Healthy Eating Tip:
Cook healthy food without sacrificing any flavor!
In the early 90s, my mother was diagnosed with breast cancer. She decided to try and mediate the disease with a macrobiotic diet. Dictionary.com defines macrobiotics as “a philosophically oriented program incorporating elements from several ancient cultures and emphasizing harmony with nature, especially through adherence to a diet consisting primarily of whole grains, beans, vegetables, and moderate amounts of seafood and fruit.” Essentially macrobiotics is a plant-based whole foods diet where you eat items that the earth produces in the area that you live in. The theory is that the earth provides what your body needs to thrive in the area that you live. I don’t buy into much of the accompanying philosophy, but the concept of eating as much locally grown food as possible is very sound both for the environment and our bodies. My parents lived about 2 hours away from the Kushi Institute in Becket, Mass., and my mother took the full set of courses there and I took time between jobs and taught her how to cook everything. She became a very good macrobiotic cook. I got a chance to meet Michio Kushi the founder of the macrobiotic movement in America on one trip to the Kushi Institute. I am not going to comment on the healing effects of the diet in terms of mediating cancer, but what this diet did for my mother in regards to her general health was nothing less than astounding. She dropped weight quickly and started functioning better in every physiological way. I saw that happen right in front of my eyes and there was no denying that her change in diet was 100% responsible. There was no counting of calories or even looking at nutrition facts labels because the diet included zero processed food so the only food she ate didn’t have a nutrition facts label on it. Rather than a diet, macrobiotics is a lifestyle modification in the fullest sense of the word. When my father was diagnosed with heart disease a few years later, he adopted the same diet and experienced the same kind of healing in his body. It was much more dramatic for him. His side of the family supplied me with a genetic predisposition for obesity, heart disease, diabetes, and a bunch of other chronic illnesses. His mother was always between 300 and 400 pounds and he was almost never below 230. He was the small one in the family!
A few years later on a visit between another set of jobs I was chatting with my parents in the kitchen as they were eating unflavored brown rice, plain sheets of nori seaweed, and natto which is a gooey mess of fermented soybeans with a texture and smell that truly defies description. I asked my father how he could eat that stuff. My father had been sneaking me off for burgers, shakes, and fries since I was born. We both enjoyed tasty food and we were fast food partners in crime. He looked back at me and said that his attitude about food had shifted and that he now viewed food “simply as fuel for my body.”
Later when I ran into heart disease myself the seed that “food can heal” was already planted and all I had to do was dig it up and massage it into a plan that worked for me. Here lies the key to successful lifestyle modification. Everybody needs to create a plan specifically designed for themselves. I keep going back to Bruce Lee because, like his fighting style, Jeet Kune Do or “The way of the intercepting fist,” his philosophy is bare-bones common sense.
“Absorb what is useful, discard what is useless,
and add what is specifically your own.”
– Bruce Lee
You can get lifestyle modification advice in many places and there is a new diet created every day, but none of that may work long term for you. What we all need to do is take good ideas from many sources and fuse them into a hybrid plan that we can use to modify our lifestyle.
When I stepped into the kitchen the last week of June 2003 to start cooking a plant-based whole foods diet for myself, even though I was highly motivated, I just couldn’t view food simply as fuel for my body. Sorry, dad! The food had to taste good, or I wasn’t going to eat it. I went back to the drawing board and started again. This time I was armed with the concept of “umami.”
Umami, with sweet, sour, bitter, and salt make up the five basic tastes we recognize. Umami is what makes a rich meat sauce or soup satisfying to your palate. Without umami, your food will be less pleasing, and you will be less likely to stick to your chosen diet. The umami taste comes from the presence of the amino acid glutamate, which is typically present in high-protein foods. Although it sounds like monosodium glutamate, it is not to be confused with MSG, but it does hit many of the same taste receptors and increases flavor and satisfaction in many the same ways that MSG does. Smithsonian Magazine has an excellent article on umami entitled “It’s the Umami, Stupid. Why the Truth About MSG is So Easy to Swallow.”
Many foods have umami, and cooking with them will make the meals you make more satisfying and increase the chance that you will remain on your chosen diet. Here is a list of some items with high levels of umami in them.
- Mushrooms; especially dried mushrooms
- Onions; especially caramelized onions
- Tomatoes; especially dried tomatoes or the reduced fresh tomatoes chefs call “concassé”
- Tomato sauce, paste, and ketchup
- Seaweeds
- Soy-based products like natto, miso, and soy sauce
- Kimchi
- Green and black tea
- Bonito flakes (dried tuna flakes used to make dashi)
- Potatoes
- Lotus root
- Garlic
- Green peas
- Corn
You can also use condiments and concentrated pastes to increase the umami in your food. Some of these items have a lot of sodium, but you only use a minimal amount in large batches of food. I use the following items all the time at Hometown Café, and nobody can say that my food is salty unless you are very sensitive to sodium. All of the following items are available at Gene’s Grocery store right here in Smith Center! If you are interested in making your food taste better, please get these items at Gene’s; ask for assistance if you can’t find them on your own.
- Better Than Bouillon bases (no-chicken & no-beef vegan bases now available with the other soup bases at Gene’s)
- Marmite (available now among the other yeast items at Gene’s)
- Bragg’s Aminos (Look for this with the soy sauces)
- Kitchen Bouquet (also available at Gene’s near the soup bases)
Look for recipes and video clips that will show you how to use these ingredients on Hometown Café sometime this year!
Here are the references for today’s Healthy Eating Tip:
Smithsonian Magazine (smithonianmag.com) 11/8/2013. “It’s the Umami, Stupid. Why the Truth About MSG is So Easy to Swallow. (Accessed 2/21/2020).