Tag Archives: enjoyment

Eating is, or at least it can be, a joyful experience.

Constructs to manage a healthy eating pattern that ignore the joys and pleasures of eating are doomed to fail.

🟢Lamb Shanks – an uncomfortable truth

My traditional Christmas meal for the last couple of years has been lamb shanks. I use my tagine and cook the shanks in a slow oven with aromatics, tomato, and dry vermouth.

Before the braising process starts, the shanks get a 20 minute oven roasting as the picture above illustrates. They look a lot different of course after braising, but a picture of that initial roasting makes it easier to see the shanks themselves as well as the fat content.

The shanks come out so tender you can cut them with a fork. And they taste so good most folks want a whole one on the plate. As for me, a half a shank will do. The label above reflects the facts for approximately 1/2 a lamb shank.

The ingredient list is simple and short – lamb, tomato, dry vermouth, onion, fennel, carrot, olive oil, parsley, salt. That means a green 🟢 for NOVA compliance. But as happens with so many of my traditional recipes, lamb shanks get a thumbs down for “healthy” due to the saturated fat from the meat.

As my zealous colleagues love to point out, avoiding ultraprocessed food products is not good guidance for a healthy dietary pattern. And lamb shanks are a good example of what my colleagues are pointing out. Even though lamb shanks have less visible fat than lamb chops, there’s enough to exceed recommended values. Those beautiful lamb shanks aren’t high in saturated fat but they don’t qualify as lean either. Even a moderate amount of saturated fat is more than the evidence based percentage DV (Daily Value) allows.

Am I concerned about a moderate amount of saturated fat? No, not really. As I used to tell my clients when I worked in counseling, you can eat pretty much what you want to as long as you’re willing to manage frequency and portion size. So if fat isn’t the uncomfortable truth, what is?

VIEW FROM MY KITCHEN WINDOW

My uncomfortable truth is sustainability. Beef and lamb have environmental issues, even when the animals are pasture raised and grassfed. And that issue concerns me.

Industrial livestock production can and does cause significant environmental damage. Eating less meat and more plants is better for the environment. So what’s an omnivore like me to do? I’ve wrestled with that question for a long time and here’s what I’ve come up.

I’m fussy about sourcing and avoid industrial production when ever I can.

I also take my own good advice – smaller portions less often. The lamb shanks are a once a year celebration meal. And I know that what’s important about celebration meals is sitting back and enjoying friends and family.

I do have another approach to sustainability but I’m going to save that one for another post.

🟢Mayocoba Beans – when perfect is the enemy of good.



Is it just me or am I the only one who loves beans because they can taste good?

Pictured above  are some beautiful Mayocoba beans I made for a holliday dinner last year as an accompaniment for roasted duck. Mayocoba beans are savory enough to stand on their own yet earthy enough to share the plate with a robust partner. Like roast duck.

The Mayocoba bean is a native of Peru. Mayocobas grow many places now including California which is where I source from. My taste for savory beans developed early on because I grew up eating Mexican street food and New England baked beans on a regular basis. We probably go through about 20 pounds a year per person. The average American on the other hand eats closer to 6 pounds.

Beans do need tender loving care to achieve tastiness. Heirloom beans, some culinary skill, an honest olive oil, the right amount of salt, flavorful aromatics like onion, carrot, fennel, and a handful of parsley.

Why heirloom beans? Because these varieties tend to have more nuanced flavor profiles than commodity crops.

THE VIEW FROM MY KITCHEN WINDOW

 Beans have officially displaced kale as the new nutrition obsession as per a headline that crossed my feed recently. My dietitian colleagues, the advisory committee for DGA2025, a growing number of Influencers, and the combined marketing muscle of American farmers who grow them – everyone seems to agree that a healthy dietary pattern includes eating a lot more beans.

If those Mayocoba beans pictured above were a product however I couldn’t market them as healthy because I used too much salt. At the same time, the amount I used meets the FDA Phase II sodium goal for restaurants.

In my view, we’re not going to be able to persuade Americans to rat more beans if we ignore palatability.

Wouldn’t it make more sense to make a respectable place for moderation within the healthy model?

 

 

🟢Pumpkin Pie – the taste of added sugars

The aroma that fills my kitchen when I’m baking a pumpkin pie lingers even after the pie comes out of the oven. It’s a sweet, voluptuous, and earthy aroma that fills the room and lifts my spirits.

There’s nothing new about humans enjoying sweetness. Industrially refined sugar cane is relatively new addition but all civilizations have had a preferred source – honey, molasses, jaggery, dried fruit, maple syrup. That’s why sugar is classified as NOVA Group 2 Culinary Processed. Industrially refined sugar is a traditional sweetener that is part of our food environment.

Since I’m a traditional cook, it makes sense that the ingredients for my pumpkin pie are simple and traditional: the pie crust (whole wheat flour, olive oil, whole milk plain yogurt, salt); the pie filling (canned pumpkin, turbinado sugar, milk, egg, butter, vanilla, spices). The only ingredient that falls into Group 4 is vanilla extract so I’m giving my pumpkin pie a green 🟢 for NOVA compliance.

And since I’m a dietitian, I also take a peek through the nutrient lens. This view presents a darker picture. Assuming the pie makes 6 servings, the percentage Daily Value reflect too much fat and way too much sugar. That added sugar percentage jumps out and smacks you in the face – 29 grams / 58% DV!

THE VIEW FROM MY KITCHEN WINDOW

Added Sugar has been a line item on our Nutrition Facts Label since 2016. Percentage Daily Value (%DV) has been part of the labeling process however since 1994. A Daily Value for a nutrient is based on nutrition research and scientific evidence which does change over time. The DV on our labels can be updated to reflect new research. But this updating process is incredibly cumbersome and moves at a notoriously slow pace.

There are two way to interpret what a %DV means.  On an item by item basis. Or in the context of the whole day.

As per the FDA, a consumer should use %DV to determine if a serving of the food is high or low in an individual nutrient – 5% DV or less is low and 20% DV or more is high. Food manufacturers like the item by item basis. That’s the current marketing strategy behind sugar substitutes. Banners for SUGAR FREE and NO ADDED SUGAR are proliferating. Manufacturers are using various combinations of novel and artificial sweeteners to reduce the %DV for added sugar on CPG labels.

My preference however, especially for sweets, is the other interpretation. I favor setting the percentage in the context of a whole day. If you don’t eat much sugar at breakfast, lunch, or snack time, having a piece of my pumpkin pie for dessert looks much better. That percentage (58%)  is significantly under what is recommended for the whole day.

🟢Roasted Cauliflower – eating more plants

The final meeting of our Dietary Guidelines 2025 Advisory Committee meeting was held this past week. The committee members have again concluded that me and my fellow Americans don’t follow the guidelines and we eat poorly. Not much change since the first set of guidelines was published back in 1980.

And that brings me to cauliflower.

October is a great month for eating more cauliflower. It’s peak season for fall vegetables here in the Hudson Valley and that cauliflower pictured above came from a local farm stand. Local, seasonal cauliflower gets to my farm stand a lot faster than commodity cauliflower grown in California or Texas and I can taste the difference. Cauliflower imports from the west coast are welcome during winter and early spring but it’s October so I always opt for local.

By weight and by calories, roasted cauliflower is made with mostly minimally processed ingredients and therefore deserves a NOVA mostly minimally processed green dot 🟢.

Even better, if my roasted cauliflower were a product I could probably use the word “healthy” on the label. I’m not stingy with olive oil and I salt to taste because I want my vegetables to be irresistibly delicious, so I was pleasantly surprised how good the stats looked for sodium and saturated fat. Nutrition stats are pegged to specific FDA reference amounts (85g for vegetables). That’s the serving size gram amounts you’ll see for example on frozen cauliflower in the freezer case. My serving is about twice a big as the reference amount because I love the taste of my roasted cauliflower. But you better believe that I too would use the smaller serving amount if I were marketing a product and could make a “healthy” nutrient content claim.

Now back to eating more plants. Eating more roasted cauliflower is a delicious way to eat more plants / vegetables. And the guidelines are clear that Americans don’t eat enough vegetables. It’s October and cauliflower is in season so joyfully and with great pleasure, I’m only too happy to comply.

THE VIEW FROM MY KITCHEN WINDOW

As per our current dietary guidelines, a healthy eating pattern is based on nutrient-dense plant-based foods. I applaud the plant-based part of the recommendation, but I do have concerns about the nutrient-dense component. Salting to taste means using just enough salt to highlight the flavors of the food, but never so much that salt overpowers the food. Sometime when I run the stats, sodium falls below the “healthy” threshold and sometimes it doesn’t.

Most of my fellow Americans don’t cook on a regular basis anyway. They depend on the food industry. In many ways, the guidelines are as much about setting limits on the food industry as they are about providing individual Americans with the nutrition facts to make informed decisions.

Here’s the dilemma. The food industry wants to sell us what we enjoy eating which as it stand right now is food products that are high in fat, sugar, salt. The dietary guidelines recommend restricting our choices to food products that are low fat, sugar, salt to reduce the risk of chronic disease development. Something gets lost in the battle between high versus low however. And that something is moderation. And that loss concern me.

The End of Craving for my Dietitian Colleagues

photo credit | gourmetmetrics

That’s my well worn copy of Mark Schatzker’s most recent book pictured above. It’s a book that asks a good question. Why have we been getting fatter over the last 40 years?

Each chapter takes us through a series of seemingly unconnected events. Towards the end of the book, we learn this from the author “so here then is the theory spelled out: the obesity epidemic is being fueled by advancements in food technology that have disrupted the brain’s ability to sense nutrients, altered eating behavior, and given food an unnatural energetic potential”. 

My plan is to review this book in terms of my training and experience as a dietitian during the 15 years I worked in weight loss. I got my RDN in 1997 and worked in corporate wellness, weight loss counselling, and bariatric wellness.

The book begins with two approaches to disease. Pellagra is caused by a vitamin deficiency. The disease is prevalent when the food supply does not include a source of niacin. Both the United States and Italy have experienced periodic bouts of pellagra. In Italy, the government encouraged its inhabitants to raise rabbits and drink yeasty wine. In the US, the government recommended fortification of grains. Both solutions worked but the metaphor of a fork in the road between the old way and the new way dominates the book.

I went back to school to study nutrition in the early 1990s and remember to this day my sense of wonder as I learned about the discovery of vitamins and the miracle of enrichment. I was delighted to learn that nutrients like niacin could cure diseases like pellagra.

We explore the brain-gut connection with a trip to Lyon and the experiments of a French psychologist with bathwater temperature and starvation. We move to Bethesda Maryland and a Kevin Hall presentation on the results of the analysis he ran on contestants in the Reality TV show The Biggest Looser. We spend time with illiterate laborers in Karnataka and learn why these men love the bitter taste of tamarind. And we end with the work of Kent Barringer who was the first to differentiate the brain’s “wanting” circuitry (dopamine driven) from the brain’s “liking” circuitry.

Schatzker is a brilliant writer and able to put complex concepts into understandable common language. Despite my training as an RDN, I struggled to follow the intricacies of brain science and neurotransmitter patterns. I got my Certificate of Training Adult Weight Management 2001 but at that time obesity was considered a behavior disorder. My training focused on helping clients navigate the ever more enticing calorie proliferation of the modern food environment.

We explore “wanting” vs “liking” with a visit to Yale and a laboratory scientist who studies glucose metabolism. We investigate the seemingly irrational behavior of compulsive gamblers, learn how Swedish gerbils behave when fed a mixture of seeds and grains of sand, and take a whirlwind tour of food technology innovations over the last 40 years. Schatzker coined the term “nutritive mismatch” to describe a situation where our taste perception confuses the signaling system of the brain  

The science of neurotransmitters and the brain / gut connection was in its infancy when I got my certification. Swedish pharmacologist, Arvid Carlsson, had just been awarded the Nobel Prize in 2000 for his contributions on the neurotransmitter, dopamine. The counseling techniques I learned were based on an assumption Schatzker refers to as “The Hungry Ape” theory. We humans gorge on food when it’s available so we have fat stores to carry us through to the next starvation cycle.

Finally we take a vacation in 19th century Italy with Goethe. We delight in eating figs, pears, macaroni, and Sicilian lettuce. We study the stalking behaviors of snakes, learn about the evolutionary benefits of our “liking” food brain circuitry, delve into the beginnings of concentrated animal feeding operations and the development of scientifically managed swine rations.

Pigs get sick if all they are fed is corn and soy. Research done in the late 1940s enabled hog farmers to maintain a nutritionally adequate diet as animals moved from foraging in pasture to a feeding lot diet of corn and soy meal. When B vitamins were added to the feed, the hogs no longer got sick. Even better, the hogs gained weight faster. If adding B vitamins to hog feed as was done back in middle of the last century promoted weight gain, could the same weight gain happen in humans? Is it possible that enrichment could actually be a contributing factor to human weight gain? Oh my goodness! That is exactly what Schatzker said. It took my breath away. I had to put the book down.

At no point in my nutrition studies has anyone questioned the value of enrichment. Or fortification for that matter. These policies were presented as unqualified nutrition success stories. I never realized until I read Schatzker’s book that most European countries don’t enrich or fortify grains.

We end with a celebration of the power of good food by visiting Leipzig Germany and a doctor who works with clinically severe obese patients. We savor the taste of a perfectly crafted dark chocolate and the culinary equivalent of pastoral romanticism as the writer celebrates and indulges in the joy of eating really good northern Italian food.

We are left with a metaphoric fork in the road. Italy represents the old fork. The United States represents the new fork. And we are left with a speculation. Maybe if we restore the relationship between flavor, nutrition, and enjoyment that food provides, we will have a chance to change eating habits and health status.

These concepts are not completely outside the RDN tool box, but for the vast majority of my dietitian colleagues, Schatzker’s book will be hard to read because it challenges aspects of our training and core principles like the acceptance of enrichment and fortification as a net positive. Or the acceptance of artificial sweeteners and sugar substitutes as categorically safe and without health-related consequence.

My first job in dietetics was nutrition counseling at a corporate wellness gym. My clients were social media savvy and would frequently bring a wild and crazy ideas to our sessions. I never directly confronted clients.  Instead I explained there were two types of people out there in blogosphere. Most are predatory charlatans who are only interested in their own self-enrichment but there are always a couple of brilliant folks who are just slightly ahead of their time. Then I would add, sometimes it’s damnably difficult to tell which is which.

My reading of The End of Craving is that Schatzker is just slightly ahead of his time.