A Mediterranean Meal for Summer Dinner
A Mediterranean Meal made of grilled salmon, kale and avocado salad, and home made baked beans.
Slices of fresh ocean salmon are placed on a grill and brushed with mustard sauce. The salmon is grilled on the stove top and then using the broiler in the oven. The grilled salmon is shown below:
The kale and avocado salad are made as follows:
1. Wash 3/4 pounds of kale and peel 3 avocados. Have 2 large lemons and sliced tomato ready.
2. Place the avocado in with the kale and mash it into the kale. It is best to use gloved hands and work into the kale. Squeeze the lemons into the salad and work in some more. Finally, add some sliced tomato.
3. Put together the salmon, kale salad, and home made baked beans for this light summer Mediterranean meal:
Eat a Mediterranean Salad to Fight Obesity – June 30th
Today’s salad contained
Romaine lettuce (locally grown)
Mixed greens (spinach and lettuces)
Tomato
Green and red pepper (fried in onions and olive oil)
Pear
Today I added a half a small can of tuna and slices of lemon
Eat a Mediterranean Salad to Fight Obesity
Eating a Mediterranean salad for lunch or dinner is a fantastic way to eat healthy and fight obesity. It is packed full of nutrients including plenty of fiber to fill you up. A Mediterranean salad can also raise your spirits! In my mind, two important aspects that make it better are:
1. Using a portable glass salad bowl with a tight fitting lid. I do not enjoy eating out of a plastic bowl.
2. Use many different ingredients and change them often.
Today’s salad contained
Romaine lettuce (locally grown)
Mixed greens (spinach and lettuces)
White beans (canned)
Tomato
Green and red pepper (fried in onions and olive oil)
Pear
Blue berries
Plans for How to Cure Obesity for Summer 2015
Since this blog is basically for my courses on Nutrition and Obesity at Rutgers University, the posts become less frequent during the summer months and between semesters. However, that does not mean that I am inactive during these times. As you were able to see in my last post, I just published a book on Ancel Keys, who was an amazing scientist and also a hard working American who sought to improve the health of all Americans.
This summer (2015), I will attempt to complete another book project– that is, a book on Obesity in America.
Here is a bit of information on my new book on Obesity:
What is the current title? So far, the title is: Nutrition, Health, and Obesity: The Rise of Obesity in America and its Causes.
Why I am writing this book? There is not a good nutrition/obesity book for the general public on the market. There are many books written by so-called “media nutrition experts.” I use “Textbook of Obesity…” (See below) in my class and it is a great book and a wonderful source of references and topics, but it is a fairly dry book for the general reader.
Do I have the background to write this book? My credentials for writing this book: I have been teaching a class entitled “Nutrition and Health” for almost 25 years. I have taught this class at Columbia University in NY, at the University of Missouri, and now about 10 years at Rutgers University. Over the past few years I have also taught a class entitled, “Obesity: Biology, Behavior, and Management” (11:709:427:01). The Obesity book I am writing uses the knowledge and experience I have gained in teaching these two classes.
What is my philosophy in writing the book? I believe that if people truly understand the problem behind energy management and obesity, and if they are presented with some solid strategies for going forward with a plan of health living, then they will not turn to fad diets or crazy practices. They will pick a course of action and stick with it.
Who is the Audience for the book? I think a medium educated and highly motivated audience interested in nutrition and health (and not requiring a science background) will be the target audience.
What are my goals and aspirations for the book? I am hoping that this book will become the “Guns, Germs, and Steel” of the nutrition area.
What are Early Readers saying? I have had two Beta readers read an early version of the book last fall, and both of them loved it. One told me, “When you publish the book, I will buy a copy for each of my children and friends.”
Please watch out for posts from my book that I will publish this summer on this Site!
Publication of My Book on the Discovery of the Mediterranean Diet by Ancel and Margaret Keys
In late March 2015 I published my book on Dr. Ancel Keys, who was a pioneer researcher into the role of serum cholesterol in coronary heart disease. Dr. Keys was born in Colorado in 1904 and attended college at the University of California at Berkeley. He was awarded his Ph.D. from the same institution and then Dr. Keys performed two post-doctoral fellowships in Europe. When he returned to the U.S., he spent several years at Harvard University, less than a year at the Mayo Clinic, and then in 1938 he was recruited to the University of Minnesota, where Dr. Keys remained his entire scientific career. While he was at the Mayo Clinic, Dr. Keys met Margaret Haney, a chemist who began to work in the Keys laboratory as a technician. In 1939, Ancel and Margaret were married and began a partnership that would last 60 years. During this partnership, several very major accomplishments were completed. These included, several that have had a great impact on the American people:
1. He formulated ready-to-eat meals (called K-rations) for the American armed forces during World War II. These turned out to be a technical success and are immortalized in hundreds of
movies and books about World War II.
2. He led a major study during World War II on starvation that provided important information on how to treat starved prisoners and civilians.
3. He conceived and implemented the Seven Countries Study and identified important dietary factors that were associated with coronary heart disease.
4. He led a series of controlled dietary fat and cholesterol feeding studies in humans that resulted in the “Keys Equation,” which accurately predicted the changes in blood cholesterolconcentrations when changes were made in the composition of fats in the diet.
But the capstone of their accomplishments was the writing of three very popular
cookbooks that would help people eat healthy. These were “Eat Well and Stay Well” (1959), and an updated version, “How to Eat Well and Stay Well the Mediterranean Way” (1975). Both books were featured on the New York Times best seller list. They wrote a third book, “The Benevolent Bean,” published in 1967, and it was also successful. A collage of the covers of the three books is shown below:
The covers of the three cookbooks written by Ancel and Margaret Keys. Photograph of the collage by JL Dixon. The cover images were used by permission of Penguin Random House LLC (which Doubleday & Company, Inc. is now part of) and Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC (which published The Benevolent Bean in 1972).
Handing Off the Second Half of Nutrition and Health to Dr. Josh Miller
After exam 2 on March 13, 2015, and spring break, I handed off the second half of the class to Dr. Josh Miller, who is chair of the Department of Nutritional Sciences. The reason for doing this is that I needed time to finish a special project that will be announced during the next blog. Therefore, Dr. Miller continued the rest of the class as diagrammed below. I wish to thank the students who took the class this spring. This was one of the best group of students that I remember ever taking Nutrition and Health.
Why is Body Fat so Important? How it keeps us alive in the Middle of the Night, March 2, 2015
Why is the Adipose/Liver-Free Fatty Acid/VLDL Cycle important?
Most people don’t like fat and would like to have as little of it as possible. But in reality, without fat, we would not be able to be free roaming individuals that do not have to be continuously tied to a stable food source.
Another reason to know about fat and this cycle is that fat is a dynamic tissue and we should try to understand it as much as possible. If we can understand how fat works it will give us insights into our selves and how we work. Also, we must understand the delivery of substrates to cells if we are to understand metabolism.
As I discussed in an earlier lecture, there is actually very little carbohydrate stored in our bodies. Even immediately after a large meal, the glycogen in our bodies is fairly limited with about 2000 Kcal of glycogen stored in our muscles and about 500 Kcal stored in the liver. Since most of us expend about 2500 Kcal per day, this stored glycogen would not last very long.
The image below was shown during the carbohydrate lecture.
Since the amount of glucose Kcal in our blood is extremely low, the blood glucose must be constantly refreshed. The liver is the organ that supplies glucose to the blood, where it is probably used primarily by the brain and red blood cells. If the heart used just glucose, the glucose would be used up rapidly.
Therefore, fatty acids are made available for the heart and for other tissues at all times. In fact, the Adipose/Liver-Free Fatty Acid/VLDL Cycle runs all the time and you don’t even know about it. But if it were to stop, you would be in very bad shape. The cycle is shown below and is described below the image:
- The fat is taken as the start of the cycle. There are many depots of fat throughout the body, and certain ones are regulated differently. But we will consider fat as one big depot.
- The triglycerides stored in the fat cell are a relatively nontoxic way to store fatty acids. The breakdown of triglycerides into free fatty acids is tightly controlled and the lipases involved are regulated by insulin, glucagon, and stress hormones. The more hours you are since your last meal, the lower the insulin and the higher the glucagon will be in blood. This situation stimulates the release of free fatty acids that enter the blood and bind to the protein, albumin. Albumin carries the fatty acids throughout the body and makes those fatty acids available for tissues, including muscles, the heart and other tissues such as skin and the digestive system.
- The liver (3) takes up excess free fatty acids so their concentration in blood does not build up too much. The liver cannot store large amounts of fat and therefore it must either oxidize (4) the fatty acids for energy or it must re-synthesize triglyceride molecules. The re-synthesized triglycerides are packaged into Very Low Density Lipoprotein and secreted from the liver in VLDL (5). VLDL travels throughout the blood stream and delivers fatty acids to many of the same tissues (6) that took up free fatty acids from albumin. In fact, the heart muscle cells (7) prefer to take up fatty acids from VLDL. The way this works is that VLDL binds to an enzyme, Lipoprotein Lipase (LPL), which hydrolyzes the triglycerides to individual fatty acids molecules. The fatty acids then diffuse into the tissue. Finally the remnant VLDLs deliver fatty acids back to the fat cells (8) where the fat cells store them as triglyceride. What is especially powerful about the Adipose/Liver-Free Fatty Acid/VLDL Cycle is that there are two separate ways the fatty acids are delivered to cells. Also, the liver protects the body from high concentrations of free fatty acids. The biological role of VLDL is to return fatty acids (in the form of triglycerides) back to the fat (and completing the cycle!).
What are some of the problems with the Adipose/Liver-Free Fatty Acid/VLDL Cycle?
One problem is that some of the VLDL particles are converted, after very complex metabolism, to LDL particles (9) that contain mostly cholesterol.
The other problem is that an over active cycle can lead to high triglycerides in the blood.
One of the key elements in the cycle is Lipoprotein Lipase, the enzyme that hydrolyzes the triglycerides in VLDL. The distribution of LPL throughout the body is very important and its distribution may be responsible for causing the precise body shape of a particular person.
How to cure obesity 
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