don’t need to be consuming 20g per serving if you’re not trying to build some serious muscle mass, look for products with 4-8g protein per serving.

In summary, it is better to have your calories come from fiber, protein, and even the good fats, rather than sugar or foods with little nutritional value. If you cannot pronounce something on the label, think again before consuming it. As the founder of a natural foods company, of course I am biased, but these are some solid guidelines that can help you and your family to eat more healthfully.

To see original article: http://health.yahoo.com/news/reuters/us_cereal_sugar.html

Nutrition in your child’s school – is there any? My kindergartener started eating lunch at school this year. She was so excited. At barely 6 years old, she is beginning to enjoy the freedom of making her own decisions. With this responsibility, she has quickly learned that it’s not always so easy to make a good choice.

I realize that my daughter’s awareness about what is healthy and what is not, is not the norm. With a mom in the natural foods business and a dad who knows just as much, our girls cannot help but learn about nutrition. Although they have never been to McDonald’s and don’t really know what it is, they do know that it’s not healthy for them. Awareness and education is a crucial component, yet is only half the battle. The other half consists of the options in your child’s school cafeteria.

With the increasing rate of obesity and Type II diabetes among young children, we not only need to teach our children what is good for them, but we also need to make sure that there are healthy options that taste good in our children’s school cafeterias.

One of my dreams is to make a difference in nutrition education across the country, but now that I have a child eating lunch at school every day, I realize that we also need to influence what options our children have to choose from.

I wish I could say that I’ve figured out how to slow down my life – but I haven’t made much progress since my June entry (http://www.zoefoods.com/blog/slowing-down-the-course-of-time-do-less-not-more/). In fact, since being on vacation, I think I’ve tried to cram in everything that I missed doing while I was gone into the last several weeks.

The result of being crazy, busy means that I am not eating as healthfully as I would like. And, the first places that I’ll steal some time from are breakfast and lunch. The result is less portion control and too many carbohydrates.

Here are some tips that I’m following to lead to healthier breakfasts and lunches:

Night Time Prep
1)    Take some salad from the Tupperware where we keep a washed head of mixed greens for the week, and put some in a single serve container for lunch for the next day. Take some other healthy leftovers like chicken, broccoli, squash, and put them in a container for lunch. Watch my portion sizes! Go heavy on the vegetables.

2)    Get to bed no later than 11pm, and ideally earlier. Goal is to wake up well-rested so that I can wake up at 6:30am and exercise!

Morning – Rise & Shine
3)    Exercise as soon as I get out of bed for 20-30 minutes. Do my Prana Power yoga video with Taylor Wells, or my Jackie Warner video, or get on the elliptical trainer!

4)    Take 10 minutes to eat breakfast with my children. Pour Zoe’s Granola into a bowl to manage the portion size and add skim milk.

5)    Grab the lunch I put together from the night before from the fridge. Remember to add oil and vinegar to my salad.

6)    Take a break for lunch and don’t eat while on the computer – it’s no better than eating in front of the television. Enjoy my meal for 10-15 minutes, it will be more satisfying and fill me up, as well as taste better. I know I think that we can multi-task, but if I focus my senses on eating, it will be far more enjoyable. Pundits claim that if we actually take breaks, we will be more productive!

I am starting today, will you?

About a week ago I wrote about the benefits of pro-biotics – supplements that contain the good bacteria that are normally found in your body. After a round of anti-biotics and two weeks of eating vegetables while traveling in China and Central Asia – it sounded like a battle was waging in my stomach.

I have now been taking pro-biotics for a week and not only do I feel better, but I felt better within two days! What a lovely thought… I’ve introduced a new army of bacteria to my gut, but this time, they’re on my side!

I hear that getting some type of stomach bug is par for the course when traveling in the Far East. I was no exception. No more details, enough said. Antibiotics are an amazing thing, but in addition to killing off the harmful bacteria, they also get rid of the good bacteria. Did you know that your body contains literally billions of bacteria and other microorganisms?

 
Probiotics is not a medical term, but rather a commercial one used to refer to dietary supplements or foods that contain the beneficial or good bacteria that are normally found in your body. According to the Mayo Clinic, you don’t need to take a supplement of probiotics  to be healthy, but consuming these probiotics in addition to what already exists in your body may provide a healthful boost to digestion and help to protect your body against harmful bacteria (that antibiotics kill off). According to the Mayo Clinic, additional research needs to be done, but “probiotics may help:

• Treat diarrhea, especially following treatment with certain antibiotics
• Prevent and treat vaginal yeast infections and urinary tract infections
• Treat irritable bowel syndrome (IBS)
• Reduce bladder cancer recurrence
• Shorten the duration of intestinal infections
• Prevent and treat inflammation following colon surgery (pouchitis)
• Prevent eczema in children.”

So, after my time in China and Central Asia, and two different bouts with harmful microorganisms that wreaked havoc on my stomach, I’ve decided to try a supplement of probiotics. I’ll get back to you in a week and let you know if I feel a difference. In the meantime, I’ll continue to eat my yogurt with Zoe’s Granola for breakfast or lunch because it’s a much yummier way to get some of those good probiotics as well as the fiber and protein I need to energize me throughout the day. Have you tried probiotics? What have you found?

Codliver oil.

I still vividly remember those mornings back in grade school, wolfing down my breakfast hoping that if I ate fast enough, Grandma would forget to take that little bottle out of the fridge.

Most mornings, Grandma outsmarted me.  When I had my guard down, she’d press my little body up against the fridge, force a spoonful into my mouth, and hold me there until I demonstrated I’d swallowed it.  Blech!

It took 20 years to recover from the trauma, but now I genuinely thank her for it.  This thoroughly old-fashioned habit (while always popular with Norwegian grandmas) is making a comeback, even here in the states.   Today’s New York Times presents some very compelling results here tying fish oil (or more specifically, Omega-3 and Omega-6 fatty acids) to improvements in childhood behavioral health. According to the article, some health practitioners are even prescribing fish oil before trying medications.  It concludes by advising everyone to “take fish oil only under the supervision of a health care provider”.

Hm, what?  What was that?  I need to ask my doctor before me or my child (if I had one) takes fish oil?

I grew up on this stuff!  My family didn’t ask anyone before they fed it to me.  And I turned out fine…

I thought about this a little, and came up with the following possible reasons.

1.  Mercury and other ocean contaminants.  So, before you take any fish oils, do be careful that the are cleaned of any such impurities.

2.  Doctors think parents might begin to self-treat all misbehaving children with massive doses of fish oil in place of medications for ADHD et al.  Well - don’t do that.  Just increase you (or your child’s) intake of fish oils or omega-3s in a reasonable fashion, with either a single daily supplement or by increasing your intake of fatty fish, walnuts and flaxseeds (ground, of course!).

3.  NYT is afraid of being sued.  I’m putting my money on this one.

The bottom line is, it’s exciting to see that once again, good nutrition and a healthy diet can directly contribute to your well-being and may even positively impact behavioral conditions.  So be good to yourself and eat your Omegas!  After all, the most significant drug we take is the food we eat everyday.