Greens -- an introduction

Fresh Greens

I was just reading 5 Super Ingredients by Melanie at dietriffic. She just discovered an Asian green called Choy Sum, and gave a stir-fry recipe. She says she means to add more greens to her diet. It's a good idea. People have been eating greens for a long time, but where meat and carbohydrates are cheap, people seem to start leaving greens off their plate, which is a shame. Greens are the green leaves of non-heading herbaceous plants, eaten as vegetables. They are generally rich in vitamins A, B (including folate), C, E, and K, as well as antioxidants and have varying amounts of the minerals magnesium, calcium, potassium, and iron. Heading cabbages (red and green), iceberg lettuce, and Belgian endive are pale by comparison and so are not treated as greens. They don't develop nearly as many nutrients.

Serving Size
Fresh raw greens, torn or sliced, are fluffy, but will compact when you cook it. To get a half-cup serving of spinach, you'll need to eat a full cup of raw spinach salad, or a quarter cup of well-cooked spinach. Collards, kale, and other, more sturdy greens, won't compact quite as much as spinach will.

Preparing Greens
Very young greens are tender and can be eaten with their ribs, veins, and stems. Sturdier and more mature greens may have tough or bitter stems and veins, which need to be torn or stripped out. Large Romaine lettuce can be torn away from the thickest, whitest portion of its stem. With sturdy collards, grab the stem with one hand, wrap your other hand around the leaf, and strip it right off the vein.

Greens grow close to the ground, so they can be sandy or muddy. If you've got just 4-5 leaves of Romaine for your salad, you can give them a quick "shower" under running water. If you've got a couple pounds of greens, give them a bath in a large bowl or your well-cleaned sink. Agitate the leaves, let the dirt settle, scoop out the leaves, rinse the sink, and do it again. Check the bottom of the sink for dirt and sand. If you got it all, you are done.

To quickly chop a big pile of greens, stack a few up, roll them around their central veins, and slice them into ribbons with a chef's knife. You can turn the mass of ribbons sideways if you like and slice them into rough rectangles.

Most types of greens don't need to cook long -- five minutes or less for very tender young greens, 10 minutes for most sturdy large-leafed greens, 20 minutes for really tough, mature leaves, and longer for certain greens that contain a lot of oxalic acid.

Photo Source: USDA

Lettuce is a members of the daisy family. Many Western varieties have been bred for mild flavor to be used in fresh salads, while many more bitter Asian varieties have been bred for use in cooking. They all belong to the same species. People have been eating lettuces for over 4000 years. The darker green loose-leaf lettuces have lots of vitamins and minerals and a mild flavor. A popular way to serve lettuce in the US is in a green salad.
Endives, Radicchio and Escarole are all related to chicory, another member of the daisy family. Most are more bitter than lettuces. While Radicchio and curly endive are used in fresh salads, escarole is usually served served as a cooked green or as a soup.

Photo Source: USDA

Spinach, Chard (Silverbeet), Beet Greens. Chard and Beets are different varieties of beet, while spinach is a close relative. These greens have a mild flavor. Young leaves are used fresh in salads while older leaves are cooked.
Amaranth Greens are related to spinach and chard, and are usually eaten cooked.
Spinach and Amaranth leaves contain a fair amount of oxalic acid, which can cause problems for people susceptible to gout or kidney stones

Photo Source: Whole Foods

Kole greens like collards, kale, turnip and mustard greens, rapini, Chinese mustard, choy sum, bok choy and kai lan are all the same species as turnips, and are closely related to cabbage and broccoli. Most of these are served cooked, although young mustard greens are can be eaten raw in salads.
Arugula or Rocket is in the same family as cabbages, has a peppery taste, and is often used like lettuce



Taro, Kalo, Dasheen, malanga, cocoyam -- varieties of colocasia and xanthosoma have been grown around the world for thousands of years. The greens contain needles of oxalic acid, and must be cooked for a long time before they can be eaten. These greens are popular in the Caribbean and Polynesia

Weeds or uncultivated greens Other greens, such as dandelion, lamb's quarters, miner's lettuce, and purslane, are collected wild and are not as likely to show up in the supermarket. Some of these greens contain even more vitamins, minerals, and antioxidants than supermarket variety greens.

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Atkins adherents eat more vegetables?

Robert Atkins did not base his diet on science. He read a bit, lost some weight, recommended it to his patients, and built an empire on books and supplements. But, twenty five years later, the science started to get done when a medical professor at Duke wrote Atkins asking him for data to back up his claims. Atkins began funding Westman and Yancy to do some studies. The results in these 4- to 6-month studies were encouraging. Participants lost weight. Triglycerides went down. HDL went up. Diabetics' blood sugar improved. When interviewed in 2004, one of the researchers had something interesting to say:

"We had people in our studies tell us that they are eating more vegetables on the Atkins diet," says Yancy. "It's because people have concentrated so much on starches and carbohydrates. When those are taken out of the picture, they have only meat, eggs, and vegetables as an option, and so they end up eating more vegetables."[1]

Eating more of the green, leafy, low-calorie vegetables seems to be one thing all the diets agree on.

1. _The skinny on the Low-Carb Craze Kim McDonald, Duke Magazine 2004 September;90(5)

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Healthier Choices, step 3: take a little walk

What does walking have to do with nutrition? Food contains energy. If you decide to lose weight, you could have a tough time taking in all the nutrients you need while restricting the calories. Exercise burns some of those calories, allowing you to lose weight while still getting enough to eat.

Even 5 minutes a day is better than no exercise at all!

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A more balanced granola

As I said in my last post, you have to beware of some of those "healthy" recipes, like the nutty high-fat granola recipe recently published in the Philadelphia Inquirer. Why should you beware a recipe like this one? Because, even though the recipe is adapted from a book called "The Healthy Kitchen", each serving is high in calories, fat (including saturated fat) and sugar. For each serving of grain, the recipe provides 404 calories, including 21g (1.5 tablespoons; 6g saturated) of fat and 25 g (2 tablespoons) of sugar.

Looking for better alternatives, I consulted Alton Brown's Granola recipe. It provides 1 serving of grain for 353 calories, with 19 grams of fat and 25g of suger. A minor improvement. Surely, one could do better.

You could eat a Nature Valley Crunchy Granola Bar, Oats and Honey flavor. That's 100 calories per bar (which come 2 to the pouch). Each bar has only 3g of fat (none of it saturated), 7 g of sugars. Eat the whole 2-bar pack, and you get close to 2 servings of grain, all for only 200 calories.

Or you could make your own. Most granola recipes taste like a very rich cookie. That's the sugar (white, brown, or honey, it's still a lot of sugar) and the oil talking. What you want to make at home will be closer to the Nature Valley product -- lower in sugars and oils.

What exactly is one serving of grain? According to mypyramid.gov, that is approximately 1 oz serving of bread, or the equivalent. How many cups of dry oatmeal is that? That's a little trickier to figure out. But http://www.mypyramidtracker.gov/ can help.

• Log in to mypyramidtracker, select "proceed to food intake".
• In the text box under "Enter Food Item", type "oats, raw", and click the search button. Under "Search results", click the "Add" button next to "oats, raw", and click the "Select Quantity" button in the other half of the screen.
• Now you'll be able to select a serving size of "1 cup", a "Number of Servings" of 100 (yes, 100) and click "Save and Analyze".
• On the "Analyze Your Food" display, scroll down and click on Calculate MyPyramid Stats to find out that 100 cups of oats is equivalent to 285.7 1-oz servings of grain.

Result: 0.35 cups (approximately a third of a cup) of rolled oats per serving. That's a hassle, isn't it? I keep the results in an EXCEL spreadsheet so I won't have to go through that again. Similarly, I searched on "wheat germ, crude" to find out that a serving of wheat germ is approximately a quarter of a cup. And a serving of wheat flour is approximately .128 cup (2 tablespoons). Why did I look these up? I was looking at a low-fat honey granola bar recipe

-- Low-Fat Honey Granola Bars (foodgeeks.com) --
12 servings
1/4 cup quick-cooking oats
1/4 cup whole wheat flour
1/4 cup toasted wheat germ
1/4 tsp. ground cinnamon
1/4 cup plus 2 tbsp. honey
1/3 cup dark raisins
-------------

That's less than 4 servings of grain in the entire recipe, or just about a third of a serving of grain per serving of grain per bar. I scaled the recipe by 3 and gave it a try. Bah! An oatmeal cookie with a play-doh texture. Wheat flour + liquid (honey) without fat = playdoh.

I'll try to come up with something.

• A crispy, crunchy granola bar that tastes good
• Not much over 100 calories per serving of grain (remembering that a serving of rolled oats contains 110 calories)
• Not overloaded with sugar or fat.

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Beware the healthy granola recipe

The Philadelphia Inquirer published an interesting article about how fast-food and convenience-food makers are vying for your breakfast dollar. It criticizes a few popular morning choices (McGriddles, McMuffins, and Starbucks' Venti Caffé Mocha with whipped cream), and offers a side bar (not available online) advocating more nutritionally balanced breakfasts you throw together at home in three minutes or less. Unfortunately, it also offers a Granola Recipe that (to quote the author) makes the denigrated 300-calorie McMuffin "look like diet fare".

Sure, the granola is chock full of natural, wholesome ingredients. But each serving (maybe 3/4 cup) provides over 400 calories. That's a nice snack if you are an iditarod musher, but a bit heavy in the cereal bowl for the rest of us.

By my calculations, each serving (maybe about 3/4 cup) amounts to about

• 1 serving of grain
• about an ounce of nuts and seeds, which counts as 2 ounces of meat (http://www.mypyramid.gov/pyramid/meat_counts.html)
• 21 grams (1 1/2 tablespoons) of fat, 5 grams of which is saturated
• 1 1/3 tablespoons of sugar
• No dairy
• No fruit or vegetables

I double-checked the weight per cup of the almonds, sunflower seeds, and coconut at the USDA and nutritiondata databases (just use this blog's nutrition data search bar to check for yourself).

Instead of this nutty, high-fat granola, I would choose:

• 1 serving of grain: 1/3 cup oatmeal (prepared with 1 cup of water), 1 slice of whole-grain bread, or 1 cup of cheerios (60 - 110 calories)
• 1 serving of dairy: 8 oz skim milk (93 calories)
• 1 serving of fruit: 1/2 cup fruit (40 to 80 calories)

Total: under 300 calories. Save the nuts for an afternoon snack (1/2 oz walnut halves is under 100 calories).

How many calories do you need a day? How many servings of which foods do you need? Find out at mypyramid.gov.

(correction to serving size of rolled oats 4/24/2007)

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Cold Potatoes are Better

According to this document published by the Oldways Food Issues Think Tank, it sounds as if the glycemic index of a baked potato goes down when it cools. The document promotes increasing fiber in the diet with an emphasis on resistant starch (starch that resists digestion and passes through to the large intestine) and a product called Hi-Maize resistant starch. Resistant starch is a type of dietary fiber. This product is meant to increase the dietary fiber of baked goods without giving them that "heavy" "high-fiber" texture.

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