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 uUsed with permission. Copyright (c)
2004-2007 Dr. Donna Schwontkowski. All rights
reserved.