health and nutrition – Page 7

Cravings and Squicks

Warning – this post contains discussion of vomiting.

Food, being, ideally, a sensual pleasure, is one of those things that we either really love or really abhor. Individual foods, I mean.

As children, we go through phases where we dislike different things, based on taste, texture or smell. As we age, those tastes usually adapt and progress, and we willingly eat spinach or beans or whatever food it is we hated so ardently in our youth.

The one exception to this is when food becomes associated with a traumatic event, particularly something physically traumatic like a serious illness. Watching it all come back up can turn us off from ever desiring a particular food again.

When I was a kid, my Mom was a big fan of cream of tomato soup. She always added additional milk to our soup, in part to cool it and additionally to make it creamier. Except one day, the soup was too hot and the milk curdled, although I didn’t know it at first spoonful. Haven’t been able to eat cream of tomato soup since then. I can’t, to be completely honest, even watch other people eat it, especially if they break crackers into it.

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Manic Organic – Part 2

Today we’re looking at the organic options in the higher-end grocery stores in my ‘hood. And the options really appear to be all about location. In Parkdale proper, even the prepackaged organic items can be hit or miss, but once I headed over to Roncesvalles Avenue where the supermarkets face stiff competition from a plethora of greengrocers, the organic options were overwhelming.

Loblaws
2280 Dundas West

With 300 products in the PC Organics line, I’m not about to list them all, and I’m going to go with the assumption that the Dufferin Mall No Frills offers a good cross-section of the prepared organic products. Instead, at Loblaws I concentrated on the produce section where there was, indeed, a decent amount of organic options to choose from. Organic strawberries were posted as being $5.99 compared to $4.99 for conventional and that price must have been attractive to customers as there were no organic strawberries left when I was there.

Of the organic cabbage, beets, radish, kale and carrots, all were imported. Pineapples, grapes and pears were also sold bagged, so there was no picking and choosing. Organic onions and sweet potatoes were sold in bags only, which might make the conventional versions of those items more of an option for anyone who needed only one or two of each. There was a decent selection of loose organic fruit, however, with mangoes, oranges, pears, lemons, avocado and kiwi all represented, as well as 5 varieties of organic apples.

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Manic Organic – Part 1

A few months back I read something in one of the newspaper food columns about how relatively easy it was to get organic produce at local supermarkets. The article specifically mentioned the No Frills in Dufferin Mall, and it left me scratching my head. See, I shop at that No Frills and I can’t really recall seeing a whole lot of organic produce there.

This provoked the desire to start exploring. Maybe there were hidden gems in my local shops that I wasn’t even aware of. So over the past few weeks, I’ve been wandering the supermarkets of the west end of downtown to see exactly what there was out there in terms of organics.

You’ll notice that I stuck to supermarkets and chain grocery stores, as this is where most people shop. My own grocery shopping excursions take me regularly to St. Lawrence and Kensington Markets, Whole Foods and Pusateri’s, as well as a variety of farmer’s markets, shops in ethnic neighbourhoods and small health food stores, in addition to frequenting the stores listed below.

In my travels for this article, I looked for specific items such as milk and soy milk, eggs, produce and prepared foods.

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Getting Taken For a Ride with Canada’s Food Guide

Yes, it’s the day that Canadians have been waiting for with bated breath – the release of Canada’s first new food guide in fifteen years. The media can’t stop singing the praises of the thing, but much of the media write their articles based on press releases. The truth is, the new Food Guide is not especially useful to anyone.

The guide has been redesigned to allow more personalization of choices; there are more ethnic foods to accommodate the cultural changes within our population, and it allows individuals to make specific choices with regards to which foods they will eat from each section.

But while the new Guide does offer serving sizes, it doesn’t differentiate it terms of calories or fat content. In the milk and milk “alternatives” section (to which I must emit a giant “HA!” – the only non-dairy “alternative” offered is soy milk), skim milk, 1% and 2% milk are all considered equal. And in the alternatives section, you can have pudding instead of a glass of milk. Not that milk should even be there to begin with (it’s really not necessary to good health and nutrition), but the Food Guide really wasn’t created with the health of Canadians as its primary focus anyway, and marketing boards have a much bigger say in the final draft than the real and genuine health concerns brought up by doctors.

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Let There Be Pie

About a year ago, I wrote a post bemoaning the transfats in shortening and a bunch of people suggested that I try a butter crust for making pies. I was generally pleased with a butter crust – it handles great and tastes delicious, but I was never totally happy with the fact that it seemed to get soggy. There’s just two people in our household and lest we make pigs of ourselves, we’re not really able to eat a whole pie between us (nor should we ever aspire to) before the crust got downright nasty.

Wednesday, Crisco announced that they have removed the transfats from ALL of their products. Not just that one, hard-to-find, green can of non-hydrogenated shortening, but the whole shebang.

Now that still doesn’t make Crisco a perfect product – as I’ve pointed out before, it’s made of t-shirts doused in pesticides. But butter has its failings as well, and while I’m not adverse to butter for specific, small-scale uses, I don’t always want the scary pile of cholesterol that a slice of butter-crust pie carries with it. (And yes, I’m a vegetarian, and yes, despite the fact that I’m a big gal, you’d kill your mother to have my cholesterol levels, but still – it all helps.)

So I think I might just have to switch back to shortening for my pie-making needs. With the health concerns pretty much evenly balanced now, it really does come down to taste and texture.

If Soy Makes You Gay, How Come There Are so Many People in China?

Oh, those crazy Christians. Always questioning the world around them looking for answers to the things they don’t understand. Which would normally be a good thing, except when answers = scapegoating. Now that we’ve confirmed that Tinky Winky and his purse aren’t turning the world’s children into raging drag queens, the time has come for the Christian right to determine exactly what causes “teh gay”.

Apparently, it’s soy.

According to columnist Jim Rutz at WorldNetDaily (an informative site with articles titled “25 reasons to celebrate the nativity”, and why you should pull your children from public school (hint- it’s the debbil!!!), soy, which contains estrogen, is turning the fine, masculine young men of the United States into limp-wristed girlie-men.

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Exotic Fruit – Fresh Dates

Just about everyone has eaten dates at some point. From the much-loved date square, to those little styrofoam trays of beautifully arranged dried dates available during Ramadan or Christmas, dates are a well-known treat.

But have you ever eaten a fresh one?

Fresh dates are available in late summer and early fall and can most easily be found in East Asian markets or at some farmer’s markets in California. Fresh dates are reddish or yellow in color and are often hard as they are picked before they have fully ripened. They are sold by weight, still attached to a short branch.

Fresh dates can be eaten “green” or what is known at the ”kimri” stage, where they have not ripened and have the consistency of a firm apple with a slightly sweet, green flavour. They are crunchy and slightly pithy near the seed.

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Eat Cake and Lose Weight – The Truth About “Moderation”

All things are fine… in moderation.

How often have we heard that phrase in regards to health and dieting? But what does it really mean? Experts tout a “balanced diet”, which, in theory, offers a bit of wiggle room for an occasional piece of cake, but what they really mean by “balanced” is choosing a variety of foods from all four food groups (the veg and grain and protein food groups, not the sugar, fat, alcohol and caffeine version) and eschewing junk food completely.

Oh, but that’s no fun, is it? We are drawn to diets that encourage moderation because we don’t want to feel deprived of our favorite foods. You’ve got to treat yourself occasionally, right? The problem is – few of us seem to know exactly what occasionally is. A recent study on obese people indicated that 75% of the study respondents claimed to have healthy eating habits which has led doctors to believe that most people don’t actually know what “healthy eating habits” are.

And the term “moderation” or the encouragement to “eat snack items in moderation” doesn’t help. Is moderation a junk food snack per day? Once a week? Or once a month? Do we save cake for a special occasion (such as a birthday), or is every day a special occasion because there’s cake?

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Can Following the Food Guide Make You Fat?

Both Canada and the US have versions of a food guide which outlines recommended daily intakes for the four main food groups. Started during the rationing of WW2, both countries have revised their guides a number of times since then.

Canada’s last revision was in 1992 where we went from “the four food groups” to a rainbow design to show that some items can and should be consumed more frequently. The US went with a pyramid design, although both guides are fairly similar in regards to quantities.

The main thing both guides have in common is that both are heavily influenced by the various food lobby groups (what boards, cattle farmers associations, dairy boards, etc) whose clients have a vested interest in having the goverment encourage people to eat specific foods.

The revised Canadian guide was supposed to have been released in spring 2006, and is now slated for some time in early 2007.

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Salad Days

People should not throw wedding receptions on Daylight Saving Time switch overs. Or at least not the day after. We went to a wedding reception last night and stayed out far too late and drank far too much. There were drink tickets and the G&T’s were being made with premium gin and an 8 to 1 ratio of G to T. There was much dancing and eating of cake and sushi, not to mention the spitting out of little tiny quiche upon the discovery of the bacon contained therein.

This morning, after little sleep, combined with too much booze and too much dancing (there’s nothing like a gay wedding for good tunes on the dancefloor), I’m feeling a bit rough around the edges.

Ever since I can remember, a hangover demands a salad. My body just wants something fresh and crisp and cold. I have the makings of an excellent salad in the kitchen, of course, but moving from a reclining to a standing position causes me to emit loud “Urrrnnnnggghhh!” noises reminiscent of Lurch from the Addams family.

The quick lunch choices in our immediate vicinity are few. Two burger joints, two sub places and a roti place which, while I typically adore the roti place, didn’t sit well in my brain today.

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