Walk In The Woods With Pritikin Chief

March 24th, 2008 at 04:30pm Michael Conniff 2

We had entered the “practice” portion of the “Women’s Health Conference: From Theory To Practice”—and that meant a group of us was walking in the woods to the Rio Grande Trail and thence into Clark’s Market in Aspen with Dr. Bob Vogel, the University of Maryland professor of medicine who doubles as chief of medicine for the Pritikin Longevity Center and Pritikin Research Foundation.

We did some thinking and came up with Japan: rice and other grains, noodles, vegetables, fish—and very little chicken or beef.

“There’s only one thing wrong with the Japanese diet,” Dr. Vogel said. “Too much salt.”

Salt would turn out to be a major culprit on our trip to the market to learn how best to read the labels now required by the Food and Drug Administration. If a service size is 100 calories, for example, then the sodium per service should not exceed 100 milligrams.

Good luck with that: no matter where we looked—and we looked all over the supermarket, salt was available in quantities too great for your health. The same goes, not surprisingly, for sugar. We looked at a Xing drink with ginseng and honey. Guess what—way too sweet—and that’s why the good doctor said it was a good idea to water down your juice and “to get your fruit by eating fruit.”

The other big idea we took away was to beware saturated fat. Canola oil is half the fat of olive oil, no matter what you’ve heard about “The Mediterranean Diet.” So olive oil is out. Butter is pure saturated fat and the Doc showed use a few margarines (and one kind of Minute Maid orange juice) that actually lowers your cholesterol. Cheese and ice cream is to be savored in minute quantities. Cream and even 1 percent milk is a no-no. Trans fat is bad. Fried food, potato chips, charcoal grilling—all of that’s to be avoided like a plague on your house if you want it to be a home.

 And he called egg whites “the perfect food,” though it’s okay to drop in an egg yolk into your diet here and there. The answer to most of our problems is to eat a jumbo sized salad for lunch and for dinner, one sprinkled with vegetables, beans, and a smattering of chicken or fish.

The culinary carnage could have been much worse. At one point in the session, the Colorado Mountain College professor Tom Buesch happened by with a Fanta orange soda and a sugar bar of some kind that passed for healthy. Tom, 65 and not slowing down, was unapologetic. Somebody’s got to keep the economy moving.

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