a balanced plate

 

Earlier this month, I spoke with our local Fox 6 Wake up team about the USDA's new My Plate.  You can find the tv spot and my post for Get Active Today's blog below.  As I've continued to talk with folks about My Plate and its emphasis on fruits and vegetables, I've heard concerns people have about eating locally and healthfully year round.  The worry is that dairy and meat and grains may be the only local foods available during the winter months in places like Wisconsin. 

 

It is true that this is the time of year when its seems easiest to pile your plate high with fresh fruits and vegetables as more and more produce comes into its own in our local farms and gardens.  But this is also the time of year to be thinking about the long. cold nights of winter.  By "putting by" ripe veggies in the summer, either by canning, drying, or freezing, we can eat locally and promote health all year round. Local, seasonal, just picked, ripe produce grown in healthy soil tends to be packed with a lot more nutrients than the industrially produced produce flown in from all over the world that line our winter market shelves.  Buying extra asparagus, strawberries, green beans, kale, collards, spinach and so on picked at the peak of flavor and ripeness in these early months of summer and quick freezing them preserves a lot of their nutrient value for later on when the only fresh, local produce we can find is what keeps in a root cellar (onions, potatoes, winter squash, etc...)  Later on in the summer, we can look forward to other "good freezers" like tomatoes, peppers, summer squash... Check out this site that has helped me with a windfall harvest, many a time, for instructions on how to preserve almost anything: Pick Your Own.

 

  

USDA Food guides have been around since 1894 and the newest version, in my opinion, represents a major improvement over the past hundred plus years.  While the recommendations remain the same, in accordance with the 2010 Dietary Guidelines for Americans, as the My Pyramid…the real success of My Plate is that it is easy to understand. Dietitians, such as myself, and other health educators have been using the Plate Method for nutrition education for years because people find it easier to visualize a healthy eating pattern when looking at a meal plate versus a food “pyramid.”  

Vegetables are the real winners in this new My Plate model as they are given the largest area of space on the plate.  Fruits win too. Basically, we are meant to pile our plates up with fruits and vegetables, leaving a quarter of the plate for whole grains and a quarter for protein foods like meat, fish, chicken, eggs, beans, nuts, and seeds.  Dairy is shown on the side and people who drink milk are encouraged to choose low fat options.  

This is a great time of year to start eating more produce as our farmer’s markets are getting into full swing.  Just last night I piled my plate high with a green lettuce, asparagus and radish salad, and served it with an herb-feta-omelet with whole wheat bread...yum! To find a farmer’s market in your neighborhood you can use the Get Active Today Farmer’s Market tools http://www.getactivetoday.com/fitness-nutrition/5/FarmersMarkets.aspx and be sure to check out the Farm Fresh Atlas of South Eastern Wisconsin.http://www.farmfreshatlas.org/southeast/

Here are the key take home messages from www.choosemyplate.gov:

Balancing Calories  

● Enjoy your food, but eat less.  

● Avoid oversized portions.    

Foods to Increase  

● Make half your plate fruits and vegetables.  

● Make at least half your grains whole grains.  

● Switch to fat-free or low-fat (1%) milk.    

Foods to Reduce  

● Compare sodium in foods like soup, bread, and frozen meals ― and choose the foods with lower numbers.  

● Drink water instead of sugary drinks.     

Local Farmer Open House

This Saturday, you, your family, and friends, can learn about Local Food & Community Supported Agriculture from area farmers, chefs, and various local foodies at the Local Farmer Open House at the Urban Ecology Center.  To spread the word,  I asked my friend, the fabulous farmer-philosopher David Koslowski of Pinehold Gardens, to talk to the Fox 6 morning team about the upcoming open house for Get Active Today's "March is Nutrition Month" segment.  Why?  Because buying local food supports the health of people and places, as well as our community and the local economy (at a time when these things are sorely in need of everyone's support.)   We can make a blanket statement about local food being nutritious, because not only does it tend to be fresher than what you find in supermarket shelves it also primarily exists on the "little to no processing end" of the processed food spectrum (as opposed to the gallons of uber-hyper-super-processed foods we consume laden with added salts, sugars, and fats, with little of the original sustenance remaining.)  Check out Dave's spot here for a taste of what fun you can expect this Saturday at one of Milwaukee's treasure's, the UEC.
 

Just What are You Eating?

I do love this graphic of "What the Average American Consumes in a Year" by Visual Economics. The bad news (no surprises  really, though startling to be sure) is that, on average, we're eating 110 lbs red meat, 192.3 lbs. of flour and cereal products, 141.6 lbs. of caloric sweeteners, including 42 lbs. of corn syrup, 29 lbs. of French fries, 23 lbs. of pizza and 24 lbs. of ice cream, 53 gallons of soda each year, averaging about one gallon each week, and 2.736 lbs. of sodium.  But I was pleased to see we eat 415.4 lbs. of vegetables and 273.2 lbs. of fruit each year, on average. Though I suspect that potatoes (in the form of french fries and chips?) account for the vast majority of the veg intake--they usually do in food frequency questionnaires.  Bottom-line is we're eating way too much of highly processed, carbon-intensive foods, and not enough of the whole foods that have been keep humans healthy for ages.

I thought of this graphic this morning after I talked about food labels with Kim Murphy on Fox 6 for Get Active Today (you can watch below.)  Its an important food literacy issue simply because Americans eat so much processed food these days.  While surveys show that many people look at food labels, they don't show that people really "get" them, and my encounters with clients confirms for me that most people don't understand them well, and therefore don't really know just what they are putting in their mouths.  Confusing the issue can be the front of the label health claims....remember these claims ("3 grams fiber!" or "No cholesterol!") may or may not be relevant to the foods overall nutrient value. Reading the ingredient list and the nutrient facts label can help you sort out a packaged food's true nutrition nature.

Whole or minimally processed foods, like fruits, vegetables, whole grains, beans. fish, dairy, nuts, pastured meats, eggs, and so on, are naturally nutrient dense in their original (or close to original)  states.  My advice is to choose plenty of these foods and learn to understand food labels. You can go to Get Active Today for a helpful handout on label reading.

 

Solstice Sustenance

Sicilian alter of light....

The winter solstice marks the shortest day & longest night of the year...it is a time to consider our relationship to the sun and all of the energy its light provides; light energy that makes possible life on earth.  

Though today is also the first calendar day of winter, we've been in full snow mode for quite a while here in the upper Midwest.  Its times like these when our food traditions just seem to make both poetic and actual sense--our bodies crave the nourishing hearty greens, root vegetables, winter squash, and other "good keepers" like apples, onions, shallots, and so on that have graced larders for centuries.  All those foods that have undergone the remarkable process of storing up the sun's energy so that we can be fed.

Having recently returned from Terra Madre, Slow Food's international meeting in Italy, I was fortunate to learn about many different countries food traditions.  Here in the Great Lakes region, winter fruit and veg are part of our food heritage and the joy of eating in place. As a cook and a dietitian, I encourage people to eat their veggies all year round...not just because  they are good for us, but because they taste divine.  Earlier this morning I visited the Wake Up team on Fox 6 for Get Active Today to share some of my favorite seasonal produce recipes to celebrate the season.  You can watch the clip below and get the recipes here.

In Gratitude

 Boston Marrow Squash--great for pie!

The world wide web is a flurry of Thanksgiving articles and blog posts.  I have added my own to the throng with a healthy, local food themed piece on Get Active Today’s website, replete with recipes made with ingredients sourced at the winter farmer’s market.

This year, I’ve noted that the many people harping on the gluttony and over consumption that can often be involved in American holidays has ratcheted up a notch; some have gone so far as to boycott Thanksgiving.  That seems a shame.  I like to think that this is one holiday where we can truly, easily, observe and celebrate our eternal connection to the land.  To give thanks for the many things that make the act of eating together possible is something I feel we should do more often.   So while many feel this holiday has gone too far (and really, its easy to agree when you consider the average Thanksgiving meal holds more than double our daily calorie needs) I think the answer is not to banish it, but to bring it back down to its earthly origin.

While Thanksgiving is an American holiday (and though we get the origin story of the original Thanksgiving wrong over and over again) giving thanks for a good harvest is something all cultures have done for the millennia. More generally speaking, gratitude is something that all cultures, all religions express, and nowadays science has shown us that gratitude is associated with well-being.

So in this spirit of gratitude I reflect on what I am thankful for this year:  I’m thankful for the birds and the bees and all the pollinators of our fruit trees and plants, the farmers who’ve worked on bent knee and with sore backs to cultivate food from the soil for my table, the little garden that could still flush with herbs in my yard, the great diversity of lifeforms around the globe, the clean water that flows out of my tap from the fresh water reservoir that is Lake Michigan, and for the people I love both near and far that nourish my soul...