healthy eating Archives - Page 3 of 7

This Type of Diet Is a Total Fad

June 24, 2019 by Debi Simons

Ho-kay. I haven’t written about fad dieting for a while; to be honest, I thought I’d pretty well covered the bases with the keto, Whole30, vegan, food-sensitivity and paleo diets, with a brief foray into what Tom Brady eats, and figured that every other weird eating plan out there was just a variant on these. But I realize that I’ve never actually discussed the whole gluten-free craze, which I plan to do, plus some other somewhat more fringe-y ideas (since, sigh, going gluten free has become pretty mainstream). But I’m going to start this new round of anti-faddism with something I heard about only recently, and that is the “blood-type diet.” While it became popular with the publication of Eat Right 4 Your Type (no link provided, as I don’t want anyone wasting money on it) in 1996, it’s still alive and kicking. A revised and updated version of the book was published in 2016, and I found out about (or was reminded of) the diet because I heard about someone I know who is following it.

Use Food to Promote Conviviality without Promoting Indulgence

June 19, 2019 by Debi Simons

I’ve been thinking a lot recently about party food, even more than usual, because I’m working on a cookbook about such stuff (working title: Tiny Bites). Lately I’ve been testing my take on Swiss buttercream frosting. (Yesterday’s version was root beer. The batch is now in the freezer awaiting its use as a topping for root-beer brownies at the wedding reception I’m helping with in August. It was pretty good, but I’m still tweaking the basic recipe.)

So, as I’ve often said, food can be a tool that promotes conviviality. People aren’t eating because they’re hungry

I Attain Pizza Nirvana–and Eat Only One Slice

June 19, 2020June 17, 2019 by Debi Simons

Image by Christopher Kuszajewski from Pixabay

We are mildly obsessed with homemade pizza at our house. (But not as obsessed as Kenji Lopez-Alt, who carried out a monster experiment in his monster cookbook The Food Lab about whether or not the mineral content in the water has anything to do with crust quality. You can read all about it in the Kindle sample available on the Amazon page linked to above.) My son regularly makes the complicated recipe for deep-dish Chicago-style pizza from Cook’s Illustrated, and I’ve been on a kick

How Do I Balance the Day?

May 2, 2019 by Debi Simons

Since I’ve been writing so much about various fad diets that you should just blithely ignore (with more to come), I thought it might be a good idea to write something about how a person should eat, and how well my own diet stacks up.

So first, for breakfast, Jim and I typically alternate between an egg-and-meat meal and a grain-based meal. If we had an omelet with veggies, cheese and perhaps some meat one morning then I might make whole-grain muffins the next day. Or we might have bagels bought

How Do You Evaluate Health Claims?

May 1, 2019April 30, 2019 by Debi Simons

I thought that I had covered the major fad diets out there but realized that there are a few more to aim at. Before I plunge into more of these scams, I figured it would be a good idea to write more generally about how to make informed decisions about your health or anything else. Ridiculous new ideas are coming down the pike every day. Here are some guidelines you can use:

More Thoughts on Veganism

April 25, 2019April 10, 2019 by Debi Simons

I wrote last week about some of the complications that can arise from following a vegan diet, and I want to follow up with more, perhaps rather scattered, observations about this lifestyle. I’ll be including links to two articles written by young women who struggled while trying to follow veganism. One decided to start including some animal protein into her life and saw some dramatic improvements in her health; the other steadfastly refused to do that but was able to re-jigger things so that she was getting enough protein (understandable) and, you may be surprised to hear, cholesterol. Yes, that horrible substance that causes heart attacks. Too-low cholesterol levels are

The Vegan Lifestyle and Its Complications

April 25, 2019April 4, 2019 by Debi Simons

So far I’ve discussed the keto, paleo, Whole30, food sensitivity, and Tom Brady diets, and there are many more out there. I’m going next to veganism as a lifestyle. As I’ve said before, there are two principles to keep in mind in looking at these various eating plans:

1) People are free to choose how they eat, and

2) Personal convictions/conscience should not be violated.

Four Great Books by the Great Michael Pollan

April 25, 2019March 26, 2019 by Debi Simons

I first got acquainted with Michael Pollan back when I was trying to be a vegetable gardener as well as a flower gardener and was reading every gardening book I could get my hands on.

Second Nature: A Gardener

Second Nature: A Gardener’s Education was written in 1991; I probably read it 3-4 years later after we bought our first house and I was trying to get do something worthwhile in the yard. Pollan’s book uses his experiences in starting a vegetable garden of his own as a jumping-off point for all sorts of thoughts about how we provide food for ourselves and how a garden shapes the gardener as well as the other way around. I’d recommend it highly if you’re interested in growing anything in the dirt. I have officially taken myself out of the vegetable gardening business, but even so I’d probably enjoy re-reading this book. (How it can be possible that someone can grow flowers successfully but not vegetables is a puzzle, but I seem to fit into that category, so I’ve thrown in the towel. The farmer’s markets around here should be getting some business from me starting soon.)

My Two Eating Catchphrases

March 22, 2019 by Debi Simons

It has occurred to me that I’ve evolved two simple principles that can then be applied to any aspect of life, in particular to eating. Here they are:

The laws of physics have not been repealed.

The secret is that there is no secret.

So What’s the Whole30, Like, For?

April 25, 2019March 19, 2019 by Debi Simons

Yesterday I ranted and raved about Melissa Hartwig and her crazy diet (that’s made her a very, very rich celebrity), but I went on and on without ever getting to the central question, which is:

Exactly what is this whole hoop-de-doo supposed to do for you?

Let’s get to that now. Remember, the idea for “going clean” for 30 days was an impulsive idea from Hartwig’s then-boyfriend, now-divorced-husband, Dallas: