Save Your Life By Eating At Home

The slow insidious displacement of home cooked and communally shared family meals by the industrial food system has fattened our nation and weakened our family ties. In 1900, 2 percent of meals were eaten outside the home. In 2010, 50 percent were eaten away from home and one in five breakfasts is from McDonald’s. Most family meals happen about three times a week, last less than 20 minutes and are spent watching television or texting while each family member eats a different microwaved “food.” More meals are eaten in the minivan than the kitchen.

Research shows that children who have regular meals with their parents do better in every way, from better grades, to healthier relationships, to staying out of trouble. They are 42 percent less likely to drink, 50 percent less likely to smoke and 66 percent less like to smoke marijuana. Regular family dinners protect girls from bulimia, anorexia, and diet pills. Family dinners also reduce the incidence of childhood obesity. In a study on household routines and obesity in US pre-school aged children, it was shown that kids as young as four have a lower risk of obesity if they eat regular family dinners, have enough sleep, and don’t watch TV on weekdays.

We complain of not having enough time to cook, but Americans spend more time watching cooking on the Food Network, than actually preparing their own meals. In his series Food Revolution, Jamie Oliver showed us how we have raised a generation of Americans who can’t recognize a single vegetable or fruit, and don’t know how to cook.

The family dinner has been hijacked by the food industry. The transformations of the American home and meal outlined above did not happen by accident. Broccoli, peaches, almonds, kidney beans, and other whole foods don’t need a food ingredient label or bar code, but for some reason these foods—the foods we co-evolved with over millennia—had to be “improved” by Food Science. As a result, the processed-food industry and industrial agriculture has changed our diet, decade by decade, not by accident but by intention.

That we need nutritionists and doctors to teach us how to eat is a sad reflection of the state of society. These are things our grandparents knew without thinking twice about them. What foods to eat, how to prepare them, and an understanding of why you should share them in family and community have been embedded in cultural traditions since the dawn of human society.

One hundred years ago all we ate was local, organic food; grass-fed, real, whole food. There were no fast-food restaurants, there was no junk food, there was no frozen food—there was just what your mother or grandmother made. Most meals were eaten at home. In the modern age that tradition, that knowledge, is being lost.

The sustainability of our planet, our health, and our food supply are inextricably linked. The ecology of eating—the importance of what you put on your fork—has never been more critical to our survival as a nation or as a species. The earth will survive our self-destruction. But we may not.

Common sense and scientific research lead us to the conclusion that if we want healthy bodies we must put the right raw materials in them: real; whole; local; fresh; unadulterated; unprocessed; and chemical-, hormone-, and antibiotic-free food. There is no role for foreign molecules such as trans fats and high-fructose corn syrup, or for industrially developed and processed food that interferes with our biology at every level.

That is why I believe the most important and the most powerful tool you have to change your health and the world is your fork. Imagine an experiment—let’s call it a celebration: We call upon the people of the world to join together and celebrate food for one week. For one week or even one day, we all eat breakfast and dinner at home with our families or friends. For one week we all eat only real, whole, fresh food. Imagine for a moment the power of the fork to change the world.

The extraordinary thing is that we have the ability to move large corporations and create social change by our collective choices. We can reclaim the family dinner, reviving and renewing it. Doing so will help us learn how to find and prepare real food quickly and simply, teach our children by example how to connect, build security, safety and social skills, meal after meal, day after day, year after year.

Here are some tips that will help you take back the family dinner in your home starting today.

Reclaim Your Kitchen

Throw away any foods with high fructose corn syrup, hydrogenated fats or sugar or fat as the first or second ingredient on the label. Fill your shelves with real fresh, whole, local foods when possible. And join a community support agriculture network to get a cheaper supply of fresh vegetables weekly or frequent farmers markets.


Reinstate the Family Dinner

Read Laurie David’s The Family Dinner. She suggests the following guidelines: Make a set dinnertime, no phones or texting during dinner, everyone eats the same meal, no television, only filtered or tap water, invite friends and family, everyone clean up together.


Eat Together
No matter how modest the meal, create a special place to sit down together, and set the table with care and respect. Savor the ritual of the table. Mealtime is a time for empathy and generosity, a time to nourish and communicate.

Learn How to Cook and Shop
You can make this a family activity, and it does not need to take a ton of time. Keep meals quick and simple.

Plant a Garden
This is the most nutritious, tastiest, environmentally friendly food you will ever eat.

Conserve, Compost, and Recycle
Bring your own shopping bags to the market, recycle your paper, cans, bottles and plastic and start a compost bucket (and find where in your community you can share you goodies).

Invest in Food
As Alice Waters says, food is precious. We should treat it that way. Americans currently spend less than10 percent of their income on food, while most European’s spend about 20 percent of their income on food. We will be more nourished by good food than by more stuff. And we will save ourselves much money and costs over our lifetime.

Curbing Late-Night Cravings

Does this sound familiar?

You wake up in the morning motivated to stick to your diet and exercise. You make it to the gym and have a great workout. You prepare and enjoy low-calorie, high-fiber, tasty meals. After dinner, you relax in your living room.

An hour or two later, your mind wanders off to the kitchen. You're drawn to the goodies therein. You imagine how wonderful a snack would be right about now... and why not? You were good all day, and just a little won't hurt...

Before you know it, you've gone way overboard.

I think we've all done it. But over time, those extra indulgences can really add up. Not to mention, it can do a number on your dignity and self-respect, which is never good for your emotional well-being.

The best defense against behavior we later regret is to prevent that behavior in the first place. Here are some ways to curb those late-night cravings.

- Try to imagine how you will feel after giving in. If you can remember the sense of regret from former lapses clearly enough, it might be enough to motivate you to steer clear. If you do lapse, write down your feelings right afterward to serve as a detractor in the future.

- Try to imagine how you will feel in the morning, knowing that you didn't overeat the night before. When you do succeed, write down how it feels to have made the right decision, and keep your journal handy. This, along with the tip above, are powerful motivators.

- When you're teetering between "cheating" and "being good," try to visualize yourself being successful.

How do you define success?

- Ask yourself: Is the pleasure I will derive from going off my diet greater than the reward I would feel if I didn't? What are the benefits of sticking to your plan? What would the consequences be for not sticking to it?

- Set up a reward system. For example, for each evening that you stick to your intended eating plan, schedule yourself a massage or buy a new workout top.

- Distract yourself with an enjoyable and/or productive activity. Read a novel. Plan your meals and workouts for next week. Take up scrapbooking. Scour the sink. Go for a walk. Call a friend. Organize those photos. Clean out your email.

- Otherwise engage your tastebuds. Chew sugar-free gum. Brush your teeth. Drink a tall glass of water or cup of herbal tea. If you truly are hungry, eat a piece of fruit or something similar.

I portion my calories in such a way that I can afford to eat a treat every night if I like, which is 150 calories or less. This way I don't feel deprived and end up binging. No one needs to eat perfectly 100% of the time, after all. I don't eat the treat every night though, only if I have a craving. However, if I don't have a treat one night, I do not bank those calories for later. I just let them go.

The Dangers of the Medical Industrial Complex

Doctors think they make decisions based on medical evidence.

But they don’t!

In fact, half of medical evidence is hidden from your doctors. And the half that’s hidden is the half that shows drugs don’t work.

The bad news is that drug companies are not policed by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) the way they should be. A drug should be proven both effective and safe before it is prescribed to millions of people.

Sadly, that often isn’t the case.

Let me share with you two recent examples that highlight the dangerous collusion between drug companies and our government agency. They show why the FDA should really stand for “Federal Drug Aid.”

First, we now know that the cholesterol-lowering drug Zetia actually causes harm and leads to faster progression of heart disease despite lowering cholesterol 58 percent when combined with Zocor.

This challenges the belief that high cholesterol causes heart attacks and shakes the $40 billion dollar cholesterol drug industry at its foundation.

Second, it’s come to light that nearly all the negative studies on antidepressants – that’s more than half of all studies on these drugs – were never published, giving a false sense of effectiveness of antidepressants to treat depression..

Do not blame your doctor, instead, blame deceptive scientific practices and industry-protective government policies.  Let’s talk a closer look at these findings and their implications.

When a drug company designs and performs a study, it has to be registered with the FDA and all the results must be submitted to the FDA.  But it doesn’t work that way.

Instead, the pharmaceutical companies only submit the data they want to get published to medical journals.  That means that any negative studies are hidden from the scientific community and from the public.

And when drug studies are sponsored by drug companies – as most are – they find positive outcomes at 4 times the rate of independently funded studies. This is also true for nutrition studies funded by the food industry that show the benefits of dairy or high-fructose corn syrup.

The FDA does not release this information.

Since drug companies fund most of the research in the world, other therapies that work better – such as diet and lifestyle or nutritional therapies – never get enough funding.

That was, it didn’t until 2004 when all the major scientific journals banded together and refused to publish any data from any drug study that did not list the results of all trials, either positive or negative, in a central database.

Well, that sounds good – but listing obscure, unpublished studies buried deep in a hard-to-navigate public database run by the National Institutes of Health is hardly visible public disclosure.

The research studies are at least listed, but try to find out the results.  After a few hours searching around on the website clinicaltrials.gov, I gave up.

Last year, Congress passed legislation expanding how much detail must be listed, but at the end of the day, who even looks at that?  Most doctors don’t even have time to read the medical journals they receive. They get tiny bits of information from drug reps, whom come to their office with free lunch and a sound bite about their drug.

They get slightly more information from researchers who are funded by pharmaceutical companies and present their findings at conferences sponsored by pharmaceutical companies, using presentations prepared for them by pharmaceutical companies.  Not exactly independent, evidence-based medicine!

Now let’s get back to the news about Zetia.  Zetia is a new drug that lowers cholesterol by a different mechanism than statin drugs like Lipitor and Zocor.

Why does this matter?

Well, doctors have been brainwashed to think that cholesterol is the cause of heart attacks even though half of all people who have heart attacks have normal cholesterol.  And it seemed like the statins, which lowered cholesterol, actually reduced heart attacks.

Seems logical. If you lower cholesterol, you reduce heart attacks, right?

No!

The reason statins lower risk is not because they lower cholesterol, but because they reduce inflammation.  In fact, studies by Dr. Paul Ridker of Harvard show that the risk of heart attacks was only reduced if inflammation was lowered along with LDL cholesterol – but not if LDL cholesterol was lowered alone.

So then along comes a drug that can be combined with statins to lower cholesterol even more. Great idea?  Not really.

You see, the FDA approved Zetia without any proof that it lowered heart attacks or reduced the progression of heart disease. The drug was approved solely on the basis that it lowered cholesterol.

Yet Zetia was given to 5 million people – and made the drug companies $5 billion a year. That’s almost $14 million a day!  And once Zetia was approved, its makers had no incentive to prove that it actually did what it was thought to do – lower heart attacks.

They dragged their feet doing the studies and then released the negative data (which they did only under pressure from news agencies and Congress) after a long delay. Wouldn’t you drag your feet too if you were making $14 million a day?

But the FDA had the negative data on Zetia – and it didn’t speak up.  The data that was withheld proved that Zetia did not reduce heart attacks but actually increased fatty plaques in the arteries despite lowering cholesterol.

Let that sink in for a moment.

That’s right: Lowering cholesterol led to more heart disease!

That turns our whole medical model upside down. It shows us that high cholesterol is not a disease and may or may not be related to heart attacks.

Another recent study put another nail in the coffin of the Cholesterol Myth.

A major new cholesterol drug, torcetrapib, was pulled from the pipeline in December 2006 because despite lowering LDL cholesterol and raising HDL cholesterol in 15,000 people, it caused MORE heart attacks and strokes. This was to be the new cholesterol wonder drug. Oops.

This points to a big research mess that is flawed in three ways.

First, what gets studied depends on who is funding it.

Since drug companies fund most of the research in the world, other therapies that work better – such as diet and lifestyle or nutritional therapies – never get enough funding.

Second, drug companies are aided by the FDA, which suppresses, hides, and doesn’t publish negative studies on drugs, only positive ones. This leads doctors to think they have all the evidence when they don’t.

Third, doctors, patients, and the media believe they have the whole truth, often until it is too late, like with Zetia or Premarin or Vioxx. The evidence was there, but no one looked or publicized it.  This makes it very difficult for consumers to get the best treatments for their health and the whole truth about drugs.

Here is  advice on how to make sense of things.

1. Follow the money. Look carefully at who funded the study. Be suspicious if it was funded by drug companies.
2. Call or email your congressperson or Senator to demand better legislation providing an easy-to-navigate database of all drug trials, with consumer-friendly summaries of both published and unpublished data submitted to the FDA so you can look up the drug you are prescribed and have a balanced opinion.
3. Don’t assume that drugs are the answer to your health problems. Heart disease is not a Lipitor deficiency but the result of your lifestyle interacting with your genes.
4. Learn to ask the question “why?” – and search for the answers. Dealing with lifestyle and environmental factors (the basis of UltraWellness) almost always works better for chronic illnesses. Drugs are there as a backup only if needed.

So take a closer look at the information you’ve been given about drugs. You might be surprised by what you find.

Recipe: Oatmeal Meatballs With Spinach

Oats can help you drop pounds by revving your calorie burn and curbing cravings.

Serves 4

 

INGREDIENTS

• 1/2 cup instant oats
• 1/4 cup nonfat plain yogurt
• 1/2 cup packed baby spinach, thinly sliced
• 1/4 cup packed basil, chopped, plus 1 sprig
• 1/4 cup grated Parmesan
• 1 egg white
• 3 cloves garlic, finely chopped, divided
• 1 teaspoon salt
• 1/2 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
• 1/2 pound all-white-meat ground turkey
• olive oil cooking spray
• 1 can (26 oz) diced tomatoes, plus juice
• 1/2 cup dry white wine
• 4 oz whole-wheat pasta, cooked according to the package instructions

PREPARATION

1. Heat oven to 400˚. Mix oats and yogurt with 1/4 cup water in a bowl until oats begin to absorb liquid. Add spinach, basil, Parmesan, egg white, half the garlic, salt and pepper, and stir. Add turkey and mix until well combined. Form into 16 2-inch meatballs.
2. Coat a large, oven-safe stockpot with cooking spray. Add meatballs and bake until they begin to brown, 10 to 15 minutes. Turn and bake 10 minutes more. Add remaining garlic, basil sprig, tomatoes and wine. Cover and cook until meatballs are cooked through and sauce begins to thicken, 20 minutes. Serve immediately with pasta.

The skinny

314 calories per serving, 3.3 g fat (1.3 g saturated), 40.4 g carbs, 3.7 g fiber, 22.9 g protein

Comments

 

Bridgetcarroll says:

I made these delicious meatballs last night and was surprised at how good they were. My husband loved them as well! I also used a pound of turkey meat, one egg white and one whole egg (oops!), greek non fat yogurt, and did not double the spinach or basil. I used Trader Joe's Traditional Marinara sauce which is 50 calories in half a cup. It's really good sauce for only $2 bucks. After the meatballs were done I placed them in the sauce and was happy with the flavor. Will make again!

 

Quoll1969 says:

Turkey Mince is great numbers vs other meat products if dieting. Go Turkey!

gville76 says:

I made this last night and it was very tasty! I did make a few adjustments, which probably alleviate the other users' issues with meatballs turning out watery or with a smaller than expected yield. I used old fashioned oats instead of instant, nonfat Greek yogurt instead of nonfat plain, an entire egg instead of an egg white, and 1 pound of extra lean ground turkey instead of 1/2 pound. With the extra meat, you can safely double the spinach. These meatballs turn out nicely if you use red wine instead of white, but make sure to spoon the tomato/wine mixture over the meatballs before continuing the baking process so they won't appear half pink. One other small change was the use of diced tomatoes with basil, garlic, and oregano instead of plain diced tomatoes - these give the sauce more flavor without adding any calories or sodium.

 

schmaech says:

I made this last night, and while the recipe is a great base, made as is, it is pretty much terrible. I loved the oats and yogurt in it, as well as the spinach. However, there was too much liquid and the meatballs would barely form. They crumbled when I tried to turn them despite letting them cook for longer than the initial 10-15 minutes. Also, their flavor was blah. They didn't taste like anything. Next time, I will definitely decrease the amount of water and probably add more oats and spinach, and some more spices to get some flavor to them. Hopefully they will be better.

 

SaraWo24 says:

I just made these last night, and thought that they were fantastic! My boyfriend (who is against anything healthy) didn't even notice that they were made with oatmeal and yogurt. Later in the night, he opened up my laptop and saw the recipe: "Those meatballs were made with oatmeal?.....they were actually really good and moist." So, they definitely got a thumbs up from him. I added a bit more spinach (probably another 1/2 cup), and was able to get the 16 meatballs. Very delicious, and I think they might be good in a homemade Italian-style wedding soup too!

 

kjulien says:

I made 12 nice sized meatballs out of this and served it over spaghetti squash rather than the pasta. It was delish!

 

kgelleruo says:

do recipes like this include calories for the pasta?

 

MeganMay says:

It is impossible to make 16 two inch meatballs out of 1/2 pound of turkey. flavor is great.