Review”John taught me how to cook and how to make healthful feed taste terrific. Get this book and he’ll part that brilliant wisdom and practical counsel with you. Your body and your taste buds will thank you for it.”
— Michael Roizen, M.D., Chief Wellness Officer of the Cleveland Clinic and coauthor of four #1 New York Times Bestsellers, including YOU: Staying Young
“Dr. La Puma brings to your table a rare combining of medical experience and culinary skills. Anyone’s health and meals will both gain by reading this book.”
—Walter C. Willet, M.D., Chair, Department of Nutrition, Harvard School of Public Health
“Through the culinary wizardry of Dr. John La Puma, not even your taste buds will know that you’re eating ‘good for you’ food. You may live well–and long–with his guidance.”
—Mehmet Oz, M.D., Author of YOU: Staying Young and YOU: The Owner’s Manual
“Every one of us has an internal doctor, a natural inner leader, that may keep us healthy. Dr. La Puma teaches you how to eat the right feed so your inner doctor may do it is work. Learn how to eat well and feel well at the same time. “
—Jack Canfield Co-author of the Chicken Soup for the Body and Soul®
“John La Puma has a way of bringing the science and delights that will have to come from healthful eating together on the same plate. As a arousing and attention holding blend of both chef and physician, his passion and talent come through with practical and enticing tips on how to shop, cook, and eat. In this engaging book, he shows us that healthful feed may be both good for you and fetch delicious pleasure to our lives.”
—Jesse Ziff Cool, Author, Restauranteur, and Advocate of Sustainable Agriculture
From the Hardcover edition.
About the AuthorJOHN LA PUMA, M.D., is the New York Times bestselling coauthor of The RealAge Diet and Cooking the RealAge Way, the host of ChefMD on television, and the conductor of the Santa Barbara Institute for Medical Nutrition and Healthy Weight in Santa Barbara, California.
REBECCA POWELL MARX is a writer and television producer and a 2007 and 2008 International Health and Media FREDDIE award winner.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.CHAPTER 1
Enhancing Bioavailability: ABSORB MORE OF THE GOOD STUFF
Sex is good, but not as good as fresh, sweet corn.
-Garrison Keillor
Bioavailability-Test Your ChefMD IQ
1. Is cooking vegetables better nutritionally than eating them raw?
Yes No
2. Does thawing frozen vegetables before cooking them help to maintain their nutritional value?
Yes No
3. Do you in general eat your fruits with the skin off?
Yes No
4. Do you in general eat your vegetables with the skin on?
Yes No
5. Is it true that eating a few almonds before eating a sausage will support block the negative effects of it is completely filled fat?
Yes No
6. Do you know how to sauté, steam, simmer, marinate, arid rub, roast, and grill?
Yes No
7. Do you use herbs and spices liberally?
Yes No
8. Do you commonly use a low-fat or nonfat salad dressing on your salad?
Yes No
9. Is milk chocolate more nutritious than dark chocolate?
Yes No
10. Can cocoa lower blood pressure?
Yes No
Scoring: Give yourself 1 point for each rectify answer.
1. Yes: Cooking ordinarily unlocks vitamins from the
ber in vegetables, and less cooking is ordinarily better. When you boil your veggies a heap of of the nutrients end up in the water. You keep the nutrients when you steam.
2. No: Studies show that frozen vegetables maintain a much higher level of nutrition when cooked frozen.
3. No: Bet you knew this. Much of the nutritional value of fruit is in the skin.
4. Yes: Bet you knew this, too. Like fruit, much of the nutritional value in vegetables is in the skin.
5. Yes: Eating a few nuts before eating meat will support block the negative effects of the meat’s completely filled fat.
6. Yes: These are healthful ways of preparing foods.
7. Yes: Herbs and spices integrate an unbelievable array of antioxidants and, of course, outstanding avor.
8. No: There’s a surprise. Use full-fat dressings or add a bit of healthful fat (avocado, walnuts, almonds, olives) to your salad.
9. No: Dark chocolate good, milk chocolate bad (more on that later).
10. Yes: Just 30 calories worth of dark chocolate every day may help.
Total score (0-10):
8-10 points: Your Inner ChefMD is smart and cookin’.
4-7 points: Your Inner ChefMD is closely ready for prime time. Read this chapter to hone your skills.
0-3 points: Your Inner ChefMD needs to go to culinary medical school. Read this chapter immediately!
Food is like sex. When done well, it engages all
ve senses; it taps into our most primal needs and urges and it’s among the biggest delights you may experience. And like sex, eating good feed is a celebration, and an af
rmation of life.
Would you watch TV while having sex? If it was great sex, probably not. So why would you grab a burger while running through an airport or eat a hot dog while sitting in front of the tube?
It’s so much more satisfying to take delight in and savor the experience of eating good, fresh, nourishing feed than to eat mindlessly. And like sex, eating a meal is ordinarily better if you’re doing it with somebody you love.
You know you will have to eat more fruits and vegetables-you’ve been hearing it since you were a little child and didn’t want to eat your peas. Now that you’re a grown up, your brussels sprouts probably still get left behind on the plate, and the last piece of fruit you had was the maraschino cherry out of a mai tai. You recognise that if you ate more fruits and vegetables, you’d be healthier. But what you may not recognise is that how you look and feel is also affected by your food’s bioavailability. Say what?
What Is Bioavailability?
Bioavailability is a word borrowed from pharmacology, the study of drugs and their effects on the body. In pharmacology, bioavailability means the amount of a peculiar drug the body in truth absorbs into the bloodstream, not just the amount you take. It’s how much medicine is available for your body to use.
With respect to food, bioavailability means body ready: the nutrients absorbed and available for your body to use. Naturally, you want to maximize the body readiness of healthful nutrients for your system. Let me give you numerous examples.
Say it’s a finelooking summer day and you stop by your local farmers’ market to pick up a watermelon. You get it home and you kind of wish the watermelon were cold, but you don’t want to wait for it to cool down in the refrigerator. Take heart. Watermelon that’s been stored at room temperature has up to 40 percent more lycopene and up to 139 percent more beta-carotene than watermelon out of the cooler or your fridge. Store and eat your watermelon at room temperature to maximize those powerful antioxidants. And here’s a little bonus. The lycopene and beta-carotene in harvested watermelon actually increments over time-for up to two weeks. So let that freshly picked melon mellow to maximize it is nutrients.
Sure, you already recognise that boiling vegetables reduces their nutritional value. But if you’re going to boil your vegetables, and I’d prefer you steam them, do it in as little water and for as short a time as possible. Reducing the amount of water and the cooking time reduces nutrient loss and maximizes bioavailability.
I’m sure you’ve noticed how the color of the water turns somewhat yellow when you’re boiling a yellow vegetable and tints green when you boil a green vegetable, right? That’s the avonoids leaching out of your meal. Flavonoids are brilliant antioxidant compounds in vegetables that give them their extremely pleasing colors and activate your DNA repair system, helping to protect you from cancer. Save that water and use it to make soup or cook pasta.
Here’s an example of how to maximize the body-readiness of vitamin C in your fruit. Buy whole fruit and cut it up yourself. Although it’s easiest to grab the packages of presliced fruits your grocer has conveniently prepared, studies show that preslicing fruit may reduce it is vitamin C content over time. Cantaloupe, kiwi, and pineapple seem in particular prone to vitamin C loss when precut. Precut fruit costs you more and you get less nutrition. I’d call that a double whammy. So, know your fruit: for cantaloupe, kiwi, and pineapple, go whole and slice your own.
The conception of body-readiness is critical to the ChefMD plan, because it is the missing link to being simultaneously overweight and undernourished, as so some humans now are.
Why? Because our feed is progressively less nourishment providing than it applied to be-and not just processed fast foods. Researchers not long ago looked at data from the USDA from 1950 and 1999 on the nutrient content of forty-three dissimilar crops of fruits and vegetables. They found that six out of thirteen nutrients had declined in these crops over the
fty-year period: protein was down by 6 percent, calcium by 16 percent, phosphorus by 9 percent, iron by 15 percent, riboavin by 38 percent, and vitamin C by regarding 20 percent. Furthermore, they found a strong correlation amid high yield in wheat crops and a loss of nutrients in the wheat, such as zinc and phosphate. This was also unfeigned of high-yield mercantile broccoli and it is level of calcium.
And it’s not just vegetables. A British study showed that chicken in 2004 contained a third less protein than chicken in 1940. The twenty-
rst-century chicken likewise had more than twice as much fat and a third more calories.
Wow. We’ve become much better at manufacturing more prominent and larger quantities of food, but bite for bite it is nutritional value is littler and smaller.
We don’t know the precise reason for this decline in nutrition over the past decades. Greater crop yields are seen by a great deal of as the culprit. Whatever the reason, I want to aid you to absorb more nutrients from the feed you eat-because the fact of the matter is that there are less nutrients in it.
How much you eat; what other foods you eat at the same time; and how you cook, store, and choose feed all affect how much you absorb from what you eat and how well your body may use it.
Some people point out that your genes dictate how you absorb nutrients, and how unfair that is. Some people eat a healthful diet and die at
fty; others eat that same diet and thrive past one hundred. That’s the diet-gene paradox: our genes determine how we absorb what’s in feed that’s good for us, and not so good for us. But the aweinspiring thing is that feed may tell your genes what to do, and with better bioavailability, you may get even more from what you eat-no matter what your genes.
Sadly, there are likewise barricades to bioavailability. Say, for example, you’re attempting to get more leafy greens in your diet, a wondrous thing to do. You’ve hit on a crunchy green, totally virtuous salad, with beauteous red peppers, green peppers, a grape cherry tomato or two, with a low-cal squeeze of lemon or store-bought fat-free dressing. You’re sitting pretty, having possibly 125 calories in a bowl as big as your head and headed to weight-loss heaven. You may feel virtuous when you sit at your desk at lunchtime with that lunch, and perhaps likewise feel a little jealous when you see your co- worker’s Philly cheese steak.
What you might not know is that the fat-free dressing is in truth keeping you from absorbing the carotenoids in that green salad that may help stave off cancer. Locked up inside that salad is closely each antioxidant you’ve ever heard of. You’re getting less than you could-unless you eat that salad with avocado, or with walnuts or roasted walnut oil, or extra-virgin olive oil, or closely any other good-for-you fat.
Why? Because the oil makes the lutein in the green peppers, the capsanthin in the red peppers, the lycopene in the tomato, even the limonene in the lemon more body ready for you. Each of them is optimally absorbed with a bit of fat. Even reduced-fat dressing won’t let you get as a good deal of of these worthful nutrients as you could. You’ve been running from fat-who knew you might genuinely need it?
Later in the book, I’ll instruct you to make a si…
LOTS of great tips that doesn’t feel like a COMPELTE repetition of what other books have already said
Big Bood of Culinary Medicine
