Eat Your Vegetables!! (Seven a day)

A new study reported by the BBC confirms that vegetables are good for you!

 

Eating seven or more portions of fruit and vegetables a day is healthier than the five currently recommended and would save more lives, researchers say.

A study of 65,226 men and women indicated the more fruit and vegetables people ate, the less likely they were to die - at any age.

The University College London researchers used the National Health Survey, which collects data from people in the UK each year through questionnaires and nurse visits, to look at diet and lifestyle.

Risk of death by any cause was reduced by:

• 14% by eating one to three portions of fruit or veg per day
• 29% for three to five
• 36% for five to seven
• 42% for seven or more

Fresh vegetables had the strongest protective effect, followed by salad and then fruit.

This is an amazingly strong effect. You can improve your health dramatically by eating more vegetables!
 

The Guilt of Mark Bittman

I really enjoy reading Mark Bittman in the New York Times. Recently he has been writing more about food quality and the political and economic environment of food. Earlier, he had a regular column and video blog of great recipes.
He has published many books of recipes including vegetarian and vegan recipes. For the past few years he has been on a "Vegan Before 6" diet where he doesn't eat animal products during the day but is a "flexitarian" for the evening meal. He had great success with this diet, losing 30 pounds and improving his cholesterol levels and his health.
He points out three problems with food from animals:
1. Animal products are not healthy for individuals (saturated fat, toxins, etc.).
2. Animal products are not health for the planet (resource and industrial chemical intensive).
3. There are serious ethical problems with industrial animal farming.
Taking these into consideration, he comes up with a compromise which is to eat vegan during the day but allow himself some animal products in the evening. This reduces the three problems but does not eliminate them. This is a compromise between his health and his guilt.
One should look at his three problems and reach the logical conclusion that it is better for your health and the planet to not eat any animal products. However, he must still crave meat and eggs and cheese and butter since he eats them for his main meal.
Receently the Annals of Internal Medicine published a flawed meta-analysis of nutritional studies and concluded that animal fat can't be shown to lead to heart disease. There are many problems with this meta-analysis which relies on one study from the dairy industry for it's main conclusion and a few errors and omissions which have been pointed out by many people. The analysis actually did show that people who ate more animal fat did suffer greater amounts of heart disease but they determined that this result was "not significant". For some reason, their analysis did not include the recent study of the Mediterranean diet which found improvements in heart health (as well as general health, cancer, etc.) from eating fewer animal products.
However, most news outlets gladly pronounced that it was OK to eat animal fat! Mark Bittman contributed his own take in "Butter is Back". His guilt at eating animal fat is now reduced. In this article, he does reaffirm his commitment to vegetables and to avoiding factory food but still thinks it's just fine to eat dairy and meat that is raised humanely.
We really shouldn't live our lives by "avoiding guilt". Most people are fairly set in their ways and won't change unless they face immediate danger. However, I have seen people in the hospital with severe lung disease continue to smoke as soon as they get off the respirator so I'm not sure that even certain death will change deeply ingrained behavior.

However, one should go back and re-read Mark Bittman's three problems:

1. Animal products are not healthy for individuals (saturated fat, toxins, etc.).
2. Animal products are not health for the planet (resource and industrial chemical intensive).
3. There are serious ethical problems with industrial animal farming.

Follow these to their logical conclusion and adjust your diet accordingly.

Veggie Burgers... they keep getting better

I've been experimenting with different veggie burger recipes for many months. Store bought veggie burgers and uniformly terrible (and many are not vegan) so, like many things, you have to do it yourself to get good results.
My previous veggie burger post in October was for Southwest Black Bean and Brown Rice burgers and they were pretty good.
However, in January I found an excellent recipe by J. Kenji López-Alt. This fellow is a committed cook who really understands food.
His criteria:

The Perfect Veggie Burger

There are a few key characteristics that I look for in a great veggie patty.

• The burger must be structurally sound. I want a veggie burger that holds its shape and doesn't have the texture of mashed potatoes, squishing out the back of the bun as I bite down.
• The burger must have good textural contrast. All lumps or all smooth is no good. I want the patty to be soft and tender, but have little bits and bites of crunch and chew.
• The burger's flavor must be good, but not overly assertive. I want my burger to have a good balance of savory flavors. What I don't is for a single flavor—say a spice or an herb—to dominate, restricting my topping choices.
• The burger must hold together on a griddle or grill. A veggie burger that cracks or crumbles and falls into the grill grates when you cook it may as well not ever have existed int he first place.
• The burger must not suck.*

In a column on SeriousEats called The Food Lab, he details his extensive experiments as well as demonstrates his mastery of cooking to develop the Perfect Veggie Burger.  I recommend you read this entire article because it describes in detail what goes into making good food and food that tastes good.
The final recipe is here. It's mushrooms, leeks, celery, barley and eggplant plus a bunch of other stuff. It's a bit complicated but worth it. I made a big batch and froze the extras. To cook the frozen burgers, I don't thaw them first but just fry them in a little oil over medium heat.
Enjoy!

Fat Makes You Stupid, Exercise Makes You Smart

An interesting research article just published in the Journal of Neuroscience with the ponderous title "Obesity elicits interleukin 1-mediated deficits in hippocampal synaptic plasticity" describes in detail the mechanism whereby the accumulation of fat creates an inflammatory molecule (interleukin 1) which crosses the blood brain barrier and creates synaptic dysfunction in the brain (makes you stupid).
They also describe how exercise makes you smarter using the same mechanism. When you exercise, the levels of this molecule go down and your synapses start working better again.
These experiments are done in mice but same mechanism takes place in humans.
The NY Times has a very nice article ("How Fat May Hurt the Brain, and How Exercise May Help")
describing all of this in easy to understand language.

So... the message is clear... eat healthy food, not too much and get exercise!

Also... more bad news on meat and dairy:
According to a new study published in the journal Cell Metabolism Tuesday, middle-aged people who regularly consume a diet high in animal proteins from meat and dairy products are more likely to die of cancer than someone who doesn't.

Just one word of advice: vegetables!