A taste for healthy eating

People making better choices with their diet

Julian Armstrong
CanWest News Service

Monday, January 16, 2006

Blueberries on your morning cereal. Whole grain bread in your sandwiches. Thirty minutes to eat your dinner.

Take any of this nutritional advice in 2006 and you'll be giving your health a break, say nutrition professionals when asked for their latest advice as we try to recover from overindulgence during the holidays.

Despite the fact surveys show up to 50 per cent of us are overweight, and most of us are not eating even a minimum healthy diet, these food specialists are feeling optimistic that diet reform is in the air.

They are gratified that the Atkins low carbohydrate diet, which they judged hazardous to our health, is fading away, and happy at the appearance of a new weight-control plan with the catchy name Volumetrics. The work of a respected nutrition professor, it shows how to lose weight eating -- but not overeating -- your favourite foods.

Shoppers are getting better help with food choices since the long-awaited, federally mandated system of nutritional labeling appeared on almost all packaged food in our stores Dec.12. Although the anticipated May launch of a new Canada's Food Guide has been postponed because final consultations were halted by the election, a task force studying how to remove trans fatty acids from our food is continuing.

"There is already less trans-fat in our food than six months ago, for example in frozen pizza," said Montreal dietitian Louise Lambert-Lagace. "I think we're living exciting moments."

We're buying more fresh fruit and vegetables, six per cent more nationally, according to AC Neilsen research figures for March 2004, compared with the year earlier.

More and better-tasting loaves of whole grain bread are competing successfully with regular white bread, or what McGill University chemistry Prof. Joe Schwarcz calls "that sliced, white, marshmallow-like product."

That white bread may be "enriched" with artificial nutrients, "but those additions represent only a fraction of what's taken out," when the flour is milled, said Schwarcz, whose new book Let Them Eat Flax (ECW Press, $18.95) contains a readable dose of the latest nutritional information.

Weston's whole grain loaves, called Country Harvest, come in nine varieties, each containing beneficial omega-3 fatty acids from added soy. Dempster's line of 10 Whole Grains breads include one called Ancient Grains, made of spelt, kamut, quinoa and amaranth.

The recommendation that we eat three servings of whole grains a day puzzles people, Schwarcz said. Have a bowl of whole grain cereal and a sandwich made with two slices of whole grain bread, and that gives you three servings, he said. He'd like to see whole grains as a side dish, in particular the ancient grains, which can be steamed or cooked in stock like couscous.

"Blueberries are the best fruit," he said, noting that their antioxidants have been credited with discouraging blood clot formation, improving night vision, slowing macular degeneration, reducing the risk of cancer, and slowing aging. Regarding aging, Schwarcz reports in his new book on research at Tufts University in Boston. Elderly rats were fed a diet rich in blueberries while younger rats ate regular laboratory food. The older rats improved their balance, co-ordination and shortterm memory.

Eating slowly allows the brain time to tell us we've reached the satiation point and to stop eating, rather than continue gobbling down huge portions that are making us fat.

Montreal dietitian Kim Arrey finds that, almost without exception, her overweight patients eat quickly. "They seem to feel that if it happened (eating) in an instant and nobody saw it, it doesn't count," she said.

So she asks they return to sitting down for a leisurely meal. "We don't dine any more. We have to get back to the concept of dining. I can't believe most people don't have half-an-hour to eat. A lot of us have the time but we have other priorities, from driving children to after-school activities to watching TV. We eat while we're shopping or driving the car, and quickly."

By the end of the day, we've consumed an amount of food large enough to increase our weight.

Copy the Mediterranean custom of sitting down to a leisurely two-hour meal, Arrey suggested.

Dietitians are alarmed that children and teenagers are not eating enough fruit and vegetables or consuming enough dairy products.

Commenting on what she called "dramatic" lacks in the diets of young people, Montreal public health dietitian Lise Bertrand said other types of promotion of healthy diets must be found. "We are not hitting our target," she said.

What's needed is a restoration of cooking and nutrition education in the schools, said TV cook Ricardo Larrivee.

"Mix food with math, add an hour of cooking classes and an hour of exercise to the curriculum. We need to make the children good consumers who ask for the right foods, and we have to restore healthy food to the school cafeterias," Larrivee said. "Let's do something for society, for our kids. "It took 15 years to create the obesity problem. But, if we work at it, we can reduce that weight in five to 10 years."

(MONTREAL GAZETTE )

Questions (answered in sentence form)

  1. According to this article, what percentage of Canadians are overweight?
  2. Why are food specialists optimistic that diet reform is in the air? (5 reasons)
  3. What are some of the ways that the article suggests we can increase our intake of whole grains?
  4. How do Canadians busy schedules interfere with maintaining a healthy lifestyle?
  5. What do you think of Ricardo Larrivee’s idea of adding food and cooking into the required curriculum?
  6. Should school cafeterias be doing more to offer healthy choices for students?