Good Diet

Why it’s OK to Eat Dessert

I don’t know about you but I used to feel HUGELY guilty about having dessert! It wasn’t about calories, back when I was young I didn’t need to lose any weight. It just felt wrong, so wrong! All those empty calories filling me up when I should be eating something healthy like raw carrots or kale maybe.

But you know what? Despite feeling really guilty for years I doubt a day passed when I didn’t have a sweet treat at some point in the day. Okay, maybe in my mid-twenties when I was a wanna-be vegetarian, which, by the way, was the point in my life when I was the least healthy.

Why decide everyday to NOT have sweets and them eat them anyway?

Biology, my dear, that’s why. Sugars both simple and complex are something the body craves for good reason. And these sugars have been a part of mankind’s diet forever.

People talk about craving sweets like it’s so weird, or unusual that they should want something sweet to eat. I’m here to tell you that everyone wants something sweet to eat, just like everyone wants something salty, or fatty, or sometimes even a little bitter. It’s natural to want all these flavors from time to time. And it’s natural that if your diet is imbalanced in some way that cravings for a particular flavor or type of food might become more intense.

It’s All About Calories, just not the way you think …

The times in my life when I craved sweets the most were the times when my diet was the most calorie restricted. I was fairly thin as a girl and young woman and I don’t think I ever consciously restricted my caloric intake. I wasn’t one for dieting. I was all about nutrition. So I would skip meals when nothing good was immediately available to eat. Looking back I think I must have lived on about 1500 calories a day. And I practiced intermittent fasting, though I didn’t know it had a name

On busy days I would barely eat at all. I’d get food for the kids and skip getting something for myself. Or I’d skip breakfast and lunch, drink coffee all day and have a snack in the evening. Usually something sweet.

I was half crazy for sweets during these times. I think the cause was a simple lack of calories. Just not enough fuel for the machine to keep me running thru all the things a young mommy must do in a day. So my body was telling me to eat the food with the most immediately available fuel to keep my brain working and my body moving. It wanted something sweet and it wanted it now!

Eating Sweets Isn’t a Black or White Issue

It’s all about quantity. And about quality. And about what else you eat along with the treat.

Let’s think about how people used to handle sweets. What were the commonly accepted rules taught to kids and young moms about the eating of treats?

First and foremost, between meal snacking was pretty taboo. People were expected to eat and eat well at mealtimes and eat nothing in between.
Next thing to notice is that meals were hearty and filling with plenty of fats and starches. By the time people finished the meal they were really full. And it lasted too, all the way to the next meal.
Lastly, each meal had a small portion of something really sweet. Something like large lunch with a couple of cookies as dessert. Or breakfast with toast and jam. Or dinner which usually featured a fancier dessert that generally everyone was too full to have very much of.

Get the picture? Good food that was rich and filling overcame the desire for sweets in quantity. Just a little bit was enough to satisfy. That’s how it worked. It was an automatic way of moderating everyone’s intake of sweets.

So enjoy your dessert!

And don’t worry! If you get enough of the good stuff into you and your kids the desire for sweets will start to die down. And what sweets you do eat will be made with such good ingredients that they actually make a contribution to your health! Hard to believe? Well, that’s a topic for another post 🙂 .

Is Your Doctor a Nutrition Expert?

by Granny Filed Under: Straight Talk

When you need advice on nutrition where do you go? Most of us go to the only place we feel we will receive sound, reasoned well thought out advice … our doctors! We think, well, he’s been to medical school where he’s received deep and extensive training on the functioning of the human body. He is the most knowledgeable person I know when it comes to nutrition.

Is that true though? Sure, he’s clearly been thru years of training to prepare him for a medical career. But did that training include nutrition? Shockingly, most of the time the answer is no, it did not. At least not training of any meaningful depth. Did you know that you could learn everything the average doctor knows about nutrition in one long weekend of study?

Your Doctor is NOT a Nutrition Expert

Did you know that only a minority (25%) of medical schools require ANY classes on nutrition? And that when they do require some training in nutrition it is less than 20 hours of instructions out of thousands of training hours? Check out this video for all the details:

So, if that’s the case who can you trust for reliable information on what is healthy to eat? Especially for you specifically? Can you turn to experts on nutrition for reliable, detailed advice on what to do?

Tons of Really Bad Nutrition Advice Out There

There are lots of nutrition experts out there of all different kinds and varieties, with widely diverging opinions and levels of training varying from extensive 4 year programs down to having read a book last weekend 😉 . To outsiders the nutrition field looks like one giant raucous argument. I think that’s one reason why people rely so heavily on M.D.’s for information. It’s just too hard to figure out who’s reliable.

For myself, I use history and food culture as the best guideline to what I and my family eat. My brother likes to say that on the internet you can find authoritative quotes to prove anything you want! And boy howdy is that true in the field of nutrition! Check out this joke post on the dangers of kale 😉 . Just one small example. Your food culture taken as a whole is the best guide you have on what is good for humans to eat.

I don’t pay a lot of attention to the macro-nutrient wars, i.e. low-carb, no-carb, low-fat or the more recently designed diets like paleo or veganism or raw foodism. None of these diets have been eaten historically by any culture. I don’t pay a lot of attention to the dietary recommendations from the media. These usually come in the form of ‘scares’ about specific foods. I simply try to eat as closely to the way my great-grandmother ate as I possibly can with my time and budget constraints.

Nutrition is TOO Important, Do Your Own Research

This is your life and your health! The single most important thing you will do that determines your future health and that of your family is making good decisions when it comes to food. That is simply too important to be left to others. You can’t just ask experts yes and no, black and white questions about food! The answers you get back will not be that helpful for you in your specific situation.

Instead we all have to do our own research and come to our own conclusions. And then do our level best to follow thru on what we find out. We may in fact decide that the expert recommendations we’ve received from medical professionals are in fact the best thing for us. But then we reached that conclusion for ourselves!

What do you think?

Did Grandma Eat Gluten?

by Granny Filed Under: Straight Talk

Take a trip thru the grocery store and you’ll find gluten-free labels everywhere! It seems gluten-free eating has arrived and everyone is doing it. The guy in the cubicle next to you, his wife cured her allergies by going gluten-free. Your doctor suggested that you might consider it for weight loss. Your friend wants to go gluten-free but says they have an unreasoning addiction to bread that drives them eat entire loaves in the middle of the night 😉 .

Well, call me a skeptic but I remember when the idea of eliminating wheat was deemed a bit fringe. After all wheat has been a staple of the human diet for millennia. I use traditional diets as my yardstick for determining what my diet should look like. After all, it’s gotten the human race this far hasn’t it? Our ancestors survived and thrived on a traditional diet long enough to produce us!

I receive questions about gluten and breads very often and frankly I’m concerned about all those who are new to the world of real food being confused by the avalanche of negative press gluten containing products and starches in general are receiving. So let me just state as clearly as I can that restrictive diets like the gluten-free diet are not traditional! Now, I understand that there are many with genuine medical issues surrounding gluten. This post doesn’t address their situation at all. Instead I’m talking about a very modern tendency to restrict entire food groups for a lifetime based on very flimsy evidence or even worse fashion. I view this as a dangerous practice and what’s more, your Grandma would have too.

Grandma Ate Gluten and Plenty of It!

Yes, she did eat gluten. Your great grandma most likely even made her own bread every week developing the gluten with her own two hands, forming the dough into loaves and baking them in a wood fired oven. These loaves were made with a sourdough starter that she maintained and shared amongst friends. By the time the loaves went into the oven they were well fermented to get a good rise and flavor and to reduce the anti-nutrients present in the grains. This whole process was sacrosanct in Granny’s world. The dictionary defines sacrosanct as “Regarded as too important or valuable to be interfered with.” Bread making was serious business! If you could be transported back in time to Granny’s kitchen she’d offer you bread and would be pretty horrified if you refused it. She would have seen it as high foolishness on your part.

The Hype Implies that Gluten is an Unnatural Additive

Gluten is entirely natural to grains with bread grains having the highest percentages. The rise and texture of dough is greatly affected by gluten content so some commercial bakeries do indeed add even more gluten to their breads than would naturally be present. This practice requires the ability to separate gluten and is therefore modern. The presence of gluten in grain-based foods though is totally traditional.

The Hype Implies that High-Gluten Hybridized Wheat is Basically GMO

Modern wheat is hybridized wheat. Virtually all of the food supply is grown from hybrid seeds. Peppers, carrots, lettuce, beans and of course wheat found in the supermarket or farmers market are nearly 100% hybrid varieties of plants. While there may be advantages in flavor and just sheer variety in the pre-hybridized heirloom seeds no one is eating these plants in large quantities. We are all eating hybrids every day.

Man has been influencing the breeding of plants for centuries. Hybrids have been around for at least a couple hundred years and represent a more sophisticated kind of tinkering than what was done before. Hybrids became popular with farmers about 100 years ago during Granny’s time. They are produced by cross-pollinating varieties to produce a new variety with desired characteristics. It does NOT involve splicing of genes across species or any of the other Dr. Frankenstein horror show science genetically modified foods are subject to. Barring possible contamination from Monsanto’s GMO wheat experiments nowhere in the world is the wheat supply grown from GMO seeds.

You might have read the argument that since modern hybridized wheat contains considerably more gluten than ancient varieties that we modern folk should avoid it like the plague. Modern wheat does contain more gluten than old varieties, that isn’t in dispute. But does it follow that we should completely cut out this staple of traditional diets completely as a result? I don’t think so. If you feel it’s a priority in your budget to ensure your grains are as old school as possible you could consider spelt or einkorn wheat instead of the more modern hybrids. There are options other than elimination.

Many Arguments Against Gluten are Really Arguments Against Eating Processed Foods

Many of the arguments against modern wheat go on at length about modern baking methods, quick rise yeasts and dough conditioners for example. These are really not arguments against wheat or gluten but are instead arguments against eating processed foods. We all know that commercial bakeries use such things and more, like preservatives to keep the bread fresher longer, dyes and even artificial flavorings. If you want to eat breads make them at home using traditional methods or find yourself a good local bakery. Baking bread is one of those scary to do household tasks that once you try it you wonder why it was so intimidating! If you’re following The Granny Plan you could make it a kitchen project to work on over a bit of time.

What If You Are Having Trouble Digesting Grains?

Many people find that proper preparation of gluten containing flours makes them completely digestible. Really, rarely does anyone in our culture have a chance to eat properly prepared grains. It’s worth a trial run if you’re experiencing trouble. If that doesn’t help addressing problems with bad gut flora helps many to eat gluten containing foods without issues. Some of the protocols for addressing gut dysbiosis involve eliminating grains for a predetermined time while rebuilding the gut. Also worth a trial. I’d encourage everyone to give it much serious consideration before deciding to cut gluten long-term though. Like Granny it pains me to see people cut this major traditional staple out of their diet forever.