Prime Time - Jane Fonda [46]
Essential Things to Add
Besides reducing our intake of these five destructive things, here is the number one positive thing to do: Increase your intake of fruits, vegetables, and whole grains.
We ought to base the bulk of our diets on fruits; vegetables; nuts; legumes, including lentils, peas, and beans; whole grains, such as brown rice, bulgur, and buckwheat; and whole grain products, such as whole wheat bread, multigrain and bran cereals, and non-instant oatmeal.
These foods should make up 50 to 60 percent or more of our daily calories. You don’t have to become a vegetarian, but we all ought to move much more in that direction.
Unfortunately, many people eat far too few fruits and vegetables, and the grain foods they choose are usually made with white flour. That’s a prescription for gastrointestinal disease, heart disease, diabetes, and maybe cancer, according to a preponderance of scientific research.
Five Basic Food Groups
These five food groups should provide our basic nutrition: 1) breads and cereals; 2) fruits and vegetables; 3) dairy products; 4) proteins; and 5) heart-healthy fats. Getting an appropriate daily amount of each of these is the key.
BREADS AND CEREALS
This category includes all of the whole grains (rice, barley, millet, cracked wheat, corn), whole grain breads and cereals (non-instant oatmeal, bran, etc.), and whole grain crackers, pasta, and tortillas. This food group should provide the primary daily source of our energy.
Just to be clear, by whole grains I am talking about foods that contain all the germ and fiber from the grains, not just the starch. Here’s why this is important: Before grains are refined, they contain the bran and the germ, which provide a wide range of nutrients, such as vitamin A and the B vitamins (thiamine, niacin, riboflavin, and pantothenic acid); minerals (calcium, magnesium, potassium, phosphorous, sodium, selenium, and iron); protein; essential oils; and phytonutrients, including antioxidants (the free-radical fighters), which appear to promote health. They also contain small amounts of sodium or sugar and a lot of fiber. When flour is refined, however, the nutrient-rich germ and the fiber-rich cell walls, the bran, of the grain are removed—and fed to livestock!
Fiber-Rich Foods
Fiber is found in whole grains, beans, peas, seeds, nuts (raw and unsalted is best!), lentils, fresh fruits and vegetables, and sprouted seeds such as soybeans, mung beans, and alfalfa, which you can sprout yourself at home. Besides being high in fiber, these foods are packed with vitamins, minerals, and phytonutrients. Most plant foods are little factories of nutrients. When these phytochemicals are taken into your body’s tissues, they may have health-promoting properties. Almost everyone—including, probably, you—does not consume enough fiber-rich foods and, therefore, dietary fiber.
Not all fibers are the same. According to the excellent Nutrition Action Healthletter, soluble fiber from oats, barley, and fresh fruits and vegetables can lower a person’s cholesterol and reduce their risk of heart disease.1 On the other hand, insoluble fiber, like that from whole wheat (especially the bran part), is not broken down by bacteria in the gut and helps with bowel regularity. All high-fiber foods break down into glucose more slowly than simple or refined foods do. This means that they provide more sustained energy over a greater length of time than refined grains like white bread or white rice (or sugars) can. (Which is why my breakfasts of oatmeal helped me perform well on tests as a youngster.) Dietary fiber is also important for people who want to lose weight, because it helps make meals more filling.
Highly refined carbohydrates like white flour are low in fiber; whole wheat bread—the kind that contains the wheat germ and the bran—has three times as much fiber as white bread. The Dietary Guidelines for Americans recommends 14 grams of fiber per 1,000 calories consumed, so that’s about 22 to 39 grams of fiber every day, depending on your caloric