Nate Wood, MD, MHS, is an assistant professor of medicine (general medicine) at Yale School of Medicine, a trained chef, and director of the Irving and Alice Brown Teaching Kitchen at Yale New Haven Health. This is a lightly edited excerpt from his interview on the Health & Veritas podcast, episode 193, “Cooking Lessons for Better Health.” Listen to the whole interview to learn more about healthy food, how to make it, and how to incorporate it into your lifestyle.
Q+A
Quick Question: What Food Counts as Healthy?
What types of food count as healthy?
Nate Wood, MD, MHS: I think a lot of people are just confused in general about what is healthy. We all feel that way. So, I try to boil down nutrition science into a couple of basic tenets, and we know that eating whole and minimally processed plants are good for us—fruits, vegetables, whole grains, nuts, seeds, legumes. Time and time again the research shows that.
Where people sometimes go a bit awry is to say, “Okay, we know that these plants are healthy, so what’s the opposite of that? And that must be unhealthy.” So, what’s opposite of plants: animals. But really what the research shows is that if we’re thinking of two opposite ends of the spectrum, with plants being on one end, the other end is probably hyperpalatable, ultra-processed foods. Hyperpalatable, meaning the food is high in at least two of the three following: salt, sugar and fat. So, if a food is ultra-processed and high in two or three of those things, it’s probably not going to be health-promoting.
We focus on time saving in the Teaching Kitchen, and we really like to empower patients to buy frozen fruits and vegetables because they are just as healthy if not healthier than fresh because they’re picked at the peak of ripeness and flash frozen. Oftentimes they’re already cut up. You can pop them in the microwave or in the skillet with whatever else you’re making. They save a lot of time, and they keep forever in the freezer. Super easy addition.
Same thing with canned legumes, you can buy all sorts of beans, and chickpeas, and lentils, and things of that nature in cans, shelf stable for years, you can buy the low- or the no-sodium version, or you can rinse off some of that excess sodium in a colander.
Lots of pantry staples can save you time and still be healthy. I think people are scared of, for instance, minute rice, but really that is just rice that has had some holes poked in it, it’s been parboiled and then dried. It’s just rice. It just cooks faster. So, thinking about minute brown rice or things like that to really help people save time. Those easy tips and tricks combined with a basic but evidence-based understanding of nutrition I think can help a lot of folks.
Health & Veritas is hosted by Yale School of Medicine’s Howard Forman, MD, MBA, professor of radiology and biomedical imaging, and Harlan Krumholz, MD, SM, Harold H. Hines Jr. Professor of Medicine (Cardiology).
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