Eating For Health

So what are dietitians’ eating?   What tips do they have for a healthier you?   Read more about Dietitians' Top 10 Diet Tips .   Let’s look at 5 top tips today and next week we’ll do the remaining 5 tips.     Enjoy Fast Food, but Make Smarter Choices and Go Only Once a Week or less My husband and I enjoy some fast food but we choose from the menu carefully.   At McDonald’s I like their Egg McMuffin and orange juice.   For dinner we will choose one of the salads McDonalds   offer and a carton of milk.   At KFC we choose the grilled chicken over the fried chicken.    Look at how many calories you can save by making a wiser choice at KFC.   Have a chicken breast at KFC but choose the grilled and you save 270 calories not to mention 198 less calories from fat.   Even the sodium is lower in a grilled piece of chicken breast.   Carefully choose some sides and you don’t have that high a calorie meal from KFC.   For example, choose corn on the cob for only 70 calories rather th

We have all heard processed foods have less nutritional value than fresh foods.   Processing destroys vitamins and leads to nutritionally inferior foods?   But is this always true?   Recent research is helping to dispel some of these myths.   In fact, for antioxidants processing seems to boost their effectiveness. Tomatoes Fresh is best, right?   Well, maybe not.   Research has shown that cooked tomatoes like spaghetti sauce, or canned tomatoes has higher antioxidant levels than fresh tomatoes.   How can this be?   As far back as 2002, a study in the Journal of Agricultural Food Chemistry noted that heating tomatoes such as the heat involved in canning tomatoes, resulted in elevating not only the total antioxidant content of the tomato but also the lycopene content.   Although some vitamin C was lost in processing, the antioxidant value was increased.   Substances like lycopene help guard against some cancers and heart disease.   It seems heating the tomatoes releases the

Like chicken nuggets?   What kid doesn’t like a meal of chicken nuggets, fries and a soft drink?   So how healthy are those chicken nuggets?   In the class I teach, students always say chicken nuggets are healthy because chicken is healthy.    True, a baked chicken breast without the skin is lean protein and quite healthy.   But fried foods like chicken nuggets are drenched in fat so that is already one strike against them.   And is the meat in a chicken nugget really lean white meat?   Well this week, NBC news ran a story What's in that chicken nugget?    They noted how researchers in Mississippi analyzed chicken nuggets to find out what is in them.   They purchased chicken nuggets from two nationally recognized fast food chains, went back to their labs and preserved, stained and analyzed the contents of the nuggets.   Chicken nugget – Fast Food Restaurant 1                 50% muscle                 50% fat, blood vessels, nerves Chicken nuggets – Fast Food R

There is so much talk in the literature and at gyms, schools, meetings about people who have chosen to go gluten-free.   Not that they have celiac disease which requires a gluten- free diet but because they think it is “healthier”.   A lady friend has told me she has gone “gluten- free”.   When I asked why she was on this diet, she said, “to be healthier”.   So does going on a gluten-free diet make you “healthier” if you don’t have celiac disease?   What is gluten?      Gluten is a protein found in certain grains, wheat, barley, rye and triticale.   . How popular are gluten-free diets?   These diets have become big business.   Amazing how someone who does not have celiac disease pays extra money to go on a gluten-free diet they not only don’t need but may actually be less healthy.   If you do a title search on Amazon.com you will come up with over 7,000 books.   Some celebrities have gone gluten-free and then sell a book to go along with their new diet approach.   For example,