Peruvian Beef and Squash Stew

I love winter squash. Not everyone does. Including some members of my family. So I was interested when I saw a recipe in FoodontheFood, from a blogger who quite a CSA that gave her too much squash. But she enjoyed a squash dish made by her mother's Peruvian friend. So I thought my resident squash-haters might not hate it. And they didn't. Just like Tammy Donroe, they were suprised that there's nothing fancy in this dish hiding the squash flavor. Just plenty of garlic and a little bit of time.

-= Exported from BigOven =-

Peruvian Beef and Squash Stew 2

Chopping up all this squash takes some time, but you’ll make a major dent in your squash pile, and, really, isn’t that what matters?

Recipe By: http://foodonthefood.com
Serving Size: 8
Cuisine: Peruvian
Main Ingredient: Pumpkin
Categories: Winter, Fall, Braise, Vegetables, Main Dish

-= Ingredients =-
1 tablespoon olive oil
2 medium onions ; chopped
6 cloves garlic ; smashed
2 tablespoon paprika
2 pound Beef bottom round roast
8 cups Winter squash ; seeded and sliced in half
2 medium tomatoes ; chopped
1/8 teaspoon Pepper ; or to taste
1/4 pound Low Fat Cheddar cheese ; optional

-= Instructions =-
In a large braising pot, heat olive oil until shimmering. Brown meat on all sides. Sauté onions, garlic, and paprika over medium heat until soft.
Add tomatoes, lay pieces of squash over top, cover, and cook over low heat or in oven 30-45 minutes, until squash is soft.
Remove squash from pot, return pot to oven. Cool squash until you can handle it, then scrape it out of the rind. Return squash to pot, mash, stir, and return to heat.. Continue to cook over low heat until the squash cooks down into a thick sauce and meat is tender. Timing will depend on whether you cut meat into 1" stew chunks (15 more minutes) or left it in roast-sized chunks (another hour or so)

Optional: Sprinkle with cheese and cover until melted. Remove from heat and serve over rice.

Without Optional Cheese:
Serving: 1.67 cups (407g), Calories: 345: Fat: 14g : Sodium: 72mg
Protein: 27g, NetCarbs: 19, K: 1505mg
SatFat: 6g, PolyFat: 1g, MonoFat: 7g, Chol: 71mg
TotCarbs: 26g, Fiber: 7g, Sugars: 8g
Calories: 42.0% from fat, 22.0% from carbohydrates 31.3% from protein
RecipePoints: 6.67

DASH: Vegetables: 3.2: Fruits/Juices: 0.0: Dairy: 0.0: Grains: 0.0: Meat/Fish: 1.3: Seeds: 0.0: Fats: 0.4: Sweets: 0.0
USDA: Vegetables: 1.6: Fruits/Juices: 0.0: Dairy: 0.0: Grains: 0.0: Meat/Fish/Seeds: 4.0: Fats: 0.4: Sweets: 0.0

With Optional Cheese:
Serving: 1.67 cups (421g), Calories: 380: Fat: 16g : Sodium: 158mg
Protein: 31g, NetCarbs: 19, K: 1505mg
SatFat: 7g, PolyFat: 1g, MonoFat: 7g, Chol: 79mg
TotCarbs: 26g, Fiber: 7g, Sugars: 8g
Calories: 43.0% from fat, 20.0% from carbohydrates 32.6% from protein
RecipePoints: 7.53

DASH: Vegetables: 3.2: Fruits/Juices: 0.0: Dairy: 0.5: Grains: 0.0: Meat/Fish: 1.3: Seeds: 0.0: Fats: 0.4: Sweets: 0.0
USDA: Vegetables: 1.6: Fruits/Juices: 0.0: Dairy: 0.5: Grains: 0.0: Meat/Fish/Seeds: 4.0: Fats: 0.4: Sweets: 0.0


** This recipe can be pasted into BigOven without retyping. **
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How to Eat More Chocolate for your heart, part II

I'm an avid read of Monica Reinegel's NutritionData Blog, because I love data about nutrition. As I was reading Eating chocolate for your heart, I noticed a comment from another of her readers, asking Monica for more information about which brand of chocolate is best for the heart. I had asked myself the same thing a few months back, so I posted my own comment, as chock full of references as cocoa is chock full of useful flavanols. Which the website immediately rejected as spam, on account of all those useful links. A comment like that probably belongs on my own blog. So here it is. In How to Eat More Chocolate for your heart, I decided the easiest way is simply to stir a tablespoon of unsweetened natural cocoa into a bowl of oatmeal or a mug of hot water or milk one to three times a day, for 200 to 600mg of cocoa flavanol (CF). This is because:

• 1 T (5g) Hershey unsweetened natural cocoa PROBABLY has about 200mg CF and 20 Cal, and you can drink it like coffee.
• 1/2 ounce of baking chocolate (100% cacao) PROBABLY has 230-300mg CF and 70 Cal, but it is not much fun to eat.
• 1 1/2 ounces of Ritter Sport Halbbitter (50% cacao) has 200mg CF and 200 Cal -- delicious, if you aren't worried about the extra sugar/fat calories.

I found this out by searching on "cocoa", and "antioxidant". I saw answers at the USDA, pubmed, the American Cocoa Research Institute, Hershey's, and Mars. I learned words like polyphenol, flavan-3-ol, flavanol (not to be confused with flavonol), and proanthocyanidin. I read chocolate-makers' websites, requested research papers they cited at their websites, and asked about the flavanol content of their products. And then I had to make some sense of it.

• Hardly anybody will give you even an approximate flavanol content for their product if it isn't already on the package. It costs money to test flavanol content. It must cost even more to assure that a product always has a certain minimum flavanol content. It might cost them a lot to say a product usually has a certain flavanol content, then get sued when a certain batch had less.
• A paper from Arkansas gave me my best rule of thumb -- as long as the cocoa isn't dutched, the content of antioxidants is proportional to the percentage of nonfat cocoa solids (NFCS) in the product. That's pretty simple. A Hershey PR rep. sent me a copy of the paper, and I found out how much NFCS and antioxidants were in a number of unidentified grocery-store products.
• The USDA has produced a proanthocyanidin database, that shows that cinnamon, grape seeds, and cocoa are highest in proanthocyanidins
• Ritter Sport shared the CF content of their Halbbitter bar with researchers in 2004 -- about 500mg CF per 100g.

How to Eat More Chocolate For Your Heart

Red wine with that burger, please -- study shows flavanols can neutralize some bad chemicals right in the stomach.

Edited 5 Feb 2009 to fix broken links

References

• Gu et al. Concentrations of proanthocyanidins in common foods and estimations of normal consumption.J Nutr. 2004 Mar;134(3):613-7.
• USDA Proanthocyanidin database http://www.ars.usda.gov/Services/docs.htm?docid=5843


• The Hershey Company. Antioxidant activity and polyphenol and procyanidin contents of selected commercially available cocoa-containing and chocolate products in the United States. J Agric Food Chem. 2006 May 31;54(11):4062-8.
• Gu et. al. Procyanidin and catechin contents and antioxidant capacity of cocoa and chocolate products. J Agric Food Chem. 2006 May 31;54(11):4057-61. Hershey emailed a copy on my request.
• Taubert, et al. Chocolate and blood pressure in elderly individuals with isolated systolic hypertension. JAMA. 2003 Aug 27;290(8):1029-30. (Cocoa polyphenol content of Ritter Sport Halbbitter)
• Taubert et al. Effect of cocoa and tea intake on blood pressure: a meta-analysis. Arch Intern Med. 2007 Apr 9;167(7):626-34
• Aron, et al. Flavan-3-ols: Nature, occurrence and biological activity. Mol Nutr Food Res. 2008 Jan;52(1):79-104 -- A review of the chemistry and health effects of flavanols.

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Baby Lima Beans

My family doesn't like mashed cauliflower. We'd rather have it raw, or steamed with a sprinkling of cheese. It is definitely not a replacement for a big pile of mashed potatoes.
But we did find a "better carb choices" substitute. It's white, has a mild flavor, feels creamy in your mouth, and is popular with the kids. It's easy to cook. It goes well with a little bacon, and makes a nice side dish.

Baby Lima beans! This one is simple:

Cook one cup dried baby limas in enough broth to cover.
Simmer for one hour, adding additional water as necessary.
Season to taste.

Thanks to Mel at dietriffic for reminding me about the latest legume addition to my diet.

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New USDA salmon figures based on too-few samples?

Farm-raised salmon is cheap compared to fresh. You might find farm-raised for $9.00 a pound in the fresh case and $5.99 a pound in 2-pound package of individually-wrapped frozen fillets.

But farm-raised salmon has lately been known to have a lot of omega-6 fatty acids, making it very inflammatory -- just the sort of thing you DON'T want if you are looking for heart-healthy diet choices.

So I was surprised to read that they have suddenly gotten better. The newly-updated USDA database says that the ratio of omega-6 to omega-3 fatty acids in farmed Atlantic Salmon is now a favorable 1:2.6 instead of the former, very unfavorable 7:1 (is that right? 7:1? Who's got a copy of the old database?). So a serving farm-raised salmon has gone from being highly inflammatory to being highly anti-inflammatory. The ratio is not quite as good as for wild Atlantic Salmon (1:12), but since the farm-raised salmon is nearly twice as fatty, you get a bigger anti-inflammatory dose per ounce.

Monica Reinagel proposed that big changes in aquaculture practices have accounted for this change. But I am not sure this change is universal. I quickly searched for "salmon USDA" and came up with a USDA poster presentation from Experimental Biology 2007 giving lipid figures for salmon. Turns out, only 2 samples of farm-raised Atlantic Salmon were tested, from shopping trips to 12 different US grocery stores.

Two samples? Is that representative of all the farmed Atlantic salmon available in the US? How can I know if the salmon I see in my grocery store more closely resembles the new farmed salmon or the old?

Is it normal for the USDA to "improve" its database with data from such a narrow sampling? What other USDA figures should I start distrusting?

• The "old" farmed salmon: Quantitative Analysis of the Benefits and Risks of Consuming Farmed and Wild Salmon. J. Nutr. 135:2639-2643, November 2005


• The "new" farmed salmon: Exler, J. 2007. Nutrient content and variability in newly obtained salmon data for USDA Nutrient Database for Standard Reference. Experimental Biology, April 25, 2007, Washington, D.C. (abstract)

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Christmas Traditions on a diet

When you decide to change your diet during the holidays, you're in a bit of a pickle. There was just no way to make any changes at Thanksgiving. Potatatoes, stuffing, cranberry sauce, and pies. It's tradition!

Now Christmas is approaching. And guess what. Christmas cookies are a tradition. Lots of sugar, white flour, and saturated fats. I've got low-fat wheat-flour cookies, and sugary no-flour cookies, and sugary, buttery cookies. But I can't make anything decent that matches up with any sort of diet recommended for people watching their triglycerides. No. I don't quite have the hang of the Splenda meringue, so it's off the list for this year. We made the cookies already. And we're sending them to our families and friends. We call these little devils gifts. It's a tradition!

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Neal Barnard's Meal Plan Anti-Inflammatory

I know you've all been wondering about this, and couldn't wait for someone to hurry up and tackle the question. So I used the tools at Nutritiondata to work it out, (depending especially on Monica Reinagel's Inflammation Factor to estimate the inflammatory potential of foods) First I entered recipes for Barnard's Fruit Smoothie, Lebanese-Style Lentils and Pasta, Orange Applesauce Date Cake, Blackeyed Pea and Sweet Potato Soup, and Creamy Poppyseed Dressing. More or less. I got a little agitated with the interface and left out some of the seasonings. Next, I used these recipes to create Menues as Recipes for Breakfast, Lunch, and Dinner from Day 1 of his "7 Days of Healthful Meals". Barnard doesn't talk much about how many calories you should get in a day or what serving sizes to use to meet those requirements, so I guessed on how much oatmeal to serve myself for breakfast, how much soup to have for lunch, etc.

According to Nutritiondata, breakfast was mildly inflammatory, lunch was strongly anti-inflammatory, and dinner was mildly anti-inflamatory. When I added up all 3 meals and the smoothie, I wound up with 1704 calories for the day, an estimated glycemic load of 127, (which some diabetics might consider a tad high), and an inflammation factor of 82, which is mildly anti-inflammatory. That inflammation factor is a good feature. After-meal inflammation seems to be an important contributor to heart disease. It contributes to a whole cascade of bad things, from higher triglyceride levels to smaller cholesterol particles, to high blood pressure, to artery damage, fatty plaque deposits, plaque eruptions, and blood clotting. I was just reading about it all once again in a medscape article about triglycerides -- it's not a pretty picture.

All in all, it looks like Barnard's diet is good for the heart.

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Melamine is still in our foods

A year and a half ago, I said pretty much all I wanted to say about cheap imported food ingredients -- avoid them. It's too easy to sneak in powdered melamine scrap in place of vegetable protein powders, isolates, and concentrates, or powdered milk or eggs. Too easy to replace glycerine with antifreeze. This means avoiding all the processed foods made with these ingredients, too. You can't know where they came from. And the FDA has just blocked the import of all milk products from China, along with pet and laboratory animal feeds.

Hong Kong and South Korea are turning away eggs and egg products because they are contaminated. It isn't clear whether the powdered eggs rejected by South Korea were directly contaminated, or if they were simply came from chickens fed contaminated feed. The levels of melamine in the flesh, milk, or eggs of an animal fed contaminated feed are likely to be much less than the levels of food ingredients directly contaminated with melamine.

product	contamination level
Sanlu milk, reconstituted	~360 ppm
Recalled 2007 pet food	60-70 ppm
Recalled Chinese vegetable proteins	>70 ppm
Egg powder, South Korea	.1ppm - 4 ppm
Hong Kong eggs	3.5 ppm

The FDA says 2.5ppm is the level of concern, except for in baby formula where none (or 25ppb, the limit of detection) is tolerable. This is based on evidence that 50ppm is tolerable (from animal studies?), up from a 2007 LOC of 194ppb to 450ppb, based on a TDI of .63 mg/kg/day, with a "100-fold safety factor".

Using the EU's TDI of .5mg/kg/day, the WHO concludes that the LOC for milk is 25ppm -- 10 times as high as the FDA's LOC.

How about a nice home-made Chipotle-Squash soup instead?

• FDA Melamine Contamination information page
  

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