Posted on November 23, 2006 by Gerald Pugliese
Written by Lisa Fuhrman for the September 2006 edition of Healthy Times:
Pack these healthful and tasty natural entrees in your child’s lunch box, and you will be giving them a priceless gift.
Roll-ups and vegetable wraps
Take a whole grain flat bread or tortilla and spread a favorite Fuhrman-style dressing or sauce over half of the round roll-up. Then add a thin layer of chopped or shredded raw veggies such as lettuce, tomato, avocado, onion, red cabbage, and cucumber.
Bananas
Bananas are a school lunch dream. They can be served straight, right in their own protective and fun packaging. They can be sliced or mashed onto whole-grain bread, with nut butter, apple butter, or a prune whip. Try it with raw almond butter or raw cashew butter, as they are more nutritious and healthful than roasted peanut butter. It’s even better if you add some shredded romaine lettuce to the banana-nut sandwich.
Rice-bean burgers
Healthful burgers on whole wheat buns are always accepted as a school lunch, and no other kid can tell it’s not a meat burger. Try a simple burger made with ingredients such as oats, brown rice, lentils, red onions, chopped nuts, nutritional yeast, and egg white, and some ketchup or other spices. There are hundreds of ways to make a great veggie burger.
Fresh Fruit
Few people think of fresh fruit as a main dish for children’s lunches, but fruit can be the centerpiece of the lunch. Children love bags of grapes, cherries, or strawberries. My kids even like shredded raw apple, mixed with raisins, shredded carrots, and shredded lettuce. A little sauce made with raw cashews, orange juice, lemon, and maybe some blood orange vinegar is a hit with the kids.
Nuts and seeds
Throw in a small bag of raw nuts or sunflower seeds. Ask your child if they want some extra to share with friends. My kids’ favorite is macadamia nuts, which I buy in the shell. They taste incredibly fresh and sweet when you crack them yourself, compared to the ones already shelled. I put them in a heavy clear plastic bag and lay them out flat on the floor of the garage or driveway and then hit each nut firmly with a hammer through the bag. Then, after emptying the mix of broken shells and nuts into a plate, I separate out the nuts, discarding the shells. My children love to help pick out (and eat as they go!) the nuts. It gives them something productive to do and helps make lunchtime a pleasure instead of a stressor.
Dried fruits
Dried black figs, hard bread dates, some unsweetened dried papaya or dried persimmon—what kid doesn’t love these natural candies? Make sure your children floss and brush their teeth when they come home from school. Dried fruits can stick between teeth, causing cavities. Dried fruits also can be soaked overnight in juice or nut milks and then used like jam on the side of sandwich or pita with some nut butter. Make sure the dried fruits you get are unfumigated, unsulfured and unsweetened.
Check out
Jaffe Brothers Natural Foods for quality dried fruits and nuts.
Posted on November 8, 2006 by Gerald Pugliese
Nor do people crave foods that they have not already tasted. "Think of food cravings as a sensory memory," says psychologist Marcia Pelchat of the Monell Chemical Senses Center, a research organization in Philadelphia. "You remember how good it felt the last time you had that food. You have to have experienced eating it before."
Medicine has been too depressing for me lately. I just took care of a guy with life threatening, self-inflicted stab wounds to the neck and chest a few minutes ago. He was arrested during a meth lab bust. He yelled out to the police that he didn't want to go to jail, took a knife, cut his own neck and stabbed himself in the chest. He bagged his internal jugular and put a hole in his ventricle.
It was another appearance by Ingraham's mysterious underground candy salesman, a lanky, A- and B-average senior who has been defying the Seattle Public Schools' nutrition and solicitation policies for about a year. The Seattle Times agreed not to identify him, but around Ingraham, most teachers and administrators have looked the other way, anyway. Some buy from him.
When they were about halfway through their burgers they discovered marijuana on the meat and used a field test kit confirm it. They sought treatment at a hospital while their fellow officers arrested 3 Burger King employees and charged them with possession of marijuana and aggravated battery on an officer, a felony.
The number of alcohol-related deaths last year stood at 8,386, compared to 4,144 in 1991. Death rates among middle-aged men more than doubled to 30 per 100,000 of the population.
Lentils are high in protein, cholesterol-lowering soluble fiber, iron, most B vitamins, folate, molybdenum, manganese, phosphorous, copper, thiamin and potassium. The pigment in Beluga black lentils acts like an antioxidant and helps protect against heart disease, and cancer. Cooked lentils have only 230 calories per cup.
Many of the China's environmental disasters have been blamed on companies which, counting on lax enforcement of regulations, find it easier and cheaper to dump poisons into rivers and the ground instead of treating them.
You reach a "goal weight" - How did you come by this number? What is an ideal body weight and who decides what is normal?
You decided that you are happy with your appearance.
Yet what may seem like just another routine odd job around the house is really a vigorous aerobic workout that involves prolonged repetitive motion, twisting, bending, lifting and carrying. Due to the physically strenuous nature of the work, the American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons reminds those charged with the task to take proper safety measures to avoid injury.
A new study in mice suggests that sugary drinks contribute to liver damage. For the research, German scientists either gave mice sugar-sweetened water or water containing an artificial sweetner. They found that mice with the sugar water ate less but still gained more weight and also suffered from "fatty liver." The problem was worse when a specific type of sugar - fructose - was used. According to Reuters, the scientists concluded: "These data support the hypothesis that high fructose consumption may not only (damage) the liver through over-feeding, but may be" toxic to it.
