A friend was wondering whether it was bad to eat soy patties for lunch every day. This led to a discussion of ingredient lists on packages and concerns about processed food. You hear it all the time—heck, I say it here all the time: Home-cooked foods beat prepared or convenience foods any day of the week.

But why, my friend wanted to know, are processed foods bad? Can’t we just check the list of ingredients? If there are too many chemicals that we’ve never heard of, we are wary. But maybe if the ingredients listed on a label are all natural, the processing isn’t such a big deal.

Or is it?

My friend pointed out, correctly, that processing is often a good thing:

• Cooking makes foods tasty and easier to digest.
• Processing, like canning or drying, helps foods last longer.
• Processing can eliminate pathogenic bacteria, as when milk is pasteurized.

So a certain amount of processing can work in our favor, although these benefits may also come with lower nutritional value. Still, the real problem is when foods get over-processed.

Here are some things that might affect your convenience food before it gets to your plate:

• Ingredients we don’t want. Manufacturers add emulsifiers and starches for improving texture, preservatives to keep food fresh longer, and flavors, colors, sodium, mono-sodium glutamate, and sugars to make food more palatable to the average consumer.
• Low-quality ingredients. The label is only as specific as the law required by your country. The ingredients might say corn, but does that mean corn starch or cornmeal? Or maybe kernels? They are not equally healthy. Are the ingredients organic? What conditions were they grown in? How old are they?
• Using the least healthy part of the natural product. A classic example is apple juice concentrate, which contains almost pure sugar. Even though it’s natural. You’re getting sugar from a large number of apples, but without the fiber and the anti-oxidants.
• Just because an ingredient is at the end of the list doesn’t mean it’s not going to impact  your health. Some ingredients can cause harm even in small quantities. And the product must contain a minimum amount of an ingredient for it to appear on the label, so you could be eating unpleasant things without realizing. Ask any mother of a child with life-threatening allergies how much she relies on package labels.
• Toxic chemicals might be used in the manufacturing process, like enzymes that make foods softer or remove bitterness. But since they’re not officially ingredients, they won’t appear on the list.
• Packaging.  A few years ago a toxic chemical, BPA, was found in certain plastics. These plastics were (and still are, in some cases), used in baby bottles and canned foods. The BPA leaches into the food, but you’ll never find it listed.
• Vitamin and mineral loss.Water-soluble vitamins are not retained in fruits and vegetable even after minimal processing. Heck, once you slice a tomato it starts to lose Vitamin C.Vitamins, minerals and fiber are removed from whole grains in processing so they will last longer. Almost all processed foods contain white flour, which has a long shelf life. The company might add some of the vitamins and minerals back into the food in another form (think children’s cereals), but your body doesn’t absorb them as well.
• Oils and fats. Since good fats are expensive processed foods contain cheap, unhealthy oils, often in large quantities. Here the label will give you a clue—but you can only decide whether you want to buy the product or not. At home you can choose the type of oil and how much goes in it.
• Heating. Processed foods are usually exposed to high temperatures. High cooking temperatures create AGE’s, or advanced glucation end products. These toxic glucose byproducts are associated with high blood sugar and diabetes. They are found in most heated foods and, in great excess, in commercial infant formulas because cow’s milk must be heated at extreme temperatures to make it edible for babies. Reducing the amounts of processed and grilled foods also reduced the level of AGE’s in the blood.
• Price. You pay for convenience. Even if you can get food for less than it costs you to make at home, you end up with lower quality ingredients, unnecessary additives, and unknown processing methods.
• Environmental Impact. Processing uses precious water and fuel and creates pollution.

A lot of these concerns also apply to foods we buy in their natural state, to prepare at home. However, it’s much easier to research one ingredient than those from a long list, especially when you can examine the food for yourself. And even if you cook with white flour and soy oil, you still avoid many of the “extras” in convenience foods.

The main concern of a food manufacturer is profit. So it will aim for a product with cheap ingredients, a uniform taste that appeals to many (sugar/salt/msg), and long shelf life (processed foods last longer than fresh, even without the added preservatives).

As for labels, food producers only share whatever makes them look good. Whether the food is healthy or not interests them only as far as their marketing department. It’s naïve to assume that a food is healthy because only healthy ingredients are listed.

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When Scott signed up for an email subscription to Cooking Manager, he mentioned that he was looking for tips on cooking for his diabetic wife. I wrote to ask him what he usually cooked, and he replied:

“Pasta dishes, sandwiches, sandwiches, meat and potatoes, ice cream, cookies, everything that I should not because I loved Italian food. Does that answer your question, Hannah?”

It sure does, Scott!

The phrase, “I should not,” is telling. Even though his wife is the one with the diagnosis, Scott realizes that unless he changes his habits he is heading in the same direction.

According to the American Diabetes Association, 1.9 million new cases of diabetes were diagnosed in people aged 20 years and older in 2010. 8.3 % of the U.S. population has diabetes, whether or not it has been diagnosed. About three times that number have pre-diabetes, meaning that they are at increased risk of contracting the disease.

Too often, people think that they don’t need to worry about their diets as long as their “numbers”  like blood glucose level, weight, cholesterol and so on are within normal range. But diabetes is clearly connected to poor eating habits. Why wait until you have no choice but to eat like a diabetic? Start altering your diet now, before you get to the point of no return.

I don’t envy Scott. Changing your eating habits from top to bottom is not an easy thing to do.

Here are ten tips for Scott and his wife:

1. Get some help. Maybe you can find a support group for family members of diabetics, or weight loss. There are on-line forums too.
2. Focus on what you can enjoy instead of what you are missing. Since you like Italian cooking, you can still eat spicy tomato sauce as long as it doesn’t contain too much sugar or fat. Use it for topping brown rice or whole-wheat pasta.
3. Scour cookbooks and websites to find the types of recipes that work for you. Many delicious foods fit into a diabetic diet.
4. Focus on eating less. Most Type II diabetics need to lose weight. You and your wife can still enjoy the foods you always have, just not as frequently and not in the amounts you were used to.
5. Switch to whole grains. You still won’t be able to eat as much as you like, but more than the processed alternatives or potatoes. Experiment with grains you may have eschewed like oats, barley and quinoa.
6. Add vegetables, beans and legumes to your menus. There are many tasty ways to enjoy these healthy foods in soups, sauces and casseroles.
7. Invest in a slow cooker or pressure cooker. Cooking meals in one pot can save you time and money. These are both great tools for making healthy meals in less time.
8. Plan your menus and shopping lists in advance. When you are relying on home-cooked food, you need more advanced planning. And changing from one style of cooking to another requires extra practice time too.
9. Divide up the cooking into smaller steps, like soaking beans or chopping vegetables in advance. Don’t forget to use pre-leftovers and rotating food.
10. Give yourselves time. There is a Hebrew expression, “All beginnings are difficult.” After a while, you will get used to a new way of cooking and eating.

Vegan blogger Rena Reich was surprised when I asked her for an interview, because I had just written about the bad experiences of well-known vegan blogger Tasha. Her interview will appear on Monday, but in the meantime she responded to my post, Dangers of a Vegan Diet.

I feel very badly for Tasha. I can only imagine how she feels. No one, at least no one that I know, would choose a vegan diet unless they were dedicated to the reasons for becoming vegan in the first place. I totally respect her for leaving veganism. Although she now eats meat, she is still doing it in a very responsible way.
Instead of just going out and chowing down on whatever steak she can find, she is being careful about what she puts in her mouth. She knows where her meat is coming from; something that I believe few other people can say.
I actually have no problem with people eating meat, my problem is the way that animals are factory farmed. Industrial farms around the world are keen about keeping us in the dark. What’s more surprising is that people want it that way. They don’t want to know things like the majority of antibiotics being sold in the US goes to livestock or what happens to all the male laying chicks. People want to be removed from the process, and be able to pick up their meat ready to stick in the pot. Most people know more about where the shoes on their feet come from than the food that they stick in their mouth.
That’s all true, without even mentioning how unfriendly for the environment factory farming is. Factory farming is responsible for more green house gases than all the transportation mechanisms in the world combined. A person does more harm to the environment by eating a burger than the gas used in their car to drive out to the fast food restaurant of their choice.
My family and I range in our degree of animal product consumption. I’m vegan. My kids have free-range chicken from a reputable breeder once a week. My son prepares it and the rest of the family digs in while I eat my tofu or some other concoction that I’ve thrown together. Other than that one weekly piece of free-range chicken, my children (ages 18, 17, and 14) are all vegetarian. My eldest also doesn’t eat eggs. My husband still eats everything (and feels guilty about it).
Tasha proved that there are health risks for some people. Most people do very well on a vegan diet. Vegans have a lower incidence of diabetes, heart disease, osteoporosis, cancer, and a slew of other ailments. Some people can’t eat gluten. They shouldn’t eat gluten. Some people can’t eat peanuts. They shouldn’t eat peanuts. Some people can’t absorb nutrients without eating meat. They should eat meat responsibly.
What do I do to make sure that I’m getting all the nutrients that I need? I take vitamin and iron supplements and I go for blood tests to make sure that everything is the way that it should be. Since I have become vegan, I have not had any ill effects from my diet. If I found that I did, I would do what Tasha does and add a bit of free-range chicken to supplement the nutrients that I need.

Rena writes at The Pet Wiki and her tech blog. She veganizes recipes at her food blog, Vegan Start.

Photo credit: Jenny Downing

Veganism, a diet containing no animal-based foods including meat, fish, dairy or eggs, is a growing trend.You can find vegan recipes for just about anything including Thanksgiving turkey. Environmentalists like veganism too.

But this week, a popular vegan blogger stopped being a vegan. Tasha of Voracious Eats was always careful to take iron and Vitamin B12 supplements. But she got sick, and her blood tests showed severe deficiencies:

The results explained perfectly why I had been feeling weak and exhausted for more than 6 months. Whereas I had previously lived for working out and even an hour on the elliptical wasn’t enough for me, lately doing more than 20 minutes at a leisurely pace caused me to yearn to spend the rest of the day in bed recuperating. When I could I slept till noon, I felt lightheaded when I stood up, I couldn’t remember simple words or the names of my friends, and I was freezing cold even in the midst of a sweltering Saudi summer. Of the myriad symptoms I’ve listed here and the ones I will not be describing publicly, the absolute worst of all was my depression. This awful, lifelong foe I’ve been battling on and off was sneaking back into my life, painting the edges of my world a sickening black and stealing the joy that I had fought so desperately to regain.

Her doctor gently explained that while some people thrive on  a vegan diet, our bodies do not absorb vitamins and minerals from supplements the way they do from actual food. Fortunately, adding small amounts of meat and eggs to her body resolved every one of her problems.

Reactions from the vegan community included death threats. But Tasha also learned that many advocates of a vegan diet secretly eat some animal protein from time to time. And she is not the only one to quit veganism publicly for health reasons.

In the last part of her post, Tasha explains why veganism won’t solve global warming, because manure is the most effect and sustainable fertilizer for growing all those vegetables.

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(If you had problems opening this post previously, try again.)

Chef Jamie Oliver gives a powerful talk on reversing the decline in healthy eating and the alarming rise in obesity. In one clip, he demonstrates how American schoolchildren can’t identify a tomato or a potato, much less beets or broccoli. His vision for America involves teaching every child about food, and teaching children and families ten simple, healthy recipes that they can cook at home. Well worth twenty minutes of your time.

I would teach these recipes:

1. Tuna casserole (with vegetables instead of canned soup)
2. Vegetarian or turkey chili
3. Spanish rice
4. Crustless quiche
5. Soup stock/vegetable soup
6. Marinara sauce
7. Patties
8. Rice and Chickpea Casserole
9. Red Snapper with Lemon and Dill or some other simple fish recipe.
10. Stir-fry chicken.

In addition to recipes, everyone should know how to buy and store food, use up leftovers, care for equipment, and other basics of running a kitchen.

Have you thought about cutting back on the amount of sodium your family eats? The USDA recommends that all adults consume no more than 2300 mg. of sodium a day. That’s one measly teaspoon of salt. Middle-aged and older adults, blacks, and those with hypertension (high blood pressure) or pre-hypertension should limit salt even more, to 1500 milligrams daily. The reason? Eating too much salt puts you at higher risk for heart disease.

Salt is essential for our diets, but most of us eat much more than we need. The average daily intake in the US is 3436 milligrams. And more than half of Americans have hypertension or prehypertension.

People who often eat out in restaurants, or rely on canned or processed foods, may be eating too much salt.  If you cook at home, using less salt may be easier than you think. My husband learned this after we had been married for a while. Foods he used to enjoy suddenly tasted too salty. According to this article from the Center for Disease Control: “A randomized trial showed that the perceived pleasantness of highly salted food was based on dietary habit and that this perception could be changed by gradual reduction of dietary intake of sodium.”

But eating less salt doesn’t mean giving up on tasty food. Here are some ideas for home cooks who want to lower the amount of sodium in food.

1. Read ingredient and nutrition labels. Processing foods removes flavor, and salt is added to replace the lost freshness and taste. The vast majority of processed foods,  including desserts, are high in sodium.
2. Prepare foods while they are still fresh and flavorful. Follow guidelines for keeping food fresh as long as possible.
3. Use sharp flavors like hot peppers, citrus juice and zest, mushrooms, tomatoes, garlic, herbs, spices, onions and vinegar. They are all healthy additions to tasty food.
4. Discard liquid from salty canned foods like tuna, beans or vegetables. Beans and vegetables can be rinsed off.
5. Don’t add salt to cooking water. Always taste and add salt at the end of cooking.
6. Check out this list of tips for avoiding canned and powdered soup, which generally contain large amounts of sodium.

Salt is not usually essential in cooking. There are even pickling recipes that don’t call for salt.  If you want to cut back on sodium, add a little less salt  to your recipe and see if anyone notices. If they don’t say anything, great. If they do comment, try the same amount next time and see what happens. There’s a good chance their taste buds will have adjusted.

Of course, these tips don’t help much if the family adds it back at the table via the salt shaker. What suggestions do you have for breaking a salt-shaker habit?

Photo credit: Kevin Dooley

In this video, Mark Bittman explains that the most important thing we can do to help the environment—more than eating locally, organically, or whatever—is to eat less meat. According to Bittman the USDA requirements are influenced by the dairy and beef industry, are way too high. Adults only need 1/2 pound of meat a week, and the average American eats half a pound a day. He also explains the effect of all of the animal protein on our health. An important reminder for those of us in the middle of the holiday season.

The video includes a short, fascinating history of American cooking.

Even though I consider my family to be semi-vegetarian,  we eat considerably more meat the recommended amount. What about yours?

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Cooking at home is the best way to make sure that your food is high in quality and nutrition. Just by cutting out extra salt, fat and sugar and preservatives in processed foods, you’re ahead of the game.  But all home cooking isn’t equal. Some techniques preserve the vitamins and minerals in your food, while others destroy them.

It’s not always practical to follow every technique each time. But the tips below can help you make better decisions.

1. Wash vegetables shortly before cooking or eating, and avoid soaking.
2. Eat food while it is still fresh.
3. Store fruits and vegetables whole, and remove stems just before eating.
4. Cover and refrigerate cooked foods quickly, while still hot if possible.
5. Avoid freezing. Freezing reduces the moisture, and the nutrients, in food.
6. Eat vegetables raw, or cook just until done. Many vegetables, like broccoli, taste good when partially cooked although they are healthiest raw. Some vegetables, like tomatoes and carrots, contain vitamins and antioxidants released only by cooking. Vitamin C is lessened by cooking, but it’s available in most fresh fruits or vegetables.
7. Choose the right cooking method. Steaming foods preserves the most vitamins. The pressure cooker or microwave also work well. Avoid covering vegetables with water, unless you are using the cooking water as soup or for another recipe. Serve foods with the cooking water, or add to soup. Avoid deep-frying.
8. Soak beans in cold water overnight (or skip the soaking altogether) instead of pre-boiling and throwing out the water. You’ll be throwing out vitamins as well. The exception is kidney beans, cannellini, and butter beans that need to be boiled at high temperature for ten minutes to kill dangerous toxins.
9. Scrub and cook vegetables whole, with the peel on. You can slip the peel off after cooking. Most vitamins are just under the peel, so they are lost if you peel them while raw.
10. Keep pieces large. Vitamins escape from the surface of cut vegetables. Grinding or mashing foods releases even more vitamins into the air.
11. Eat iron-rich foods with Vitamin C. But cooking in an iron pot reduces Vitamin C in foods.
12. Chew food carefully. Now is the time to mash it well so your body can digest it effectively.

More suggestions? Questions? Please share in the comments.

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Photo credit: CP Storm

Please welcome Cathryn Johnson for today’s guest post.

Stomach: A slave that must accept everything that is given to it, but which avenges wrongs as slyly as does the slave. – Emile Souvester

We often forget that our stomachs are not garbage disposals. Without thinking, we fill them with all sorts of tempting junk, whether it be chocolate, chips or soda. In today’s society, fast is considered better. But most fast foods are far from healthy. They are full of oils, carbohydrates and artificial flavors. When putting these things into our stomachs, there may be a nagging voice in the back of our minds telling us, “That is another 500 calories.” But that voice can easily be shushed.

However, after years of quieting that voice, many of our stomachs have begun to revolt. The revolt can come in the form of our stomachs taking on lives of their own, as they swell and grow in size. Or they can become upset, gaseous, or constipated. And other parts of our body may also join in the coup. Unhealthy eating habits is related to many ailments.

I have compiled a list of proverbs and thoughts from great thinkers throughout history on healthy eating to guide, inspire, motivate and challenge us to do our stomachs a favor and eat healthier. Read them in order, as the thoughts build on each other.

You are what you eat.
-American Proverb

One can not think well, love well, or sleep well if one has not dined well.

-Virginia Woolf (1882 – 1941) – English author

Food is an important part of a balanced diet.

-Fran Lebowitz (1950 – present) – American author

To eat is a necessity, but to eat intelligently is an art.
-La Rochefoucauld (1613-1680) – noted French author of maxims and memoirs

Our lives are not in the lap of the gods, but in the lap of our cooks.
-Lin Yutang (1895 – 1976) – Chinese writer and inventor

In general, mankind, since the improvement of cookery, eat twice as much as nature re-quires.

-Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790) – Founding Fathers of the United States, he was also a leading author and printer, satirist, political theorist, politician, postmaster, scientist, inventor, civic activist, statesman, and diplomat

Simple diet is best; for many dishes bring many diseases; and rich sauces are worse than heaping several meats upon each other.

-Pliny the Younger (61 AD – ca. 112 AD) – a lawyer, author, and magistrate of Ancient Rome

Eat well, drink in moderation, and sleep sound, in these three good health abound.

-Latin Proverb

When diet is wrong medicine is of no use.
When diet is correct medicine is of no need.
-Ancient Ayurvedic Proverb

He that takes medicine and neglects diet, wastes the skill of the physician.
-Chinese Proverb

The doctor of the future will give no medication, but will interest his patients in the care of the human frame, diet and in the cause and prevention of disease.

-Thomas Edison (1847-1931) – American inventor, scientist, and businessman

One should eat to live, not live to eat.

-Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790) – Founding Father of the United States, leading author and printer, satirist, political theorist, politician, postmaster, scientist, inventor, civic activist, statesman, and diplomat

Author Bio: Cathryn Johnson is self proclaimed health-nut and a content writer for Online MBA Rankings who gives advice on the education, pursuing an online MBA and living a healthy life. In her free time she enjoys travel, theater and having fun in the sun.

In Jewish communities across the globe, stores are stocking  shelves with Kosher for Passover (KFP) products. And people with celiac disease and their parents, Jewish or not, are stocking up on KFP foods. What’s the connection?

The central food of the week-long Jewish holiday of Passover is matzah. Matzah can be made of any of five species: barley, oats, rye, spelt and wheat. Wheat is the only kind generally available. Because of the quantities required and the strict rules surrounding its production, matzah is generally made in a separate factory.

Eating matzah is an important part of the Seder, the festive meal served on the first night of Passover. This doesn’t concern non-Jews with celiac. What’s important for celiac sufferers is the prohibition against leavened foods, or chametz.

Chametz, or leavened food, has a strict definition according to Jewish law. Chametz is produced when one of five grains, barley, oats, wheat, rye and spelt, comes into contact with liquid and is allowed to rest for 18 minutes before the completion of baking. The complexity of the laws of chametz and matzah means that in practice, any processed food prepared without Passover in mind is assumed to be chametz.

Because of this complexity, foods to be sold under Kosher-for-Passover supervision must be manufactured separately. Equipment must be cleaned from top to bottom to remove any trace of chametz, or leavened grains. Any crumb of wheat or oats would render the product chametz, and prevent it from receiving the Kosher for Passover label. Some products are nearly identical to the year-round equivalent, while some require substitutions for ingredients that are not kosher for passover (for instance, corn starch would be replaced by potato starch).

Some KFP products may contain matzah or matzah flour. Examples are breakfast cereals, cake mixes, chocolate-covered matzah, and gefilte fish. If this is the case, matzah will be listed as an ingredient.

When a product is labelled “non-gebrokt,” it will not contain any matzah product. Gebrokt means soaked. Some jews observe a stringency of avoiding matzah that has touched liquid after baking. Non-gebrokt products will not use matzah as a secondary ingredient, because it would touch liquid somewhere along the way.

Sephardic Jews, of Spanish or North African origin, have two main leniencies compared to Ashkenazi, or Eastern European Jews: Sephardic Jews may eat wheat products that are made from flour combined with juice or eggs and baked according to Passover rituals. This is known as “matzah ashirah” and will also be clearly labelled. Most also eat corn, rice and legumes. In Israel, with its large population of sephardim, there is a wider variety of kosher-for-Passover products that are also gluten-free.

Quick Guide to Gluten-Free Passover Products:

• Any product containing matzah, matzah meal, matzah flour, or matzah ashirah, etc. should be assumed to contain wheat.
• Passover products labelled “non-gebrokt” can be assumed to contain no trace of wheat, oats, barley, rye or spelt.
• In the US, starch in processed Passover foods is likely to be from potatoes.
• Products marked Kosher for Passover will not contain wheat, oats, barley, rye or spelt unless they are a matzah product, or include matzah among the ingredients.
• In Israel, which has large numbers of Sephardic Jews, Kosher for Passover products may contain rice or corn as well as potatoes.

I hope that this helps celiac sufferers and their families navigate the Passover shelves this time of year.

Gluten-Free Recipes on Cooking Manager:

Summer Chickpea Stew

Rice Pudding in the Microwave

Lentils with Onion and Garlic