Category: Tips

Canned veggies are often more nutritious than "fresh" veggies in grocery stores displays

7/25/2013

Because I try to vegetables everyday, I sometimes impulsively buy way more veggies at the grocery store than I can reasonably eat in a week's time, so a big portion of those veggies rot and I have to throw them out. This blunts the enthusiasm some, and then I end up buying too little.

So lately I've wondered if canned veggies are as good as what you get from the grocery store. Sure they are not fresh, but either are many veggies and fruits at the counter in the local grocery store, having spent days and maybe weeks in trucks and distribution centers after being plucked off trees or taken out of the ground.

Well, it turns out that canned veggies can often be as nutritious, losing little in the process, and sometimes more nutritious than the same veggies at the grocery store, according to a scientific study described in this NY Times article. Just make sure when you read the label on the canned veggie that there is no added sugar or other hard to pronounce chemicals and little salt (which is a preservative).

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Dr. Ornish on low-carb diets, weight loss & eating for good health

9/27/2012

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Dr. Dean Ornish is a preventive cardiologist at UCSF who's shown for over 2 decades that some people can reverse the symptoms and signs of their coronary heart disease by just diet and meditation alone (see his 1989 JAMA paper titled "Intensive Lifestyle Changes for Reversal of Coronary Heart Disease"). He's been running the Preventive Medicine Research Institute, where he and his team continue research into how changing what you eat and how you handle your stress can influence your health and your body battles disease.

So it caught my attention when I learned that Dr. Ornish wrote an essay carried by the New York Times ("Eating for Health, Not Weight," 9/22/2012). In it he writes that the purpose of diets should not be to lose weight. Rather, the purpose should be to improve your health. By virtue of eating for health, you'll control your weight. More importantly, you'll feel better and keep disease away. An interesting point he makes is that being obese doesn't always lead to disease. Studies like this one run in JAMA this year (and covered in another NYT piece) have implied that obese people live longer than thinner people.

Read on...

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Finding what's healthy & eating well at Indian restaurants

2/20/2012

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What do we eat food for if not for sustenance, nourishment and enjoyment? Having been at Indian restaurants several times in the past 2 weeks has given me (forgive the terrible pun) food for thought on how to eat well at Indian restaurants.

After all, you'll get calories (sometimes plenty) to keep up with the day (which is the sustenance part) at an Indian restaurant, and also have a good time (the enjoyment part). But how do you get the best nutrition (the nourishment part)?

Click the 'Read More' link below to see the rest of the article and to find out how you can win a copy of "The Healthy Indian Diet."

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One roadblock to eating healthy is a complete mirage

9/25/2011

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You hear people always say it costs a lot to eat healthy. But this isn't true. And Mark Bittman points out in his NY Times essay "Is Junk Food Cheaper?" that nobody should believe it. After all, we tend to buy into these wrong perceptions, and thus it is no surprise that many pass on eating natural foods because they don't want to spend what they perceive will be "Whole Foods dollars" to get organic stuff that they then have to go home to cook.

(Here's a figure showing how it actually costs more to feed a family of 4 unhealthy stuff from McDonald's than it does to feed that same family a healthier meal from foods bought at the grocery story.)

Moving on, here's the biggest roadblock: it takes too much time and effort to cook. This used to be my roadblock. But as Mr. Bittman explains, it's really not that time-consuming to cook compared with how much time people spend watching TV. Yet it's all about perception, not facts. And the most important perception in all of this is that cooking is work and not something pleasurable.

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5 foods that make us fat, and 5 that help us lose weight

6/28/2011

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The New England Journal of Medicine published a report on 120,000 American men and women who were not obese at baseline and free of chronic disease studied by nutrition researchers at the Harvard School of Public Health (including Dr. Walter Willett, of whom I'm a fan thanks to his book "Eat, Drink, and Be Healthy").

As presented in an amazingly well-made Atlantic Monthly slideshow, the researchers distill for simplicity's sake 5 foods that help us gain excess body fat (i.e., make us fat) and 5 foods that help us from gaining excess body fat (or stay lean). Read on to see the foods and accompanying graph.

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You don't have to change your whole way of eating

4/26/2011

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Some of you may feel the Healthy Indian Diet is all-consuming, that it will tell you to make drastic changes in what you eat. But this isn't true. Actually, I'm a fan of mixing things up.

I bet most of you are like me and don't eat Indian food everyday. In fact being Indian-American, I still eat "local" stuff like pizzas and omlettes, and also love panini sandwiches like this one my brother made.

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Canned veggies are often more nutritious than "fresh" veggies in grocery stores displays

Dr. Ornish on low-carb diets, weight loss & eating for good health

Finding what's healthy & eating well at Indian restaurants

One roadblock to eating healthy is a complete mirage

5 foods that make us fat, and 5 that help us lose weight

You don't have to change your whole way of eating

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