Snacking has become a national pastime in the U.S. The snack aisles in the supermarkets have expanded to include major parts of the store that act as a huge vending machine from one end to another. Nuts have had the reputation of being unhealthy due to their fat content; now they are considered healthy for many reasons.
Although they are so many varieties, walnuts often stand out as an example of how nuts can be easily incorporated into a healthy diet.
Most nuts contain healthy antioxidant compounds called polyphenols, which improve cholesterol scores and help lower rates of oxidative stress and vascular disease. But of all nuts, walnuts pack the greatest punch of polyphenols according to a 2011 study from the Royal Society of Chemistry journal, Food and Function. Also, they come in first when it comes to their stores of polyunsaturated fatty acids, essential for improved metabolism, satiety, and prevention of Type 2 diabetes.
It is interesting to encourage walnut consumption when possible to support your brain, thanks to those antioxidants, various vitamins and other nutrients, and a type of plant-based omega-3 fat called alpha-linolenic acid. In a recent published study, Lenore Arab, a professor of disease prevention at UCLA and her colleagues examined diet and lifestyle habits of thousands of adults. In terms of memory, concentration and “information processing speed”, the people who ate more walnuts signficantly outperformed their counterparts that eat less walnuts. These results held solid even after the results controlled for age, ethnicity, exercise and other lifestyle factors.
Note: I use chopped walnuts, dried cherries or cranberries on salads. There are two common kinds of walnuts – the English from California and the black walnut, which is native to America. They differ slightly in their nutrition – the English has slightly less protein and slightly more fat. Both are great! Time Special Edition, The Science of Nutrition)
Note: Walnuts are ironically shaped like a brain. Look carefully and you will see the resemblance (similar examples are “kidney beans are shaped like a kidney”. “The Doctor or Signatures is a concept in herbalism that’s been around for centuries based on the idea that God marked everything with a sign which was a signature or indication of the item’s purpose. In this particular case certain foods had a purpose and resembled the food itself.(The 150 Healthiest Foods on Earth, Jonny Bowden, PhD, CNS.)
“The 1950s was an era of great upheaval in the United States. By the millions, Americans who had just survived two decades of economic depression and war left the cities for the greenery and open spaces of the suburbs. Suburban towns sprang up like crabgrass across the country. With these instant communities came a new American lifestyle that included suburban malls, fast-food restaurants, TV dinners, drive-in movies, and an oversized, gas-guzzling car in every garage.
“The decade was a time in which the roles within the “ideal” American family were clearly defined. The father was the breadwinner. Five days a week, fifty weeks a year, he donned his gray flannel suit, hopped into his car or on a commuter train, and headed off to earn money to support his wife, his ever-growing family, and their materialistic lifestyle. Meanwhile, his “little woman” remained home and raised the kids. Life was simple and ordered, and the cornerstone of society was authority. Teachers, police officers, politicians, and clergy were respected, and their pronouncements went unchallenged.
During previous generations, young people had been required to take jobs as soon as they were able, in order to contribute to the family income. Now, their parents indulged them with toys, games, and clothes. Girls collected dolls and stuffed animals, while boys amassed shoeboxes filled with baseball cards. The 1950s, like all other decades, saw its share of fads. In mid-decade, children wore coonskin caps. At the end, they played with hula hoops. When they became adolescents, they bought records; they also sipped malts and downed hamburgers at the local ice cream parlor. Teens and young adults dated, paired off, and “went steady,” which were preludes to becoming engaged, marrying, and beginning families of their own.
However, the decade was not without its nonconformity and rebellion. Parents were none too pleased when their adolescent children embraced rock ‘n’ roll music. Not all teens were clean-cut preppies; greasers sported longish hair and leather jackets and exuded a disdain for authority. On a more telling note, blacks, who had been systematically excluded from the burgeoning middle class, began demanding equal opportunity. But to the majority of Americans in the 1950s, adolescents with attitude and complaining minorities seemed little more than a ripple on the national landscape. There seemed to be no end to the nation’s prosperity.”
Life Was Good
If Happy Days taught us anything, it’s that life was better in the fifties. People left their door unlocked at night, kids respected their elders and a guy who lived above his best friend’s garage could still be cool so long as he owned a leather jacket. (AUTHOR UNKNOWN) – BUT TRUE!!! If you were alive, just remember Fonzy.
Note: from SJF. Women were still thought of as “being in the kitchen” “During an interview for college, the so-called counselor said: “home Ec is always good for a girl.” Needless to say, I switched to Arts and Sciences.”
However, kitchens featured all new appliances and refrigerators loaded with convenience products from the new supermarkets. Westinghouse unveils the first fully automatic defrosting refrigerator-freezer. In Corbin, KY, Colonel Harland Sanders closes his fried chicken restaurant and goes on the road with his secret blend of 11 herbs and spices, on his way to building a new chicken global empire, designated as “finger-licking good.
Men found their cooking skills at the barbecue in the backyard, some with swimming pools at suburban ranch-style homes. In 1952, George Stephen, decided to develop a new type of BBQ grill that is not an open grill. His sales go well and at the end of the decade, he buys out the BBQ division at Weber Brothers Metal Works and creates Weber-Stephen Products Co. Weber grills are still popular today.
TV Dinners
After WWII, America’s economy boomed, women entered the workforce as never before and food got a little strange. Housewives spent less time in the kitchen, so food companies came to the rescue with a buffet of processed foods. Foods were purchased in a can, package or pouch. Soups were available as liquids or in dry form. Tang landed on supermarket shelves and frozen dinners laid on trays in front of TV sets. TV dinners were introduced in 1953 by Swanson and with a flick of a wrist you could turn back the foil to display turkey in gravy, dressing, sweet potatoes, and peas ready in about 30 minutes – all with no dishes to wash.
Better Living Through Chemistry
“Better Living through Chemistry” was the slogan of the times along with “I like Ike” referring to the popular Dwight D. Eisenhower, the 5-star general from WWII winning the U.S presidency from 1953 to 1961. This change in processing came from the demand of the Army during WWII to provide needed ready-to-eat meals. The food industry responded by ramping up new technologies in canning and freeze-drying to feed the troops. The marketing of these foods presented a challenge, however. At first, many of them were less than palatable, so food companies hired home economists to develop fancy recipes and flooded magazines, newspapers and TV with ads to broadcast their virtues. Actually the first cake mix was available in 1931, but was met with disdain due to the use of dehydrated eggs, e.g. Women later would respond more favorably if they could crack their own eggs into the batter so they would feel like they were doing something positive in the kitchen.
People rushed to buy appliances, houses, cars, dishwashers, washing machines, dryers and backyard barbecue grills and new home freezers. They also bought television sets in record numbers and watched shows that represented their new idealized lives like Ozzie and Harriet and Leave It to Beaver. Beaver’s mother, June Cleaver was depicted as a housewife freed from household chores and often was serene and perfectly dressed with pearls and high heels pushing a vacuum cleaner and putting meals on the family table, all before solving the family problems.
Fast Food Nation
The birth rate soared and created what is known as the Baby Boomer Generation. Fifty million babies were born from 1945 to 1960. Food marketing shifted to kids with Tony the Tiger and fish sticks leading the campaign. Fast food had its beginnings strengthened in 1955 when Ray Kroc bought a hamburger stand from the McDonald’s brothers in San Bernadino, California. Disneyland opened in 1955 and was so popular they ran out of food on the first day.
The Seven Countries Study
In 1958, the American scientist, Ancel Keys started a study called the Seven Countries Study, which attempted to establish the association between diet and cardiovascular disease in different countries. The study results indicated that in the countries where fat consumption was the highest also had the most heart disease. This suggested the idea that dietary fat caused heart disease. He initially studied 22 countries, but reported on only seven: Finland, Greece, Italy, Japan, The Netherlands, United States, and Yugoslavia.
The problem was that he left out:
Countries where people eat a lot of fat but have little heart disease, such as Holland and Norway and France.
Countries where fat consumption is low but the rate of heart disease is high, such as Chile.
Basically, he only used data from the countries that supported his theory. This flawed observational study gained massive media attention and had a major influence on the dietary guidelines of the next few decades, i.e. cut the fat out of our diets.
The First Artificial Sweetener
In the diet world, Saccharin was manufactured in granules and became a popular sugar substitute for dieters. It was first produced in 1878 by a chemist at Johns Hopkins University, but became popular after sugar shortages in WWI and WWII. In the United States, saccharin is often found in restaurants in pink packets as “Sweet’n Low”. It was banned later but it remains on the market today. The basis for the proposed ban was a study that documented an increase in cancer in rats being fed saccharin. The “Delaney clause” of the Food Additive Amendments to the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act states that no substance can be deemed safe if it causes cancer in humans or animals. In suspending the proposed saccharin ban, Congress ordered that products containing the popular sweetener must carry a warning about its potential to cause cancer. The FDA formally lifted its proposal to ban the sweetener in 1991 based on new studies, and the requirement for a label warning was eliminated by the Saccharin Notice Repeal Act in 1996.
1954 Employee Gerry Thomas from the C.A. Swanson Co, has an idea (although fellow workers nearly laughed him out of the Omaha plant): package the left-over turkey, along with some dressing, gravy, cornbread, peas and sweet potatoes into a partitioned metal tray, sell it frozen, and consumers could heat it up for dinner. His name for the leftover meal: TV Dinner.
1955 Milkshake-machine salesman, Roy Kroc tries to persuade Dick and Mac McDonald (owner of the original McDonald’s in California) to franchise their concept. They aren’t interested but tell Kroc to go ahead and try his hand. Kroc opens his first restaurant in Des Plains, ILL., and eventually buys out the McDonald’s.
1958 Eighteen- year-old Frank Carney sees a story in the Saturday Evening Post about the pizza fad among teenagers and college students. With $600 borrowed from his mother, he and his fellow Wichita State classmate, opens the first Pizza Hut in Wichita, KS.
Nutrition was beginning to gain some attention as healthy eating became new a topic of discussion. Gaylord Hauser. Author of Look Younger, Live Longer, who promoted such “wonder” foods as yogurt, wheat germ and brewer’s yeast… Adelle Davis and her book Let’s Eat Right to Keep Fit but claims she can cure cancer – she died of bone cancer at age 70.
1955 President Dwight D. Eisenhower had a heart attack. His doctor suggests he follow a low fat diet.
Citations:
Bon Appetit. September 1999. America’s Food and Entertaining Magazine, Text by Katie O’Kennedy.
The Century in Food: America’s Fads and Favorites, Beverly Bundy, 2002.
The Oxford Companion to American Food and Drink. Edited by Andrew F. Smith Oxford University Press, 2007.
The health risks of eating ultraprocessed foods —including sausages and burgers as well as pizza and ice cream — are well documented. They have been shown to raise the risk of obesity, diabetes, and cancer among other ailments. (CNN.com).
In a new study, researchers followed more than 10,000 Brazilians with an average age of 51 for more than 10 years. They found that people who consumed more than 20% of their daily calories from ultra processed foods had a 28% faster cognitive decline compared with those whose intake was less than 20%. Unfortunately, that 20% is not a high threshold: just 400 calories out of the 2000 calorie diet. And most Americans are well over that, getting on average a whopping 58% of their calories from ultraprocessed foods.
“The sample size is substantial and the followup extensive,” says Dr. David Katz, a nutrition specialist who was not involved in the study. While short of proof, this is robust enough that we should conclude ultraprocessed foods are probably bad for our brains,”
Source: The Week. December 23, 2022, Volume 22, Issue 110.
Epigenetics refers to the inheritable changes in your DNA that don’t change the actual DNA sequences. That means these changes are potentially reversible.
What is DNA Methylation?
Your DNA consists of four bases called cytosine, guanine, adenine, and thymine. A chemical unit called a methyl group (designated by CH3 or one carbon atom and three hydrogen atoms) can be added to cytosine.
When that happens, that area of the DNA is methylated. When you lose that methyl group, the area becomes demethylated.
DNA methylation often inhibits the expression of certain genes. For example the methylation process might stop a tumor-causing gene from “turning on”, preventing cancer.
Researchers are currently working to better understand the factors that affect DNA methylation. Based on some earlier findings, there is some evidence that diet plays a role. This opens up the potential to reduce genetic risk of developing certain conditions such as breast cancer or heart disease through simple lifestyle changes.
The patterns of DNA methylation change through out your life, from fetal development to end of life. Studies suggest that DNA methylation slows down as we age. Genes that were once repressed by methylation start to become active and possibly result in a variety of diseases. Interestingly, another study found that participants”who consumed more alcohol were more likely to have decreased DNA methylation. In contrast, those who consume a lot of folate were more likely to have increased methylation.
“Can Diets Change Your DNA? The question is “are you really what you eat? The answer appears to be No. However, we have known for years that gene expression influences metabolism. A study published in Nature Microbiology in 2016 indicates that nutrition may play an important role in how some DNA sequences are expressed. The study that how genes behave is strongly influenced by the food we eat. Even so, we are still a long way from the kind of personalized medicine that will furnish nutritional therapies to treat a wide spectrum of conditions.” Stay tuned for the future. Source: You Are what Your Grandparents Ate. Judith Finlayson, 2019.
Little is known about the etiology of cancers or the origins of chronic diseases. “The precipitous rise of chronic diseases is now the subject of genetic and environmental influences. Poor nutrition and stress, we now know, can alter susceptible genes. This is the basis of epigenetics, a recently recognized mechanism underlying health and disease.” (Judith Finlayson, Robert Rose, Inc. You Are What Your Grandparents Ate, 2019.)
The Human Genome Project
The Human Genome Project has identified millions of gene defects and variants in human DNA. The average person has 250 to 300 defective genes, plus an average level of 75 variants associated with disease. Nutrient availability, particular in early life, can modify the functional level of specific genes thereby influencing disease risks. Increased understanding of epigenetic processes as well as a person’s genetic status without changing gene structure is becoming an interesting phenomenon. Gene activity can be shut off or turned on, or slowed or sped up by epigenetic mechanisms, many of which are environmental. Refer to FFandFads on epigenetics.
Diseases Resulting from Multiple Gene Variants
Cancer Most types of cancer are related to environmental exposures such as high fat and alcohol intakes, low fruit and vegetable intakes, high levels of body fat, smoking and other toxins. A number of research studies suggest that a diet rich in cruciferous vegetables may lower rates of a variety of cancers, including breast, pancreatic, bladder, lung, prostate and colon cancer. This family of vegetables is led by broccoli, cauliflower, Brussels sprouts, and cabbage to mention a few.
Certain enzymes in cruciferous veggies may help protect cell DNA from damage, and others may have antioxidant properties. Crucifers may also help to counteract cancer-causing nitrosamines and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons that are found in charred, cured or barbecued fish or meats.
Obesity “Over 40 gene variants have been related to obesity development in people exposed to Western-type diets and low levels of physical activity. The current obesity epidemic appears to be driven by a mismatch between multiple components of our 400,000 year old genetic endowment (i.e., what our ancestors ate) and current food and activity environments.
Genetics traits that helped our early ancestors survive times of famine and that encouraged food intake rather than discouraged it, and that set up metabolic systems around unrefined and unprocessed foods are at odds with much of today’s food supply and physical activity requirements.” Nutrition Now, Judith E. Brown, 7th Edition
Reversing the world wide trend in obesity rates will not be easy. We need to lessen our triggers that favor food intake and increase environments that favor physical environments – how about just increased walking environments. No need to go to the gym.
Expanding availability of healthier foods and increasing earlier nutrition education to encourage healthier lifesytes is desperately needed and the earlier the better. As Michael Pollan suggests: Eat food (unprocessed), (Not too much), Do not diet. Mainly plants (fruits and vegetables). See how easy it is???
“The Mediterranean Diet is often referred to as “the best diet in the world.” The Mediterranean diet is not a diet in the fad sense, but a traditional way of living — the same can be said for the “diets” practiced by the countries that make up the “Blue Zones” that work for health and often longevity. (Mark Bittman and David L. Katz, MD. How to Eat: All your Food and Diet Questions answered.)
History gives us clues about the development of the cuisines of the Mediterranean. European explorers would bring back spices and foods from their travels to Asia in the East and the New World, introducing them into their native countries. Conquering armies from Rome, France, Spain and Britain brought their own foods and cooking techniques with them, leaving marks on the cuisines of their Mediterranean neighbors. Today, although you will find McDonalds’s in Mediterranean countries, native cuisines are still apparent as you walk through the markets still selling local spices, produce, meats, cheeses, and seafood. For many, it becomes necessary for some people to shop daily for ingredients due to lack of refrigeration and is a way of life for them.
This is the way people work the land and feed themselves with seasonal ingredients grown in their small plots outside the kitchen. Again, this is the back to basic cuisine and the basis of many of the “diets” of the countries of the Blue Zone and Mediterranean regions. It is more than a diet, and is shown to be worthy of saying “it is a way of life”. The best advice for Americans is to buy a basic Mediterranean cookbook and try its many foods that emulate this way of living and hopefully – Skip the fast food!!!!
Try this very simple recipe.
Tomatoes with Olive Oil As with the all foods found as part of the Mediterranean diet, a tomato is no exception. These bright and juicy fruits are often categorized as a vegetable. The science is back and forth of these gems but the fact remains is that they are a healthy addition to the Mediterranean diet. For extra health, make a basic salad dressing with a tablespoon or two of extra virgin olive oil with a little garlic to your tastes.
A serving (1 cup of raw, cut up tomatoes) provides us with 2 grams of fiber and relatively little calories. In addition to that, they are a great source of vitamins, minerals and antioxidants. Just by eating a single serving, you’ll be getting –25% of your daily Vitamin C. Vitamin C is needed to form blood vessels, muscles, and collagen in bones; It helps the body absorb iron, and is involved in the healing process.
10 % of potassium – a mineral and electrolyte that helps kidneys remove excess sodium, helps muscles contract and your heartbeat regularly.
In addition, tomatoes are chock full of powerful antioxidants like lycopene, beta carotene, and lutein.
These antioxidants may protect your arteries from atherosclerosis and other cardiovascular diseases, decreases blood pressure and reduces the risk of prostate cancer in men. What a nutrition bargain!!
FOOD, FACTS and FADS 