Making Food Healthier - Part 2

February 10, 2009

Interview with Dr. John La Puma, author of Chef MD's Big Book of Culinary Medicine: A Food Lover's Road Map to Losing Weight, Preventing Disease, and Getting Really Healthy

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Mike Carruthers:
You can make some of the foods you eat healthier just by changing the way you cook them.

John La Puma:
If you bake a pizza at 550 (degrees) instead of 400 or for 14 minutes instead of 7 minutes,  you more than double the bio-availability of the anti-oxidants in the whole-wheat crust. You do need a whole-wheat crust because that's where the anti-oxidants are - in the germ and the bran not the starch.

John LaPuma, M.D.

John La Puma M.D. and author of the book Chef MD's Big Book of Culinary Medicine

If you're trying to have a low glycemic load diet (a diet that raises your blood sugar slowly and gently instead of giving you spikes) you want to make sure your pasta is cooked al dente. Why? Because your body can absorb that starch more slowly from a lightly cooked, a little bit chewy pasta instead of one that is flabby and kind of overcooked.

If you're hungry during the day, Dr. La Puma recommends a piece of bread with peanut butter on it.

If you eat bread with peanut butter it actually helps to stabilize your blood sugar better than the bread alone or bread with butter or bread with jam. Because the peanut butter helps your body digest the sugar and starch of the bread more slowly and gently which gives you a slower and gentler insulin response - which doesn't send you wanting to tear the door off of the refrigerator and vending machine at three o'clock in the afternoon.
 

To hear the complete unedited interview, click here.