Have you heard of a CSA? That stands for "Community-Supported Agriculture" and it's basically a subscription to a local farm. Every week I get a box of whatever produce is ready for harvest at that time. It's a good time of year to check out what CSA's might be in your area, and one place to do that is
LocalHarvest.org.
At this time of year, it's greens galore! This is great, because not only are greens superior sources of a vast array of nutrients, but I find that eating a lot of greens helps to keep my fasting blood glucose lower (I'm pre-diabetic). This week's box has lettuce, spinach, kale, and chard! Hurray!
Photo © Ina Peters
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(with links to carb and nutrition info, plus recipes )
About.com's Local Foods Site
I'm very excited about this! It turns out that if you boil almond meal for a couple of minutes, it thickens! This is a great discovery and I'll admit to being pretty proud of this one. The texture is similar to grits or polenta, and since almonds have a mild flavor, it can be flavored in many ways. This
recipe for low-carb grits/polenta is based on classic Italian polenta with Parmesan cheese. But it can easily be made thinner or thicker -it can even be a serviceable cheese sauce! Readers are already creating variations. My favorite use so far is with greens (I wrote up the serving suggestion at the bottom of the recipe), but I have lots of ideas to experiment with.
Photo of Almond Grits/Polenta Garnished with Chives © Laura Dolson
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Around the time when I wrote about the
important study which showed no link between saturated fat and heart disease, not many people were writing about it. Since it was put online ahead of the print publication in the
American Journal of Clinical Nutrition this month, I was curious to see what the response in the media would be when the print version came out.
As expected, there was no big barrage of headlines proclaiming this study. This is interesting, because big studies about diet, especially in major scientific journals, usually dominate the health news headlines. The people who wrote about it early on were mainly Web-based. Since then, there has been a trickle of articles, some of them in the mainstream press, but very little on television. As far as I can tell, the New York Times, Chicago Tribune, and Los Angeles Times have ignored it so far.
Interestingly, some publications have written about the story, but under a different headline. For example, in the Washington Post reporter Jennifer LaRue Huget
writes about the new Atkins Diet book, and uses that to lead into writing about the study.
There were a few noteworthy exceptions to the general burying of the story:
The Wall Street Journal (story available online at the Globe and Mail), the
Boston Globe, and
Reuters provided articles where the study was the lead.
The good news is that many online publications wrote about this study, and that most of the mainstream ones who did write about it included paragraphs about the evidence for carbohydrates being more problematic than fat when it comes to heart disease.
Looking at this issue is important, partly because there is so much we don't know about saturated fats. It seems that once it was decided that "it's bad" the door to research on specific saturated fats all but closed. A couple of years ago at a
conference about saturated fat, I had the opportunity to ask a panel of experts a question. I said, "We've been talking about saturated fat as if it's all one thing. What can we say about the different effects of these fats? For example, what can you say about the medium-chain saturated fats in coconut oil?" Lipid expert Dr. Bruce German just shook his head. "It's embarrassing", he said, "how little we know".
Photo of Whipped Cream © Angelo Gilardelli
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Looking for an easy, low-carb dessert? These raspberry jello squares made with cream cheese are easy to make and are a fun dessert for only 2.5 grams of carbohydrate. If you want to go "super-simple", they can be made without the pecan crust, but I think it adds a lot to the dessert. Check out this recipe for
Low-Carb Raspberry Chiffon Squares.
Photo © Laura Dolson
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