LOOK! On Your Plate!: It’s a Bird! It’s a Plane! It’s SUPER FOODS!

By Northwest Florida Daily News, Fort Walton Beach

Mar. 22–When you’re choosing to “eat healthy,” bear this in mind: Some foods are better choices than others. Some foods are so good for you that they deserve a category all their own: Super Foods.

Authors like Dr. Steven Pratt and nutrition experts on both a national and local level tout making food choices like these for a simple reason: eating them has been associated with profound health benefits.

Take, for example, oatmeal. Please.

According to White-Wilson Medical Center dietitian Barbara Roberts, high-fiber breakfast cereals like oatmeal or grain cereals are a great way to start your day.

“Research has shown that people who eat highfiber cereal for breakfast are more likely to meet the recommended fiber intake guidelines of 20 to 30 grams daily,” Roberts said. “I usually recommend a cereal with at least 5 grams of fiber per serving. Many good high-fiber cereals contain 10 to 12 grams of fiber in each serving.”

Keep going that same day with other high-fiber foods like dry beans and lentils, and you’ll not only have a happy metabolism, you’ll probably end up with lower cholesterol.

“While there is no silver bullet, no cure-all diet, there are some foods that are super foods just because they are what your body needs,” said local chiropractor Ed Frisbee.

He would categorize water as a super food, something most people need more of in their diet.

“And, every day people need to get plenty of dark green leafy vegetables — cooked correctly so they don’t lose the nutrients — in their diet,” he said.

He suggests fixing greens or kale by steaming them for 10 minutes, then adding a little olive oil — another super food in his opinion — to take out some of the bitterness.

“A super food should enhance how your body works,” Frisbee said.

That’s why he believes in addition to paying attention to what you eat, it’s also important to be educated on how that food is grown. A food isn’t super, Frisbee said, unless it’s organic: grown without chemical pesticides or fertilizers.

Acupuncturist Rick Abbott, associated with Frisbee’s practice, also touts the benefits of eating nutrient-rich foods combined with regular exercise to make the body work at peak efficiency.

To Abbott, that doesn’t mean just squeezing in a couple of cups of greens to offset pounds of pasta. True super foods make up the bulk of a diet to really work well.

“In our society, sweets and grains are so embedded in our diet preference that the majority of what we eat is void of nutrients,” Abbott said. “That’s why we gain weight and are still hungry. Diet and health are all connected; it’s a pattern we have to break.”

Deborah Merwin, of Feelin’ Good health food store in Destin, pointed out that some multi-grain products help boost diets with antioxidant-rich foods that might be lacking in a processed-food heavy diet.

“Antioxidants are needed in our body’s system to destroy free radicals, toxins created by diet, environmental issues or imbalances in the body like cancer or parasites,” Merwin said. “Antioxidants are foods that will go into body and act, like Pac Man, hunt and destroy free radicals.”

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Copyright (c) 2006, Northwest Florida Daily News, Fort Walton Beach

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