The 150 Healthiest 15-Minute Recipes on Earth (2 page)

Usually,
healthy
and
fast
don’t go together. “Healthy fast food” is almost an oxymoron, and most people have to choose one or the other. And when you’ve got a family to take care of, guess which one wins most often?

Years of private practice with nutrition clients (and even more years speaking to audiences around the country, writing books, and running a website that gets a ton of mail) have taught me that people are genuinely perplexed when it comes to food. They truly want to make smart and healthy choices, but those choices are usually very labor intensive (and often, though not always, expensive to boot).

Jeannette Bessinger has had the same experience, and she’s even more “in the trenches” than I am. She works with busy families, providing nutrition education, and helping them improve both their eating habits and everyday food preparation. Many of these families are also on a budget, and all of them are time-crunched, stressed out, and overcommitted. They don’t have time to investigate every food, read up on every health benefit, dissect every label, evaluate different claims, and then cook every meal from scratch. So Chef Jeannette is all-too-aware of the day-to-day challenges faced by the average person wanting to feed his or her family the best food possible in the least amount of time.

Hence, this book.

Let me say right off the bat that you’re not crazy—it’s sometimes very difficult to make healthy food quickly. You didn’t imagine that, it’s a fact of life, and we need to acknowledge that from the beginning.

But it’s not impossible.

Far from it.

So we approached this cookbook as a huge challenge. How do we put together meals that are rich in nutrients (like vitamins, minerals, phytochemicals from plants, omega-3 fats, and so on), contain a good mix of protein, healthy fat, and good carbohydrates, don’t break the caloric “bank,” and can still be assembled from start to scratch in a reasonable amount of time?

We think we solved the problem.

Is every single recipe perfect? No. Occasionally there’s a shortcut or two (like using a prepared store-bought sauce or dressing). Not every single ingredient is organic (doesn’t really have to be, actually). And once in a while the recipes will spill over 15 minutes a bit, but this is, after all, real life!

So let me tell you some of the things we looked at when we created these recipes. It may help you to understand why it’s actually possible to eat healthy food that can be prepared in no time. You just have to know what you’re looking for.

Here’s what we were looking for:

When I evaluate a food, I’m looking at the costs versus the benefits. Chocolate cake has a very high cost: lots of calories, lots of sugar, and almost nothing that’s nutritionally good for you. Now granted, it
does
have the benefit of being delicious, but that’s what evaluation is about: weighing the benefits against the cost.

When you think about it, evaluating food isn’t much different than evaluating anything else you shop for. If I go into the store and see a nice shirt, I might look at the price and say, “Hmm, the shirt is okay, but I’ll only wear it twice a year and it costs $300.” The benefit of looking nice twice a year is not enough to compensate for the outrageous cost, especially when I can find an equally nice shirt for a fraction of the price.

To put this way of thinking into the context of food, I might think to myself, “Chocolate cake tastes really good (benefit) but really screws up my blood sugar, gives me no nutrients to speak of, and is very high in calories (cost).” Now if there were no other way to get that delicious taste, I might splurge and go for the cake. But the fact is that with some creative recipe development (the kind in which Chef Jeannette excels) I can get fabulous taste at a fraction of the cost. Not only that, but I can get nutrients that support my health, protect my waistline, and give me the building blocks for everything my body needs.

So when we nutritionists speak of “nutrient density” we’re talking about the balance between nutrients and calories.

Here’s an example. Spinach is a really nutrient-dense food. One cup of raw spinach has 30 mg of calcium, 24 mg of magnesium, 167 mg of potassium, 8.4 mg of vitamin C, 1,688 mcg of beta-carotene, 2,813 IUs of vitamin A, and a whopping 3,659 mcg of lutein and zeaxanthin (two superstar nutrients for eye health).

Want to know how many calories that cup of spinach has?

Seven.

See where I’m going with this? When you can eat a few cups of a food for fewer than 50 calories and get a ton of minerals, vitamins, and phytochemicals, you’re eating a nutrient-dense food. There are a lot of nutrients densely packed into a small caloric package. Compare that to a tiny serving of commercially prepared chocolate cake that has about 54 IUs of vitamin A and not much more—not a single milligram of C, D, E, K, or any B vitamin (except for a tiny amount of folate). It’s got a ton of sugar, 35 grams of processed carbs, and comes at a caloric cost of about 235 calories, and that’s for a serving that wouldn’t satisfy anyone but a squirrel.

So maybe spinach and chocolate cake represent two extremes. But the best-kept secret in the world is that when it comes to healthy food, you can actually have your cake and eat it too. Chef Jeannette has worked her kitchen magic to concoct recipes that feature nutrient-dense food at a reasonable caloric cost and that taste delicious too.

Okay, here’s another technical-sounding concept that’s easy to understand once you cut away all the scientific jargon—glycemic load. Here’s what it means:

When you eat food, your blood sugar goes up. That’s normal and natural and expected. But you don’t want it to go too high. When blood sugar goes up, the body responds by secreting the hormone
insulin
, the job of which is to escort some of that extra sugar into the cells where it can be burned for energy. But when blood sugar rises too high (and stays up there), you need a lot of insulin to get it back down. Insulin, also known as the “fat storage” hormone, is a perfectly fine and important hormone, but when you have too much of it floating around, it can contribute to all sorts of health problems such as obesity and diabetes.

When blood sugar gets too high, it creates a separate set of problems not unrelated to the ones that come from high levels of insulin. The insulin eventually brings your blood sugar down, but sometimes it goes down too low, resulting in cravings, mood swings, and overeating. So keeping blood sugar in a nice, healthy range, which also keeps insulin in a nice, healthy range, is a major goal of healthy eating.

The glycemic index is a measure that researchers use to evaluate the effect of a given amount of food on blood sugar. (The glycemic load is an even more accurate measure of the same thing.) When foods have a high
glycemic impact, they tend to create blood sugar problems. (Just for reference, foods with the highest glycemic impact include pure sugar, white bread, cornflakes, and most processed carbohydrates.) Clearly, we want to choose foods that are reasonably low glycemic, have minimal effect on our blood sugar and keep cravings, hunger, and mood swings at bay.

That’s why Chef Jeannette and I always talk about foods that are “low glycemic.” Translated, that means they’re low in sugar or processed carbs, and won’t contribute to the myriad health problems associated with too much sugar in the diet. Foods that are high in fiber (beans, for example), high in healthy fats like omega-3 (salmon), and higher in protein (grass-fed beef, chicken, and fish) all fit the bill. And almost every vegetable on the planet, and most fruits, are pretty low glycemic as well, not to mention nutrient dense!

Speaking of fiber, it’s one of the most important constituents of your diet, and most Americans simply don’t get enough of it.

Fiber slows down digestion in the stomach and small intestine, which helps stabilize blood sugar levels. It increases our feeling of fullness, making it less likely we’ll overeat. It reduces cholesterol. It may help prevent colon cancer, and it definitely helps prevent constipation and hemorrhoids. It’s good for digestive disorders. High-fiber diets are associated with reduced rates of heart and kidney disease as well as lower rates of diabetes and obesity.

So Chef Jeannette and I pay attention to fiber. And we try to make sure it’s in every recipe whenever possible. It’s definitely one of the components of a healthy diet. Most responsible health organizations recommend that we get between 25 and 38 grams of fiber a day, but the average American only gets between 4 and 8 grams. Interestingly, most high-fiber foods are also nutrient dense and low glycemic!

Are you beginning to see a pattern here?

We make a pretty big deal about grass-fed meat and wild fish, and with good reason. Let’s start with meat. Some studies have shown that high levels of meat consumption are associated with higher rates of cancer and heart disease, leading many people to simply avoid meat altogether. But the truth about meat eating is a bit more complicated than you might think.

Most of the meat we get in the supermarket comes from what are called factory farms. If you’re an animal lover you don’t want to visit a factory farm. (In fact, it’s next to impossible. Factory farms are notoriously secret about their meat-processing practices and almost never allow visitors to observe—with good reason.) The cows are kept in tiny, confined spaces and fed a diet of grain. This is a problem. Cows don’t digest grain very well; the stomach of a ruminant is not suited to grain, and it causes terrible acidity. Not only that, grain diets are very inflammatory, and the meat of factory-farmed beef is high in proinflammatory omega-6 fats. And if the grain-based diet weren’t enough to make the cows sick (it usually is), the crowded conditions in which they live ensures that most of them won’t be the healthiest specimens. As a result, factory farms routinely shoot their animals full of antibiotics, which winds up in their meat, which winds up on your table.

That’s not all they’re shot full of. Factory-farmed meat routinely contains hormones (such as bovine growth hormone) and steroids used to fatten the cows up and hasten the time to slaughter. These are in addition to whatever pesticides and chemicals they’re exposed to in their cheap grain diet. The result is a meat “product” that is anything but healthy.

Contrast that to a grass-fed cow. Cows were meant to live on pasture. Grass is their natural diet. When they are grass fed, their meat is higher in the amazingly healthy omega-3 fats (the same fat found in cold-water fish such as salmon). Their meat also contains a cancer- and obesity-fighting fat called CLA that is conspicuously absent in the fat of factory-farmed beef. And grass-fed cows are almost always raised organically.

Studies that show ill effects from meat eating look at populations that consume large amounts of processed meats. That includes deli meats, which, in addition to all the problems stated above, also contain nitrates and high levels of sodium.

Interestingly, just as this book was going to press, a new study came out that looked at meat eating and heart disease. In this study, however, researchers didn’t just lump all “meat eaters” together. They compared people who ate nonprocessed meat, such as burgers and steaks, with people who ate high amounts of processed deli meats. The results were interesting. While processed meat eaters did indeed have significantly higher risk for heart disease, the people eating nonprocessed meat did not. I suspect that if researchers actually compared those eating grass-fed meat (and wild game) to those eating processed meat, the results would be even more dramatic.

So meat has gotten a bad name, but perhaps unfairly. Real, grass-fed meat with no antibiotics, steroids, or hormones is a very different food than store-bought, factory-farmed meat. We realize it’s not always possible to get grass-fed, but we feel strongly that whenever possible you should try to do so. It really makes a difference. When we do use deli meats in these recipes (only once or twice, actually), we always suggest nitrate-free and low-sodium varieties—this eliminates two of the most problematic compounds in processed meats and significantly reduces the dangers associated with eating it.

Similarly, farmed fish is fed an unnatural diet of corn and grain, which leads to problems similar to those encountered when cows are fed an all-grain diet. Wild fish such as salmon naturally dine on krill, mackerel, and crustaceans. Wild fish has lower levels of inflammatory omega-6s and higher levels of health-giving omega-3s—it’s also high in antioxidants (such as astaxanthin), which are provided from their natural diet.

Although there is always concern about mercury in ocean fish, the truth is that farmed fish have an even bigger problem—PCBs. PCBs are polychlorinated biphenyls, a really nasty toxin that’s been spilled into the environment since the early twentieth century and persists today, even though PCBs are now outlawed. The toxin accumulates in the fat of animals and fish, and today, according to the nonprofit Environmental Working Group, farm-raised salmon is the most PCB-contaminated protein source in the American diet.

So we recommend wild salmon whenever possible. Farmed salmon isn’t going to kill you and is a compromise between eating wild salmon and not eating salmon at all, but when you can get it, wild fish is the way to go—at least where salmon is concerned!

I’m always amused by the way the media spins studies on organic food. They love to trumpet headlines about studies that show no nutritional advantage to organic fruits and vegetables when, in fact, that’s only part of the story. It’s true that studies have been mixed about whether organic food has more nutrients than nonorganic (sometimes yes, sometimes no; it never has less). But the fact is we eat organic food
not
just because it may have a little more vitamin C or folate, but because of what it
doesn’t
have—chemicals.

We believe that it makes sense to try to reduce our daily exposure to the more than 80,000 unregulated chemicals that exist in the environment (many of which come to us via the food supply). We also recognize that organic food in general is harder to find and somewhat more expensive than nonorganic. As private citizens, Chef Jeannette and I both choose our battles on the organic front. Some foods (strawberries, for example), are more contaminated and sprayed than others so when buying those particular foods, we choose (and recommend) organic. Other foods (pineapples) are pretty clean, so for those it doesn’t matter as much. (For a complete and current list of the “dirtiest” and “cleanest” foods, go to
www.food-news.org
.)