Good cookies, bad cookies & how to tell the difference
First you get my recipe for delicious Cashew Bedtime Cookies! Then you get
an introduction to my thoughts about food, cooking and healthy eating under the headline
(below), Why Bake Healthy, Anyway?
Be sure to read it and let me know what you think. Don't forget to check back
here weekly for more healthy recipes and tips. And don't be shy about writing to me. I
want to hear from you! - Dr. Donna
Ingredients:
1/2 cup roasted cashew butter
1 egg
1/2 teaspoon kelp granules or salt
2 teaspoons baking powder
1/2 cup honey
3/4 cup arrowroot flour or arrowroot
starch.
Directions: Combine cashew
butter and honey. Add remainder of ingredients. Drop by teaspoonfuls onto cookie sheet
lined with parchment paper. Make a thumb indentation in each cookie for fruit filling
after cookies are removed from oven.
Bake 10-12 minutes at 350 degrees.
Remove cookies from cookie sheet onto wire rack and fill each cookie with one teaspoon
prickly pear cactus fruit spread, or another spread of your choice.
Why Bake Healthy, Anyway?
Sweet desserts taste good and everybody loves them.
The problem is that we easily can overindulge in these goodies replacing nourishing foods
with sweet treats.
When we do, the result is roller coaster blood-sugar levels and eventual unwanted extra
pounds. How can this be prevented? What is the missing information we need to know to do
this?
First, let’s look at why the roller coaster blood-sugar levels occur after consuming
these sweet treats that make us feel so good temporarily and may even seem to comfort us.
Traditional sweets are generally baked with ingredients that lack nutrient content such as
sugar and white flour. These ingredients are a nutritional shadow of the original sugar
cane and whole wheat flour they came from.
Lacking many of the original B vitamins and minerals, it is thought that the processed
foods end up taking these nutrients out of your body’s nutrient stores to metabolize
them.
How vitamin B reduces cravings
When you eat foods complete with their natural B vitamin and mineral content,
you feel satisfied immediately afterwards and stay satisfied up to four hours later.
But when you eat sugar-loaded treats (or meals) with low vitamin and mineral content, then
physiological reactions occur in your body that need to be addressed.
Since the tasty desserts don’t have a high-enough concentration of nutrients
in them, but are high in simple sugars, they will spike your body's blood-sugar
levels, especially if they are consumed with caffeine or sugary drinks, like soda pop.
This occurs because the simple sugars are easily digested and pass into the
bloodstream. When the blood-sugar increases rapidly, a burst of insulin results in
the body, for the purposes of quickly responding to the high blood-sugar levels.
Why your body produces insulin
The function of insulin is to bring the blood-sugar level down, causing the transport of
sugar from the blood to the tissues of the body like the muscles, brain, and internal
organs, so they can be nourished.
When the body perceives a huge dose of sugar, insulin lowers the blood-sugar
levels rapidly. Over the next hour and a half to two hours, the blood-sugar levels may
have fallen faster than usual and enter into the low blood-sugar zone.
This then creates strong cravings for additional sweets and may in some people, become
uncontrollable.
When this happens on a daily basis, or even four or five times a day in someone who is
subsisting on junk food, there is stress on the pancreas which produces the insulin, and
the adrenal glands which tell your body how to react under stress.
High blood-sugar levels are as much a stress to the body as are low blood-sugar-levels.
Sugar wears your body out
With this happening repeatedly over a lifetime, the body starts to wear out. Insulin
receptors in the organs need greater and greater amounts of insulin to act as they should.
The body takes longer to recover from stressful situations and the person may even act
more emotional over little upsets during the day. The body is moving forward to more and
more frequent emotional and physiological upsets.
This can predispose a person to diabetes and other illnesses.
More about blood-sugar levels
When blood-sugar levels are high, certain symptoms appear, such as fatigue and the feeling
that you need a nap. We are all familiar with this feeling after we eat a big meal.
When blood-sugar levels are low, other signs appear. People start getting cranky, hungry,
irritable and argumentative. They get headaches, suffer a loss of concentration, and may
feel nausea and dizziness.
Break the Cycle with Socially Conscious
Baking & Cooking
The good news is that you can break this cycle of high blood-sugar/low blood-sugar with
simple solutions. One solution is to pack the foods you cook and prepare full of
vitamins and minerals with foods that are naturally very high in nutrients. These foods
are called nutrient-dense foods. You’ll learn about these from me in weeks and months
to come.
Foods prepared with nutrient-dense foods act differently in the body than processed foods
or high sugar desserts. The sensation of fullness occurs while you are eating a normal
serving size of the recipe prepared with nutrient-dense foods.
It is possible that a high concentration of nutrients in the form of vitamins and minerals
is enough to activate a center in the brain known as the satiety center.
Your brain can help you control your weight
This center tells you that what you have eaten is enough and you need to eat no more. You
are full. Compare this to the feeling after a sweet unhealthy dessert – the feeling
that you have to eat more and more and more!
But it is actually DIFFICULT to eat too much of a food that is packed with nutrients.
Taste-testing of many of my recipes by seminar students over the years has proven this
repeatedly.
When one piece of fudge is enough to satisfy someone, you know you have a winning recipe
because you have accomplished several different goals:
You know you have enough nutrients in the
recipe and your recipe will nourish, not strip health from the person.
You know you will not contribute to
emotional chaos in the life of the person eating your food two hours later when
blood-sugar levels normally
plummet with unbalanced foods.
You know you have not contributed in any
way to their weight gain or overeating. These three goals make what you are doing into
something I
call socially conscious baking and cooking.
Healthy food really can taste good
Some people worry that healthy recipes won’t taste good. This has not been the case,
although everyone has a specific sweetness level they desire. That means you may want to
alter recipes slightly to accommodate your tastes, or the tastes of your loved ones.
But by adhering to the basic recipes and
nutritional principles we'll discuss in the future, you'll be on your way to better health
through eating!
Another fear is that you’ll have to
give up favorite foods, like chocolate. You can still eat chocolate desserts; in
fact, chocolate can be used to enhance some of the flavors of nutrient-dense foods, making
them tastier.
You’ll also learn about how to use carob, a chocolate substitute, in recipes. So
remember: You don’t have to give up your favorite desserts and goodies. Rather, we're
going to add to your list of favorites by including those that are more nutritious and
better for you than those you've eaten in the past.
That will give you more REAL options every
time you cook - and eat!
Dr. Donna's ABCs of Eating Right is updated with recipes and information on the
first and third Thursdays of every month. Bookmark this page and tell your friends Dr.
Donna is here for you.
Article and photograph used with
permission. Copyright (c) 2004-2009 Dr. Donna Schwontkowski. All rights reserved.