Eating For Health

Enjoy that pasta and cover it with some spaghetti sauce.   How healthy is spaghetti sauce?   Are some brands healthier than others?   What should you look for when buying spaghetti sauce? Is spaghetti sauce healthy? Yes.   Spaghetti sauce provides vitamins, minerals, fiber and antioxidants.   All good for your health.   Vitamins :     Spaghetti sauce is full of a number of vitamins like vitamins A, C and K.   A half cup serving of spaghetti sauce supplies about 10 mg of vitamin C.   An important vitamin for collagen formation and our immune system.   A half cup supplies about 100 skin.   Vitamin K – lots of it in spaghetti sauce.   A half of cup also supplies about 20% of w 0 IU of vitamin A or about 20% of what you need each day.   Vitamin A helps us see at night and for our skin as it builds the connective tissue under our skin.   I always tell my students to eat carrots for healthier skin but I...

How healthy is the pasta in your spaghetti, macaroni and cheese, rigatoni, and other pasta dishes?   So many people have been avoiding pasta as it is a “carb” and they think carbs are unhealthy.   Americans still enjoy their pasta as we eat about 20 pounds of it a year.   How healthy is pasta? Pasta provides a lot of nutrition.   Not just carbs but also protein, about 5-7 grams of protein in a cup of cooked pasta.   The flour used to make pasta is a high protein durum wheat flour which is higher in protein than other types of flour. If you want to add more nutrition to your spaghetti or pasta dish, add some whole wheat pasta.   We usually use about ¾ white pasta and about ¼ whole wheat pasta.   Some people use all whole wheat pasta but it is a taste one needs to get used to.   Most people hardly notice if you add just a little whole wheat pasta.    Even the white pasta provides some fiber.   And pasta is enriched w...

Some nutrition articles this week were interesting.   Peeling that apple, then maybe you are losing some nutritional benefits.   Is there a mineral that helps prevent cancer?   Apples Many people don’t like the peel of apples and thus cut it off or buy apple slices in a bag with no peel.   Eating fruit is a healthy habit.    The   Centers for Disease Control and Prevention     reports, “Statistics from a 2013 Centers for Disease Control and Prevention survey show nearly 40% of Americans eat fruit less than one time a day”.    The good news is, over 60% of us are eating fruit one or more times a day.   So eating apples is good, eating apples that are not peeled is even better. Double the fiber – leaving the peel on doubles the amount of fiber you get from eating the apple Potassium – the peel adds 25% more potassium Vitamin A – apples are not a great source of vitamin A, but leaving on the peel adds 40% more vitami...