Tag Archives: RealFood

Food is complex. Getting enough to eat used to be our challenge. Industrial processing has changed things. Industrialization started over 100 years ago but accelerated exponentially starting around 1980.

See Page – NOVA Food Classification 2009.

🔴 Naan Pizza. Convenience comes at a cost.


Ingredients count. Those ingredients assembled above are the ones I use when I make naan pizza. It’s really tasty. And it doesn’t take a lot of time to assemble and cook. But sourcing the right ingredients is crucial. From left to right going counter clockwise, here’s what I need to assemble:

Red onion. Easy to pick up in most supermarkets.

Fresh Mozzarella. If you don’t live near a market or grocer that makes fresh mozzarella, you’re out of luck. Unless you’re willing to make your own which I’ve been told is pretty easy to do. I lucked out because both in the city and where I live in the Hudson Valley we have good sources.

Jarred Pesto. Italian industrial manufacturers have done a credible job with this classic olive oil, basil, parmigiana, pine nut mixture. For me at least. The brand I used depends on what the store I shop in carries. I avoid any brand that contains seed oil, natural flavors, flavor extracts, whey, starch, flours. Why avoid seed oil? Because pesto needs to be made with olive oil to taste good.

Marinara Sauce. As with pesto, the brand depends on the store I shop in. I avoid flavor additives of any kind and I look for whole peeled tomatoes instead of tomato purée.

Naan. The best tasting naan I’ve ever used was an artisan product made on a small scale and carried locally when we lived in New York City. Now that we’ve moved to the Hudson valley, I need to make do with what is available. The naan pictured above is an industrially formulated product made with a predictable set of dough conditioners, commodity seed oils, mold inhibitors, cosmetic additives, and extracts. It’s not as chewy or clean tasting as the naan I used to use but it works and it’s available.

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My naan pizza has two things going for it – taste and convenience. Well except for the time I spend sourcing. But I’m a fanatic when it comes to sourcing. If I could find a chewier, freshly baked tradition naan, I’d track it down too. But my choices are limited to what is reasonably available, so I need to compromise and settle for well crated shelf stable product formulated with a couple of cosmetic additives.

Pizza has many positive attributes going for it, but healthy is not one of them. So we’re already in the territory of comparative unhealthiness. I’m not even sure if the low-fat, low sodium versions meet the austere criteria favored by the food police. On the other hand, my naan pizza has a healthier nutrient profile than commodity brands or popular take out offerings. And because I use good quality ingredients which are flavorful in and of themselves, I don’t need to use as much salt.

🟢Steel Cut Oats. Warm, chewy, sweet, and healthy.


A bowl of oatmeal made with steel cut oats is one of my favorite breakfasts. Especially appreciated when it’s cold outside and I want something warm inside my gut.

Steel cut oats are the closest version to oats in their whole, unprocessed form. Those unprocessed oats are called oat groats. Making oatmeal with steel cut oats is a time intensive process so it’s understandable why most of my fellow Americans prefer the option of quick cooked oats. But nothing can match the flavor of a well cooked soft, chewy, deliciously nutty consistency bowl of steel cut oatmeal.

The ingredient I use to make a bowl of oatmeal reads clean and un-trafficked: water, steel cut oats, blueberries, strawberries, pecans, turbinado sugar, butter, salt. You can see the pecans if you look closely for brown edges peaking out from time to time between oats and fruits. The ingredients I use are mostly minimally processed except for the culinary processed ingredients – sugar, butter, salt.

In one of those rare moments of consensus what tastes delicious to me actually matches what the friendly food police would allow me to label healthy. Whole Grains, Fruit, Protein (pecans are now protein foods) qualify my bowl of oatmeal as food. And as long as I limit my serving size to one cup, those nutrients of concern (added sugar, sodium, saturated fat) comply with current “healthy” thresholds.

In today’s food marketplace, oatmeals come in different degrees of processing. At one extreme is my bowl of steel cut oatmeal – time consuming to make and labor intensive to source and prep. At the other extreme is off the shelf instant oatmeal – boil in a cup, just add water, no added sugar made with novel or artificial sweeteners, often fortified with folate, and definitively #UPF ultra-processed.

And that brings me to the food matrix and cellular / acellular nutrition.

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The USDA defines “food matrix” as the nutrient and non-nutrient components of foods and their molecular relationships to each other. In other words the food matrix is the cell’s molecular structure.

There’s a complementary concept floating in and out of certain European research studies that focuses on cellular nutrients. The logic goes something like this – nutrients that remain within the cell structure – cellular nutrients – take longer to metabolize and by extension are considered healthier than nutrients that have been extracted then added back in.

Here in the US, both enrichment and fortification are common practice. And both processes require adding isolated nutrients back into a food product. Both are examples of acellular nutrients. Acellular nutrients are rapidly and completely digested in the stomach and small intestines.

Does the body care are whether nutrients arrive in a cellular structure or if these nutrients are acellular? Here in the US, the answer is pretty consistently that it makes no difference. Moreover, folate fortification has good research data to support a clear health benefit.

What can be said with certainty however is that our gut evolved over the millennia to metabolism cellular nutrients, not acellular nutrients.

🟢Green Split Pea Soup. Too much salt.

Winter is soup weather. The colder it get outside, and trust me here in New York’s Hudson Valley it can get pretty chilly, the more I appreciate a bowl of steaming hot soup. Warms me up from the inside out.

My ingredient list is simple. Green split peas, water, mirepoix (onion, carrot, fennel), olive oil, salt. It’s a tradition recipes made from scratch with no assistance from any processed or ultra-processed products so the recipes gets a green 🟢 dot.

I think I just heard someone ask what is a mirepoix? Mirepoix is a French word and it’s the basic flavor enhancement made for much of classic French cuisine. The French version consists of onion, carrot, celery. But the concept is global, infinitely mutable, and every traditional culinary cuisines uses some form of aromatic vegetable flavor base. It’s how cooks and chefs enhanced flavor prior to the industrial food era.

The taste of home made split pea soup can’t be captured in any canned or instant soup I’ve ever tasted. Cleaner. Fresher. More robust fully developed flavors. I’m not a food scientist so I can’t tell you why however. What I do know is the best quality ingredients make the most flavorful soup.

Industrially formulated soups will sometimes use combinations of aromatic vegetables but today it’s also common to use artificial or natural flavors. Industrial processors find it easier and cheaper to pick and choose from the myriad of flavorings now available.

Whether you are an home cook like me or an industrial manufacturer, the problem with soup is the same. Too much salt. Soup is notorious for being high in sodium. My home made version uses less than commercial brands do, but it’s still a lot. And for sure when it comes to using the word “healthy” on a product label, “healthy” is the Kiss of Death ☠️.

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Within our regulatory framework, there are multiple perspectives on how to evaluate salt and health outcomes. The health problem with salt is the relationship between sodium and blood pressure in some people. And the problem with high blood pressure is it can increase the risk for cardiovascular vascular disease. It’s at this point regulatory guidelines can get messy. Using the example of my homemade soup, let’s take a look at just how messy …

❌ The Nutrition Facts Label reflect a high sodium value. High means a cup provided more than 20% of the DV (Daily Value). The Dietary Guidelines has set the value for sodium at 2300mg per day using CDRR (Chronic Disease Risk Reduction) methodology.

✅ The FDA has established a Voluntary Sodium Reduction program for food processors and restaurants. This program evaluates sodium using grams per 100 for shelf stable soup. Without boring you with calculations, my homemade spite pea soup is already below target for all three categories – restaurant, frozen, and shelf stable soups.

It’s a dilemma and a bit of a kerfuffle. Is the food police going to come after me because when I salt to taste, I increase my risk for cardio vascular problems? Or should I get a standing ovation because I’m doing better than most of my fellow Americans because I my split pea soup is homemade?

🟢Walnut, Raisin, Rolled Oat Cookies. Too much sugar.

Cookies are scrumptious little bundles of calorie dense fat and sugar. And yes, there’s no way to argue than a good cookie is nutrient dense. Even a good cookie with made with whole grains and lots of walnuts and raisins like my home baked cookies pictured above.

So my little home baked beauties pictured above don’t stand a chance. I do use good ingredients so the list is NOVA friendly 🟢. The ingredient list includes minimally processed (rolled oats, walnuts, raisins, whole wheat flour, egg), some processed culinary (butter, sugar, salt), and only one ultra-processed (vanilla). But do NOVA friendly ingredients make my cookies nutrient dense?

The FDA (Food and Drug Administration) considers a food product healthy if two conditions are met. First there must be a “meaningful amount” of food from at least one of the five food groups. Second, nutrient dense as determined by the amount of sodium, saturated fat, added sugars per serving.

Do my carefully sourced ingredients constitute a “meaningful amount”? No problem here. But that’s also true for a comparable premium branded product. How about those nutrient thresholds? Comparing my cookies by weight to a comparable branded product, both the percentage DVs are virtually the same. Both are equally “unhealthy” and both equally tasty.

Could a manufacturer engineer a “healthy” fat free sugar free oatmeal raisin cookie? Absolutely yes I’m convinced it could be done.  If there’s customer demand for it, food manufacturers will find a way to make it happen by substituting novel or artificial sweeteners for sugar.

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Here’s my take on sugar and sugar substitutes. The best approach is to develop a taste for less sweet things. The next best approach is to be mindful of the options:

• Novel. These are sweeteners derived from natural plant sources. They are called novel because unlike cane sugar they have not been part of our usual American dietary pattern until recently.   Allulose, Monk fruit, Stevia, Agave, and Tagatose are the most common.

• Artificial. These sweeteners are laboratory engineered and manufactured. The list includes Aspartame, Saccharin, Sucralose, and Various Sugar Alcohols.

• Traditional. These are sweeteners we recognize. Besides cane or beet sugar, the list includes honey, dates, maple syrup, molasses.

My personal choice is traditional sweeteners because I like the taste. But I don’t have much of a sweet tooth so I’m not at risk for developing an addiction. And I’m not diabetic.

🟡Steamed Artichokes. Exceptions to every rule.

The artichoke may be the most daunting vegetable to challenge human culinary creativity. Thorny on the outside. Tough and fibrous on the inside. Except of course for the tip of each leaf and that artichoke heart which is savory, delicate, but inedible unless the choke is removed. The artichokes pictured above are French from a farmers market just outside of Paris. But they look just like the artichokes I used to eat growing up in California.

My preferred preparation is to steam artichokes and serve them cold or room temperature with a dressing part whole milk yogurt and part commercial mayonnaise.

But 66% calories UPF! How is that possible?  How can such a simple preparation be so significantly ultra-processed? The answer is because it’s customary to count UPF by weight when describing supermarket shelf space but to count UPF by calories when describing consumption.

That means we need to check both ingredients and calories. The artichokes themselves are minimally processed of course. My plain yogurt is processed. Milk becomes yogurt through fermentation, a traditional processing method that preserves whole milk by means of lactic acid.

The culprit is the commercial mayonnaise. I make the dressing 2 parts yogurt to one part mayonnaise. By weight, the mayonnaise constitutes only 12% UPF of the weigh of the sauce. By calories, the numbers look a lot different however. The ingredients for a good off the shelf mayo starts with oil, usually soybean or canola, eggs, vinegar, salt, sometimes sugar, preservatives, flavors. It’s the presence of preservatives and flavors that determine degree of processing but it’s the oil that determines the calorie contribution. So it’s the mayo that is responsible for that scary percentage –  66% UPF. And that’s the reason my steamed artichokes get a yellow 🟡 dot.

Do I know how to make my own mayonnaise? Yes I do. Am I going to stop using off the shelf mayo because it has added flavors and preservatives. No way.

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Here’s my take on flavor additives and preservatives.

• Preservatives. I don’t have a problem with their use. Some are better than others, but the way I see things, a preservative is better than food poisoning.

• Flavors. I do have a problem with added flavors because I want flavor to come from the food on the plate. It also doesn’t matter to me if flavor is laboratory engineered or extracted from natural ingredients. I avoid both. Flavor should come from quality ingredients. Like robust freshly harvested artichokes. Or naturally fermented plain yogurt. But I don’t get concerned when the manufacturer adds a flavor to the mayo unless I am willing to make time to do the grunt work myself.

🟡Grilled Chicken, Red Peppers, Pinto Beans, Pasta. Moderate salt.

Food is complex. Nutrition is wicked hard. Cutting through all those layers is no small feat, but I’m going to give it my best shot.

Americans are used to starting with nutrients. So my first suggestion is to forget nutrients for a moment and focus on the food. Those gorgeous red peppers. The grilled chicken strips. That occasional pinto bean that is peeking out here and there. Or the pasta. The Italians call the pasta “elicodale” which translates into English as spiral shaped and as you can see those deep ridges create a sort of spiral pattern.

The grilled chicken dish is freshly prepared with traditional ingredients. But as noted above, nearly a third of the calories come from ingredients which are classified as ultra-processed – NOVA Group 4 UPF. These ingredients are the grilled chicken, the vegetable broth, and the tomato basil sauce.

These three items are industrially formulated convenience products and all were developed relatively recently. Home cooks like me know that making vegetable broth or red sauce from scratch takes time. And cutting up and grilling chicken breast strips is messy. Scratch cooking tastes better, but life intercedes so I’m okay using industrially formulated products as long as they are made with simple intact ingredients and do not contain flavors, colors, texture modifiers, or acellular nutrients.

The 29% calories UPF noted above is the sum of the calories from the vegetable broth, grilled chicken, and tomato basil sauce. The yellow 🟡 dot means I used ultraprocessed products but each of the products I used are acceptable. To me.

Focusing on food is easy. For those not used to home cooking, it may take some practice but it’s a skill anyone can develop. It just takes practice.

Focusing on nutrients is not easy.  The Nutrition Facts Label can be helpful for assessing the three nutrients that health professionals recommend limiting. As you’ll note from the label above, the sodium percentage stands out from the other Daily Value percentages. Palatability is as important to me as health when I cook at home so I salt to taste. Although I use salt in moderation, the food police will still bang on my head for using too much salt. Compared to the high sodium valued seen in restaurant meals or Consumer Packaged Goods (CPG) however, my moderate use looks a lot better.

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American who pay attention to labels are used to putting nutrients first because that’s the message labels have been reinforcing for the last 50 years. The FDA (Food and Drug Administration) has been nutrient focused for 5 decades! It wasn’t until December 2024 that a “meaningful amount” of food became a component for using the word “healthy” on food product labels. It’s a positive step however and I applaud the FDA for finally acknowledging that food does count.

🟢Braised Lamb Shanks. Less meat better than giving up meat.

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?

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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. Freshly prepared. Salt to taste.



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 eat 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. Home baked. Too much sugar?

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!

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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. Freshly prepared. Salt to taste.

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.