Food Rules by Michael Pollan

Hubby’s company is having a holiday bake off next week. I am going to do my part to make sure the Rubin Rodeo wins bragging rights. It gives me a great excuse to play around with some new recipes. This afternoon, I’m experimenting with home made peanut butter cups. The ingredients are way better than Reese’s Peanut Butter cups which contain TBHQ, an ingredient I like to stay away from. What is TBHQ? Heck if I know!

Michael Pollan has a rule in his book,Food Rules: An Eater’s Manual
that says

“Don’t eat anything that your grandmother wouldn’t recognize as food”  TBHQ definitely falls into that category.

Another rule:

“Eat all the junk you want,as long as you cook it yourself”

By making peanut butter cups yourself, you have the opportunity to improve the quality of ingredients. I wouldn’t even call this “junk”, it’s a treat. I use organic peanut butter that contains one ingredient: peanuts. When it comes to chocolate chips, I look for fair trade, organic and soy free when ever possible.

Another Pollan rule in his book:

“Treat teats as treats”

Peanut Butter Cups made from scratch

This treat is special because you make it yourself. And no doubt, you’re not doing this every day. It’s special. It’s a treat!

Buying Reese’s or any other cheapie peanut butter cup at the store is not a treat, its just junk! Now that I’ve justified making these and explained my ingredient philosophy, let’s get to work!

Here’s the recipe:

Peanut Butter Cups

Ingredients:

1 cup peanut butter

1/4 cup sugar

2 Tablespoons coconut oil

10 graham crackers, ground into fine crumbs

2 cups chocolate chips

Put cupcake liners in  muffin tins
Over low heat stir the peanut butter, sugar and 1 TBSP of coconut oil together in a small sauce pan until melted and smooth
Remove from heat and stir in graham cracker crumbs
Divide evenly between the 18 (or so) cupcake liners
Pop in the freezer while you melt the chocolate chips and remaining 1 TBSP of coconut oil in a double boiler, stir occasionally
When melted remove the peanut butter cups from the freezer and spoon chocolate evenly between the 18 cups
Place in refrigerator until 1/2 hour before serving, let them warm up to room temperature so you can bite through the chocolate.

Enjoy!

Don't kid yourself! Twinkies are not a weight loss panacea!

I’ve received numerous emails and Facebook requests about the big news: a nutrition professor at  Kansas State University has allegedly lost close to 30 pounds by eating a low calorie diet that includes significant amounts of Twinkies for 8 weeks. The media circus is spinning with this news, if you haven’t already heard about it, you will very soon.

Professor Haub, along with the American Dietetic Association, cite this as proof positive that calories count.  The food industry loves nothing more than promoting the mythology that calories matter above all else. Here in America, we are over focused on calories, fat and carbs. And we’re fatter than ever.

We have a billion dollar diet industry that thrives on American’s gullibility and lack of common sense when it comes to food. 80-90% of all weight lost through dieting is regained. Weight Watchers is a great example of this phenomenon. People tell me Weight Watchers is great, they’ve gone 5 or 6 times over the years, losing the same 5-20 pounds over and over again.

As nutritional anthropologist Liz Snyder reminded me, Jenny Craig is owned by Nestle, Wt Watchers by the same co. that owns Keebler foods. Your yo-yo diet is their ponzi scheme!

Einstein said the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result.  Calorie counting is one of those insane things. Not to mention it takes all the fun out of eating food.

Back to the Twinkie guy. Here’s the deal. He’s been eating Twinkies  (and a protein shake and a multivitamin) every day for 8 weeks. His weight is down, for now.  His cholesterol has slightly improved,  which could be a result of his drinking whole milk. After all, saturated fat has been shown to improve HDL levels.

Bottom line? The real story will be 6 months to a year from now. Will the weight stay off?  Will he end up with a “unrelated” health issue? Will the news media follow that story or will we all be onto the next “big news”? Our collective attention span is too short to follow this story to the real conclusion.

To call it now and say this guy actually lost the 26 pounds is like calling a baseball game after 2 innings. The game isn’t over yet.

Before any of you go running to the store to get your share of Twinkies, you might want to take a look at this book: Trinkie, Deconstructed by Steve Ettlinger. At least then, you’ll know what you’re eating.

Whack-a-mole

I do enjoy playing Whac-a-Mole when I bring my kids to the arcade. For those of you who don’t get out that much to participate in this sort of amusement, the Whac-A-Mole machine consists of a large, waist-level cabinet with five holes in its top and a large, soft, black mallet. Each hole contains a single plastic mole. Once the game starts, the moles will begin to pop up from their holes at random. The object of the game is to force the individual moles back into their holes by hitting them directly on the head with the mallet, thereby adding to the player’s score. The more quickly this is done the higher the final score will be. As the game goes, on the pace gets faster, sometimes with 2 moles at a time rearing up out of the holes. You’ve got to be fast and hit hard to beat the moles and win the game. Its good exercise and builds hand eye coordination.

As  a parent who is trying to feed their kids the right stuff, I feel we are playing Whac-A-Mole every day with the food industry.  Let me explain my metaphor and see if you agree.

Way back when I was growing up, it was somehow determined that fat made you fat. The food industry responded with loads of “low fat”  and even “fat free” food products. Everyone rushed out to get them. And everyone continued to get fatter, and sicker. Next came the no carb craze and just about over night, everything, even bread, became “low carb” And everyone continued to gain weight and lose their health.

These days, the moles that pop up in the food industry’s Whac-A-Mole game are things like trans fats. We pounded that one down with our mallets, but the food industry responded with palm oil and cottonseed oil: two ingredients that are hurt our health and the health of the planet (as I’ve written about in previous posts) . HFCS was the next bad boy ingredient that popped up in the Whack-A-Mole game, the food industry is responding by renaming high fructose corn syrup into corn sugar and replacing HFCS in some drinks with real sugar. Will that sneaky mole get by us, or will we pound it back into its hole with our mallets?

There is way to win this game. You see, the food industry wins every game as long as we keep putting our money into their system. Bang all the moles you want, but the machine gets your quarter no matter how high the score. What we all need to do is walk away from the Whac-A-Mole game that the food industry has set up.

Invest your money elsewhere in real food that you can believe in. Food that is grown closer to home, food that doesn’t have ingredients you can’t pronounce, food that doesn’t have a fancy marketing budget.  Don’t play their game anymore.

Watch this Whac-A-Mole action and see if you feel the same way when buying standard American food in the supermarket. There really is a better way to eat and to live besides being forced to play continual game of Whac-A-Mole…..

As a parent, we all must choose our battles. Make up is one that I have been losing for a long time. Last year, one of my friends at camp saw my 12 year old daughter come to lunch with what looked like raccoon eyes. She asked me how a mom who wears no makeup could have a daughter who uses black eyeliner. I pointed out to her that all of her bunk mates had similar heavy coatings on their eyelids, this was one battle I wasn’t going to win any time soon.

All three of my daughters use far more health and beauty products and wear much more makeup than I do.  The only time I wear make up is when someone else paints it all on for a TV appearance, one of the reasons I love radio! I use some coconut oil from my kitchen as a moisturizer, I brush my teeth with all natural toothpowders made from baking soda. I guess you could say I’m a cheap date at Rite Aid.

Like the food industry, the beauty industry markets heavily to kids. Magazines, billboards and TV ads create the unrealistic images that many girls strive to emulate. Turning off the TV is one way to cut down on this propaganda, but it remains an uphill battle when everyone in your daughter’s peer group uses large quantities of unnecessary products.

Dove, part of the large conglomerate Unilever, started a worldwide marketing strategy in 2004, the Campaign for Real Beauty. Some of the ads and you tube videos they’ve created cause you to stop and think about these unrealistic images of women. The ads urge us to talk with our daughters.

While this video shows the issue of how our culture pressures young females to conform to an unrealistic standard of beauty, I’m not convinced that teens will change their behavior with this information. If these videos were used in school as part of a media literacy, critical thinking unit, that would be a start.

Greenpeace was inspired by Dove’s campaign to create a video of their own. Watching the two back to back should help our daughters wake up to the realities of the beauty industry.

This campaign helped to pressure Unilever, the biggest single buyer of palm oil, to agree to start sourcing sustainable palm oil for their products.  Rainforest Action Network, another environmental group focusing on palm oil, feels the Unilever is simply greenwashing at this time.

When you watch the Dove Onslaughter video, don’t forget to think about Girl Scout Cookies. Their cookies  are loaded with palm oil, negatively impacting personal and planetary health.

Please show both of these video clips to your daughters. Have a conversation about all the products that they use, are they really necessary? Read the ingredients on the labels, can you pronounce them or figure out where they come from? We all must consider the world wide impact of what we do to look good.

Mayonaise homemade from real eggs

When putting together my purslane potato salad last night, I ran out of mayo. Hubby offered to zip out to the store and pick up a bottle, but to use store bought mayonnaise would have canceled out the nutritional benefit of the omega 3 containing purslane!

Let me explain.  Mayonnaise is a stable emulsion of oil, egg yolk and either vinegar or lemon juice. Most brands of store bought mayonnaise use soybean oil and who knows where the heck their eggs are coming from.  These two ingredients are ones you don’t want to skimp on.  Most soybean oil in the US is genetically modified, not to mention soybean oil is high in pro-inflammatory Omega 6. My gut tells me that the company that makes Hellman’s mayonnaise is not going to go out of their way to get really high quality eggs for their mayo.

More expensive brands of mayonnaise found at the health food store, such as Spectrum are a little bit better, but most of them also contain organic soybean oil, which is an improvement but still not ideal. I’m also not a huge fan of canola oil . Despite the hype that canola oil is high in Omega 3 fats, the highly processed nature of this oil is questionable. The procedure involves a combination of high-temperature mechanical pressing and solvent extract, usually using hexane. Even after considerable refining, traces of the solvent remain. Like most vegetable oils, Canola oil also goes through the process of bleaching, degumming, deodorizing, and caustic refining, at very high temperatures. This process can alter the omega-3 content in the oil, and in certain conditions bring the trans fat level as high as 40 percent. Some brands such as Spectrum offer an expeller pressed canola oil, but once again, you’re going to want to take it a step further and look for Organic 100% expeller pressed canola oil to be sure you’re not ingesting genetically modified canola.

Sounds like a wild goose chase, huh? So this is how I came to the conclusion that I’d be better off making my own darn mayonnaise!  With a Kitchen aid mixer, the process is not all that complicated. This way I know exactly what ingredients are going in my mayo. Eggs I trust from a local farmer, organic olive oil from a good source and fresh squeezed lemon juice, what could be easier?

Lately, I’ve been buying eggs at my local farmer’s market from Feather Ridge Farm. Its worth the extra pennies to invest in eggs that come from happy chickens who are not fed antibiotics and hormones. These eggs are high in Omega 3 because the chickens were fed flaxseed and alfalfa.  You can tell the difference when you crack the egg: supermarket eggs have thinner shells and paler yolks.

Here’s my mayo recipe, try it out! Its easier than you think!

Ingredients:

• 2 egg yolks
• 3/4 teaspoon salt
• 1/2 teaspoon powdered mustard
• 1/8 teaspoon sugar
• Pinch cayenne pepper
• 4 to 5 teaspoons lemon juice or white vinegar
• 1-1/2 cups olive oil
• 4 teaspoons hot water

Procedure:

1. Beat yolks,salt, mustard, sugar, pepper  and 1 teaspoon lemon juice  until very thick and pale yellow. (Note: I used the wire whisk attachment on my KItchen Aid electric mixer at medium speed.)

2. Add about 1/4 cup oil drop by drop, beating vigorously all the while. Beat in 1 teaspoon each lemon juice and hot water. Add another 1/4 cup oil a few drops at a time, beating vigorously all the while. Beat in another teaspoon each lemon juice and water. Add 1/2 cup oil in a very fine steady stream, beating constantly, then mix in remaining lemon juice and water; slowly beat in remaining oil.  Cover and refrigerate until needed. Do not keep longer than 1 week.

Note: Making mayonnaise results in leftover egg whites. This can only mean one thing: time to make meringue cookies! Stay tuned for the recipe.

Summer is officially here now that the Memorial Day weekend has passed and June has arrived. In my book, that means ice cream season is here.Enjoying ice cream in summer makes complete sense, don’t you think?

Due to modern technology and 24/7 supermarkets, we live in a world where we can eat ice cream 12 months out of the year. Sadly, it doesn’t mean that all of that ice cream is truly delicious or special. While we may get sucked into fancy marketing campaigns, often times what is in the package is cheap, highly processed pseudo ice cream tainted with pesticides, artificial flavors and colors.  The industrial food system has taken away food’s season and its special times.  At times, I’ve been a sucker for Ben & Jerry’s. I love their playful fonts, their graphic design and funny flavors. but the grim reality is that they were bought out by Unilever in 2000. They are no longer a small company using real ingredients that your grandma would have put into ice cream.  It’s time to say goodbye to Ben & Jerry, no matter how much I like those kitschy cows.

I always tell my clients and students that you can undo the damage done by the food industry by shopping at the farmer’s market and by buying from small local vendors that use seasonal ingredients.  And yes, that works for ice cream too. I was fortunate to find a nearby “microcreamery”. The Blue Pig in Croton on Hudson has re-opened and long time Croton resident, Lisa Moir, is the new owner. Her  ice cream is made with locally sourced milk/cream from the nearby Hudson Valley Fresh dairy co-op. You won’t find High Fructose Corn Syrup, guar gum, mono and diglycerides, artificial colors or flavors in her ice cream. Lisa is  looking to source fruits, berries, and maple syrup from local farmers.  She even made a vanilla toffee ice cream loaded with artisan toffee made by my friend and former Slow Food Westchester co-leader, Michele Kim.

This weekend, I visited and sampled her banana walnut ice cream. It was out of this world. Lisa roasted bananas and walnuts for optimal flavor, no chemical flavorings needed. Ben & Jerry’s Chunky Monkey flavor contains: Guar Gum, Natural Flavors, Soya Lecithin & Carrageenan. You won’t find these ingredients in Blue Pig ice cream!

Taking a trip to a place like the Blue Pig makes eating ice cream special again.  I feel good about supporting a local business, I feel good about the ingredients, all of which I can pronounce. Bye bye Ben and Jerry, hello Blue Pig!

PS: If you don’t live nearby, find your own version of the Blue Pig close to your community. Small, local, real ingredients. Don’t fuss about the calories or fat grams, look to see if you can understand the ingredients without needing a degree in chemistry. Ice cream should consist of milk, cream, sugar, eggs, and ingredients that provide flavor – NOT “natural flavors” or artificial flavors. Life is too short to eat crappy ice cream! Make sure  your ice cream is of high quality and do your best to support local / regional food artisans, not giant conglomerates. Keep your money and your ice cream local!

Yesterday, I wrote about the ambiguous nature of one word: sugar.  The food industry and well meaning mainstream nutritionists have succeeded in confusing us. Is sugar good? Is it bad? I spend loads of time helping clients understand the  distinctions between the sugar found in carrots and how that is completely different from the crystalline fructose (a fancy word for corn syrup) found in Vitamin Water.

There are so many words on food labels and in advertising that are, quite frankly, completely dangerous.  We read them and fall into a consensus trance, believing that these products are actually good for us.  When working with middle school students, I often encourage them to go on a “health claim hunt” in their kitchen cabinets at home.  They bring back some pretty outrageous marketing gimmicks. Here’s a few:

• Contains antioxidants
• Eco-friendly
• Green
• Made with whole grains
• May lower cholesterol
• Natural
• No trans fat
• Fat free
• Strengthens your immune system

“The bigger the lie, the more it will be believed.”

- Joseph Goebbels

It may be a bit upsetting to see me quoting a Nazi about lies, but in most cases when you see a health claim, its because the product has some dirty secrets.  Let me show you a few examples.

Eco friendly water bottles that use 30% less plastic than other bottles are still plastic bottles that leach questionable chemicals into your drink. Not to mention that the source of that water might not be as pristine as you’d like to think! No way no how is bottled water eco-friendly. Watch Tapped to learn more.

Builds immunity Are you kidding me? This one takes the cake! Sugar laden cereals like this one actually can work to deplete your child’s immunity. Sugar is an anti-nutrient. In addition to the spray on vitamins (which supposedly boost your kid’s immunity) this cereal contains hydrogenated  soybean and/or cottonseed oil. You already know how I feel about cotton! The one word banner on this one should be Hazardous.

No Trans Fat is one of those phrases that puts us at ease. Sadly many many products boasting no trans fat are lying. There is a “loophole”: food packagers are allowed to round transfat measurements down to the nearest gram. And of course, they play games with serving size. In addition to sneaking in hydrogenated oils, manufacturers will put in palm oil which does not contain trans fat but this ingredient has a devastating effect on rainforests. In the long run, Palm Oil is more dangerous to our future than just about any other hazardous ingredient I rant about. No doubt you’ve read my piece about how the Girl Scouts should re-think their toxic cookie campaigns.

What to do? As Michael Pollan says, avoid food products that make health claims. We must take the time and buy real food, not foodlike products. In the long run, you’ll save money, your health and the planet. The three products I showed above have a huge carbon footprint and probably use more fossil fuels than your car does. Pay your local farmer, not your doctor. Take the time, cook from scratch. Eat food you can believe in. Don’t pay good money for lies.

Earlier this week, I wrote a guest post in The Slow Cook and the Better DC School Food blogs about sugar in schools. In this article, I barely scraped the surface of this issue. Sugars are not just “empty calories”, sugar is a major anti-nutrient that can wreck havoc with your health.

The confusion over sugar continues. After all, fruit contains sugar, and what about beets and carrots?  My teacher and mentor Joan Gussow  once famously said  “I prefer butter to margarine because I trust cows more than chemists.”  I too, trust Mother Nature more than food companies. Carrots, beets and fruit are fine. In fact, they are really good for you!

Nowadays, many people understand that high fructose corn syrup (HFCS) is bad news. The beverage industry is responding by putting “cane sugar” into their drinks. Jones Soda boasts of having “pure cane sugar” in their soda, Pepsi is now boasting of “real sugar” in their Throwback brands that are being blasted all over Facebook and Twitter.  Vitamin Water with “crystalline fructose” is now showing up as a healthier alternative in school cafeterias (its not!).

Somehow consumers didn’t get the big picture message: refined sugar is bad for you! That refined sugar could have aliases like HFCS or cane sugar or crystalline fructose (found in Coca Cola’s Vitamin Water). All of this stuff will rot your teeth, expand your waistline, raise your cholesterol, the list goes on and on.

The World Health Organization defines free sugars as all monosaccharides and disaccharides added to foods by the manufacturer, cook or consumer, plus sugars naturally present in honey, syrups and fruit juices.

One other point worth mentioning: fruit juice = sugar hit. A glass of 100% juice is NOT the same as eating a piece of fruit! As a matter of fact, your morning glass of OJ can be contributing to your high cholesterol. Parents who think they are doing their kids a favor by giving them Minute Maid Lemonade or  Snapple 100% juice for an afterschool snack are damaging their kid’s livers, making them even more hungry, and of course, helping to make their dentists rich.

Apparently, fructose makes it so you don’t feel full. Makes complete sense that food manufacturers would want to use HFCS in their products. If you don’t feel full, you’ll keep eating and drinking. Great for a food company’s shareholders, not so great for your health.

NYC Mayor Bloomberg and the Center for Science in the Public Interest have declared war on salt. They claim salt is a major factor in heart disease and stroke.  Perhaps they should take a good long look at sugar! They’ll find a connection to diabetes, cancer, heart disease, and much much more.

Bottom line:

Eat Real Food. Drink Water.

I’ve worked with countless cancer survivors in my private practice. They are some of the nicest people you would ever meet. Over the past ten years, I’ve had the good fortune to work with two wonderful groups in my community, Gilda’s Club and Support Connection that do great work supporting those dealing with cancer and other chronic illness. I highly recommend donating to these fine organizations.

Those cancer survivors who know me and my work know how crazy upset I get when I see a stunt like this KFC Pink Buckets for Cancer! The Susan G. Komen foundation has partnered up with KFC who will donate 50 cents for every bucket of chicken purchased.  Fortunately Think Before You Pink has come up with an online petition to try to convince the Susan Komen Foundation to re-think their partnership with this junk food giant, you can sign their petition by clicking here.

Of course I signed the online petition, which in turn got me an automated letter from the Susan G. Komen Foundation. Here’s what it says:

Thank you for your e-mail to us – we do appreciate you taking the time to tell us how you feel about this partnership. You should know that our partnership with KFC is designed to help reach millions of women we might not otherwise reach with breast health education and awareness messages which we consider critical to our mission. This additional outreach is made possible through KFC’s 5,300 restaurants (about 900 of them in communities not yet served by a Komen Affiliate). This partnership also helps us to generate funding toward the $1.5 billion in research and community programs that Komen has funded over 30 years – programs that are literally saving women’s lives through better treatments and early detection.

Our partnership focuses on healthy options at KFC – grilled chicken and vegetables, for example. Ultimately, we believe that the decision to maintain a well-balanced diet lies in the hands of the consumer. KFC provides tools to make those choices, by providing a healthy choice menu and advice on its website on how consumers can limit fat and calorie consumption in its products. We appreciate your concern and thank you for sharing it with us.
Very truly yours,

Margo K. Lucero
Director, Global Corporate Relations
Susan G. Komen for the Cure(r)

My automated online click with Think Before You Pink resulted in an automated email response. I’m sure the folks at Susan Komen Foundation are quantifying the onslaught of online responses, but so far they are still promoting pink buckets of fried chicken. Right now, the best thing to do to get Susan’s attention is to get out your good stationary and hand write her foundation a nice (angry) note. Good old snail mail will do more to change this foundation’s mind than an online petition.

Here’s the address:

Headquarters
5005 LBJ Freeway, Suite 250
Dallas, TX 75244

Let’s talk about this food for a minute.  If you want to check the ingredients of KFC’s products, you’ll have to click on this “nutrition page” and then click on the box on the left that says Ingredient Statement. You’ll need your reading glasses, but do take the time to read them. You’ll be shocked at all the MSG, hydrogenated cottonseed oils and soybean oils that goes into most of their products. I’ve written about Cotton ( It’s not a food!) and about their grilled chicken back when Oprah decided to promote free buckets of the stuff.

I know that you know better than to eat fast food like KFC if you want to be healthy. It’s not about the calories, or the “tools” on their website, it’s about ingredients. Even KFC’s green beans are coated with MSG! (you’ll see in on the ingredient list online, I’m not making this up!). Please take the time to tell Susan Komen that they are misleading people into believing that these pink buckets of chicken are somehow health supportive.  Tell Susan Komen to hire me! I’d be happy to teach them about how to make health supportive decisions that will benefit their Foundation and the people they serve.

When you see partially hydrogenated cottonseed oil on a food label, think beyond trans fat! This super cheap oil is one of the most toxic ingredients in processed food today, let me count a few ways:

#1 Cotton is not a food! These cottonseeds are a left over by product of producing cotton fiber. Common sense will tell you, it’s not a food, we probably shouldn’t be eating it.

#2 Cotton is one of the most toxic crops. While only three percent of the world’s farming acreage is cotton, these crops are sprayed with up to 25 percent of the world’s pesticides and herbicides, including some of the most toxic. Therefore cottonseed oil has an extremely high level of pesticide residue. Pesticides that are not approved for food are sprayed on cotton crops, because once again, cotton is not a food (see #1)

#3 Cottonseed oil is extremely high in pro-inflammatory omega 6 fatty acids. The ratio of omega 6:omega 3 in cottonseed oil is around 259:1. If you are supplementing with fish oil or flax oil to increase your anti-inflammatory omega 3 levels, and you ingest even a little bit of cottonseed oil, you’re gonna need gallons of omega 3 to balance that out!

#4 GMOs Genetically engineered (GE) cotton is another problem. Playing on concerns about pesticides, Monsanto has pushed GE cottonseeds onto the market in more than a half-dozen countries as the “green alternative” for cotton growers. In terms of human health hazards, herbicide-resistant GE cotton plants–and their oil and seed derivatives–contain foreign proteins, bacteria, viral promoters, and antibiotic resistant genes–food ingredients that humans have never eaten before. These GE plants and their derivatives are unlabeled and untested for hazards to human health and the environment. These cotton plants are gene-spliced so that the cotton plant emits its own pesticide, or else the plant is genetically engineered to be able to survive mega-doses of powerful pesticides.

All in all, when I see cottonseed oil as an ingredient on a packaged food product, I quickly come to the conclusion that this edible foodlike substance is hazardous to my and my family’s health.  Sadly, Girl Scout Cookies are loaded with this hazardous, toxic ingredient.

While you’re at it, make sure the cotton clothing you buy is organic. Wear it, don’t eat it!