Color It Bright

Let’s say that one of your New Year’s Resolutions was to be healthier. It is now three months down the road. How is that resolution going? Maybe you made some changes, but now you’ve slipped back to old habits.

Change is difficult, especially if you are trying to make big changes. And it may be unclear what would be the best way to change. So let’s start small with a simple dietary change. This change is called Color It Bright.

The biggest mistake that most individuals make when cooking at home or eating out is to have a meal where all or most of the food is in a similar, boring color palette of white, cream, tan, brown. A palette of that color scheme often means fried food (high fat) is present. But the biggest problem is that the nutrient content of such a meal is poor.

For instance, look at this picture of a typical restaurant southern fried chicken dinner. Note that the color scheme is blah: brown fried chicken and fried okra; brown pinto beans; cream/brown corn bread; and creamy coleslaw. BORING!!

Fried chicken dinner with pinto beans, fried okra, coleslaw, and cornbread.

This meal will fill you up and will provide you with some protein, but it is high in fat and low in vitamins, minerals, and phytonutrients that are needed for good health. If most of your meals are in the blah, boring color palette, this needs to change.

The best meals are those where two-thirds to three-quarters of the foods you eat are brightly-colored fruits and vegetables: the deeper, the richer the color, the better. If you cook/boil your vegetables until they are a pale imitation of their fresh or frozen state, then you are cooking out the good stuff. It is best to eat fruits and vegetables raw or steamed.

Some of you may be saying, well I have a pretty colorful meal because I eat yellow corn with my chicken. Sorry, but corn is not a fruit or vegetable. It is a grain, so it doesn’t count towards the two-thirds to three-quarters total of brightly-colored, nutrient-dense fruits and vegetables. Nor does yellow cheese count as a colorful food. This is just a saturated-fat version of white milk.

The picture below provides you with a better example of healthy eating. Note that about half of the food on the foil is brightly colored. The other half will be grilled tilapia: an excellent low-fat source of protein, which makes the 50/50 balance acceptable.

For meat and potatoes fans, there are also healthier, colorful options such as shown below. In place of nutrient-poor white potatoes, substitute bright orange sweet potatoes. Make sure the meat portion is only one-third or less of the meal. Add another brightly-colored vegetable, and you are good to go.

Salads are an excellent way to get lots of fruits and vegetables into your meal, but only if richly-colored leaves are used. As noted above, creamy coleslaw is a big no-no. This is also true of salads primarily based on iceberg lettuce. Most leaves of iceberg lettuce are so pale that they contain only the idea of green, not the reality, as is obvious in this salad shown below. Yes, it does include a bit of a bright spot with the few tomato pieces; but otherwise, it is strongly tilted towards the boring end of the eating palette.

On the other hand, the salad shown below hits the right, bright spot for dining pleasure. The leaves are richly colored. There are broccoli florets and cherry tomatoes. And only about one-quarter of the salad is the pale tilapia. You could add some julienned carrots for even more color and nutrition.

Here is another excellent choice: Thai chicken salad which is three-quarters spring greens and spinach and one-quarter grilled chicken.

What about dessert? Pink frosting on confetti cake doesn’t count. Sorry. But you can still make your sweet tooth happy with a beautiful bowl of mixed berries; and get tons of great nutrients in the bargain.

Let’s not forget breakfast. Most of you probably consider breakfast a bowl of cereal with milk. Not a good color scheme. You may add fruit to the cereal, which is better. But the fruit needs to be at least 50% of what is in the bowl to make it a good balance. Or, you could have 25% fruit mixed with cereal, and also eat half a grapefruit.

For those not into cereal, a better option overall is an omelet made with the entire egg, not just the whites. There are lots of good nutrients that your body needs in the yolk. The spinach omelet shown below packs a good and colorful nutrient punch, but could be even better if tomatoes were included.

So make the easy change to eating nutrient-rich meals:

Color It Bright and you will be Eating Right!

Gut Check

Over the past few weeks there has been a lot of media coverage on the new guidelines for mammograms and breast self exams. Analysis of scientific research indicates that mammograms can do more harm than good. This is not what anti-breast cancer crusaders like the Susan G. Komen Foundation want to hear. Women are worried and confused because they have been told that they must have mammograms to detect and prevent breast cancer. Now the scientists are saying that is not the case and that, in fact, they can be counter-productive.

For every women correctly diagnosed with cancer after a mammogram there are significantly more women who endure the trauma of a false positive reading. They have no disease but undergo what turn out to be needless breast biopsies where they run the risk of a lung puncture from a poorly-performed needle biopsy. Unless a woman has a family/genetic history of breast cancer, the odds of her getting it prior to age 70 are actually quite low.

No one wants to be the one to tell the average 40-year-old woman without a family history of breast cancer to stop getting mammograms and then find out 3 years later that she developed breast cancer. But, again, the odds of her developing it are low. The cancer foundations and some health professionals appear to be operating under the “better safe than sorry” mantra while ignoring the fact that false positives can also lead to a sorry situation.

In 2002, Gerd Gigerenzer, author of Calculated Risks: How to Know When Numbers Deceive You, pointed out that the general public and many medical professionals do not really understand statistics. This lack of understanding leads them to judge inaccurately the actual risks and benefits of health screenings.

According to Gigerenzer, the vast majority of physicians who participated in the research described in his book cannot accurately determine risks and benefits when these are presented in the form of probabilities. (e.g. There is a 25% risk reduction in death from breast cancer with mammography.) Only when the results are presented in the form of natural frequencies do the risks and benefits become clear. (e.g. 1000 women got mammograms each year for 10 years and 1000 women did not. At the end of 10 years, 3 women in the first group and 4 women in the second group died of breast cancer.) If we and our physicians cannot accurately determine risks and benefits when they are presented as probabilities, we could be unnecessarily risking our health. How many of the 997 women who got mammograms each year for 10 years also had false positives during that time? How many experienced the trauma, pain, and potential negative outcomes of the additional testing required to rectify that false positive?

Rather than relying on mammograms (and other types of screenings) to safeguard their health, it would be better for women in their 40s and 50s to actively employ measures that we know can help prevent cancer. These measures include eating plenty of richly-colored fruits and vegetables; eliminating dairy and other saturated fats; getting plenty of exercise; sleeping around 8 hours each night; and taking a minimum supplement of 1000 IU/day of vitamin D3. More vitamin D supplementation may be required to get the blood levels of 25 OHD to the optimal level of 50 ng/mL.

By following these preventive measures all women, even those with a family history of breast cancer, will reduce their odds of developing the disease. And those without a family history will be able to ignore their guts and go with their brains in accepting the scientific data which states that we in the United States have been over-using mammograms. Look at the natural frequency data. Mammograms haven’t been as much help as we thought. Eat right, exercise, sleep well, and take vitamin D. That’s where the science is.