OSC:Wellness brings you “quick tip” changes for healthier living. A more balanced sense of wellness can come One Small Change at a time.
This week’s tip is from Jill Weisenberger, Registered Dietitian and author of several nutrition books. She shares how to activate and stabilize garlic’s health-boosting compounds. You can find more simple tips like this in Jill’s second book The Overworked Person’s Guide to Better Nutrition.
Chop garlic 10 minutes before cooking. Garlic likely decreases the risk of colorectal cancer and stomach cancer. It’s also studied for possible roles in heart disease prevention. Chopping or crushing garlic activates its natural health-boosting compounds. But heat instantly deactivates them. Allow the chopped or crushed garlic to sit at room temperature for at least 10 minutes before heating to stabilize the disease fighters.
OSC:Wellness brings you “quick tip” changes for healthier living. A more balanced sense of wellness can come One Small Change at a time.
This One Small Change tip is from Torey Armul, a Registered Dietitian and spokesperson for the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics. She encourages us to plan ahead for better wellness.
Create a plan for what you’ll eat tomorrow, and when. Preparing and planning ahead is the key to success in any endeavor, including health and weight loss. Take a proactive role by creating a meal schedule, packing your foods ahead of time and setting personal reminders. Without a plan, it’s easy to lose track of your goals and lose control over your food environment (being surrounded by only unhealthy options, for example) and your appetite (going too long between meals builds the desire for unhealthy foods).
—Torey Armul, MS, RD, CSSD Registered Dietitian, spokesperson for the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics
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Looking in the wrong place for nutrition information can cause you to make unnecessary or harmful diet changes, give up foods you don’t need to, and waste money on special supplements and products.
How do you know what information you can trust, whether online, from friends, or in the news?
Join me in the Diabetes Smart Online Symposium to learn how to determine whether a source is credible, and get ideas for where to turn for accurate nutrition information.
Registered Dietitian Nutritionist (RDN) Day is almost over, but that isn’t going to stop me from posting about it! 😉
Dietitians are food and nutrition experts who have at least a bachelor’s level education along with supervised training in multiple areas of dietetics, have passed a national exam, and participate in continuing education every year.
giving you tips about eating for improved athletic performance,
suggesting flavorful additions to make sure your healthy food isn’t boring food, and
helping you figure out how to enjoyably treat yourself to special foods – without guilt or bingeing.
Dietitians also work in many other ways, including fighting for anti-hunger causes, researching nutrition treatments for diseases like cancers or heart disease, and working with farmers to help create sustainable food systems.
If you would like to find a dietitian to help you on your health journey, you can use the Academy’s Find a Registered Dietitian Nutritionist feature, where you can search by location and specialty.
Do you know a dietitian? Please thank them for the work they do. 🙂
November is American Diabetes Month. It is also the month of Thanksgiving, which is known for food in abundance, especially food full of starchy carbohydrates.
What Thanksgiving foods have fewer carbohydrates? What recipes can be changed or substituted so people with diabetes don’t feel like they can only eat one bite of the rest of the family’s food?
The American Diabetes Association has a large list of free diabetes-friendly recipes for holidays and throughout the year. Another good sources of recipes is the USDA SNAP-Ed recipe finder (although these vary in carbohydrate content), and they even give information on cost (per recipe and per serving). I’ve pulled out a few examples here, with carbohydrates (in grams per serving). You can go to each recipe to find the rest of the nutrition information.
general homemade pumpkin pie (average is about 40 g carb in 1/8 of pie, click to see source)
What foods have carbohydrates?
In general, carbohydrates are found in sweets and desserts; grains and grain-based foods (pastas, rice, bread, crackers, etc); beans, peas, and legumes; milk and yogurt; and fruits. Carbohydrates are not bad. We need them to survive. However, eating too many can be harmful, especially for a person with diabetes. The amount of carbohydrates we should eat depends on what we are doing and our own bodies. A dietitian (or other members of your diabetes healthcare team) can help you figure out how many carbohydrates you should eat.
Other tips for a healthy Thanksgiving
In addition to new recipes, people with diabetes (and everyone at the table) can practice moderation and mindful eating to help reduce the amount of carbohydrates (and calories and fat, etc) that they eat during the holidays.
Moderation means being aware of how much we eat, thinking about portion sizes, and eating slowly to allow our bodies to realize that we’re actually eating.
Mindful eating is being aware of and enjoying whatever we’re eating by thinking about how the food tastes, smells, and feels as we eat it.
It may also be helpful to eat a small snack an hour or two before you sit down for the Thanksgiving meal, to avoid excessive hunger and filling your plate with more food than you need. Snacks like cut vegetables, a small handful of nuts, or a piece of cheese are good choices.
One more tip to keep in mind: you can’t save up your carbohydrates and eat them all at once on Thanksgiving. Rollover minutes may work for cell phone plans, but there is no such thing as a rollover carbohydrates meal plan. You diabetes medical team should have told you an estimate of grams of carbohydrates per meal, or given you a number of carbohydrate exchanges per meal. Stick with this plan, even during Thanksgiving and other holiday meals.
If you need help figuring out how many carbohydrates you should eat each meal or want help with eating well with diabetes, including tips on portion sizes, meal planning, and eating out, you can use this Find a Registered Dietitian tool to find an RD near you.
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As an introduction to who I am and this site, you can read the About page.
For now, I want to share one of the posts that I have written at Nutrition Nuts and Bolts. It describes what a Registered Dietitian (RD) is and the requirements that need to be met in order to be called an RD.
This is important to me because my goal is to become an RD. Understandably, in our acronym-saturated language, not everyone knows what that is, so this post should help with that and tell you a little about the track people take to get there.
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Shelly Najjar, MPH, RDN 