Post No.: 0954
Furrywisepuppy says:
The ‘Eatwell Guide’ suggests that our diet should consist of roughly 40% fruit and vegetables, 38% bread, rice, potatoes, pasta or other starchy foods, 8% dairy products and alternatives, 12% meat, fish, eggs, beans, pulses and other non-dairy sources of protein, and 1% oils and spreads.
Public health recommendations like consume ‘at least 5 (preferably 7) portions of (a variety of) fruit and veg each day’, ‘8 glasses of water per day’ and ‘oily fish twice a week’ are easy-to-remember guides. You’ll need to be adaptable though because water can be obtained through food, not just drinks, plus you’ll need to drink more if it’s hot, you’re more active or have a cold. ‘Walking at least 10,000 steps per day’ doesn’t mean other physical activities that elevate your heart rate for a decent length of time regularly don’t count. Walking more briskly can also achieve the same benefits with fewer steps.
We do tend to prefer simple rules to live by. We just shouldn’t take them as too black-or-white e.g. after hearing about the risks of eating too much canned fish, or the benefits of certain ‘superfoods’, some people will go and take that advice to the extreme and either exclude all of, or almost exclusively eat only, a particular type of food. (Do note however that some advice originates from mass media rather than public health sources.)
Understand also that vegetables are generally better than fruits because they contain less sugar; and fried or overly-processed vegetables like chips don’t count as one of your ‘5 a day’ because of the amount of oil and salt added hence the negatives will outweigh the positives if one doesn’t need those calories or salt. It’s not so much about the proper definition of a fruit, vegetable or legume, or it being fresh, dried, canned or frozen, but the micronutrient and fibre content compared to the fat, salt and added sugar content in the case of fried starches.
It’s ultimately about obtaining a balanced and varied diet that covers all the nutritional requirements you personally need to operate optimally without consuming excessive calories in the process. Physically get your heart rate up, lungs puffing and joints moving for a sustained period of time regularly too – how you do this is up to you. And don’t worry if you binge during a party or miss a day of exercise – just don’t make it habitual.
99% of the time, whatever new research we come across – it’ll still ultimately point to a recommendation of eating lots of vegetables and fruits, less red meat, only a little alcohol if any at all, drinking plenty of water, not smoking, and getting regular exercise that gets your heart rate up i.e. the overall advice for living as long and healthy a life as possible remains reasonably constant despite lots of new research.
A good tip is to plan all your meals ahead. Time, not nutrition, is often the deciding factor when selecting what to eat. It’s not even always about cost. Many hold the misperception that one cannot afford nutritious, healthy and filling meals for the same price as fast-food meals. A healthful and filling meal can be had for less as long as one plans ahead. Plus with enough cooking skill, certain dishes can be cooked at home faster than getting a take-away delivered too.
The stress from feeling that one doesn’t have the time to cook in modern life (or from misplaced priorities) can lead to ordering comfort-eating choices too often, which usually means highly-processed, high-calorie, fast-food choices. Planning ahead will reduce the stress of figuring out what to eat and thus what to cook, and make it much easier to eat healthfully and together as a family.
The ‘satiety cascade’ describes how we get to feel satisfied after eating and before wanting to eat again. It describes how our sensory information based on the tastes, textures, etc. of food itself and our expectations based on our prior experiences, then how full our stomachs feel after swallowing, and then how fast our stomachs empty into the intestines, all influence how soon we feel sated after eating and how long it’ll be before we’ll feel peckish again. Digestion starts in the mouth with chewing and enzymes in the saliva, but how we prepare our food matters too – like whole food versus blitzed, or cooking versus raw.
Humans learnt how to build fires and cook, and this was strongly arguably a key advantage that allowed humans to eat an incredibly wide variety of foods and increase the bioavailability of nutrients e.g. rarer steaks are harder to digest thus take more energy to digest. Cooking was a significant breakthrough that allowed humans to extract more nutrients per unit of food. The issue nowadays in some places is that people simply eat too much, not that they shouldn’t cook.
So knowing how to cook remains a vital life skill. Cooking should be seen as a normal, quotidian thing that every adult does – not a ‘special’ skill; albeit some can take this skill to exceptional levels. (Just like running is a normal ability for most, although some can take it to world-class levels.) In some countries like the UK, people consider cooking as ‘wow, that’s impressive’ when in most parts around the world it’s nothing remarkable.
Cooking is for all genders. Cooking is masculine from the perspective of using knives, fire and gadgets, and taking raw materials and making something useful from them to be shared with one’s family. Yet it’s generally those men who don’t do the cooking on a day-to-day basis who think that it’s the ‘pinnacle of manliness’ to take charge of the barbecue once per year! Once per year for one meal is their idea of demonstrating masculinity(!) Not that barbecuing should be gendered at all.
When cooking, you care more about what you’re serving your family. Cooking from scratch allows you to understand more properly what goes into particular dishes. People are often surprised about how much butter and sugar goes into some cakes, yet these very same people never bat an eyelid when consuming these very same cakes every day at a café! We shouldn’t judge things superficially – we might worry about the obvious visible fat on a pork chop but not think that cookies or pastries could contain even more saturated fat because it’s not so visible. So cook more often and you’ll understand how much sugar and fat goes into making things like regular cakes and biscuits.
Whenever I’m cooking, I’m always bearing in mind a few checklists. I’m looking to balance carbohydrates, proteins, fats and other nutrients. I then consider soft, chewy and crispy textures, hot and cold temperatures, and whether something needs a sauce. I also ask myself does something need more sweetness, sourness, saltiness, bitterness, umaminess, spicy heat, herbs, aromatics or smokiness? (There are more rare effects like that provided by wasabi or Sichuan pepper too.) A dish doesn’t need to incorporate all the different textures or tastes but that’s what goes on in my head. If something – whether you cooked or bought it – is bland then add some more flavour yourself. If something is too strong in flavour then use less of it or dilute it down rather than bin it. If something is too wet then reduce/evaporate the liquid away. If something goes too dry then add water or a sauce rather than discard it. If something is undercooked then cook it some more. If something is overcooked then it could still be edible. Only discard (the specific part of) something if it’s toxic or burnt. The less you know, you might think that you must start again if you didn’t follow a recipe instruction properly. Meanwhile, the more you know, you’ll know how dishes can be rescued rather than wasted where possible. Chef’s kiss!
Post No.: 0934 sifted through taste, aroma and flavour.
With more cooking nous, experience and experimentation, you’ll e.g. know how to adapt recipes when you cannot get hold of certain ingredients. You’ll intuitively know that you can heat up a readymade pizza on the hob with a frying pan and lid, then finish it off under a grill to get the Maillard reactions, caramelisation and dextrinisation on top, in order to save gas and time compared to using an oven (unless the oven would be full). You’ll know that brining a turkey can keep it moist and flavoured throughout. You’ll know that, although wetness goes against crispiness, you’ll need a somewhat wet batter to get a crispy coating on a deep-fried fish. And so on. And don’t worry – even the experiments of professional chefs don’t always succeed. But they’ll always learn something from them. Through the Twitter comment button below, you can share some of your own cooking tips.
Some self-proclaimed ‘foodies’ are actually just ‘food snobs’. There are famished families around the world yet some people will wilt at the notion of eating their greens, or the crusts of bread. Even if something ranks as a ‘1 out of 10’ in taste for you – unless it’s poisonous, don’t waste it. Skimmed milk and bread isn’t that exciting to most people – but to someone who’s been utterly starving, it’s nothing to sniff at (although I will inevitably sniff everything – woof!)
Your kids might actually like vegetables – just not the dull way you cook and serve them(!) Slice and chop up fruit for your kids, rather than just hand a fruit to them, so that they seem more bite-sized and convenient for them. People are generally afraid of change, are wary of anything apparently alien, and like to stick to what they’re used to – hence why it’s best to introduce variety and healthy habits to children when young. The more we eat something, the more we’ll be okay with it.
‘Meal replacement drinks’ don’t require cooking but can leave people feeling incredibly bored and hungry for something to bite and chew, meaning they might end up ingesting more calories overall. Drinking instead of eating something, even if both things contain identical amounts of calories, doesn’t usually leave one feeling as sated (similar to drinking apple juice compared to eating an apple). A thick soup, compared to a thin broth or liquid, can conversely make us feel fuller for longer though. Eating more satisfying foods, even if they’re richer, may mean that one eats less overall because one feels more satisfied for longer. Some people merely eat to survive rather than find eating a pleasure in itself, but most people enjoy eating in itself. Also, different people require subtly different balances of nutrients so one meal replacement blend cannot be universally optimal.
Healthiness doesn’t involve extremes – we can even have too much oxygen (oxygen toxicity). But there’s some research into how a severely calorie-restricted diet might improve one’s life expectancy, as well as memory. But you might want to ask if that’ll be a great quality of life, especially because regular exercise, enough sleep and a generally healthy diet that isn’t extremely restricted can offer similar benefits without the low-energy feelings?
A severely restricted diet, or a meal replacement drink diet even if it technically contains the optimal balance of nutrients and calories, won’t likely be great for one’s mental well-being (although to be fair, even meal replacement drinks manufacturers don’t expect people to replace every single meal of every single day with their products – they say it’s just for those one-off occasions when you might otherwise skip a meal or eat junk because you don’t have more than a couple of minutes to cook or order food and eat).
Finally, pain is usually a sign that something’s wrong, thus if the junk food you’re regularly consuming is giving you heartburn, indigestion or some other discomfort – don’t look for some kind of pill to get you through such bellyaches. Just stop eating so much of whatever you’re eating!
Woof.
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