Stevie Joe and Nutrition

Time is catching up with ol' Stevie Joe, and his blood pressure is slowly but surely rising. Not wanting to hooked on a bunch of medications, I've been reading up on healthy diets. This is not new territory for me as I was once quite the nutritional role model. However, once you get started on the Denver omelets down at the Junebug Cafe and Internet Lounge, it's hard to stop.

Anyhoo, I pulled out my favorite 80s era vegetarian cookbook, Laurel's Kitchen. You Birkenstock-wearing free-love folks will know what I'm talking about. I made my favorite dish from that book, the Spanish rice. It was just as I remembered except instead of drinking red wine with it, I sipped some fruit juice (seeing as how red wine gets my migraines going). Now, when I ran out of fruit juice, I slipped into my old bad habits and cracked open a sodi-pop. You know what? That sodi-pop tasted just awful with the Spanish rice and vice versa.

That got me to thinking about processed foods. Maybe processed drinks, like sodi-pop, go better with processed foods, like just about everything at a supermarket today. If you are like me and your blood pressure is creeping up, you are probably scanning nutritional labels looking for salt and sodium. The bad news is just about every processed food is loaded with them (even so-called "heart healthy" frozen dinners).

So, if you want to reduce the sodium in your diet, you're going to have to start cooking stuff from scratch just like Grandma used to. Let me tell you, this takes some work. Shopping and cooking just got a lot more complicated. However, the benefits are great. Once you get the processed food monkey off of your back, you start dumping a lot more than sodium from your diet. Just take a look at some of those labels!

Go to your big chain supermarket and pick up a loaf of "fresh-baked" bread from their "bakery." Read the label. See a bunch of stuff you can't pronounce? That's because the dough is probably made elsewhere and shipped to your local store to be heated up. See? Not so fresh. Gonna need some preservatives in there. Make some bread from scratch (really not so hard), and it's going to taste better and be better for you. That's the way Stevie Joe rolls.

More nutritional tips soon . . .

Stevie Joe Parker Living™