Cookbook:Eating for Health (Redirected from Cookbook:Eating for health)
Cookbook
In choosing a healthful diet, you must start with two important concepts:
- Your diet choice is no good if you fail to follow it.
- Your diet choice can not make up for smoking, lack of exercise, or any other bad habit.
Following your diet
Not everyone is trying to lose weight, but as an example, suppose that you are. Suppose that you eat a delicious deep-fried mars bar. Would you consider this a failure? If you would consider yourself as having failed, then you are doomed. You will give in to your craving, then give up on your diet because you consider yourself to have failed. Perfectionism will be your undoing.
With a different attitude, you won't have this problem. Get yourself in the habit of making good dietary choices. At each meal, you should be looking for good food to eat, with little concern for poor choices made previously. When faced with a yummy deep-fried mars bar, you can eat it without the guilt of having broken a specific diet. For your next meal, you'll probably choose something better, but you might just have another tasty deep-fried mars bar. It's OK as long as you don't make a habit of it or give up.
You will have difficulty following your diet if you don't like the food. Below, you will find some general advice on cooking tasty healthful food. To some extent you may need to adjust your idea of what tastes good. For example, if a creamy sauce like creme Anglaise is appealing to you, learn to associate it with something icky such as pus squeezed from a wound. Just imagine that it is such a thing, and soon you'll not be wanting it.
You will be very unhappy if you fight the urge to eat. In some people, unhappiness can bring on eating binges. If you wish to lose weight, filling up on low-calorie vegetables like celery and mushrooms may help. Beyond that, you'll just need to increase your activity level. As an extra incentive, increased activity often makes people feel good.
Non-diet concerns
Diet is hardly your main problem if you won't excercise. As with following a good diet, excercise is best if you can work it into your daily schedule. For example, you might choose to live on the top floor of an apartment without an elevator. You might walk to work instead of driving. Most people can't stick to a real excercise program. If you do like running though, Dean Karnazes has shown that you can burn off 35,000 calories (about 83.5 deep-fried mars bars) with a 262-mile (422 km) run.
You might as well enjoy cancer-causing foods if you will not avoid smoking. You probably don't have a good sense of taste though. You already know this.
Balance
Humans are made for a diet consisting primarily of vegetables, but not without meat. Fresh leafy green vegetables are most important, but also eat the yellow vegetables. Starches (bread, grits, pasta, potatoes...) are tasty, low-cost, and not terrible for you... but they do have a high glycemic index which can promote diabetes and they can cause a build up of gas in the digestive tract. You can do very well by planning meals as small servings of meat with heaping piles of vegetables. Add fat and oil as needed for energy, rather than using sugar for this purpose, but add herbs and spices for taste.
Specific tips
Vegetables
Most vegetables should be lightly steamed. While cooking can destroy nutrients, it also makes nutrients more available for the body. Uncooked vegetables can spread disease from farm workers, manure, and animal contamination. Boiling will leach nutrients out of the vegetables, so you should avoid it. If you do not have a proper steamer, try placing a colander into a large pot with a lid and a half inch of water.
Many of the best-tasting vegetables are commonly hated because they are typically overcooked.
Broccoli, Brussels sprouts, asparagus, cabbage, spinach, and bean sprouts are all tasty when bought fresh and not overcooked. Broccoli is particularly versatile, tasty, nutritious, and long-lived in the refrigerator. Don't forget to try the more unusual vegetables, such as okra (cooked with tomatoes) and bok choy. Variety is good for you.
Try serving your green vegetables with lemon juice instead of creamy sauces. Lemon juice is particularly good with broccoli and spinach. You might prefer vinegar with cabbage.
Lettuce is fairly worthless, and it doesn't keep well anyway. Try replacing lettuce with spinach or alfalfa sprouts.
While green vegetables are most important, don't forget the yellow vegetables (squash, carrot, sweet potato) and tomatoes.
Meat, including eggs and fish
In general, meat needs to be well-cooked for safety. This is particularly important for pork, and less important for the extremely fresh saltwater fish commonly used in sushi.
Microwaving meat is generally bad, because dangerous bacteria can survive in any cold spots that remain.
It is bad to brown meat, and even worse to char it. When you do this, you create cancer-causing chemicals. It is particularly important to avoid browning "pink meat" (ham, bacon, corned beef) because the added nitrates and nitrites react during browning to make things much worse.
Healthful ways to cook meat include:
When choosing beef in the USA, avoid the USDA Prime and USDA Choice grades. The USDA Select grade is leaner, and the rarely-seen USDA Standard grade is leanest. (the rating system is backwards because it dates back to an era when people had very different ideas about health)
In place of salt on meat, try some herbs and spices. For example, a pork roast goes well with rosemary. Chicken goes well with sage, rosemary, and thyme. For a more Asian flavor, use ginger and soy sauce.
You might enjoy your meat with teriyaki, barbeque, or sweet and sour sauce. These sauces are somewhat high in sugar, but the good taste may save you from far worse dietary choices.
A technique to remove excess fat from shredded or ground meats after frying is to remove the meat to a metal collander, and rinse with hot water. This is especially important when cooking such meats ahead of time to prepare for freezing - otherwise the fat solidifies on the meat when it freezes, and can sometimes cause unpleasant odors and tastes.
For fish, try cooking it with some ground herbs and spices. Also, try serving it plain or with lemon juice. You won't need to cover up a "fishy" (bacterial) smell if you buy good fish and use it quickly; good fish does not have an odor.
Egg whites are generally better than egg yolks. In most recipes, you can use 2 egg whites to replace 1 whole egg.
Try flavoring your scrambled eggs with chopped black olives instead of bacon bits.
Oil and Fat
For general use, canola oil (low erucic acid rapeseed oil) is a good choice.
Fancy grades of olive oil can be better, but they are easy to overheat because they have low smoke points. When oil is overheated, harmful chemicals end up both in the food and in the air. (use olive oil on your salad, and canola oil for making a deep-fried mars bar)
As a general rule, it is more healthful to choose liquid oils over solid fats. It is currently suspected that the trans- fats (hydrogenated oils) are least desirable; these are found in most margarine and shortening.
Milk
People with Northern European ancestry usually handle milk well. Other people are likely to have trouble digesting milk, particularly the lactose, which causes flatulence. Milk can be treated to remove lactose by fermenting it or by adding an enzyme. Look for strong (aged) cheeses and Lactaid if you have this problem.
If you choose to avoid milk, you will need an alternate source of calcium. Anchovies and canned salmon are a good sources. You may also need an alternate source of vitamin D, which is normally added to milk. This is particularly important if you are a dark-skinned person who does not receive lots of exposure to bright sunlight. (oddly, the human body relies on ultraviolet light to produce vitamin D)
Salt
For salt added at the table, consider using flaked salt. It's the same stuff, but it tastes stronger (so you use less) because it dissolves faster.
When cooking, you can reduce salt by 20% to 45% without giving up taste by adding a small amount of MSG. Consider doing this with meat, soups, eggs, stir-fry, fried rice, and anything else you might consider to be a "savory" dish. (MSG contains far less sodium than table salt does)
See above for specific tips for meat and vegetable salt reduction.
Flour-based foods and fiber
Whole wheat flour provides dietary fiber, which helps to clean you out. Whole wheat flour also has more protein than plain white flour. In most recipes, you can replace half of the plain white flour with whole wheat flour. The more whole wheat you use, the less the result will rise. You might add some extra leavening agent (yeast, baking powder, etc.) to make up for this. Many recipes are specifically designed for 100% whole wheat flour, including pancakes and raisin oatmeal muffins.
When making batter for deep-fat frying, try using cornmeal in place of some of the plain white flour.
Instead of white rice, choose brown rice. This gives you extra flavor, fiber, and nutrients.
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