Myocardial Monday: Product Raves

A few days after Christmas of 2008, Michael’s Mommy suffered a heart attack. By the grace of God, she lives to tell the tale. As a continual reminder of how your diet can affect your body, we here at Being Michael’s Daddy have declared this day to be “Myocardial Monday.” Here we’ll offer information about food and nutrition in hopes that it will help others avoid facing what could be a fatal condition.

Today I highlight a couple of things that are now big stars in our home’s healthy living foodie lineup.

Smart Balance
I like butter. Scratch that – I love butter. It’s so dang creamy and yummy and delicious. And it’s better than stinky old margarine with its synthesized, unnatural, laboratory-born saturated fats. Gimme those good old fashioned natural saturated fats any day.

Well… except for the fact that butter is little more than a big old bolus of triglycerides and it doesn’t take much of it to really clog up your arteries. Not much at all. I don’t see how Paula Deen survives from day to day, with those recipes.

Anyway…

Now, I’m not one to jump on the bandwagon of any particular “healthy” product. Least of all, one that’s supposed to be as wonderful as Smart Balance purports. I’ve heard the claims, about its wonderfulness and taste and spreadability and healthy balance of Omega Threes and all that.

Puh. I tried it once years ago when it was introduced, and it was a gag fest. It was horrible. It was something I abruptly scraped off of my tongue and wish I could have erased from my brain for eternity.

But then just last year, my wife has this heart attack, see, and it got us thinking that maybe we should start sniffing around the healthy foods again.

And so we bought some of it, as a “butter alternative”.

And we tried it.

And guess what? It’s good.

And by that, I don’t mean “it’s an acceptable substitute,” or “I guess it’ll do, since I can’t have butter,” or even “I’m trying to be healthy and I have to convince myself it doesn’t taste like waxy slug vomit.”

What I actually mean is “It’s really good.”

Really.

No, really. They must have changed the formula somewhere down the line, because it doesn’t taste healthy, or even unpleasant. It’s actually something we like to consume. With moderation, of course.

Please, please, please, try it yourself. You’ll find it in the dairy section of your store right by the butter and margarine.

Quinoa
I wanted to call this “kwin NO ah” but have learned better. It’s pronounced “KEEN wah”. This is a little grain-like morsel of goodness that’s been a staple food in the Andes for thousands of years. Quinoa looks like bird seed. But – it’s not a grain (Gasp! Say it isn’t so!). Ah, but it is so. The plant is related to beets and spinach. Since it isn’t a grass, the seeds aren’t classified as a grain.

What’s so amazing about this thing?

It’s a protein powerhouse. Compared to grains like wheat, rice, rye and oats, it’s highest in protein and lowest in carbohydrates. It is higher in lysine than wheat and is similar to milk in balance of amino acids. Lower in sodium and higher in calcium, phosphorus, magnesium, potassium, iron and other minerals than wheat, barley or corn. It’s gluten-free, and is considered a “complete” protein – that is, it has all the proteins your body needs. It is, for all intents and purposes, a perfect food for humans.

But it cooks like rice or oatmeal, and can be used in the same ways. It can be eaten raw (not that I recommend this, unless you sit on a perch in a small cage and nosh on a cuttlebone from time to time) or ground into flour, or cooked in a risotto.

At our house, we mix two cups of Quinoa with an equal amount of rolled oats and roast it in a pan for ten minutes, stirring often. This imparts a nice, nutty flavor. Then we stir in half a cup of flaxseed and keep it in a gallon Ziploc bag, so that when breakfast time comes around, I just put ½ cup of it into a cup of salted boiling water and let it cook for 15 minutes. A light little sprinkle of brown sugar, maybe some raisins and milk, and voila – breakfast. Breakfast that’ll keep you going until lunchtime with no problem at all. And I’m a snacker, so that’s saying something.

If you follow the “Inflammation Factor”, you might be a little discouraged to see that Quinoa is considered “highly inflammatory.” By this, they don’t mean that it makes up scandalous accusations towards its fellow cereal products. The inflammation factor of a given food refers to its tendency to contribute to systemic inflammation in the body, which can lead to heart disease, cancer, Alzheimer’s, osteoporosis and a host of other problems. This particular field of diet study is not widely studied at this point, but it’s just a matter of time. In any event, there are a whole lot of foods that are far worse for being inflammatory. Like white bread, for instance.

I will go into more detail about the health implications of inflammation in a future Myocardial Monday post, but suffice it to say that Quinoa’s nutritional level overshadows its alleged inflammatory concerns.

Quinoa is a very healthy grain alternative that packs a lot of nutrition in a small package, and it’s still relatively inexpensive to buy in bulk.