The 150 Healthiest 15-Minute Recipes on Earth (45 page)

Nutty Fruit Bars II: Heart-Lovin’ Lemon Zinger Truffles

From Dr. Jonny
: So here’s the deal: Every so often when Chef Jeannette sends me these recipes, she’ll tag one with a note that says, “Drop everything and make this! It’s amazing!” This recipe came with such a note, so of course, I had to drop everything and make it (my basic rule is to obey every whim of anyone who makes food as well as Chef Jeannette does). Well, she was right. These truffles are amazing, and they come together in minutes. You’ll never find an “energy bar” in the supermarket, even the gourmet ones, that tastes as good as these do, and certainly not one that has as much nutrition. High in heart-healthy fiber from the apples and oats, these bars are tangy and fresh tasting with just the right amount of sweetness. You will truly be amazed at how delicious they are!

1/2 cup (70 g) loosely packed pitted dates (8 or 9, or 6 to 7 if using Medjool—very sweet and creamy, but also large!)

1/2 cup (85 g) dried apples

1/2 cup (75 g) raw cashews

1/4 cup (20 g) whole rolled oats

2 tablespoons (12 g) oat bran

1/2 teaspoon ground ginger

2 tablespoons (28 ml) fresh-squeezed lemon juice

1 teaspoon lemon zest

Place the dates, apples, cashews, oats, oat bran, ginger, lemon juice, and lemon zest in a food processor and pulse a few times to break up the larger pieces. Then process for 1 to 2 minutes, scraping down the sides a couple of times. The mixture will first come apart and then become finer, finally holding together in a clump of “dough” that will roll around in the processor. When the ingredients are well incorporated into a dough, roll the mixture into quarter-size “truffles” or tubelike mini-bars, or flatten it evenly into a 5 × 7-inch (13 × 18 cm) Pyrex dish (3-cup size) and slice (slicing is smoother if the dough is chilled for at least 1 hour).

Yield
: approximately 15 large or 20 small truffles or 8 pan bars
Per Serving
: 46 Calories; 2g Fat (34.6% calories from fat); 1g Protein; 7g Carbohydrate; 1g Dietary Fiber; 0mg Cholesterol; 5mg Sodium

Nutritional labels, often confusing for even the most sophisticated consumers, contain a lot of information. Some of it is useful. A good deal of it is not.

Let me explain.

Let’s start with the stuff that’s helpful to know. How much protein is in a serving size, for example? How many grams of carbohydrates? How much sugar? And of course, how many calories? Assuming you know what these numbers mean, this can be good information to have.

For example, I recently got hold of a nice little package of blackberries, imported from another country where the rules governing nutritional labeling are a little different than they are in the United States. Here’s what was on the label:

Now as labels go, that’s pretty useful, though I would have liked to see fiber listed (the berries are very high in fiber, which you wouldn’t know from this label). The choice of calcium, potassium, vitamin A, and vitamin C is fairly arbitrary—what happened to magnesium? Iron? Vitamin B
₁₂
—but different countries have different regulations about what must be listed on the label. (The U.S. government mandates that food manufacturers list calcium, iron, vitamin A, and vitamin C. Go figure.) All things considered, the imported berry label’s not bad.

In the United States, a typical label looks like this:

SAMPLE NUTRITION FACTS LABEL

The first thing I have a problem with is the “calories from fat” part in the upper right-hand corner. This implies that calories from fat are somehow a bad thing, worse for you than calories from any other source. For example, the calories from fat listed on a tablespoon of fish oil would be 100 percent of the total calories because fish oil is pure fat. So what? Similarly, the calling out of saturated fat for special attention perpetuates the myth that saturated fat is always bad, which it’s not.

So if you evaluate our recipes through the lens of “fat is bad,” you’re likely to be surprised—some of our recipes are indeed higher in fat than you might expect, especially if you buy into the antifat concept. We hope you don’t. (Buy into that concept, I mean, because it’s boneheadedly wrong.) Fear not because the
quality
of the fat in our recipes is high and the health value is positive, as we note throughout the book. The now-famous disclaimer in all movies and TV productions, “no animals were harmed during the making of this movie,” can be aptly paraphrased here:
No harm will come to you from the fat in these recipes
.

On the plus side, the labeling laws mandate that manufacturers list the number of grams of trans fats. Trans fats are almost
always
bad (unlike saturated fat), and you should strive to keep your dietary intake of them as close to zero as possible. If something has trans fats in it, I want to know about it. Even 1 gram is too much.

The laws also mandate labeling sodium, which is something you should pay attention to. Although not everyone is salt sensitive, (meaning their blood sugar goes up in response to sodium,) enough of us are that it’s worth knowing about. Current dietary recommendations are to consume no more than 2,300 to 2,400 mg of sodium per day (about the amount in a teaspoon of salt), but the problem is that most of our sodium doesn’t come from the saltshaker. It comes from processed foods. If a portion of soup contains 800 mg of sodium, I want to know about it.

The useless and confusing part of the nutrition facts label is that column on the right where it lists % Daily Value. There are many things to dislike about this practice—for instance, everything. The daily value is something almost no one understands, but basically it’s the amount of a given nutrient that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) thinks you need each day. The
percent
daily value is the
percentage
of that total
amount that the food in question provides. The problem is that many nutritionists, myself included, disagree with the government’s recommended amounts for many nutrients.

For example, let’s take the vitamin C in the generic serving of macaroni and cheese listed on the label above. The FDA’s recommended daily intake for vitamin C is 75 to 90 mg, an amount no nutritionist I’ve ever met thinks is optimal or even adequate. Now let’s do some math:

The label says a serving of macaroni and cheese contains 2 percent of the daily value for vitamin C. Two percent of 90 mg is…1.8 mg of vitamin C. You can tell from the label that 2 percent is awfully low, and you’d be right in thinking this food has virtually no vitamin C.

Where it gets tricky is this: Let’s suppose that macaroni and cheese had 45 mg of vitamin C. Then the label would say it contains 50 percent of your recommended daily intake. You’d be thinking, “Wow, I’m getting a lot of vitamin C in this dish” but in fact you’d be getting a ridiculously low amount (45 mg) that only has a high “percent daily value” because the daily value itself is so low.

It gets even trickier when you’re talking about percentages as they relate to carbohydrates, fat, and protein. Again, the FDA makes a ridiculous assumption, which is that the average American diet is either 2,000 calories a day or 2,500. Most Americans eat way more than 2,000 calories a day, which makes the FDA’s one-size-fits-all model irrelevant to them.

The agency makes other assumptions about the ideal amount of protein, fat, and carbs that you should consume each day for that amount of calories—assumptions that are, well, highly questionable. (Many researchers believe that 50 grams a day of protein is pathetically low, especially for weight loss purposes, yet that’s the amount of the recommended daily value. And many health professionals get apoplectic at the daily value for carbohydrates—an astoundingly high 300 grams a day!) So if the label tells you you’re getting 30 percent of the daily value of protein, you might think that’s a lot, but it’s 30 percent of a very low amount. And a food with a whopping 150 grams of carbs (such as an average restaurant portion of pasta) is “only” half the recommended daily amount for carbohydrates. Give me a break!

My advice: Ignore the
percent daily value
on the nutrition facts label. It’s confusing, misleading, and adds almost nothing to your knowledge.