Full Plate, Glass Half Full, Orange Dish

This entry is short. This week my plate was figuratively a bit too full, hence too little time to write a well-structured piece. I am happy, though, to share some nuggets that hopefully fuel your interest.

A Plate Full of Knowledge

Those three items are keeping me intellectually busy:

• Two students in Nutrition & Health from the Wageningen University & Research, Eva Everloo and Ella Stephens, have produced an excellent online course on EdX – “Plant Based Diets: Food for a Sustainable Future”. I will share some of their wisdom and insights later. The course is now closed for enrollment but I reckon it will reopen one day.
• The new book “The Plant Based Athlete” finally reached my home. I’m on chapter 3, “It’s time to have the protein talk”. This book is well written, I highly recommend it already. It’s exciting as it promises to help you make a personalized choice, regardless of what your motivation and fitness levels are.
• I picked up a new hobby: reading labels on packages in the supermarket. The webinar “Food as Medicine”, in Dutch (“Voeding als Medicijn”) organized by Ivo Houben of How2BeHealthy, among other things, how to recognize healthy ingredients on food labels.

Glass Half Full: Protein Transition

Whether it’s DNA, karma or education, I have had to train myself to take a positive outlook on life. It is sometimes challenging to discover a silver lining in the flow of negative messages surrounding us. I choose to see the three aforementioned nuggets of knowledge as anecdotal evidence that the world is warming up (no, not talking about the climate) to the idea of a protein transition.

We need to eat less meat and adopt a plant-based diet. For the sake of our health, that of our planet and – yes, these are big words – the survival of the human race. Obviously I suffer, like everyone else, a condition called “confirmation bias”: I look for evidence that reinforces my convictions.

Hence my pledge to back my standpoint with objective evidence. Thanks to the sources I mentioned before I will come back to that!

Orange Dish

In the spirit of the European Football Championship (Soccer) and as the Netherlands are playing tonight I’m happy to close this piece with an orange dish. Thanks to Boerschappen for this “Oranje AVG”, it’s delicious. It is yummy and it is based on locally sourced ingredients, as always with Boerschappen.

• Just mix small potatoes with oil, pepper, salt and paprika powder and bake them in your oven for 30 minutes.
• Grill orange cauliflower (it’s extra full of vitamin A) for a few minutes in a pan and add them to the potatoes for the last 10 minutes and put a little (Dutch) cheese on top to melt.
• In a pan saute some garlic and onions and bake mushrooms and/or a vegetarian burger in a bit of butter (learned from Ivo: to bake, real butter is beter than olive oil).

Voilà: an orange potatoe-vegetable-burger dish. Full of healthy carbohydrates, proteins and fat and micronutrients. My photograph doesn’t do the dish justice. It really is delicious!

Based on a this dish, here is a reminder of what constitutes healthy foods, based on the Canadian government’s food guide.

Source: https://food-guide.canada.ca/en/

Enjoy, and stay tuned!