LIFELONG LEARNING
Many people would like to be healthy but just don’t know how to cook balanced and delicious meals for themselves. Lifelong Learning SMTX’s current lecture series is a chance to learn just that. Tina Valdez will be making healthy cooking easier from 6 to 8 p.m. every Thursday until March 27 in the Multi Purpose Room of the San Marcos Activity Center. A recent lecture focused on ways to improve diet to mitigate or prevent diabetes.
Valdez started the class by playing an informational video by Dr. Neal Barnard, who wrote a book on reversing diabetes. He said diabetes is when the body doesn’t convert sugars into energy for various processes. There are three types: Type 1 Diabetes — pancreas doesn’t make insulin, Type 2 Diabetes — pancreas makes insulin but cells don’t respond to it normally, and gestational diabetes — similar to type 2 and occurs in pregnancy.
Tina Valdez
“Sugar, that is glucose, is the body’s fuel. In the same way that gasoline powers your car, glucose powers your muscles, your brain, all the rest of you,” Barnard said. “It comes from sugary foods and starchy food and as it enters the blood, your pancreas makes insulin. It’s a hormone that acts really like a key and lets the glucose from the blood pass into the cells of the body and in diabetes, that system isn’t working. Somehow, insulin is not able to get the glucose into the cells very effectively.”
Barnard said the best diet for those with diabetes, and in general, is a vegan diet, which doesn’t use any animal products and is filled with whole grains, vegetables, fruits and legumes.
“They are not only the slimmest group, they are actually the only group whose BMI [Body Mass Index] is smack in the middle of the healthy range,” he said. “Now look at diabetes. Meat eaters have the highest rates, the vegans have the lowest rates. And as animal products are added into the diet, the higher the diabetes problems; as animal products are taken out of the diet, the lower the [instances of ] diabetes.”
Barnard did a study and found that those eating a vegan diet were able to eat as much as they wanted and still reduced their A1C to a higher degree than those not on a vegan diet that reduced calorie intake. A1C is a blood test that measures blood sugar over a longer period of time and not just in the moment.
He said in addition to removing animal products, it is wise to also reduce the use of oil.
“Fat is the densest source of calories. A gram of fat has nine calories. A gram is about a 28th of an ounce. Now, in contrast, a gram of carbohydrate has only four calories,” Barnard said. “And it doesn’t matter what kind of fat it is, there’s nine calories in a gram.”
Barnard said the third step is to choose foods with a low glycemic index, which are foods that make the blood sugar rise more slowly.
“First of all, table sugar is high GI. Not a big surprise. Fruits are good. They give you a sweet taste with a surprisingly low glycemic index. White and wheat breads are high GI. Rye and pumpernickel are lower. White baking potatoes [have a] high glycemic index. Sweet potatoes are lower. Most cold cereals are high glycemic index, especially if they have a toy inside. … Bran cereals are better,” Barnard said. “Beans, all their relatives, like lentils, peas, they’re always low glycemic index, a great choice. Green leafy vegetables too; consider them all low. Now pasta — spaghetti — …[has a] low glycemic index, and that’s because pasta is compacted, unlike, say, bread. So the pasta actually digests rather slowly, and it releases its natural sugars only very gradually. Barley, Bulgar, parboiled rice — that’s converted rice — they all have a low GI.”
Filling up on fiber is also beneficial.
“Fiber has effectively no calories, but it fills you up and it tricks your brain into thinking you’re really full. So every time you eat vegetables or fruits or whole grains or legumes, you’re eating fiber,” Barnard said. “On average, every 14 grams of fiber that you add to your diet cuts your calorie intake by about 10%. Now, on the other hand, … meat-derived foods don’t have any fiber, so if you get all the calories with no fiber to trigger satiety or to turn down your appetite, you get every calorie they hold.”
Valdez said it’s all about keeping food simple.
“Also, [it’s important to be] avoiding animal products, especially to help with our cholesterol levels and so forth,” Valdez said. “We can get plenty of protein just by eating our legumes, our greens and stuff a lot more than we realize, and it can keep us fuller longer as well.”
Valdez gave several food recommendations that followed these rules. She talked about making your own dressing without oil, cutting potatoes in chunks and rinsing excess starch, using nutritional yeast — which has Vitamin B12 — to make cheese, using wheat Jasmine rice, making vegetable broth to substitute for meat broth and making your own almond milk. She also discussed minimizing salt intake and using fresh herbs for flavor instead.
“Trying to find a salt that doesn’t have metals in it is kind of hard because it’s coming from the ground,” Valdez said. “That’s another reason why we need to minimize the amount of salt we have in our food because then we’re putting in toxins in our body with the salt, unfortunately.”
Valdez made a tasty edamame salad for the class as a good example of a meal that is vegan with a low glycemic index and high fiber that was cooked without oil.
“It’s just frozen edamame, and I had my peppers frozen, so that created moisture in my pan as I was letting it cook,” she said. “Then I put my onions into sauté. Onions will have their own juices as well. Then threw in the corn. And then once it was all together, then … [I added] the basil and the diced tomatoes, and then just put that together. And then I chilled it.”
This Thursday’s course is on How Foods Fight Heart Disease.
