Food Choices that improve cholesterol and blood sugar.

A review of studies on how what we eat affects our bodies right after a meal says that, when you eat too much fat or highly-processed carbohydrates in one meal, your blood sugar and triglycerides go up quickly. Your body can't metabolize this excess very well, and you wind up with free radicals, oxidative stress, inflammation, and a stress response. You will have immediate increases in blood pressure, oxidation of LDL cholesterol, C-reactive protein production, and risk of blood clotting. This can go on for longer than four hours after a meal, at which time you'll be nearly ready for another meal....

Post-prandial "glucose excursions" are associated with risk of cardiovascular disease (atherosclerosis or hardening or narrowing of the arteries), which can lead to a heart attack, a stroke, or cognitive decline (where you have more and more trouble with memory and alertness, and become confused more often) -- all because of poor circulation to your heart and brain. On top of that, those spikes in blood sugar and insulin will lead to excess fat deep in your belly (called visceral fat), which increases your risk of diabetes and high blood pressure.

The good news is that most people can slow down the rate at which these bad things happen, or even stop them, just by making a few changes in how they eat. You can probably reduce your risk of heart disease or even lose belly fat.

Eat Better Carbs
Cut down on white bread, white rice, and white potatoes. Substitute pasta, whole unmilled grains (like brown rice and bulgar), and even pasta. Avoid highly-processed foods that have a lot of sugar, high-fructose corn syrup, white flour, and processed starch. Then substitute more vegetables like broccoli and spinach for some of the grains and potatoes. Eat "good carb" fruits like citrus, cherries, and berries.

I tried this one out last Friday. I made a pasta salad, but added quite a lot of chopped vegetables. Little bits of leftover grilled asparagus, red peppers, broccoli, onion, some fresh herbs from the garden, a little carrot and celery, a few peas, and some small red beans. It was colorful and delicious, and there was less room in the bowl for pasta.

Eat better fats
Avoid trans fats and saturated fats. Use modest amounts of olive oil or nut oils, and get some fish oils for their omega-3 fatty acids. The omega-3 fatty acids improve the after-meal triglycerides and reduce inflammation and risk of heart disease.

I'm working on adding one meal of fish per week to my family's menu, and maybe working up to two meals a week. Tuna sandwiches and tuna in the pasta salad go over pretty well.

Eat foods that slow digestion
Like nuts, vinegar, and cinnamon, and high-fiber foods like lettuce, spinach, and broccoli. A nice big serving of green salad dressed with vinegar and a little olive oil can lower your after-meal blood sugar by 25% or more and help you to feel more full. And a very small serving of nuts gives you antioxidants and decreases after-meal oxidative damage.

So I've tried having a small handful of plain, unsalted almonds as an evening snack, as a substitute for a small snack of pretzels. I pack low-sugar fruit cups in the kids' lunches instead of pudding cups, and include a bundle of carrot sticks. I try to serve a green salad or (when I can get them) a fresh beet salad dressed in vinegar. I've also found the kids are less likely to make faces at cooked greens if I serve them with vinegar.

Eat a little lean protein
At each meal to keep your metabolism up. This includes egg whites, fish, game meat (and other very lean red meats), skinless poultry breast, and nonfat dairy protein. They can decrease after-meal inflammation and help with losing weight.

Does nonfat milk on the quick oats at breakfast count?

Eat modest-sized servings
So your body can handle the load. Foods that help you feel full will help. They authors recommend vinegar and high-fiber foods.

We actually bring measuring cups to the table to help with this.

Move
Get 30 minutes or more per day of moderate or stronger physical activity. Even light exercise, if you keep up with it daily, can help. 90 minutes of exercise within 2 hours before or after a meal can cut your after-meal blood sugar and triglycerides in half.

Here's where I could really help myself some more, although the rest of my family doesn't seem to have a lot of problem. I think I'm spending too much time looking for health information and writing about it, and need to spend more time weeding the garden.

Keep a Healthy Weight
Strive for a waist size less than half your height.

Foods that reduce inflammation include fish oil and other omega-3 fatty acid supplements (since they reduce blood triglycerides), deeply-colored fresh fruits and vegetables, nuts, and cinnamon.

I think I've been doing a pretty good job in the last couple of years improving my family's diet. In the next few months, I'm going to put some focus on continuing to improve our carbohydrates, since there's a big benefit there. And I'll continue exploring the anti-oxidants. I really like the idea of improving my health with cocoa and cinnamon.

• J Am Coll Cardiol. 2008 Jan 22;51(3):249-55. Dietary strategies for improving post-prandial glucose, lipids, inflammation, and cardiovascular health. O'Keefe JH, Gheewala NM, O'Keefe JO. Summary or full article available from medscape.
• Endocr Pract. 2008 Jan-Feb;14(1):112-24. Postprandial dysmetabolism: the missing link between diabetes and cardiovascular events?. Bell DS, O'Keefe JH, Jellinger P.

Last edited (corrected typos) 29 Oct 2008

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Food Safety: Cutting out Cantaloupe Cross Contamination

Here's the thing: I don't wash much produce. Not Bananas, oranges, apples, winter squash, zucchini, green peppers, or green beans. Not even broccoli or cantaloupe. Unless it seems dirty. I always wash leeks, lettuce, spinach, kale, collards because they always have silt or sand in them. I generally wash potatoes, carrots, and beets, because they grow underground and "might" be dirty. I don't wash waxed rutabagas before I peel them. I really don't obsess about whether food I am just about to cook might have a few invisible germs on it.

And my family is fine.

All the recent talk about how difficult it actually is to rinse, soak, wash, bleach, or scrub the germs off the surface of a cantaloupe got me wondering. The discussions at Fanatic Cook raise a lot of valid points about how hard it is to make sure you've gotten rid of something you can't even see. So I found this video from the International Food Safety Network refreshing. Instead of instruction in eliminating the invisible, it counsels cutting down on cross contamination. At six minutes, it seems a little long. So I'll summarize:

• It is really hard to scrub the germs off a cantaloupe.


• You might splash wash-water all over the place.


• Instead, cut down contact between the outside and the inside


• Cut the (unwashed) cantaloupe into quarters. You won't spread many bacteria to the flesh.


• Now use a clean knife to separate the flesh from the rind.


• Slide that flesh onto a clean cutting board. Wash your hands before you handle the flesh further.


• Refrigerate the cut cantaloupe immediately.

Of course I routinely wash my hands before cooking, even thought they don't look dirty. But, for some reason, I just can't see doing the same with the produce, and this approach makes more sense to me.

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Food Safety: When do you wash your produce?

There's an interesting discussion going on at the Fanatic Cook blog. It began with Honduran cantaloupes that are associated with a Salmonella outbreak in the US.

Of course, produce grows outdoors in the dirt. Animals poop outdoors in the dirt. Contamination from passing birds, livestock, or vermin is always a possiblity. When I buy a melon directly from the farmer, it is dirty. Before I slice it, I give that melon a good rinse and scrub-down in the sink. Afterwards, I give the sink a soapy scrub-down to clean it. This keeps the dirt, and the germs in the dirt, off the counter, cutting board, and knife, and out of the food.

But when I buy a melon at the supermarket, it looks as clean as if I had just washed it myself. So I don't wash it. I rarely wash apples, oranges, or tomatoes. I have never washed a banana. Have you? Even though you know that, every time you grab a piece of produce, you could get invisible germs on your hands and spread them all over the kitchen? Why aren't you and your family sick every single day? Is this like playing Russian Roulette with vegetables?

Well, maybe. Most tragedies happen after a whole string of things has gone wrong. And there are many opportunities between the field and the plate to prevent a food-borne illness.

Most soil germs are not dangerous. But fertilizer/manure or irrigation water could be contaminated and spread germs in the field. The dirty-looking recirculated wash water they use in packing plants could be OK if they treat it properly, or it could be putting germs right back on the potatoes. Workers could be protecting the food, or contaminating it if they don't wash their hands. And you never know who has handled the produce in the grocery store.

Knowing all that, I'm responsible for the food I choose and how I handle it. I follow a few simple rules.

• Vegetable washes haven't proven to be any more effective than plain, clean water at removing bacteria, so I stick with plain water, and scrub, rub, agitate, or spray.
• Keep the sink and the scrubbers clean.
• There is no way to remove 100% of the germs on foods. So try not to let the germs grow. Eat, cook, or refrigerate things soon after you cut them.
• If those watermelon slices start to look "different", it's time to toss them. Avoid damaged produce. Don't eat rotten stuff.
• This summer, I'm sure I'll still be eating unwashed vegetables straight off the vine.
• I'm not going to start washing bananas.
• I'll think again about prewashed mini-carrots, but I'll probably keep trusting the Jolly Green Giant, the distribution network, and my local grocery store.
  

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FIT vegetable wash powder (Citric acid, sodium lauryl sulfate, sodium carbonate & magnesium carbonate, Grapefruit Oil extract) was developed by Proctor and Gamble, which then sold the license to Healthpro Brands. It is distributed to growers, packers, and shippers by Caruso Foods

According to the Cornell Department of Agriculture, no-one knows how much food-borne illness originates on the farm.

Bleaching produce is only recommeded in extreme situations, such as flooding. Leafy vegetables, fleshy vegetables (tomatoes, summer squash, peppers) and berries cannot be adequately disinfected. Other contaminated vegetables can be cleaned in fresh water and then soaked in a very weak chlorine solution for 15 to 20 minutes.

Did you hear A&P sued a couple of its former stock clerks for making a video in which they licked produce and put it back on the shelves?

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Eat More Fruits and Vegetables

The Produce for Better Health Foundation has begun a new campaign, "fruits and veggies -- more matters" to promote produce consumption. Apparantly the "5 A Day THE COLOR WAY" message (also developed by the Produce for Better Health Foundation) was too complicated or too intimidating (what with all those capital letters and whatnot). Maybe the PBH feels the emphasis on more, rather than on 5 servings of produce daily causes less guilt or oppositional feelings, and will result in increased produce purchases.

Of course, "5" is the magic number only for those getting about 2,200 Calories per day. Most of us need less. It is pretty simple to find out what you need. The next step is just figuring out when to eat all that produce. Don't wait for dinner -- it will just be too much food. And the TOO MUCH FOOD diet gets old as quickly as any other fad diet.

Here's how my favorite 8-year-old typically gets 3 1/2 cups of fruit and vegetables in a day:

• A banana at mid-morning snack
• Half a cup of applesauce and 10 mini-carrots with lunch
• Half a cup of broccoli, half a cup of spaghetti sauce, and one cup of salad at dinner.

I should get 4.5 cups a day, so I can add to this:

• 1/4 cup of raisins or 1/2 cup orange juice at breakfast, or half an orange after dinner
• Increase broccoli to 1 cup, spaghetti sauce to 3/4 cup, salad to 1 1/2 cups.

This is all pretty easy to remember (even with little details like dried fruit counting twice as much and fluffy salad greens counting half as much), and even the 4-year-old is getting pretty good at food choices. Do we need more?

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