Oatmeal Chocolate Chia Cookies

There’s truly nothing better than the smell of toasting oats. Except maybe these cookies baking. With the added scents of cinnamon and chocolate in this recipe, the smell of these cookies fresh out of the oven fills a home and a heart with happiness.

oatmeal chia cookie

This recipe was another experiment in making a slightly healthier version of an old staple. It contains sugar, so it’s still meant to be a treat, but with the added fiber from the extra dose of oats, and the healthy Omega-3 fatty acids from chia seeds, this version of the classic oatmeal chocolate cookie at least has a few redeeming qualities.

The chia seeds are ground (I used a coffee grinder) to increase the surface area. This makes them more bio-available to the body, and once moisture is added to the dough, forms a gel to hold the cookies together since they lack gluten.

If you look back at my Hemp Cocoa cookies, my goal when creating gluten free cookies is to not use other grain mixes, and to come up with a version that tastes as good or better than the original, has a better nutrition profile, and just happens to be gluten free.

Oatmeal Chocolate Chia Cookies (gluten free)

10 ounces butter

5 ounces cane sugar

5 ounces brown sugar

2 teaspoon vanilla extract

3 eggs

10 ounces instant oats, toasted

12 ounces ground oats

2 ounces ground chia

1 teaspoon baking soda

2 teaspoons ground cinnamon

½ teaspoon salt

10 ounces semi sweet chocolate chips

Cream together butter and sugars. Mix in eggs and vanilla. Combine dries in a bowl and add to wets. Mix until well combined. Mix in chocolate chips. Allow dough to sit for 10 minutes before scooping with 2 ounce scoop. This allows time for the chia to become mucilaginous and holds the dough together better.  Flatten cookies into discs before baking. Bake 10 minutes at 325*F.

oatmeal choc chia cookie

Enjoy!

Healthy Holiday Cheat Sheet

‘Tis The Season

The holiday season officially kicks off with Thanksgiving this week, which means office parties, endless cocktails, elaborate meals, and tasty treats in abundance.

The holidays are a time of year to gather with friends and family to celebrate and commune, but it’s also a time of anxiety for many who wish to maintain their health and avoid feeling sluggish or less than ideal starting the new year.

Here are a few simple tips to help you feel fantastic when January rolls around. Choose a few that you know will move the needle for you and stick with those or employ them all (just don’t overwhelm yourself!). Either way, you’re bound to be feeling great and ready to take on the new year once the holiday madness dies down.

thanksgiving

The Tips

  • Eat a meal with 20-30g of protein within an hour of waking.

This sets up your hormones and metabolism to keep you from overeating later in the day.

  • Eat a small meal before going to parties.

Not showing up to the party ravished will keep you from diving in to the first food your eyes see, and make it less likely for you to over indulge.

  • Decide ahead of time that you’re only going to have 1 or 2 drinks.

Having a plan is always good. Not only do those drinks contain extra sugar and calories, but they lower your inhibitions, causing you to snack and drink more.

  • Make time for exercise. 

Exercise is not only great for stress reduction during this hectic time of year, but it likely gets you outdoors, which benefits your mind, body, and spirit. It may seem like you don’t have time, but maintaining your movement routine is crucial to staying healthy through the holidays.

  • Make sure you’re staying hydrated.

This might seem like common sense, but with cooler temps and long to-do lists on our minds, it’s easy to forget this basic tip, which keeps our bodies performing at their highest levels by removing toxins, carrying nutrients to cells, and so much more.

  • Fill your plate with the healthy items first. 

Having protein, fiber, and healthy fat at each meal will keep you satiated and less likely to over do the not-so-healthy items.

  • Avoid the “screw it” mindset.

If you over indulge at one meal, don’t let that snowball into an entire week or month of excess. Forgive yourself and move on. Each moment is an opportunity to make a new decision.

  • Get enough sleep.

This is the most important one on the list. Sleep is critical for everything from reducing stress levels, to keeping cortisol levels in check, to reducing sugar cravings, to maintaining immune health, and more. If you know you’re going to be out late, clear your calendar the next morning so you can sleep in.

Getting plenty of sleep is the biggest thing you can do for your health to greet the new year feeling vibrant and ready to pursue your big goals.

christmas

To your health and happiness

Enjoy the holiday season and soak up the spiritual nourishment of being with loved ones and communing over food. It’s a special time of year which can bring great joy and health if you set yourself up for success.

 

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Top 5 Reasons To Eat Real Food as an Outdoor Endurance Athlete

If I’m performing well, why should I reconsider what I eat?

Let me start by saying that I’m not going to tell you that you should eat a certain way. Eat whatever works for you.

While I do believe there are some basic nutrition principles that can benefit everyone, there is no one perfect diet.  Further, the perfect diet for you may change throughout your life.  But that’s a topic for anther day.

Change Starts At Home

The objective of this post is to explore why we make the food choices that we do. As someone who gains her sustenance through time spent outdoors, I try to make environmentally conscious choices.

When it came time to pursue a career path, I wavered between my deep interest in human performance, my passion for outdoor conservation, and my desire to make an impact through working to change the food system. When it came down to it, I felt like working as a nutritionist and addressing peoples’ personal food choices, would check all three boxes.

With a rapidly increasing population to feed and a current food system which is destructive to humans and the environment, I believe the biggest impact each of us can make is to think about what we do day in and day out.  Choosing to use green cleaning products, choosing to spend our dollars with socially conscious companies, and choosing how we nourish ourselves most likely has more of an impact on our future world than signing a petition or donating a coupe dollars to a non-profit. While those are important actions as well, it’s what we do consistently over time that changes our lives and the world. 

Why I Choose to Eat Real Food

As an outdoor endurance athlete, here are the top reasons I continue to fuel myself with real food as opposed to the sugary, processed, easily accessible fare I see filling the backpacks and bellies of fellow hikers, runners, bikers and other athletes.

Health

The most obvious reason to eat real food is enhanced personal health. Processed cakes, cookies, chips, and bars are often laden with preservatives, artificial colors and sweeteners, and a ton of sugar. These are linked to adverse health effects, including rhinitis, weight gain, brain tumors, and even cancer.  Diets high in processed foods promote obesity, metabolic syndrome, cardiovascular disease, and autoimmune diseases.

As someone who wants to perform at my best and live a long life, full of adventure, eating well just makes sense.

Price

Many people argue that it costs more to eat healthy. The price of real food, especially organic, may be more expensive than conventional produce or packaged products. However, when you consider the hidden costs of a junk food diet, it’s more cost effective to just eat real food.

What hidden costs?

Junk food often causes us to eat more, causing us to buy more, and causes long term health implications (discussed above) that lead to more medications and healthcare expenses.  Plus you’ll save money (and your stomach lining) by laying off that Vitamin I.This article from the Huffington Post expands on these hidden costs.

Beyond the monetary cost, what’s the cost of not being healthy enough to complete your outdoor adventure, whether that’s a thru-hike of the PCT or a bike trip across the country or your first marathon? What’s the cost of not achieving your dreams? What’s the cost of missing important life events, like weddings and births of grand kids, because of poor health?

Environment

As someone who spends a lot of time outdoors and cares about the preservation of those spaces, I feel a certain responsibility not to support companies that are blatantly destroying our natural resources in the name of profit. These companies act with total disregard for planetary and personal health.

As outdoor enthusiasts, we’ve experienced first hand the power of time spent in nature, and we have a responsibility to protect those spaces not just with our voices, but with our purchasing power as well.

Freedom

I don’t like to feel like I’m owned by the big corporations. I like to believe I’m still independent-thinking, to some extent. I want to be able and wiling to go against the grain of what is ‘normal’. 

As with thru-hiking, it’s an act of rebellion to choose to eat outside the junk food paradigm. We live in a time when we’re constantly brainwashed from every direction with adverts for one new product or another. Don’t be a pawn in their game. Don’t be complicit. Step outside the box.

Self-respect

Eating is one of the most fundamental acts of being human. It may be strange to say, but eating is one of the most intimate acts of being human. We take food into our mouths and literally become composed of that food. Do you want to be made up of sodium nitrate, MSG, and Red #40? Or do you want to be made of something that was once alive? Something that was made in a lab or something that grew or grazed on real grass and drank in the sun and the air which you so love?

Eat like you give a damn about yourself and the planet.

Real food is interesting and beautiful and complex. It has the ability to connect you to a place, a culture, traditions. This is obvious when comparing a Happy Meal with a traditional Mediterranean meal cooked by a Turkish grandmother. Of course, processed foods are often chosen for convenience, and you can’t always take home-cooked meals on a 2000 mile backpacking trip, but you can apply a similar mindset when choosing food for your next adventure. For example, when I consider a bag of M&Ms versus a bag of dried fruit, such as figs, apricots, and goji berries, the fruit has so many more flavors, textures, and aliveness. It supports the health of the body and the planet.

It’s never made sense to me that we celebrate our ability to crush miles while eating the most nutrient poor food imaginable. Why not celebrate eating food that nourishes our bodies and the planet we so love?

I try to be thoughtful and intentional about my choices in all other areas of life, from how I spend my time, to what I do for work, to the companies I buy my gear from. Why wouldn’t it be the same for food?

Hemp Cocoa Cookies

Cookies For Breakfast

I’ve been expanding my healthy baking horizon lately and have been playing with creating a vegan cookie that is nutritious and delicious.

I prefer not to use gluten free baking mixes that utilize starches and gums. I enjoy creating my gluten free baked goods from ground nuts or seeds, which add a level of nutrition (with healthy fat and protein) and flavor that I don’t find in the pre-made mixes.

So, this cookie is made from ingredients you probably already have on hand, except maybe the hemp hearts.

It took a few iterations to get the consistency right, but the final result ended up super-chocolaty (as desired), not too sweet, slightly nutty, and a little crunchy with the hemp hearts on top.

hemp cocoa cookie

Hemp Cocoa Cookies

(10 cookies) Vegan, Gluten Free, Grain Free

Ingredients

1 cup almond flour

¼ teaspoon salt

¼ cup brown sugar

2 teaspoon baking powder

1 teaspoon baking soda

1 teaspoon white vinegar

2 tablespoons ground flaxseed

2 ounces 85% dark chocolate, chips or coarsely chopped

⅛ cup cocoa powder

2 ounces coconut oil, melted

1 teaspoon vanilla

¼ cup peanut butter

Directions

Mix vinegar and baking soda in small cup. Combine dries in the food processor bowl. Add vinegar and soda. Add coconut oil, vanilla, and PB. Blend until well mixed. Scoop into golf ball size mounds. Dip in whole hemp hearts.

Bake for 8 minutes at 375*F.

Enjoy.

5 Tips on How to Choose the Most Nutritious Greens

Wouldn’t it be great to know you’re choosing the freshest, most nutritious greens possible at the market or grocery store?

As I mentioned in my last post, the same type of fruit or vegetable can vary widely in nutrition from one variety to the next. The ‘best’ choice is not always intuitive.

In this post, you’ll learn 5 tips on how to select, store, and prepare the varieties that are going to give you the most flavor and nutrition. I’ll also list specific varieties to look for. This information is sourced from the fantastic book Eating on the Wild Side by Jo Robinson.

Food As Medicine

Most of the people reading this have access to almost any vegetable they want 12 months of the year. This separates us from the seasonal cycles of plants and also means we are consuming vegetables and fruits that have been picked unripe and shipped across the globe. This is not optimal for nutrition or for the planet.

Seasonality

After a long winter of eating preserved meats, roots, fruit, and herbs, traditional hunter-gathers were hungry for fresh food. The bright green plants that appear in spring are full of phytonutrients and were both food and medicine after a long winter.

Recent studies show that Lamb’s quarters (Chenopodium album) for example, fights viruses and bacteria, and blocks the growth of human breast cancer cells. Another common springtime treat, Dandelion leaves have eight times the antioxidants, two times more calcium, three times more vitamin A, and five times more vitamin K and vitamin E than spinach.

What about the Taste?

The flavor of wild plants is more complex and intense than anything you’ll find in the grocery store. This is attributable to bitter, sour, and astringent compounds, which give these plants their deep nutrition and medicinal qualities.

As mentioned in the original post of this series, much of the medicine has been bred out of these wild plants, and we’re left with incredibly mild varieties, such as our most popular variety, Iceberg lettuce. This equates to a loss in vitamins and minerals in our diet, as well as calcium.

Tips to select, store, and use the most nutritious greens

To reclaim some nutrition and flavor in our diets, and to take a step into eating on the wild side, including nutrient rich greens is a great way to begin.

  1. Choose the most intensely colored lettuces (preferably red, red-brown, purple or dark green) that have the loosest arrangement of leaves.  The most nutritious greens have a more intense flavor. To moderate this, mix greens with a milder variety or add a fat, such as avocado or unfiltered olive oil.
  2. If buying bagged varieties, inspect them carefully, and skip over bags with yellow, brown, or withered leaves. Check the “use-by” date. Look for mixes with red or dark green leaves and choose the freshest one you can.
  3. Preserve nutrients and flavor by separating a head of lettuce into individual leaves or open a bag of loose greens and soak them in very cold water for 10 minutes. Dry in salad spinner or with a towel. Store greens in a resealable plastic bag poked with 10-20 pin-sized holes. Press the air out. seal the bag, and store in the crisper drawer.
  4. For a nutrient-dense salad, add in non lettuce varieties, such as arugula, radicchio, endive, and spinach. Find a greater (and fresher) variety of options at the farmer’s market. Take 5 minutes to make your own salad dressing. Bottled varieties often contain trans-fats, preservatives, and added sugar that would be a shame to pour over your delicious greens. For a simple, tasty, and nutritious dressing, toss your greens in some good olive oil, fresh squeezed lemon juice, and a dash of salt and pepper. Or search the Internet for easy home-made salad dressing.
  5. Keep an eye out for the following lettuce varieties and salad vegetables at your supermarket:
      1. Arugula
      2. California salad (mixed greens)
      3. Frisee (curly endive)
      4. Looseleaf lettuce with red or dark green leaves
      5. Rosso di Chioggia (a variety of radicchio)
      6. Rosso di Trviso (also a radicchio)

    nutritious lettuce

And the following varieties at the farmer’s market or specialty stores: Blackjack (looseleaf lettuce), Cimarron (romaine), Cocade (Oak leaf), Concept (Batavian), Dazzle (romaine), Eruption (romaine), Fire Mountain (looseleaf), Flame (looseleaf), Galactic (looseleaf), Lollo Rosso (looseleaf), Merlot (looseleaf), Marvel of Four Seasons (butterhead), Outrageous (romaine), Prizehead (looseleaf), Red Icerberg (crisphead), Red Oak Leaf (looseleaf), Red Sails (looseleaf), Red Velvet (looseleaf), Revolution (looseleaf), Rouge d’Hiver (romaine), Ruby Red (looseleaf)

With a bit of attention to variety selection, storage, and preparation, your salads can be more flavorful and nutritious than ever before!

Keep an eye out for the next post in this series about alliums (onions, garlic, shallots, leeks, etc) and how to choose for optimal flavor and nutrition.

To tasty salads and good health!

How to Select the Freshest, Most Nutritious Food Possible

Fueling to Reach Your Potential

Have you ever asked yourself “What can I eat right now to give me sustained energy for everything I need to get done today?”

We’re all familiar with the advice to eat more fruits and vegetables. What we also need to know is which fruits and vegetables to eat to get the most benefits from our food.

This is the first post in a series on how to choose fruits and vegetables with the most nutrients, flavor and freshness.

Inspiration

A while back I picked up an excellent book titled Eating on the Wild Side by Jo Robinson. Robinson details how to select, store, and prepare foods to reclaim the nutrients and flavor we’ve lost through decades of breeding fruits and veggies to be more palatable. Much of what I’ll share in this series is directly sourced from or inspired by her book. It’s a valuable resource which I highly recommend you purchase from your local bookstore.

Aren’t all fruits and vegetables basically the same?

As it turns out, no.

An apple is not an apple. A tomato is not a tomato.

One tomato on the supermarket table, for instance, can have ten times the amount of nutrients as the next. How can we know which to select to get the most nutrients and flavor? More on that to come.

 

There is also a common belief that heirloom varieties are superior in nutrition to modern fruits and veggies, but this is not always true.

For example, the Golden Delicious apple, a 100 year heirloom, has half the nutrients of the Liberty apple, which was released 75 years later. Heirloom crops have a variety of other advantages which I will not go into here, but choosing heirlooms is not always a guarantee of superior nutrition, which is our current focus.

What have we lost?

As our ancestors began to take cuttings of wild plants to grow in gardens, they selected varieties that were tender, low in bitterness and astringency, and high in sugar, starch, or oil. Plants that were tough, seedy, bitter, or in any other way unpleasant to eat were left behind in the wilderness.

This transformation of our native plants into our supermarket varieties has resulted in the loss of vitamins, minerals, protein, fiber, and healthful fats. Some of the varieties in our supermarkets are so low in nutrients and high in sugar that they actually contribute to health issues rather than alleviate them.

The ancestor to the banana, for example, is a fruit which comes in many different shapes, colors, and sizes. It’s full of hard seeds, and has a peel which is so thick and firm that it must be peeled with a knife. Thousands of years of selecting for certain traits has yielded the Cavendish banana, the variety we see in our supermarkets, with sweet and soft flesh, nearly non-existent seeds, and a peel that comes off easily.

Most nutrition experts agree that a healthy diet is high in fiber and low in sugar. Keeping our blood sugar at optimum levels is linked to a reduced risk of cancer, cardiovascular disease, chronic inflammation, obesity, and diabetes-the primary ailments of modern civilization.

With the shift in our diet from wild foods to an industrialized food system, we’ve not only experienced a loss in nutrition, but also in flavor. Every aspect of farming has become mechanized and produce now spends days or weeks in transport and storage before it is eaten. This results in fewer nutritients, picking before ripeness, and higher acidity and bitterness.

Eating Wild

Phytonutrients are the substances plants produce to protect themselves from insects, disease, UV light, weather, and animals. These phytonutrients are antioxidants for our bodies. Among the many potential health benefits of consuming plants with high amounts of phytonutrients is the protection we get from free radicals, which can inflame our artery linings, turn normal cells cancerous, damage our eyesight, and intensify aging.

Wild plants contain the highest levels of phytonutrients, and therefore, nutrition and flavor. It’s not likely that most modern humans are going to hunt and forage for most of their food. What we can do though is learn how to select the freshest, most nutrient dense varieties that are available to us at markets.

In the Kitchen

How you store, prepare, and cook your produce will also impact nutrition and flavor. You can reduce, maintain, or enhance their flavor. Cooking techniques change the bioavailability (ability to be absorbed by our bodies) of certain nutrients.

Potatoes, for example, can be stored for months without impacting their nutrition, while broccoli begins to lose it’s cancer-fighting compounds within 24 hours of picking. Simmering tomatoes for hours, as in traditional Italian sauces, not only enhances flavor, but triples it’s lycopene content.

Let Food Be Thy Medicine…

As the title of Robinson’s books states, we can learn to eat on the wild side. We can learn which varieties to select for optimal nutrition, flavor and freshness. We can learn how to use them.

The part of my brain which enjoys trying to optimize everything loves to know that I’m getting the most nutritional bang for my buck. Knowing how to select for optimal freshness, flavor, and nutrition reassures me that I’m spending my hard-earned money on the best available option.

Each post in the remainder of this series will focus on a different group of vegetables or fruits. I will name specific varieties that Robinson discovered through researching thousands of studies in the US and abroad. I will detail simple storage and cooking techniques that enhance nutrition and flavor.

As in the famous Hippocrates saying, discover how food as medicine can truly become a daily practice.

Could this be undermining your health goals?

A Sweet Secret

You’ve likely heard by now that we modern humans consume far too much sugar and that it’s wreaking havoc on our health. From expanding waistlines to insulin resistance and diabetes, too much of the sweet stuff is not just making us fat, it’s also making us sick. On average, Americans consume 66 pounds of added sugar per year.

I recently read that there is added sugar in 74% of packaged foods in supermarkets (source). Aside from the fact that it’s best to shop to borders at the grocery store and eat real food, if you’re going to eat from a package, it’s wise to know what’s in there.

Hidden in Plain Sight

“But I read labels”, you say.

Unfortunately, just having an awareness that sugar may be keeping you from reaching your health goals is not enough. Reading food labels is fantastic and is an excellent first step in keeping unwanted added sources of sugar out of your diet. The fewer the ingredients in a food the better. Ingredients should all be things you can pronounce and are familiar with.

Spotting added sugar can sometimes be tricky. It’s in things we consider healthy, like granola or yogurt. It’s also in savory items, such as ketchup, crackers, and bread.

sugar

Product labels are required to list total sugar, but not to specify how much of that sugar is naturally occurring, such as in sugar and milk, and how much has been added. Keep an eye out for the following sources of added sugar while scanning ingredient lists.

The many names of sugar

  • Agave nectar
  • Barbados sugar
  • Barley malt
  • Barley malt syrup
  • Beet sugar
  • Brown sugar
  • Buttered syrup
  • Cane juice
  • Cane juice crystals
  • Cane sugar
  • Caramel
  • Carob syrup
  • Castor sugar
  • Coconut palm sugar
  • Coconut sugar
  • Confectioner’s sugar
  • Corn sweetener
  • Corn syrup
  • Corn syrup solids
  • Date sugar
  • Dehydrated cane juice
  • Demerara sugar
  • Dextrin
  • Dextrose
  • Evaporated cane juice
  • Free-flowing brown sugars
  • Fructose
  • Fruit juice
  • Fruit juice concentrate
  • Glucose
  • Glucose solids
  • Golden sugar
  • Golden syrup
  • Grape sugar
  • HFCS (High-Fructose Corn Syrup)
  • Honey
  • Icing sugar
  • Invert sugar
  • Malt syrup
  • Maltodextrin
  • Maltol
  • Maltose
  • Mannose
  • Maple syrup
  • Molasses
  • Muscovado
  • Palm sugar
  • Panocha
  • Powdered sugar
  • Raw sugar
  • Refiner’s syrup
  • Rice syrup
  • Saccharose
  • Sorghum Syrup
  • Sucrose
  • Sugar (granulated)
  • Sweet Sorghum
  • Syrup
  • Treacle
  • Turbinado sugar
  • Yellow sugar

What instructions is your food giving your body?

Health and healing starts in the kitchen.

Food is the foundation.

In this post, you’ll learn 3 key strategies you can begin using today to improve your health from the inside out.

Food is the information that tells our bodies which genes to express and which genes to silence. More specifically, there are certain components in food that encourage our bodies to turn on or off inflammatory pathways. Inflammation is at the root of nearly all chronic conditions.

We must move beyond the idea eating by numbers. Eating optimally for our genes is about more than eating a specific percentage of macros (Carbs, Proteins, and Fat). It’s about more than counting calories. It’s about learning which ingredients boost our ability to combat oxidative stress and quench damaging free radicals.

Most importantly, it’s about learning how to get these ingredients onto our plates in a simple and nutritious way. I’ll go into the biochemistry of inflammation in another post, but for now, just know that food is talking to your body in very specific ways.

food is information

The first step towards health is to start including more foods that quiet the flames of inflammation.

Simple Strategies

Below are 3 key strategies you can implement today to lay a foundation for better health and performance in every aspect of your life.

  • Reduce the damage of oxidative stress on cells and tissue. Eat foods to help manage inflammation, oxidative stress, blood sugar, and fats. This includes grapes, blueberries, apples, watermelon, cabbage, kale, onion, leeks, radishes, capers, and turmeric.                                                                                                                            
  • Feed your gut. A healthy gut is important for a variety of reasons ranging from immunity to mental health to glowing skin. To properly absorb nutrients from your food, you need healthy gut bacteria. The following foods support your gut health: kombucha, asparagus, bananas, jicama, yogurt, miso, and tempeh.             
  • Support your detox processes. Include these foods to aid in the production of antioxidants and to help your body get rid of toxic substances produced under stress. Include the following: beets, spinach, mushrooms, avocado, oranges, eggs, sunflower seeds, and brazil nuts.

Sustainable Success

By working with ingredients that directly influence our genetic expression, we can create a toolbox of foods that improve our health at the biochemical level. When we reduce inflammation in the body, the body can begin to heal itself.

Getting these foods on your plate every day can help you begin to break free from restrictive meal plans and diet dogma, and set you up for success over the long haul.

Much of what I’ve discussed here about how specific components in food interact with our genes is from the work of Amanda Archibald