My husband always laughs at the number of friends I have.  And not just new friends, but friends I’ve had for a life time.  My friend Darcy and I have known each other since we were three-years-old.  Seriously.  But today’s blog isn’t about Darcy, it’s about my friend Tina.  She’s one of my grade school friends.  Together, we survived Catholic school – and eight years of plaid uniform skirts.  Tina was the classy one.  She lived in the house with the big white pillars, had the mom who was always impeccably dressed and even then had a sense of style.

When my blog launched earlier this week, Tina sent me a question via email. Here’s her question:

Have you heard of Greens to Go? It is a dietary supplement powder of organic vegetables and fruits that you add to plain water.  I think it has 7 daily servings of vegetables.  Looks gross (green), but tastes like green apple.  I just started using it (so I drink my salad!).  Just wondering from a nutrition standpoint if it will be any benefit - as usually I don’t get enough veggies and fruits.  Maybe you can blog about it??

Per Tina’s request, I am blogging about it as I imagine it’s a topic that many of you wonder about.  Supplements such as this are advertised all the time, and you have to wonder if it is really possible to get seven servings of fruits and vegetables all in one shot.  Sounds like a great, simple solution, right?

In thinking this through, I encourage you to go to your kitchen and line up seven fruits and vegetables.  Any seven will do – an apple, a banana, a zucchini, carrots, raspberries, green beans, a red pepper. Just look up and down the line at them – their shapes, their colors, their textures, the options of what you could do with them.

Is it really possible that a powered mix could be equivalent to this line-up?

It’s true that a powder can give you straight up nutrients like antioxidants and vitamin C, and even some fiber.  But what you’d miss are all the nutrients that exist in fruits and vegetables that haven’t yet been defined or that can’t be whittled down to a powder.  Also, what about the possibility that the combination of nutrients in fruits and vegetables is important?  Finally, and perhaps the biggest question yet, if these seven fruits and vegetables don’t show up in your eating habits, what replaces them?  Fruits and vegetables tend to provide a lot of nutrients for their calories, and tend to fill you up – all good things in overall eating habits, and traits that can’t be replaced with a powder.

But Tina raises a good point.  What if you’re a person who just doesn’t get all the fruits and vegetables you need?  Are supplements the answer?  The right answer is to figure out a way to get more fruits and vegetables in each day.  But for many of us, this isn’t all that simple.  So what’s the answer for real people living real lives?

Like every good sitcom does during ratings sweeps, I’m going to end here with a “to be continued. . . “

To consider the wide variety of fruits and vegetables that score a perfect 100, visit www.nuval.com.

It is a consistent theme that you’ll hear from me again and again in this blog – nutrition is both a young science and a complicated science.  I bring this up today in follow-up to an article published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition that hit many professional list servs and blogs yesterday.

In essence, the article suggested that eating saturated fat might not really increase your risk of heart disease.  This, of course, contradicts everything you’ve heard, and now you’re left frustrated and confused.

But stay with me here.  In the 1970s, we believed all fat was bad.  In the 1980s and 1990s, we learned there are good fats (mono- and polyunsaturated, omega-3s) and bad fats (saturated).  In the 2000s, we added trans fat to the “bad” list.  What’s happening now in the science community is that they’re looking at the various types of saturated fat to see if they impact the body differently.  This research is dropping the understanding of fats down a whole other level.  We’ve gone from the 10,000 foot level (limit the amount of fat you eat) to the 1 foot level (different types of saturated fat may impact the body differently).  It’s all part of the complexity of food and nutrition.

So what’s my advice?  Don’t jump ship and gorge yourself on sausages and cheese the rest of the day.  Let the scientific process play out, and in the meantime, stick to known advice.

Visit www.nuval.com to see how saturated fats and all fats drive scores up or down.

I grew up as the child of a gardener, a cook, a canner.  To this day, my 84-year-old mother has a garden bigger than most people’s front yards, cans tomatoes, her own salsa, jams and jellies, and still cooks Sunday dinners for the family.

For Christmas one year, my mom gave me a Squeez-O strainer.  Many of you I image are saying “A what?”  Few know the magic of the Sqeezo-O.  But I do, and was thrilled with the gift.

The Squeez-O strainer is a must-have for the serious foodie, for those who can their own tomatoes or make their own apple sauce.  I used mine this past fall to make homemade applesauce.  The beauty of the Squeez-O is that you don’t have to peel or core the apples. You cut them in half, put them in a big pan with a few inches of water, and let them cook until the apples are soft.  Then you pour them into the Squeez-O.  By simply turning the crank, this magic machine separates the cores, seeds and peels from the sauce.  Truly, it is magic.

But as I watch my Squeez-O create a pile of skins, core, seeds and some pulp, I also realize that sauce – even my homemade apple sauce – can’t have the same nutritional value of whole fruit.  Even if I use the freshest, organically grown apples, the process of making sauce is taking some of the positive nutrition out of the food.

Knowing this, I’m often surprised when people think that apple juice, apple sauce, and whole apples are nutritionally equivalent.  I would say across the board, looking at it from a nutrient-density standpoint (how much nutrition am I getting for the calories), the whole fruit is always the best option.  Does this mean you should never eat sauces, canned fruit, or fruit juices?  No, but it does mean that the whole fruit should be your default fruit.

After all, there is nothing better than stepping into my mother’s garden on a hot summer day and biting into a fresh, ripe tomato.

Visit www.nuval.com to compare your favorite whole fruit to sauce to juice.

People are often frustrated that nutrition advice keeps changing.  In the 1980s, everyone was told to eat less fat.  But then in the 1990s, carbs became the bad guys.  In the next decade it was trans fat.  Now sodium is looming on the horizon as the next evil nutrient.  No wonder consumers are confused.

The problem is that nutrition is a young science, and a complex science.  Every day more and more research is done, and it changes what we have held to be true up until that point.  This is the reason for Nutrition Outlook.  My goal through this blog is to get you to think about nutrition as it stands today, and to think about the subject of what you eat more broadly, more comprehensively.  My goal is to connect the dots for you, and make healthy food more of a reality and a joy in your life.

Advice on nutrition abounds everywhere, and I get that.  So you may be asking why you should trust me, right?  First and foremost, you should trust me because I am a registered dietitian, trained to understand the nuances of nutrition and communicate them in meaningful messages to consumers.  The rest is something we’ll build over time – you’ll trust me if I can help you live a better life in some small way.