Category: Nutrition
-
Nutrients Intro
Runner’s World recently posted this nice roundup of nutrients found in food and some of the foods that have them. It’s not exhaustive — it’s just a nice visual for thinking about how common foods can help keep us healthier. Take a look before your next trip to the store!
-
Fast Food Versus Commercial Sports Foods
Lou Schuler walks us through a sexy new study in “Why You Shouldn’t Eat a Big Mac After Today’s Workout.” The study compared commercial recovery foods, like Gatorade and PowerBars, to a rather paltry-sounding spread from McDonald’s (including small fries, and not claiming any syrup for the hotcakes). They structured the combinations of foods to…
-
Orthorexia and Other Imbalances
Orthorexia is a term recently coined (by physician Steven Bratman, who has since reconsidered his original message) to refer, most simply, to people whose rigid dietary rules are harmful to them. People with orthorexia may be preoccupied with the purity of their food (or of their bodies). Depending on the extent of their rules, they…
-
Low-Carb Blues
Carb cycling means eating different amounts of carbohydrate day to day — a common pattern is high-fat/low-carbs on rest days and high-carbs/low-fat on “training days.” Many people find it easier to eat fewer calories to support a fat-loss goal if they eat less carbohydrate, but tough workouts may feel too tough when they eat low…
-
All Calories Are Equal, but Some Are More Equal Than Others
The human body uses energy and nutrients from foods to do work and to build and repair tissues. If it has extra calories, it stores them as fat. This is normal operations — humans evolved in conditions of modest food security, so it should not surprise us that we are descended from people who made…
-
It’s a Bird! It’s a Plane! It’s Superfood!
“Superfood” is a marketing term, generally applied to expensive ingredients or foods that are not common in the Western diet, like chia seeds or acai berries. Typical claims for “superfoods” include rapid weight loss and the prevention or cure of disease. The term makes a lot of experts in nutrition crazy, because it encourages magical…
-
Creative Slow Cooker Meals
If you have a crock pot or slow cooker, you probably already know it makes a great stew, but you can get a little more creative, too. Keep some single-serving containers on hand, and you can freeze most of the recipe for an easy sack lunch or quick dinner option anytime. The photo above is…
-
Eating o’ the green
St Patrick’s day is tomorrow. Why not celebrate with some green vegetables? Vegetarian Diet Tips offers a big long list of green vegetables, including some old favorites and some true exotics. Need suggestions for cooking them? Yumi’s Vegetable Cheat Sheet has you covered. Image by Ruth Hartnup
-
What Makes Food Delicious?
Fat. Sugar. Salt. But what if you’re trying to improve the nutritional value of your food, and maybe try some options that don’t rely on fat, sugar, and salt to be palatable? One of the best ways to jazz up food is spices. And few (possibly no) traditions have as sophisticated a spice palate as…