Pumpkin season is here. Not only are pumpkins fun to carve for Halloween, they are quite a healthy food, packed with beta-carotene, fiber, potassium, and many more nutrients.

Enjoy this video depicting a baby pumpkin’s growth into a mammoth!

[h/t to Laura Hibbard]

This is a guest post by Lisa Cain, PhD, a.k.a Snack-Girl

If you combine whole grains, eggs, yogurt, milk, and fruit what do you get? Breakfast!

Anyone else missing the bacon in this description?

Last week, I wrote Mix Pancakes With Oatmeal And You Get A Super Breakfast and a dear reader told me about “baked oatmeal”. That sounded pretty good to me so I started researching recipes.

Turns out lots of people bake oatmeal! Who knew? And, there is so much to love about it.

It is:

• ridiculously easy to make
• convenient for the AM rush
• comforting and satisfying

It’s like a little bit of love in a bowl. (or a lot of love if you are my 5 year old son who seems to eat all 49 pounds of his weight every day)

And, baked oatmeal is customizable. You can add any fruit you may have lying around the kitchen. I used some frozen mango and blueberries because I am too lazy to slice anything. You could use apples, peaches, strawberries, pears, etc.

All you do is mix it up, bake it, and store it in the fridge until you are ready to eat it.

This recipe has 1/2 the sugar of most other baked oatmeal recipes. I changed it because if it isn’t sweet enough for you – it is easy to just add some sweetener to the finished product.

My son liked a little milk and maple syrup added to his “warmed in the microwave” baked oatmeal.

This recipe can be made gluten free if you use gluten free certified oats. Many oats are processed on the same machines as wheat so you have to be vigilant when purchasing them.

Here are two other great oatmeal recipes:

Make Winter Warmer With Apple and Peanut Butter Oatmeal 
Better and Faster than A Bowl of Cold Cereal

Have you seen those Pringles Multigrain commercials? Trying to convince you that despite the fact that they are made with something that sounds healthy, they are still very tasty. Here is the copy edit they use on their website:

Pringles Multigrain succeeds where many others fail, giving you a multigrain snack that tastes great. So, while the can says “multigrain”, the three new delicious flavors will leave your taste buds saying “MMMMMM.”

What you need to know:

Pringles is a very processed product. Despite the heath halo attributed to healthy grains, there is a very tiny amount of them to be found in this product. Here is the ingredient list for the plain flavor:

RICE FLOUR, VEGETABLE OIL (CONTAINS ONE OR MORE OF THE FOLLOWING: CORN OIL, COTTONSEED OIL, SOYBEAN OIL, AND/OR SUNFLOWER OIL), DRIED POTATOES, CORN FLOUR, MALTODEXTRIN, WHEAT STARCH, MODIFIED RICE STARCH, SUGAR, AND TRIGLYCEROL MONO-OLEATE. CONTAINS 2% OR LESS OF: MALTED BARLEY FLOUR, WHEAT BRAN, DRIED BLACK BEANS, SALT, AND CITRIC ACID. CONTAINS WHEAT INGREDIENTS.

Note that the main ingredient is refined rice flour. In fact the barley flour and wheat bran are way at the bottom of the ingredient list in the “less than 2%” section. Although the consumer is led to believe that this is a healthful snack, there is only 1 gram of fiber per serving. And most likely the fiber is from the added dried black beans. Oh well at least it’s not fake fiber.

Bottom line: If you see “multigrain” on a snack, be very suspicious. It does not mean whole grains, and does not mean you are getting any health benefits at all.

What to do at the supermarket:

Don’t really on the package and marketing claims for your health information. You MUST READ the ingredient list.

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The quest for the ultimate sweetener never ends. Is there, on this earth, a natural, healthy, zero calorie sweetener with no after taste, no side effects, and no long term health risks?

Wandering around the Food and Nutrition Expo here in San Diego, we came upon an interesting sign for Monk Fruit – All natural, calorie-free sweetness. Turns out this Chinese fruit, also called luo-han-guo, has been used as a sweetener in some rural areas of China for ages.

Now, BioVittoria, a New Zealand company, is trying to commercialize a powder extract derived from this product. According to the company, their process for turning fruit into a powder is much more natural than that of extracting Stevia from the stevia plant. And just like stevia, it is 200 times sweeter than table sugar. We got to taste a bit and indeed it is sweet.

The powdered sweetener is not commercially available at supermarkets yet, but it has found its way into some drinks and some Kashi products as well. According to the company, they received GRAS status from the FDA last year (Generally regarded as Safe), and now the food world has to discover them.

So far there have been no reports of negative side effects, but then again, monk fruit has not been studied as extensively as other sweeteners on the market. It will be interesting to see how this new sweetener will compete in the market in the coming years.

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We are in San Diego this weekend, for the Food and Nutrition Conference and Expo (FNCE), the annual conference bringing in 7000 dietitians for 4 days of networking, education, and new product introductions.

The opening session yesterday afternoon, American Dietetic Association (ADA) President Sylvia Escott-Stump announced that going forward the new name of the organization will be the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics. Don’t take the name change lightly, it’s been in use for 90 years, since World War 1. Here is the rationale:

“The name Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics promotes the strong science background and academic expertise of our members, primarily registered dietitians. Nutrition science underpins wellness, prevention and treatment,” she said.

“An academy is ‘a society of learned persons organized to advance science.’ This term describes our organization and immediately emphasizes the educational strength of our advice and expertise.”

“By adding nutrition to our name, we communicate our capacity for translating nutrition science into healthier lifestyles for everyone. Keeping dietetics supports our history as a food and science-based profession. Thus, the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics quickly and accurately communicates our identity—who we are and what we do,” Escott-Stump said.

“Whether planning nutritious meals for children in day-care centers or schools, teaching individuals with diabetes about managing their blood sugar or saving lives with complex nutritional interventions after surgery, registered dietitians are the best qualified providers. The name change communicates that we are the nutrition experts,” she said.

There is definitely a logic in here, but in random discussions we had with 20 dietitians in the hours since the announcement, the response was overwhelmingly…meh. They don’t think these changes will have any impact.

Some other ideas we have heard for a name change:

American Academy of…  (patriotism)

Academy of Food and Nutrition (drop the Diet word from the name, as it has a negative connotation)

Many dietitians are not very happy with the way their profession is perceived by the public, so in that sense a rebranding is necessary. And a name change is certainly part of that, in some cases. Apple Computer changes their name to Apple Inc when the iPod and iPhone started to take off. But for the ADA to be relevant and successful in the coming decades, has to do much more than change its name.

Here are Fooducate’s suggestions:

1. Drop the corporate sponsors. It will instantly put the organization at a higher level of trust in consumer minds. Since only 10% of the ADA’s budget comes from corporate sponsors, this is not going to break the organization.

2. Target Consumers. The ADA – excuse us, the AND – is not where consumers turn to for nutrition information. Hungry-Girl, Men’s Health, and LiveStrong get much more media attention, website visits, facebook fans, and twitter followers than eatright.org. Heck, even this blog gets more trafic from consumers than the ADA’s website eatright.org. Yes, the ADA was formed to service its 70,000 members. But there is so much more it can do by a total rethink of its outreach to consumers.

Get Social, get mobile!

Create viral youtube videos!

Harness all the RDs that are currently tweeting and blogging and bring them under your roof. (Look at Glam media or the Nutrition Blog Network)

Do it now.

3. Review the science. Many consumers, Fooducate readers included, have taken issue with some of the “evidence based” science which is the core to every recommendation coming from the organization. The most irritating examples are the seal of approval for foods with artificial colors, artificial sweeteners, and an assortment of other questionable ingredients.

True, most studies did not find them to cause health issues, but most studies also did not find them to be 100% healthy. It’s just that the science is too complicated to reach conclusions with 100% certainty. As parents, we don’t want to feed our kids franken-foods and then 20 years later learn that, oops, science made a mistake. If you think this is crazy, think about the changes in recommendations over the years for margarine, trans-fats, and saccharine.

In any case, we hope the AND heeds our advice, and to its many wonderful members we wish success in their important mission.

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As we strolled around the expo floor of the Natural Products Expo East in Baltimore, we couldn’t help but notice the many moms, who, unable to find a suitable solution to their children’s food needs, decided to start their own food company to fix that problem. Here is their story:

Heather Stouffer of mom made foods

Heather Stouffer of Alexandria, VA is a mom of 2 young children who worked full time and wasn’t able to cook every single night. But she hated the ready made meals filled with artificial ingredients and preservatives that were being sold in supermarkets. So she created Mom Made Foods where she is committed to real ingredients, no artificial colors or flavors, and mostly, kid tested dishes that mom cans serve on those days where getting in the kitchen to cook is just simply too much.

Jessica Grelle, chief mama at mama jess

Jessica Grelle from the Chicago, IL  area was upset when her son stopped eating carrots. She decided to puree carrots and other veggies into his pasta sauce. The results were scrumptious and led to the formation of mama jess, a line of 3 pasta sauces that are loaded with pureed veggies.

Dina Houser of Ola Granola

It seems like there are thousands of different brands of granola out there, but that does not deter Dina Houser from launching Ola Granola at the show.

Ginny Simon of ginnybakes

Hailing from Miami, FL, Ginny Simon is a mom of 4 boys who loved her organic, fresh baked cookies. And so did their friends, and their parents, and the neighbors, who offered to pay for the cookies. And thus a new company was launched.

Shannan Swanson & Liane Weintraub of Tasty Brand

Liane’s two children just couldn’t get enough of the daily vitamin gummy bears she gave them. But they were full of artificial colors and other mystery ingredients. So she decided to create a tasty treat (not vitamin) without the synthetic dyes often found in kids’ foods. Joining her to start Tasty Brand Foods is Shannan Swanson, a professional chef and mom of two. The Swanson family, several generations ago started the TV dinner revolution, so this is an interesting twist.

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(Bob from Bob’s Red Mill and Hemi from Fooducate)

We’re in Baltimore for Expo East, a semi annual food show of the natural food industry. You can see more pictures from the expo floor show here. As you know, we have a hard time with the term natural because it is not really well defined. A much more sensible approach is to call it the REAL FOOD expo, because most of what is shown here has much fewer funny-sounding ingredients than you’d find in standard supermarket fare.

Here are some interesting highlights so far.

Hummus – seems like the chickpea is trending. We all know about the health benefits of hummus dips. But here at the show we got to see hummus chips as well as green garbanzo beans offered similarly to edamame (green soybeans).

Sustainability – more and more companies are talking about their sustainability practices. Stahlbush farms from Oregon is the first to use biodegradable freezer bags for their frozen fruit and veggies.  They generate electricity for their packaging facility from vegetable waste. The excess wattage provides electricity for another 1000 families in their vicinity!

There were some ironic sustainability stories, for example the icebox water company. Instead of plastic bottles, this company is using biodegradable cartons to house their mineral water. In a landfill, the carton paper decomposes within 12-18 months. Pretty cool. However, the water is sourced in Norway and shipped halfway across the world to reach the US…

We met several husband and wife teams who are building a food business together. Arobind Velagapudi quit his job as a software engineer 3 years ago to start selling Indian Curry that actually tastes good. His company Spicy Nothings now sells into Safeway and other supermarkets on the west coast. His wife, an engineer as well, is helping out while still working in the computer industry.

And of course there are the natural food juggernauts – companies that have been around for a while or are growing like mad riding a popular trend.  Chobani Greek Yogurt seems to have doubled their booth size since the last show. Greek yogurt is very popular these days and Chobani is considered the category leader. Bob’s Red Mill is expanding its line of products from single ingredient grains and flours into granola. Earth Balance is pushing its coconut spread, now that saturated fats from coconut are becoming less evil in the public’s mind.

There are also some big food manufacturers represented here, although you wouldn’t know it from their signage and branding: Honest Tea is owned by Coca Cola. Lara Bar and Cascadian Farm are part of General Mills. Stoneyfield is owned by Dannon. Luckily for these companies (and for consumers), they mostly get to operate independently of the mothership.

This is a guest blog post by Claire Harrison

My guest post Table Salt vs. Sea Salt: The Truth received many comments.  A theme that ran through some of these responses was the evil of food processing.  For example, one person said, “My personal food philosophy is that natural is ALWAYS better than processed foods in any degree or manner,” and then slammed table salt because it was processed to meet consumer demand for a white, same-size crystal, easily flowing product.

Like other writers about food (see Bettina Elias Siegel’s post on this topic), I feel uneasy about the the terms, “natural” and “processed.”  It’s easy to identify a cauliflower at the farmer’s market as “natural” and the Vegetable Thin crackers that I described in The Salty Truth as “processed” because the latter contains ingredients that have nothing to do with nutrition and everything to do with appealing to consumers, preserving shelf life, and lowering the cost of production.

But what about a homemade cake?  Aren’t we processing a product when we cook it?  Certainly, a cake is more than the sum of its ingredients—it doesn’t taste like baking powder, flour, or sugar straight out of the box or bag.  Rather, during mixing and baking, the original ingredients have been transformed into a new product.

Moreover, the ingredients we’ve used in the cake are already processed: flour is milled, baking powder is made from sodium bicarbonate which is mined or created artificially, and sugar has to be extracted from canes or beets.

How should we describe the cake we have made?  Is it “natural” or is it “processed?” Is it “good” or is it “bad?”

When Food Processing is Good

Many people, like the responder above who espouses only “natural” food, are rejecting the industrialization of food and the many benefits that have arisen from it.

According to historian Rachel Lauden in her Utne Magazine article (2010) “In Praise of Fast Food,” if we were to revert to a pre-industrial life in which we grew or hunted for everything we ate, we would soon discover that we’d been seeing “natural” through rose-coloured glasses:

For our ancestors, natural was something quite nasty. Natural often tasted bad. Fresh meat was rank and tough, fresh fruits inedibly sour, fresh vegetables bitter. Natural was unreliable. Fresh milk soured; eggs went rotten…Grains, which supplied 50 to 90 percent of the calories in most societies, have to be threshed, ground, and cooked to make them edible…

The industrialization of food processing not only helped make food more edible and enabled better preservation, it also brought us freedoms not enjoyed by our forebears.

Think about it.  We don’t have to spend our every minute in the kitchen threshing, grinding, churning, skinning, salting, smoking, drying, baking, boiling, chopping…you name it.  Instead, we go to grocery stores and farmers’ markets, buy from a huge variety of foods both local and global, and have the ability to focus on other things besides basic sustenance.

But rather than enjoying our good fortune, we are apprehensive about food and highly susceptible to words such as “natural, “pure,” “healthy,” and “processed.”

Why?  Because they are culturally “loaded.”  

For example, did you really buy a bottled salad dressing (processed = bad) when you could have made your own with cold-pressed olive oil, vinegar in which you’ve steeped various herbs, and sea salt which you grind yourself (natural = good)?

Ouch!

Clearly, the terms that we are using when we describe food are not only vague (remember the cake), but they’re also causing us confusion, conflict, guilt, and stress.  I think we need some clarity around the issue of food processing, and a recent article in World Nutrition(2011) provides some help.

New Food Definitions

In “The Big Issue is Ultra-processing. There is No Such Thing as a Healthy Ultra-Processed Product,” Dr. Carlos Monteiro makes a distinction among three types of food:

The first type is fresh food, such as the cauliflower at the farmer’s market.  Fresh food is generally rich in nutrients and low in calories, and we can accurately call this type of food “natural.”

The second type is minimally processed food, such as a cake’s basic ingredients—salt, sugar, and flour.  We can’t call these foods “natural,” because they have undergone a certain amount of processing to meet our demands.  On the other hand, the processing is not harmful because it doesn’t change the basic nature of these foods.

Whether a salt is processed mechanically with trace elements removed and iodine added or by hand with trace elements intact, it remains salt—a product we use to enhance the flavor of other foods.

More importantly, minimally processed foods, whether unrefined (whole wheat flour) or refined (white flour) do not threaten our health when eaten in appropriate, moderate, and reasonable amounts for our individual bodies.  This last condition is important.  Each of us has different tolerances and react differently to foods.  However, generally speaking, eating any food in excess is likely to be harmful to health, no matter what it is.

The third type is ultra-processed food. Monteiro describes these as “ready-to-eat or ready-to-heat ‘fast’ dishes, snacks and drink.” He says that they are made from “cheap or degraded ingredients,” and are low in nutrients, high in calories, and full of fat, sugar, and/or salt.

Ultra-processed foods, then, are artificial foods, created through chemical additives and the additional processing of fresh and minimally processed foods.  Manufacturers of these foods have distorted healthful ingredients to the point that they no longer have healthy benefits.

In fact, Monteiro counters any health claims made by manufacturers for ultra-processed food: “Manipulation of the formulation to reduce any of their ingredients, or to add synthetic nutrients, does not change their basic nature.”

These are the processed foods that are bad for us individually and globally, healthwise and socially. Monteiro says that they contribute to obesity and thus health problems, undermine traditional food systems, and undercut regional and national food identities.

What Can We Do?

Those of us who talk or write about food in the public arena are already fighting a battle against ultra-processed food.  Writers such as Michael Pollan have set the stage for a new way of thinking about our food.  Web sites like Fooducate look carefully beyond the claims on products to the real ingredients.  I and my fellow food bloggers post recipes that generally use only fresh and minimally processed food.

But all of us who care about food and our agricultural system need to avoid the trap laid for us by the manufacturers of ultra-processed food who throw around buzzwords such as “natural” and “processed” with abandon and muddy the waters.

We should strive to be clear and accurate when we think, talk, and write about food.  Using Monteiro’s food types can be one way of doing this.  I, for one, now intend to use the words “minimally processed” and “ultra-processed” instead of just “processed.”

If all of us do this, we can help focus our grassroots resources of time, energy, and dialogue on the really important food goals in our world—changing our food system so that it provides good nutrition for everyone and supports healthy, sustainable, and diverse agriculture.

After a career as a communications consultant and university instructor, Claire Harrison has turned to blogging about food and recipes for gluten-sensitive, lactose-intolerant people who must also diet for health reasons. Read her Food ReFashionista blog.

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The UN Convened earlier this week to discuss the reasons for 67% of global deaths each year. You would think wars, famine, or natural disasters would be the top killers. But the real culprit may be the food on your plate. You see, it is far more profitable to manufacture junk food and fast foods than it is to produce healthy fare.

The conference on non-communicable disease (NCD) took place in New York. It tried to tackle the 4 NCDs:

1. cardiovascular diseases
2. diabetes
3. cancers
4. chronic respiratory diseases

The world has seen skyrocketing rates of food related disease in the past few decades: obesity, diabetes, and cardiovascular disease. Every country that has adopted a western food culture is seeing rates of disease balloon like never before.

The UN should be commended for trying to tackle this issue. However, it  seems to be in a bit of a situation. Global food corporations are demanding (and receiving) a seat at the discussion table. So effectively, the junk food companies are considered partners in trying to find solution, instead of the problem itself.

While some companies have announced voluntary measure to reduce sodium in products, or to eliminate trans-fats, many activists are worried that these are merely symbolic gestures on their quest to infiltrate additional territories.

“Our position is that partnership isn’t the right word. It implies trust and respect,” said Patti Rundall, who helped run the campaign against infant formula sales in Africa 30 years ago and today is working to limit the marketing of processed food in the developing world. “The allegiance of the food companies is to create profits. Their voluntary commitments are only good for as long as they want to keep them,” she said.

Laurent Huber, 41, a Swiss exercise physiologist who works for an anti-smoking group, said, “The fast-food industry and the junk-food industry cannot be engaged in the policy process. They are part of the problem. This conflict of interest needs to be looked at.” read more from the Washington Post….

Here is the UN Resolution. What do you think? Will it make a dent in non communicable disease?

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There are more and more people asking us about chia seeds lately, so here are a few things to know.

1. Chia is derived from the word “chian” which means oily. Chia is an edible seed derived from the plant Salvia hispanica. It is a member of the mint family and has been cultivated in Mexico an Guatamela as far back as by the Aztecs.

2. Today, chia seeds are grown and consumed mostly in Mexico. They are also popular in Australia, Bolivia, Guatemala and Ecuador. And it seems they are making inroads to the US.

3. Chia seeds are the richest plant source of omega-3 fatty acids (in particular – alpha-linolenic acid or ALA). These fatty acids are usually found in oily fish and nuts and are vital in protecting against inflammation as well as assisting with brain development.

4. Chia seeds have a low glycemic index (GI), which means diabetics can use them to help control blood sugar levels.

5. They’re extremely high in fiber (11g in a 1 ounce!).

6. Chia seeds are also rich in antioxidants, which means they can be stored for a long time without going off or rancid.

7. The seeds boast high levels of other nutrients such as protein, calcium, phosphorus, magnesium, manganese, copper, iron, molybdenum, niacin, and zinc.

Cool but how do I eat these little buggers?

It’s up to you and your imaginations but here are some examples:

8. Try sprinkling chia seeds on your breakfast cereal, or a yogurt.

9. Toss them into a salad or an omelette.

10. Grind them up and  add to dough for muffins or bread.

11. Use them in meat stuffing or sprinkled into in a stir fry.

12. Another way of preparing the seeds is by submerging them in water. This allows them to absorb the water and form a gel (chia gel) which can help keep your body hydrated – great for any athletes out there. Some studies claim that this property of the chia seeds may help with weight loss because it helps you feel fuller for longer and delays the increase in blood sugar levels of other foods you may be eating with the chia seeds.

13. Whatever you do, start with the whole chia seed  rather than buying a ground up powder or  supplement pill.

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