Healthy Food & Healthy Living by Dr. Ayala

Why cooking helps with weight loss and wellness

There’s a clear link between eating home cooked meals and diet quality. Eating more home-cooked meals is also associated with lower risk of obesity.

Teaching cooking skills is an important method for improving eating habits, and is more effective than just instructing people about nutrition, but what kind of cooking should be emphasized in these lessons? 

The healthfulness of cooking practices depends on both ingredients and techniques. Health promoting cooking methods include using whole grains, adding herbs and spices, using healthy oils such as olive oil, incorporating fruits and vegetables, using onion and garlic, and using lower amounts of fat. On the other hand are health compromising cooking methods such as deep frying, use of processed foods, animal fat, processed meat, and adding sugar and sweeteners in cooking. A method for quantifying healthy cooking has been established – the Healthy Cooking Index applies a point for each health promoting behavior, and deducts a point for health compromising actions. 

A new study in Appetite looks at about 150 overweight or obese people undergoing a weight loss program. The participants were assessed for cooking practices after the weight loss intervention.

And the results: those who had a higher healthy cooking score achieved more weight loss and ate healthier.

Next, the researchers attempted to identify cooking patterns and came up with three types of cooking: Red Meat Simple, Vegetarian Simple, and Health and Taste Enhancing. 

Red Meat Simple cooks used fewer healthful additions, such as whole grains, fruit, and vegetables, or olive oil while using more red meat and animal fat and cooked meat to high temperatures. 

Vegetarian Simple cooks cooked less meat, were more likely to add fruit and vegetables, to cook with herbs and spices, use healthy cooking techniques (baking, boiling, or steaming), moderate salt and oil use, and to avoid deep frying and cooking meats to high temperatures or charring. 

The Health and Taste Enhancing cooking is characterized by higher use of taste enhancers including herbs,  spices and alliums, as well as healthful use of oils such as olive oil, fruits, vegetables, and whole grains. These kind of cooks were more likely to marinade meat prior to cooking, and to use low-fat cooking methods and moderate the salt and oil when cooking. 

The researchers found that The Red Meat Simple cooking pattern was associated with less weight loss compared to the other patterns.

Why would that be? Healthier cooking habits translate diet advice into everyday life, and make guidelines into meals. Eat-more-veggies is an abstract aspiration, while a tasty salad bowl is an adoptable habit.

Other studies have shown that hands-on cooking lessons resulted in weight loss compared to guidance followed by demonstration only.

The cooking patterns analysis hints at what's most important to impart in cooking classes: “complexity is not a necessary aspect of healthy cooking,” the authors write. “Having more advanced technical cooking skills and, in turn, making more complex dishes does not necessarily yield healthier food consumption. Promoting cooking practices that are likely to positively impact the nutritional content of the foods prepared and deterring the use of practices that are likely to negatively impact the nutritional content of foods we prepare may be more important than trying to achieve advanced levels of culinary expertise.”

Cooking plants 

Since what’s missing most from the American diet is plant based foods and whole foods, practicing kitchen skills on these ingredients is the most valuable.

A study looking at the veggie consumption and cooking skills of university students in Brazil found that less than half the students ate vegetables regularly, but knowing how to cook was significantly associated with eating veggies daily. These results are in agreement with another study of more than 1000 freshmen in the US that found that confidence in the ability to cook from basic ingredients and to follow a recipe was associated with eating more fruits and vegetables and better weight status. 

The basic skills we all need as cooks should include salads knowhow, what to make with whole grains, and a few basic cooking techniques that incorporate vegetables with grains and with protein sources, such as making a stir fry, cooking a soup, and oven roasting.

Knowing how to make healthy, tasty, simple and affordable meals is key to health and weight control, it’s a practice that’s central to wellbeing.

Dr. Ayala

How sustainable are the keto and paleo diets?

Food is one of the most direct ways in which we connect to nature. Even the most urban dwelling person eating a processed diet eats what comes from nature. 

Food choices also affect nature. Food production is intimately intertwined with the environment and with our climate, especially with the exponential growth of the human population and our expanding consumption patterns.

And food choices matter: Our diet affects our own health, and also the health of our planet, as the carbon footprint of different food choices carries different environmental costs. 

The American diet changes over time, and as people aspire to improve their health and weight status they’re open to hearing about new eating patterns – and their environmental impact. On the rise are the Mediterranean style diet and several plant forward ones, and the paleo and keto diet are also gaining a following – it’s estimated that ~10 percent of Americans are giving them a try. A new study in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition looks at the carbon footprint of these and other popular diets.

The study includes more than 16,000 people whose diet was categorized into vegan, vegetarian, pescatarian, paleo, keto, or omnivore – which includes all other diets. The carbon footprint of each dietary pattern was calculated using a previously developed database of food impacts on the environment called dataFIELD. The diet quality of each diet was assessed by comparing it to the Healthy Eating Index (HEI) and the Alternate Healthy Eating Index (AHEI). 

And the results: Keto and paleo diets have a higher carbon footprint and a lower mean diet quality than vegetarian, vegan, and pescatarian diets. The keto diet, which is a high-fat low-carb diet, is estimated to produce almost 3 kg of carbon dioxide for every 1,000 calories of food. The paleo diet, which prioritizes meats, nuts and vegetables, emits 2.6 kg of carbon dioxide for every 1,000 calories. A vegan diet, on the other hand,  generates 0.7 kg of carbon dioxide per 1,000 calories – less than a fourth of a keto diet.

How much difference could changing your diet make? “For any given day, if a third of the omnivores consumed a 2000 kcal vegetarian diet, and assuming accompanying shifts in domestic production, the savings would be equivalent to eliminating 340 million passenger vehicle miles,” the authors write. Over a year this would amount to about 5 percent of what we needed to do to meet the US targets of the Paris accords, and improve our diet quality, reducing risk of chronic disease.

An omnivore’s compromise

The single most environmentally-impactful food choice regards animal products. Animal food production emits much more greenhouse gasses than plant foods. Beef production emits 10 times more than chicken, and 20 times as much as growing legumes, nuts and seeds. 

Studies show that vegan and vegetarian diets emit less greenhouse gasses. Several other diets that are usually adopted for health benefits – such as the Mediterranean-style diet and the DASH diet also carry a smaller carbon footprint than the typical American diet.

We can all take steps towards greater sustainability by eating more plants and less meat, eating less processed foods, choosing organic when possible, preferring produce that's locally grown and in season, and avoiding waste.

Even the smallest steps count in a world with more eight billion people making food choices.

Dr. Ayala