Mother Earth News - Mother Earth News 1990

Maintain a heart-healthy diet with these tips, including recipes for chicken and vegetables Provenale and spaghetti with cauliflower.

By Robert Barnett

January/February 1990

More horsefeathers get tossed about regarding the subject of nutrition than just about anything else. This modern snake-oil salesmanship used to be the stamping ground of the quacks, selling you vitamin B93 to cure baldness, or psoriasis, or impotence. Now the food industry itself has jumped in.

Health sells. A third of all new food products introduced in 1988 boasted a health claim. Its certainly encouraging to see powerful companies compete to bring us lighter, healthier, lower-fat foods. Lets face it: We need all the help we can get.

But as corporations search for competitive advantage in the marketplace, the truth is sometimes lost along the way. This product claims it has no cholesterol, but it turns out to be high in tropical oils such as palm, which is mostly saturated fat, which raises blood cholesterol (the kind that counts) even more dramatically than does the intake of dietary cholesterol. Yet another argues its a better breakfast cereal because it has more vitamins than its whole-grain brother, as if the purpose of breakfast were to supply us with a sugar-coated vitamin pill, rather than with nourishing, energizing complex carbohydrates.

Must the quest for a healthy diet really be confusing? Not at all. In fact, its rather astoundingly simple, as it turns out. Listen to The Surgeon Generals Report on Nutrition and Health. The number one rule: Cut fat. More specifically: Reduce consumption of fat (especially saturated fat) and cholesterol. Choose foods relatively low in these substances, such as vegetables, fruits, whole grains, fish, poultry, lean meats, and low-fat dairy products. Use preparation methods that add little or no fat.

The reasons behind such recommendations are many. A diet thats too high in fat, especially the saturated type thats found mostly in animal foods such as dairy fat (butter, cream, whole milk) and meat fat (heavily marbled beef, pork fat, chicken skin), increases the blood levels of such fats as cholesterol, and that can increase the risk of heart disease. A high-fat diet may also predispose to cancer. And diabetes. And gallbladder disease. Not to mention obesity, which can complicate other health problems.

Perhaps youve heard recently that theres a controversy over the relationship between cholesterol and heart disease. There has been, although it focuses mostly on the wisdom of a federal program, the National Cholesterol Education Program, which may encourage doctors to put too many patients who have high cholesterol on cholesterol-lowering drugs. No one really disputes the finding that a high level of cholesterol increases the risk of heart disease, or that lowering your cholesterol level to below 200 through diet will reduce that risk.

Of course, theres more to preventing heart disease than lowering blood cholesterol. Family history is one risk factor; if your biological relatives have had early heart disease, then its especially important to reduce other risk factors. Besides cholesterol, those include smoking and high blood pressure. Obesity, if it leads to high blood pressure or high cholesterol, also increases the damage.

Fortunately, all of these risk factors, except for smoking, can be reduced through regular exercise and a good diet. Nor is the best way to build a healthy diet just to avoid fat. Once the food industry comes out with fat substitutes-at least two are now up for approval by the Food and Drug Administration-youll be encouraged to eat low-fat ice cream and potato chips. But no matter how low-fat your ice cream, eating it all day long will never make you healthy. It lacks many of the nutrients our bodies need.

Instead, the best way to achieve a healthy diet is to get in the habit of eating more fresh, wholesome, natural foods. Like fruits and vegetables. Theyre low in lots of stuff: low in fat, low in sodium, low in calories. But theyre high in something, too. Nutrients. Vitamins and minerals. Dont forget them! One medium-sized carrot contains an average individuals required daily supply of vitamin A. Better yet, its in the form of beta-carotene, the plant precursor to vitamin A that may help prevent lung and other cancers. Carrots also are high in fiber.

But why eat a carrot instead of taking a beta-carotene pill? Well, theres probably nothing wrong with taking beta-carotene in a supplement. But doing so gets us off the track intellectually, gets us thinking of individual nutrients as magic bullets. Lots of ads feed that notion, too, whether theyre for oat bran or calcium. Its true that beta-carotene looks promising from a research perspective. But heres the real news: Scientific studies find that people who eat more fruits and vegetables of all kinds have a lower incidence of certain cancers than do people who eat only a few types of fruits and vegetables, or none at all.

So take an apple to your desk for an afternoon snack, or slice some carrots into a plastic bag and put them in the fridge for your kids to munch on, and get in the habit of including a green salad with dinner. The darker the green, the more vitamins it has.

The National Research Councils 1989 report, Diet and Health: Implications for Reducing Chronic Disease Risk, puts great emphasis on fruits and vegetables and on whole grains. This is the NRCs advice: Every day eat five or more servings of a combination of vegetables and fruits, especially green and yellow vegetables and citrus fruits. Also, increase intake of starches and other complex carbohydrates by eating six or more daily servings of a combination of breads, cereals, and legumes. (A serving, the report explains, is equal to a half cup of most fresh or cooked vegetables, fruits, dry or cooked cereals, and legumes. A serving is also defined as one medium piece of fresh fruit, one slice of bread, or one roll or muffin.)

Legumes, such as pinto beans, soybeans (even tofu), or split peas, are worth special attention. Theyre rich in protein and iron, and so can replace red meat for a weekday supper. Theyre inexpensive. They store well. Theyre rich in many vitamins, too, and full of fiber, including the type of soluble fiber-also found in oats-that tends to lower blood levels of cholesterol. And they taste pretty good in chili.

Does all this emphasis on grains and greens mean that beef is out? Not really. Beef, like all red meat, tends to be fairly high in fat and saturated fat, but a small portion (three or four ounces) of very lean beef provides good amounts of such nutrients as iron, zinc, manganese, and B vitamins (though not B93). Its all a question of balance. Chicken without the abdominal fat and the skin is a low-fat food. So is fish, which tends to be low in fat and especially low in saturated fat, and contains Omega-3 fatty acids, which can lower blood cholesterol and may lower blood pressure as well.

The same concern over fat goes for dairy products. From the butter on our bread to the cream in our coffee, dairy foods supply a lot of fat. But 1% milk provides lots of calcium and protein with little fat. Skim milk has essentially no fat. Eating low-fat frozen yogurt instead of premium ice cream can slice calories off your evenings dessert. Adding a little nonfat dry milk to stews and soups can add calcium without any fat at all.