Week 15: Ya Can't Beat Somethin' with Nothin'

If you are going to stop eating wheat for a month as I am suggesting, then you have to replace the wheat with something else. First let me suggest what you don't replace it with. While the gluten-free products you see on the grocery shelves have the advantage of functioning, tasting, and often looking like the bread you are replacing, these are not healthy products. If you are going to change then you need to change, and these "fake foods" need to be avoided.

A personal example is the bread I ate for a year before I tested positive for gluten anti-bodies. Since I was doing low carb, I naturally selected a low carb bread. I had at least one slice a day, sometimes as much as three. Let's face it, sandwiches are easy and you can eat them anywhere. Curse you, Earl of Sandwich! 

Bread is not a naturally low carb food, so how do they make it low carb? Remember that gluten is a protein that is not digestible. Ideally it just goes right through us when we eat it. So can you guess what the main ingredient in low carb bread usually is? That's right, they use gluten. I am not sure how much more gluten was in this product, but it has to be a high multiple of a normal slice of bread. Looking back on it, it is hardly surprising that I evolved an anti-body reaction to wheat. I was overdosing on gluten!

All these "fake " foods have this issue. If you take a product and adjust it for some artificial goal, you get an odd product. To get low fat, they often add sugar. To get low carb, they often add fat. They have to do one or the other if they want a salable product. It has to taste good. This is why in an earlier week I suggested that you eliminate sodas, even if they are diet sodas. It takes about 6 weeks for our tastes to change. I still remember the shock I felt as I ate some brussels sprouts and noticed how sweet they tasted. Vegetables may not become your favorite, but as your taste buds change, your eating habits can also change.

In an earlier week I suggested one cup of cooked vegetables, and an occasional salad as a meal. Now it is time to get even more serious about vegetables. I suggest two cups of vegetables every day as a minimum. Yes, fresh is better, but frozen works just fine. I often will take one of the frozen steamable bags and eat it all myself. That is usually more than two cups. This much has an interesting side effect: the bulk of this much vegetables is quite filling, and I find I eat fewer calories. Yes, you can drizzle the vegetables with butter or olive oil or any sauce that might be left over from the meat, I sometimes do. Note that the definition of drizzle is different from the definition of drench. But just as often I add nothing, and with my changing tastes it tastes just fine.

I also suggest that you eat one cup of raw vegetables each day. Note with lettuce you will need 2 or 3 cups to replace one cup of raw vegetables. We bought a tray of raw vegetables just recently, and we never even opened the ranch dressing dip. We did not need it. The tray was handy, however. We are still using it, adding various raw vegetables as we eat it. Since this Sunday is the Super Bowl, you can make your own healthy munchies without the ranch dipping dressing.

You can buy already made salads. We like the Bistro brand. While it is better to make your own dressing and salads, the salad dressing in these pre-made salads are portion-controlled. The oils they use would not be my first choice, but they do all the measuring for you. For a recipe for salad dressing from a previous week click here.

So even if you have decided not to go along with a gluten-free experiment for a month, your assignment for this week is to eat two cups of cooked vegetables and one cup of raw vegetables each and every day. You didn't think this year-long process would be easy did you?

Still need more convincing? I am still not convinced that gluten is the root of all evil. Wheat after all, is not a root vegetable. But this video is interesting and it is your homework for this week.