Month: July 2017

Bananas are one of our favorite fruits.

What’s not to love? They’re technically berries, they come with their own carrying case, they have a large window for ripeness, you can buy them year-round for a low price, and they’re a perfect addition to your smoothie.

Bananas have all these nutrients because of phloem bundles.

Stay with us for a minute. “Phloem bundles” is the admittedly unappetizing name for those flat strings of banana that exist between the peel and the fruit itself. These bundles distribute water and nutrients throughout the berry.
If you throw those phloem bundles away, you’re not alone. Some people find the strings as unappealing as their name while others happily gobble them down. Nicholas Gillitt, a director at the Dole Nutrition Institute, told The Huffington Post that no nutritional studies had been done specifically on phloem bundles.

You’re probably throwing away other important parts of your favorite fruits and vegetables.

For instance, you’re being wasteful if you toss peels of apples, oranges, and bananas, as they’re fairly nutritious. For example, apple peels contain an antioxidant called quercetin, which benefits the lungs and brain.

If you’re looking for a delicious, nutritious skin, try a potato.

Potato skins have several B vitamins along with vitamin C, iron, calcium, and potassium. Potato skins also have a ton of dietary fiber, and given that most people need more of this nutrient, you might as well finish the entire spud.

Don’t throw away half of what you buy.

Many people eat Swiss chard for the leaves, but the stems are also edible. You can cook them alongside the leaves for a dose of glutamine, an amino acid that helps heal the body.
Similarly, the greens on beets and turnips are edible, though most people simply toss them in the compost. They taste wonderful when they’re blanched and sauteed in olive oil. When you make the most out of your veggie purchase, you’ll save money and receive a bigger dose of vitamins.

I’m sorry. I’m one of those people; I’ve got to ask my servers about all of the ingredients in their restaurant’s dishes.

See, I’ve got that crazy tick-borne disease that caused me to develop an allergy to mammal meat as a full-grown adult.

Now, when I visit a Mexican restaraunt, I’ve got to ask if the refried beans are made with lard. If I’m ordering seafood at a place that does crawfish boils, I’ve got to ask if they boil sausage with the shellfish. I can eat the bejeebers out of a chicken sandwich, but if there’s bacon on it, I could go into anaphylactic shock.

I know this makes me a pain in the bum, but I like supporting local businesses and trying new things. I’m not going to crawl into a culinary hole and never eat out again. I try to be polite and flexible when chatting with my servers. And I always tip at least 20 percent.

So when I heard that a seafood chef from Down Under was railing against fake food allergies, I was ready to roast the cook like a shrimp on the barbie.

The Angsty Aussie

Patrick Friesen is a Sydney-based chef who runs the kitchen at Queen Chow, where they specialize in high-end Cantonese-style street food.

In addition to cooking expensive Chinese food, Friesen has an active Instagram account. In mid-July 2017, the chef took to the photo-sharing app to rant about people with peculiar dietary requirements.

“Can people with dietary requirements start knowing what you can and can’t eat?” Friesen began. “Shellfish allergy but loves oyster sauce. Gluten free but loves gluten as long as it’s not a piece of bread. Vegetarians that love a chicken wing. Pescatarians who eat chicken.”

It’s definitely not easy for a cook to navigate all of these minute details.

“Sort your s*** out and let your waiter know,” Friesen wrote. “You make it really damn hard for people with actual allergies and dietaries to go out to eat.”

I can’t blame a chef for getting frustrated at having to cater to guest requests—who doesn’t need to vent about parts of their job? But it does seem like Friesen was frustrated at a broad swath of the population.

Context helps to sort things out.

The Daily Telegraph caught up with Friesen and learned that the Sydney chef’s mother suffers from celiac disease…as he says, an “actual allergy.”

It’s not that the Australian isn’t sympathetic to his mother’s condition, but he suspects that some people are just being fickle with their requests.

“You have these people who come in on a first date and they say ‘I’m allergic to onions’ because they just don’t want to have onion breath,” Friesen told the Sydney-based publication.

And we say ‘well, it’s an Asian restaurant, you know there are onions in pretty much everything’…or eschalots or onion powder or whatever. And then they say ‘oh OK it’s fine. I’ll just eat everything’. So clearly it’s not an allergy at all.

“And for the kitchen it can be torture. Especially when we have real allergies to be concerned about.”

It’s a little easier to sympathize with the cook when you learn where he’s coming from.

Wisdom in the Comments (for Once!)

When you’re emotionally invested in a topic, the best rule of thumb is to avoid reading the comments about that issue. For some reason, I read them anyway.

Many of the comments on Friesen’s post seemed to fall in the “there’s no such thing as food allergies” category, but there was one gem that helped calm me down about the subject.

Instagram user rach_the_wanderer put it this way:

“You can please a customer who doesn’t like nuts by not giving them nuts. For someone with a legit allergy, you need to rewash hands, change gloves, break out newly dishwashed (not hand washed) utensils and open fresh packages of all ingredients. The point is, just say you don’t like something and it won’t be included—you don’t need to fake an allergy.”

I still feel like it’s a little rough for a chef to judge paying customers for what they order, but I can understand his frustration with the way we talk about our relationships with food.

A Persistent Problem

I don’t think Chef Friesen’s complaint is going to get sorted out anytime soon.

Let’s all agree to stick to a few simple rules. For restaurant patrons, if you have an aversion to some foods, don’t call call your preference an allergy. If you run a swanky restaurant, accept that your customers are going to be picky and that nothing you say on the internet is private.

As for me, I’m just stickin’ with chicken—I hope that’s not a problem in the kitchen.

Whether we’re looking to lose weight or improve our overall health, most of us could probably spend more time thinking about what we’re putting in our bodies.
Some foods seem like they’d be good for you, but unless you’ve actually read the nutrition labels, you might be surprised at what’s in them. Here are a few foods to avoid if you want to keep your diet on track.

1. Soda isn’t the only beverage to avoid.

You already know that sodas aren’t great, but don’t just switch out the sugary beverages with “diet” alternatives. Diet sodas have been linked to weight gain by a number of scientific studies.
“Consensus from interventional studies suggests that artificial sweeteners do not help reduce weight when used alone,” wrote neuroscientist Qing Yang in a 2010 mini-review of artificial sweeteners. “BMI did not decrease after 25 weeks of substituting diet beverages for sugar-sweetened beverages in 103 adolescents in a randomized controlled trial, except among the heaviest participants.”

Another study linked artificially sweetened beverages with an increased risk of stroke and dementia. We’d recommend sticking to tap water, black coffee, and unsweetened tea, perhaps with a twist of lemon for flavor.

2. Certain condiments can pack on the calories.

Condiments and sauces might seem like excellent tools for making nutritious foods more tolerable, but they’re often full of unnecessary sugars and salts. Barbecue sauce, for instance, can pack in up to 35 calories per tablespoon-sized serving, and most of those calories come from carbohydrates.

Whenever possible, consider cutting the condiments and replacing them with fresh vegetables. By using a tomato slice instead of ketchup, for instance, you can cut your caloric load while adding potassium, fiber, and vitamin C to your diet.

3. Beware of many—but not all—canned foods.

Too much salt can lead to high blood pressure and cardiovascular disease, and many canned foods are high in sodium. But contrary to popular belief, salt is not essential to canning.

During the canning process, foods are exposed to high temperatures for long periods. This eliminates any harmful bacteria, preserving the food, and since there’s no bacteria, there’s no real need for salt.
There’s just one problem: The canning process can make foods unpalatable. To get around this issue, some manufacturers add a ton of salt to their recipes.

Ultimately, you’ll need to read the labels to find out whether canned foods are high in sodium. You’ll find that sauces and soups often have a ton of salt, but many canned veggies are perfectly fine. Even when they are packed in salty water, you can cut the sodium content by simply rinsing the vegetables in fresh water.

4. Yogurt is a nutritious addition to your diet, unless…

Yogurt is considered a classic health food. It’s a great way to add protein and calcium to your diet, but if you’re not careful, it’s also a great way to add a bunch of empty calories.

Many flavored yogurts contain about 18 to 26 grams of sugar per serving, sometimes with added artificial sweeteners. Plain yogurt, by comparison, contains about 12 grams of sugar, most of which is lactose. You’re better off buying the plain yogurt and adding fresh fruit; it’ll taste better, and you’ll save a few calories.

Vitamin C is the go-to cure for the common cold, right?

Wrong.

It turns out that there’s no evidence to support the pervasive claims that a big glass of orange juice can cure a case of the sniffles.

In fact, the opposite is true. High doses of any vitamin—including vitamin C—are harmful to your health. So why do Americans continue to spend more than $30 billion annually on vitamin supplements?

The bizarre history of the vitamin supplement craze starts with one brilliant scientist, Linus Pauling, who believed that vitamin C was an all-natural miracle cure and convinced millions of Americans to believe the same.

Vitamin C: the Original Megavitamin

By the time Linus Pauling was 30 years old, he’d already won the first of two Nobel Prizes for his groundbreaking work on chemical compounds. He was considered one of the most brilliant scientists of his time. According to The Atlantic, even Albert Einstein admitted Pauling’s work was “too complicated.”

After winning the Nobel Peace Prize for his anti-war work in the 1960s, Pauling received a letter from Dr. Irwin Stone, who claimed that a “High Level Ascorbic Acid Regimen” of vitamin C could extend human life by several years.

Despite little evidence to corroborate Stone’s claims, Pauling was an instant believer in the healing power of vitamins and immediately began taking vitamin C in quantities that far exceeded the recommended daily amount.

In 1970, Pauling published a best-selling book called Vitamin C and the Common Cold, which boldly asserted that taking 1,000 milligrams of vitamin C daily could eventually eradicate the common cold altogether.

In the revised edition published in 1976, Pauling went even further. He claimed that high doses of vitamin C could cure not only cancer but virtually every other disease known to man.

Although Pauling was a highly regarded scientist and was considered the father of molecular biology, his peers published study after study that refuted his claims. Nevertheless, Pauling remained adamant, and his books stayed on bestseller lists for years.

Vitamania goes viral.

An undeniably brilliant scientist, Pauling was largely considered a quack by medical professionals.

Still, by the mid 1970s, nearly 50 million Americans were following Pauling’s vitamin C advice to ward off colds, cancer, and other ailments.

In 1972, Dr. Irwin Stone (remember him?) published The Healing Factor (with a foreword by Pauling), which further promoted the idea that megavitamin therapy could cure myriad ills.

The vitamin craze continued to grow steadily until the early 1990s, when it exploded after Time magazine published a cover story echoing Pauling’s claims that vitamins could “fight cancer, heart disease, and the ravages of aging.”

The magazine sold like hotcakes and was even distributed to members of Congress in an effort to influence the Food and Drug Administration to support vitamin supplements.

A couple of decades later, and vitamania is everywhere. V
itamins are in everything from drinks to snack cakes.

According to journalist Catherine Price, “we tend to think that vitamins can hold the key to good health, and we let this enthusiasm for the idea get in the way of our good health.”

Linus Pauling truly believed that vitamin supplements could cure every disease on Earth. His enthusiasm spurred the modern vitamin craze that has persisted for more than 40 years.

Although Pauling was an exceptional molecular biologist, his claims regarding vitamin supplements are mostly untrue.

In reality, Price says, “there’s potential long-term risk in constantly saturating our bodies with way more than we actually need.”

Although there are people who do suffer from serious vitamin deficiencies around the world, most Americans get all the vitamins they need from a well-rounded diet. Recent research shows that vitamin supplements do nothing to improve heart health or memory loss.

Antioxidants aren’t a cure-all.

Pauling believed that antioxidants were the reason vitamins could cure everything from colds to cancer. It turns out that antioxidants found in vitamins (particularly vitamin C) could be the reason vitamins actually shorten lifespan.

A little science:

Antioxidants prevent cell damage done by free radicals. Free radicals in the body are highly reactive because they contain an unpaired electron. Without antioxidants to stabilize free radicals, serious cellular damage that leads to heart disease, cancer, and memory loss can occur.

Free radicals aren’t all bad, though. In certain instances, free radicals can act as signal substances that alert the body something’s wrong, thus triggering the balancing antioxidant response. It’s only when too many free radicals exist that long-term cellular damage can occur.

A variety of antioxidants naturally occur in food and help the body balance free radicals. This variety provides a protective buffer as antioxidants connect to free radicals in the body.

In an interview with Scientific American, Dr. Cleva Villanueva explains it this way: “chocolate has more than 20 antioxidant flavonoids. One is converted into a free radical and becomes reactive, but less reactive [than the first]. It then reacts with another, and that one is less reactive and so on and so forth, and all of them react with each other, decreasing the damage that would be happening to our lipids, or proteins or DNA.”

When we take a large amount of just one antioxidant—like a big dose of vitamin C—that protective buffer disappears. 

According to Diane McKay, a researcher at Tufts University, “If you have too many antioxidants, you suppress your body’s own ability to turn on its antioxidant defense system.”

The Truth About Vitamins

In reality, the truth about whether vitamins are good or bad for us lies somewhere in the middle. Vitamins are necessary for overall good health and can in moderation lower the risk of certain health conditions.

Unless you do have true vitamin deficiency, such as with rickets, most doctors recommend a nutritious diet full of whole grains, fruits, vegetables, and lean proteins as the best way to get the recommended daily amount of vitamins.

Linus Pauling was wrong about vitamin C, but he steadfastly believed in his work until the end of his life. Although vitamins may not do anything for your cold, doctors agree there’s nothing wrong with drinking orange juice in moderation when you’re sick.