What kind of Diet works for you?

[Becca]

I won't argue with you. Many people who have IBS (Irritable Bowel Syndrome) have difficulty with red meat, pork, and wheat glutin. I have heard that the ability to tolerate and fully digest red meat may be tied in with blood type. type A+ tend to have alkaline blood and need an extra boost from acidic foods such as tomato to digest it all. I am not entierly sure of this, but I do have type A+ and have always had problems with red meat. I'd rather eat peanut butter, fish, and chicken, as well as an asortment of veggies that are high in protien like garden peas (4-6 grams in each cup, not bad!).

[spiraler]

eat grape nuts all day everyday and you will be healthy....thats my suggestion.

[Pilot]

I tried to eat my wife's cooking, but my stomach couldn't handle it for long
I lost a little weight by running to the john.

[Merryprankster]

1) Use pure water. Tap water has minerals and stuff in it that takes away from your nutritional value you should be getting.

This simply isn't true. Minerals in your water has next to no impact on the nutritional value of your food. Now, having bad water might be an issue in its own right, but it's not a nutritional thing.

2) If you are going to use beans that need to be soaked, use pure water, and then use the water you used to soak them to cook.

See above. Additionally, throwing out the water does little to the nutritional value of the bean.

3) Most things lose most of their nutiritional value when cooked, thats why stews and soups are so good, they keep most of the nutritional value in the broth itself.

This is absolutely untrue for a variety of reasons. For instance, if you use meat in your soup, the protein doesn't leach out into the stock - it's still back in the meat. Further, what you are talking about is nutrients leaching out into the water. This only happens with water soluble nutrients. Additionally, the cell membranes mitigate this greatly. If you use a roasting, sauteing or other non-moist heat technique, you will not experience leaching at all.

Finally, cooking actually improves the nutritional value of most foods. The raw food diet fad is a myth of crap. Nutrients become, more, not less available when you cook the food - while SOME nutrients do break down, cooking makes more of those nutrients accessable to your body by making the food easier to digest. This is precisely why we cook foods.

4) Beans are a good source of protein but are also a complex carbohydrate, so they fill you up faster than meat, and provide similiar nutrition value.

Beans do not have a similar nutrition profile to meat. Meat tends to be high in B vitamins and red meat is especially high in iron. This is in addition to all the minerals it contains. Further, meat is a complete protein while beans are absolutely not. I love beans, and they are great nutritionally, but it is not similar at all.

5) Do not use lemon, lemon juice, or chilly sauce in your soups and stews while cooking them. Acidic material takes away from the nutritional value. If you are going to use that stuff, add it seperately in your bowl and do not cook with it. (i don't always follow this concept, I like spicy food a lot!)

This is absolutely not true. Acidifying the cooking liquid will not detract from the nutritional value appreciably. The pH necessary to damage the nutrients would render the food item in question unpalatable. These are fairly stable compounds for the most part and hardly require special treatment - if you can boil it without problems (and you can), a tiny shift in pH isn't going to be an issue (and it doesn't.)

[Reggie1]

I'll try not to derail the thread too long, but:

MP--thanks for the using chuck as a cut for a roast idea. My wife used to make a bad roast, and it would drive her crazy. When I read what you wrote, I asked her what cut she used. Surprise, surprise, it was rump. We went out and got a chuck roast a few days ago, and she did her same recipe with the different cut of meat. It was awesome! Just thinking about it makes me salivate...

[Gangsterfist]

MP-

When you cook vegetables, they lose some nutritional value. Meat is a different story, and yes beans are not a sufficient replacement to the protiens and vitamins that meat gives you. That is why if you cook vegetables its best to steam them. If you saute them in a wok or frying pan they can lose some nutritional value.

http://waltonfeed.com/self/beans2.html


Above is a link to some of the information I posted. As far as tap water goes, it has traces of chlorine and other minerals that may take away from some nutritional value. Of course it may or may not make a huge difference, but from what I have read it does. Of course a lot of it applies to water soulable vitamins like you mentioned before.

So....

I decided to research it a bit, and I found out that a lot of what I had mentioned was actually a bit out dated. I read some more recent studies on food and cooking them, and it does state that what I was talking about is true to a sense when it comes to vegetables, (which is what i was referring to). That steaming vegetables will retain some of those water soulable vitamins. It seems that cooking foods (as long as cooked properly) do not really lose nutritional value. However when researching this I did find something interesting about cooking in microwaves.

http://www.relfe.com/microwave.html

So, it seems for the most part MP was right, and what I posted seems to be a bit outdated research. However, every article I did reach that was recent says you must cook the food right. There are right and wrong ways to cook food.

I guess you do learn something new every day....

[Merryprankster]

Gangster, you are correct that this does tend to happen with veggies more so than anything else, and it really is a boiling problem....

But try roasting some zucchini sometime!!!, MMMMMMMM


BTW I just reread my post, and it seems a touch aggressive. My apologies!

Hey reggie, glad to hear it! The fat in chuck really makes a difference.

[Becca]

Rump roast is better in a crock pot, I hate to say. As to the veggie thing, another good way to propare them without loosing nutition is to steam them. I usually do them in a special Tuperware microwave steaming pan. It only cost me $15 and I use it daily. Also, it only takes 5 minutes, fresh or frozen.

On another note entirly... Has anyone out there tried that Koshi GoLean cerial? I have been thinking about trying it since I eat alot of cerial and it looks like an easy way to add more protein into my diet.