Savory Oats ... wait 'til you see the nutrition!

Breakfast:

Dan was in a bit of a rush this morning so he wanted me to make his usual banana, kale and walnut smoothie to get him out of the house more quickly and I was happy to oblige.

I also made him a liter of fresh veggie and fruit juice with some leftover over for me to have throughout the day like Dan does at work.

One thing I have been forgetting to mention for days is that I have started added two Brazil nuts to Dan’s daily serving of trail mix for their selenium content. Since he isn’t eating walnut butter with Brazil nuts everyday like he used to I decided that I needed to add the Brazil nuts into his diet somewhere else. If you want to read more about selenium check out this post.

After Dan left for work and I was through exercising I decided to make myself another bowl of savory oatmeal. It was a cool morning and I knew this would hit the spot. I also wanted to see the nutritional statistics on the dish so I plugged them into the program this morning. I thought I would share the specifics in case anyone is interested besides me. Here is what I did:

Cheezy Broccoli and Tomato Oatmeal
Serves 1

Ingredients:

½ cup oats
1 cup water
3 tablespoons nutritional yeast
1 ½ cups broccoli, finely chopped
2 Roma tomatoes, diced
freshly ground black pepper, to taste
1 tablespoon salsa
1 tablespoon fresh parsley, minced
1 tablespoon walnut parmesan
1 tablespoon salty crispy leeks

Directions:

Combine the oats and water and cook until thick. Add the nutritional yeast and stir to evenly distribute. Cook until the broccoli is the texture you like. Add the diced Roma tomatoes and cook a minute to heat them through. Add additional water if you oatmeal gets too thick. Taste the oats and add black pepper to taste and add more nutritional yeast if you want a more cheezy flavor. Top with salsa, fresh parsley walnut parmesan, and crispy leeks.

Nutritional Information:

Amount Per Serving
Calories - 311.52
Calories From Fat (15%) - 47.63
Total Fat - 5.09g
Saturated Fat - 0.62g
Cholesterol - 0mg
Sodium - 176.6mg
Potassium - 1402.91mg
Total Carbohydrates - 57.31g
Fiber - 18.17g
Sugar - 11.13g
Protein - 19.01g

Comments:

I love the nutrition stats on this as well as the taste. It is a big, filling and tasty bowl of food for so few calories and fat grams. Did you notice the 18g of fiber and 19g of protein? Wow! Many variations of this will be showing up on my breakfast table when the weather is cool.

Additionally this serving of oatmeal contained 5,000+IU of vitamin A, 170mg of vitamin C, 190mg of calcium, 200mcg of folate, 270mcg of vitamin K, 340mg of phosphorus, 130mg of magnesium and 24mcg of selenium. Pretty impressive for something you can make in less than 5 minutes. I am so excited by the nutrition of this as well as its ability to keep me full for hours.

After the savory oatmeal breakfast I had a mug of double green tea with ascorbate C powder added after it had steeped for 10 minutes. I read in "Anticancer" that you get the maximum EGCG after brewing green tea for 10 minutes and then you should drink it within two hours of steeping to maximize the nutrition. Since reading that I have been trying to brew and drink my tea quickly.

The idea of adding ascorbate C powder came from a study I read that showed the EGCG stayed bioavailable longer with the vitamin C, allowing more of it to be absorbed. We drink green tea for its healthful properties so why not make the beverage as health giving as possible. That is my thought process anyway. ;-)

Lunch:

The oatmeal stayed with me so long I didn’t actually get hungry for lunch but I knew I needed to eat something because I hadn’t had much to eat today. Since I had fresh juice in the refrigerator I opted to pour myself a glass from this morning and have two Brazil nuts to go with the juice. I knew this wouldn’t stay with me a long as a meal but I can also get more fresh juice again when I get hungry.

Eating and Relationships:

It never occurred to me that changing what we ate would have an impact on our relationships but it did. My best friend of over a decade who is a low carb omnivore is the most supportive of all our friends. He works in healthcare as a hospital pharmacist and seems to understand why we made these changes. Beyond him our other friends have met our dietary changes with skepticism at best, and antagonism at worst. I have actually had friends with health problems tell me flat out they didn’t want to know what changes they could make because they weren’t going to make them. Then I have had other friends that tell me defiantly that a diet of moderation (including meat and cheese) with “judicious” use of olive oil is perfectly healthy. *sigh* This idea really kills me since there isn’t any good science to back this it up and I have looked for it.

I have literally spent thousands of hours over the last year and half reading everything I can get my hands on about nutrition, health, and cancer. The more I read the more certain I am that our diet is as healthful as I can make it. When I learn new things I incorporate them into our diet but those ideas are fewer and farther between now than they were at the beginning of my research project.

I wanted to mention the impact eating this way will have on your relationships because I was shocked when it happened. People that I thought were great friends now seem uncomfortable around us to the point that they seem to avoid us. I think it has to do with the fact that they don’t want to change their habits and that is why they don’t want to understand how unhealthy their habits actually are. This makes me very sad because I want everyone to understand the difference they can make in their life, and health and that it is as simple as what they eat. It makes me incredibly sad that I can’t seem to get through to the people that are/were the most important to me. =(

Why this diet and why now?:

I know when we were confronted with cancer the first thing I wanted to know from the oncologist was what we could do. He responded with, “There is nothing you can do other than moderate exercise”. Since that discussion I have learned there is much we can do, and we do it. I fell into that same trap everyone does asking their MD for nutrition advice. That was a big mistake. Thankfully I am not the sort of person that blindly believes whatever I am told or I read so I kept looking for answers. We love our oncologist but he is an MD not an RD (registered dietitian). We don’t ask him for dietary advice any longer. Oddly the surgical oncologist was much more open to the idea of nutrition playing a role in maintenance and recovery and encouraged us to keep doing what we were doing because it was helping. Since this younger MD spent some time at NCI (National Cancer Institute) we were happy to hear that he embraced what we were doing.

One thing you learn being around doctors is that there are as many opinions as there are doctors you talk to. In many cases medicine seems much more art than science. That was a tough concept for me at first because my background is finance where things are cut and dried. The entire concept of a gray area in terms of treatment made me very uncomfortable. I now know that it just the way it is. The best advice I can give anyone is that you should educate yourself about health and be the best health care consumer possible. Always do your homework, get a second opinion and don’t stop looking for answers or trying to help yourself.

I often think of something my pharmacist friend said to me probably a decade ago because I thought it was very profound and it never occurred to me but it is so obvious. “Don’t forget that 50% of all MD’s were in the bottom 50% of their class.” Yes there is a difference in the ability of doctors and the outcome of their patients. I know this better than anyone since my hospital department used to report those outcome statistics.

As many of you know who have been reading a long time even though I was a hospital controller until I retired early. However that means my healthcare background is finance not science. I was around healthcare/science but definitely on the periphery. Allopathic (western) doctors are great at treating acute problems (broken bones, bacterial infections, replacing a damaged joint, etc.) but they are not as great at dealing with chronic problems (heart disease and cancer). It seems to me that problems that take a long time to come on are obviously caused by how we are living our lives. In my mind what we put into our bodies is the biggest contributor to our health. When we are young the cumulative damage isn’t that much but by the time you are our ages (48 and 56) there is a lot of damage built up. In order to give our bodies some hope of repairing that prior damage we adopted the healthiest diet possible. Do I think everyone will do this? No way. I wish they would but I don’t believe most people want to change. They want to hold onto those habits they have had for a lifetime. I wish I could say I understand this but I don’t. Since I am not the type of person that avoids change it never occurred to me to not look for answers and make changes according to what I learned.

When we decided to change we made the leap from omnivore to vegan literally overnight. I figured we could do anything for a month and then see if there was any benefit. The health benefits were huge and quick. Watching Dan’s cholesterol go from 280 to 165 (or 155 I don’t remember which is correct now) in 3 weeks was all the evidence I needed to make this a lifestyle rather than a temporary situation. Giving up the olive oil and salt took much longer but did eventually happen. In the end our diet is mostly based on the theory behind Dr. Fuhrman’s “Eat to Live” and “Eat for Health” program. I say mostly because I have adapted things I have learned from other books and scienticific studies over the years.

Dan and I talk about how we feel all the time and both of us are convinced that we are more energetic now than we have been for decades. Pretty amazing stuff considering everything else we have going on. Even if we weren’t concerned about the cancer and this point we would both eat this way because we feel so much better. We both like going to the doctor now and seeing who has the better blood pressure and lab work. Who what expect that at our age? LOL

Snack:

Given Dan’s schedule I always have a snack late afternoon to hold me over until our dinner. I had the rest of the fresh veggie and fruit juice I made this morning. This time I had a small amount of walnuts to healthy fat.

Changing the house with the seasons:

I like to make the house cozier when it is colder outside. This is one the reasons I have been more quiet lately. There has been too much time at our place changing the house. While this isn’t something I had time to do when I worked I think it is nice to have the house be cozy when it is cold and light and airy when it is hot outside. I hope to get finished with this project soon so I have more time to spend on the blog.

Dinner:

We had another big salad for dinner tonight. This one contained: shredded romaine, fresh cilantro, diced tomato, thinly sliced cucumber, thinly sliced carrot, avocado, salsa, walnut parmesan and dehydrated leek. I love having a big salad for dinner. It fills us up and best of all provides a lot of nutrition. What is not to like about that? ;-)

Signing out:

I have a few errands to run tomorrow so I won’t be on line until later in the day. I hope you have a nice evening and a good Wednesday. Talk to you again soon. Tomorrow I want to find time to make some healthy spreads with okara that I had in the freezer which is now defrosted.