Resolve to eat well in 2010

Welcome to 2010....and to the first day of the rest of your foodie life! As many of us wake up from a night of "turn of the decade" revelry and head straight for the greasy spoon cure...resolutions that seemed so on point last night are probably being postponed for Monday. So while you nurse your hangover, why not take advantage of this opportunity and mentally prepare to set some real revolution in place.

A quick and very unscientific Google scan points to a harrowing survey statistic - that only 8% of people keep their New Year's resolutions....and about half fail by January. If any of you are dedicated gym goers, you probably loathe the January gym crush but keep your self serene knowing that the rif raff will disappear by February 1. Why is that? Perhaps we need to look at what is motivating our resolve for the answer. Is it 10 pounds and a serious energy deficit brought on by holiday excesses? Is it a desire to look like the airbrushed masses blankly staring back at us from our magazines in time for summmer nuptuals? Or what if resolutions come from a more serious dissatisfaction from how we are actually living our lives?

The biggest obstacle I see with clients is the "extreme makeover" phenomenon. People who vow to go from take out and Seinfeld to vegan raw and yogic literally overnight. This all or nothing approach is almost always doomed to fail because it suffers from a fundamental disconnect of what your needs really are and what benefits your current lifestyle brings. This concept might take a bit of explanation. For example, if you work a typically harried 55 hour work week, when you get home your primary objective is probably to clear your head and nurture your psyche back from the enormous stresses of the day. You turn on the TV and order a pizza so you no longer have to make any decisions and can conserve that last thread of energy left in your body. You lay down, perhaps without knowing it, because this physically cues your body to relax. And the high fat, high salt, high calorie food is also a common response to stress...and soothing hormones are released as a response to the indulgence. As a result of these choices long term, you may not be that fit or too practiced in the kitchen. Then January 1st rolls around and you commit to yoga 5 times a week...rushing from the office to make sure you get a spot in the class, and then finding yourself at home 2 hours later than normal only to try and figure out how to get some plant based protein and vegetables morphed into a nourishing meal before you have to get to bed.....just thinking about it is already stressing me out. So a few weeks later.....it is back to Seinfeld and pizza because your soul just can't take it. 

I personally am a big fan of the quiet revolution. The challenge I find is convincing people that taking small steps will actually result in the kind of monumental change they are looking for without the headaches. But it is far easier to work on goals in an achievable stepwise fashion. Want to be a vegan? Perhaps your first goal should be buying Becoming Vegan, a great book by two Canadian dietitians that will teach you everything you need to know. And since that is an easy one, you could add that you will experiment with cooking tofu or tempeh each Sunday. This way you will have time to look up a recipe and then have fun experimenting. Once you have that one down, you could make the switch from cow's milk to soy milk in your morning latte. By working each new change into your lifestyle permanently, by the end of the year you might actually get to vegan. And you won't be struggling...each new change will become habit.

I am going to leave you with 10 mini resolutions to get you inspired. Perhaps try adding one a week....and within 10 weeks you are going to have gotten a lot farther that most of the resolution crazed masses.

1. Add 1/2 cup of blueberries to your breakfast every morning for an antioxidant boost.

2. Trim up your milk: if you drink 2%, move to 1%; if you drink 1%, switch to skim

3. Replace your afternoon snack with chopped celery, baby carrots and a bit of hummus to sneak more veggies into your day.

4. Replace your second cup of coffee with green tea for less caffeine and cancer busting phytochemicals.

5. Swap veggie ground round for ground beef once a week to save saturated fat and calories...not to mention the eco effects of eating veggie.

6. Snack on yogurt with 1/3 cup of Bran Buds or Smart Bran to boost fibre intake in a big way.

7. Keep prewashed bags of spinach in the fridge and add it to everything: saute in omelets, pasta sauces and stews; stuff sandwiches and wraps or toss with dressing for a super simple side salad to an otherwise veggie-free meal.

8. Keep good quality pureed veggie soups at the office so you always have a healthy lunch or snack option.

9. Swap at least one energy drink or flavoured "water"  a day for actual water for a natural energy boost.

10. Try one new recipe per week; buy a beautiful new cookbook or troll great, free recipe websites like eating well or epicurious.

PS. My own resolutions this year pertain largely to my committment to this blog - I am going for a post a week. If you have any topics you would like to see covered...just let me know!

Here's to personal revolution,

Desiree

A Local Table...in stores now!

Here it is folks! I am officially (self) published....A Local Table: the Choices Markets Cookbook launched at Choices Markets and Cookworks yesterday. It has been a labour of love over the past six months and it is amazing to finally see it in print. I hope you all love it!

The cookbook features 98 recipes by Choices Markets' executive chef, Antonio Cerullo. Antonio comes from an Italian fine dining background but he is a bit of a cowboy when it comes to food. No matter what we throw at him, from tofu to gluten free, raw foods to reinvented Italian classics, his flair for creating simple yet elegant and delicious meals that anyone can create makes his monthly cooking classes at our White Rock store pretty popular!

A Local Table reflects what Choices Markets is all about  - there is something for everyone! Many of the recipes are gluten free and there are plenty of meal ideas for the vegan, vegetarian or meatarian in your life. Each recipe is colour coded according to diet suitability and comes with nutrition facts to help make diet planning a snap, just in case you're counting calories....I prefer to count sheep, myself!

What makes this cookbook unique is that not only is it about local foods but it also focuses on what is local right where we live, here in BC. The recipes are divided amongst the seasons -yes, you really can eat local in February! To help prove it, our wonderful friends at Farm Folk/City Folk provided us with their Get Local Metro Vancouver map and they even created an Okanagan calendar for us too! So if you live in Kelowna, you can crack open our book and see that in November, you can get local cauliflower and garlic to make a curry. In Vancouver, you might take advantage of the local potatoes and leeks to make a soup to ward off the rainy days.

We have featured 4 amazing local farms in BC and other local businesses who are making healthy and sustainable food for our family tables. I have also written a section on sustainable nutrition that talks about how each one of us can help to reduce the carbon foot print of our meals every day.

If you are in the Lower Mainland this weekend, join us at Cookworks on West Broadway (near Granville) on Saturday, November 21st between 11:00AM and 4:00PM for our launch party or attend our Cooking Class at our White Rock store on Monday November 23rd (call the store to pre-register).

A Local Table is just $19.95...with $5 dollars from each book to Farm Folk/City Folk!

Let me know what you think of the book...and get cooking!
Desiree

Drink...Tea

Good health depends on staying hydrated: water is the medium in which every single reaction in our bodies takes place. Unfortunately, should the urge to sip hit, there aren't a lot of healthy options on offer. Store shelves are stocked with a kaleidoscope of flavoured drinks that offer little more than sugar with preservatives and crayon box hues. Vitamin Water anyone? Kool-Aid with vitamins would still be Kool-Aid. Think about it!

Research shows that liquid calories are the worst offenders when it comes to weight gain because our bodies don't really register the energy intake like they do with a solid meal. So what's a health conscious drinker to do? We diligently shun any beverage with sugar...or fake sugar...or calories of any sort and drink loads of pure, simple water day in and day out (out of a BPA free reusable bottle). Which, truthfully, can get a little boring! Sometimes you need a little flavour...healthy flavour. The answer to your healthy drink quest? Tea!


Tea has a lot going for it: calorie free, much lower in caffeine than coffee and host to powerful disease busting antioxidants. So drink plenty of water...but when you need a little healthy flavour in your life - try one of these 5 great teas!


1. Oooli. Made right here in Vancouver, Oooli is all about oolong tea. What is great about Oooli is that it is real brewed tea, either plain (zero calories!) or lightly sweetened with fruit flavours. The highest calorie count is 80 calories for a 473mL serving and nothing artificial - which is waaaay less than other "iced teas" aka liquid glucose delivery systems. Flavour without the sugar hit!
2. Kombucha Wonder Drink. Kombucha is a fermented tea that has been enjoyed for centuries...the nice people at Wonder Drink people have conveniently bottled it for us! Kombucha is celebrated for detoxifying and energizing properties (try it for yourself to see how you feel - I like it!) and at about 60 calories per 250 ml....the highest calorie count of all 5 teas on my list but not too bad in moderation. One note...I didn't realize that Wonder Drink pasteurizes their products, so unfortunately there are no live probiotics to benefit your gut health - but the products of fermentation (the organic acids purported to detoxify) still live on!
3. Numi Pu-erh Teas. Ever heard of Pu-erh? Pu-erh is a highly prized tea picked from very old tea trees which is then fermented for 60 days. The result is a rich, earthy taste and a higher antioxidant count than most green teas. Pu-erh is purported to have numerous health benefits (you can check them out on Numi's site)....apparently in Taiwan, Pu-erh is called the "skinny tea"! Any Taiwanese tea drinkers out there...let me know! Did I mention there is a chocolate flavour? Yum.
4. Red Espresso. Not that coffee is hideous for you...it isn't really...but perhaps you are a latte lover looking to swap your bean for leaf? Red Espresso is calling! Red Espresso is a specially ground rooibos tea that can be used in your espresso machine or french press. Naturally caffeine free and antioxidant rich, long used in South Africa as a healthy beverage - rooibos tea has a sweet, rich flavour that definitely satisfies the coffee craving. You can buy Red Espresso in the shops and a few local cafes have started making tea lattes from it too.
5. Matcha. The classic green tea health beverage, matcha tea is a highly prized green tea that is ground into a vibrant green powder with a rich, grassy taste. Whisked with a small amount of hot water, matcha is traditionally drunk almost like an espresso shot and because you actually consume the tea leaves - matcha blows traditional green tea out of the water when it comes to antioxidant levels. A bit of an acquired taste....but matcha is where it's at.

To your health!
Desiree

PS....just in case you are wondering, no one paid me to talk about their products...but the nice folks at Oooli did supply me with the photo when I asked...these are all drinks I actually love!

Eat...at Habit

Welcome back Habit! For those of you unfamiliar with Habit on Main St...sadly, 10 months ago this great restaurant had a fire and closed down for a while. It is reopened with a refocused theme and menu and finally (I seriously don't get out much nowadays...) my husband and I tried it out this previous Friday.

For those of you who went to Habit version 1.0 - you will be relieved to note that they still have the amazing carrot and brie pierogies.

The room now looks like an ultra sultry take on the 70's rumpus room (kind of how you always imagined it looking as a nocturnal teenager) complete with a comfort food packed menu. The cocktail list features the classics reinvented (sex on the beach, deconstructed bento box style so you can shake your own? YES!) and a big list of Canadian whiskey...because is there a single one of us who doesn't crave a Crown and coke every once and a while?

We started with a smoked onion and white bean hummus...and yum! I love hummus but I never expect that anyone can do anything really that exciting with it. A little extra garlic or spice, but that is about it. Well, the smoked onion gave the dip and incredible flavour and it was served with fry bread. I know that I shouldn't be condoning fry bread but it was so bloody good how can you say no?

For the main course, my husband had tuna casserole (OceanWise of course!) and I had the vegetarian shepherd's pie. Jim loved the casserole, super rich, creamy and indulgent. The shepherd's pie was just what I wanted: silky lentils, rich and filling, topped with a potato-parsnip hash. And enough fibre to ensure your digestive system hums for days afterwards. I promise to start bringing my camera when I eat so I can snap some shots of the gorgeous food.

So if you are looking to support an awesome local restaurant, give the chains a break for the night and get cozy at Habit. 2610 Main St. www.habitlounge.ca

Eat...to boost your immune system

Nothing like getting caught up after a vacation to cut into your blogging time but I am back! Since we are running head first into probably the most interesting cold and flu season we have experienced in recent memory (H1N1 anyone?)I thought it fitting to spend some time talking about how we can boost our immunity with good nutrition.

Now, I don't think anyone can hear this enough...washing your hands constantly and not touching your face is a massive step towards stemming the spread of cold and flu germs but building a healthy strong body through good nutrition can help you fight off whatever little bug may come your way.

Let's take this step by step...and talk first about probiotics. Yogurt has been considered a health food for literally thousands of years. Revered in Indian Ayurvedic medicine as a "food of the gods", the secret to yogurt's success is fermentation by lactic acid forming bacteria. It was Dr Elie Metchnikoff in the early 1900s that popularized the health giving benefits of yogurt in the West, believing that the healthy bacteria in yogurt fought disease causing critters and normalized bowel habits.

Clinical research is mixed on the health benefits of probiotics, which probiotic strains are best and the dosage but probiotics are typically taken to encourage a healthy mix of bacteria in the colon. The link to our immune system is one of a healthy barrier. Believe it or not, our gut (from mouth to you-know-what) is actually the outside of our body...what? Yup, our gut is a first line defense against the outside world much like our skin is. So keeping our gut barrier healthy (and discouraging disease causing bacteria from setting up camp in our colon) theoretically helps to strengthen our immune defenses.

Researchers have learned that our gut health is regulated by the bacteria that live within us. A newer concept in GI medicine is one of gut barrier integrity, or "leaky gut": the idea being that if our gut is unhealthy, the cells which are supposed to be a barrier to the outside world become "leaky", allowing food particles and bugs that have no business getting through the velvet ropes to crash the party. The result is inflammation, infection and potentially food and gut hypersensitivity. It is thought that probiotics may reduce inflammation as a whole by downregulating inflammatory messengers called cytokines and therefore gut sensitivity.

If you want to learn more and like reading original scientific articles (and really, who doesn't), see this great 2009 review article here: http://www.springerlink.com/content/3656030247656066/fulltext.pdf . By the way, I love it when journals offer free access to their publication...so thank you Journal of Gastroenterology :)

To supplement or not? As a dietitian, I am always a food first kind of girl but I have been known to take a probiotic supplement if feeling like I have been "hit with a bug". However, then the question becomes "which brands can I trust?". This is where things get a little tricky. A 2004 study done at UBC looked at 10 common over-the-counter probiotic supplements and not a single one of them met the specifications shown on the label. 50% of them didn't even contain the bacterial strain they claimed on the label. What is frustrating is that the researchers declined to name the brands - which I would really like to know. If a company is saying one thing and selling another, customers should have the right to know! Here is the study URL if you want to check it out for yourself. http://www.cfp.ca/cgi/reprint/50/4/583 . If you do want to take a supplement, make sure you enlist the help of someone knowledgeable who knows the brands.

My personal probiotic prescription for better health? 3/4 cup of plain nonfat organic yogurt daily. Keep it simple (and get a boost of protein and calcium along with your probiotics!). Remember, it was yogurt that has been revered as a health food...not the individual strains it may or may not contain (not yet at least!).

There is a lot of bad yogurt on the shelves - filled with gelatin and other stabilizers, colours, flavours and other gunk that you don't need. Good yogurt should be milk and live active bacterial cultures. Like it a little sweet? Add a bit of honey or maple syrup or better yet, try one of my favourite healthy snacks: take a half cup frozen blueberries, add yogurt and put in your lunch box along with some hemp seed and organic bran. By mid morning, the berries will have thawed and juiced up the yogurt better than any premixed stuff. Mix in the other goodies for some fibre and healthy omega 3 fats!

A bientot,
Desiree