Photo by Michael Hodge

We already know that food manufacturers and the media tend to exaggerate the benefits of popular health foods, but what about all the wonderfully healthy foods they ignore?

It’s time to shine the spotlight on 10 of my favorite healthy foods that never get the attention they deserve.

Top 10 Most Underrated Health Foods

1. Oysters

Per calorie, oysters are one of the most nutritious foods on the planet, and are particularly high in essential omega-3 fatty acids and vitamin D, which is notoriously tough to get from food.

Also, because oysters lack a central nervous system and are 95% of the world’s supply are sustainably farmed, some vegetarian thought leaders have argued that oysters can be included in the diet as an ethical source of natural vitamin B12 (present in significant quantities only in animal foods).

2. Sauerkraut & kimchi

I’m the first to admit that fermented foods can be a little pungent, but that doesn’t preclude them from tasting delicious and being one of the healthiest things you can eat. In a recent conversation I had with Michael Pollan, he suggested that a lack of fermented foods is one of the most notable differences between the Western diet and all other successful diets throughout history. This is a point worth considering.

Traditionally, fermentation has been used to preserve foods, but it also serves to increase nutritional value and add friendly bacteria to the gut. These healthy microbes help with digestion and nutrient absorption, and without them our gut health deteriorates substantially, setting the stage for many chronic diseases.

3. Dark & organ meats

People often demonize meats, especially the darker varieties, for their fat content and overlook how nutritious they are. Of course they are relatively higher in calories as well, which is why you don’t need to eat very much in a sitting. But fear of saturated fat shouldn’t deter you from enjoying the occasional piece of fatty meat every now and then. Organ meats in particular, like liver and kidney, are rich sources of essential nutrients. And they can be delicious when prepared properly.

4. Seaweed

Okinawa is a small island in Southern Japan that is home to some of the longest lived people on earth. Sea vegetables are a staple of the traditional Okinawan diet, and are thought to be responsible for many aspects of health. Seaweed is also a good source of iodine for people who prefer to use high-end sea salts or kosher salt for cooking, which typically lack iodine. I make an effort to eat seaweed often and try as many different kinds as I can get my hands on.

5. Egg yolks

I realize I might be beating a dead horse with this one, but until I stop seeing friends and family throwing out perfectly good egg yolks I’m just going to keep drilling home this point. Egg consumption is not associated with heart disease, and for some people they improve blood lipids. Also, you’re throwing away so much goodness. And keep in mind that if you buy fresh, pastured eggs (hens frolicking in grass eating bugs—find them at your local farmers market) then nutrient values will be significantly higher than conventional eggs.

6. Beans & lentils

My favorite thing about last year’s biggest diet trend, The 4-Hour Body, is that Tim made beans and lentils cool to eat. I’ve been telling readers this for years, and finally people are listening, but there are still a lot of folks out there who don’t appreciate how wonderful they really are.

For myself and many others, weight loss is much easier when I include beans and lentils as opposed to eliminating carbohydrates completely. Plus they fill you with energy without the bloating and other negative effects that can sometimes come from grains. They’re also a great source of iron, folate and other essential nutrients.

7. Root vegetables

Root vegetables are right up there with the green leafys in my book. In fact, many of them are from the same cruciferous family. I never come home from shopping without at least one bunch of radishes, salad turnips or carrots. I also have a lot of love for beets, sunchokes and even all the different kinds of potatoes. Vegetables don’t need to be green to be good for you.

8. Coffee

Many people view their morning brew as a vice, but in reality coffee is a healthy beverage. Coffee is one of the best sources of polyphenols and antioxidants in many people’s diets, and has been proven to protect against liver disease, type 2 diabetes, and a host of other diseases. The biggest problem most people have with coffee is confusing the brew itself with the creamy, sugary drinks that are closer to milkshakes than the beverage studied by scientists in the studies I linked to above. And the only real risk of too much coffee is that it can upset your sleep.

9. Hard cheese

Yes, I just called cheese healthy. But of course I’m not talking about the processed American “cheese” that may or may not contain milk. Sadly, I’m not even talking about burrata.

Hard cheeses that have been aged (think parmesan and asiago) are the most significant dietary source of vitamin K2, a nutrient that has been shown to protect against heart disease and cancer. Like meat, cheese has a lot of calories so you still have to be careful with how much you eat. But it’s important to understand that cheese is not just empty calories, and in reasonable amounts it can actually be good for you.

10. Mushrooms

American’s tend to view mushrooms as neutral foods, but they been used in Chinese medicine for thousands of years. Though there really isn’t enough evidence to make conclusive statements about the health benefits of all mushrooms, many compounds have been identified in mushrooms that show potential for boosting immunity and possibly protecting against cancer. Mushrooms are also an unappreciated source of vitamins and minerals, and shouldn’t be ignored as low calorie sponges that only go on pizza.

What are your favorite unappreciated health foods?

Photo by Robert S. Donovan

Huge thanks to Emilia Wollheim for sharing her story. I think she brings a very important message about the value of nutrition and the importance of trying different things until you find the diet that works best for you.

While Emilia found that more fat was necessary for her optimal health (as did I), keep in mind that some people thrive best on a diet with less fat. Humans vary substantially in their genetic background, so you can’t assume that what works for someone else will work for you. Experimenting with your healthstyle is the only way to figure it out.

Emilia has a certification in holistic nutrition from Bauman College and has worked in community health education. She is currently training to be a Natural Chef and blogs about her unique experiences with food, nutrition and health at Wine and Butter.

How Butter and Real Food Saved My Health

by Emilia Wollheim

Hello Summer Tomato Readers,

My name is Emilia and I’m hugely honoured to be guest posting on Summer Tomato. I have been a big fan of Summer Tomato since the beginning and I love Darya’s clear explanations and refusal to accept cliche. Most of all though I love her ‘healthstyle’ message and I wish I’d found a resource like Summer Tomato, back when I began dieting.

My unhealthy experience with dieting came after University when I decided I wanted to lose a few vanity pounds. I looked to various women’s magazines for guidance, and soon came up with a diet that was low in calories and very low in fat. It centered around salad without dressing, fruit, fat-free yogurt and muffins, scrambled egg whites and a small amount of seeds and fish. I lost weight quickly and was thrilled.

The problem was that not only did I lose weight, but I also developed other problems. These included extreme anxiety, irrational behavior if food was late and incredibly low immunity. People who knew me joked that I got sick an awful lot for the healthiest eater they knew. The worst symptom however was that my hormones became completely off balance. To put it bluntly, I barely menstruated for four years.

During this time I sought lots of medical advice about the problem. It was assumed to be a temporary result of my weight loss. After that many doctors made the diagnosis of polycystic ovaries, despite the fact that none were evident in scans. Since I wasn’t (quite) technically underweight, lifestyle factors were barely considered. The only advice some doctors gave me was to gain weight, exercise less or eat more protein. I did all of these dutifully, without result.

The transformational moment came after Christmas one year. I spend Christmas with my husband’s family who eat a very traditional British diet: fresh meat from local farms and homegrown vegetables. Everything is cooked in copious amounts of butter, but served in small portions. The only consistent time my cycles would re-start was after Christmas, despite the fact that my weight and exercise habits didn’t change. Since I was eating meat at home regularly by then (albeit grilled chicken breasts), I began to wonder if there was something unique about eating a diet high in both saturated fat and protein that helped me.

I began to study Nourishing Traditions and the Paleo diet, and started to (very loosely) incorporate some of the principles. I chose to first focus on including more saturated fat in my diet: butter, full fat milk and yogurt, whole eggs and fattier cuts of meat. I also refused to see fat as a negotiable, and stopped skimping on butter in my cooking so I could have a cookie later.

Second, I started to ensure I was getting some good protein at every meal. Meat or fish once per day, plenty of nuts, and legumes instead of bread. I also began including more exceptionally nutritious sources of protein like oily fish of all varieties, as well as organ meats like liver and kidney (yes, really!).

Third, I switched my attitude toward food. Instead of trying to eat more food for fewer calories, I started trying to eat moderate amounts of highly nutritious and enjoyable food. Buying smaller portions of vegetables, but getting them from the farmers market. Having the occasional delicious ice cream, instead of a daily frozen yogurt. Pretty much entirely cutting out refined flours, artificial additives and other non-foods. It was, I believe, this third change that was the most important. It was also the hardest since it defies our current societal instruction to seek out the most food or pleasure, for the least calories or money.

After I started eating this way, the improvements to my health were virtually immediate. My anxiety subsided, my moods normalised. Within two months my hormones began to re-stabilize. I am certain the dietary changes were pivotal because any time I reverted to eating less fat and protein, or relying on refined carbohydrates, my problems returned.

It took time to change my eating habits permanently—starting to eat butter can be as hard as stopping—but I am now a devoted and healthy convert. My current healthstyle is enjoyable, sustaining, affordable and supportive of my fertility. It it is also rather like Darya’s weight maintenance recommendations: high in healthy fats served with vegetables, and rich in legumes and good sources of protein; focusing on quality over quantity and resisting redundant ideas about ‘healthy’ packaged foods. Which brings me full circle to my first point.

For me, the impression many doctors gave that my fertility had everything to do with my weight, calorie intake and genetics turned out be far from the truth. I believe that for many people fertility has everything to do with nutrient intake. I am therefore so pleased there are rational websites like Summer Tomato that can help spread the message.

Thanks so much for allowing me to tell my story Darya!

How has eating real food helped your health?

Photo by Irwin-Scott

I’ve had about a zillion people ask me about a new study that came out in the Archives of Internal Medicine this week linking red meat consumption to increased mortality.

Naturally some people are afraid their carne asada habit may be dooming them to an early death, and who could blame them with headlines like these?

On the other hand, I suspect many of you have dismissed the study out of hand because it conflicts with your world view that animal foods only make good things happen.

But in the interest of science and being grown ups, let’s take a look at the study and see what we can learn.

First, it is worth mentioning that the study was fairly well-designed and conducted by a respectable team of scientists at Harvard. They reanalyzed data from two large prospective cohort studies: The Health Professionals Follow-Up Study (HPFS, 1986-2008) and the Nurses Health Study (NHS, 1980-2008).

Both cohorts were large groups of health care professionals, which would presumably limit differences in education and income that can often confound health studies. The participants filled out regular food frequency questionnaires that have been previously validated as decently reliable (though food frequency questionnaires are notoriously unreliable).

Importantly, all the participants were eating Western diets during what have come to be known as the least healthy decades in US history. Also important, during the course of the study both red and processed meat consumption declined in both men and women.

“The mean daily intake of unprocessed red meat dropped from 0.75 to 0.63 servings from 1986 to 2006 in men and from 1.10 to 0.55 servings from 1980 to 2006 in women.”

The authors never comment on what this reduced consumption means for their analysis, however, since they “created cumulative averages of food intake from baseline to death from the repeated food frequency questionnaires.”

According to the report, people who ate the most red meat were more likely to smoke, drink, eat far more calories and be overweight. They were also less likely to exercise and eat healthy foods like fruits, vegetables, whole grains and fish. Basically they were less healthy people with less healthy habits.

The authors claim to have controlled for such lifestyle factors by doing statistical corrections for these variables, which is the industry standard for this type of analysis. They also performed a sensitivity analysis to see if any other dietary variable (including glycemic load) may have impacted their results. They did not detect any significant differences when controlling for these factors, which I admittedly find surprising.

To their credit, the authors made an effort to distinguish between processed and unprocessed meats. Given the time during which the study took place, however, it’s unlikely that any of the participants were eating non-industrial, grass-fed and pastured meat. I think this is an important point, particularly when considering cancer mortality, since toxic compounds tend to accumulate in the fat of animals.

In their analysis the authors estimated that for every one serving of red meat per day (defined as 3 oz), total mortality risk increased by 12% (20% for processed red meat alone, 13% for unprocessed). Heart disease risk increased by 16% for total red meat (21% for processed red meat, 18% for processed), and cancer risk increased 10% for total red meat (16% for processed, 10% unprocessed).

To help put this in perspective, in the Nurses Health Study (the larger of the two) the group that ate the least meat consumed about a 1.5 oz (half a deck of cards) of meat per day and the group that ate the most consumed around 6.5 oz of meat per day (here’s the data I’m pulling from, using the 3 oz serving size for conversion).

Remember, these numbers are for daily consumption. For the highest group, that’s nearly 3 pounds per week (45.5 oz). For the lowest group, under 1 pound (10.5 oz). Realistically, the lowest group probably ate red meat 1-2 times per week, while the highest group ate it once or twice a day. How we got from here to “all red meat will kill you” isn’t exactly clear.

Interestingly, when they did an analysis to see the specific effect of saturated fat in meat it accounted for only 4% of the 16% estimated risk. This is fairly low considering that saturated fat is supposedly what makes meat so bad for us by raising cholesterol. But since the authors say that saturated fat could account for some of the increased risk, can we at least assume that those eating the most meat were more likely to have higher cholesterol? Not so fast. It turns out that in both cohorts, those in the lowest group of meat consumption were the most likely to have high cholesterol. (Thanks Denise Minger for making this astute observation).

So what about the meat is killing us exactly? In addition to saturated fat, the authors also estimated that heme iron in meat (assumed to be a risk factor for some diseases) can account for another 5% of the risk, but they do not elaborate on how this might work. It is unclear what else about red meat may be increasing mortality risk, though preservation methods are suspected for the higher risk associated with processed meats.

The authors also used some fancy statistical magic to estimate what would happen if the participants theoretically replaced one “daily” meat serving with an equal portion of either fish, poultry, nuts, legumes, low-fat dairy or whole grains and determined that mortality risk would decline 7%, 14%, 19%, 10%, 10% and 14%, respectively. It is important to remember though that *ahem* these are not real experiments but merely estimations based on the numbers and statistical models used in this study. At best an analysis like this can generate a hypothesis that could then be tested in a controlled trial.

Fortunately controlled studies replacing meats (oh, and all the other crap in the Western diet) with other nutritious, whole foods have already been done. For example, in the Lyon Diet Heart Study (1988) a group of patients who had already had a heart attack were instructed to change their diets. One group went on the low-fat American Heart Association diet, the other group adopted a Mediterranean style diet that included lots of green and root vegetables, fruits, legumes, more fish and poultry, less red meat, olive oil and no cream. After only 3 years the study was stopped by the ethics and safety committee because the Mediterranean diet group had a 70% reduced risk of death compared to those on the low-fat diet.

Studies have consistently shown that replacing some dietary meat with fish and other sources of omega-3 fatty acids reduces the risk of heart disease. However, replacing red meat with anything else (even olive oil) seems to be pointless. For this reason I’ve always been skeptical that red meat is uniquely bad when the simpler explanation would be that eating more fish is uniquely good. I don’t see how this new analysis of old studies changes anything.

Lastly, although the authors included controls for lifestyle factors I’m highly suspicious that people with so many unhealthy habits are at an increased risk of death primarily because of meat consumption. Consequently, all that I’d feel comfortable concluding from the new analysis is that in the context of a Western diet, eating something other than meat every once in awhile is probably a good idea. Outside of the Western diet? It’s much harder to say.

What are your thoughts on the study?

For The Love of Food

Welcome to Friday’s For The Love of Food, Summer Tomato’s weekly link roundup.

Some truly fantastic articles this week including new data that farmers markets aren’t as expensive as you think, how to cut calories with a knife, and one of my favorite go-to recipes ever.

Want to see all my favorite links? Be sure to follow me on on Digg. I also share links at Twitter (@summertomato) and the Summer Tomato Facebook fan page. I’m very active on all these sites and would love to connect with you.

Links of the week

• New Study Compares Prices at Farmers’ Markets and Supermarkets. The Results Might Surprise You. <<Turns out when you actually do the comparison farmers markets are pretty affordable, particularly for organics. (Politics of the Plate)
• The “No Nitrites Added” Hoax <<Speaking of nutritionism, here it is at it’s worst. Just because it is natural, doesn’t make it nitrite free–if that even matters. Great investigative work by Michael Ruhlman.
• Do Cooking Shows Make You Fat? <<BS of the week. Though the article does a decent job of exploring the pros and cons, the idea that the popularization of food and cooking could be a bad thing makes me nauseated. We’d all be better served by embracing a stronger food culture. (Fox News)
• Rethinking Saturated Fat? <<I had the great pleasure of meeting Dr. Weil this week, and was struck by how thoughtfully he fields questions. Interesting to see his take on saturated fat evolve. (Dr. Weil)
• Is sodium a dietary red herring for the effects of processed foods? <<Totally agree with Yoni on this one. Interesting to see where the great salt debate finally lands. (Weighty Matters)
• How to Make Your Herbs Last Longer <<Just in time for spring! I have a lot of trouble keeping herbs fresh, so am excited to try these tricks. (Serious Eats)
• Cutting calories could be as easy as cutting up your food <<All these little behavioral tricks to cut calories can add up. Grab a knife. (Los Angeles Times)
• A Fresh Food Diet Rapidly Reduces Bisphenol-A Content Of Your Body <<Worried about BPA? Good news, it’s easy to cut your levels with a healthy diet. (TreeHugger)
• The Antidote to Fructose Fears <<Great perspective here for those of you who are now worried about fruit being dangerous because of the fructose it contains. (Nutrition Overeasy)
• Easiest Bean or Grain Salad on the Planet <<I love this because I seriously eat a variety of this several times a week, usually for lunch. Try using miso in place of the dijon mustard on occasion. (Mark Bittman)

What inspired you this week?

For those of you who haven’t been following along with the Tomato Slice newsletter, I recently launched a segment called Office Hours where I make myself available to take any questions subscribers may have.

This week I held a special Office Hours to discuss 2 articles from last week’s For The Love Of Food post:

1. Is Sugar Toxic? by Gary Taubes
2. The latest scientific consensus on saturated fat and heart disease

Since I had so many questions on these papers, I recorded the session and posted it above.

If you’d like to know more about the sugar article, I also recommend Dr. Lustig’s YouTube video mentioned in the article, as well as his interview this week on KQED which I’ve included below.

Feel free to leave your thoughts or ask questions in the comments.