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Does Clean Eating Mean Making Sure You Wash Your Veggies?

March 22, 2011 By Penny Klatell, PhD, RN Leave a Comment

What Is Clean Eating?

Clean eating is about wholesome and natural food – food that isn’t full of chemicals, preservatives, additives and isn’t processed and/or refined.

Clean eating is healthy eating. All of the whole, natural, unprocessed foods in a clean diet are chock full of vitamins, minerals, fiber, and other nutrition that will help you control your weight, blood pressure, blood sugar, and cholesterol, and other markers important for good health.

What To Do

To eat clean, the April 2011 edition of Environmental Nutrition lists seven basic behaviors:

  • Eat fresh, uncomplicated, whole food – and choose it in its natural state.
  • Eat smaller meals – perhaps three small meals and two snacks each day instead of behemoth portions.
  • Eat good carbs  — keep the healthy carbs like veggies, legumes, whole grains, and fruit in your life – and ditch the processed and refined ones like the “whites”  (sugar, flour, rice).
  • Incorporate healthy fats like the monounsaturated fat in olive oil and nuts and cut down on the saturated fats found in dairy and animal products and the trans fats in processed baked and fried foods.
  • Eat high quality lean protein like fish, chicken, turkey, lean meat, and low or non-fat dairy.
  • Make water your beverage of choice.
  • Move your body.

By the way, you do need to wash your vegetables – and fruit.  Wash them really well in plenty of plain water.  No need for detergents or fancy vegetable washes.

Filed Under: Calorie Tips, Healthy Eating, Food Facts, Manage Your Weight, Restaurants, Diners, Fast Food, Shopping, Cooking, Baking, Takeout, Prepared Food, Junk Food Tagged With: activity, carbohydrates, clean eating, eating habits, eating plan, food prep, fruit, monounsaturated fat, protein, vegetables, water, weight management strategies

Too Few Veggies — You’re Not Alone!

February 22, 2011 By Penny Klatell, PhD, RN 1 Comment

Photoexpress

Despite a couple of years of public health initiatives, an explosion in farmers markets, bagged salads, and a White House garden, Americans still don’t eat enough vegetables.

Only 23% of meals include a vegetable (fries don’t count but lettuce on a burger does) and only 17% of dinners prepared at home include a salad (down from 22% in 1994).  Salads ordered as a main course at either lunch or dinner in restaurants dropped to 5% (10% in 1989).

Only 26% of America’s adults eat vegetables three or more times a day (not including French fries) according to a study recently released by the CDC, way short of the government’s health objectives set a decade ago, and less than half of what public health officials had hoped.

2010 Dietary Guidelines

The just released 2010 Dietary Guidelines (yes, 2010 released in 2011) recommends that as part of a healthy eating pattern we should increase the amount of vegetables and fruit we eat.

That means filling half your plate with fruit and vegetables.  They should be colorful and include a variety of dark green, red, and orange veggies, including beans and peas.

Give Me A Reason I Should Eat More Veggies

Vegetable haters might ask, “Why should I”? There are some really good reasons:

  • They’re low in calories
  • They’re rich in the nutrients we often lack (folate, magnesium, dietary fiber, Vitamins A, C, and K)
  • They may help prevent some chronic diseases
  • They’re linked to lower risks for heart attacks, strokes, and some kinds of cancers.

Why We Don’t Eat Them

Just telling people to eat more vegetables obviously isn’t working. People know veggies are good for you but lots of us don’t want to admit that we don’t eat them or even like them.

Honestly, veggies can be a lot of work. How often do you get home, open your fridge, look at the veggies (if they’re in there) and just admit you’re too tired to cook them?  Cooking fresh stuff does require time and a commitment. And, unfortunately, poorly cooked vegetables can taste terrible – and, especially for out of season or organic, can be costly.  We basically want low cost, tasty, and convenient.

What To Do

  • Change your mindset.  Eating vegetables needs to become a habit – the go to, the default, instead of chips, or cookies, or fries.
  • Think visually:  make one half of your plate a color palate of vegetables.
  • Don’t be intimidated by them.  Learn about them and how to cook them.
  • Experiment with ways to make them taste good (hold off on gobs of butter, cheese, and cream, however, or you’re somewhat defeating your total healthy diet purpose). Try cooking with herbs, broth, and big flavor producers like onions, garlic, and peppers.
  • Check out the way the food industry is making vegetables easier:  fresh cut up vegetables ready to cook; already prepared vegetables to take-out; washed and bagged salad varieties; frozen vegetables ready to pop into the microwave.
  • Expose children’s palates to vegetables.  Make them the norm.  Students who gardened in Berkeley’s “edible schoolyard” program ate one and a half more servings of fruits and vegetables a day than kids who weren’t in the program.
  • Work to make vegetables more affordable and available.  Support farmers’ markets (some markets allow food stamps to be used), rooftop and urban gardens. Get fresh veggies into schools.
  • Plant your own garden or just a pot on the stoop or windowsill.
  • Do what you can to make vegetables an easy choice.

Filed Under: Calorie Tips, Healthy Eating, Food Facts, Manage Your Weight, Shopping, Cooking, Baking Tagged With: calorie tips, diet, dietary guidelines, food facts, food shopping, fruit, habits, vegetables, weight management strategies

Is The Sugar In Fruit A “Diet” Buster?

December 7, 2010 By Penny Klatell, PhD, RN Leave a Comment

Fructose:  A Simple Sugar

Fruit sugar, or fructose, is a simple sugar that your body metabolizes quickly and easily. Fructose, has few, if any, advantages over sucrose, the kind of sugar in candy.

Moderate fruit intake is recommended as part of a healthy diet. The simple sugars, like fructose, found in fruit are not a problem for active and healthy people. But, if you have diabetes or prediabetes, too much fruit could throw your blood sugar levels out of whack.

Fruit juice is often made from fruit concentrate with added refined sugar, so too much fruit juice can be a bad thing.  FYI:  there really isn’t a big nutritional difference if your jam is sweetened with “sugar” or “fruit juice sweetener.” They are both sugar.

A Good Idea

Having fruit in your diet is a good idea for a bunch of reasons. It tastes good and most of it has a substantial amount of fiber — which helps to reduce the risk of some diseases. Fruit is also a good source of vitamins and minerals.  A well rounded diet with plenty of fruit, vegetables, and some lean protein is a good bet.

It’s also pretty cool that a lot of fruit comes in it’s own wrapper and single serving package.  Think oranges, clementines, tangerines, apples, pears, and bananas to name a few.  They’re really grab and go.  And berries – so high in antioxidants.  Delicious, too.  Watermelon is 92% water by weight, filled with vitamin C, and a necessary part of so many barbecues and beach parties.

All sugar adds calories but there are certainly a lot of reasons to choose fruit and its sugar over the nutritionally empty sugared sweet stuff like candy and soda.

The fiber and water in fruit help you to feel full.  The fruit is packed with vitamins and minerals.  Because of its fiber, fruit takes longer to digest than processed sweets made with refined sugar.  And, it doesn’t create a spike in your blood sugar —  which is then followed by a steep drop that makes you hungry all over again.

Sugar And Calories In Popular Fruit

Some examples:

One fruit or the portion shown

Calories

Carbs (in grams)

Apple (with the peel)

81

21

Apricot 17 4
Banana 105 27
Blackberries (½ cup) 37 9
Blueberries, fresh (½ cup) 41 10
Cherries (½ cup) 52 12
Grapes (10 medium seedless) 36 9
Grapefruit (1 medium half) 46 12
Mango,  fresh 135 35
Melon:   Canteloupe (1 half) 94 22
Melon:   Honeydew (1 tenth) 46 12
Nectarine (medium) 67 16
Orange 65 16
Peach 37 10
Pear (medium) 98 25
Pineapple,  fresh (½ cup cubed) 39 10
Plum 36 9
Prune (1 dried & pitted) 20 5
Raisins (dried ½ cup) 110 29
Raspberry (½ cup) 31 7
Rhubarb (½ cup cubed) 14 3
Strawberries (½ cup) 23 5
Tangerine 37 9

Filed Under: Calorie Tips, Healthy Eating, Food Facts, Manage Your Weight, Shopping, Cooking, Baking, Snacking, Noshing, Tasting Tagged With: calorie tips, food facts, fructose, fruit, simple carbs, sugar, sugar in fruit, weight management strategies

How Much Real Food Do You Eat?

September 17, 2010 By Penny Klatell, PhD, RN Leave a Comment

Have you seen the TV commercials where a parent does whacko things to prevent her child from knowing that canned pasta in tomato sauce counts as a vegetable serving?

Give me a break.  Kids need to know that vegetables are great food – and that they come from a garden not from a can of pasta with tomato sauce or from a mixture of vegetable juices.  In case you missed it, during Jamie Oliver’s attempts to change school cafeteria foods he goes into an elementary school classroom and asks the kids to identify the vegetables he holds up. They didn’t even know what an actual tomato looked like.

The health gurus tell us over and over again that vegetables and fruit are a necessary part of a healthy diet.  They do all kinds of good things for our bodies.  They taste good, they’re a whole lot cheaper than meat, fish, and many types of dairy products, and they don’t have the saturated fat found in animal foods.

According to the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC):

  • Only a third of Americans eat two or more fruit servings a day – with orange juice ranking first in consumption.
  • Only a quarter eat three or more vegetable servings each day with potato the number one veggie (if you guess long, skinny, and fried as the most popular form you’ve grabbed the brass ring).

The Way It Was

I grew up in New York City in an era when canned and then frozen veggies reigned.  But, I would spend summers and vacations on my Grandmother’s farm in Pennsylvania and eat produce straight from the garden – or from what had been “put up” at the end of the harvest season.

My Aunt, the 12th child of my grandparents’ 13 kids, sent me the following email:

My mother did canning the old fashioned way, it was called cold packing.  Everything you wanted to preserve was cleaned and packed into bottles —  because of our large family we used 2 quart bottles.  After the bottles were packed they were put into a big vat of water and brought to a boil. The boiling time depended on what was in the bottles.

Our family packed 210 quarts of tomatoes, 180 quarts of string beans, and about 80 to100 quarts of fruit (cherries, blueberries, etc.). We made our own jelly and jam such as strawberry, grape, and peach. We dried beans and peas in the sun also picked mushrooms and dried them for the winter.

Talk about eating real food and a diet filled with vegetables!

The Bottom Line

Although most of us don’t grow and preserve out food anymore, farmer’s markets and even supermarkets are giving many of us easier access to beautiful fresh produce.  Still, Americans lag far behind the government’s recommended servings for fruit and vegetables.

According to the Harvard School of Public Health, a diet rich in vegetables and fruit has significant health benefits including:  lower blood pressure; a reduced risk of stroke, heart disease, and probably some cancers; decreased risk of digestive and eye disorders; and an evening out of blood sugar which helps control your appetite.

The goal for most people is at least nine servings (4½ cups) of vegetables and fruit a day, and according to the Harvard School of Public Health, potatoes don’t count. To give your body the nutrients it needs try to eat a variety of produce, especially dark leafy greens, cooked tomatoes, and anything that’s a rich yellow, orange, or red color.

The Challenge

Challenge yourself to try a new kind of fruit or vegetable, or experiment in preparing it or serving it in new ways. Cook it, eat it raw, add it to a recipe, and jazz it up with herbs and spices which are also good for you.  Once you start trying, you’ll be amazed at how many opportunities there are to add fruit and veggies to your meals.  For your health’s sake, make it a challenge and a goal for you and your family to eat more produce.

Filed Under: Calorie Tips, Healthy Eating, Food Facts, Shopping, Cooking, Baking Tagged With: food, food facts, fruit, real food, vegetables, whole food

Rx: Apples And Some Broccoli

September 14, 2010 By Penny Klatell, PhD, RN Leave a Comment

A sample prescription

A Prescription For Veggies?

Yea for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts and the docs at three medical centers who are writing prescriptions for produce for families with weight problems.

Families with low incomes get coupons for produce that they can redeem at local farmers’ markets. The value of a coupon is $1 per person per day. It seems like a small amount, but with the coupons a family of four can get $120 of fresh produce  a month.

What’s The Rationale?

This objective is to get kids to increase their fruit and veggies by one serving a day.  It is also seen as a opportunity to introduce the children, who have a limited range of exposure, to real food.  The coupon is somewhat symbolic – the $1 coupon competes with the 99 cent fast food meals so familiar to these kids.

Obesity Has Tripled

According to the CDC, childhood obesity has more than tripled over the last 30 years.   Sedentary lifestyles and limited access to fresh, healthy food are seen as reasons for this rapid increase. Along with handing out the coupons, the doctors will follow the families receiving the coupons to determine how their eating patterns are affected.  They will also monitor health parameters like weight and body mass index (BMI).

The hope is, too, that the families become invested in good nutritional practices by hanging out with both the farmers and the consumers at the farmers’ market – and that they then develop a preference for shopping at these types of markets rather than fast food restaurants, supermarkets, big box and convenience stores.

Will It Help Farmers’ Markets, Too?

It may also help the farmers’ markets compete with the fast food vendors who entice kids and families with cheap calories and cheap meals.

The number of farmers’ markets has dramatically increased: from 1,755 in 1994 to more than 5,200.  Although US farmers’ markets generate over $1 billion in annual sales, they are low on the totem pole compared to the fast food industry which brought in over $22.79 billion in 2008.

Healthy Eating Patterns And Lifestyles

As the mayor of Boston said, “When I go to work in the morning, I see kids standing at the bus stop eating chips and drinking a soda.  I hope this will help them change their eating habits and lead to a healthier lifestyle.”

Filed Under: Food for Fun and Thought, Manage Your Weight, Shopping, Cooking, Baking Tagged With: calories, food and health, food for fun and thought, food markets, fruit, obesity, vegetables

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