It's 6:45 p.m. After a bruising day at the office and a hair-raising commute on the freeway, you are standing in the kitchen about to prepare a healthy, satisfying dinner for your spouse, your two school-age children and yourself. As usual, all they want to know is "What's for dinner?" and "When do we eat?" You dump a box of thin spaghetti into a pot of boiling water, zap 3 cups of green beans in the microwave, pop a loaf of frozen garlic bread into the toaster oven and pour a medium-size jar of marinara sauce into a saucepan to simmer. While all that's bubbling, you chop up half a head of iceberg lettuce and a couple of tomatoes for the salad, which you'll sprinkle with a light dressing. Dessert will be two scoops of frozen yogurt per person and a plate of assorted low-fat cookies for the family to share. Sounds pretty healthy, right?
Wrong. While this meal may be better than what most Americans eat for dinner, it's enough food for a family twice the size of yours. In addition, it contains some nutritional traps that in the best-case scenario will make you fat and in the worst will increase your chances of developing diabetes, heart disease and certain types of cancer. Think you know the pitfalls? Read on. You may discover some surprises.
Here are just a few of the problems:
--Most "light" salad dressings are too heavy on sugar and salt and too light on nutrition. A better choice is a simple oil-and-vinegar dressing, which--although packed with calories--contains lots of heart-healthy mono-unsaturated fatty acids and no saturated fat.
--You're serving your family too many highly processed foods. The latest research shows that such foods won't keep them satisfied for very long and may make them hungrier in the long run.
--Having different kinds of cookies to choose from makes it more likely that your family will eat more cookies than they should. The fewer our choices, the less we eat.
--Your portion sizes are far too generous. According to the U.S. Food Guide Pyramid, you're giving each member of your family 4 servings of spaghetti, 112 servings of marinara sauce and 2 servings of frozen yogurt. The whole meal contains 1,500 calories per person, or 80% of the daily requirement for a sedentary office worker.
--Let's not even get started on whether the tomatoes should be cooked or raw, how much salt, sugar and trans fat there is in the garlic bread, or how many calories are packed into that marinara sauce.
It just goes to show that it's hard to eat healthy even when we try. We've all heard that fruits and vegetables are good for us, that restaurant portions are too big, that we should exercise more. But even a casual glance at public-health statistics suggests that Americans don't know how to put that information into practice. Two out of three Americans are overweight or obese. The incidence of Type 2 diabetes among children is climbing. And any gains we've made against heart disease by quitting smoking may be about to disappear.