I love dogs and I love my hometown, New York City. Who says all city residents are Type A and harried? Maybe we could learn a thing or two from our four legged friends who appear to be well fed, content, and happy.
Pets can help to keep you healthy and certainly can be an incentive to go for a nice long walk.
Do you have a clue what the difference is between reduced fat, low fat, light, and fat free. You practically have to walk around with a cheat sheet — or an app — to figure out if something actually lives up to the promise on the product’s label.
The same thing is true on menus, in deli cases, and the little labels perched next to the choices in salad bars. Are the calories in the low calorie tuna salad less than the calories in the reduced calorie? Can you even believe those calligraphied labels behind the glass cases?
Packaged food labels list ingredients in descending order by weight, not amount. The first ingredient listed has the greatest amount by weight, the last ingredient is the one with the least amount by weight. That’s why preservatives are usually at the end of the ingredients list. A ton of chemicals are not necessary to increase shelf life — a little bit will do it. However, fat, sugar, and grains have more heft and usually are closer to the beginning of the ingredients list.
Labels have to include the total amount of fat, saturated fat and unsaturated fat. This carves the way for the low, reduced, and fat free categories.
Confused by the ins and outs of labeling? You’re not alone. Try to be as savvy as possible and do a little investigating. A product sporting a reduced fat label just means that it contains at least 25% less fat than the original version. Unfortunately, this doesn’t necessarily mean that it ends up being a low fat product. Take a reduced fat muffin. If the fat content in the original full fat muffin is 30g and the fat has been reduced to 15g — a 50% reduction which allows it to say it is reduced fat — the reduced fat muffin still has a fat content five times higher than the 3g of fat per serving that officially qualifies as low fat. Check the calorie count and fat breakdown on the nutrition label for more complete info.
Are you thinking about eating more vegetables and less meat but worry about getting enough protein?
Of course you can always get protein from excellent non-meat sources like eggs, fish, nuts and seeds, certain grains, and low or non fat dairy products. But what about vegetables?
Many people are aware that beans can be good protein sources.
For example, here’s the number of grams of protein in one cup of:
Here’s the number of grams of protein for one cup of each of these vegetables:
There are other vegetable sources of protein, too. These are just examples of some of the more common veggies that can serve as protein sources. For a more complete list you can always check the USDA’s data base.
For upping your protein – especially in a meatless meal – try adding some raw spinach instead of lettuce on your sandwich. How about broccoli slaw instead of cole slaw, or peas mixed with your pasta? Sounds good to me!
Hippocrates (460 -377 BC) said our food should be our medicine and our medicine should be our food.
This photo is of the vending machine in the family/guest waiting room on the ambulatory surgery floor of a major New York City hospital.
Wouldn’t Hippocrates be horrified?
Americans tend to like sweet stuff and most of us eat more of it than we should.
Although we’re warned to be conscious of the amount of sugar we eat, that doesn’t mean never eat anything sweet. Of course, some people choose not to, but if you do – eat the good stuff – like real maple syrup.
Maple trees are tapped in early Spring for the sap used to make syrup. The sap is a clear, watery liquid which is boiled down to concentrate it into syrup.
Native Indians in the US and Canada were probably the first producers of maple products. They would make gashes in the trees, collect the sap, let it partially freeze to enrich it, then reduce it by heating, sometimes by dropping heated stones into the collected sap.
This year’s harsh winter created great conditions for an incredible maple syrup season. The below freezing nights and above freezing days were ideal and nearly doubled production at some sugar shacks, especially for light grades of syrup.
The syrup color generally depends on the time of the season the sap is collected. Lighter syrup tastes cleaner and more sugary and usually results from colder temperatures earlier in the season. Dark syrup has a different sugar content, a taste that lingers in your mouth, and usually comes from sap collected later in the season.
According to the Stamford Museum and Nature Center (CT):
The sticky stuff, often called pancake syrup, that you likely find in your local diner and in the Aunt Jemima and Mrs. Butterworth’s bottles on your supermarket shelves is not considered “real” maple syrup. That’s because it’s not made from maple sap but rather from a mixture of corn syrup, high fructose corn syrup, and a chemical soup of colorings, flavors, and preservatives.
Real maple syrup is graded. In the US (Canada has different grading) the grading is: