Living Skillfully: Your Mind and Health

I’ve promised a couple of times to share some of my recipes that I’m using as part of my weight gain journey. As well as Mike’s Remarkable Energy Cookie, here is one I’ve been making successfully for a while: the fruit/nut/seed healthy treat bar.

It’s really a meta-recipe, which goes like this:

Ingredients
3 cups assorted dried fruit (make sure that about half of the fruit is sticky, for example, dates, prunes and/or figs, to hold the rest together)
1.5 cups assorted nuts and seeds

Method
1. Place all ingredients in food processor. (Don’t use a blender unless you are totally confident that it can handle the nuts. I found this out the hard way.) If your food processor is not very large or powerful, process the ingredients one at a time rather than all together.
2. Pulse until they stick together naturally when pressed, but not so long as to turn the seeds into paste.
3. Press into a wide dish and divide into portions with a spatula.
4. Refrigerate.

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I got the idea from The World’s Healthiest Foods, Essential Guide for the Healthiest Way of Eating (aff), which has a recipe for a sesame bar with walnuts and dates. Walnuts aren’t my favorite nuts, and dates aren’t my favorite dried fruit, so I decided to see if substituting other nuts and dried fruit, but keeping the proportions the same, would work just as well. It does.

Over on Nutritiondata.com, I’ve created this as a recipe using the kinds of things I typically put in it: dried apples, dried apricots, dates (which I don’t mind in small quantities), figs, prunes, raisins, almonds, cashews, peanuts and sesame seeds. (The dates, by the way, should read 0.5 cup as well, but it wasn’t an option.) I’ve now updated it slightly as I’ve started using sunflower seeds as well. I couldn’t work out how to make this a separate recipe so the link above now refers to the sunflower seed version.

On that page you will see the nutritional analysis, which is pretty good. You can ignore the warning that most of the calories come from sugars; there’s nothing wrong with getting lots of calories from fruit sugars that are accompanied by other nutrients. It’s got a low glycaemic load (because of the dietary fibre which slows down the digestion, and because fruit sugars need to be processed through the liver before being released into the bloodstream), lots of minerals, practically no sodium (I left out the salt suggested in the original recipe, it’s not needed), and supplies 110 calories from a 30g serving.

This is a good thing for me, because I want plenty of calories. But it’s a good thing for you, too, even if you’re wanting to lose weight. Why? Because those calories are accompanied by vitamins, minerals and dietary fibre. If you ate a 100-calorie, 25g commercial candy bar instead, you only have to glance at the nutritional analysis to see how much more healthy the fruit/nut/seed bar is, especially when you’re aware that on the Nutrient Balance display the items in yellow are things that you should eat less of.

See, the problem with sugar is not that it is directly “bad” for you, apart from rotting your teeth if you don’t have good dental hygiene. The problem is that sugary treats don’t usually contain much except calories. Your body needs a certain number of calories each day to fuel it, but to function properly it also needs a certain amount of vitamins, minerals, dietary fibre and so forth. These are contained in foods that usually give you calories as well. If you are eating a healthy diet – lots of fruits, nuts, seeds, vegetables, lean meat and dairy – you will get all of the nutrients you need for your body to function, along with a number of calories which will usually be about right for you or perhaps a little less than you need. You can then top it up with a few more calories. But if you start out with a foundation of calorie-rich, nutrient-poor foods, like most westerners do, in order to get enough of the other nutrients you need you will probably end up consuming more calories than you need, and they will get stored in your body as fat.

This is the concept of nutrient density, which is the proportion of calories to nutrients in a given food. Most processed foods have a low nutrient density; they have few nutrients per calorie. If you consistently eat natural whole foods, though, their nutrient density is much higher, and you will probably find your health improving naturally.

So give this healthy treat bar a try and see if you like it. I certainly do.

(And if you liked this post, you may also like Three Things I’ve Learned from Creative Cooking.)

Technorati Tags: nutrition, recipe, healthy treat, dried fruit, nuts, seeds, calories, nutrient density, healthy eating

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