Dick Logue - 500 Heart-Healthy Slow Cooker Recipes: Comfort Food Favorites That Both Your Family and Doctor Will Love

DedicationTo all the email correspondents, newsletter subscribers, and others who encouraged me to continue producing more recipes. Even though sometimes it seemed like work, their assurances that it was useful information kept me going. INTRODUCTION Why a Heart-Healthy
Slow Cooker Book? F or a number of years, the slow cooker has been one of the most often-used appliances in our kitchen. It can be a real savior for working people, delivering a hot, ready-to-eat meal when you come home from a long day and feel least like cooking. (Not to mention that wonderful aroma that will be filling the house.) It also is good for your food budget, allowing you to use less costly cuts of meat and turn them into fork-tender delicacies. But the sad truth is that a lot of the recipes out there for the slow cooker are not all that great from a health standpoint. Do a quick search online or open a typical slow cooker cookbook and youll find recipes that are full of more fat, sodium, and calories than are good for you.

Of course, most dont include any nutrition analysis, but you can imagine what it would look like for the first slow-cooked dip recipe that comes up on Google, which calls for 2 pounds of Velveeta cheese, plus taco seasoning mix and other high-sodium ingredients. As someone whos been making recipes more heart-friendly for more than 10 years, that bothered me. It forced people to either eat things that were less healthy than they should or limit their use of the slow cooker. So I decided to take some of the slow cooker recipes that we had used for years, add some new ones, and put together a book that would solve the problema book of heart-healthy slow cooker recipes. This is that book.

A fair question is what we really mean by heart-healthy and how these recipes fit that description better than the ones in other slow cooker books.

It seems like there is a lot of discussion and some controversy about what really is heart-healthy. But there are a couple of key concepts that I have come to believe in over the years that most mainstream medical people agree with as well. They are as follows: Reduced sodium Reduced saturated fats and trans fats Less dietary cholesterol Higher fiber Lets look at each of these in turn and see why these recipes adhere to these concepts.

As many of you who are familiar with my other books or my website may know, reducing sodium was the first goal of my heart-healthy cooking journey. As a starting point, consider the following facts: The United States Food and Drug Administration recommends 2,300 milligrams (mg) of sodium daily for healthy adults. The US Department of Agriculture recommends that individuals with hypertension, African Americans, and adults 50 and older should consume no more than 1,500 mg of sodium per day.

The United Kingdom Recommended Nutritional Intake (RNI) is 1,600 mg daily. The National Research Council of the National Academy of Sciences recommends 1,100 to 1,500 mg daily for adults. Studies have shown that many people in the United States and Canada routinely consume 2 to 3 times that amount. Given these figures, its pretty safe to say that many of us consume more sodium than is good for us. If you already have a history of heart disease or have a family history of it, its even worse. I know I sound a bit like a zealot in this, but I can honestly say that I felt much better when I first started my low-sodium diet over 10 years ago.

And Im probably in a better position now medically than I was then. All I can say is that its worked for me and for lots of other people Ive talked to.

These have been shown by a number of studies to be major contributors to high cholesterol. In general, saturated fats are fats that are solid at room temperature. There are several sources of saturated fats. The most common ones are the following: Red meatsBeef, pork, and lamb contribute a significant amount of saturated fat to our diets.

Many experts recommend reducing the amount of red meat we eat. If you find that difficult, and I admit that I do, the slow cooker can help by allowing you to use leaner cuts of meat. Poultry skinAny slow cooker recipe you look at recommends removing the skin from poultry, thus problem solved. Whole fat dairy productsBy using other items like cream soups and fat-free evaporated milk in our slow cooker recipes, you wont even notice that you arent using whole milk or cream for that chowder. Tropical oilsWe use only healthier oils like olive and canola and dont even miss things like palm and coconut oil. Trans fats are also called trans-fatty acids.

They are produced by adding hydrogen to vegetable oil through a process called hydrogenation. This makes the fat more solid and less likely to spoil. Research has clearly linked trans fats to a number of health problems. The most common sources are margarine and other solid shortenings. In general, I never use them.

Although there has been some disagreement about how significant the role of eating foods high in cholesterol is in increasing your blood cholesterol, most experts still recommend reducing it.

Common sources of dietary cholesterol are the following: Egg yolksI almost never use whole eggs, preferring to use an egg substitute like Egg Beaters that is made from egg whites. I cant tell the difference. Organ meatsThis is good news for everyone who hates liver. (I happen to like it, but I only eat it once every couple of months.) ShellfishThis is another thing I like but try to limit.

There have been a number of studies showing the benefits of increasing our fiber intake, not only for heart health, but for many other areas of the body as well. A few key findings are as follows: A study published in the May 11, 2000 issue of The New England Journal of Medicine reported that diabetic patients who maintained a very high-fiber daily diet lowered their glucose levels by 10 percent.

A 1976 study by the Veterans Administration Medical Center in Lexington, Kentucky, showed that fiber is useful in treating diabetes, high blood pressure, and obesity and in reducing cholesterol levels. Two studies published in The Lancet showed that people with high fiber diets suffered from fewer incidents of colon polyps and colon cancer. So there are a lot of good reasons to add more fiber to your diet, even if you arent currently being treated for a medical condition that requires it. In the next section I describe what weve done to bring these recipes in line with these guidelines.

Most of the things weve done to make these recipes more heart-friendly involve simple substitutions and changes to the usual ingredients. Some may seem obvious, particularly to anyone who has read any of my other books.

Some may be less so. The following are some of the key ones.

One question that may occur to some people looking over the recipes in this book is, Why is there no salt in any of the ingredient lists? Thats a fair question and deserves an answer. As I said in the Introduction, I first got involved with heart-healthy cooking because my doctor put me on a low-sodium diet. It took some time and lots of experimentation, but I learned how to cook things that both taste good and are easy to prepare that are still low in sodium. Along the way, we literally threw away our salt shaker.

Theres one shaker full of light salt (half salt and half salt substitute) on the table. My wife uses that occasionally. Two of my children have given up salt completely, not because they need to for medical reasons, but because they are convinced like I am that its the healthy thing to do. When I started creating recipes focused on other areas of heart health, going back to using salt wasnt even something I considered. In creating these recipes, I was not as strict about the amount of sodium as I usually am in my own diet. I didnt plan on people buying special sodium-free baking powder that is difficult to find except online.

Next page