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!

During the last NMA episode I heard about his new book coming up, The Plant-Based Athlete. If you, like me, pre-order it before June 15 you’ll get some nice digital goodies! This is free publicity, I don’t get any kickback or other kind of advantage.

In the process of looking at those goodies I stumbled across a video of Matt giving a lecture. This is an introduction to Matt’s Stress-Free Plant-Based Plan. Also known as the No Meat Athlete’s Perfect Day. Subtitle: “How to thrive without worrying about nutrients or following a meal plan.”

Let me describe how Matt’s perfect meal day looks like. I will later explain why it is so perfect!

1. Smoothie or Oatmeal

Matt starts the day with an oatmeal or a smoothie. This breakfast’s ingredients:

• Berries or other fruit
• Flaxseeds or other nut
• Greens, like spinach or broccoli
• Green/White Tea Leaves or matcha powder
• Turmeric

And of course oats if you rather have something more to fill your stomach

You can find many of Matt’s recipes here. You get many more if you pre-order his book ;-).

2. Giant salad with beans & nut-based dressing

For lunch, Matt has a big bowl of greens, throws in beans, other veggies, and tops it off with a nut-based dressing such as tahini with garlic and onions. To make this more filling Matt might add whole grains like rice, quinoa or whole wheat bread. For dessert? Fruit!

3. A grain, a green, and a bean

For the last meal of the day Matt makes a burrito, tacos, soup, pasta or curry, and tries to always work in onions or garlic. This dinner is based on the following ingredients:

• Whole grains
• Cruciferous and other (green) vegetables
• Beans
• Mushrooms
• Turmeric
• Nuts or seeds (topping or dressing)

Snacks are allowed in Matt’s diet. Think fruit, hummus with veggies or whole grains (crackers, bread). And let me add that Matt, as a 100% vegan adds supplements to his diet. Whole-food, plant-based diets, while very high in many micronutrients, typically don’t provide enough vitamins B12, D3, and DHA/EPA.

No Meat Athlete Framework

So, have you discovered a pattern in this perfect meal day? Well, there is a one!

Matt Frazier developed a framework based on reading two books: How Not to Die (Michael Greger, M.D. and Gene Stone. New York: Flatiron Books, 2015) and Super Immunity (Joel Fuhrman, M.D. New York: HarperOne, 2011). The common denominator is that to remain healthy there are eight food groups that you basically need to eat every day.

These “8 foods to eat every day” are:

1. Greens (leafy greens, cruciferous vegetables). Eat them often, raw and cooked!
2. Other vegetables, mushrooms and whole grains.
3. Berries and other fruits. Quoting Matt: “the most vibrantly colored fruits because of their strong anti-inflammatory, anti-oxidant, and anti-cancer properties. Buy them organic if possible.”
4. Flaxseeds and other nuts and seeds. These natural fats are high in Omega-3s among other good stuff.
5. Beans, that includes lentils, chick peas and other legumes. They are a food common to the world’s longest-lived cultures (see my piece on the Blue Zones).
6. Onions and garlic. Not because they taste great but because of their positive effect on reducing cancer risks.
7. Turmeric / curcumin. Thanks largely to its pigment it protect against heart disease & cancer. Others spices are beneficial as well.
8. Tea, green, white or herbal. Because it’s high in antioxidants.

Good to know as well: Matt warns that some of these foods may not be good for you. Turmeric may cause pain for people will gall stones. I you’re on blood thinning medication, eating an abundance of greens could require that your doctor up your dosage to prevent blood clots. So as always: there are exceptions and it’s recommended you consult your physician if you suffer specific conditions.

As the subtitle mentioned earlier indicates: if you manage to work these eight food groups in your daily diet, you don’t have to worry about “am I getting enough proteins?” (or other nutrients).

As always, I hope this inspires you. Go for a run and eat healthy!

After this morning’s run I wanted to eat a healthy breakfast that would be ready in a few minutes. Looked in our fridge and decided to put together a healthy bread spread based on the ingredients featured in the picture above: fresh spinash leaves, grilled eggplant, tomatoes, red pepper, black olives, tabasco.

Started by chopping the spinash leaves, and proceeded to do the same for the other ingredients.

I just proceeded by mixing and, using a spoon and fork, created an ugly-looking but – as it turns out – delicious spread! Then tasted it, added tabasco, pepper, salt, a bit of oil and vinegar… done!

The result: a delicious and healthy slide of bread for breakfast!

Hope this gives you some ideas. Please share your own recipes with me!