Rebecca Wigod
Geoff Remocker remembers being nutritionally unenlightened. A dozen years ago, when the amiable, dark-haired dentist was diagnosed with elevated blood cholesterol, he ate fast food for lunch everyday – mainly because there’s an outlet handily close to his Burnaby office. Teasing him, his wife, Jane, jokes that “he had a card, like a frequent-flyer card. He went so often, they gave him free coffee.”
That was then, this is now.
Geoff, who was at risk for heart disease – his mother had a heart attack at 39 – now recognizes that he needs to watch his diet. These days, he packs his own lunch, putting in fruit and whole-grain bread and going easy on the fat-laden cheese.
Indeed, the whole Remocker family is eating less fat then before. Jane, an occupational therapist, sought professional advice from Vancouver dietician Ramona Josephson, who gave them a heart health makeover.
With Josephson’s guidance, Jane has gradually changed her food-shopping and cooking habits. She has stopped enriching cooking vegetables with butter, started buying one-per-cent milk and started using canola or olive oil, instead of stocking up on whichever cooking oil was on sale.
Making these changes wasn’t easy. Jane was already keeping kosher, following the exacting dietary laws of the Jewish faith. “I thought, Oh my gosh – now I’ve got to worry about fat as well!” But the effort has paid off. Geoff’s cholesterol level has come down. And the Remocker’s 17-year old daughter, Sara, whose erstwhile junk food habit caused her weight to balloon three years ago, is svelte again.
Cutting the fat in family meals protects children from future heart disease. Kids as young as three can have fatty streaks in their arteries, and by 10 there is evidence of the laying down of fat in the arteries.
When Geoff Remocker discovered he was at risk of heart disease his wife, Jane, called in a dietician to give the family’s meals a makeover. Now no one’s feeling deprived, and the health benefits are obvious.
Trying to cure your bad diet habits? Keep a written record of what you eat.
The Heart and Stroke Foundation of Canada recently reported that the poor eating habits of Canada’s children are setting them up for cardiovascular disease. In a survey of 400 families across Canada, it found that only 20 per cent of youngsters eat the recommended five daily servings of fruit and vegetables ( a serving is equivalent to a tennis ball in size and volume) and only 28 per cent eat mainly brown bread and whole grain cereals.
Josephson says a healthy diet “is not a quick-fix diet. Change is achievable and sustainable if you approach it in a healthy way. Making small changes on a daily basis will pay off in the long run.” One recent evening, the Remockers gathered for dinner in the kitchen nook of their comfortable Vancouver home. Their oldest child, Ben, wasn’t there, since he’s away at university. But Sara, who is in Grade 12 at Prince of Wales secondary, came hurrying in.
She sat down at the table, over which a blue-patterned jug of daffodils beamed a golden benediction. Unlike many families in this frenetic day and age, the Remockers manage to eat dinner together five evenings a week.
Gail, who attends York House School and turns 14 later this month, slid into a chair. With her pet, Tommy – a large champagne-coloured rat – perched on her shoulder, shoulder, she cut a rather startling figure. During a group interview, the Remocker girls teased their dad about his age (54) and his mostly conquered taste for fried food.
Mom Jane recalled that she once had a deep-fat fryer and used it to make French fries. Somewhat wistfully, she said that she doesn’t use that any more. “Once you’ve made these changes, you think ‘It would be nice to make chips.’ But I can no longer bring myself to do it any longer.”
These days, she peels potatoes, quarters them lengthwise, parboils them, tosses them with a little olive oil and crisps them in a hot oven. “Still not the same as fries,” groused Geoff, who grew up Scotland and subscribes to the easygoing credo that “a little of what you fancy does you good.”
Josephson, the dietician, reports that one of Geoff’s bad habits is snacking on cookies, “both at work and at home, before and after dinner.” Counselling him, she suggested he keep track of the number he’s putting away, since a written record is chastening to confront. Alternatively, she said he could substitute low-fat cookies (graham wafers, arrowroot biscuits) or low-fat crackers (rice cakes, water biscuits, matzo, melba toast).
According to her new book, The HeartSmart Shopper (Douglas & McIntyre, $9.95), which is endorsed by the Heart and Stroke Foundation, the best way to budget your fat intake is to think in terms of teaspoons of fat. Given that a medium-sized muffin and a domino-sized piece of cheddar each contain two teaspoons of fat, those teaspoons add up quickly.
Jane, who works part-time from home, had fairly good control over the nutritional makeup of family meals. “I don’t have a lot of convenience foods,” she said. She finds that pleasing her daughters’ palates is a bit of a challenge. “Girls.” She said, “have this thing where they turn 13 and immediately become vegetarians, but they actually don’t like vegetables.”
A wail of protest arose from Gail. “What? I love vegetables. She makes this up in her head,” huffed the teen, who had put her rat back in his cage and was absently admiring her manicure. “I don’t like many vegetables,” she conceded. But those she does like, “I like to eat them a lot.” “I guess that’s maybe what I mean,” Jane said placatingly. “She has a limited range of choices.” According to Josephson, Gail is a fussy eater with a smallish appetite. Gail says her family thinks she starves herself, “but I don’t. I eat when I’m hungry, and that’s not very often.”
Sara, who turns 18 soon, has had to struggle to subdue her appetite. When she was in Grade 9, the weight problem that plagued her was directly traceable to junk food. “I’d have at least one bag of chips a day at school,” she recalled. “I’d come home and eat chocolate granola bars, cake – lots of baking. I just ate and ate and ate, and I just started gaining and gaining weight.”
Josephson advised her to satisfy her cravings with fruit, or even go out for a walk to take her mind off them.
Sara, who has since shed seven kilograms (15 pounds) and kept it off for a year, said that now when she puts cream cheese on a bagel, it’s the light version “and I wouldn’t load it on.” Because teenage girls are so sensitive about their bodies, slender Jane never mentions dieting to her daughters, and she discourages them from weighing themselves. Geoff interjected that he weighs himself every morning. But Jane, twitting him, shot back: “He’s a dentist. He’s obsessive-compulsive.”
Josephson applauds the changes the Remockers have made but says that there’s always room for improvement. Now that Jane makes a point of buying water-packed tuna (100 grams contain ¾ teaspoon of fat, compared with three or four teaspoons in the same amount of oil-packed tuna), Josephson is working on her to start mixing it with low-fat mayonnaise.
Jane, suspicious of the chemical used in food processing, needed to be convinced that low-fat mayo isn’t “full of garbage. These days food is quite complicated,” she sighed. “For the average person, it’s very hard to know what you’re really eating.”
Shopping hints to help you cut the fat
A large supermarket carries 25,000 different items, so it is any wonder shoppers have trouble making smart food choices?
Ramona Josephson, who has a Vancouver nutrition counseling practice and earlier was chief dietitian at the former Shaughnessy and Grace hospitals, suggests that, to ensure good health for you and your family you:
- Shop according to the grocery cart’s three sections. Fill the large, main compartment with fruit, vegetables and grain products like whole-wheat bread, bagels, pasta and rice, she says. Use the smaller, fold-down compartment for lean meats, fish and low-fat dairy products. Choosing carefully, put fats like margarine and cooking oil in the carrier at the very bottom of the cart.
- Eat red meat less often, i.e., only once a week.
- Eat eggs less often. People with a history of heart disease should have no more than two per week.
- Eat less cheese and, ideally, make it low-fat mozzarella.
- Choose olive or canola oil in preference to oils on the market.
- Use a non-hydrogenated margarine, preferably the “lite” version.
- Eat high-fibre cereal instead of granola, which is high in fat.
