Once in a blue moon, someone will raise their voice and say something that will make a lot of pieces in the puzzle fall into place. Things will suddenly start making sense.
Daphne Miller has spoken, and her thoughts and knowledge on dieting should be turning heads soon. Miller is a doctor, associate clinical professor at UC San Francisco and a nutritionist. Her message is as genious as it is easy: Go back to basics:
As a doctor with a private family practice in San Francisco, Daphne Miller has seen her share of patients suffering from “Western diseases”: diabetes, depression, heart disease, and breast cancer. Rather than treating or preventing these ailments just with Western medicine, though, Miller—who completed a fellowship in integrative medicine at the University of Arizona after graduating from Harvard Medical School—also uses a nutrition-based approach, prescribing whole foods (local, seasonal, and organic if possible) and advising her patients to avoid most processed foods. Her new book, The Jungle Effect: A Doctor Discovers the Healthiest Diets from Around the World—Why They Work and How to Bring Them Home (HarperCollins), examines the traditional diets in places around the world where rates of Western diseases are minimal, offering a selection of recipes from each region. Gourmet Associate Web Editor Christy Harrison spoke to Miller about
the problems with Americanized ethnic cuisine, the great thing about extra-hot Cheetos, and why al dente penne is less likely to give you diabetes than mushy spaghetti.
Read more here: http://www.gourmet.com/foodpolitics/2008/05/jungleeffect_QA
She also talks about how traditional food has been altered into processed foods full of starch and unhealthy fats:
Take the emblematic Passover food: matzo. Both in Nana's kitchen and in her own mother's kitchen in Eastern Europe, "matzo" stood for unleavened bread. But this is where the similarity ended. Traditional matzo was a handmade, nutty flatbread made from hard wheat. Nana, by contrast, served a packaged, pasty cracker that had no more flavor than air.
Read more about that here: http://www.latimes.com/features/health/medicine/la-oe-miller19apr19,1,4173894.story
Miller took off from California and vent to visit people and places were the Western diseases don't exist, like on Crete, Iceland and Okinawa in Japan.
This is what she found out:
The problem, as Dr. Miller discovered when she travelled to all of these places to see for herself, is that health and longevity are about the only things that these cultures have in common. The robust Tarahumara Indians, for example, eat a diet of 80% carbohydrates (mostly in the form of starchy vegetables like corn and potatoes!), while the indestructable Cretans get almost 50% of their calories from fat. Some long-lived cultures eat almost no meat, while the hale and hearty Icelanders eschew vegetables as "animal feed" and eat large quantities of lamb and fish.
She concludes that traditional diets work chiefly because they are based on the plants and animals that flourish in the local ecosystem, prepared and consumed in a way that has been fine-tuned by generations of trial and error to provide optimal nutrition for those people.
Read more about it here: http://blog.nutritiondata.com/ndblog/2008/04/is-a-varied-die.html
Other experts have also taken to Millers thoughts and find her research very interesting. One of the things Miller is teaching, is that home cooked meals are better for you than restaurant food. It doesn't have to take a lot of time and effort either.
Here is her answer when she is asked about her own priorities:
I don’t mean to sound self-righteous about this, but I don’t have hired help. I’m a doctor, I have two kids, I teach, I manage to exercise most days, and I still manage to cook. It’s just a matter of priorities. It’s a matter of deciding that this is the way you’re going to spend family time and relaxation time—not in front of the TV, not driving somewhere in your car, but actually just in the kitchen for a half hour or 40 minutes, making a meal.
When people really get sick, they have all the time in the world. All of a sudden they go to all these doctor’s appointments and they have to stand in line at a pharmacy to buy their medications. And they have to go for testing and they have to go for follow-up, and they have to spend all the hours being anxious about their disease, losing productive time doing that. And it’s like, just invest a little bit ahead of time. But I know that’s not the politically correct answer.
I mean, people are cooking, but it’s just not part of the popular culture to be proud of yourself as a home cook. I think it’s considered anti-feminist, because the idea is that women are the ones that ultimately are going to be trapped in the kitchen. I have quite a few friends that really feel that for them it’s been a strong political statement to not cook. But I think the onus is on the family, whatever your family structure is. Whoever lives under your roof, you all cook together.
Here is two of her recipes from her new book (that I'm definitely ordering, by the way!)
“Research shows that if you cook at home, you’re healthier,” notes Dr. Miller. When Americans say they’re too busy, she points out that indigenous people manage to cook without our time-saving devices. For an easy meal, she suggests placing fresh dried beans and water (at a one-to-three ratio) in a slow cooker before work. When you get home, season, top with salsa and avocado slices, and serve with corn tortillas.
Horta Omelet
To make this breakfast recipe from the Isle of Crete, Dr. Miller suggests using free-range eggs for better taste. Sprinkle the dish with fresh lemon juice to boost the flavor and help your body absorb nutrients in the greens.
2 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil
2 garlic cloves, minced
2 cups chopped fresh greens (such as purslane, kale, or Swiss chard), with tough stems removed
2 tablespoons loosely crumbled feta cheese
3 to 4 eggs, lightly beaten
3 tablespoons chopped kalamata olives
2 lemon wedges
Pinch of salt
Heat olive oil over medium heat, add garlic, and stir until soft. Add greens and stir until soft. Evenly distribute greens on bottom of pan and sprinkle with feta. Pour eggs over the top, and cook until they’re done. Top with olives, salt, and lemon juice.
Serves 2.
(http://www.drweilselfhealing.com/show_document.asp?iDocumentID=548&iBDC=6576&iPageNumber=1)
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