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Q&A
How to Stay Healthy During the Holidays
Clean Food author Terry Walters weighs in
Connecticut mom and marathoner Terry Walters was teaching cooking classes out of her home for years, showing people how to identify unusual grains like amaranth at the grocery store, and make themselves feel better by learning to prepare those grains in tasty ways. Now she has a new cookbook, Clean Food, full of really easy, really healthy dishes that just happen to be vegan. She’s not vegan, but she believes we could all do with more vegetables in our diets. CHOW.com asked Walters for suggestions on how to survive holiday excesses.
How can I be healthier this holiday season? Mother Nature gives us tools to combat holiday temptations. We crave sweet, comforting foods during the dark winter months, and this also happens to be the time when winter squash comes out, which is very sweet. You can get your sweets without craving packaged sweets so much. Also, the thing about the holidays is, we often feel that once we’ve started, we say: “I’m just going to throw in the towel.” The key is moderation. There’s nothing wrong with a splurge if you’re in balance most of the time.
How do you find balance? It’s like skiing: Once you start to lose balance, it’s really hard to not fall down. We do that to ourselves when we don’t eat breakfast, fuel ourselves on coffee and sugar, then crash, and we’re depleted, and we reach for carbs, or holiday fare if it’s the holidays, because it’s a quick pick-me-up. What I’m really into for breakfast is dinner! I have a young family, and if I’m going to cook something like, say, sautéed kale and collards for dinner, I make a ton of it, then warm it up in the morning with some quinoa, or some soup. I love that food in the morning. I feel like it carries me through. So later in the day, if I do end up eating complex carbs, I’m coming into it with more balance and I can handle it better. I don’t feel so terrible.
You eat dinner for breakfast? I do, but I’ll sometimes make brown-rice pudding or sweet potato pie and my kids will even have that for breakfast or lunch. The pie crust is made of chickpea flour. Even the teff cookies from my cookbook—teff is such a small grain that when you grind it, it has nearly the same nutritional value as when it was whole. They’ll think, “Mom rocks because she lets us have cookies for breakfast,” and I feel good because it’s clean fuel.
What should people eat if they’re hung over? I know for myself when I’m hitting that wall, I drink water with lemon. It alkalinizes the body and gives you a cleansing start to your day. The body wants to be slightly more alkalinized than acidic. During the holidays, we become more acidic from eating more meat, complex carbohydrates, alcohol, sugar, caffeine, preservatives, and stress. Diseases start in conditions of acidity.
What’s better: an organic bag of Pirate’s Booty or a bowl of nonorganic broccoli? It’s going to be a different answer for everybody. For the person who’s eating fast food 24/7, the organic Booty is probably much cleaner than what they normally eat. For someone who’s never eaten broccoli, even the kind with pesticides, it’s better that they’re developing a taste for broccoli. If it’s green and you can identify how it’s grown, that’s great, and if next time you think about the pesticides, and maybe question that, great. It’s a process.
How much should people go out of their way to eat organic? We eat local blueberries that aren’t certified organic, but I know [the growers] do not use a lot of pesticides. On the other hand, I won’t touch a nonorganic apple, because I know they are riddled with pesticides. The Environmental Working Group has a website that shows you what’s better or worse to eat nonorganic. So maybe it might be worth it to buy certain things in the organic market, and then it’s OK to buy certain other things from the fruit guys on the street.
Are there any cost-cutting tricks you know of? Seasonal produce is the biggest cost-efficient food. Food that’s in season is going to be front and center in the grocery store, usually on sale. At the farmers’ market this morning, we bought maybe 15 jalapeños, and the guy put it on the scale and said it was $2!
How do you feel about shortcuts? I’m a mom, so I’m all about shortcuts. There’s a recipe in my book called Three Sisters Deep-Dish Pie that I created based on this squash, corn, and bean hash I was cooking on the stove. Now, I knew that if I just left it like that, my family would say, “What’s this going to be?” So I had this frozen gluten-free pie crust in the freezer; I crumbled it on top of the hash and browned it, and it was a casserole! That frozen pie crust absolutely made the difference between my family eating clean and not.
What’s your go-to one-dish meal? Almost every soup in the book is a go-to. If it doesn’t have greens in it, I add it, and it’s complete in my opinion. I also cook rice in a rice cooker and at the last minute put cut-up vegetables on top inside so they steam. Five out of seven days a week I’ll make kale and collard greens. I’ll toss them with rice pasta and beans, and that could be one night’s dinner. Another night, maybe I’ll sauté white beans with leeks.
Do you have any special secret ingredient? Ume plum vinegar. A little bit goes a long way. I use minimal amounts as a seasoning for vegetables, grains, anything. You can get it in a health food store. Also gomashio spice mix, sprinkled on top of things.
Are there any dishes or foods you eat to reduce stress? Theoretically, and this is just me, when I eat greens, I’m doing myself so much good. When I start to feel run-down, I say, “Have you eaten greens?” The first person who told me to eat kale and brown rice, I did it, and it was disgusting. But it was easy to make it taste delicious: Sauté it with garlic. It’s that easy.
What, exactly, are this woman's qualifications to make statements like "...I drink water with lemon. It alkalinizes the body and gives you a cleansing start to your day. The body wants to be slightly more alkalinized than acidic. During the holidays, we become more acidic from eating more meat, complex carbohydrates, alcohol, sugar, caffeine, preservatives, and stress. Diseases start in conditions of acidity."?
I googled her, looked at her website, and didn't see any indication that she has any training in nutrition, any health field or biological science, etc. I wish Chow were a little less credulous than to run an article that is basically just a plug for this woman's book.
Lemons are acidic.
FYI...A food's acid or alkaline-forming tendency in the body has nothing to do with the actual pH of the food itself. For example, lemons are very acidic, however the end-products they produce after digestion and assimilation are alkaline so lemons are alkaline-forming in the body. Likewise, meat will test alkaline before digestion but it leaves acidic residue in the body so, like nearly all animal products, meat is classified as acid-forming.
Please look up buffer systems, if the pH of your body really changed all sorts of important reactions wouldn't occur and you'd die.
Relax, Ruth - It's an Interview, not an Endorsement. Believe it or don't, the choice is left to the reader.
No, tommyskitchen. Ruth doesn't have to calm down, and she's well within her rights to point out author's utter lack of qualifications.
This post would have been more aptly titled "How to be a Smelly Hippie for the Holidays".
Wow - Snobs abound here.
Do you really equate Vegans as "Smelly Hippies" - What, are we in Third Grade again?
If you don't agree with the content of the article, fine. But please grow up before posting, Waldo.
Right, tommyskitchen. Because it's much more mature to shout someone down and act as if you're the sole arbiter about what we "snobs" are and are not allowed to think and say "around here."
And yes. I do equate Vegans with "Smelly Hippies". South Park told me so. :)
Not only that, but I see you chose to ignore the "meat" of the argument, which was that the author has little to no qualifications and pushes a perspective that is based upon questionable, nonexistent, or debunked science. Such as:
1.) That organic foods are automatically healthier than "inorganic". (Not everyone can afford the outrageous premium in this economy, anyhow.)
2.) I cringe everytime I see someone allude (even obliquely) to the lemon-and-water cleanse diets which have been debunked thoroughly.
3.) The article is hardly even about what it's title is, which hinted at helpful hints for the holidays, which is why I made the joke about the title. It was easier and more to the point than doing it the boring way and writing a long comment post, which most people wouldn't read anyhow. I did it for you though, tommyskitchen. :)
Kisses,
-waldo
This article only brushed up against the subject of healthy eating for the holidays. I would like an article more on topic :(
Waldo, thank you for finally taking the time to educate instead of just pass on old South Park Jokes. Finally, some good discussion! Sometimes I think you "Snobs" don't have it in ya, but you proved me wrong this time.
Kisses!
Not everything has to be a news show, tommyskitchen.
@spellweaver16: I agree completely. I would be far more interested in "health remakes" of classic holiday dishes than a thinly disguised book advertisement.
tommyskitchen -- it becomes an endorsement when the "interviewer" doesn't ask any follow-up questions and just regurgitates unquestioningly everything this woman says. It also becomes an endorsement that they chose to run this particular "interview" with a woman who is blantantly plugging her book, rather than interviewing a range of people who have actual qualifications and aren't hawking anything.
@waldo: That's exactly what I was thinking! The classics as they are, are not terribly healthy, for the most part. Some ideas for healthy substitutions in the recipes would be great.
Ruth/spellweaver16: Sounds like the three of us should start our own website. ;)
"I won’t touch a nonorganic apple, because I know they are riddled with pesticides."
a) talk about "snob."
b) many small farm farmers don't use pesticides, but can't afford all of the specifications to make their farm "certified organic." so does she really know what's "riddled with pesticides"
This article/interview/endorsement doesn't seem to fit with the Chow audience. How many chowhounds really want to know about vegan options for thanksgiving? And how many vegans visit chow for recipe ideas?
Bring on the butter-laden side dishes. Being healthy on Thanksgiving for me is all about portion control anyway.
I think that the health benefits of lemon are numerous from reading websites like Dr. Weil and others...I drink filtered water with fresh lemon throughout the day but especially in the morning before I even have my one cuppa 'joe. Lemon cleanses liver & kidneys and also offers Vitamin C benefits. I don't know for sure all about the alkaline stuff but I have read that our acid-forming diets are killing us, therefore fresh fruits, veggies and whole grains are so important. Well, anyway, here's some info'...I'll keep drinking my lemon water and lemon green teas.
http://proliberty.com/observer/200407...
Just because someone says it on the internet doesn't mean it's true -- there's a lot of faux-medical advice and theories ranging from faddish to crackpot, some even being plugged by people with medical training. In the case of the article linked just above, I knew it was by a crackpot when I read the second paragraph: "If you are buying commercial lemons from the store, learn kinesiology and muscle test the lemons you buy so that you know one way or another whether the lemons you are purchasing are actually therapeutic for you." Amazing how you can make "squeeze the lemons" sound like a scientific methodology and use it to assert that you can tell the supposed therapeutic value of lemons by squeezing them. I suspect that any benefits from drinking lemon water come mostly from the water, and not the lemons -- the lemons just make it taste better.
BTW, for the record I'm not anti-vegan, I'm just anti-people making spurious health claims.
Preach it, Ruth! I prefer cucumber in my water to lemons :)
hmmm...well, my grandmother used to drink water with lemon every morning back in the 70's...so I doubt that the lemon claims are a "fad"...but perhaps "folklore" to you. What the hey...google it and see what you find--it's not just one person making the claim, that I can see, anyway.
My biggest laugh in this interview is her insinuation that grinding grains somehow makes them less healthy -- and teff's OK since it's so small!
That's just plain nonsense. If you grind any grain and use the bran, germ and everything else, viola: You have the same exact nutritional profile. Vitamins and minerals don't escape into the air just because the structure of the grain is broken down. What do you think your teeth and digestive tract do to them?
Please spare me the arguments from the grain mill industry. I'm sure if you grind your grains and store them at high temperatures for a long time, they'll lose something. But the suggestion that simply grinding them does anything to them is akin to the popular belief in the past that toasting bread eliminates most of its calories. It's based on no science.
The snake oil of the "natural living" industrial complex is breathtaking sometimes.
As a South Park loving vegan, I think Ruth has a point. Many of the questions asked are inappropriate given the book author's lack of credentials. You can't blame the book author for answering them, but if you are going to print the answers there should be some professional agreeing or disagreeing with the alleged facts.
Kale and collard greens 5 out of 7 days a week. Yum.
I'm borderline vegan and I read Chow all the time. I love this website. I started reading it before I went veggie. Now I get ideas and then I veganize them.
Thanks maxie, you managed to put it better than I did: my objection to this article lies in the fact that it's both soliciting and promoting health advice from someone who has no health credentials whatsoever.
And yes. I do equate Vegans with "Smelly Hippies". South Park told me so. :)
OMG, OMG, OMG - THIS is why I log on to Chowhound several times a day!! TOOOOO