Nutition - Is it possible to get a balanced diet?

[C~Q]

Thanks Dach, I have been briefly searching the web to find out some more info and it looks like It depends on what the veggie is and the way it is cooked.

In another article published in The Journal of the American Dietetic Association, nutrient retention was compared when beef strips were stir-fried, broiled, and microwaved. The report notes that the true retention of vitamin B6, iron, zinc, and magnesium were significantly higher in strips that were cooked by stir-frying than in those cooked by microwaving or by broiling. Although many people today are not necessarily big beef-eaters, this tells us something about the relationship between food preparation and nutrients.

Most Australians could do with more salads and fresh raw foods in their daily diets, but an all-raw food diet is restrictive and unnecessary. There are also some valuable components in some products that are more bioavailable after cooking. The lycopene in tomatoes, for example, is more easily absorbed from cooked tomatoes than from raw. However, the folate in tomatoes is destroyed by cooking. The obvious solution is to eat both raw and cooked tomatoes.

Some cooking methods retain higher levels of nutrients, so let's take a closer look.

Steaming
Steaming preserves around 90% or more of most vitamins, including folate ? the most fragile of the vitamins. There is almost no loss of vitamin E with steaming and the limited research on retention of antioxidants also supports steaming as the top cooking method.

Stir-frying
With a quick stir-fry in a hot pan using a little oil, over 80% of most vitamins are retained ? as long as you stir-fry only to the tender crisp stage. If you stir-fry for so long that the vegetables begin to lose their bright colour, their vitamins will also start disappearing rapidly.

Baking
Baking results only in small losses of most nutrients, but is applicable to vegetables such as potatoes, sweet potatoes, pumpkin, onions, carrots, beetroot, fennel, parsnips and swedes. Green vegetables don't taste so good when baked as they lose texture and colour and this will parallel their losses of vitamin C and the B complex vitamins.

Boiling
It might be the most common method of cooking vegetables, but boiling the worst from a nutritional viewpoint. Nutrients leach into the cooking water and the more water and the longer the cooking period, the greater the losses. Some vitamins can be saved if the water is used in soups or sauces, but in general, losses of at least 50% of the vitamins occur with boiling.

Boiling is suitable when making soups as the vitamin-rich liquid is consumed. However, much of the folate from green vegetables will be destroyed, so it's important to enjoy salads as well as soups.


The take-home message is that an ideal diet contains both cooked and raw foods. When cooking, steaming is the preferred method for vegetables, followed closely by stir-frying or microwaving. For top retention of vitamins and protective phytochemicals, avoid boiling or microwaving in large amounts of water for long periods at high power.

Some fruit might be 3 years old but that is very rare - the more perishable fruits strawberries, blueberries, mandarins etc just can't be stored that long. If you buy from the farmer's markets the fruit is very fresh.

I don't think it's very rare at all. In the last week I have spoken to quite a few people who have told me the same thing. Also at the markets. If you go to one that is run by small farms or people growing their own F&V then yes, it would be fresh, but a lot of the bigger markets have food from the last few seasons that they will try and sell you first. I have found it very hard to find decent fruit and veg in any supermarket. I think the most important thing I have taken from this is to ask the people that work there whether it's this years season or not.

The main problem with getting enough Protein in your diet is that protein breaks down into amino acids, only 12 of these amino acids are made in the body and the other 8 have to be obtained from the diet. However the body's cells require ALL 20 of the amino acids to be present to be used. Yes, Protein is found in many foods - all nutrients are. Which is why people are encouraged to have a balanced diet.

There are many things that can effect calcium absorption http://paleodiet.com/losspts.txt here are a few.

I'm not being argumentative but I think making a few statements to counter everything I have said is encouraging the attitude of many people to not look into where our food is coming from, how it's made and what is in it.

[Phteven]

TBH I think that it's easier to have a balanced diet now than ever before.
In years gone by people ate food that was in season and in climates with a very cold winter spend most of the winter subsisting on heavily salted or picked produce. The choice of fruits was pretty much limited to what was grown nearby and in many cases to what they could grow themselves.
Until the industrial revolution even the wealthy were only one bad season from starvation and generally had attrocious diets.
I've got a photo somewhere of the avaerage 50's family standing in front of the food they consumed in a year. There was not a great deal of variety and there was a lot of fatty and heavily salted food.

TBH I think that we're incredibly lucky in that we have access to such a variety of healthy and nutritious foods. If I was living on US$5 a week I might find it hard to have a nutritious diet but since I don't I guess I think my glass is pretty much full.

IMO the statement that it is impossible to get a balanced diet is taking a totally ahistorical view of nutrition. It's never been possible yet the human race has thrived and prospered despite it.

[C~Q]

I started this thread was in the hope that we could give each other tips and advice on how to improve our diets and make our food and the food we feed our children more balanced and nutritious. I hope some people can come up with some constructive advise.

MR - I agree that it's scary the amount of high sugar/salt foods their are out there. I'm trying now to make my own sauces instead of using pre-made ones.

[Phteven]

I think I was a bit out of line. Sorry for being a b1tch and derailling your thread.
I still think it's totally incorrect to say that we can't have a balanced diet. An entire industry has grown out of convincing Australians that our diets are inadequate in this that and the other. As a result we have the world's most expensive wee.

I would encourage everyone to rip up some of their lawn or flowers and plant veges.
A vege garden doesn't just provide healthy fruit it's also a way to teach our children about life, insects, the environment, plants and so on. A composting system is a part of any good garden so you can reduce landfill too.
Even in a tiny apartment we can grow some veges and herbs in pots.

[C~Q]

No worries, you weren't a *****! I do know what you mean about big companies trying to convince us that we are lacking in certain things only to pop up with a miracle pill to cure everything which is why I think people need to discuss things like this - to open peoples eyes who otherwise would believe everything they're told (myself included )

[Phteven]

When I was at woolies today I had a look at the packing dates on the sides of all the boxes.
Most of the fruit that I looked at was packed quite recently.
I wrote the dates down on my phone (and got some wierd looks lol)
Cucumber, tomatoe - 30/07
Lettuce, onions, 27/07
Pears 01/08
Apples 28/07
Rockmelon 31/07
I'm ok with those dates because although they aren't Ideal I have kept my own home grown veges for just as long. Sometimes you get a glut so you end up storing quite a bit. Homegrown pears need to be picked before ripening and ripened off the tree or they just rot (maybe not all breeds but the ones my Dad grew did)

There was a box of grapes packed January. TBH I wouldn't have bought them anyway because they looked kind of skanky - the stems weren't nice and fresh looking, they were wizened yet soggy.
I didn't look at the dates on any of the imported fruits because I don't buy them anyway (I'm not quite a locavore but I try to buy local produce) but I guess they would have been older. I tend to stick mainly to what is seasonal. It seems so wrong eating a mango in winter. MIL bought some mexican ones last winter and they were awful.

ETA - I busted my local woolies breaking company policy too. The policy is to display fruit in the boxes it is packed in but the spinich I bought was in a crate that had manderins packed in it about a week ago - tsk tsk tsk.

[TheBear]

Unfortunately the carton dates only indicate when the items were packed into those cartons, they may well have been in storage before being packed into the cardboard cartons. If you get the names of the producers off the cartons then you can usually find out a little more, if the carton is generic and does not carry the name of the producer then chances are it's been repacked somewhere along the line. Cardboard cartons don't hold up well in high humidity storage, so anything that has been stored has to be repacked when it comes out of storage....unless it was originally packed in breathable plastic....look at the little punnets of berries as an example.

My suggestions:-
1. Don't buy anything with artificial sweeteners in it - this is pretty much anything with the word "Diet" written on it. Artificial sweeteners have been repeatedly shown to stimulate appetite - if you eat something sweet that contains few calories, then your body will make you go looking for the calories elsewhere. Many reduced fat items are artificially sweetened. Use natural sugars - honey, fruit, etc in preference to processed sugar.

2. Eat for flavour as much as nutrition - treat your meals as a celebration of produce, not merely an exercise in sustenance. Commercial food production is about producing maximum product for minimum cost, the biggest cost item is naturally grown produce - very few traditional diets work this way - the bulk of your diet should consist of fresh produce, complemented with a small quantity of prepared stocks and sauces.

3. Make your own stocks and sauces - it's the best way of getting maximum nutritional value out of the produce that have bought, the offcuts and trimmings from your more elaborate meals will furnish you with a range of sauces, stock and even soups. Don't buy pre-trimmed produce - if you buy root vegetables, then get them with the leaves still attached, buy whole chickens, whole fish, etc. Just about every part of the produce has a place in most traditional diets, the roughage, fibre and nutritional benefits of these sub-prime foods goes a long way to balance your diet.
Prepared sauces and dressings are usually really bad news, they are salt, sugar and fat rich and full of chemicals to stablise them for long term storage. If you have oils, spices and vinegars in your store cupboard, then you can reconstruct most of the supermarkets' product ranges with surprisingly little effort.

4. Source your produce carefully - know where it has come from, how it has been handled and treated. Avoid varities of fruit and veg that have been geneticially modified for faster growth - slow, growing varieties contain more flavour and more nutritional benefit.

5. Source your meat with even more care - eat more mature animals on a regular basis, mutton or hoggett in preference to lamb, beef > 2 years old (most Aussie beef is <1 yr). Avoid animals that have been specially grown for fast growth, try to source meat that grows slower for more flavour.

6. Eat less fat, but don't compromise the rest of your diet to do it - if you increase the intake of sugar and processed grains in order to reduce fat then you will do more harm than good. Fats carry flavour and much nutritional value, eradicating them is not part of a balanced diet. Learn the lessons from traditional diets that use cooking methods and seasonings to get maximum benefit and minimum detriment from fat.

7. Season your food well - the use of a broad range of seasonings (fresh and dried) will help reduce your salt intake without reducing flavour.

8. Reduce your intake of processed grains - eat whole grains in place of processed grains, but limit them to a small part of your diet - use beans and pulses to replace them where possible. Grains are a relatively recent introduction to our diet, and their is a fair bit of evidence to suggest that the side effects of digesting grains is still not well understood.

9. Broaden your diet - try new types of produce, cook them in new ways - the internet will provide you with a hundred recipes for anything you don't already know how to cook.

10. Buy food from farmers, not from scientists or large commercial organisations - we've been farming for 000's of years, and scientifically/commercially dabbling with the food supply on a widespread basis for around a hundred....the scientists and accountants still know a lot less about what we need to eat than the farmers. The rates of obesity and diet related illnesses have sky-rocketed in direct proportion to the popularity of processed food products....they should make up a very small part of your diet.

[AngelPunks]

my uni lecturer said to us during class one day (for "food as medicine") that we should try to eat 20 different foods every day and that the fresher the food the better because it kept a lot more of the vitality in the foods

[Astrid]

With regards to Nutrigrain I always used to think to myself "Ironmen?? More like constipated men!" Very little fibre in them.

[Nai]

By "Iron men" they are actually referring to what comes out of them - Stools of Steel

[christy]

LOL Nai!!! I was just perusing our mail and found a brochure for "Foods that Harm, Foods that Heal" and one of the side things says "BACON: Less salt than cornflakes?" OMG.... Is it???? That would be hilarious, and yet seriously wrong.

[C~Q]

"BACON: Less salt than cornflakes?" .

No way!!!