People food for thought
In previous entry titled "Cooking with fresh ingredients ", I wrote about food made from scratch with fresh ingredients taste better and better for your body.
Recently, I was reading through local news paper and read about food products that looks "Healthy food" can be not so healthy when you read the food label.
According to the news paper article, sometimes when you buy foods, packaging can be deceiving. I think it is true, both for people food and dog food. Whether food is for you or for your dogs/cats, reading food label is very important. I feel that people tend to add more and more ingredients to the food simply taste fine "as is", along with preservatives, fillers, coloring,sugar etc...
Article writer, Heidi, picked 7 products that appeared to be healthy on package but in reality, when you read the label, it is not that healthy in her article. Can you name a few products that may appear to be healthy to eat but not so much in reality?
Here are some of the 7 products that were talked about in her article.
#1 Apple sauce
Eating fruits and vegetable seems healthy but when you think about how apple sauce is made, your perception towards apple sauce may change. Apple sauce is made by apples that were peeled,cooked to mush, and some products add corn syrup to enhance the flavor.
Article recommends to eat apple "as is". I agree that eating an apple "as is" is much healthier than sugary apple sauce. And raw apple provides Vitamin A,Vitamin C, calcium, iron, fiber etc
When I was a kid, my lunch my mother made for me to bring to school always had fruits. When she put apple as a fruits, she cut it like rabbits. My friends showed interests in looking my bunny apple slices.
Slicing apple like bunny is easy. Take a whole apple, cut to 8th. Then remove the core by making slit from both side. Then, carefully, move knife under the peel to about 3rd length, remove the knife from under the peel, and make pointy slits to make the peel looks like bunny ears. Voila! You just made a bunny apple! You can make it with Asian pear too.
Asian pear bunny
Have you tried Asian pear? It is crisp and very tasty. Try and see if you like it.You can find them at local grocery stores.
Apple tends to change color as it contact with air when left out. To avoid this color change, here is what my mother taught me to do. Before cutting an apple, pour water into small bowl, add sprinkle of table salt. After slicing an apple, dip the apple into salt water very quickly and it will stay the same color. I know some people put dash of lemon juice over fruits to keep the fruits from changing color but I tend to use my mother's method.
When whatever recipes you like to follow required Apple sauce, you can make one from scratch beforehand or just add grated apples along with dash of lemon juice and adjust sweetness with brown sugar during the cooking process.
#2 Organic Granola
I thought Granola is rolled oats, nuts, fruits and healthy choice of snacks, but again, when you turns the package over and read the food label, and despite the short ingredients list, second ingredients comes sugar.
Article recommends to cook Oatmeal.
#3 Honey Roasted Turkey breast
Turkey is lean meat but article suggest to check the amount of sodium used for the products. It says that honey and smoked variety, has high sodium content. Also lunch meat variety tends to have sodium phosphate, Sodium nitrate as preservatives for longer shelf life.
Article suggest to try nitrate free lunch meat. I think if you cook roast beef or roast chicken or something similar, left over meat can be good for making sand which out of it.
#4 Fruits flavored yogurt
Yogurt has good bacteria for your guts, namely L. acidophilus and other cultures. But flavored yogurt is high in sugar, and some brands has more sugar than one brand of brownie.
Article suggest to try plain Yogurt because it has no added sugar in it.
Yogurt has many use. If you eat it as snacks, then, adding slice of fresh fruits is one way to enjoy yogurt. Or, you can make your own jam and add a little bit of home made jam to yogurt and add fresh fruits.
Making jam is easy to make. My mother used to make strawberry jam a lot. Just cook down the strawberry in the pan along with dash of lemon juice and add a bit of white table sugar.That is all there to it. It was kept in fridge and ran out very quick because it was tasty.
Or, you can make fruit flavored frozen yogurt. Just whip heavy cream along with 1-2 tbs of white sugar, add a bit of yogurt, add mushed uncooked raw strawberry and mixed it into heavy cream and yogurt and freeze.
You can also make smoothie with yogurt. Just add frozen fruits,add yogurt,add dash of lemon juice and a bit of honey and puree.
If you love baking, you can use yogurt instead of milk and cup cakes / muffin comes out soft moist texture to it. If you want to make Greek tzatziki sauce, just puree cucumber,garlic, yogurt along with salt pepper.. and depending on your preference, you add a bit of mint or dash of lemon along with dill.. Tzatziki sauce is especially taste good with lamb burger for this sauce.
In the past, back in Japan, I used to make yogurt pasta. It is just yogurt, salt and pepper, dash of olive oil mixed well and pour over spaghetti. I have not made it for long time and I am not sure if I still like them or not, but it was something I used to make a lot.
So, even if you do not eat Yogurt as snack a lot, there are many many ways to use it. I always have one big tab of Plain Yogurt in fridge and it is staple item at our house.
To read a full article from Free Lance Star newspaper, please click here .
What are your healthy snacks?
Recently, I was reading through local news paper and read about food products that looks "Healthy food" can be not so healthy when you read the food label.
According to the news paper article, sometimes when you buy foods, packaging can be deceiving. I think it is true, both for people food and dog food. Whether food is for you or for your dogs/cats, reading food label is very important. I feel that people tend to add more and more ingredients to the food simply taste fine "as is", along with preservatives, fillers, coloring,sugar etc...
Article writer, Heidi, picked 7 products that appeared to be healthy on package but in reality, when you read the label, it is not that healthy in her article. Can you name a few products that may appear to be healthy to eat but not so much in reality?
Here are some of the 7 products that were talked about in her article.
#1 Apple sauce
Eating fruits and vegetable seems healthy but when you think about how apple sauce is made, your perception towards apple sauce may change. Apple sauce is made by apples that were peeled,cooked to mush, and some products add corn syrup to enhance the flavor.
Article recommends to eat apple "as is". I agree that eating an apple "as is" is much healthier than sugary apple sauce. And raw apple provides Vitamin A,Vitamin C, calcium, iron, fiber etc
When I was a kid, my lunch my mother made for me to bring to school always had fruits. When she put apple as a fruits, she cut it like rabbits. My friends showed interests in looking my bunny apple slices.
Slicing apple like bunny is easy. Take a whole apple, cut to 8th. Then remove the core by making slit from both side. Then, carefully, move knife under the peel to about 3rd length, remove the knife from under the peel, and make pointy slits to make the peel looks like bunny ears. Voila! You just made a bunny apple! You can make it with Asian pear too.
Asian pear bunny
Have you tried Asian pear? It is crisp and very tasty. Try and see if you like it.You can find them at local grocery stores.
Apple tends to change color as it contact with air when left out. To avoid this color change, here is what my mother taught me to do. Before cutting an apple, pour water into small bowl, add sprinkle of table salt. After slicing an apple, dip the apple into salt water very quickly and it will stay the same color. I know some people put dash of lemon juice over fruits to keep the fruits from changing color but I tend to use my mother's method.
When whatever recipes you like to follow required Apple sauce, you can make one from scratch beforehand or just add grated apples along with dash of lemon juice and adjust sweetness with brown sugar during the cooking process.
#2 Organic Granola
I thought Granola is rolled oats, nuts, fruits and healthy choice of snacks, but again, when you turns the package over and read the food label, and despite the short ingredients list, second ingredients comes sugar.
Article recommends to cook Oatmeal.
#3 Honey Roasted Turkey breast
Turkey is lean meat but article suggest to check the amount of sodium used for the products. It says that honey and smoked variety, has high sodium content. Also lunch meat variety tends to have sodium phosphate, Sodium nitrate as preservatives for longer shelf life.
Article suggest to try nitrate free lunch meat. I think if you cook roast beef or roast chicken or something similar, left over meat can be good for making sand which out of it.
#4 Fruits flavored yogurt
Yogurt has good bacteria for your guts, namely L. acidophilus and other cultures. But flavored yogurt is high in sugar, and some brands has more sugar than one brand of brownie.
Article suggest to try plain Yogurt because it has no added sugar in it.
Yogurt has many use. If you eat it as snacks, then, adding slice of fresh fruits is one way to enjoy yogurt. Or, you can make your own jam and add a little bit of home made jam to yogurt and add fresh fruits.
Making jam is easy to make. My mother used to make strawberry jam a lot. Just cook down the strawberry in the pan along with dash of lemon juice and add a bit of white table sugar.That is all there to it. It was kept in fridge and ran out very quick because it was tasty.
Or, you can make fruit flavored frozen yogurt. Just whip heavy cream along with 1-2 tbs of white sugar, add a bit of yogurt, add mushed uncooked raw strawberry and mixed it into heavy cream and yogurt and freeze.
You can also make smoothie with yogurt. Just add frozen fruits,add yogurt,add dash of lemon juice and a bit of honey and puree.
If you love baking, you can use yogurt instead of milk and cup cakes / muffin comes out soft moist texture to it. If you want to make Greek tzatziki sauce, just puree cucumber,garlic, yogurt along with salt pepper.. and depending on your preference, you add a bit of mint or dash of lemon along with dill.. Tzatziki sauce is especially taste good with lamb burger for this sauce.
In the past, back in Japan, I used to make yogurt pasta. It is just yogurt, salt and pepper, dash of olive oil mixed well and pour over spaghetti. I have not made it for long time and I am not sure if I still like them or not, but it was something I used to make a lot.
So, even if you do not eat Yogurt as snack a lot, there are many many ways to use it. I always have one big tab of Plain Yogurt in fridge and it is staple item at our house.
To read a full article from Free Lance Star newspaper, please click here .
What are your healthy snacks?
I love asian pears! My mother (also japanese) always gave me fruit, and my friends in school never got fruit in their lunches. Even today, with every meal, she always has a bowl of cut fruit. My dog loves apple sauce -- we buy unsweetened organic apple sauce and freeze it inside a kong. Do you think this is okay to give him? Sometimes he gets little pieces of apples, but never the core.
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I love Asian pears, Fuji Apple, which I am accustomed to eating when growing up. I think they are crispier than American pears,American apples. I did not grew up here in the states, and I do not know what are in the brown bag/lunch box for many kids at school. However, I just watched TV show called "Food Revolution" the other day where they showed what kids with brown bag had. It was jaw dropping because one kid had 3 bags or so of lunch in the brown bag but all junk food such as chips, jellybeans etc, other kid brought store bought ready to eat lunch meal? Maybe if many more people try to eat fresh food, what are in the brown bag/lunch box could change and it might have fruits, vegetable..dishes their mother made from scratch for them just like the bento box I am accustomed to see.
I have never had applesauce. So, I do not know what are on food label.I just googled one company that makes organic unsweetened applesauce here, and you can see nutrition label although it does not show ingredients list.When you click on nutrition fact clickable, you get to see sugar content on the products. I see that 1 cup of apple sauce has 21g of sugar. When you look up raw apple without skin, one cup slice here, you see 11g of sugar per cup of raw apple without skin. Regular applesauce seems to have 25g or so of sugar with the same company's products, so, compare with that products, unsweetened applesauce has less sugar in it but, it has more sugar than raw apple sugar. I am not sure what makes unsweetened applesauce sweeter than raw apple.
My stumpy little dog "Palette" does not like apple piece. I hear some dogs love apple but, she turns her nose up. She loves tropical fruits such as papaya, mango or berries.
I do not give vegetable or fruits to my dog as part of diet. However, I give vegetable or fruits as treats. When I had an apple, I once puree the apple in mixer along with plain yogurt, pour them into ice cube tray and freeze them. Raw sliced apple is not Palette's favorite treats but when I make frozen yogurt treats like this, she loves it. I make cool down treats with whatever fruits (except grapes)/vegetable (except onion) in the fridge when treats is gone. That is usually what she gets after walk or being bathed as cool down treats. Personally, I prefer to use raw apple to make treats out of it rather than applesauce.
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You are right about a lot of the bagged lunches that parents send with their kids... It is all fast, packaged foods with little nutritional value, and when they were given school lunches, so many of them only ate the snacks and threw out the fresh fruits and the vegetables. Only the kids that looked like they didn't get food at home ate everything.
Our older dogs don't tend to eat a lot of the fresh fruit and veggies, but the pups will eat most anything we offer them. They all love carrots and cooked veggies. The pups really like raw apples, oranges... most anything we give them. I hadn't thought about freezing some of that stuff but that will be really good for treats when it is really hot around here.
We live in a desert area and sometimes the temps get up to 120... OFTEN it can be over 105 for a week or two at a time. I think I mentioned that we use a pool for them, too, then.
As usual, you have given me some more good recipes for us and for the dogs, too! Thanks
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When I was a kid, school lunch did not have choices such as choice of milk. Everyone had same plain milk.Sometimes, milk came with coco powder packet so that kids can pour those to their plain milk and stir with straw and drink.It was rare occurrence and I remember I was looking forward for the special drink sometimes.
As for brown bag lunch, it is nice if Japanese Bento box culture becomes popular here in the states. Mothers might need to be up early to make lunches for kids, but making with fresh ingredients and having overall control of everything including preservatives,coloring,sugar amount etc.. is plus.It is more nutritious and fun for kids to eat,too. It is probably cheaper to make than buying pre packaged lunch.
If you missed entry on "Bento box culture in Japan", you can read here.
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