There are many things that can get in the way of eating healthfully and losing weight.  One of the major areas to consider is how we think about healthy eating and “diet”.   If we approach a healthy life-style, especially eating right, in the wrong way it’s possible to become defeated before we have a chance to get our plan into first gear.  Here are 5 major misconceptions to avoid when you set out to change the way you eat this year.  Five Dangerous Eating Myths

The secret to keeping your family healthy is getting them to eat nutrition meal.  Cooking healthy gourmet dishes is the key.  We destroy the myth that healthy cooking is bland and boring. Healthful technique turns ordinary food into extraordinary meals.  

To schedule a Free Healthful Cooking or Healthful Weight Loss Class for a Church, School, or Community Service Group call (909) 257-7549 or email The Healthful Chef at askhealthfulchef@gmail.com.

In the South California area?  You can join us for a Healthful Chef Cooking Class or Meet-up.  Learn from the inventor of “Healthy Gourmet”.  Great tasting food can be made good for you in spite of popular thinking.

To schedule a Free Healthful Cooking or Healthful Weight Loss Class for a Church, School, or Community Service Group call (909) 257-7549 or email The Healthful Chef at akhealthfulchef@gmail.com.

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In the South California area? You can join us for a Healthful Chef Cooking Class or Meet-up. Learn from the inventor of “Healthy Gourmet”. Great tasting food can be made good for you in spite of popular thinking.

To schedule a Free Healthful Cooking or Healthful Weight Loss Class for a Church, School, or Community Service Group call (909) 257-7549 or email The Healthful Chef at askhealthfulchef@gmail.com.

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To schedule a Free Healthful Cooking or Healthful Weight Loss Class for a Church, School, or Community Service Group call (909) 257-7549 or email The Healthful Chef at a askhealthfulchef@gmail.com.

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Black Beans are one of my all-time favorite comfort dishes. If you are watching calories, they taste great plus they leave me feeling full and completely satisfied. I enjoy them as a main course paired with a salad or vegetables. I am known for an amazing Black Bean Turkey Chile. I also include black beans in an Organic Black Bean and Heirloom Tomato Salad that I serve as a side dish with Herb Roasted Wild Salmon. Black Beans are an excellent addition to casseroles, soups, and stews.

Here are the reasons they are good for you too:  Why you should eat black beans?

In a recent blog post I wrote about the reasons information about nutrition and eating seems so confusing.  The best way to guard against the huge amount of misinformation is to have your own sources of reliable information.  As you begin to read and study more you will start to easily distinguish the helpful news and information from deceptive and misleading claims.

To get started, here is a list of 10 books that I think every “Healthful Chef” should own whether you are a professional chef or not:

1. Techniques of  Health Cooking, Culinary Institute of America
2. Clean Food, Terry Walters
3. The Rodale Whole Food Cookbook. Rodale Inc.
4. Eat This And Live, Con Colbert, MD
5. The Conscious Cook, Tal Ronnen
6. Foods That Harm Foods That Heal, Reader’s Digest
7. EatWell 500-Calorie Dinner, Jessie Price & Nicci Micco
8. The 150  Healthiest Foods on Earth, Jonny Bowden, Ph.D
9. Allergy-Free Cookbook, Publication International
10. 100 Best Health Foods,  Love Food

Knowing what  foods are healthful these days can be a challenge.  Should I eat certain types of fish because of their high levels Omega-3 Fats or avoid them because of their concentration of heavy metals such as mercury?  Should I eat more fiber rich grains or will such carbohydrates just make me fat?  Are “Free-range” chickens any better for me than those raised in confinement?  These are the types of nutrition topic for which there are often conflicting – even confusing – claims and counter claims.

In this article I would like to explain some of the reasons for the endless series of conflicting diet advice.  Let’s begin by accepting that there will always be some amount of misinformation promoted by people or organization  with profit or political motives.  Companies, industry organizations, and individuals wishing to sell us there products will always be tempted to twist the facts to make the sell.  Can you envision the National Pork Board promoting research suggesting that you should eat less pork?

Setting aside the normal propaganda, there are legitimate challenges to providing clear and conclusive “Scientific” answer regarding what foods are more health promotion than others.

Nutrition researcher encounter many difficulties in studying food’s effects on our health.  The main challenges include issues with collecting data, separating multiple variables, and determining cause when correlations are discovered.

Collecting research data for nutrition studies often requires participants to complete lengthy surveys or maintain logs regarding what they eat.  The two biggest issues with these methods are that subjects may have a hard time recalling or documenting with accuracy the foods they consume.

Although studies with animals and live cells in test tubes allow for a more controlled laboratory environment, it is hard to say with certainty that the outcomes of these types of studies mirror the reactions in the human body.

Assuming researchers have a supply of useful data, the next major hurdle is determining how to isolate the variable(s) that are being studied.  One major problem in this area is the fact that when study participants eat more of one food they naturally consume less of another.  For example, if one sets out to determine the effect of eating fresh spinach on cholesterol levels,  it is very likely that people eating significantly large quantities of spinach leaves everyday will also eat less of something else such as meat.  Hence, is the outcome a result of more spinach or less meat?  This is an inherent challenge of dietary research.

Let’s say a researcher manages to collected a substantial amount of reliable data and has been able to isolate an important variable.  One additional challenge is being able to say with scientific certainty that the isolated variable caused whatever effect took place.

The ongoing research with tomatoes and the antioxidant Lycopene illustrates this challenge.  In studies with men, who ate large amounts of tomato sauce, the subjects were noted as having high levels of Lycopene in their bodies.  They also experienced lower incidence of prostate cancer.  The immediate conclusion and media headline was “Lycopene Prevents Prostate Cancer”.  Unfortunately, follow-up studies focusing specifically on Lycopene consumption did not demonstrated any lower rates of  prostate cancer.  The follow-up research suggests that something other than Lycopene alone was responsible for the original lower rate of cancer.

Considering just this hand-full of challenges in the world diet research, it is no wonder so much confusing information leaks into magazines, books, news casts, and onto the internet.