An inviting citrus display recently spotted at Dean & Deluca

On the eve of the Super Bowl, I’ve got the Citrus Bowl on my mind.  Only in my world, the Citrus Bowl actually refers to a huge platter on my kitchen counter piled high with mounds of sunny, spherical fruit.  (Sorry football fans; I don’t even know who’s playing tonight…)  You see, I’ve been on a major citrus bender recently.  The available offerings this year seem even more plentiful than usual, with amazingly sweet mandarins, dramatic blood oranges and exotic pomelos playing wingman to winter standbys like navel oranges, tangelos and pink grapefruits.  It’s enough to make a girl forget about her beloved Clementines, whose season has pretty much passed.

Much Ado About Citrus

Diets higher in citrus fruits have been associated with a decreased risk of stroke. A large, prospective study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association back in 1999 quantified the protective effect as follows: each additional serving of citrus fruits (including juices) in the diet was associated with a 19% reduced risk of stroke (the effect size was even greater for women than for men).  High citrus fruit consumption in the diet has also been shown to correlate more closely with a reduced cancer risk than high Vitamin C consumption, indicating that there’s something protective going on in those citrus fruits beyond just the Vitamin C.

As the above suggests, citrus fruits are a prime example of a whole food being greater than the sum of its parts, nutritionally speaking.

California Mandarins--stems, leaves and all--are in stores now. They're astonishingly delicious.

The membranes of a citrus fruit, for example (those white and translucent skins and stringy bits that surround the fruit segments) are loaded with several phytonutrients called flavonoids.  Examples of such flavonoids found in oranges, for example, include limonoids and hesperidin; both compounds which are currently being investigated for their cholesterol-lowering and blood pressure-lowering effects.  And according to the research scientists at the USDA whom I grilled recently, while it’s true that these compounds do make it into citrus juice, levels tend to be higher in fresh-picked, unprocessed fruits (or fruit juices squeezed at home from fresh fruits)–particularly when you eat the membranes too.  And while we’re on the topic of squeezing your own juice, here’s a fun little citrus fact I picked up from my buddies at the USDA: there’s a compound that occurs naturally in mandarins/satsumas called synephrine, which is the same ingredient you’ll find in many popular cold and allergy  medications (like Sudafed).  So loading up on some mandarins or squeezing yourself some mandarin juice if you find yourself under the weather this cold season is a scientifically-based, natural way to get some relief while getting some fiber and meeting your Vitamin C requirements for the day. Take that, Sudafed!  (Note that synephrine is also the same compound that replaced ephedra in many diet pills under the code name Citrus Aurantium, although there’s no compelling data to suggest it actually helps people lose weight.)

A Caveat about Grapefruit

You may have heard that you should avoid grapefruit or grapefruit juice if you’re taking certain medications, including certain calcium channel blockers (for high blood pressure), statins (for high cholesterol), immunosuppressants and antidepressants.  Not only is this true, but the interaction also occurs with grapefruit-related citrus fruits such as Pomelos and Seville Oranges (otherwise known as Sour Oranges or Bitter Oranges; they’re popular in Hispanic cuisine). There are multiple culprits in these fruits that are responsible for the interaction, including the flavonoid called naringin, which competes with these drugs for the same metabolic pathway in the liver.  Grapefruit wins the competition, which means the drug circulates for longer in the body before being broken down.  This results in potentially dangerous blood levels of the drug and a high risk of adverse effects.

Citrus Salads, Sweet & Savory

There are so many awesome citrus flavor combinations:  Orange and mint.  Grapefruit and fennel.  Orange and beets.  Grapefruit and vanilla.  Orange and almond. It’s really hard to go wrong.  But just to get you started, here are a few of my favorite ways to work through the mounds of wintry citrus love on my kitchen counter:

• Mark Bittman’s easy and visually-arresting Winter Citrus Salad

• Fennel Grapefruit Salad from the queen of content, Oprah.  (You can use gluten-free croutons from Gillian’s or Gluten Free Pantry if you so desire)

• Mâche salad with blood orange, pistachio and pomegranate from Bon Apetit.  (Use arugula if you can’t find mache).

• Grapefruit Vanilla Salad (serves 4):  Combine 2 cups water + 3/4 cup sugar + 1 vanilla bean, split in half lengthwise, in a saucepan.  (Don’t worry, you’re not actually going to be eating all of this sugar…)  Stir over low heat until the sugar dissolves.  Once its dissolved, stop stirring, turn up the heat and boil the syrup for 1 minute.  Turn off the heat and let cool completely.  Remove the vanilla bean and either discard or reserve for garnish.  Pour the syrup in a bowl with 3 lbs of sliced pink grapefruit, mix well, and let marinate in the fridge for at least an hour.  Serve with a slotted spoon.    A great brunch dish.  Works beautifully with a sprinkle of fresh, chopped mint leaves, too.

Tweet This Post

While the universe of food bloggers readies its collective arsenal of chocolate dessert porn in anticipation of Valentine’s Day, I’ve decided to take a fashion risk and pay homage to a red-colored, heart-loving delicacy that gets notably less airtime at this–or any–time of year: Borscht.

Now, if the word ‘Borscht’ conjures up romance-quashing images of hardscrabble nineteenth-century Eastern European peasantry for you, then I’d like to make the case for why this beautiful potage has just as much right to kick off your Valentine’s Day meal as the Red Velvet cupcake has to finish it off.

Of course, if you’ve never heard of Borscht, then I’m delighted to introduce you to this versatile and time-honored beet soup.  You may find it served hot or cold, vegetarian or meaty, Ukranian style or Russian style, clear and magenta or spiked with sour cream to produce an opaque, creamy pink color.  However it’s executed, you can be sure that every self-respecting Borscht-lover will claim that their grandmother’s version is undoubtedly the best.

Borscht is heart-y

Borscht is made with beets, and beets are loaded with nutrients that nourish your heart and support cardiovascular health. (It’s not a coincidence our grandparents lived so long despite their habit of spreading chicken fat (schmaltz) on bread and eating chopped liver by the gallon.)

For starters, beets are an excellent source of folate and a good source of blood-pressure-lowering potassium.  Diets rich in folate-rich foods have been associated with a decreased risk of heart disease in multiple large studies, though researchers are still trying to figure out why.  (Folic acid supplementation has not been shown to have the same effect.  Go figure.)   1 cup of boiled beets contains about 75 calories, 16g of carbohydrate (of which 3.5g are fiber), ~35% of the daily recommended intake of folate, and 15% of the daily value of potassium. (Canned beets lose about 30% of their folate compared to beets you boil yourself, but remain a very good source despite that).

Betacyanins are the purply red pigments that give beets their rich, gorgeous magenta color, and they happen to be powerful antioxidants.  While antioxidants are used throughout the body to help prevent cell damage that can give rise to mutations, animal studies suggest a possible benefit in colon cancer prevention in particular.

Betaine, another compound found naturally in beets, has anti-inflammatory properties. Studies have shown that people with diets rich in foods containing betaine had lower levels of inflammatory markers in their blood–like C-reactive protein and homocysteine–compared to be people with diets low in betaine-rich foods.  These inflammatory markers are associated with an increased risk of heart disease, so it seems that the lower the level, the better.

Borscht is hip

Veselka, the venerable and hip Ukranian diner in NYC’s East Village, features Ukranian Borscht as the very first item on its menu, and reportedly serves 5,000 gallons of it every year.  A photo of the restaurant’s famous borscht adorns the cover of its recently-published cookbook, whose pages feature not one but FOUR separate recipes for their intoxicating magenta brew, including their Famous Borscht, Cold Borscht, White Borscht and Christmas Borscht.  (You can get their famous Borscht recipe here, but vegetarians beware that their version calls for pork butt and beef stock.  Try their Christmas Borscht version for a meatless option, and see below for some cooking tips.)

Borscht is so hip that I suspect its only a matter of time until Bobby Flay challenges Veselka owner Tom Birchard to a Borscht Throwdown.

How to cook and enjoy Beets

While beets can absolutely be eaten raw (usually you’ll find them grated in a salad), you’ll most often encounter them roasted or boiled. Beets cooked from scratch are a thousand times more flavorful than canned beets, and have a much lovelier texture, so if you’ve tried the latter and were unimpressed, you might want to give them another try!  Cooking beets is a cinch, but can be a bit messy.  Here’s how it goes:

If you buy beets still attached to their greens, trim the greens off, leaving about an inch on top. Leaving some of the stem helps keep the healthful pigments from leeching out during cooking.  Save the trimmed portion!  Beet greens are super nutritious and you can chop them up and drop them into any ol’ soup… they’re sort of like swiss chard taste-wise…a bit bitter.)  Just soak them a few times in cold water to remove all of the dirt before cooking.  Wash them if you’re going to boil, but really give them a good scrub if you’re planning on roasting them.  DO NOT PEEL the beet before cooking, or they will bleed more of their nutritious colorful pigments… and make a giant mess.

Nothing says 'I love you' like a bouquet of boiled beets

To boil: Drop trimmed beets into boiling water.  Let them boil until they are soft enough to be pierced easily with a knife, anywhere from 30 to 90 minutes, depending on size.

To roast: Rub clean beets with a little bit of oil (olive or grapeseed works well), wrap well in foil, and place on another foil-lined pan.  (The double-foil will make sure that the sugars from your roasting beet don’t drip onto the pan and burn).  Bake at 325 degrees for 40 minutes to an hour (depending on size).  Your beets are ready when they can be pierced easily with a knife.

To peel cooked beets: peel cooked beets while they are still warm (but cooled off enough to handle.)  Some people like to use gloves for this to avoid staining their hands.  My favorite way to peel a beet is by scraping the sides of the beet with a plain ol’ spoon while standing over the sink… the peel will slide right off and the mess will be contained.  I do it bare-handed ‘cuz that’s just how I roll.

One of my favorite ways to eat beets is cooked, in a composed salad, spiked with some sort of vinegary drizzle (a syrupy balsamic vinegar works great here) to cut the sweetness.  Beets pair beautifully with citrus fruits for a colorful, seasonal salad that injects some gorgeous color into your wintry food wardrobe. Try this classic (and easy) recipe for Beet, Citrus & Mint salad to take advantage of the amazing bounty of winter citrus available right now.

Beet Pee

Don’t be alarmed if, after eating a heaping serving of beets or borscht, your pee is tinted pink or reddish. It’s called “Beeturia” (I swear, I don’t make this stuff up), and it’s totally harmless.  Be forewarned that your number twos might also take on a bit of a rosy hue a day or so after you’ve gone on a beet bender…. once again, totally normal and totally harmless.  Consider it a post-Valentine’s Day treat for your colon.

Now, back to the Borscht

There are countless versions of Borscht.  Russian style tends to have more “stuff” in it: piles of cooked or pickled beets, cabbage and/or potatoes, making for a heartier soup.  Ukranian style tends to be brothier, but often features some meat or a mushroom dumpling or two floating around, which adds some heft. You can approximate the homemade dumpling effortlessly by tossing some store-bought mushroom tortellini or ravioli into your soup.  For a gluten-free version, look forDePuma’s (amazing) gluten-free Wild Mushroom Ravioli, or  Conte’s gluten-free Potato Onion Pierogis. Other common borscht accessories include lima beans, hard boiled eggs, meat, potatoes, or any combination thereof.  All borschts are generally garnished with dill and a dollop of sour cream, which can be swapped out for a fat-free plain, greek-style yogurt seamlessly if you’re looking to keep your borscht on the lighter side.

I made Veselka’s vegetarian Christmas Borscht (pictured to the left, recipe link above) and used the gluten-free Conte’s Pierogis instead of the (homemade, 2+ hour-prep time mushroom-onion dumplings) the recipe called for.  Considering my grandma used to serve store-bought Borscht from a jar, I figured she probably wouldn’t have disapproved of this little shortcut.  It was delicious, and the house smelled amazing while the beets were pickling on the stovetop and the aromatic vegetable broth was simmering.

A multi-culti V-day: Ukranian borscht with Polish pierogis (hidden) and Greek yogurt

However, in case you want to find your own Borscht beshert (that’s Yiddish for ’soul mate’) before committing to the recipe I used, here are some other attractive candidates for you to consider, both vegetarian and non:

Hot Beef Borscht: for the meat and potatoes man…and the woman who loves him.

Russian Borscht: vegetarian; served chilled, with hard boiled eggs.  To cool down after a passionate Valentine’s encounter, perchance?

Hot Borscht recipe styled after the version from the Russian Tea Room of old: A quicker version; uses store-bought beef broth and includes cabbage and tomato.  For nostalgic New York couples who can’t afford the new, $18-a-bowl version offered on the restaurant’s current menu.

Borscht with Beet Greens: for the frugalista and her coupon-clipping man, who love the idea of using every last bit of the beet…greens and all.

Happy Valentine’s Day to you and your Borscht of choice!

Tweet This Post

Gigante beans: Some foods are OK to supersize

If you know not the creamy comfort that is biting into an enormous and aptly-named gigante bean, then it is my mission today to convince you to seek out this elusive packet of leguminous deliciousness.

I’ve gone on about my love for beans–and their nutritional virtues–in the past.  And while many folks profess to like beans well enough, too, they fail to see what inspires my unbridled passion for these little packets of complex-carbohydrate goodness.  After all, the American bean vocabulary tends to be pretty limited: we know garbanzos, kidneys, black beans and cannelinis.  Occasionally we dabble in pintos or black-eyed peas.  But unless it comes in a can, most of us can’t be bothered to expand our bean horizons.

If ever there was a bean to inspire a nation to abandon its lazybean tendencies, however, surely the Gigante (aka: Gigande, Yigante, Hija) must be it. Most popular in Greek cuisine (yes, the same clever people who brought us geometry and democracy have also retained this most delicious of beans in their collective leguminous repertoire), gigante beans boast a divine creamy texture and the ability to maintain their shape after all sorts of cooking.  I decided it was time to start making my own gigantes after the $9.99/lb Antipasto bar at Whole Foods lured me in one time too many with that ridiculously delicious Gigante Bean salad of theirs.  (What kind of person spends $18.98 on an impulse bean purchase?!)  Like all bean varieties, Gigantes are an excellent source of complex carbohydrate, protein, fiber, antioxidants and a good source of iron.

Buying Beans

My new favorite place to buy beans is Purcell Mountain Farms, an Idaho-based farm with an excellent online store.  In addition to having the most reasonable prices for my favorite hard-to-find Gigante beans and Beluga lentils, they offer a surprising variety of organic and heirloom bean varieties with romantic names and fashionable appearances.  If you’re bored to tears with your kidneys and pintos, surely an Eye of the Goat, Jackson Wonder or Mortgage Lifter bean will liven up your winter soups–and spirits–mighty fast.    And if you’ve eschewed standard beans for their dull, lackluster appearances, might I suggest the speckled Dapple Grey variety, or perhaps a melange of Orca, Jacob’s Cattle and Painted Pony beans to match the animal-print napkins at your next dinner party?  There are so many gorgeous, interesting, delicious historic bean varieties to try if you’re willing to venture beyond the supermarket aisles.  And by buying heirloom bean varieties, you’re doing your small part to support environmentally-sound practices that promote biodiversity.  Forget  blue ketchups and animal-shaped nuggets to entice your finnicky kids to eat; let them pick out their own mix of fashion-colored and patterned beans and see if that doesn’t get them engaged in the healthy eating process.

If you are a bean buff and are interested in learning more about the folklore behind the wide, wonderful world of beans–as well as how to prepare them–I strongly recommend Aliza Green’s essential cookbook, Beans, from which I learned, for example, that Gigante beans are a variety of so-called “runner beans” that were brought to America from Greece and Spain.

Cooking beans from scratch

While I resisted it for years, I have come to discover that cooking beans from dry isn’t nearly as annoying as I had thought it would be. If you have the foresight to plan ahead, tomorrow night’s dinner beans into a big bowl of water in a ratio of about 3 cups water per 1 cup beans before you go to bed is the easiest way to prep your beans for a faster cooking time the next day.  And if you’re as Type A as I am, the feeling of accomplishment that comes with multi-tasking overnight will lull you into a happy, albeit geeky, slumber.   This would be the regular soaking method.

The quick-soaking method takes about an hour to an hour and a half.  In this case, you’d put your beans in a large saucepan so that they’re covered with 2 inches of water.  Bring the water to a boil and simmer for 2 minutes.  Then, turn off the heat, cover the pan, and let your beans soak in the water for 60-90 minutes, until tender.  Drain the water and proceed with your recipe.

The #1 rule when cooking any dry bean is to avoid adding acid of any kind with the bean until it is already tender.  Don’t add any vinegar, wine, citrus juice, tomato product or anything else acidic to the cooking water until your beans are nice and soft; otherwise, the acid will prevent your beans from softening no matter how long you cook them.

Gigante Beans: Two Ways

Yigandes Plaki: Loosely translates to "Why, oh why, was I not born to a Greek grandmother?"

I am obsessed with this first recipe for Greek-style Baked Gigante Beans, (aka Yigandes Plaki) which was adapted from Nancy Harmon Jenkins’  The New Mediterranean Diet Cookbook and posted on another food blog.  (Better they should have to deal with the copyright issues than me!)  While I’ll admit that it took forever and a half to make, don’t forget that I live in a freezing house and am all for any recipe that involves keeping the oven on for long periods of time.  (If you pre-soak your beans overnight, the first 40-50 minute bean simmering step can be cut in half.)  It strikes me that this recipe would be perfectly suited for a slow-cooker, but since I have yet to figure out how to use the slow-cooker I got for my wedding, I will defer to any ambitious crock-pot enthusiasts out there to adapt this recipe on our behalf and post their findings in the comments section.)  Since I didn’t have fresh herbs, I used a bunch of dry ones (including basil and oregano), which resulted in a final product that, in addition to being mouth-meltingly creamy, gave a similar flavor effect to lasagna…in the best possible way.  In fact, I would recommend serving it like you would lasagna; accompanied by a nice garlicky side dish of broccoli rabe or sauteed bitter greens to counteract the sweetness and bring some green to the plate.  It is absolutely delicious.  If your children don’t like this recipe, then send them back for a refund.

Another easy way to serve gigantes is as a room temperature bean salad appetizer.  Gigantes are commonly featured among the mezze in Greece, and a salad is a perfect way to pay homage to this civilized bean.  Mark Bittman offers an easy-to-follow formula for a Greek-style gigante bean salad in his modern kitchen staple, How to Cook Everything Vegetarian.

Of course, to replicate the Whole Foods Antipasto version that I’m so addicted to, here’s the closest recipe approximation I could come up with, reconstructed from the posted ingredient list on their salad bar signage:

Recipe: Tamara’s Whole Foods Gigante Bean Salad Knockoff

• Cook 1/2 lb of gigante beans per the cooking instructions above
• Roast 1 small red pepper and 1 small green pepper over open flame (your gas burner will do just fine).  Peel their skins off and slice peppers into super-thin strips.
• Mix cooked beans with 1/4 cup apple cider vinegar, 2 TBSP olive oil, 1 TBSP fresh chopped parsley, 1/2 cup (or more, to taste) or roasted pepper strips, 1-2 minced garlic cloves and salt to taste.
• Let salad marinate in fridge for several hours so flavors can blend.
• Serve at room temperature.

Tweet This Post

I’ll admit that I do a fair amount of eavesdropping when exposed to public conversations about food.  I can’t help it.  It’s hard enough to resist taking a visual inventory of your shopping cart contents when you’re standing in front of me in line at the supermarket, so please cut me some slack.  Besides, if not for my auditory curiosity, I wouldn’t have come to learn just how highly the eating public seems to regard Agave Nectar.

This relative newcomer to the mainstream supermarket has earned itself a reputation as a low-glycemic sweetener that many believe to be safe for diabetics or healthier than sugar. Given these widespread perceptions, I thought it prudent to do a little bit of nutritional truth-seeking, to help my sweet-toothed readers understand what Agave Nectar really is: benefits and drawbacks alike.

What Agave Nectar is…and isn’t

Despite what the name might lead you to believe, Agave Nectar in its ready-to-use form doesn’t actually exist in nature.  In other words, you couldn’t just put a spigot in an agave plant and expect some sort of sweet, golden liquid to start pouring out of it like sap from a maple tree.  Whether it’s labeled “raw” or not, Agave Nectar is a man-made sweetener derived from Mexican agave plants that must undergo several processing steps to produce the end product.  The pulp is macerated to produce a juice that is filtered to varying degrees and then must be heated to break down the starch into its sugary components that make it taste sweet.  (It can also be enzymatically-treated to create the same effect.)  The less filtered the nectar, the darker it will be and the more minerals (like calcium, iron, potassium and magnesium) it will retain.

Because the agave plant’s natural starches are largely composed of long chains of fructose (a monosaccharide, or single unit sugar), the resulting syrup that is produced when this starch breaks down will also contain a relatively high degree of fructose.  Unlike other monosaccharides (namely, glucose/dextrose), fructose must first be metabolized by our liver to produce usable energy rather than being immediately absorbed into the bloodstream and available for use.  As a result, fructose does not raise blood sugar to the same extent that glucose does, and can thus be said to have a lower-glycemic effect.  This is why many people believe that Agave nectar is safer for diabetics than other sweeteners.

The first catch, however, is that you have no idea how much fructose is actually in that Agave nectar you bought. While available information would suggest that Agave nectar routinely contains 90% fructose, in fact some products have been shown to contain only 55%, and most commercially available products appear to fall in the 70-80% range.  (The ratio of fructose to glucose will vary by the species of agave plant used, the processing method and whether anything is added to the agave nectar.)  Just by way of comparison, plain old table sugar is about 50% fructose.  And High Fructose Corn Syrup (HFCS) is usually 55% , too.  Which means that some brands of Agave nectar may have no different an effect on your blood sugar than plain old white sugar or HFCS.  Unless you verify the amount of fructose or the glycemic index of the particular brand of Agave nectar you buy, you cannot assume that it’s any safer for diabetics than any other caloric sweetener. Not all products are 100% agave nectar, and some brands have been reported to mix in corn syrup (glucose) or other ingredients to their agave products.  I should also mention that there have been no clinical trials investigating the glycemic effect of Agave Nectar in subjects who actually have diabetes that I’m aware of, so I would emphasize that caution is key when your blood sugar control is at stake.

The second catch, of course, is that we rarely eat our sweeteners alone. The ACTUAL blood sugar effect of a food will depend on the rest of the meal eaten with that food.  Protein, fat and fiber all moderate the impact of carbohydrates on our blood sugar.  The amount we eat of a food will also impact its effect on our blood sugar, and a larger portion of a “low-glycemic food” could easily produce a higher spike in blood sugar than a smaller portion of a “medium glycemic food” like table sugar.  The only way to truly know how swapping out your current sweetener or adding agave nectar to a typical meal will affect your individual blood sugar is to actually test your blood sugar before and two hours after the meal.

Is Agave Nectar Low-GI?

Caveats aside, the glycemic index can still be a useful tool when comparing foods to one another. And so a little bit of poking around online

Glycemic index of Agave Nectars varies widely by brand

yielded the following Glycemic Index information on some leading Agave Nectar products from the manufacturer’s web sites. I have not independently verified any of these claims.  Note that to be considered “low glycemic,”  a product must produce an indexed blood sugar response of 55 or less when compared to a standard (pure glucose=100).  By way of comparison, table sugar–which, if you’ll recall, is half fructose– has a glycemic index that ranges from 58-65 (it varies depending on the source of the sugar), rendering it a “medium glycemic” product.

• Wholesome Sweeteners Organic Blue Agave: 75% fructose and 20% glucose.  Claims a glycemic index of 39 or less.
• Madhava: The manufacturer’s website claims that their product’s glycemic index “measures in the range of 32.”  (It strikes me that 32 isn’t so much a ‘range’ as a single data point, and I’d be interested to know whether the aforementioned range has a higher end…?)
• Nekulti agave nectar: claims a GI range of 34-38
• Volcanic Nectar Blue Agave: This is the only agave product I have come across that is verified by a 3rd party agency, the Glycemic Research Institute, to be a low-glycemic product.  It clocked in at a 27.
• Sweet Cactus Farms: GI of 19, as listed in the University of Sydney’s generally reliable GI Database.

As you can see, there is some pretty wide variation in the reported glycemic indeces of available products, but several options that appear to fit the low-glycemic bill nonetheless.

Is fructose even a good thing?

There is an irony about our collective embrace of Agave Nectar as we simultaneously demonize its metaphysical twin, High Fructose Corn Syrup.  Which is: the very characteristic of HFCS that leading critics argue to be responsible for its obesity-promoting qualities–namely, its fructose content– is precisely the characteristic that Agave-lovers are drawn to about Agave.  So which is it?  Is fructose evil and fat-promoting, or is it wholesome and health-promoting?

The answer is neither.  And both.

The scientific literature shows that people on experimental diets which are unnaturally high in fructose (from any source) have significantly increased levels of triglycerides (a risk factor for heart disease for which diabetics are especially susceptible) and increased production of fat in the liver (fatty liver).  (The experimental doses were usually 2-3x higher than the typical fructose intake in even a crappy American diet).  At lower doses, drinking fructose before a meal has been shown repeatedly to be associated with consuming more overall calories when compared to people who drink glucose (or a sweet, diet drink) instead.  (Our brains do not register fructose like they do glucose, so eating fructose doesn’t trigger the hormonal signals that tell us we’re satisfied in the same way that eating glucose does.)

In other words, a high fructose diet is not a good thing for anyone.  But fructose from any source in SMALL amounts--whether from table sugar, HFCS, fruit juice, Agave or honey– will not contribute significantly to an increase in fat accumulation in your liver or your blood, nor is it likely to be much better or worse than an alternative. A drizzle of honey on your yogurt, a sugar cube in your coffee once a day, a favorite salad dressing or ketchup that contains HFCS, some agave nectar on your pancakes… these are not things to sweat about in the context of a generally healthy diet.  And if you are diabetic, replacing table sugar, maple syrup or honey with a higher-fructose alternative (in small amounts) could possibly–but not definitely–help to moderate your blood sugar spikes.

But when it comes to drinking your sugar– whether that beverage of yours is sweetened with HFCS, 100% sugar, honey or Agave nectar– your brain is not going to register these calories in its internal calculus of whether it’s gotten enough energy to satisfy its needs, and you are not likely to compensate for those extra calories by eating less.  So drinking your sugar in any form is not a habit I’d recommend getting into, and none of these sweeteners are shown to be any better or worse than the others when it comes to sweetened beverages.

To Agave or not to Agave?

Buyer beware: Agave-sweetened products don't necessarily have less carbohydrate or fewer calories than conventionally-sweetened versions.

As you can see, I’m not quite convinced that Agave nectar is all that much healthier than sugar, HFCS or honey.  It has the same number of calories as these alternatives (16 per teaspoon) and it’s not necessarily going to produce lower blood sugars when consumed in the context of a typical diet.

Having said that, there are a few cases I can envision in which Agave could be a better alternative to other sweeteners.

1. As a honey replacement for vegans
2. As a sugar substitute in baking… IF you take advantage of agave’s sweeter taste to reduce the total amount of sugar in the recipe.

Guidelines for replacing sugar with agave vary from conservative to aggressive.  The more sugar you take out, of course, the healthier the end product will be, so I’d encourage pushing the envelope with your favorite recipes to see how they hold up to the swap-out.

The most conservative guidelines I’ve seen recommend a 25% reduction in sugar when using agave, or 3/4 cup agave nectar for each 1 cup of sugar that the recipe calls for.  When doing this, they also recommend removing 1/3 of the liquid in the recipe and reducing the oven temperature by 25 degrees.

Karina Allrich, the Gluten Free Goddess, however, takes it further.  She recommends to use 1/3 to 1/2 cup agave nectar for each 1 cup of sugar that a recipe calls for, and reducing the liquid by just 3 TBSP to compensate.  If this formula works for your recipes, you’ll save at least 72g of carbohydrate and 290 calories in the entire recipe.  That’s non-trivial.

Some food manufacturers are taking advantage of agave’s sweeter taste to reduce the total sugar and calories in their food products, but others are taking advantage of your unconditional love of agave to sell you expensive, agave-sweetened products that have no fewer calories and no less sugar than the original.  You should always read the label and compare.

Tweet This Post

A sweet potato pie that comes in both naughty (with crust) or nice (sans crust) versions.

These frigid days, I find myself seeking out excuses to keep the oven on in the kitchen to help warm up the ground floor of our chilly little house. And thus was the idea born to bake a Sweet Potato Pie, which would entail baking the sweet potatoes for a blessed hour, and then baking the assembled pie for another glorious 60 minutes. If your home has better climate control than mine and you need a different excuse to bake yourself a pie, perhaps you can make it in honor of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s birthday.  Admittedly, by all accounts, his favorite pie was actually pecan. But if he were still alive today, he’d be 81 years old and probably watching his sugar and fat intake. And being a reasonable man, surely he would have enjoyed a marginally less sinful, Vitamin A-rich wedge of Sweet Potato Pie just as much.

Having resolved to bake myself a pie, there was, of course, the matter of the crust. I’d suffered through enough of those godawful frozen gluten-free pie crusts from Thanksgiving. And I couldn’t bear the thought of playing around with a sticky rice-flour dough only to be disappointed. So I decided to experiment with my own version of a graham cracker crumb crust made with what I suspected would be a perfect substitute: Puffins cereal, pulsed through the food processor. I used the Honey Rice variety since it’s gluten-free, but the recipe below should work with your Puffin flavor of choice. If you are more virtuous than I was, however, and would prefer to go crust-free, feel free to bake this pie as a souffle-cake of sorts in a well-lubed springform pan. It will still be delicious, and leaving out the crust transforms this indulgent pie into a healthy, sensible dessert with almost half the calories and some very redeeming nutritional qualities (see below for the stats).

One last matter I’d like to clear up before the root vegetable police pounce on me about the whole sweet potato/yam issue. The bright orange root vegetables we tend to refer to as ‘yams’ in this country are almost always the so-called “soft” variety of sweet potato. (True yams, botanically speaking, come from Africa or the Caribbean, and are not related to sweet potatoes.  They are much starchier and lack the same levels of Vitamin A; see the description of Ñame from my previous post on Caribbean root vegetables to see the difference).   There are also “firm” sweet potatoes, which have a paler yellow flesh and bake up to be drier than the moist, soft, orangey soft sweet potato we call yams.  I used jewel yam sweet potatoes in this recipe–can you get over that gorgeous color?–to create the perfect soft, souffle-like filling.

Recipe: Tamara’s Sweet Potato Pie

Serves 8

For the (optional) crust:

1 and 2/3 cups of Puffin crumbs (will require about 3.5-4 cups of Puffins cereal pulsed in your food processor).  For gluten-free, use the Honey Rice or Multigrain Puffin cereal variety.

6 TBSP (organic) unsalted butter, melted

1/4 cup (organic) sugar

Preheat oven to 350 degrees.  Blend all ingredients in a bowl until well-combined.  Dump mixture into a 9″ pie pan and press it with your hands to cover the bottom and sides of pan evenly.  Bake for 7-9 minutes until set.  Remove from oven and cool before filling.

For the Sweet Potato filling:

2 to 2 1/4 lbs. sweet potatoes (”yams”), scrubbed clean.

3 large eggs

3/4 cup (organic) light brown sugar

2 TBSP (organic) unsalted butter, melted

1/2 tsp nutmeg

1/2 tsp cinnamon

1/2 tsp salt

2 TBSP rum

1. Bake the sweet potatoes: pierce them with a fork several times, place on a baking sheet and bake at 400 degrees for 45 minutes to an hour until nice and soft all the way through.
2. Split open the baked sweet potatoes and scoop out the orange flesh into a large mixing bowl.  (It should easily peel away from the skin).
3. Add the eggs, brown sugar, melted butter, nutmeg, cinnamon, salt and rum to the sweet potato flesh.  Mix all together using a large fork until ingredients well combined, but so that sweet potato flesh still remains somewhat textured and fibrous.  (Don’t beat it into a super-smooth filling… the somewhat lumpier texture is what makes a sweet potato pie so different than a silky pumpkin pie and gives it a characteristic heartiness.)
4. If you are using a crust, pour filling into crust.  If you are making a crustless souffle-custard-cake, pour mixture into a well-greased 9″ springform pan.
5. Bake for 60-75 minutes at 350 degrees.  The pie is ready when the filling is nice and firm and a knife inserted into the center comes out clean.

Approximate nutrition information per serving (assumes 8 servings):

With Puffin crust: 390 calories, 62g carbohydrate (5 diabetic exchanges…which will certainly blow your entire meal’s budget) of which 4g are fiber, 5g protein, 14g fat, and >100% of the recommended daily intake of Vitamin A for adults

Without crust: 215 calories, 40g carbohydrate (3 diabetic exchanges) of which 3g are fiber, 4g protein, 5g fat and >100% of the recommended daily intake of Vitamin A for adults

Tweet This Post

Introducing the Burgeriest (soy-free, gluten-free, vegan) homemade Veggie Burger

For some time, friends and readers have been asking me to share a recipe for a good, easy to make, homemade veggie burger.  And so my New Year’s Resolution this year was to make good on my promises to do so. (Besides, it’s a heck of a lot easier than losing weight.)

As it turns out, there’s a lot of dissatisfaction out there with the available options.  Most commercial offerings have gluten or soy; ingredients which many people avoid by choice or necessity.  And most recipes for homemade versions are incredibly time-consuming, multi-step ordeals; I still have nightmares about the 2-hour Shutter’s veggie burger project I took on two summers ago that involved cooking brown rice from scratch (45 minutes), cooking beets from scratch (1 hour), and mixing them with a laundry list of hard-to-find-GF-versions-of  pantry items* to produce a delicious but exhausting veggie burger.  Then there was that Martha Stewart Chickpea burger that tasted suspiciously similar to falafel.  (Tasty…but if I had wanted falafel, I would have just made falafel…).  I had all but given up on finding a tasty, easy homemade burgery veggie burger until the most recent article in a recent New York Times series on the safety (or lack thereof) of ground beef sold in America provided the second wind I needed to find a delicious, easy, healthful ground beefless recipe for my dear readers to make at home.

Resolved: Eat Less Red Meat in 2010

Even if you’re not a vegetarian, swapping out a beefy burger for a meatless one every so often will do you good– and help you make good on those New Year’s Resolutions to start eating more healthily.  In a landmark study of over 550,000 people aged 50-71 years (that’s crazy huge, by the way) by Sinha et al published in March, 2009 in the Archives of Internal Medicine, researchers followed subjects for 10 years to determine how various dietary factors contributed to mortality. They controlled for all sorts of factors, including race, smoking, alcohol use, weight, exercise habits, vitamin use and multiple dietary habits.  And they found that men and women who ate more red meat were  31% and 36%, respectively, more likely to die for any reason during the 10 year period when compared to people to ate the least red meat. Cancer was the leading cause of mortality, followed by cardiovascular disease.  On average, the group with the lowest red meat consumption ate only about 1/3 of an ounce per 1,000 calories in their diet, compared with the highest meat consumption group, which ate about 2.5 oz red meat per 1,000 calories in their diet.  In other words, in a typical 2,000 calorie diet, the lowest-risk group ate less than 1 oz red meat per day on average (~4.5 oz per week), versus the highest risk group who ate about 5oz per day (~17 oz per week).  The results were statistically significant for trend, meaning that even reducing red meat consumption somewhat from the highest level (without going as low as the lowest-intake level) was still associated with a reduced risk of death.

The bottom line: swapping out one average beef burger a week with a meatless version brings you 3-6oz closer to the group whose dietary habits have been associated with the lowest risk of death within 10 years. And what better New Year’s Resolution than to live past New Year’s 2020?

The Best Homemade Veggie Burger Recipe

And so, after countless veggie burger experiments, spanning several years and multiple genres, I’m pleased to point you in the direction of Mollie Katzen’s Lentil-Walnut Burger. I know what you’re thinking when you hear “lentil-walnut.”  You’re thinking about long-

Two Lentil Walnut burgers on a (gluten-free) bun

haired tree huggers.  70’s style health food stores that smell like vitamins. Hemp, bean sprouts and Birkenstocks.   But do try to keep an open mind.  Mollie loves food, and she knows food.  As such, this burger tastes nothing of lentils or walnuts; it’s greater than the sum of its parts.  The batter has a similar texture and appearance to ground beef–it looks like a beef burger when cooking and when cooked.  Not in the creepy Boca Burger way, but in a ‘it definitely feels burgery rather than bean-pattyish’ way.   The burgers have that same savory, umami flavor profile of a beef burger–delivered by the cider vinegar and mushrooms?–rather than the more bean-and-vegetably flavor typical of a veggie burger.  And you can make the whole batter in the time it takes to cook lentils: 30 minutes flat.  (If I may offer a tip: mash the cooked lentils with your hands–squeeze ‘em real good until they’re totally mush.  It helps make a very coherent batter.) So give this tie-dyed, hippie burger a chance, will you?

To make Mollie’s recipe gluten-free you have several options instead of the bread crumbs/wheat germ/oats she calls for:

1. Use gluten free breadcrumbs, like Gillian’s, Hol-Grain, or Glutino
2. Use gluten-free oats, like Bob’s Red Mill
3. Use the Quinoa Flakes you have leftover from making my gluten-free Quatzoh Balls (of course this will make the recipe more hippie than it is already)
   
4. Make your own gluten-free breadcrumbs by toasting your favorite frozen gluten-free waffle and tossing it in a food processor (Click here for instructions from the clever gluten-free goddess who came up with this nifty idea

Approximate nutrition info per burger (assumes each recipe makes 6 burgers and you use 1 TBSP of oil to cook the burgers in a non-stick pan.  Excludes bun.):  250 calories, 29g carbohydrate–of which 10 huge grams are fiber (so, a net of 19g of carbohydrate–or one and a half diabetic exchanges), 11g protein, 12g (heart-healthy, unsaturated) fat, and 3.8mg iron (~20% of the daily value of 18mg).  Serve with ketchup and a slice of tomato to help absorb the iron from the beans and spinach.

** If I haven’t scared you away from the Shutter’s recipe and you’re up for the challenge, you can substitute Wheat-free Tamari sauce for the soy sauce.  Premier Japan makes a gluten-free Hoisin sauce.  And use any of the bread-crumb-replacement strategies listed above in place of the oat bran or wheat germ she calls for.  And for goodness sake, use canned beets instead of roasting your own fresh ones as I foolishly did and you can redeem that extra hour of your life to play Rhythm Kung Fu on the Wii Fit Plus you got for Christmas.

Tweet This Post

Curry leaves: If you can't find them, why not grow your own?

I’ve got a bit of cabin fever this holiday season.  Between yesterday’s all-day rain-athon, the gray, dreary weather last week, and having to work on Thanksgiving, Christmas eve and Christmas day, I’ve been dreaming of getting away.  Alas, since there are no vacation days in my future, I decided to create a faux getaway by visiting Newark Avenue near Journal Square in Jersey City, a veritable slice of India right in my own backyard.  Granted, it’s not the most picturesque of neighborhoods.  But it boasts a half dozen “cash and carry” markets where the offering of vegetables, herbs, beans and pantry items capture the imagination… and inspire me to cook dishes that make my house smell wholly unfamiliar.  The perfect cure for cabin fever.

I scored a bag full of goodies to fuel a week’s worth of cooking experiments, but the fresh bag of curry leaves I bought for a mere $0.50 turned out to be the magic ingredient I needed to transform a pantry of mundane, workaday foods into Iddiyappam: a bright, unusual accompaniment to the aromatic lentil dal (stew) Alex was working on.

Curry leaves bear no relation to the spice we know as curry powder.  (In fact, curry powder isn’t actually a spice so much as a blend of multiple spices that vary by brand.)  Curry leaves are narrow, edible, green leaves grown on (what else?) curry trees–also known as Kari trees– and are sold fresh on the branch.  They smell nothing like curry the spice, nor do they taste anything like curry the spice.  To me, they smell a little bit nutty, but others describe the aroma as bell-pepperish or citrusy.  To unlock their distinctive flavor, you just fry them in some oil; this process unlocks their alchemistic ability to transform a dish beyond the mere sum of its parts.  (If you’ve ever fried sage leaves, you’ll understand what I’m talking about here.)  I don’t recommend leaving them out of a dish that calls for them.

If you are lucky enough to live near an Indian market–or a specialty grocery that carries fresh curry leaves (you may seem them sold as “meetha neem” or “kadhi patta”)–buy them. Alternatively, if you love Indian food and live in a temperate climate– California comes to mind– why not consider planting yourself a curry leaf plant? The species name is Murraya Koenigii, and you can order one online from a variety of sources.  According to Carol Selva Rajah, the Sydney-based co-author of The Food of India (Murdoch Books, 2002), her outdoor curry plants have grown to over six feet tall (!) in sunny Sydney.  (However, you can grow more modestly-sized plants potted indoors).  Just think of all the great produce you could barter with your neighbors with that many curry leaves!  Note that dried leaves have nowhere near the flavor or aroma as fresh leaves, so if you find some fresh ones, it’s best to freeze any extras for a rainy day and thaw them when needed.

So once you’ve scored yourself some leaves, you can try frying them in a bit of oil before starting your favorite curry recipe (especially fish) and then proceed as usual; they’ll add a surprising bit of depth and complexity. You can use them as a garnish to mulligatawny (or any lentil) soup, as Carol suggests.   Or you can use them to try out the Iddiyapam recipe that brightened up my dreary weekend; it’s a Southern Indian rice noodle based dish that makes an interesting substitute for plain old rice alongside a more strongly-flavored sauce or stew.  With Carol’s permission, I offer you her recipe–adapted only to reduce the oil slightly for my calorie-conscious readers.  (I assure you, it’s no worse for it.)  I recommend getting a big pot of water boiling at the outset and cooking the eggs while the rice noodles are busy soaking.  After 10 minutes, scoop the eggs out with a slotted spoon and keep the boiling water going for the rice noodles.

Iddiyapam: Easier to make than to pronounce

Recipe: Iddiyappam (adapted everso slightly and reprinted with permission from Carol Selva Rajah)

Serves 6

8 oz rice vermicelli (look for these in the Asian section of any supermarket)

2 TBSP oil

1/3 cup cashew nuts

1/2 onion, chopped

3 eggs

1 cup frozen peas, thawed

10 curry leaves

2 carrots, grated

2 leeks, finely shredded

1 red pepper, diced

2 TBSP ketchup

1 TBSP soy sauce (to make it gluten-free, use wheat-free Tamari sauce instead)

1 tsp salt

1. Soak the rice vermicelli in cold water for 30 minutes
2. Meanwhile, get a pot of water boiling and cook the eggs for 10 minutes to hard boil, the remove with a slotted spoon and cool in cold water.  When cold, peel them and cut into wedges.
3. Drain vermicelli and put them in the pot of boiling water.  Remove from the heat and leave in the pan for 3 minutes.  Drain and rinse in cold water.
4. Heat 1 TBSP oil in a non-stick frying pan and fry the cashews until golden.  (Note: don’t be tempted to toast them without oil to save calories; frying them in oil results in a ridiculously delicious effect)
5. Remove cashews from pan, add the onion to pan, fry until dark golden, then remove from pan and set aside.
6. Heat the remaining 1 TBSP oil in the frying pan and briefly fry the curry leaves.  Add the carrot, leeks and red pepper and stir for 1 minute.  Add the ketchup, soy sauce/tamari , salt and vermicelli, stirring constantly to prevent the noodles from sticking to pan.
7. Serve on a platter and garnish with the peas, cashews, fried onion and egg slices.

Approximate nutrition info per serving (assumes 6 servings per recipe): 300 calories, 44g carbohydrate of which 3g are fiber (total 3 diabetic exchanges), 8g protein, 10g fat.

Tweet This Post

Hope Santa's got some Cod Liver Oil for us in that sleigh

Monday, December 21st is the Winter Solstice: the shortest day of the year.  What better occasion, then, to issue a wake-up call to my dear readers that you are all most likely deficient (or insufficient) in Vitamin D, the so-called “sunshine vitamin”?  (So much for spreading holiday cheer, huh?)

It’s not your fault, really.  As I’ve written previously, Vitamin D was never supposed to be a dietary vitamin at all.  It’s a hormone that our bodies manufacture from a cholesterol-derived precursor that lives in our skin and gets activated by the sun’s UVB rays.  For millennia of human existence, this system worked pretty well: minimally-clothed people spent long days outside working, hunting and gathering, making loads of D in their skin and storing the excess in their fat cells for the winter months.  Humans who wound up in sunlight-deprived places like Alaska or Scandinavia compensated by evolving into a diet rich in fatty fish–one of the only good naturally-occurring food sources of D, since these fish consume algae that manufacture D from the sun’s UV rays (remember photosynthesis?), and wind up storing it in their fat.  Fast-forward to our modern lifestyles: more time spent indoors, limited outdoor time spent in smoggy cities with tall, sun-blocking buildings, sunscreens, clothing, fortified foods that don’t contain the advertised levels of Vitamin D and a recommended daily value that most experts agree is entirely too low… and lo and behold, we find ourselves in an epidemic of Vitamin D deficiency.

Recent government data from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) confirms my own unscientific observations that most of us have insufficient Vitamin D status.  Not a single person I’ve encountered in the past year who had their Vitamin D levels checked–from infants in the hospital I work at to my 30-something year old colleagues to our parents and their 60+ year old friends  — has been Vitamin D sufficient.  The most recent NHANES data I’ve come across, reported in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition (2008) suggests that about 77% of all American adults are Vitamin D insufficient by currently emerging standards… and an astounding 90% of Mexican Americans and 97% of African Americans are insufficient.  A large study published this past September the journal Pediatrics suggests that prevalence of Vitamin D insufficiency is about 60% in young people aged 1-21.

In other words, unless you are a Caucasian sun-worshipper living in Miami, I’d be willing to bet that you, too, are Vitamin D insufficient.

Why D matters

The association between Vitamin D and rickets– the poor bone mineralization that causes bowed legs and other skeletal deformities in children– is long-established and well-known.  But in the past few decades, evidence has been mounting that points to a crucial role for Vitamin D in a host of other, unrelated health conditions.  Insufficient Vitamin D levels have been associated with an increased prevalence of diabetes, hypertension (high blood pressure) and digestive system cancers (especially esophageal, oral/pharyngeal, colon and pancreatic ).  Poorer vitamin D status has also been associated with higher rates of autoimmune diseases like Type I diabetes, MS, rheumatoid arthritis and Inflammatory Bowel Diseases. (While I haven’t come across any associations specifically to Celiac Disease prevalence and Vitamin D status in the scientific literature, given the autoimmune nature of celiac and its genetic relation to Type I diabetes, its a biologically plausible connection.)  A very recent study published in the Journal of the American Society of Nephrology attributed the increased prevalence of end-stage kidney disease in black men versus white men to the higher prevalence of vitamin D deficiency in black men.

D for Immunity

For immunity, think herring.

I find it curious that so many Americans are obsessed with Vitamin C and its immunity-enhancing benefits.  On average, healthy American adults and children easily meet the daily recommended Vitamin C intake from diet alone (which is 60mg for adults, though smokers will have higher needs of closer to 100mg), and the maximum body pool of vitamin C is associated with daily doses of ~100mg (in adult males).  In other words, given the relatively low turnover of vitamin C in our bodies, daily intake of 100mg/day will saturate your cells and blood with all the vitamin C they can carry (1,500mg total), and all they need to optimize the vitamin C-associated functions they perform, including maximizing your white blood cell response to infectious agents.  Doses beyond 100mg/day are essentially pointless from a nutritional standpoint, and those megadoses of Vitamin C aren’t going to do much beyond filling your pee with vitamin C or give you a mild case of diarrhea.

If you’re serious about optimizing your immune system’s function and are hell-bent on popping a pill to do so, I’d suggest you replace your Vitamin C supplement stash with a Vitamin D one.  Vitamin D is metabolized by our macrophages–the white blood cells that engulf and destroy pathogenic invaders (including cells infected with flu viruses, by the way) that don’t belong there.  Vitamin D induces macrophages to produce one of the proteins responsible for the destruction of these infective agents, so being Vitamin D sufficient is an important condition to supporting the effectiveness of this important immune defense… particularly in sunshine-deprived cold and flu season.  Since most of us do have sufficient Vitamin C levels and don’t have sufficient vitamin D levels, taking a Vitamin D supplement is more likely to enhance our immune system’s strength than taking a Vitamin C supplement.

Get your D

We Vitamin D crusaders are eagerly awaiting a report from the Institute of Medicine in May, 2010 that will contain their committee’s recommendations regarding a possible increase in the current dietary reference intake for Vitamin D– as well as possible increases in the safe upper limit daily dose.  Until that safe upper limit is officially increased, food manufacturers aren’t likely to fortify our milk and cereals with levels high enough to make a difference in our collective Vitamin D status.  Currently, the officially-sanctioned safe upper limit for people over age 1 is 2,000 IU per day. (Your multivitamin or Calcium supplement probably contains somewhere between 100-400 IU/day.)

If you don’t know your Vitamin D status but are concerned about preventing a deficiency, I’d suggest taking 1,000-2,000 IU of supplemental Vitamin D3 per day right off the bat.  (At least in the non-summer months).  If you’re pregnant, I’d suggest starting at 2,000 IU/day, having your Vitamin D levels tested and working with your doctor on a dose that will bring you up to sufficient levels if need be; your needs may turn out to be higher and require a prescription-strength dose to meet them.  If you happen to get tested for Vitamin D and are found to be overtly clinically deficient, your doctor is likely to put you on a prescription-strength repletion protocol to bring your blood levels up to snuff; it usually involves doses from 10,000-50,000 IU for a short period of time, and is then tapered down to maintenance doses of 2,000-6,000 IU/day.

Canned fish, like salmon, mackerel and sardines, are among the best dietary sources of Vitamin D

Of course, maximizing the Vitamin D in your diet will also help.  While surveys have shown that the actual amount of Vitamin D found in fortified dairy is significantly less than what the labels claim (I’ll add this to my list of grievances against the U.S. dairy industry), fortified milk (or your favorite dairy-free milk analogue) is still among the most convenient food sources of Vitamin D. Since Vitamin D is a fat-soluble vitamin–meaning that your intestines absorb it only in the presence of some dietary fat– skim milk isn’t going to do the trick unless you’re having it as part of a meal with some other source of fat.  Go on…switching to 1% milk in your breakfast cereal or latte isn’t going to kill you; for each cup, it’s a 20 calorie difference from skim milk, but those extra 2g of fat will help you absorb the D.  (And ordering your tall, double no-whip latte only ‘half-skinny’ will add another element of snootiness to your custom coffee creation at Starbucks.  Fun!)

Other good food sources of Vitamin D include:

• canned salmon (3oz of canned sockeye salmon contains ~675 IU; your typical farmed salmon fillet will have about half or less due to the lack of algae in the fish’s diet.  Wild sockeye used in canned salmon is among the more sustainable seafood choices available.)
• cod liver oil (1 tsp contains 450 IU.  Grandma knew best!)
• mackerel (3oz of cooked mackerel contains ~390 IU, and Spanish Mackerel is among the more sustainable seafood options currently available)
• herring (3oz of cooked Atlantic herring contains ~180 IU, and is another good choice from a sustainability perspective)
• sardines (3oz of canned sardines contain ~165 IU, and are an excellent choice from a sustainability perspective)
• canned tuna (3oz contains ~150 IU)
• fortified breakfast cereals (check the label, as it will vary by brand, but most contain 10-25% of the current daily value per serving, or about 40-100 IU)
• vitamin D-fortified orange juice (100 IU per 8oz)
• dairy products made with Vitamin D fortified milk (e.g., yogurt.  Typically, one 6oz container contains 80 IU)
• dried shiitake mushrooms (you can, of course, reconstitute them and still get the D.  But its the drying process that activates the D, so fresh shiitakes will not contain the same levels.  My calculations suggest that 1 cup of rehydrated shiitakes (0.5oz, or 3/4 cup, dry) contains about 130 IU of Vitamin D.

Tweet This Post

Dear Santa (and by “Santa” I mean food manufacturers and marketers):

Below is my wish list of products I wish you’d develop and market.  Instead of filling supermarket shelves with more crap we don’t need, won’t you please make any of these useful products and put them in our collective stockings?

Readers: I hereby invite you to add to this wish-list by submitting your comments below!

• Lactose-free, (organic) cow’s milk yogurt:  The #1 search term that brings people to my blog, hands down, is “lactose-free yogurt.”  There is a huge need for it in the marketplace, and the only company that had been marketing such a product, True Yogurt, has recently disappeared from supermarket shelves due to the loss of their production facilities.  I hope they will re-appear in the not-too-distant future, but their absence calls attention to this massive gap in the over-assorted yogurt aisle.  Instead of launching more so-called “functional yogurts” with bogus, unsubstantiated health claims about immunity, heart health and digestive health, won’t someone just make a plain ol’ lactose-free cow’s milk yogurt? Not a highly-processed soy yogurt.   Not a highly-processed rice milk yogurt.  Just a natural, just-sweet-enough yogurt made with lowfat lactose-free milk and no processed crap, preferably made with hormone-free, organic milk.  At the risk of being called greedy, I’d order up a lactose-free Greek Yogurt variety, too.

• Individual packets of wheat-free Tamari sauce: If these babies existed, I’d keep them in my purse (just like my mom keeps Sweet & Low in her wallet) and feel at liberty to join my friends for sushi whenever I pleased.   If they were reduced sodium, all the better.  Of course, if enlightened Asian restaurants across the country started offering these on the table for us wheat-free customers, that’d be swell, too.

• Mini cans of LITE coconut milk:  A few food companies have finally caught on that very few of us ever use a 14.5 oz can of coconut milk at a time, and are tired of seeing the leftovers grow moldy in the fridge within a few days.  The resulting 5.6 oz can is a welcome addition to the supermarket, and given the price premium per ounce that marketers are charging, would seem to be a profitable item for manufacturers as well.  Unfortunately, these baby cans are as yet only available in full-fat coconut milk, which I am loathe to use for its whopping saturated fat and calorie content.  Won’t someone please start selling LITE coconut milk in the 5.6oz can?

• Whole grain, gluten-free cereal fortified with iron, B12 and folic acid:  While the universe of gluten-free cereals is slowly growing, the universe of healthy gluten-free cereals made with whole grains and containing fiber is not.  While I appreciate the gesture that Chex made with their gluten-free varieties of corn, rice, honey nut and cinnamon Chex cereals, these products contain a maximum of 1g fiber per serving–and some varieties have none at all.  I think you can do better, General Mills.  Take a page out of the Puffins playbook: Barbara’s Bakery managed to squeeze a more respectable 3g of fiber into their new gluten-free Multigrain Puffins cereal from whole grain sources and they fortified it with Iron, Vitamin D and calcium to boot… all of which are nutrients that people consuming a plant-based diet have a hard time getting enough of.  If they had thrown in some B12, it would have been perfection…

• Oat Matzoh: Granted, matzoh is a bit of a niche product, purchased by Jews (and the closeted non-Jewish Matzoh fans whose love for this constipation-inducing, bland, aptly-nicknamed “bread of affliction” continues to puzzle me), once a year during Passover.  Each year, the presumably static matzoh market is further segmented by new and fashionable varieties to address imagined consumer need states: whole wheat matzoh, “thin tea matzoh” (perhaps for those Jews expecting to have High Tea with the Queen of England during Passover?), spelt matzoh, unsalted matzoh, egg matzoh, yolk-free egg matzoh (for lovers of Egg Matzoh with high-cholesterol?).  And yet, not one gluten-free Matzoh variety is available for a population with higher than average incidence rates of Celiac disease.  (Sounds like someone in marketing has not been doing their homework…)  Last year, my mom hunted down a box of gluten-free Oat Matzoh from England for me.  They cost her $30 for an 8 oz box whose ingredient label read: “Oat flour, water.”  At $60 a pound, these matzohs produced a week’s worth of matzoh brie for breakfast that cost about the same as an equivalent amount of Kobe beef.  Surely, an American company could produce an equivalent product locally to meet the demands of the wheat-free crowd?

• Heirloom, heritage and novel varieties of fruits and vegetables: Overwhelming–and arguably unnecessary– variety dominate the modern supermarket in all aisles except one: the produce aisle.  Why is it that I can get 20 different types of Colgate toothpaste in most supermarkets, but only 3 types of lettuce?  Or just 4 types of apple?  Some scary stats to ponder from the Sustainable Table:
  • Almost 96% of the commercial vegetable varieties available in 1903 are now extinct
  • Twelve plant crops account for more than 3/4 of the food consumed in the world, and just three–rice, wheat and maize–are relied on for more than half of the world’s food.

The textbook rationale for this unacceptable state of affairs is that marketers can only make money from selling “value added” (read: processed) foods, and that produce is a commodity with thin margins.  Perhaps this is true if you are producing and selling commoditized varieties of produce, like generic, tasteless heads of iceberg lettuce for which consumers are understandably unwilling to pay a premium.  But those few growers who have dared to introduce a unique varietal of fruit or vegetable that is differentiated on the basis of its awesome flavor (like Honeycrisp apples, for example) have demonstrated that there are price premiums to achieve and profit to be made even in the produce aisle. (Mind you: I’m not talking genetically-modified species here.)  News flash, produce managers and agribusiness mongers: you can actually make money while restoring some of the planet’s biodiversity and enriching our collective lives by reaching back into the vast archive of plant species that once roamed the earth and re-introducing the delicious-est ones back into our diets.

Thank you in advance, Santa, for considering my requests above and passing them along to the naughty food marketers who seek to make your “nice” list by next Christmas.

Love, Tamara

Tweet This Post

With about 5mg of iron per serving, this hearty vegetarian chili is far from an anemic entree.

Iron is a problem for lots of people.

While the average American man eats enough of it, most babies, children and pre-menopausal women do not.  And that’s not even including the vegetarianally-inclined.  Iron deficiency is the #1 nutritional deficiency in the world, and remains a problem even in over-nourished America.  Data from population surveys (1999-2000) show that toddlers and females aged 12-49 have the highest rates of iron deficiency in our country, with prevalence of  7% and 9-16%, respectively.

The majority of iron in our bodies exists as part of hemoglobin–the oxygen-transporting complex in red blood cells.  (A much smaller amount is used for other functions, such as DNA synthesis, the synthesis of neurotransmitters, immune function and the metabolism of food to create energy.)  Given these varied roles of iron, it makes sense that (1) people who lose more blood lose more iron, and (2) people who are growing (infants, children, pregnant women) will require more iron to manufacture more red blood cells, new DNA for each new cell in their growing bodies, and to promote brain development.  When someone has an insufficient number of red blood cells due to a lack of dietary iron, the condition is called Iron-Deficiency Anemia (though there are other types of anemia caused by non-iron factors as well).  Symptoms of anemia range from mild (fatigue, always feeling cold, rapid heart rate or palpitations) to severe (all of the above, plus atrophy of taste buds, sore tongue, sores at the corners of the mouth and spoon-shaped fingernails.)  Children with iron-deficiency anemia may experience retardation in cognitive and motor development that may be irreversible, irritability/attention deficit, stunted growth, and increased susceptibility to illness and lead poisoning.  Pregnant women with iron-deficiency anemia are more likely to miscarry and have low-birth weight babies.

Iron absorption and storage is a very tightly regulated process in our bodies; iron is efficiently recycled from old red blood cells that have been decommissioned, and used for the creation of 200 million new red blood cells per day.  On average, we only lose about 1.2mg of iron per day, which is approximately the amount that we absorb from our diets.  When we’re deficient, our body is able to absorb more.  When we’re awash in iron, our body is able to absorb less.  (Although large doses of supplemental iron can overwhelm our body’s natural feedback mechanisms, which is why it’s important to keep your iron supplements out of reach of children–iron overdose is the #1 cause of poisoning among children under 6 years old.)

Don’t let the Daily Values deceive you

Officially, the recommended daily value for iron is 18mg, which is the amount of dietary iron needed by adult women aged 19-50. (Though women who use birth control pills only require about 11mg per day due to an average of 60% less blood lost in their monthly periods.)  Adult men and women over age 50 require significantly less–only 8mg.  Pregnant women require 27mg/day, which is why a prenatal vitamin is recommended; it would be incredibly challenging to meet these needs consistently through diet alone.

More interestingly, infants 7-12 months need 11mg–or almost 40% more than a grown adult male! This is the reason why experts recommend iron-fortified cereals or pureed meat as baby’s first complementary foods after age 6 months; with the amount of iron infants need and the tiny quantities they eat, it’s virtually impossible to meet their needs on breastmilk or formula and foods like applesauce or pureed veggies alone.

But the daily values can be deceiving, as they assume one important fact: that the average American consumes an omnivorous diet. Since iron from animal sources (called “heme iron”) is up to 10x better absorbed–and the presence of meat, poultry or fish in a meal containing vegetarian sources of iron (called “non-heme iron”) helps increase the body’s ability to absorb it– the vegetarians among us actually have significantly increased irons needs as follows:

Vegetarian adult males: 14mg/day

Vegetarian pre-menopausal women: 33mg/day (though less if you’re on the pill)

And for those of you who donate blood with any regularity, know that each pint of blood you donate has over 200mg of iron that you’ll need to replace over time (though NOT all at once… iron toxicity is very serious, and wholly unpleasant).

What foods are the best sources of iron?

Iron absorption ranges by food source, from as low as 2% for spinach and legumes to 20% for steak.  Average bioavailability of iron from a mixed diet is 18%, whereas it’s only 10% from the average vegetarian diet.

Oysters are an iron-rich, sustainable seafood choice. Slurp ‘em if you got ‘em.

The best non-vegetarian sources of iron are:

• • • • • Chicken liver (12.8mg in 3.5 oz cooked)
        • Clams (11mg in 1/4 cup canned)
        • Oysters (5.6mg iron in 6 oysters)
        • Shrimp (2.6mg in 3oz)
        • Beef (2.3mg in 3oz)
        • Dark meat turkey (2.3mg in 3oz)
        • Canned light tuna (1.3mg in 3oz)
        • Dark meat chicken (1.1mg in 3 oz)

When it comes to vegetarian sources of iron, it’s tricky to talk about ‘best sources,’ because the absorbability of the iron will vary widely by what you eat the foods with. While tofu is an excellent source of iron on paper, there are compounds in soy protein that have an inhibitory effect on iron absorption.  The same goes for legumes and spinach; the presence of compounds called phytates drastically reduces the absorption of their significant iron content to as little as 2%.  The presence of significant amounts of calcium can also inhibit iron absorption, which is why prenatal vitamins have very little calcium in them and cow’s milk is NOT recommended for children under 12 months old.  In contrast, several dietary factors can enhance the absorbability of non-heme iron; these include: vitamin C, organic acids such as those naturally found in certain fruits and vegetables (citric acid, lactic acid, malic acid), alcohol, and the presence of meat, fish or poultry in the same meal (the mechanism behind this last one is unknown, so the scientific community refers to this mystery phenomenon as “MFP factor”–or meat, poultry, fish factor.  I’m not making this up.)

With these important caveats in mind, here is a list of some of the best vegetarian sources of protein:

• Fortified breakfast cereals (e.g.,Total, Raisin Bran, Cheerios): content varies, but one serving may contain up to 100% of the 18mg daily value.  Sadly, gluten-free cereals tend not to be fortified.
• Tofu (6.2mg in 1/2 cup firm)
• White beans (3.9mg in 1/2 cup)
• Lentils (3.3mg in 1/2 cup cooked)
• Blackstrap molasses (3.5mg in 1 TBSP)
• Cooked spinach (3.2mg in 1/2 cup)
• Baked potato (2.8mg in 1 medium potato with skin)
• Kidney beans (2.6mg in 1/2 cup cooked)
• Amaranth grain (2.6mg in 1/2 cup cooked)
• Prune juice (2.3mg in 6oz)
• Cashew nuts (1.7mg in 1 oz)
• Rolled oats (not fortified) (1.7mg in 1/2 cup dry)

When Life Hands you Anemia, Make Chili

Whether you make it with ground beef (or better yet, turkey) or keep it vegetarian, chili is one of the first foods I recommend to my anemic brothers and sisters looking to increase their dietary iron intake.  (One can only eat so much chicken liver, after all.)  The presence of tomatoes–which contain absorption-enhancing Vitamin C, citric acid and malic acid– help improve the bioavailability of iron in the beans.  If you use ground meat of any kind, you’ll get a two-fold effect on iron content: both from the heme iron content of the meat itself, as well as though the MFP factor’s further enhancement of the vegetarian iron bioavailability.

My go-to- recipe for vegetarian chili is this classic one for False Alarm Vegetable Chili from Martha Stewart.  It will surely go down in history as the unfussiest recipe she has ever featured, as it basically calls for chopping up a bunch of vegetables, dumping them in a pot all at once, and then dumping a bunch of dry and canned ingredients in 5 minutes later.  Voila.  It serves 10, and each serving contains ~4.7mg of iron.

If you prefer some meat in your chili, try this recipe for Colorful Turkey Chili from Whole Foods market.  It serves 4-6, and assuming one serving is ~1/5th of the recipe, each serving would contain ~5mg of iron.

Tweet This Post