Healthy Eating
Seminars@Hadley
Healthy Eating: Easy to “Digest” Information
We Can All Use
Presented by
Elisa Trigalo
Martha Pamperin
Moderated by
Dawn Turco
September 25, 2007
Dawn Turco
Our presenters, one is just down the hall from me at the Hadley school in Winnetka, Illinois, Elisa Trigalo and she will be our first presenter to talk this evening. She will talk a little bit about herself. I will tell you that we are thrilled to have her here tonight. She’s new both to the seminar but also to Hadley. She’s a friend of one of our staff members and we were looking for knowledgeable nutritionists to help us with the conversation tonight and here she is. So thank you, Elisa
Also, presenting the second in row is Martha Pamperin, a Hadley instructor out of California. You can see our presenters are nowhere near each other but someone how we get all of this to work. So just hang in there with us this evening. Martha will be coming on and giving us some of her tips and insights into how she is a blind adult person with a family; has access to kinds of information that she needs to put out a good meal, a healthy mean and to get labels read and do her shopping. All of those kinds of tips and I suspect some of our presenters will be able to add to the list tonight.
We will be running for approximately an hour. Each presenter will have a few words of comment or presentation and then we will open it up for discussion. There will be opportune time for the questions. Having said all of that I think we’ll get started .And again, welcome. I will hand the microphone now over to Elisa, thank you.
Elisa Trigalo
Hello, this is Elisa. I’m here in Winnetka. I’m going to tell you just a few words about myself. I’m a registered dietician. I have a bachelors and a master’s degree in nutritional science. I work in an outpatient clinic where I meet with patients to talk about their diet and try to find ways that they might want to change it or improve it for health reasons.
What I’m going to do now is talk a little bit about what healthy eating guidelines are and if anyone has any questions we can take one or two questions. Then I’d like to go into a little bit more detail about things you can do in your diet to help prevent or possibly treat certain chronic illnesses. I’m going to talk about healthy diet based on the food pyramid guide. I think a lot of people might be familiar with the food pyramid guide but may or may not know exactly how to use it for their own benefit.
There is an excellent website; it’s very easy to find because it’s called mypyramid.gov and it’s got a lot of information on it as well as some interactive places you can go to get more specified information for your own diet. The food pyramid guide is divided into categories, different types of food groups. The first food group is grains. Grains are starches. Those are the basis of a healthy diet. According to the food pyramid guide you need to eat about half of your calories, 50 to 60% of your calories from starches. Of those starches you want as many as possible, at least half of them, to be whole grains.
The types of foods in this category are anything that comes from wheat— bread, cereal, noodles. Then you have rice, crackers, potatoes could be a starch and then there are all different kinds of interesting starches like barley, quinoa, arrowroot, etc. Then we talk about fruits and vegetables; from what we know about diet nowadays, the more fruits and the more vegetables in your diet, the better. One way to think about eating a lot of different fruits and vegetables is to think about colors. If you think about your dark green vegetables like broccoli or spinach you’re going to get a lot of vitamins and minerals from those things.
Then you think about different colors like orange and red—sweet potatoes, carrots, tomatoes. Then you can think of white like cauliflower, onions, garlic. All of those different color categories have different nutrients. The variety in your diet makes a big difference. Fruits, there are all different kinds of fruits. There are tropical fruits. There are citrus fruits, bananas, grapes. You can have them as fresh fruits. You can use frozen fruits to make shakes. You could use dried or canned fruits. They all have nutritional value.
Juice is pretty popular these days but drinking a lot of fruit juice probably isn’t a real good idea. Eating the whole fruit is better. Then we have the dairy category or the milk category where you have anything made from milk. So it could be milk, it could be yogurt, cottage cheese, yellow cheeses. All of those things count as dairy. We tend to recommend that people try to use low fat or fat free dairy wherever they can.
The last group in the pyramid is the protein group. These proteins you can think of in two categories. You can have proteins that come from animals so that would be beef, pork, any poultry—chicken or turkey and then seafood which would be fish or shrimp or oysters, clams anything like that. Those are all animal proteins. Eggs go in that category as well.
Then there are vegetarian proteins which you would be getting from soy or any type of dried beans or lentils like kidney beans, pinto beans, lentil soup, and black beans - all of those have a lot of protein. Nuts, seeds those also have protein and are all healthy for you. That’s the basic idea of the food pyramid guide along with the fact that you need to try and get exercise in your daily life. Some type of physical activity is recommended.
Now, how do you know what you want to do for your own self? Well, if you go to the website, mypyramid.gov, you will see on their homepage that there is a little list on the left-hand side and the topic subject on that list is called “My Pyramid Plan.” When you go to My Pyramid Plan you can enter a few of your own data. You enter your age, your weight, and your height. Then you need to tell them if you’re male or female and you can choose activity level. Then it’s going to give you what you calorie level should be and you can print that out. You’ll get a personalized pyramid guide. It will tell you for your age and height related etc, it will tell me how many servings of grains you need to eat in a day. It gives you an idea of what a serving is which we’ll talk about later. It tells me how much fruit and vegetable you need to eat for you calorie needs; same thing for dairy, same thing for protein.
Once you get your personalized information it makes it easier for you to start knowing how your diet fits into those guidelines. Also on that website you can print out a worksheet and you can work from there. We’re going to talk about that later on. I’d like to know now if anyone has any questions just about the general eating requirements.
Caller
Yeah, Elisa I just wanted to know, obviously you said it was not a good idea to treat a lot of fruit juices but what about if you take the fruits themselves like grapes or whatever and squeeze the juices of the fruits themselves into a drink. Is that a pretty health decision?
Elisa Trigalo
That’s a good question. The juice that you would be making from your fresh fruits is perfectly healthy. The problem with fruit juice is that people tend to not realize how many calories that could be drinking in a glass of fruit juice. So for example if you need to be careful about your calorie intake and you drink a large glass or orange juice you might use five or six oranges to squeeze that glass of juice. But you probably would never sit down and eat six oranges. If you’re trying to watch your calories, juice can be a problem. Does anyone else have a question?
Caller
I’m wondering, regarding the grain. I’m allergic to wheat. What is left to me in that category because I understand a lot of the grains are farmed with wheat and I just can’t have wheat?
Elisa Trigalo
For people who are allergic to wheat I won’t go into your personal history but a wheat allergy is actually a gluten allergy and that’s also known as Celiac disease. For people who must avoid gluten they shouldn’t eat anything made from wheat, oats or rye. Well, oats is a little bit of a question. It’s actually wheat, barley and rye. Oats you have to be a little careful about so the best things to do are to find some brands that you know are wheat free. I could actually have Dawn put up a link for you but the Celiac Sprue Foundation is a good place to start. They have a lot of information online.
I’m going to give you a little bit of an idea about what to do to try with your diet to help. This is really about preventing chronic disease. This is the area that I work in, in my clinic so I’m really concerned that people come to me and understand their numbers; that the doctor has done their lab tests and is telling them the information they need to know so that they can be productive in their healthcare.
First of all I’m just going to talk a little bit about heart disease and what you need to know to monitor, make sure that as much as possible your diet is going according to a heart healthy diet. A little bit about blood pressure, diabetes and cancer.
Heart disease, as everyone knows, you don’t want to have high cholesterol. People know they don’t want high cholesterol but they’re not quite sure what their cholesterol should be and what all of those numbers mean it’s really important that you know your cholesterol numbers. So if you go to the doctor for a checkup and they tell you “Oh yeah, you’re fine.” I would recommend that you know your numbers and these are the numbers you want to know; you want to know your total cholesterol. That number should be less than 200. You want to know your bad cholesterol which is called LDL cholesterol. That number should definitely be less than 160, hopefully less than 130 and as ideal as possible near 100.
The LDL cholesterol is the bad cholesterol and that can be to a great extent controlled with a low fat diet. If you’re cholesterol is high or your bad cholesterol is high you really need to be careful about eating a low fat diet. Your good cholesterol on the other hand, your HDL cholesterol, you want to be high. If you’re a man you want it to be above 40. If you’re a woman you want it to be above 50. HDL cholesterol responds to exercise so the more exercise you are able to do it can help raise your good cholesterol.
The other number that you need to be aware of is your triglycerides which is part of your total cholesterol that you’ll get if you do that blood test. Triglycerides should be less than 150 and they can also respond to some diet changes in particular if a person tends to eat a lot of simple sugars, like sweet things or pastries made with white flour. Those type of not real healthy carbohydrates. Or if they eat a lot of fat in the diet that can respond somewhat to reduce your fat and reduce your triglycerides. The other thing is if you happen to drink a lot of alcohol or sweet drinks like soda, too much fruit juice, all of that will to some extent help your cholesterol.
High blood pressure is something that a lot of people don’t really know what is high, what are my numbers? What should I do about it? The normal blood pressure is 120 over 80. If you’re approximately at that, you could be 110 over 75 or you could be 122 over 83, somewhere in that neighborhood, that’s a pretty good blood pressure. But once your blood pressure gets to be either over 140 or over 90, either of those two numbers, and then you’re starting to have high blood pressure. The most important thing, diet-wise, about keeping your blood pressure under control is to make sure you don’t eat too much salt. You really need to try and limit your salt.
There is a whole diet plan that goes along with keeping a healthy blood pressure and it’s called the “Dash Diet.” That’s also going to be one of the website links that we have where you can find out more about Dash Diet. The other thing I’d like people to really know about is diabetes and what is called pre diabetes. That relates to your blood sugar numbers. Most people know if your blood sugar is too high it’s not go but what you need to know is that when you do your blood test and you’ve been fasting overnight, which means you didn’t eat anything for at least eight hours. You can drink water but you shouldn’t eat any food and you do your blood test. You want your blood sugar to be less than 100. If your blood sugar is less than 100 then hopefully everything is fine. If your sugar is a little bit over 100 you may have pre diabetes. If your fasting blood sugar is over 126 then technically that is the cut-off for diabetes.
It is real important to know those numbers. Obviously if you do have diabetes or pre diabetes that is very controllable with diet. We can try and talk about that later if people are interested. The other disease that is, to a great extent, preventable by healthy diet is cancer. There are a lot of cancers that professionals feel really could be prevented if people kept a healthier diet. Following the healthy diet guidelines that I started talking about based on the pyramid, they make a difference for a lot of reasons. There are other medical conditions that are related to diet such as osteoporosis, certain types of anemia. People have food allergies that they have to be careful about and anyone who might have kidney disease, that is very important to keep a strict diet.
Those are the medical conditions that I’m really interested in. I don’t know if anyone might have a question at this point. I would take a few questions.
Dawn Turco
I did have a text message from Jill who is on a 1,600 calorie diet and she is diabetic. She’s just not sure—she’s taking medications as well for edema. She wasn’t quite sure what she should be able to eat to stay healthy. Did you want to address maybe some of the ideas that are good rules of thumb for people with diabetes?