January
2007
The Tuesday 10
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Top 10 Fibrous Foods:
It’s critical to get sufficient fiber into your body, and few people do.
Fiber is a key component of disease prevention (including heart disease and cancer). I recommend fiber because it also helps keep you lean, it clears the body of toxins, reduces cholesterol, and of course, it aids digestion.
Lack of fiber results in many health problems, most of which, nobody likes to talk about in polite company, myself included. But doubling or tripling your fiber intake can clear up IBS, improve metabolism and immunity, fight inflammation and indigestion, and - nice side benefit - improve your mental clarity and focus.
Refined grains and starches aren’t the smart way to get fiber - these are things like potatoes, bread, cereal, pasta, pizza, dessert, and chips. They have some fiber, but not as much as crunchy, stalky vegetables and sturdier whole grains - and they’re just worthless carbs anyway. You can eat three or four times the vegetables for the same amount of calories that are in one serving of grains, and I think vegetables have better flavor anyway.
1. Broccoli
2. Cauliflower
3. Brussels Sprouts
I passionately avoided these for the first thirty years of my life, only to discover they aren’t so bad. With lemon and garlic, they actually taste amazing. And all this time, I was envisioning rows of tiny cabbages. Who knew they grew this way? There goes the image of a miniature harvesting machine. It was fun while it lasted.
4. Asparagus
5. Celery or bok choy
I hate strings, so I go for the bok choy.
6. Good grains: quinoa, brown rice, beans
Quinoa (keen-wah) is a complete protein. Not bad for a grain. (Though I’m not a fan of grains.)
7. Sturdy greens: spinach, cabbage, kale
8. Sprouted-grain bread
Sprouted-grain bread is technically not made of flour, which is pretty cool if you must have bread now and then. Personally I don’t do bread very often. It’s as unprocessed as you can get for bread. My favorite brand is Ezekiel bread.
9. Real oatmeal (not the instant kind)
10. Green beans: snow, sugar snap, string
Fibrous - it’s even more entertaining if you say it like fib-russ instead of fibe-russ. Try it. “Dude, my lunch was so fib-russ. That’s a really fib-russ meal. You need to eat more fib-russ foods if you want to lose that gut.” You can really annoy your wife and buddies this way. So I hear.
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[...] Recently I talked about what I eat in a day, and though you might call it “low-carb”, I think of it as simply eating the way humans should eat (humble, I know). The focus is on fiber from greens, lean meat, good fats from fish and certain vegetable oils, and yes, even some saturated fat. So long as fat isn’t refined, I think much of our dread of saturated fat is overblown. (You all know how I feel about cholesterol - I think inflammation is far more deadly for humans.) I’m inclined to believe it’s the proportion of “good” to “bad” fat that is more important than fretting over the amount of saturated fat in your steak. [...]