Wizard Recipes

How did the people eating the traditional Mediterranean diet pack so many vegetables into their daily meals? Easily and deliciously. In the Mediterranean, vegetable consumption is not just a matter of eating any vegetable at any time, in whatever state is most convenient. Vegetable selection is a matter of pride, vegetable preparation an art, and vegetable consumption a pure pleasure. Most essentially, in the Mediterranean, vegetables are chosen according to what is in season.

Outdoor produce markets throughout the Mediterranean offer the season’s best, freshest, most vibrant vegetables. Your local grocer, farmer’s market, or produce stand is also likely to feature the freshest locally grown produce. Even if the vegetables in season in your area aren’t those in season in the Mediterranean, eating the freshest seasonal produce is still eating in the Mediterranean way.

Seek out the best sources for vegetables in your area, and you may discover that vegetables taste much better than you think. Here are a few more Mediterranean-inspired tips for adding vegetables to your day. You’ll wonder how you ever ate without them!

• Looking for a fast-food lunch? A wedge of hearty wheat bread, a small chunk of feta or other cheese, a few slices of ripe tomato, a handful of leafy greens drizzled with olive oil and a squeeze of fresh lemon juice, and a ripe peach or other seasonal fruit for dessert take less time to prepare than going through the drive-through. Bring your Mediterranean lunch to work with you and everyone will wonder what upscale deli supplied your meal.
• The next time you make spaghetti, stir a shredded carrot and a finely chopped green or red pepper, a few mushrooms, or a handful of chopped spinach into the sauce. Vegetable additions add color, flavor, and nutritional power to your pasta dinner.
• Instead of grilling burgers, grill vegetables, Mediterranean style. Slice onions, peppers, zucchini, portabella mushroom caps, eggplant, and tomatoes into thick slices, drizzle with olive oil, and grill. If you want to add a Middle Eastern flair, skewer the vegetables into shish kebabs. A chunk or two of chicken or lamb among the vegetables would be authentic and would add an extra dash of protein. Serve with lemon wedges.
• Drizzle those plain vegetables with a little olive oil and a sprinkling of fresh grated cheese, or garnish with a splash of tomato sauce or a few sun-dried tomatoes. Tomato sauce also adds culinary interest to broiled fish.
• If you can relate to former U.S. President George H. W. Bush when it comes to broccoli (his aversion to this beautiful vegetable was well known), maybe you just haven’t had it cooked really well. Try steaming broccoli just until it is very bright green and tender. Toss with a little olive oil, sea salt, minced garlic, and a few flakes of red pepper. Serve and eat immediately. Perfectly cooked broccoli is a joy. Overcooked or old broccoli is enough to make anyone dislike the stuff.

• Leafy green salads are an important part of many Mediterranean meals. Get in the habit of including a bowl of leafy greens with olive oil and a little lemon juice or vinegar with at least one meal every day. A few extra chopped vegetables and a little grated cheese will make your greens even more interesting and nutrient-rich. (Just remember to forgo the creamy dressing in favor of a dressing with an olive oil base.)

Do you think you don’t have enough time to chop up a salad? Take advantage of food industry technology and splurge on ready-to-eat bagged veggies and greens. Selections are plentiful, many types are organic, and they come prewashed. What could be quicker?

• Eat pizza in the Mediterranean style. Unlike American pizzas, Mediterranean pizzas are typically thin, light concoctions with just a few toppings. Fresh tomato sauce and one or two featured vegetables (mushrooms, garlic slices, onion, zucchini, broccoli, peppers) and a very light sprinkling of mozzarella or Parmesan cheese on a fresh-baked (or store-bought, if you are pressed for time) whole-grain crust makes a perfect light dinner.

Many Mediterranean pizzas don’t even include cheese. In the mood for something more substantial? The more veggies, the better! Add roasted eggplant, mushrooms, red peppers (better than green if you want that lycopene punch)-you name it! See how much your pizza can hold. Load up and enjoy!

• Are you or your kids getting bored with peanut butter sandwiches? Add chopped or shredded carrots for a surprising, refreshing, flavorful crunch.
• Pumpkin is an American vegetable, but its nutritional value is Mediterranean in spirit! Stir canned pumpkin into hot oatmeal for breakfast with a little cinnamon and brown sugar. Add a generous spoonful to applesauce for a light dessert, or stir some into vanilla yogurt for an added zing.
• Microwave a sweet potato or yam until soft for a quick, carotenoid- and fiber-rich snack, or try baked sweet potato fries or yam chips, brushed lightly with olive oil and baked at 400 degrees until lightly browned and fork-tender, about twenty minutes, or longer if you’ve got a large pan full.

The one thing you can do to make your diet more “Mediterranean” is to begin eating more fresh vegetables today. Whether or not they were traditionally grown and consumed in the Mediterranean, the very concept of eating the vegetables grown on the land around you captures the essence of the traditional Mediterranean diet. Vegetables add beauty to your plate, excitement to your palate, and a host of vital substances to your body.

In 1874, England increased taxes for the imported sugar, the price has fallen by half, and at the end of the nineteenth century, a part of calories in the British diet came from sugar, and the rest came mostly from refined flour.

Because of the pure and cheap sugar was now accessible to all, the human metabolism must face not only a steady flow of glucose, but also a higher amount of fructose, because sugar or sucrose is half fructose. (The consumption of fructose per capita increased by 25 percent in the last 30 years) In nature, fructose is a rare and precious element, which is found, depending on the season, in the ripe fruit, “wrapped” in a whole food product full of fibers (which slows the assimilation) and important micro-nutrients. No wonder that natural selection has programmed us to be attracted to sweet foods: in form that is found in nature-in fruits and some vegetables - sugar gives us a slow-release form of energy accompanied by minerals and all kinds of micro-nutrients essential to us that we can not get from other sources. (Even honey, the purest form of sugar met in nature, contains some micro-nutrients.)

One crucial change occurred in the American diet after 1909 (when the U.S. Department of Agriculture began to notice the phenomenon) was the increase of the percentage of sugar calories from 13 to 20%. Add to this number the percentage of calories from carbohydrates (about 40%) and it results that at least half of the American diet consists of various forms of sugars -calories which provides nothing but energy. There are two ways that the energy density of refined carbohydrates leads to obesity. First, we are consuming much more calories per unit of food, the removed fiber from the food is the one which would have give us the feeling of fullness, making us so stop eating it. Also, the sudden fluctuations of glucose drives faster to high insulin levels which, after glucose is assimilated drops sharply, creating the feeling of hunger.

If the accelerated spread of western diets has given us immediate satisfaction of sugar for many people-especially for those recently exposed to this system-the speed of this industrial diet overcomes the capacity to process insulin, the consequence being the appearance of type 2 diabetes and all other chronic diseases associated to the metabolic syndrome. As a specialist in nutrition said, “we actually participate in a national experiment of intravenous glucose administration”. And let’s not forget the flow of fructose, which might be a much higher evolutionary novelty, and therefore much more difficult to manage by the human metabolism than glucose. Probably not accidentally the rates of type 2 diabetes are lower in European populations which have had a longer period of time than other groups to adapt their metabolism to the quick release of refined carbohydrates: these changes occurred first in their food environment. The first contact with such food, as it happens in case of ordinary people who have traditional diets and come to America or if the fast-food comes to them is a shock to the body. A shock that is called by experts a nutritional transition and it can be fatal.

This is the first major change in the Western diet which may explain the devastating effects they have on people’s health, replacing the known relationships with whole foods whom we have co-evolved for thousands of years. The Western diet force our body to connect and to face some nutrients that are efficient delivered and snatched from their diet context. Our ancient evolutionary relationship with the seeds of cereals and with the fruit from plants suddenly gave up the place to a rather shaky marriage with glucose and fructose

From this point of view, the refinement of whole food means not only an invention of new ways to make products more resistant and more portable, but also to focus their energy and in a way to accelerate them. The major leap in terms of acceleration was made around 1870, when in Europe were introduced the rolls (iron, steel or porcelain) used for grinding grain. Perhaps more than any other technology, this, which in 1880 replaced the millstones throughout Europe and America, marked the beginning of our food industrialization -reducing it to its chemical essence and accelerating its uptake. Refined flour is the first product of fast food.

Before the millstone revolution, wheat was grounded between two stone wheels and white flour could not be a perfect white because the millstones were removing the bran from the wheat grain (and therefore most of the fiber), but could not remove the germ or embryo that contains essential oils rich in nutrients. The stone mills were only crushing and releasing germ oil. The effect was the gray-yellow shade of the obtained flour (the yellow color is given by carotene) also the shelf-life was shorter because, in contact with air, oil, and rust quickly, that means it grows rancid. People saw and smelled these things and were not satisfied. But what their senses were not perceived was that in the seeds were the most valuable flour nutrients, including most of the proteins, folic acid and other B vitamins, carotenes and other antioxidants and omega-3 fatty acids which quickly grown rancid.

The insert of rollers which could remove the germ by grinding only the endosperm (the starch and protein package from the seeds) has resolved the issue of conservation and color. Now, almost everyone could afford to buy immaculate white flour, which could now be preserved for several months. There was no need for each city to have its own mill, because from that point flour could be transported for long distances. (In addition, it can be ground throughout the year by large companies in big cities: heavy stone mills based on hydraulic power depended on watercourses; the new shafts could be maneuvered whenever and wherever steam engines) And so, one of the basis food product from the Western diets has escaped the space and time limitations, it was sold by appearance and not on the criterion of nutritional value. From this perspective, white flour was one of the first modern industrial food products.

The problem was that beautiful white powder was null or almost null in terms of nutrition. The same was now in the case of corn flour and white rice, whose refining (i.e. removal of the most nutritious parts) was introduced around the same period. In all regions where there were introduced on a large scale, the new refining technologies appeared in a short time, devastating epidemics of beriberi and pellagra. Both diseases are caused by vitamin B deficiencies which were contained in seed. But probably because ot the sudden disappearance of other micro-nutrients from bread, and also the omega-3 fatty acids, affect health, especially that of poor townspeople in Europe, for whom bread was a fundamental food product.

Innovation is exciting, but when it comes to food, novelty should be approached with caution. If various types of diets or nourishments are the result of an evolutionary process, than this means that a culinary innovation is a kind of mutation: it could be a revolutionary breakthrough, but probably it is not. Abandoning the idea of pitched roofs was a great and interesting step for the modern architecture, but often trough horizontal roofs that replaced the pitched ones water could penetrate.

Soy is an interesting case. Americans consume more than ever many soy products, especially because of the ingenuity of an industry whose purpose is to process and sell the immense amounts of so-called Western diseases- including obesity, diabetes, cardiovascular disease, hypertension and some types of cancer related to nourishment- which almost invariably begin to appear shortly after a population abandon their traditional diet and lifestyle. But what we did not know before O’Dea brought the aborigines in the Savanna (Her experiment was followed by a series of similar experiments that generated similar results achieved by Native Americans and indigenous subjects from Hawaii) is that some of the most harmful effects of Western diets are reversible in a very short time-interval. It seems that, at least to a certain extent, we can set back the change of diet and can eliminate some of the evil done. This has major implications for our health.

Kerin O’Dea’s experiment is remarkable in its simplicity and trough the refuse of the researcher to get lured and attracted into the scientific labyrinth of nourishment. She didn’t set her mind (before or after the experiment), to isolate a nutrient from all the food complexity, that could explain the results- no matter if the improved health condition of the group was because of the low-fat diets, lack of refined carbohydrates or reducing the total number calories. O’Dea was interested in ample food models even if this approach is limited (such a study does not tell us which element of the Western diet should be adjusted to temper the worst effects), it has the great accomplishment to avoid the chaos of conflicting theories regarding various individual nutrients and turn our attention again, on some fundamental issues on the relationship between diet and health.

For example: How much are we all aboriginal? If we think that two-thirds of Americans are overweight or obese, as one quarter of us suffer from metabolic syndrome, that 54 million of people have started to diabetes and the incidence of type 2 diabetes increases by 5% every year since 1990, Going up from 4% to 7.7% of the adult population (that means more than 20 million Americans), the question sounds not at all ridiculous

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Please note that our organism doesn’t work as a balloon that we can inflate or deflate as we please. Losing weight, especially through very restrictive and short term diets, cannot lead to something else but to a very high organism disequilibrium, and, to make matters worse, pounds lost do not necessarily refer to the excess fat from your body.

Our body disposes of 125 000 calories stocked as: 80-85% in our fat reserves and the rest is in blood, liver, muscles etc. All of this reserve can be used by our body and can assure a 40 days survival without any alimentary additions (we would only need water).

Just by drinking water, for 3 weeks, let’s say, can only lead to a 18-24 pounds, from which only 4-10 pounds are fat! Why? Because our organism loses water first, then muscular mass and than fat.

This is why losing weight from through extreme measures is not a correct method, realised most of the time by dehydration and simply muscles melting, whereas our goal is to lose FAT. This can only be obtained by maintaining a hypo caloric diet for a long period of time (at least a 3 months).

Every lost kilogram of fat means a 7000 kcal economy, and the daily restriction cannot be more than 500-800kcal, so, the correct manner of losing 1 kg would be in 7 to 10 days.

And the above cannot be repeated every time, as the danger of the yo-yo effects

Fish is a very nutritious type of food with numerous dietetic qualities, easily digestible due to its high content of proteins, vitamins (A, D, E, B12) and minerals (Phosphor, Iodium and Potassium). More than that, fish contains the so called “good fat” which is non dangerous, high is no saturated fatty acids and also essential fatty acids like Omega 3 and 6, that cannot be synthesized by itself by our organism.

Advantages:

- decreases the risk of cardiac diseases

- the essential oils offer fluidity to the blood and diminish inflammatory effects, decreasing the risk or arthrosclerosis

- Omega 3 and 6 diminish psoriasis and poliarthritis symptoms.

- fish contains D vitamin, essential in Calcium absorption

- iron from anchovies and tuna is 30 times better absorbed than the iron from vegetables

- oysters have aphrodisiac properties, stimulating the estrogen and testosterone, assuring a high sperm quality

- fats contained in fish meat have a positive effect on HDL cholesterol (the good cholesterol), increasing its quantity

- seafood have a low calorie content, being indicated for diets

Disadvantages:

-Shrimps are high in Calcium, but also in cholesterol

-All seafood may contain toxic quantities of pollution metals (Mercury), so be careful from where you purchase them.

-Fish that is consumed raw must be extremely fresh

-The fish skin shouldn’t be consumed due its high fat content

-Salty fish is contraindicated for high blood pressure or hepatic diseases.

• Eggs are one of the few nearly complete foods for a human body—nature designed them to be the sole source of food and nutrients to the fast-growing chick embryo. Their protein content is high, 13 percent (or 6 grams in each large egg). Even the egg shell is nutritious, 96 percent calcium carbonate, an essential element for building human bones (but how do we eat it?). If the kids get upset with bits of egg shell in their scrambled eggs, assure them that you are just trying to help them build strong bones.

• Once a favorite breakfast food in the  Anglo-Saxon world, egg consumption has steadily declined since the 1950s. Americans ate 402 eggs apiece annually in 1945 (1.1/day). By 1991 per capita consumption had dropped to 234 (0.6/day), but it is slowly rising again. In 1998 the annual consumption is 255 eggs. The major reason for the decline is all that   cholesterol in the yolk, a health concern to many people today. A large egg contains an average of 215 milligrams of cholesterol. Its total fat content is a moderate 5 grams or 10 percent of each egg. All the cholesterol and fat are in the yolk.

• Food scientists are working feverishly to reduce the cholesterol level of eggs, attacking the problem on several levels. One approach is to cut down on the development of cholesterol before the hen produces the egg. Biologists are putting laying hens on special to do that.
• Another approach is to chemically remove some of the cholesterol after the hen lays the egg. If we can take the caffeine out of coffee beans, surely we can reduce the amount of cholesterol in eggs to a tolerable level. It is just a matter of time. But to do this, biochemists have to remove the eggs from the shells and add chemicals that bind with the cholesterol, then remove the chemical together with the cholesterol. This part was easy. They ran into problem getting the eggs back into their original containers after they reduced the cholesterol. At this time they can only market the low-cholesterol eggs as scrambled or separated into yolks and whites.

• Genetic alteration of the hens is another approach they are working on. In early 1995, a small egg farm in the Milwaukee area introduced “designer” eggs with 25 percent less fat and 25 percent lower cholesterol using this technique.