Health for life

Every Saturday, we post a piece from the CHG archives. This one comes from June 2009.

Though it might seem intuitive, determining a recipe’s cost and nutritional value can get pretty complicated, pretty quickly. Ingredient prices can add up before you know it, and a combination of fats, meats, and cheeses will take a toll on your calorie count without even registering on your radar. And sometimes, even the most harmless-looking dishes, like All Recipes’ Greek Pasta Salad with Shrimp, Tomatoes, Zucchini, Peppers, and Feta, can run you $2 and 42 grams of fat per serving.

So, how can you tell if a dish is good for you, just by looking at it? How can you avoid the pitfalls of secretly fatty and financially unsound food? How can you err on the side of caution when it comes to cooking?

Look no further, sweet readers. We’ve got you covered. If your recipe source doesn’t give a nutritional breakdown and you’re unsure of the potential cost, these tips will help you decide whether the money/waistline expenditures are worth the trouble. If you have any suggestions, be sure to include them in the comment section.

DO choose your source wisely. Man, I love Paula Deen. Her food looks stupendous and she’s endlessly entertaining – like Yo Gabba Gabba if it was a charmingly cackley southern woman. That said, her concoctions might not be the best choice for those concerned about weight. If you know you’re looking for healthier recipes, sources like Everyday Food, Cooking Light, and Eating Well will generally be more helpful than the Neelys or the Two Fat Ladies. Likewise, reproducing a dish from Grant Achatz’s Alinea cookbook will probably run you a pretty penny compared to the average Cook’s Illustrated meal. Starting your search with a website, cookbook, or blog aimed at your requirements is half the battle.

DO check the number of servings. Once you have a recipe in mind, before you do anything else, check how many people it’s supposed to sate. Fourteen ounces of flank steak does little damage split among eight eaters, but can destroy diets if it’s meant only for two.

DO read the ingredient list caully. After the serving size, the ingredients are the most important determinant of the cost and nutritional value of a recipe. Scan the rundown, look for a few keywords (many of which are listed below), and be extra aware of extravagant or difficult-to-find foods for your area, which will drive up the price.

DO consider recipes with one or two out-of-the-box ingredients. In small doses, odds are it/they won’t break the bank, and you can incorporate new flavors into your repertoire. Lemongrass? Meyer lemons? Lemon basil? Sure, why not?

DON’T dismiss a long list of ingredients outright. Lighter foods like Bon Appetit’s Turkey Chili with Beans frequently require multiple, inexpensive spices and flavorings to make up for the absence of fat. While their sheer number can seem pretty intimidating, don’t fret. Oftentimes, these foods can be found right in your pantry for minimal cost.

DO count the number of ingredients already in-house. Speaking about that pantry, recipes based on dry goods will usually be cheaper than ones requiring a trip to the supermarket. Look for meals that use rice, beans, pasta, and other staples as jump off points, and go from there.

DO opt for whole food ingredients. If it can be found in the outer aisles of your supermarket, it’s probably a good start to a meal. Fresh fruits, veggies, and lean meats give recipes more bang for the buck, and almost guarantee a healthier overall experience. Fewer preservatives and extra-excellent flavor are just bonuses.

DON’T choose recipes made from processed food. The less ingredients are handled by humans, the better. Why? Well, in general, heavily processed and pre-cut edibles are more expensive and worse for you than the aforementioned whole foods. Semi Homemade-style meals may be convenient, but when you’re sacrificing money, nutrition, and taste, is it worth it?

DO watch out for lots of meat and cheese. In moderation, neither of these is anything to fear. But prices and calories rise when a meal centers on multiple cups of frommage or large cuts of beef or pork. Instead, search for recipes where meat and cheese are add-ons instead of the main event. You’ll save all around.

DO calculate about 12 or 13 grams of fat per tablespoon of butter or oil. When doing a cursory scan of any recipe, I take extra care to check the total cooking fat. If there’s a lot, but it can be easily reduced (like in sautés), I keep going. If there’s a lot, but the amount is set in stone (as in some baking), I move along to the next dish.

DON’T rule out all fatty ingredients. Nuts, olives, avocados and certain oils aren’t low-fat foods, but they’re healthy ones because of the vitamins and minerals they offer. Relatively inexpensive and often pivotal to a dish’s overall flavor, they should be incorporated into any diet in moderation.

DO look for words like: baked, roasted, steamed, grilled, or sautéed. These cooking techniques tend to use less fat than others while still producing flavorful foods. Steaming and boiling are good keywords as well.

DON’T choose recipes with the words: fried, au gratin, cream sauce, bisque, bacon-wrapped, or lard. Each of these terms implies one thing: fat. If you’re serious about watching your weight, there are lighter recipes for certain dishes (Spaghetti Carbonara, etc.), but straight-up lobster bisque will do a number on your numbers.

Confusing? Maybe. Do-able? Definitely. With some practice, these rules will get easier to use. And in the end, you’ll have no problem telling the difference between the recipe you really want and the recipe you thought you wanted.

Readers, fire away in the comment section.

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• How to Tell if a Recipe is Worth Cooking With Five Easy Questions at Casual Kitchen
• Frugal Food Hacks: 10 Tricks to Simplifying Online Recipe Searches
• The Dos and Don’ts of Buying a Cookbook

The Disease Management Care Blog is proud of its native ability to resist the highly tailored "microtargeting" of advertisers. It can confidently say this because it uses its own independently formed perences to take advantage of on-line sales, movie placements, Twitter prompts, cable TV commercials and internet radio ads. Its not its fault that it attracts certain targeting and rejects the DMCB spouses assertion that theres no discernible difference between Chopin and Smirnoff.

Smart DMCB readers undoubtedly feel just as secure about their native immunity to outside influencers. But that doesnt mean they wont be impressed by just how industrialized microtargeting has become when they look at this Feb 27 C-SPAN Washington Journal on Targeted Political Ads. The same decades-old science that matches a particular product to a certain profile for automobiles, accessories and aspirin is now being used as never before in the 2012 political campaigns.

The DMCB thinks there may be a silver lining here.  As this gets better every day, microtargeting is undoubtedly destined to be adopted by the disease and population health management industry. Over and beyond its ability to use details from insurance claims and electronic health records, microtargeting can also vacuum up and digest data on the magazines we subscribe to, the cable shows we watch, the credit charges we amass, the computer "cookies" we accumulate or the social media we embrace to triangulate on consumers health profiles.

For example.... the analytics modeling could fit a known behavior (like having a lot of flat screens in the home tuned to reruns of the gluttonous Man vs. Food ) with certain conditions (like undiagnosed diabetes). It could also be used to link key health consumer attitudes (like wanting to sign up for your PCPs newly minted patient centered medical home) with a certain behaviors (such as being unable to resist viewing online images of cute puppies). Or what about leveraging the most obvious association: possessing high native intelligence and reading this blog.

Silliness aside, to the DMCBs knowledge, tapping into our public, demographic and on-line footprints for "health care microtargeting" hasnt been really commercialized - yet. It searched the published medical literature and didnt find much that was useful (though given its academic pedigree, that shouldnt be surprising), but, thanks to Google, it did find this blog post (as if wed expect otherwise) by "Sirensong. She points out that geeks are on it, so the DMCB suspects its just a matter of time.

If any readers are aware of anything more to this, please share.

Image from Wikipedia

Hi,

Ive always thought of gastric bypass surgery (GBS) and all its cousins, as "Franken-surgery." The one and only good thing it does is force you to make the kinds of eating changes that make you lose weight. You simply can no longer eat the way you used to. You have no alternative. There are no more lies or head games. The unfortunate part of GBS type operations is that they can still eventually fail and you can still gain back the weight you once lost.  About thirty years ago, my BFF at the time, did that.

I was her support for the entire year that it took her to lose her weight. I watched her throwing up. I witnessed the pain she was in. I saw the agony she went through and I decided that I was NEVER going to do that. I would rather be fat, than to do that. Within a year an a half she had stubbornly fought her way back to eating as she used to and put the weight back on again.

Please do not misunderstand. I am not judging people who have decided to do GBS. It seems that many people are doing it and successfully losing weight from it. If that is the course a person has chosen and it has worked for them, then I say "Hooray, you did it. Way to go!"  It is just that, for me, I dont see it.

But why not adopt that "mind set" of "accepting that you must eat less," and leave out the expense and trauma of Franken-surgery? If you think about it, the whole purpose of GBS is to make you stop eating so much. Why not just decide to "stop eating so much" without the major trauma to your body and your pocket book?

I think I am thinking about this because I am still struggling to lose weight. For a long time I thought it was the "kind" of food that caused the problem. So I cleaned up my eating by cutting out carbs and eating fewer processed foods.

I got my A1C back down to a normal place and my new doctor says that I am no longer pre-diabetic. I am excited about that. But I still have high blood pressure and have not made it past the 30-pound-lost marker. I am still obese.

Ive tried the 16-hour per day fast for a few weeks and still not seen any real weight loss that lasted on my scale. After reading the "Anything Goes Diet" and focusing on it for a few days I think I really need to focus simply on eating less in a way that works for me. It now makes sense to me to eat, say, once day, and the rest of the time, just stop eating.

We dont come with a tattooed label on us that says we MUST EAT THREE MEALS A DAY, or even we MUST EAT FIVE SMALL MEALS A DAY.  There are really no rules but the ones we or someone before us has made up.

I had been considering eating as I do now and trying a once a week 24-hour fast... and I may still do that. But Im also thinking about just eating a nice normal meal once a day, with a protein snack thrown in sometime during the day, and the rest of the time, just not eating. Ive discovered that I can go for long periods of time without eating which I had thought was not possible. And not only can I do it, I like doing it. I like the way it feels. I really dont like that "bloated" feeling that comes from eating large, especially carb-laden meals. It is so much more pleasant to have an empty stomach. It provides almost an odd sense of freedom.

Maybe I could do the opposite of the 24-hour fast. I could eat once a day for six days and on the seventh day, have two, perhaps even three meals. Then go back to the once a day meals. I could eat whatever I wanted. I know how important it is to me to eat healthy, so I would make sure my one meal had both protein and vegetables. I would still eat salads for the fresh raw veggies.

I could add to the salad a moderate size of animal protein (beef, pork, chicken, fish, or eggs) plus a serving of cooked veggies with some nuts or a fist-sized portion of some carb. A small portion of carbs. And I dont have to do the carbs each day. I wonder how long it would take me to begin to see a weight loss if I did that. I wont know if I dont try it.

I feel like trying it. I feel frustrated by all the things Ive tried and not being successful at the one thing I really wanted: the weight loss. I am a human being, I should be able to lose weight just like other human beings are doing. I need to do something that I can do. I use to do Franken-surgery, (as my doctor suggested) but that does not mean I cannot focus on achieving the same kind of total calorie reduction in a way that makes better sense to me.

I am sure there are folks who will have objections to this idea. Im sure that if someone had mentioned this to me a while ago, I would never have even thought of being open to the idea. But Ive gone down the road and ended up somewhere else. I need to do something that works -- for me.

From my reading I know that cutting out food, as in fasting, does no harm to the body if done in a controlled manner. It has been scientifically proven that small daily fasting does not even lower the bodys metabolism or reduce muscle. The body will only cannibalize itself after extremely long periods of time without food. Im not talking about that. The fasting Im talking about simply gives the body a rest. Im not talking about fasting for 40 days and 40 nights. Im talking about eating a good healthy meal once a day, plus a protein snack at some other time during the day.

I think this would accomplish the goal of reducing the daily caloric intake without all the fuss and measuring and counting and control. I hate the fuss, measuring and counting and the control. When I do that my whole day is spent focused on food. Im not interested in spending my life being focused on food. Im interested in eating a good meal and then moving on to other stuff. Thank God!!

Ok. It makes sense to me. Im going to try it. I can drink unsweet tea, and water all day long. I suppose diet sodas would work, too, but I hate soda, so why even bring it up? The only juice will be watered down cranberry juice (with no sugar or other sugary fruit juice added) -- and that only when I feel it is "medically" necessary. So, water it is. And a cup of tea now and then. And that is my new plan.

Ill be back soon with any news flashes...

LOL

Hope you are well,

Marcia