Food Over Medicine by Pamela A. Popper, Glen Merzer Page B

have a dish here called vegetable byriani that has almonds in it; I eat that. But I don’t buy avocados at the store and put them on all of my salads. Nor do I have a bag of almonds at my house to nosh on because these are densely caloric, high-protein, high-fat foods. I tell everybody I could easily be a three-hundred-pound vegan. I’m at a healthy weight because I minimize this kind of stuff in the diet.
    GM: What about coconut? I’ll go into a health food store and there will be all these raw desserts, these supposedly healthy alternative desserts. However, they have so much coconut in them that they’ll have eighteen grams of saturated fat. Is coconut as unhealthy as it appears to be?
    PP: Absolutely. It’s full of saturated fat. Now, having said that, I love it. If you told me I could never have coconut again, I might have to end my life. So I don’t want to give it up, but I’m very clear that it’s a treat. Raw food desserts and raw food dishes in general are very high in fat. They often accomplish the textures they desire by using really high-fat foods.
    This issue of food-versus-treat is something we just have to drive home. On the one hand, we certainly don’t want people to think they’re making a sixty-year commitment to never having dessert, birthday cake, or wedding cake, etc.; that’s not going to fly. Nor do we want people stressing out thinking they blew the diet. That’s a bad idea. On the other hand, this stuff can’t be part of the daily fare. We need to make the whole foods our daily fare and make the treats occasional. And this is something that people get into all the time: “Well, what do you mean by occasional?” And I tell them it should be situational. Do we have a reason for having this item that is not part of the daily fare? If you graduate first in your class, a glass of champagne is okay. But today’s Tuesday, it’s a pretty normal day, we’re not celebrating anything around here, so I think we ought to just eat our beans and rice and vegetables.
    GM: On the subject of plant foods that you have to watch your intake of, what about dried fruit?
    PP: There are two issues with dried fruit: First, it’s high in calories. You can sit down and eat half a bag of dried apricots pretty easily. Just think about how many calories you consumed. It’s like eating three dozen apricots, which you would never do. Second, you have to make sure the dried fruits you’re buying aren’t adulterated. There are lots of sulfites, coloring agents, and sugar in many dried fruit products. Any time you buy cranberries that taste good right out of the package, you know that they’ve had sugar added to them because cranberries are actually sour. Be careful when you buy dried fruits; you don’t want to be eating a lot of that stuff. Again, I’ll eat it when it’s in a dish. Del makes a great salad here that has raisins in it, or I’ll put raisins on my oatmeal every so often. But I’m not eating handfuls of dried bananas, dried apples, dried pineapples, that kind of stuff.
    GM: How about fruit juice?
    PP: Never.
    GM: Okay, what’s wrong with fruit juice?
    PP: It’s concentrated calories and sugar. Instead of drinking apple juice, eat apples; instead of orange juice, eat oranges.
    GM: What about salt?
    PP: Well, now we get into a contentious issue. Salt restriction is one of those things that became part of the conventional wisdom; we’ve been told it’s necessary for people to restrict salt in order to have normal blood pressure.
    Early in my career, I heard Dr. McDougall buck the establishment by saying that salt restriction is not only inadvisable but may be detrimental. I got curious about it, so I reviewed the studies that had shown that salt restriction was beneficial; the difficulty was that salt restriction is usually accompanied with other dietary changes. The famous DASH (Dietary Approaches to Stop Hypertension) diet, promoted by the USDA to lower hypertension, is probably the best