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| Nutritionist and Author |
Many people want to know more specifics about my new holiday E-book, such as what type of flour and sweeteners I use in my recipes. Rather than answer people individually, I decided to put the most common questions I have been receiving and my answers in this Q&A interview in case you were wondering about these questions, too.
Q. How is your book different from other cookbooks?
Copy from the Back Cover of the Book:
There’s a little-known secret to enjoying the holidays with health, energy and no weight gain: Eating against the grain. Preparing low- to no-grain foods may be unknown to most people but it is an overlooked strategy for making delicious holiday meals quicker, easier and with far less fuss.
In Healthier Holidays Going Against the Grain, nutritionist Melissa Diane Smith offers 135 simple tips and 25 original recipes that can help people who eat any of the following diets:
If you like the against-the-grain information you receive in Nutrition News and Notes but are hungry for more, join the Going Against the Grain Group! By not yet being a member, here are topics you’ve missed:
How to Spring Clean Your Diet
Creative Vegetable Ideas
Eating Further Against the Grain – when a gluten-free diet isn’t therapeutic enough
Baking with Coconut Flour
Eating Gluten Free in Restaurants
Summer Vacation from Cooking
More Summertime Strategies
Recipes, including Filet of Sole Florentine, Greek Halibut, Cool Noodle Tabouli for One, and Banana Coconut Muffins
Helpful Convenience Products from Trader Joe’s, Whole Foods and more
Vegetables offer more protection against diabetes than grains or fruit, Australian research shows.
A study, which looked at fiber intake and tracked 2000 people over 49 years of age for 10 years, found that vegetable fiber had the strongest link to reduced risk of type 2 diabetes.
Last Monday I participated in a short, nationally televised “grain debate” in New Zealand on NZ TV One.
You can view the video here.
I’m back from my trip to New Zealand and it’s good to be back online. First, the country is beautiful and the people are wonderful. Unfortunately, I experienced some not-so-nice weather and my trip was way too short, but I still packed a lot into those days that I was there.
I gave the keynote address, “Going Against the Grain: The Overlooked and Most Effective Strategy to Prevent and Reverse Obesity and Diabetes,” to the Australasian Integrative Medicine Association (AIMA) conference in Auckland last Saturday and then a workshop, “Going Against the Grain for Practitioners and Patients,” the next day. The doctors in attendance were very welcoming and receptive to the information and I was impressed with how many of them already were eating against the grain themselves in one way or another. New Zealand is in good hands with the doctors in AIMA NZ.
Last Sunday, an article about me and my work came out in New Zealand Woman’s Weekly, the publication with the largest circulation in the country (approximately 1 million people in a country of 4 million people). Read or download the article:
Note: This is an older study — one that most people don’t know about but should.
Change the diet and see striking improvements in virtually every measure of health for people with diabetes in just seven weeks? That’s exactly what happened for ten middle-aged, overweight, diabetic Australian Aborigines in 1982.
All ten of them had developed type 2 diabetes after leaving the bush where they had lived some years before and abandoning their traditional diet. Their diet in an urban area of Australia consisted mainly of flour, sugar, rice, carbonated drinks, beer, port, powdered milk, cheap fatty meat, and potatoes.
For a research experiment, the Aborigines agreed to return to their traditional homeland, and eat the way they did before, hunting and gathering foods. During that seven-week period of time, their diet consisted of seafood, along with birds, kangaroo and the fatty larvae of a local insect (during the time they were on the coast). They moved to a more inland location and ate freshwater fish and shellfish, turtle, crocodile, birds, kangaroo, yams, figs, bush honey, and other plant foods.
Eat real food kind of goes without saying. But we need to get back to that and steer away from thinking of foods as carriers of nutrients that manufacturers can manipulate for the better for our health, keynote speaker and The New York Times best-selling author Michael Pollan told a capacity crowd at Natural Products Expo West last week.
Natural Products Expo West is the country’s largest natural, organic, and healthy products trade show. It was larger than ever this year: More than 52,000 retailers, manufacturers and industry professionals attended the show to see a record 3,392 exhibits in the Anaheim Convention Center. “Gluten-Free” was an extremely popular category of products – even hotter than it has been the past few years. There were a number of healthful, whole-food, gluten-free products at the convention. However, it is amazing how many companies offer highly refined gluten-free products that people think are healthy just because they’re gluten free. Pollan’s comments on the changes that have taken place with our food and the way we look at food offers some much-needed perspective so we can make smarter choices in the foods we buy.
Some people simply like to enjoy the visual, sensual experience of watching my Food Slide Show without explanation. (It’s best to view the slide show with a high-speed connection.) Others want to know more specifics about the foods in the slide show. So, for those of you who want to know the details, here are the foods in the order they appear:
Want to know how to make these delicious, gluten-free, grain-free, sugar-free muffins?
Join the online Going Against the Grain Group!
The Going Against the Grain Group goes further than just offering you against-the-grain nutrition news. It offers ongoing nutritional support all year long with quick and easy meal ideas, recipes, food preparation tips, special reports, nutrition lessons and information about helpful food products, including early announcements of new products and products that fare best in real-life taste tests.