Spicy Baked Fish Recipe

Recipe for Spicy Baked Fish: This spicy seafood dish will delight everyone.... Read more

Health Tip: Eat More Vegetables

(HealthDay News) -- Instead of getting bored with the same old vegetable choices that take too long to prepare, choose convenience and variety in your vegetables.

Here are easy ways to get plenty of vegetables in your diet, provided by the U.S. Department of Agriculture:

• Buy fresh vegetables that are in season -- they'll be at their peak flavor, and often less expensive.


• Keep plenty of frozen vegetables on hand for quick and easy microwave meals and sides.
• Look for conveniently packed vegetables, such as washed and peeled carrots, pre-washed bags of salads, and cut vegetables.
• Save time by making a baked potato in the microwave instead of the oven.
• Alternate your veggie choices and how you cook them. Try them raw and crunchy, then try them steamed.

5 Ways Your Healthy Eating Habits Can Save the Planet

In honor of Earth Day, easy ways to make life here a little healthier for everyone
by Julie Upton, RD

Thanks in part to factory farming and our national appetite for processed convenience foods, scientists say one calorie requires seven times that much fossil fuel. In other words, your 400-calorie breakfast of cereal, fruit, and milk required 2,800 calories worth of oil. No wonder our food costs are soaring along with OPEC's oil prices.

In honor of Earth Day today, April 22, I plan to decrease the carbon footprint my lifestyle makes with these five pledges. Making them will mean that I'll be eating more delicious seasonal, plant-based foods as well.

1. Swear Off Bottled Water
I'll be using my reusable CamelBak bottle, which is also free of harmful bisphenol plastics. I'm also mixing more Crystal Light and other flavored drinks myself instead of guzzling sodas that come in bottles or cans. Sure, you can recycle, but the EPA estimates that less than one third of plastic soft drink bottles are recycled, so why not try to reuse instead?

2. BYOB
Paper or plastic? The answer is neither, because both bags require huge energy inputs to create, and both contribute to pollution. The best option is to use a bag made of cloth or canvas that you can reuse. I keep several reusable shopping bags in the trunk of my car so I have them handy when I make quick stops at the supermarket. If I do take a plastic or paper bag from the store, I reuse and recycle them.

3. Support Local Farmers
I'm going to support farmers more by shopping at the local farmer's market whenever possible to cut back on the energy required for transporting food. Spending my money at farmer's markets means that I'm supporting local or regional farmers that help to keep farmers farming—instead of becoming real estate agents for the next suburb.

4. Packaging Points
Foods that require processing, packaging, and then shipping across the U.S. or world are sucking up precious limited fossil fuels. My pledge is to buy more foods in bulk and shop the perimeter of supermarkets, where the foods are often less processed. I'll skip products that come individually packaged and look more closely at food packages to support companies that are using recyclable packaging.

5. Eat Lower on the Food Chain
According to the University of Michigan's Center for Sustainable Systems, a diet that gets 28% of its calories from animal-based products (meats, poultry, dairy) uses twice as much fossil fuel as a vegetarian diet. In adddition, livestock produce an estimated one billion tons of earth-polluting waste each year. Bottom line: It's better for the earth for you to eat grains and legumes, rather than the animals that feed on them.

Even Dietitians Break Their Own Rules

Chocolate for breakfast, drinking before five—my rules are good guidelines, but they're not law
by Frances Largeman-Roth, RD

Like many responsible adults, I follow lots of rules. Some are for safety—look both ways before crossing the street; don’t leave perishable food out for more than two hours. Others are my own self-imposed, because-it’s-healthy-for-me and I-want-to-set-a-good-example limitations. These rules include the following.

No snacking after dinner, unless it’s a piece of fruit.
Always select the whole-grain choice.
Chocolate is best rationed out into small, sinful desserts.
No coffee after 11 a.m.
Don’t drink alone before 5 p.m.
There are others, but I won’t bore you. I highlight these because I broke them all on a recent work trip to New York City.

I’m always thrilled with the small groceries in New York, which are filled with the kinds of foods that I have to search high and low for in Birmingham. I bought a bar of marzipan, that continental almond-paste confection, covered in dark chocolate. The first night I was there, I sliced off a morsel and enjoyed the combination of bittersweet chocolate and thick and nutty marzipan. I went to bed satisfied.

The second night, after schlepping around for hours in Chelsea and eating a fairly healthy Vietnamese dinner, I returned to my hotel room exhausted. I sliced off another piece of the marzipan. And then another. Soon I said screw it and ate the rest of the bar, thereby breaking rule #1. I wouldn’t feel so badly about that if I hadn’t started the following morning with chocolate waffles filled with a creamy layer of peanut butter at Norma’s. This was not a whole-grain breakfast option, nor was it in keeping with my law of chocolate being a dessert item. Goodbye rules #2 and #3.

And because my neighbors at the hotel were loudmouths with a tendency to slam doors, my sleep had been delayed and disrupted. This gave me the perfect excuse to break rule #4 on each day of my trip. Perhaps it was my new devil-may-care attitude that allowed me to throw rule #5 to the wind as well. It was scarcely 4 p.m. when I ordered a glass of Prosecco sparkling wine at the hotel bar, but I rationalized that I had only been to one holiday party this year and therefore hadn’t been overly boozing it.

OK, so I broke five of my rules. They’re good guidelines and by sticking to them I can have a few glasses of wine each week and not fret too much about dinners out. But no one got hurt due to my lapse in willpower, and (shocker!) I didn’t gain five pounds. This all goes to show that you don’t need to be good all the time, just most of the time.

Can New Nutrition Ratings for Food Make Us Healthier?

I don't think we need a "nutrition-based GPS system" to tell us spinach is better than taffy
by Julie Upton, RD

A new food-ranking system called the Overall Nutrition Quality Index (ONQI) is about to make your grocery shopping a healthier or more confusing experience, depending on whom you ask. The ONQI is already in many stores and will debut nationwide this spring. Later this year, the ratings of about 50,000 foods and food products will be available online.

But I'm not convinced it will help any of us make better food choices.
The ONQI is based on evaluating some 30 different nutrients and dividing the good (vitamins, minerals, protein, phytonutrients, etc.) by the bad (saturated fat, cholesterol, sodium, added sugars, glycemic load, etc.). The end result is a formula that scores a product based on its nutrition facts and some other nuances that help shape a healthy diet. Continue reading »

Compliments to the Condiments

Overlooked jars and bottles can rescue dinner
by Frances Largeman-Roth, RD

I’m ashamed to call myself a food editor these days. My wine glasses are seeing far more use than my pots and pans, and I haven’t made a real trip to the grocery store in weeks. I’ll blame it on recent travels.

When my husband, Jon, is in town (he’s a consultant), I’m far more likely to spend time making dinner. But when it’s just little old me and Millie, our furry canine dictator, I’m just as bad as every other American. OK, not quite. I lean more on fast-yet-healthful foods than fast foods, enjoying Amy’s Kitchen organic, vegetarian frozen dinners and my own gussied up English muffin sandwiches (black olive tapenade really elevates them). I’m a firm believer that you can do almost anything with top-notch condiments. And though Jon growls at me for the wide assortment of half-full bottles and jars in the fridge, I keep them in stock. I think of them as accessories—you could go without them, but life just wouldn’t be as fabulous. Here’s my roundup of the essentials. Continue reading »