Healthy Living - Nutrition and Wellness.

For the best possible results, how far would you travel? Would you take an international flight to find a hospital that ranked among the very best in the world for the treatment of heart attacks? For the best possible results in nine cardiac care measures, just how far would you go? St. Tammany Parish Hospital, world-class healthcare, close to home. Hello, and welcome to Healthy Living, brought to you by St. Tammany Parish Hospital. I'm your host, Christian Moises. Living in South Louisiana, food is king, and we clearly love to eat, but not all the food that we put into our bodies sometimes are the healthiest choices. We talk a lot on our shows about how eating right is the key to a healthy lifestyle, but we don't really tell you how to do that. So today we have three guests that are going to really kind of walk us through those steps on how to make nutritious meals, how to do correct grocery shopping and whatnot. So first we're joined by Hope Gardner, a clinical dietitian with our food services department. Hope, thanks for being here today. Good morning, Christian. You do a lot of interaction with patients at the hospital, kind of getting them to eat right and eat better and make healthy choices. Tell us a little bit about your interaction with those patients and kind of what your end goal is. Well the ultimate goal of our profession as a dietitian is the prevention side of becoming sick. We don't like to wait until patients are sick and in the hospital, but of course once they are, it's our role to help them understand their diets, what's going to help them eat right to help them feel good so they won't get sick in the long run. Right. I know some of the things that we were talking about before the show deals with kids, your interactions with kids and making sure kids are eating right. Early infancy through school age children, how can they maintain a healthy diet? Well the first thing parents or caregivers can do for children is to start having more meals at home. Family meal time is very important. It helps decrease their incidence of developing diabetes, heart disease as well as obesity and that's the big upcoming focus is going to be on overweight children. It's just not healthy. No, that's a big issue and we're going to talk about obesity actually later on in the show with our second guest. You talked about family meal time and that's a huge thing and with society actually, we've really kind of gotten away from that, sitting at the dinner table and talking and eating the correct foods. What's the best way to do that? How can you get people back on track? Well first of all, we do live very busy lives and families are busy bustling kids here and there for soccer practice or the commutes are long now, longer working hours, but it's still going to be important for families to have a sit down meal at home even if it's just once or twice a week. On average, research has shown that parents only spend about 38 minutes per week in conversation with their children. That's amazing. So you think you have all this time to spend with your children but ultimately we don't and between the ages of one and five, those children are very impressionable by having a meal time. So yes, as a family, as a parent, you want your child to learn how to behave at the dinner table. You want to provide them with a variety of foods that they may not get if you're always on the go. You want to have a good sharing time with your child. If we're only spending 38 minutes a week with conversation in our child, what's with 15 or 20 minutes three or four days a week to make it an hour worth of our time. And you talked about making sure you give them a variety of food and items to try. It's also a great way to make sure that they're eating right. You're not eating on the go all the time and it introduces them to those different types of foods. So you're dealing with picky eaters too, feeling them out and seeing what they like and don't like. On that same vein, talking about kids and healthy diet, packing nutritious lunches are really important and key to that obesity battle and making sure they're getting the right food at school. Give us some hints on healthy lunches and how to go about doing that. You want to make sure you give them, first of all, like we said, variety is key. Try to incorporate as many different food groups as you can. Say, for instance, a cheese stick, a sandwich. You can put some fruit in there and have a little juice box or some water. And that incorporates your breads, your meats, your dairy and fruits. Vegetables, some cherry tomatoes, celery sticks, carrot sticks, anything like that. But yes, it is easy. Put an ice pack in there and they're good to go. You're telling us to get these kids to eat these fruits and vegetables. We hear it all the time. How do you do that? They're going to be sitting next to a kid who probably has a little Debbie brownie and a hamburger. How do you make that fun? It always starts at home. You want your child to very easy to somewhat manipulate your child, even if they are a picky eater, like you mentioned. You always want to serve them what you know they're going to eat. If they're demanding macaroni and cheese and they're a three-year-old, you're not going to really want to argue with them. You want to provide them with a good variety of foods, but always give them something that you know they're going to eat. If you know without a doubt, little Johnny will eat mac and cheese, by all means, give them the macaroni and cheese, but include something else on the plate in just one or two tablespoon size and let them know you have to take at least one bite of that, and then I'll give you more macaroni and cheese. It's just a way to encourage them, but always use the one bite rule. Whatever's on your plate, you have to take at least one bite. You don't have to swallow it, but you have to put it in your mouth. Well, we were talking about packing a healthy lunch and you brought up about juice drinks and whatnot. Now juice drinks, I know there's a whole variety of them out there. Some are not so great. You want to talk a little bit about kind of which fruit juices we should be going after in the grocery store? Absolutely. First, you want to look for 100% juice. Juicy juice, Northland blend. You can always take your own container, a reusable container, and fill it with your own juice from home for the best bet. It's absolutely fine to use Capri Sun or some of the other name brands, but go for the 100% juice or water if nothing else. Kids who are not very active, if they're not outside sweating and playing a whole lot, don't need any type of juice replacements like the Powerades, Gatorades, sports drinks, those types of things. Save that for a time when they are sweating and very active. Right. And exercise, exercise, exercise. We hear it all the time. How does that tie into what you deal with with your patients when you're talking to them? You're talking about healthy eating, but exercise is as important, if not more. Absolutely. And when we're talking about a one to five-year-old, a healthy child is an active child. Just because they're running around playing all day long doesn't mean they're hyperactive. It means they're healthy to the point where you should be out there playing with them. Get a ball and roll it back and forth on a rainy day. Play inside games if you can, Twister or some of those other fun games, but get out and get active. Absolutely. We could talk about this forever. Is there anything that we maybe have missed? Any key points when it comes to maintaining a healthy diet, especially focused on children that you would like to get across? Keep in mind that family mealtime, which is so important this day and age. Here in Louisiana, 12% of children between the ages of two and five are classified as being obese. The one thing we can do is keep the meals at home. That doesn't mean you can't order pizza. Order pizza, have it delivered. Keep it simple. Include your child at the grocery store when you go. Have them pick out a few foods. They have ownership and they're going to want to try it when they get home. The main thing is to make sure that you keep it fun. You keep it interesting and let the child participate with that. Hope, thanks so much. That's a great introduction to our next segment. When we come back, we'll be talking about obesity and how to maintain that healthy weight limit. They're the movers and the shakers. They're the ones who change our world and they deserve places designed especially for them. Built with kids' specific needs in mind. The latest technology in the caring hands of our dedicated pediatric specialists and primary care physicians. Helping kids feel like kids. St. Tammany Parish Hospital. World-class health care for children close to home. Welcome back to Healthy Living brought to you by St. Tammany Parish Hospital. We were just speaking with Hope Gardner, a dietician with the hospital who is teaching us about healthy lifestyle choices and food choices for your children. She also was speaking about obesity which is a great introduction to our next guest, Haley Tanner who is a clinical dietician with Mary Bird Perkins Cancer Center at St. Tammany Parish Hospital. Obesity is one of the things that you talk about a lot with your patients. I wanted to start off with obesity and how it is now an actual disease and what you can do to maintain a healthy weight. Obesity occurs when we start our chronic energy intake so we are consuming more calories than we are expending. Having said that, there are a lot of things, a lot of aspects that influence obesity which include our genetic makeup, some medicines that we take, some side effects of the medicines, our environment. Kind of like Hope was talking about earlier, just constantly being on the run, drive throughs. It's very hard to maintain a healthy weight. Two things that you can do. I like to say try to eat clean. Eat more whole foods. Fruits, vegetables, whole grains, legumes. Going back to the fruits and vegetables, they don't have to be your fresh produce. Sometimes that's hard to get but you can do frozen. Frozen is just as good as your fresh. They are flash frozen at their peak of ripeness. Canned, if you do canned, just make sure you rinse them before you eat them. Also, trying to adopt a physically active lifestyle is very important. If you're not physically active, just try to make some changes in your daily activity. Maybe walk with co-workers during your lunch hour or park further away from your building or the store and just taking those few extra steps. Take the stairs instead of the elevator. Just got to make the effort for it. Right. Or if you want and you have the time in your busy schedule, maybe go to a gym. Sit down with a personal trainer and talk to them. Say, this is where I'm at and this is where I want to be. They could help devise a plan for you to get you more physically active. You have to start small. You don't want to start with this huge workout regimen because sometimes it can deter you from going back. It's being realistic. It's setting yourself up for success and not just going 110 percent right out of the box. That's right. We talked about maintaining a healthy weight. Part of that is portion control. I know you have some really cool tricks on things to give you an idea of what size you should be eating of different types of food. Portions have grown over the past 20 years. In vending machines, when you get a 20 ounce Coke, that has nearly 240 calories. 20 years ago, a bottle of Coke was 6.5 ounces. The calorie difference between the Coke 20 years ago and Coke today is 160 calories. It's amazing. I'm bad about fast food, but I'll go to Burger King for example. I'll get a medium and the drink that comes with the medium is a gallon of Diet Coke. It is. Our perception of portions are distorted now. What we think is a normal sized portion is actually too large. A few tips to think about when making your plate would be for breakfast. If you want a waffle or pancake, it should be the size of a CD or DVD. Your cooked rice or cooked pasta should be the size of a tennis ball. That's cooked, not raw. Your yield portion should be the size of a tennis ball. A baseball is a good reference for how much vegetables or fruit you should be eating. Cereal in the mornings. Cooked cereal or other cereals, dry cereals, should be the size of your fist. A good size for a portion of meat, one serving size of a piece of chicken or a hamburger should be the size of a deck of cards. That's 3 ounces. I need to do some rethinking. I'm probably eating 2 or 3 fistfuls of cereal in the morning. Yes, me too. I don't know if you've come across this and this is what you share, but I had done Weight Watchers a couple of years ago. One of the best things, going back to family meal time, is don't bring the food to the table. Serve yourself in the kitchen so that way you're not having complete access to that at the table. You can just keep getting that mashed potato as much as you want. I notice that at home. When I have the meal on the table, I'm always getting more potatoes or more of something that I shouldn't be getting. So it is best to leave it in the kitchen and not at the table with you. And is serving yourself on a smaller plate, I've heard that before, is that a good way? It is because that helps you put portions into perspective. We tend to want to fill up our plate so if you use a salad plate, you get that perception. And those are the right portions. One of the things you do talk about with patients is reducing red meat consumption. Why is that so important? You want the red meat in your diet, but there's good ways to go about it. Right. The American Institute of Cancer Research recommends that you exceed no more than 24 ounces a week of beef, lamb, and pork. But some other protein is very important in your diet. It helps you stay full. So choosing fish, chicken, and beans. Beans are an excellent protein. Pair it with some whole grain rice because that will make it a complete protein. Eggs, nuts. Those are great options for protein sources. And then also, you really want to limit your consumption of processed meats. So anything that's smoked or has any kind of preservatives or nitrates added to them, try to avoid those at all costs. Maybe instead of going to the deli or buying your processed luncheon meats, maybe bake a large turkey and slice it and use that as your lunch meat. One of the things you do with the Cancer Center, you have this awesome program called Fighting With Your Fork. I definitely wanted to talk about that. What you do with that program. I went to one of the most recent ones and you made this awesome, and I imagine healthy, green spinach soup. Yes. And it's not just for cancer patients though. It's a great program. I offer a cooking demonstration once a month. My class is sponsored by Winn-Dixie and I'm able to give every participant a cookbook. And these cookbooks are using whole foods. Minimally processed foods. Your broths. A lot of your broths they're telling you to make from scratch. And I do. But the cream of spinach and brie soup, that was actually a broth-based soup, but it looked creamy because it was the brie that made it give that appearance. And the class is great because it teaches you how to maintain those healthy weights and cook smartly and healthily. Not a word, but you know what I'm getting at. Well great Haley, I appreciate it. Thank you so much for being here today. Thank you for having me. And we'll be back shortly. After meticulous planning and loads of preparation, the instruments are ready. The lights are focused. Introducing the Covington Surgery Center. A state-of-the-art outpatient surgical facility right in your own backyard. St. Tammany Parish Hospital. World-class health care close to home. Welcome back. We've been talking about healthy eating and some of the portion control sizes, how you can incorporate your kids, pack healthy lunches. But now that you have all that information we're actually going to give you the how-to to do this in the kitchen and how to pick those correct groceries. To help us with that is our chef at St. Tammany Parish Hospital, Avery Crosby. Thanks for being here today. Glad to be here. You cook some great food, which I have to mention before we even get into this, you cook healthy food in our cafeteria which is open to the public. We do. You should make it a point to come by and have lunch sometime at the hospital. It's most inexpensive meal in the parish. It really is. I was kind of blown away when I started eating there. We have great staff. Lunch under five dollars in this economy is great. But talking about healthy cooking and whatnot, you'd like to share some of those secrets on how to do that in your home. One of the big things is how to correctly shop at the grocery store. That's where it starts. It's hard to do that. You've got all these different packages of things and the labels are set up so that the servings are skew. It says one serving on a package or 12 servings on a package and you have to kind of define which ones are which. I usually start at the back of the grocery store, the opposite way that it's set up, because you get your staples that way and then you kind of go to the front. The store is set up to kind of fix you in a certain direction. So it helps to work their system as you would work your own system, if you will. Try not to buy a lot of box jobs. We call them box jobs, pre-made meals. They have a lot of sodium in them, a lot of trans fats. The trans fats help hold things together and keep them on a longer shelf life. So does the sodium, so does the salt. But try not to buy as many of the box jobs. Go for things that are more natural, like you guys were talking about before. And they're easy, but to tell you the truth, I don't find that they're that tasty either. There's a lot more you can do going on the preparing it yourself side. Part of it being the grocery shopping, part of it being going to the markets that we have around here. We have some fantastic markets. You can buy food that's in season and a lot of it really inexpensive compared to a grocery store. A couple of weeks ago we were picking up lettuce and we're paying two dollars for a head of lettuce. It's five times the size of the grocery store lettuce. It's just magnificent bargains in some of the farmers markets. Now you talked about how it's important to start in the back of the grocery store, not use their pre-designed system. Many people may not even realize that grocery stores are designed like that on purpose. Millions of dollars of marketing to make sure we shop the right way. What's the importance of starting in the back and working your way up? Well, you want to find your staples. Your bread, your milk, your eggs. All those basic things are towards the end of your shopping trip. Granted, that's a refrigerated section and you're worried about having the groceries in your cart for a length of time, but your grocery shopping is not going to last more than 45 minutes. It's not like it's going to sit in your basket for something that's going to inhibit the growth or mess up the growth. One of the things that we want to talk about is once you have those groceries and you're in the kitchen, looking at recipes. How can you alter recipes to trim the fat, trim the cholesterol, sodium, whatnot? How do you alter that and still have the recipe taste great? That's part of the fun of playing with your food. Besides grocery shopping in the farmers markets, I'd like to dip into just a little bit of having the kids take ownership, which I think Hope talked about a little bit. Grow a garden. It doesn't have to be some big, masterful expanse of your entire yard. You can just take Swiss chard or rainbow chard, which is really colorful, tastes like a cross between celery and lettuce and goes wonderful in salads, and put that right in your front garden. It looks beautiful. You can trim off little leaves here and there. Your children can do that with you. They'll plant with you. They'll go and trim the garden. We give my kids a bowl and say, okay, yard time. They go out with a pair of scissors and they'll walk around and snip a bit off of each one and make a bowl of salad out of our yard. Because they've planted the plants, they know which ones are edible. They didn't always like it at first. There's that one bite rule. But having ownership, they started to get a little more into it and now they're very proud to do it. It's educational and it's healthy. The true test is when their friends come over. Their friends come over and they don't like the food that we have in our salad that came from the grocery that we knew we didn't do so well. But their kids were pretty interested in it. Their friends were pretty interested in it. They enjoyed it. It's fun. It's good family bonding time, too. Growing up, my grandfather always had a garden in the back with carrots. I don't want to dig them up early. He's like, no, they have to grow. Let them grow. It got me eating vegetables. Vegetables are out of the ground, which is organic and it's free. You can go to the feed store and pick up a pack of seeds for two dollars and have more than you'll ever use in any given time. I want to reinforce, going back to the grocery store real quick. Haley was talking about this earlier. Fresh versus frozen. Cans, whatnot. Fresh, of course, is always the best option. It's always best, but it's not always available in that season. You get to the point where you want to make a recipe a certain way. Some frozen foods are better than others. If you look at the ingredients and it has two or three ingredients and the main ingredient is the peas that are on there, you're probably going to be okay. If you're buying something with a frozen pack of sauce, you're probably edging over something you may not want to go into. One of the things, talking about when you're reading labels at the grocery store, what are some of the key things that you should be looking for? You talked about servings, but when it comes to daily percentage values of cholesterol and sodium, what are some of the key things in terms of making the best choices? The three big things to look for, I guess, are the fat, the sodium, and the carbohydrates. The fat's at the top of the label when you look at it. The one that you don't want to have is the trans fat. You can live with the other ones and they're probably going to be fine. The trans fats are the ones that are not a natural fat and it does terrible things to your body. You don't want to play with that. The government's asking us to reduce these. Whole cities, in fact, are asking to remove them from the plates. You don't want to have that in your food. When you go down to the sodium, 1,500 milligrams is a good amount for a whole day. That's a little less than a teaspoon. If you were to hold that in your hand, you'd think, oh, I don't want to eat that. That's a tremendous amount. Then you take a can of soup that has two servings in it and there's 800, 900 milligrams of sodium per serving. You have to watch how much you're taking in. It never amazes me, even though some of those soups say no sodium, the way people eat it. Soup is healthier, but they're loaded with sodium. I guess that's why you're saying no boxed meals. Try to avoid boxed meals because they make up. There are alternatives out there. Just on tomato sauce. If you walk up to the grocery store and there's 15, 20 different types of tomatoes and as many brands, pick up a couple and compare. Some of them have 10, 15 milligrams of sodium for the entire can, which is incredible, or per serving. Then some of them have 10, 15 times that. It's a decision you have to make. You have to take a second, put your glasses on and read what it says on the package. Chef, I appreciate it. I have to say too, coming out in our next issue of Heart to Heart, you're starting to provide some awesome recipes that are very tasty, but they're also health conscious. We have them on our website, we have them on our social media accounts, and they're going to be in Heart to Heart. Hopefully we can get you to keep sharing your secret recipe files. It's a pleasure to do it. We have a great staff. We have a little garden at the hospital that we put our fresh herbs in that we jazz up the food a little bit with. My office window overlooks it. A lot of times y'all will be fresh grilling, which for a hospital is great because grilling is always a healthy option. Our foundation was nice enough to pick up a smoker for us. Just what you're saying, when you're cooking the food in a certain way, that grilling process, that smoking process, adds flavor to something that you don't have to add the salt to. It drips the fat off of it. Taste before you salt. Always. That's what I've always been taught. Always, always. Chef, I appreciate it. Thanks for being here. Thank you, Christian. Thank you for joining us today. We'll see you next time.