Pita Pizzas and an Introduction
Dinner tonight: pita pizzas again I’m afraid, made this time with a Spolumbos Italian sausage (from the freezer) cooked up with a thinly sliced onion, some mushrooms I found in the back of the fridge (frozen on the inside, wrinkly on the outside) and some frozen spinach. These babies were load-ed. I’m sorry it isn’t very inspiring, but I am sticking to my no-shop agenda. I even managed to bake chocolate cupcakes for book club tomorrow using what I have in the cupboard. (I may, however, need to duck into the corner store for some eggs to make Seven Minute Frosting to go on top.)
But before I go – I want to introduce you to someone.
His name is Dr. Walter Willett. He’s a world-renowned Harvard-based researcher and chairman of the Harvard School of Public Health’s department of nutrition, and he has been working since the 70’s on the optimum diet. (By diet I mean way of eating in general, not a weight loss diet.)
When people ask me – how do I eat? Do I follow Canada’s Food Guide? (Short answer: No.) Do I follow any other sort of nutritional plan? Not really. It would be most accurate to say I follow food like Wimpy follows a hamburger, but if I had to give you one basic nutritional guideline to follow, this would be it.
Dr. Willett, along with the faculty in the Department of Nutrition at the Harvard School of Public Health, came up with this Healthy Eating Pyramid. Why another pyramid? Using a pyramid is just a way to make it easy for us to visualize what the structure of our diet should look like – rather than try to remember how many servings we need and what size those servings should be (which might then vary depending on our age, size and physical activity) we can remember that in general, our diet should be based on whole grains, fruits and vegetables, plant oils, nuts, legumes and seeds, then lesser amounts of lean protein from fish, poultry and eggs, modest dairy consumption and butter, red meat and simple carbs only occasionally. And it’s all science-based.
I won’t get into comparing Canada’s Food Guide, except to say that I ran a typical day’s worth of food through my nutritional analysis program and came up with well over 3000 calories. (And oh: 25% of the members of the Food Guide Advisory Committee are from Big Food.)
Dr. W was the first to make the distinction between healthy fats and unhealthy fats, and the fact that people on a low-fat diet often missed out on important nutrients. (Canada’s Food Guide doesn’t pay much attention to fats: “include a small amount – 2-3 Tbsp. – of unsaturated fat each day. This includes oil used for cooking, dressings, margarine and mayonnaise” – kind of hard to calculate tablespoons of fat when it’s in something. And while there is a mention of trans fat, the directive provided is “Limit trans fat”, this despite the fact that Health Canada’s own trans fat task force calls for the elimination of trans fat from our food supply. So shouldn’t it be “Avoid trans-fat”? And you might notice that pudding (!), chocolate milk and sweetened yogurt are all lumped in with 1% and even skim milk in the dairy group, as if they were equal choices.)
Dr. Willett is my kinda guy. If you’re interested in this nutrition stuff, poke around the Harvard School of Public Health website – The Nutrition Source – it really simplifies things, and nothing is skewed by companies who have a vested interest in selling their products. There’s even a page on weight control.
(And if you’re looking for extra reading credits, there’s an excellent story on Dr. W in the April 2007 issue of Cooking Light.)
Pyramid Illustration Copyright © 2008 Harvard University. For more information about The Healthy Eating Pyramid, please see The Nutrition Source, Department of Nutrition, Harvard School of Public Health, , and Eat, Drink, and Be Healthy, by Walter C. Willett, M.D. and Patrick J. Skerrett (2005), Free Press/Simon & Schuster Inc.
March 03 2009 | leftovers and sweet stuff | 16 Comments »
