The New York Times
January 23, 2005
EATING MY SPINACH

Four Days on the Uncle Sam Diet ...

By WILLIAM GRIMES

Illus:
http://tinyurl.com/6sqdg

WHEN the Agriculture Department unveiled its new dietary guidelines this
month, it laid down a challenge to all Americans: Eat better, smarter and
healthier, or else. The "or else" included a long list of ailments that
plague the developed world, from heart disease and osteoporosis to diabetes.

Along with the stick, however, came some nice, healthy carrots: Follow the
guidelines and you will be stocking up on nutrients that help prevent
cancer. You should also lose some weight. Odds are you'll live longer and
feel better. Just stick to the road map.

I gave it a try, curious to see how hard it would be to change my eating
patterns to fit the program, which seemed to be calling not just for
nutritional change, but cultural change - a redefinition of what makes a
meal.

For four days, I regulated my calories, stepped up my consumption of fruits
and vegetables, cut down on fat and even, against every instinct in my body
and soul, resumed an exercise regimen that I had tried and swiftly abandoned
decades ago. It has been a testing period.

I took little notice of the previous guidelines, issued in 2000. At the time
I was the restaurant critic for this newspaper, paid to trample on every
rule in the dietary guidebook. I do recall looking quickly at the daily
maximums and wondering how a recent meal at a Viennese-style cafe, where I
sampled 12 desserts, would fit into the grid..

A year ago I left the restaurant beat, and since then I have eaten a fairly
normal American diet, though with a pretentious urban slant. Never
margarine, always butter, for example. Fine farmhouse cheeses rather than
Kraft Singles. Ground buffalo instead of chuck. So I assumed that the new
guidelines would not require any wrenching changes: A small adjustment here
and there, but nothing I couldn't live with.

I was wrong.

My daily calorie allowance, determined by my age, height and weight, was
2,211, with a discretionary allowance of 290 calories. That much seemed
doable. And in many respects, I ought to be an ideal candidate to follow
almost any diet. I am thin, my cholesterol level is low and my blood
pressure seems to be not just acceptable, but fabulous. Doctors constantly
comment on it. In other words, I would be starting off at a point that, for
many of my overweight, cholesterol-burdened fellow citizens, remains a
distant goal.

But I have more in common with them than I would have thought. Looking over
the Agriculture Department's suggested meal plans, I saw wide discrepancies
between my usual meals and the guidelines.

Whole grains do not figure largely in my diet. Milk appears only in my tea
and coffee, whereas the guidelines propose two to three servings a day for a
2,000-calorie diet, with an 8-ounce glass of milk (or a cup of yogurt, or an
ounce and a half of low-fat cheese) equaling one serving. The guidelines
limit salt intake to a mere teaspoon a day.

The real surprise involved fruit and vegetable consumption. The 2000
guidelines had suggested two servings of fruit and three servings of
vegetables a day. A fruit serving would be a medium-sized piece of fruit or
6 ounces of juice; a vegetable serving would be a cup of raw leaf vegetables
or a half-cup of cooked vegetables.

The new guidelines up the ante to four or five servings of each a day. And
they strongly favor dark-green powerhouses like kale and spinach rather than
the nutritionally wimpy iceberg lettuce and the like.

Although I did not dwell on it at first glance, the meat and fish ration
seemed a little skimpy: less than 6 ounces a day. But I had full confidence
that I could plan a government-regulation menu and stick to it.

As a nondieter, I found myself in unfamiliar territory. First, I had to
learn to read a nutrition label and to calculate calories. I experienced
sticker shock, something like that idiotic moment of awakening that
out-of-touch politicians experience on the campaign trail when they walk
into a store and see the price of milk. I knew, in a general way, that
butter contains a lot of fat, and that my consumption would have to go down.
I was dismayed to find that a mere stick of butter contains a whopping 800
calories, or more than one-third of my daily allotment.

The calculations did not come easy. Reading the fine print on the guidelines
reminded me of setting up my DVD player. "Low fat" cheeses were recommended,
but what qualified as low fat, exactly?

Calories, it turns out, are only part of the equation. The guidelines also
include limits on the share of daily caloric intake that ought to come from
fats, divided into three categories: the benevolent polyunsaturated and
monounsaturated fats; the merely bad saturated fats; and the really, really
horrible transfats, the kind that turn up in essential foods like spicy
tortilla chips.

The explanation of "discretionary" calories was fairly opaque, like a legal
codicil. It seemed to say that everyone gets some wiggle room, if they stick
to nutrient-dense foods (those with little or no fat and no added sugars).
But it goes on to say that solid fat and sugar calories always need to be
counted as discretionary calories. Did this mean that they count double?

Consultation with experts clarified the issue. The discretionary calories
are like a reward for good behavior: If you adhere strictly to the
guidelines, eat only nutrient-dense foods and manage to achieve all your
nutritional goals within the daily calorie allowance, you get to splurge a
bit on anything you like - candy bars, or a (very tiny) deep-fried pie, or
perhaps a few extra-cheesy nacho chips.

Plunging ahead, I revised my usual breakfast, based on several slices of
butter-streusel coffee cake, and instead consumed two servings of orange
juice, a half-cup of oatmeal with a teaspoon of brown sugar, and two cups of
tea with milk. Plus one slice of brioche toast with jam.

Two hours later, I experienced hunger pangs and ate a banana, which added to
my fruit intake (now at three servings with the orange juice) but also posed
a conundrum. A medium banana has 105 calories, 7 of them from fat. It is not
equal to an orange, which has 65 calories, 3 of them from fat. But they each
count as one serving.

Lunch was tuna salad on a whole-grain roll with lettuce and two servings of
peach juice, containing added sugar that (I think) counted against my
discretionary allowance. I indulged in some Gruyère cheese, pretending that
it was low-fat.

By accident, the tuna salad proved to be a real fat-buster. I had run out of
mayonnaise and used yogurt instead. (Mayonnaise tastes better.) I followed
up with an oatmeal chocolate-chip cookie with walnuts. An hour or two later
I was hungry again, and ate another banana.

The guidelines call for 30 minutes of moderately vigorous exercise most days
to reduce the risk of chronic disease; 60 minutes to prevent weight gain; or
90 minutes to lose weight. I went for the low number.

My exercise regimen, a combination of weight lifting and hitting a tennis
ball against a wall while running around wildly, was every bit as boring and
miserable as I remembered. To introduce variety, I reactivated an old
exercise bicycle, rusted nearly solid after years of neglect.

I tried to fantasize that I was cycling along the Loire on a sunny day. It
did not work. My thoughts kept turning to pike quenelles, a regional
specialty, and the superb meals that I once enjoyed at the Lion d'Or in
Romorantin, where, I can tell you, no one was counting calories.

By dinner time, stark choices loomed. My calories were running out, and the
vegetable account was in deep deficit. Catfish was the entrée, and I
lovingly eyed a recipe involving a pecan-butter sauce.

But pecans, I quickly discovered, are butter in the form of a nut. One cup
contains 822 calories, 772 of them from fat. Add that to the butter in the
recipe, and you wind up with a dish that tops 1,200 calories per serving. I
opted for a spice rub and ran the filets under the broiler with a little
butter.

I also steamed a mountain of spinach and heaped a truckload of coleslaw on
the plate to satisfy the vegetable requirement. But it still wasn't enough.

And so it went. By Day 2, with buffalo burgers on the dinner menu, I had
become fixated on the meat and fish category. A quite modest four-ounce
burger patty uses up more than two-thirds of the daily quota. To stay on
program, I would have to scale back the tuna sandwich.

The guidelines were beginning to feel like wartime rationing. I walked
around with a nagging feeling of being just slightly deprived. After two
days, it began to haunt me.

I also began to chafe at the relentless assault on pleasure that the
guidelines seemed to represent. At every turn, Americans were being urged to
consume foods in their least tasty forms. There they were, the dreaded
chicken breast with the skin removed, the unadorned steamed fish and the
unspeakable processed cheeses.

In the world of the guidelines, food is a kind of medicine that, taken in
the right doses, can promote good health. In the real world, of course,
people regard food and its flavors as a source of pleasure. And therein lies
just one of the problems with the guidelines, which my wife took one look at
before saying with a shake of her head, "No one is ever going to eat like
this."

As a cultural document, the guidelines are strange. They set themselves the
worthy but futile goal of imposing a style of eating for which Americans
have no model. It's all very well to announce that everyone should eat five
servings of vegetables a day. But where does that fit in the culinary
template that Americans instinctively consult when planning a meal? The
typical American dinner is an entrée with a starch and a vegetable, preceded
in some cases by a salad or soup and followed with dessert.

For Asians, it's quite normal to eat multiple vegetable dishes at the same
meal (even at breakfast), and to prepare very small quantities of fish or
meat with much larger quantities of rice. But Americans rarely eat multiple
vegetable dishes except on Thanksgiving. If they are going to triple their
vegetable consumption, they'll have to greatly enlarge the vegetable
portions they do eat, throwing the meal off balance, or else walk around
nibbling on carrots and cauliflower florets from a plastic bag.

The new guidelines are not just health policy, they're cultural policy, too.
To comply fully, Americans will have to rethink their inherited notions of
what makes a meal, and what makes a meal satisfying.

That is a very tall order - even taller than the daily mound of uncooked
leafy vegetables that everyone is supposed to eat.


http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/23/we...ew/23grim.html

I don't know what William Grimes' problem is with 3 veg and two fruit a
day.

>The typical American dinner is an entr=E9e with a starch and a
vegetable, preceded
>in some cases by a salad or soup and followed with dessert.

>For Asians, it's quite normal to eat multiple vegetable dishes at the
same
>meal (even at breakfast), and to prepare very small quantities of fish
or
>meat with much larger quantities of rice. But Americans rarely eat
multiple
>vegetable dishes except on Thanksgiving. If they are going to triple
their
>vegetable consumption, they'll have to greatly enlarge the vegetable
>portions they do eat, throwing the meal off balance, or else walk
around
>nibbling on carrots and cauliflower florets from a plastic bag.

The salad counts as a veg, and if it's a big salad, probably 2 veg
servings by a nutritionist's measure (paging Cindy?). If you eat fruit
for dessert on a normal day then there's one of your fruit servings.
That leaves another veg and a fruit to parcel out among breakfast,
lunch and snacks. What's so hard about that?

It's true that the calorie counting makes the food options look like a
real drag. I never count calories. I know that if I want to stay at my
ideal weight (which I'm not, believe me, even though I've been in
chemotherapy for 3 months) I have to quit snacking at night, quit
indulging in junk food and all the butter I want, and cut back on
chocolate and chocolate croissants. I have never in my life been able
to deny myself such treats for longer than a few days at a time so for
me, weight control is about moderation. And exercise. Today I put on
some music and danced. Worked up a sweat. Then I'll walk the
neighborhood doing errands, stay out for an hour, come back with two
bags of groceries. The nurse who's following my progress insists that
this adds up to moderate, not light, exercise.

I am getting it, however, that portion control is key. My habit is to
eat enormous portions of pasta, bread etc. I really don't need to. I
can pick at meat, but I love my carbs. I can still have them, but maybe
eating a half loaf of walnut levain bread over the course of a day
isn't conducive to being slender and svelte, not after age 40. (When I
was 34 and had no car, I worked for a culinary school, ate everything I
wanted to including pastries, and was lean as a deer from all the
walking and stair climbing)
The famed French paradox may be due to their small portions.

Leila

In article .com>,
"Leila" > wrote:

> I don't know what William Grimes' problem is with 3 veg and two fruit a
> day.
>
> >The typical American dinner is an entrée with a starch and a
> vegetable, preceded
> >in some cases by a salad or soup and followed with dessert.
>
> >For Asians, it's quite normal to eat multiple vegetable dishes at the
> same
> >meal (even at breakfast), and to prepare very small quantities of fish
> or
> >meat with much larger quantities of rice. But Americans rarely eat
> multiple
> >vegetable dishes except on Thanksgiving. If they are going to triple
> their
> >vegetable consumption, they'll have to greatly enlarge the vegetable
> >portions they do eat, throwing the meal off balance, or else walk
> around
> >nibbling on carrots and cauliflower florets from a plastic bag.
>
> The salad counts as a veg, and if it's a big salad, probably 2 veg
> servings by a nutritionist's measure (paging Cindy?). If you eat fruit
> for dessert on a normal day then there's one of your fruit servings.
> That leaves another veg and a fruit to parcel out among breakfast,
> lunch and snacks. What's so hard about that?

You rang? The accoutrements on top of the lettuce (tomato, carrot,
cucumber, etc.) could count as another serving of vegetables. One half
cup of vegetables (1 cup of greens) really isn't much. Just take the
measuring cups to the table next time you eat.

When I handed out the new Dietary Guidelines to the students in my
classes two weeks ago, I think the biggest shock to them was the
exercise component. Most of these students are traditional college age,
but many are working and going to school. They have no clue about how
to fit in that amount of exercise into their schedules.

Cindy

--
C.J. Fuller

Delete the obvious to email me

Cindy wrote:
When I handed out the new Dietary Guidelines to the students in my
~classes two weeks ago, I think the biggest shock to them was the
~exercise component. Most of these students are traditional college
age,
~but many are working and going to school. They have no clue about
how
~to fit in that amount of exercise into their schedules.
~
~Cindy

and Maxine wrote:

>In 10-15 minute increments. When my husband was going to school, I'd
>hear him agonizing about not being able to do the work. So I'd drag
>him kicking and screaming (two very good exercizes<G>) away from his
>homework and feed him a light snack and make him join me for a walk.
snip
>I had joined a study that tried to see what the effects of 1/2 hour a
>day of exercize in 10-15 minute increments would have on the body.
>I'm not a good dieter, but lost about 5 pounds, dropped my cholesterol
>30 points, and got to buy clothing a size smaller.

I'm with you, Maxine. I still think the real reason why Americans are
fatter is that our lives are designed to make walking an "exercise"
that we have to find time for, instead of a natural part of getting
around. When I had no car, first in New York City and then in the Bay
Area for three years, I never worried about my weight. No reason to. I
usually walked a mile and a half a day just getting to transit and
back. Long walks all the time for fun, or because I got sick of waiting
for a bus. This only works in safe urban neighborhoods. Where I live
now, I can do some walking to shop, and there's plenty of nice
neighborhood walking for exercise and pleasure, but in order to get the
kids from school/shop for clothes or office supplies/see my parents
etc. I have to get in the car. If I lived farther out, in a more
upscale neighborhood in the further suburbs, I wouldn't even be able to
get my groceries on foot, the way I can now.

Modern American life, with freeways and far flung suburbs, is designed
to make us fat.

I like this increments idea. Saw something about changing your diet
this way - just fix one thing -eat one less french fry for a while,
then cut down by two, etc. Or switch to whole wheat bread. This is
what I'm doing lately. I'm in chemotherapy so for a week out of every
three I eat "white" food - rice and potatoes and saltines. But the
other two weeks I'd been eating all kinds of crap, in quantities to
make up for the week of saltines. Gained 10 pounds in the first 6 weeks
(some of that is just the chemical imbalance, the MD says). Now I'm
just trying to moderate without making any big rules for myself.
Walking a little more, putting on music and dancing, eating a little
better. Still eating treats, just not so darned many! The weight is
normalizing. Last thing you want when you're bald and hormonally
challenged is to put on extra weight, too.

Ob Food: pressure cooker chili beans tonight. This batch didn't come
out as tasty as the last one - I made it blander because it's for a
kiddie birthday party. Big green salad with Meyer Lemon vinaigrette
(neighbor's lemon tree); some bittersweet chocolate - antioxidants! -
and an orange for dessert.

Leila