Fall Is the Perfect Time for Healthy Cooking
With summer in the rearview mirror, many of us are ready to head back to the kitchen with the determination to make, serve, and eat healthier foods more than ever before. Certainly, the fall months seem to make us clamor for comfort foods with gatherings of friends and family. Now, the spotlight is all of that with the emphasis on healthy.
What we are not looking forward to is the beginning of the “holiday 15.”
If you used the summer to get in shape, you are ahead of the game and are ready to tackle the fall and holiday food extravaganzas. If you didn’t or don’t want to slip back, there are many cookbooks available to use as guides for preparing healthy meals that are perfect for the season and all year round.
Dr. Oz and the Power of Food as Medicine
You might try the Dr. Mehmet Oz book, Food Can Fix It: The Superfood Switch to Fight Fat, Defy Aging and Eat Your Way Healthy, which is chock-full of ideas for how to get your health back on track, including a 21-day weight-loss plan.
The Doctor Behind the Diet
You may remember Dr. Oz from The Oprah Winfrey Show and later his own long-running daytime program, The Dr. Oz Show. Today, Dr. Oz is a practicing cardiac surgeon, bestselling author, and currently serves as Administrator of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services.
Highlights from Food Can Fix It
In Food Can Fix It, Dr. Oz highlights the power of food as medicine—how what we eat can help prevent or even reverse common health issues. His plan and recipes aim to help readers retrain their eating habits for long-term wellness.
Drawing on his medical experience, Dr. Oz shares his knowledge of how food affects our bodies, “food fixes,” or what you can eat to fight what ails you. His important message is to “change the food you eat, and you change your body.” This simple but important rule is important for all of us.
Dr. Oz shares ideas on how food can help fix what ails you from how to lose weight and also issues with the heart, fatigue, pain, brain power, bad moods, immunity, skin and hair, and the gut.
Sprinkled throughout the book, making it not only an interesting but also a fun read, are tips and factoids to devour. There’s the “10-Second Headache Reliever,” which touts drinking six extra glasses of water a day to help relieve chronic headache pain; the anti-inflammatory punch of adding cinnamon to coffee; and ideas for how to feed a cold.
Wow, did you know that vitamin B9 and B12 deficiencies can lead to prematurely gray hair? Who knew? But this is just one of the many, many facts from Dr. Oz’s book.
The 21-Day Superfood Plan
The Food Can Fix It’s 21-day plan is designed, he says, to help you change your eating habits. On it, you could lose three to four pounds during the first week and one to two pounds each following week. Suggested menus for breakfast, lunch, snacks, and dinners are included, along with easy-to-follow recipes (many including color photos).
Why Food Is More Than Fuel
“Food can break you, but it also holds the power to fix your body, prevent some diseases, and reverse others.” He explains how food’s a medicine that can cure or prevent illness and disease, can be an elixir to a longer life, and is “sacred” in the way it brings people together and affects our spiritual and emotional well-being.
Dr. Oz offers the road map through his 21-day plan and 125 recipes. The plan is designed to help you “re-train your body and your taste buds so that you can start a life-long commitment to eating well—and loving every body-changing bite.”
Rather than offering lists of superfoods, Oz shares his vision for how to create a “superfood way of life.” He says the goal for this book is to instill habits rather than to offer silver bullets.
We give Dr. Oz three cheers for his thoughts on how food should be thought of as even more than just good for the physical body. “You should not only love the foods you eat, but also love the people you eat with. That way meals become memories.”
Try Dr. Oz’s Roasted Brussels Sprouts with Grapes Recipe
One delicious recipe to try this fall is his Special-Occasion Veggies Roasted Brussels Sprouts with Grapes.
Photo: Raymond Horn
Special-Occasion Veggies Roasted Brussels Sprouts with Grapes
Makes 8 servings
- 1 1/ 2 pounds Brussels sprouts, trimmed and halved
- 3 tablespoons olive oil
- 1/ 2 teaspoon coarse salt
- 1/ 4 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
- 3 large shallots, sliced 1/ 4 inch thick
- 2 cups red seedless grapes
- 1 tablespoon red wine vinegar
- 1/ 8 cup unsalted roasted almonds, coarsely chopped
Preheat the oven to 425°F.
On a rimmed baking sheet, toss the Brussels sprouts with 2 tablespoons of the olive oil, the salt, and pepper.
On a separate rimmed baking sheet, toss the shallots and grapes with the remaining 1 tablespoon olive oil. Roast the sprouts and grapes, turning when browned on one side (about 20 minutes for sprouts, 15 minutes for grapes), and roast until browned all over, 25 to 35 minutes total.
Combine the vinegar with 1 tablespoon water and add to the baking sheet with the grapes. As it steams, deglaze the pan, stirring up any browned bits from the pan with a wooden spoon. Toss the grape mixture and sprouts together, and top with the almonds.
Continue Your Healthy Lifestyle Journey
Excerpted from FOOD CAN FIX IT by Dr. Mehmet Oz. Copyright © 2017 by Hearst Communications, Inc. Excerpted with permission by Scribner, a division of Simon & Schuster, Inc.
