bite my words

Dispelling nutrition myths, ranting, and occasionally, raving

Tag Archives: healthy eating


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Cucumber

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Yes! I found a vegetable that’s in season that I haven’t blogged about yet. Cucumbers!

Cucumbers are delicious, healthy, and refreshing. One cup of cucumber contains a mere 20 calories. It also provides you with lots of water as well as 20 mg of calcium, 185 mg of potassium, and 16 mg of magnesium (not a lot, but every little bit counts!).

Try adding cucumber slices to your water for a refreshing drink. Snack on cucumber spears. Or make a simple salad of chopped cucumber and tomato topped with freshly ground pepper and a little bit of salt.


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Soup diet

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Along with the proliferation of people wearing as little clothing as possible this time of year, there seems to be a lot of people going on soup diets.

I just want to say: these diets are ridiculous. Basically, you can consume as much soup as you like but nothing else. The soups are vegetarian and don’t contain any starchy vegetables. Essentially, you’re consuming very few calories, as it would be hard to consume many through these low-cal soups alone. Along with no starch, you’re also getting no fat and no protein. Not satisfying, not sustainable, not healthy.

I know that people are doing this with the notion of “kick-starting” themselves into losing weight and getting healthy. However, more often than not, people on these diets get frustrated with feeling hungry, and the lack of variety, after a couple of days and end-up quitting by gorging on something high-cal and all thoughts of healthy choices are thrown out the window. Much better to start making small, sustainable healthy changes to your diet than to try to subsist on soup alone.


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Why cheating makes me angry

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Reading the article How Nutrition Pros Cheat — And Get Away With It irked me. The author begins by making a great point. That many people trying to lose weight have an all or nothing mentality and don’t permit themselves to have certain foods when they’re dieting. The problem is, that’s not realistic. You can’t expect yourself to never have your less than healthy favourites ever again. If you’re forbidding yourself from having them then you’re not likely to maintain that diet and meet your goals. 

What irked me about the article was the continuous referral to unhealthy favourites as “cheat” foods. This just perpetuates the mentality that the author is suggesting getting away from. If you’re thinking of a food as a “cheat” then you’re still on a Diet. In order to develop healthier relationships with food we need to avoid demonizing foods and thinking of indulgences as cheating. Your healthy eating should be part of your overall healthy lifestyle. A permanent change. Not a temporary diet. This doesn’t mean never eating unhealthy food. It means learning where, when, and how much of these foods you can consume without guilt and without derailing your nutrition goals. Letting yourself have a small ice cream cone is not “cheating”. Never allowing yourself to enjoy ice cream again is cheating yourself out of the pleasure of enjoying one of your favourite foods. 


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Grocery store lessons: Graduates for toddlers Juice Treats

Not having kids myself, I’ve somehow managed to remain blissfully unaware of the proliferation of horrendous packaged foods available in the baby food section. Unfortunately (or fortunately, as it provided me with blogspiration) the other day I took a closer look at some of the items being sold to parents for their young children. There were the usual jars of visually unappealing pureed foods. Alongside those, there were also a number of snack items and microwavable meals for toddlers. One snack in particular caught my eye: Graduates for Toddlers Juice Treats.

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These Juice Treats are being marketed as “real fruit” snacks for toddlers. Call me crazy, but real fruit does not generally come in a box in the form of gummy candy. Why do we need to teach children that treats are candy? Why can’t we teach them that fresh apples, for example, are treats? And don’t for one second think that these gummies have anything in common with actual fruit. Nope, one 28 gram packet has 100 calories, 25 mg of sodium, no fibre, 17 g sugar, 0.1 g protein, and 4% DV of vitamin C. “But they have vitamin C” you might argue. Yep, that’s not from fruit, it’s from the added ascorbic acid. It’s also not very much vitamin C. A small orange has 85% DV of vitamin C. It, as well as other fruits, also contains other vitamins and minerals, Juice Treats do not. The first ingredient in these snacks is corn syrup. The second is sugar. The “fruit” is a bit of pureed fruit and a bit of fruit juice (read: more sugar). Let’s also not forget the oral health nightmare that feeding your toddler gummy treats can create.

What more is there to say? These Juice Treats are no substitute for actual fruit.

 


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Avoiding teaching disordered eating

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New evidence is surfacing that healthy eating initiatives in schools may be backfiring. It seems that some students have developed eating disorders (or disordered eating) after participating in obesity-prevention and healthy living programs in schools. While cause and effect can not be known for certain (i.e. there is no way for us to know if these students developed these food-related issues as a direct result of these programs) this news does raise an element of concern. I think that there are a number of strategies we, as health care providers and educators, can employ to avoid these unintended consequences.

Firstly, we need to be careful about our messaging. Telling students what they should and shouldn’t eat has the potential to instil in them a sense of guilt when consuming foods they come to believe are “bad”. Infusing eating with negative emotions is definitely a good start for disordered eating. Far better to emphasis healthy and delicious foods and how to incorporate them into diets regularly than to tell kids not to drink pop or eat candy. This reminds me of an episode of Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution. While I know that he meant well I was horrified when I saw him making students run laps to teach them how much effort it would take to burn off the calories from their chosen snack (snacks were oranges, chocolate bars, or pop if my memory serves me correctly).

Beyond our messaging, we need to teach by example. It’s one thing to have a dietitian come in and tell the class about healthy eating and nutrition. It’s another, and far more meaningful lesson, thing for children to see their parents, teachers, and other adults living the lifestyle we’re telling them to live. I know that it can be hard to find the time to cook supper some days. I know that after working for 9 hours you don’t want to go to the gym, or run, or whatever your chosen exercise is. Honestly, these activities are the best medicine; both for yourself and for the future generation.

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