Listening to Radio 4’s Today programme this morning I was overwhelmed by the news that President Obama’s healthcare reform looks like it will be passed. If you’re reading this in the US you might not be aware of how supportive many of us around the world – in countries that have some government healthcare available – are with your move to make individual healthcare for 35 million Americans a reality.
The boost to the economy by getting sick workers back and active will be a blessing, and though it’s essential to reduce the total number of citizens that need government health insurance in the long term, one way to do it is to ensure that the population is as healthy as possible.
Good food and nutrition are essential to achieving this, and this is where baking usually comes under fire. I’m talking cookies, cakes, bread: the whole delicious gamut. There is the undeniable truth that if you consume a diet that’s very heavy in carbohydrates (flour and sugar primarily) and fats (butter and oil) you’ll find it nearly impossible to keep your weight down and the belly fat off unless you can burn off all the calories like a Olympic champion.
Well, for me that kind of exercise is out of the question, and that’s down to intention rather than time. If it was really important to me I would make the time, but I usually give preference to almost anything else in my life. So my only option is to modify what I eat, the way I eat it and also the way I bake. This is what I do.
1. View baked foods as a treat
This is number one I believe. Keep the quantity of fresh vegetables in your diet as high as you can, and make sure the size of the portions you eat is relative to the energy your body uses during the day. Baked goods are high in calories, meaning high in fuel for the body, and if you eat more than your body can burn then it will be stored as fat. My body can’t use 10 slices of bread a day, no matter how much my head wants it. So I slice it thinner, make the piece of cake a little smaller, and limit the biscuits to every other day and keep it special.
2. Add some wholemeal flour to every recipe
This has two benefits, and not necessary the ones you’d expect. The first is to slightly reduce the calorific value of the total weight of flour used and help to extend the time taken by the body to burn that fuel. Complex carbohydrates like wholemeal flour will sustain your blood sugar levels for longer and stop the munchies kicking in to early. The other benefit is that the added fibre will help promote good gut and colon health. Now, when it comes to whether wholemeal flour is “healthier” than white, the jury is out. Most of the nutrients are trapped within the fibre and aren’t subsequently extracted by our body during digestion. So, although potentially important micro-nutrients are present in wholemeal flour, eating the stuff won’t access them.
3. Tweak the recipe to reduce the fat
Cutting the butter in the recipe with a little sunflower oil (3/4 butter to 1/4 oil), adding ingredients other than fat to help keep it moist (a little grated apple, pear or carrot, or a puree of dried fruit), increase the flavours to mask a reduction in fat (grated orange or lemon zest, spices, vanilla or fresh ginger); any of the these tips or a few together will help a recipe where you’ve dropped the fat content. As a general guide, most baking recipes will, on appearance alone, hold up with the fat reduced by a fifth to a quarter so long as a little liquid is added to compensate. However, it will show in the flavour and texture so be both accepting of this, and creative in ramping up the other aspects of the bakes good. Make the topping crisper, the filling more generous, the flavour bolder, and this should help.
4. Cut the sugar
My recipes are quite generous with sweetness as I have a sweet tooth, and I’ve been told on the form that you can reduce the sugar in my recipes by half easily (which I don’t believe). But with all recipes you should, like with fat, be able to reduce the sugar by a fifth to a quarter without affecting the appearance too much. Sugar has the added benefit of turning baked goods chewy, but other ingredients can help here. Grind rolled oats to a powder and add 2 tbsp (about 20g) per 500g mixture together with an equal amount of water, and this will help give the texture a neat chewy roundness. For added sweetness, some flavours and ingredients taste sweeter than others. Honey, dates, orange zest, vanilla, for example, all have flavours that taste ‘sweet’ rather than savoury and so by adding these ingredients you food the brain into thinking something is sweeter than it actually is.
5. Don’t eat the whole cake!
Share it, freeze it, whatever you need to do so that the cake isn’t tempting you every hour of the day and night. I can confess to getting up in the night to have a slice of cake, and nibbling away at a tray of cookies until they vanish. I give away what I can, but I often freeze it cut into portions. That way I can just take out what I want and then have to wait until it defrosts. That cools some of the urgency in my hunger and means that I’m less likely to go back for that 2nd or 3rd piece.
Cycling on a regular basis (70 miles today though less normally) means I can eat whatever I want though we don’t have cake and biscuits at home all the time anyway but make it more of a special treat.
Hi Dan, I think ‘share it freeze it’ is the way I go too, then you have all the bread and cake making pleasure and joy and you don’t have to eat it all… in fact it is the only way if you want to try lots of different recipes and techniques if you don’t have a family to feed.
Is there any truth in the claim that sourdough bread has a lower GI? And what does that mean? I was recently advised to add linseed (flaxseed) to food as well, which is probably best done in bread as it sticks between your teeth if you add it to breakfast cereal. Zeb
Just grind the flaxseed for a few seconds in a coffee grinder to break it up just before adding into the dough or adding to cereal.
Dan
I agree with what you have written above…I once read in a sports book that there IS a proper size portion of everything….you just have to find it and remember that it is how something fits in to the whole of your diet on the day, the week, the month not the amount of fat and sugar in it per se
I think the key is to regard baking as a treat….small portions of something you made youself taste far better than anything you can buy and should satisfy you more….put the “leftovers” in the freezer and they are there for when you don’t have time to bake…
Off to make the macaroons, knead the bread, ferment the hot x buns….and then it is fish soup for supper to get back to balance !
Oh absolutely, bread and other baked goods become more delectable if you eat them as treats. I sometimes hold myself back from having the first cup of coffee and a piece of cake of the day until past noon.
About cutting the sugar, the tips above are very good. There are wonderful fruitbreads. But I sometimes make rich desserts and are sure to get those looks and remarks from guests in the kitchen that say “How can you put so much sugar and butter in there? Oh, and the cream. That is too much cream, seriously. Do you want to posion us?”
“Please, it is a dessert, you’re not supposed to eat it 3 times a day for the rest of your life”, I usually don’t reply, because the guest is always right.
Lots of good tips there, thanks, Dan.
As someone who can’t stop baking and having difficulty controlling my weight, I factor one portion of cake, or whatever, into my daily intake, but it wouldn’t hurt to follow some of your tips for reducing sugar and fat content. However, I fear reducing both in one product will result in something just a little too worthy, making eating it more of a chore than a joy!
Moderation is the key to everything! Home-baked products are so much more healthy than most mass-produced, store-bought products….so baking your own is definitely the way to go! btw, dangerous to assume anything about US from media reports- no one in US has done w/out healthcare, as hospitals are and have been obligated to treat EVERYONE who comes into Emergency Room (what you call A&E) w/out worry about cost. Many people just get all their care at them. The 36MM figure is given by some for those w/out health insurance- and most dispute the number, thinking it’s around 8-10MM. Who knows? At any rate, no one in US has been doing w/out first-rate care for nothing if that’s what they needed… the rest is all politics and best ignored! Back to baking….
My spouse has diabetes, the insulin-dependent type, and I’m always looking for ways to cut down on carbohydrates, especially sugar. I make whole-wheat banana bread with lots of mashed banana, no sugar or artificial sweetener, an egg and leavening, but no butter. I frequently bake whole-grain cookies that have ground-up raisins and/or other fruit as the only sweetener, but if I use sugar, I always cut it by at least half. Cinnamon, nutmeg, cloves and ginger in baked goods can trick our brains to perceive sweetness. Naturally sweet vegetables such as pureed pumpkin, squash (marrow in U.K.?) or yams are good in tea breads, cookies, bars, cakes and pies. Whenever I bake something, I use an Excel spreadsheet to calculate carbohydrates (for him) and calories (for me) per serving.
Hi Zeb,
I’m usually cautious about sweeping statements regarding sourdough bread – whether it’s the supposed microbiology of “every” loaf or the health benefits of “every” loaf. Our body’s ability to utilise the food we eat as fuel will depend on many aspects and, in the case of “sourdough” bread, it would depend on the flour used primarily, and after than the amount of starch and natural sugars that remain after fermentation. In that respect, I would guess that it’s possible to match a sourdough loaf to a commercially yeasted one.
Dan
I have read from numerous books that utilizing a sourdough in a wholemeal dough neutralizes the phytic acids that prevent your body from absorbing all of the nutrients in the flour. Source: Bread by Jeffery Hamelman, among others.