Are Egg Yolks Like Cigarettes?
Lots of people often ask me why I don’t eat eggs. The incredible, edible, egg? Thought to be a cornerstone of a healthy diet and active lifestyle? Not so much. Here’s a little more evidence to explain why I don’t. From The Huffington Post:
Egg Yolks, Smoking Clog Arteries Similarly, Says Study
Is a diet rich in whole eggs nearly as artery clogging as smoking? That’s the premise of a new study, published Aug. 14 in the journal, Atherosclerosis.
Dr. J. David Spence, a professor of neurology at Western University in Canada found a relationship between egg yolk consumption and the development of atherosclerosis, a condition that contributes to heart attack and stroke risk in which plaque accumulates along the walls of the arteries. The connection was similar to one between smoking and arterial plaque that was calculated in the same study, he and a team of researchers found.
Spence’s research team surveyed 1,231 middle-aged male and female patients who had been referred to a vascular prevention clinic at the London Health Sciences Centre’s University Hospital after suffering a stroke or a “mini-stroke.”
A healthy breakfast? Not really.
The team measured subjects’ carotid wall thickness, and compared that with answers about egg yolk consumption, smoking, exercise habits and other lifestyle factors. They did not have the data to look at overall dietary patterns, according to Spence.
The researchers calculated egg yolk consumption and cigarette consumption in the same manner, and found that the top 20 percent of egg consumers had narrowing of the carotid artery that was two-thirds that of smokers. The finding is particularly surprising, as cigarettes are known to cause immediate and profound damage to vascular health.
But some critics of the study are concerned with the comparison between egg yolks and cigarettes. While both are harmful, they cause harm in different ways.
“Smoking has a direct effect on blood vessels and development of plaque, whereas with eggs, it’s really an indirect effect: Eggs are part of the diet and the diet has an effect on overall blood cholesterol,” said Dr. David J. Frid, a staff cardiologist in preventive cardiology at the Cleveland Clinic. “A high level of blood cholesterol can lead to arterial plaque, but there are so many factors that can affect your cholesterol above eating eggs. There’s the rest of your diet, whether you’re overweight, whether you exercise, genetics.”
Instead, Frid suggested that eating a lot of egg yolks could represent an overall intake of high-fat, high-cholesterol foods. People who report eating a lot of eggs may consume unhealthy fare like sausages or grits along with them; those who eat egg whites only are particularly mindful of their saturated fat and cholesterol intake across the board. “The eggs could be a marker of people who have poor diet, rather than an actual characteristic,” he says.
Dr. David J. Gordon, special assistant for clinical studies at the Division of Cardiovascular Sciences at the National Heart Blood and Lung Institute, agreed.
“This study does not address other dietary factors known to influence cardiovascular risk, such as saturated and trans fat, or dietary fiber,” he wrote in an email to Healthy Living. “It is difficult to pinpoint the effect of one specific food or nutrient without considering the other components of a person’s diet.”
But egg consumption isn’t entirely unhealthful, research suggests. One major study found that egg eating was associated with a rise in serum HDL levels — the good, protective kind of cholesterol — along with LDL levels, which clog arteries. Eggs are also a good source of vitamin D, according to Frid.
But Spence asserts that these findings are based on a fundamental misunderstanding of cholesterol. “The cholesterol level you wake up with in the morning, has nothing to do with diet,” he told HuffPost. “It’s determined by how much cholesterol your liver produces.”
And that’s not the cholesterol you should worry about either, he argues. Instead, the rise in cholesterol that follows a meal causes immediate inflammation, which in turn contributes to plaque build-up and the narrowing of the arterial wall.
Arterial plaque builds up when blood vessels become irritated and inflamed — a normal occurrence for everyone, though some conditions like diabetes make the inflammation more frequent and more profound — the body’s repair response generates plaque, explained Frid. The nicotine and tar ingested from cigarette smoking inflames blood vessels, encouraging plaque accumulation. Dietary cholesterol, meanwhile, helps dictate how much plaque will build up, he said.
The takeaway?
A single egg yolk, at 200 mg, has two-thirds of the National Heart Blood and Lung Institute’s recommended daily cholesterol intake for healthy individuals who don’t have heart disease, diabetes or high LDL-cholesterol. That organization recommends limiting whole eggs to four per week. Meanwhile, smoking, like excessive dietary cholesterol consumption, is a risk factor for poor cardiovascular health.
While atherosclerosis is a risk factor for heart attack and stroke, and dietary cholesterol is associated with atherosclerosis, there is no research that shows a direct relationship between dietary cholesterol, and heart attack and stroke.
“Carotid plaque area, which was the primary measurement in this study, is a surrogate outcome for cardiovascular events; but, an association with this surrogate measure cannot be directly equated with risk of stroke or myocardial infarction,” wrote Gordon.
Egg Yolks, Smoking Clog Arteries Similarly, Says Study – The Huffington Post
Vegan diet giving Matt Watson his best shot at MLS
Yet another athlete giving a vegan diet a shot. I don’t know much about MLS (or club “football” in Europe), but it seems to me like out of any major sport, a plant-based diet and soccer would be a perfect fit. Turns out the reigning MVP of the MLS has been plant-based for 20 years!
Vegan diet giving Matt Watson his best shot at MLS.
Some athletes, like Oakland A’s relief pitcher Pat Neshek, turned to veganism because of an enlightening experience.
In 2007, Neshek read The China Study — which details the connection between nutrition and disease — and instantly cut out meat and dairy.
For others, it’s ethical reasons. Or medical.
Tennis star Venus Williams changed to a vegan diet in 2011 in an effort to combat the auto-immune disease Sjogren’s Syndrome.
Vancouver Whitecaps midfielder Matt Watson simply wanted to try everything possible to stick in Major League Soccer.
“I had a terrible diet,” said Watson, a 27-year-old from Redditch, England, who spent four seasons with the second-division Carolina RailHawks, including time under current Whitecaps coach Martin Rennie.
“I ate a lot of Chick-fil-A,” he said, referring to the American fast-food chain.
“It’s like fried chicken, burgers, french fries. Virtually every day after practice I’d get that, or Chinese food. Too much Coca-Cola. I’ve got a sweet tooth, so tons of cookies and sugary stuff.
“I think at the level I was playing at maybe you can get away with it. But here, I wanted to give it my best shot, so I thought I’d give it a try. This might be my only chance to play in MLS.”
Watson had a teammate in Carolina, goalkeeper Akira Fitzgerald, who was a vegan. The two also played indoor together for the Baltimore Blast and Fitzgerald had been prodding Watson to change his ways.
“I used to give him stick,” Watson admitted. “But I thought I’d give it a try for a week.”
And that week has turned into months, and Watson — who was also affected by the documentary Forks Over Knives — doesn’t see turning back.
“I actually instantly felt better,” he said, “which might be obvious when you have a diet of Coca-Cola.”
Watson started six of the Whitecaps’ first nine games this season as Rennie favoured an athletic, disruptive midfield to establish a defensive foundation.
While Watson struggled at times in possession, he certainly didn’t lack energy. He can run for days. (Carl Lewis is the most famous vegan athlete).
Watson hasn’t played since May 5, hampered by an ankle sprain, but he’s fit again and could see time this week.
There are things Watson misses. Like Cadbury’s chocolate, and burgers. Team barbecues, he said, can be a source of considerable envy.
He gets his protein from beans, quinoa and tofu. The Whitecaps work with Dana Lis, a SportMedBC dietitian, who’s hooked Watson on Vega protein shakes.
Watson’s wife is not on board. Neither are his kids, which makes life a little tougher.
But the hardest part might not be missing meat or milk chocolate, or dealing with dinners at home, but rather putting up with the ribbing from some of his teammates.
“I just take the abuse,” Watson said. “It’s mainly Barry [Robson] calling me names, a little girl or whatever. And Brad [Knighton]. Brad is Captain America.”
There’s one man’s opinion, though, that means a lot more to Watson. Canadian international Dwayne De Rosario, who plays for D.C. United, was MLS MVP last season.
De Rosario has been meat-free for 20 years; he was a vegan for 10 and has since started eating fish.
“That’s not bad company to be in,” said Watson. “If he can do it, it can’t be that detrimental.”
Fish Sticks and Green Beans, but Plant-Based
My wife loves the fish filet at McDonalds, and has loved it her entire life. Unfortunately for her, I never let her go there (except for one time in Vegas), so seeing a post from Lindsay Nixon at Happy Herbivore about her tofu fish filet definitely piqued my interest. We decided to give it a try last night, but seeing as we didn’t have any bread in the house, we decided to turn the recipe into “fish sticks” instead of the filet. Here’s what we did, adapted from this recipe from Lindsay.
Reminds me of my old college “white trash” meals, except healthy, vegan, and delicious!
Tofu Fish Sticks
Ingredients:
- 1 14 oz package firm tofu, pressed (I use the Tofu XPress, but you can press it overnight between two plates with something heavy on top)
- 1/2 cup whole wheat breadcrumbs (I had whole wheat panko breadcrumbs and they worked pretty well, but I think I’m going to try again with regular whole wheat crumbs)
- 1 tbsp kelp granules (you can buy this in the Asian section of Whole Foods)
- 1/2 tsp onion powder
- 1/2 tsp garlic powder
- 1/4 tsp Old Bay seasoning
- 1/2 cup almond milk (or soy, rice, etc.)
Method:
- Preheat oven to 350 F.
- Line a baking sheet with parchment paper or better yet, use a Silpat.
- Take your pressed tofu and slice it lengthwise right through the middle on the side, so essentially you have 2 thinner “sheets” of tofu. Keeping the two pieces together, slice about 5 “sticks” across.
- Mix the breadcrumbs and all the spices together in a shallow bowl.
- Put the almond milk in a bowl as well.
- Dip each tofu stick in the milk, then roll it in the batter and place it on the baking sheet.
- Bake the tofu sticks for 25 to 30 minutes, until sufficiently crispy.
No fish sticks are complete without tartar sauce, so here’s a vegan version, courtesy of my lovely wife.
Tartar Sauce
Ingredients:
- 1/2 cup fat free Nayonnaise (or vegenaise)
- 1/4 cup dill relish
- 1 tsp onion powder
- 1 tsp dried dill
Method:
- Mix all together. Be sure to taste (we usually just eyeball this) and adjust accordingly.
We also decide to steam up some green beans, squeeze some lemon juice on top of them, and sprinkle some Old Bay on them as well. Paired with a mixed green salad, it was a perfect meal!
Quick “Asian-Style” Spinach Salad For Lunch
I was looking through Healthy Girl’s Kitchen’s excellent list of oil-free salad dressings this weekend and came across this “Asian Low-Oil Dressing” which looked interesting. I decided to whip it up and put together a salad from what I had on hand, and it turned out amazing. It’s low oil, which means only one teaspoon of sesame oil in the entire batch for some flavor, which from a fat and processed food standpoint is completely negligible in my book. There’s definitely all sorts of other stuff you can put in this salad (it’d be awesome with kelp noodles), but use this as a starting point and let your imagination go crazy.
Dressing:
Olympian vegetarians! – from the guardian.co.uk
Here’s a cool article from the Guardian about famous vegetarian athletes. I’ve always been a huge fan of Bode Miller and had no idea he was a plant eater!
Olympic vegetarians: the elite athletes who shun meat
Lizzie Armitstead isn’t the first athlete to achieve Olympic success on a non-meat diet. We raise a glass of vegetarian champagne to some of the best.
Lizzie Armitstead was just 10 years old when she told her parents she wanted to become a vegetarian. Yesterday, she won Great Britain’s first medal of the Olympic Games, taking silver in the gruelling 87-mile road cycling race, no less.
I was brought up as vegetarian from birth and have been a long distance runner for most of my adult life. One of the most common misconceptions I’ve come across is that vegetarians are pallid, gentle creatures who would recoil in a tough sporting arena. Despite the fact I was breaking school records on the track, people still questioned my diet’s ability to make me strong.
I spent six months last year living and training with some of Kenya’s greatest long-distance runners, for my book, Running With the Kenyans. The athletes (from the Rift Valley) were not strictly vegetarian, but ate very little meat, which is usually reserved for special occasions such as weddings or funerals. Although there were occasional non-vegetarian meals served in the athlete training camps, we lived mostly on a diet of rice, beans, ugali (a dough made of maize flour and water) and green vegetables. The list of gold medals the Kenyan athletes have won on the track is almost endless. (On a personal note, I returned home to run a marathon in under three hours.)
However, most nutritionists are still unconvinced of the benefits of a vegetarian diet for elite sportspeople. While it can mean a diet low in saturated fat, which is good, it requires athletes to be more vigilant about their intake of protein, iron and vitamin B12. “It is hard work,” says Linia Patel, a sports nutritionist at the British Dietetic Society. “It can be done, of course, but I take my hat off to those who do it.”
Yet as Armitstead has shown yet again, vegetarians continue to rise to the very top of their sports. She follows a long line of Olympians who have managed to excel without “eating corpses”, as she herself puts it. In honour of her medal, here are a few other great vegetarian Olympians:
Paavo Nurmi
Paavo Nurmi. Photograph: Keystone-France/Gamma-Keystone via Getty
One of the greatest distance runners in history, the ‘Flying Finn’ won nine gold medals in long-distance running events during the 1924 and 1928 Olympics, including the 1,500m and 5,000m on the same afternoon in Paris in 1924.
Murray Rose
Known as the ‘Seaweed Streak’ because of his vegan diet, Australian swimmer Rose won four Olympic gold medals in the 1956 and 1960 Olympics. He was a vegan from from childhood.
Edwin Moses
Gold medalist Edwin Moses. Photograph: Bob Thomas/Getty Images
Twice the Olympic 400m hurdles gold medallist, Moses went on one of the most incredible winning streaks in the history of sport when he won 122 successive races between 1977 and 1987, breaking four world records along the way.
Bode Miller
One of the greatest American alpine skiers of all time, Miller has won five Olympic medals, including gold in Vancouver in 2010. He was raised as a vegetarian on an organic farm in New Hampshire.
Carl Lewis
Carl Lewis crosses the line in 1991. Photograph: Getty Images
Carl Lewis wasn’t a vegetarian when he won four gold medals in Los Angeles in 1984, but turning vegan later in his career only seemed to help. In 1991 he won the 100m at the world championships at the age of 30 in a world record. It was, he has said, his greatest race.
Emil Voigt
The last British man to win a long-distance gold medal at the Olympics, in 1908 in London, Voigt was a former Guardian writer as well as a dedicated vegetarian.
Christopher Campbell
The wrestling arena is no exception when it comes to vegetarian winners. Campbell missed his chance at Olympic gold in 1980 through the US boycott of the Games – he won the world title in 1981 – but he managed to come back in 1992 to win bronze in Barcelona at the ripe old age of 37.
Martina Navratilova
Martina Navratilova in action in 2004. Photograph: Gabriel Bouys/AFP/Getty
Although she lost in the quarter finals in her only Olympic appearance in Athens in 2004, Navratilova is one of the greatest tennis players in history, winning 18 Grand Slams, including an incredible nine Wimbledon titles.She is a strong advocate of vegetarianism.
Having only passed through Chicago until a few weeks ago, I’ve always pictured the city to be incredibly meat-centric, like that awesome SNL skit “Bill Swerski’s Superfans” where Chris Farley (RIP, you genius) complains that he’s got a “polish sausage lodged in the lining of my arc.” Da Bears! Well, it turns out there’s actually some solid vegan/vegetarian places to check out in the city. My wife and I happened to have an extra day in the city this past Monday, so we headed to the famous and long-running (“Meat-Free Since ’83) Chicago Diner for lunch. The wife had actually done a brand redesign project in college using them as a subject, so she’d been wanting to try it for a long time.
It was pretty cool to feel like we were in a regular old-school diner but have a huge menu of vegan/vegetarian options, and the food was really really good. Here are some photos of our meal:
Classic signage outside.
Steamed gyoza for an appetizer.
I had the “Soul Bowl,” with quinoa, tofu scramble, sautéed greens, mashed sweet potatoes, and black beans. Incredibly satisfying and delicious!
Vegan Athletes Taking Over The News!
Aside from the ever-present endurance athletes like Brendan Brazier, Scott Jurek, and Rich Roll, I usually have to dig and search for news about plant-based athletes in mainstream sports, but this weekend was very, very different. First, Serena Williams (supposedly following a raw vegan diet) wins Wimbledon singles and then wins doubles with her also supposedly raw vegan sister, Venus. Pretty big deal.
Vegan.
And then, NFL running back Arian Foster announces he’s gone vegan (although only for a week so far). It’ll be really interesting to see what happens with his performance this year – I’m betting he’ll be quicker, faster, and able to recover more quickly from each game, but you never know in the NFL. Not surprisingly, he’s been receiving a whole lot of backlash from fans and writers about this diet change – will he go soft now that he doesn’t have “muscle-building” meat in his system? Has everyone forgotten that Tony Gonzalez, the most prolific Tight End ever to play the game and famous for going over the middle, has been vegan for years? Here’s what I’m wondering – If Foster comes back and puts up huge numbers this season, will other skill players follow suit? Will we see Larry Fitzgerald drinking a green smoothie during a postgame interview? Only time will tell. What do you think?
The Real Issue With Health Care
Obviously Health Care is in the news these days, and I’ve promised myself to keep political content off this site. However, this article from Dr. Joel Fuhrman was just too good not to post. However you feel about Obamacare, the biggest issues facing our nation’s health have been all but completely ignored.
We may be required to buy medical insurance, but what we really need is health insurance
-by Dr. Joel Fuhrman
The Affordable Care Act was intended to make insurance coverage more secure and affordable, and insure millions of uninsured Americans. The Supreme Court has now deemed the individual mandate portion – the requirement that everyone purchase health insurance – to be constitutional.
Certainly, some aspects of medical insurance coverage are in need of reform. But a much greater need exists – the need for Americans to reform their health by reforming their diets.
Of course there will be continued debate on this subject, but when we look at the big picture (the overall health of the American people), the Supreme Court’s decision and even government involvement is irrelevant. Regardless of the government’s involvement, the health of Americans will not improve unless the eating habits of Americans improve.
The U.S. per capita health costs are the highest in the world. Health care made up more than 17% of the GDP in 2010. Health care costs rose 5.8% in the year ending February 2012, and costs are predicted to continue rising. As health care costs rise, so will insurance costs. Overconsumption of medical care (for example, overuse of diagnostic tests) is a significant driver of health care costs.1
These high costs do not bring about better outcomes than other developed countries. In the U.S. life expectancy is lower than in similarly developed nations whose per capita costs are lower.1 The U.S. is ranked 38th in life expectancy, 37th in infant mortality, and 37th in overall health outcomes, according to the World Health Organization. We cannot expect the Affordable Care Act to significantly improve the health of Americans – its aim is only to increase access to care, which also mean more needless drugs, radiation exposure and surgeries. More medical care does not translate into better health, as much of what doctors do is harmful, such as prescribe antibiotics for viral infections, perform angioplasties and bypass surgeries on stable CAD, or perform CT scans, prostatectomies and other worthless, expensive invasive interventions that serve to protect the doctor, not the patient. Actually interventions that do not extend life are worse than worthless because they create harm. People should not be denied access to care in emergencies, but overall our population (including lower income people) need less medical care, not more.
Read more and comment at DiseaseProof.com
1. Brawley OW. The American Cancer Society and the American Health Care System. Oncologist 2011;16:920-925.
As if we needed another reason to tout the powerful benefits of a plant-strong diet, a new study suggests fruits and veggies may help smokers quit. Check out the report below from The Guardian Nigeria on the recently released study from the journal Nicotine and Tobacco Research. And no, I don’t read this newspaper regularly, it showed up in my daily Google search.
High plant-based foods’ intake may help smokers quit, stay tobacco free
Thursday, 28 June 2012 00:00 BY CHUKWUMA MUANYA
Can plant-based foods and herbal preparation help smokers quit the habit for good? CHUKWUMA MUANYA writes.
THERE have been various proposed treatments for people who want to quit smoking. Top on the list is the administration of nicotine, the putative addictive substance in tobacco smoking.
One of the most successful approaches, which have been used to date in reducing the incidence of tobacco smoking, relies upon nicotine containing chewing gum, and nicotine patch. However, these approaches have reported unpleasant side effects, and they are not easy to come by in this part of the world.
But researchers have found that eating more plant-based foods such as fruits, vegetables and spices may help smokers quit the habit and stay tobacco-free for longer.
According to a new study published in the journal Nicotine and Tobacco Research, smokers who consumed the most fruit and vegetables were three times more likely to be tobacco-free for at least 30 days at follow-up 14 months later than those consuming the lowest amount of fruits and vegetables.
These findings persisted even when adjustments were made to take into account age, gender, race/ethnicity, education, household income and health orientation.
They also found that smokers with higher fruit and vegetable consumption smoked fewer cigarettes per day, waited longer to smoke their first cigarette of the day and scored lower on a common test of nicotine dependence.
The study University at Buffalo (UB), United States, public health researchers, is the first longitudinal study on the relationship between fruit and vegetable consumption and smoking cessation.
Also, a herbal preparation made predominantly with ginger (Zingiber officinale), scent leaf (Ocimum gratissimum, nchuanwu in Igbo, effirin ajale in Yoruba), cloves (Syzygium aromaticum), nutmeg (Myristica fragrans), camphor plant (Cinnamomum camphora), among others has received a United States patent for quitting smoking.
The novel nicotine free anticigarette herbal formulation has received a United States Patent 7534454 as an anti-dote to the poisoning effects of tobacco products such as cigarettes and other similar tobacco related products.
The formulation comprises of sterilised dried plant powder/extracts together with the conventional additives to form the oral dosage forms, which include tablets, capsules, syrup and powders ready for suspension and mouth spray.
The anti tobacco addiction herbal formulation comprises of Sesbania grandiflora, Madagascar periwinkle (Catharanthus roseus), holy basil (Ocimum sanctum), nutmeg (Myristica fragrans), Elettaria cardamomum, Carum copticum, clove (Syzygium aromaticum), Cinnamomum tamala, calamus root (Acorus calamus), ginger (Zingiber officinale), black pepper (Piper nigrum), Cinnamomum zeylanicum, Cuminum cyminum, Nigella sativum, camphor plant (Cinnamomum camphora), Piper longum, scent leaf (Ocimum gratissimum) and Hemidesmus indicus.
The inventors include: Karerat Arun Kumar, Ifthikar Oommer Rowther Mohammed, Varghese Joy, and Vellappillil Achuthan Venugopal of MIR Holistics Pvt. Ltd., New Delhi, India; and Palpu Pushpangadan, Rawat Ajay Kumar Singh, Rao Chandana Venkateswara, and Govindarajan Raghavan of National Botanical Research Institute, Lucknow, Uttar Pradesh, India.
In a detailed description of the invention, the inventors wrote: “…If desired one or more pharmaceutical additives can be added and the composition converted to a solid dosage forms like tablet or capsule or used as a syrup, aerosol spray etc. Sesbania grandiflora and Ocimum gratissimum potentiated the free radical scavenging and 89.5 per cent stopped smoking with the formulation containing the Sesbania grandiflora and Ocimum gratissimum than that of the composition containing the other components…”
It was observed that the formulation at a dose of more than 1,000 mg/kg did not cause any biochemical changes in serum or any significant change in the organ weight or any change in haematological parameters. It was further observed that the formulation at a dose of 100-200-mg/kg showed stoppage of smoking in three to10 weeks treatment as well as showed free radical scavenging property and potent antioxidant activity.
“It is, therefore, noted that the formulation is useful as an antidote to the effects of tobacco as well as helps prevent smoking,” the inventors wrote.
Meanwhile, the authors, from UB’s School of Public Health and Health Professions, surveyed 1,000 smokers aged 25 and older from around the country, using random-digit dialing telephone interviews. They followed up with the respondents fourteen months later, asking them if they had abstained from tobacco use during the previous month.
Chair of the Department of Community Health and Health Behavior at UB, Dr. Gary A. Giovino, said: “Other studies have taken a snapshot approach, asking smokers and nonsmokers about their diets. We knew from our previous work that people who were abstinent from cigarettes for less than six months consumed more fruits and vegetables than those who still smoked. What we didn’t know was whether recent quitters increased their fruit and vegetable consumption or if smokers who ate more fruits and vegetables were more likely to quit.”
First author on the paper and graduate research assistant in the UB Department of Community Health and Health Behaviour, Dr. Jeffrey P. Haibach, said: “We may have identified a new tool that can help people quit smoking. Granted, this is just an observational study, but improving one’s diet may facilitate quitting.”
Several explanations are possible, such as less nicotine dependence for people who consume a lot of fruits and vegetables or the fact that higher fiber consumption from fruits and vegetables make people feel fuller.
“It is also possible that fruits and vegetables give people more of a feeling of satiety or fullness so that they feel less of a need to smoke, since smokers sometimes confuse hunger with an urge to smoke,” explains Haibach.
And unlike some foods, which are known to enhance the taste of tobacco, such as meats, caffeinated beverages and alcohol, fruits and vegetables do not enhance the taste of tobacco.
The UB researchers caution that more research is needed to determine if these findings replicate and if they do, to identify the mechanisms that explain how fruit and vegetable consumption may help smokers quit. They also see a need for research on other dietary components and smoking cessation.
High plant-based foods’ intake may help smokers quit, stay tobacco free.
The Perfect Shopping Cart: Trader Joe’s – Part 1
When you’re trying to get into the whole foods plant-based diet way of eating, figuring out what to buy at a grocery store is incredibly confusing. Yes, it’s important to buy as much produce as possible, but for the average busy person, prepping all your food from scratch is nearly impossible. Over the next couple of months, I’m going to highlight some of the many excellent food products at various grocery stores that are worth purchasing, starting with Trader Joe’s. There are plenty of deceptively unhealthy food products at TJ’s, but there are some really good ones that would be great staples to have in your kitchen. I’ve gotten to the point where aside from looking for new products, I know basically exactly what I’m going to buy every time I set food in the store. Here are a few of the products I buy regularly, more to come later:
Guacamole Hummus
Yes, I know it sounds weird – chickpeas with avocados – but this stuff is unbelievably good. Substitute it for regular guacamole in any Mexican dish and cut the calories from fat in half, put it on top of baked potatoes, or just dip veggies in it.
Eggplant Hummus
Aside from the guacamole hummus, this one is the only TJ’s hummus that’s oil-free. Luckily, it also happens to be my favorite.
Trader Joe’s Lentils
A little high in salt, but the convenience of these really can’t be beat. Add them to the top of salads or in soups, wrap them up in burritos, or just eat them plain. A great quick snack if you’re short on time.
Organic Spaghetti Sauce with Mushrooms
This is the only oil-free sauce TJ’s has, but it’s a good one. The addition of mushrooms and their powerful cancer and fat fighting properties is always a bonus.
Quick-Cook Brown Basmati Rice
Brown rice is delicious but usually takes forever to cook. Not this stuff – it’s parboiled and only takes about 15 minutes to make. What you sacrifice in texture (the grains tend to stick to each other a bit) you more than make up for in convenience. Added bonus of your whole house smelling like popcorn when it’s cooking.
Organic Lacinato (Dinosaur) Kale
Yes, finally Trader Joe’s carries organic kale! These are cheaper than the pre-washed bags at Whole Foods and much bigger too. They’re easy to use as a base for salads, smoothies, adding to soups or chilis, or baking/dehydrating into kale chips, among other things.
Okay, that’s it for today. I’ll have more in the coming weeks, along with a master list so you can print it out and bring it shopping with you!
The Plant Eater 
