What Goes in Your Body?

I'm trying to eat better since I was diagnosed with cancer in December and even better since the complications of my second surgery in June.

Never much of a fried foods person I've always liked fruits and vegetables but over the last six months have added some things to my diet and subtracted others in the interest of wellness. Most of the time I'm confident that I'm doing a good job, especially with the help of shopper food/manager daughter Kate who has been somewhat cornered into the role of nutrition guru since she's smart, savvy, a great researcher and has taken on the flipped upside-down role of stay-at-home mom to me.

We're lucky to be guided by my friend and medical librarian Patricia Anderson who tells us everything we didn't want to know about plant estrogens which I must avoid because my tumor cells need estrogen to grow. But still sometimes I wonder if I could be doing more.

So I was interested to see that Tara Parker-Pope  who writes on health for the New York Times Blog recently asked Dr. Jonny Bowden, author of “The 150 Healthiest Foods on Earth,” (some of them fairly obscure) to list some favorite foods that are - thank you Tara for specifying this part - easy to find.

Here's his list:

1. Beets
2. Cabbage.
3. Swiss chard
4. Cinnamon
5. Pomegranate juice
6. Dried plums
7. Pumpkin seeds
8. Sardines
9. Turmeric
10. Frozen blueberries
11. Canned pumpkin

So how did you do?

How many of these do you eat regularly? Forced to poke around your pantry to see if you've got any of these in stock?

I've got three of the eleven in the house; one only by accident I admit. (Thank you Connie Reece for the Texas nuts that contained a fair number of pumpkin seeds which I actually was surprised to love. Now I just need to find your supplier.)

Blueberries top my cereal every morning and I love beets but have them only occasionally. Cabbage is not something I love but I don't dislike it either and it is part of salads that I routinely order when eating out or via take-out.

Pomegranate juice is new for me but very tasty, not too tart at all though some think so.

Cinnamon is hard to fit into my routine, though and I wonder if it is worth the effort for the little I'd actually consume without wanting to head off to the pastry shop for something that would be decidedly unhealthy.

Sardines and canned pumpkin though? Don't look for that happening any time soon.

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Put it to Use

To find suggestions on how to include these foods in our diets I poked around here and then looking further into this I found that an article in Mental Floss touts the goodness of all portions of the pumpkin, including the blossom, and provides a handy chart to back up the information.

Comments

[Alanna]

I actually really like canned pumpkin - I add pumpkin pie spices and treat it like pudding.

[Otenth]

Both cinnamon and turmeric could be used with canned pumpkin to do something interesting. (Cinnamon would be paired with the pumpkin almost effortlessly--it's a part of most pie spice mixtures.)

Cinnamon could also be added to the dried plums (aka "prunes" LOL) with other dried fruit in rote grütze (a cold soup or dessert). I suppose some pomegranate juice could go in there too!

[Suki Fuller]

Ha, why is it that I feel so bloody unhealthy with 7 of 11 in my house? Oh yeah must be that I am not eating them, they're just taking up space in their various locations! Thanks for the tip on the book, article and links. I'll get on that. As for sardines, I love them...

[Mary Ann]

Why frozen blueberries? Are they better than fresh? Cinnamon is great for helping lower glucose levels. My diabetic husband takes a 500 mg. capsule of cinnamon twice a day. Available in most drug stores and even WalMart.

[Jill Aldrich]

Great info, thanks. I'd like to know about the frozen blueberries, too...

[Susan Reynolds]

Somehow the link to the original article got lost in typepad's current wonkiness so I need to dig around and add that but I didn't see the why of the frozen option for blueberries Mary Ann and Jill - I wonder if my food gurus Patricia or Kate know why Doctor Bowden was high on frozen. Perhaps it's just the convenience factor. Easy to dump on a bowl of cereal - at least at my house

Suki needs to give me some help on the sardines. Maybe if I had a secret recipe that made them into something I just could not resist snacking on?

Otenth, I like your idea for prunes. Wonder if canned plums might work in the same concoction or if just the canning process takes so much out of them they're worthless.

Alanna I'm not sure I've ever even tasted turmeric but I'm sure I've tasted canned pumpkin and said "blech". Maybe chocolate sauce on top could make it palatable?

[Eve]

Very informative. Thank you. I have gone directly to my library link and requested two of Dr. Jonny's books. =)