Eating on the Wild Side

Happy Friday to you! I hope your week has been going well.

I wanted to share a nutrition-related book with you that I recently finished and really enjoyed:

I first heard about this book from my coworker, who was reading it to get CEUs for her RD. She shared some things she was reading with me one day at work and it sounded so interesting that I decided to check the CD set from our local library.

Listening to this book helped my 1-hour commute seem a litttttttle more bearable.

Eating on the Wild Side is all about how to get the most out of our food nutritionally. Some things the author touches on:

-Explaining how fresh fruit loses nutrients as it sits in the grocery store (I actually discuss this to patients fairly often… many times frozen fruits and vegetables contain more nutrients than fresh)

-Discussing ways to increase the shelf life of your produce: did you know lettuce will last longer if you rinse it and keep it in a ziploc bag with ~20 small pin holes?

-Identifying cooking methods with different plants that can either enhance or destroy nutrients. For example, heating tomatoes actually increases their lycopene levels and antioxidant activity.

My favorite thing I learned from this book: immediately cooking chopped garlic destroys its antioxidant activity. Letting it sit for 10 minutes allows different compounds that are separated in the original structure of garlic to “mix” together and eventually create antioxidant activity. For all of you science people out there, immediately heating chopped garlic denatures the enzyme needed for this chemical reaction to occur.

I had never heard of that before but I will definitely let my chopped garlic sit for 10 minutes before I cook with it. All of you chefs out there might hate this but the book also recommends using a garlic press since it mixes all of the layers of garlic together really well.

I obviously really love dietetics but sometimes I think books about nutrition can be a little dry. This was definitely not the case for Eating on the Wild Side. I thought it was very interesting! I would highly recommend it to anyone who enjoys cooking, food science, or nutrition. I was actually thinking this book would make the perfect gift for some of my RD friends