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It’s an unfortunate truth of small-space living that the tinier the kitchen, the harder it is to find storage space — and worse, stay organized. While some of us invest in new ways to carve out storage space and keep our kitchens tidy, others are forced to forgo their non-essential (and clutter-causing) kitchen wares, especially plastic Tupperware.
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When I was growing up in Texas, my family spent every Sunday eating BBQ brisket sandwiches, coleslaw, and pecan pie, and my friends and I went out for chips and queso and sizzling fajitas. When I moved to New York after college, I gave up this weekly tradition — all the Tex-Mex flavors disappeared, and grilling outside just wasn’t an option.
After eight years of eating my way through New York, however, I’m finally back in Austin and I’m trying to embrace my culinary roots. I’ve stocked my pantry with all my favorite Texas ingredients. These ingredients are always easy to find, affordable, and can turn any sad weeknight dinner into a masterpiece at any moment. Here are five of my favorite pantry essentials.
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Chitra Agrawal, the cookbook author behind Vibrant India, created a line of authentic Indian condiments called Brooklyn Delhi, which are sold at Whole Foods stores nationwide — but that doesn’t mean that she shops there exclusively. In fact, many of Chitra’s favorite finds come from her local Indian grocery store.
For more than a decade, Chitra has specialized in cooking, teaching, and writing about Indian home cooking, in addition to traveling to India each year to visit family and pick up recipe inspiration for her blog, The ABCD’s of Cooking. We asked Chitra for her favorite Indian grocery store finds from the freezer aisle, and she was actually super passionate about this topic. Here are her favorite picks to shop when she’s home in Brooklyn.
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It’s been a long time since I published the Definitive Guide to Fish Oils.
Oh sure, here and there I’ve cited some research supporting the beneficial effects of fish fat, but it almost goes without saying that omega-3s are important. Everyone knows it. Even the most curmudgeonly, conventional wisdom-spouting, statin script-writing, lifestyle modification-ignoring doc will tell you to take fish oil. And research in the last few years has not only continually confirmed the health advantages but illuminated new applications—and new physiological explanations—for their essential function in the body.
But what are those benefits, exactly? Why should we be eating fatty fish or, barring access to high quality edible marine life, taking fish oil supplements?
A major reason is that fish oil can help us reclaim our ancestral omega-3:omega-6 ratio and thus restore the inflammatory backdrop of the human body.
Polyunsaturated fats convert to eicosanoids in the body. Both omega-6 and omega-3-derived eicosanoids are important signaling molecules, but each has different effects, both figuring prominently in the body’s response to inflammation. Omega-6 eicosanoids are generally pro-inflammatory, while omega-3 eicosanoids are anti-inflammatory. Omega-3-derived eicosanoids (the type we get from taking fish oil or eating fatty fish) actually reduce inflammation; in an unbalanced diet heavy in vegetable oils, the omega-6 eicosanoids far outnumber the omega-3s and contribute to a lot more inflammation.
The best available evidence points to ancient humans having an omega-3:omega-6 ratio of around 1 to 1. A typical ratio these days is 1 to 16!
As most diseases and health conditions have an inflammatory component, such lopsided ratios can predispose us to any number of health problems. Conversely, correcting those ratios with smart supplementation of fish oil has the potential to correct or prevent those health problems.
Let’s look at some of them and what the most recent research tells us.
Arthritis is an inflammatory disease, whether we’re talking autoimmune arthritis or wear-and-tear arthritis.
The potential mechanisms are there. In vitro studies using isolated joint tissue show that both DHA and EPA increase joint lubrication. Studies in people show that fish oil reduces inflammatory markers and may even stop the progression of inflammation into inflammatory arthritis.
In a recent study out of Thailand, knee arthritis patients who took fish oil improved their walking speed. “Everyone felt good and happy with the fish oil.” In psoriatic arthritis, fish oil reduced inflammatory markers and lowered patients’ reliance on pain meds.
Fish oil also helps reduce the symptoms of autoimmune rheumatoid arthritis (RA). In one paper, fish oil supplements had additive effects on top of RA drugs. 3-6 grams appears to be an effective dose range. If that sounds high, it is—but you need that much to quell the exaggerated inflammatory responses of RA.
Depression is another one of those conditions that we don’t often think of as an inflammatory disease, but it is. The evidence is considerable. Vets with the most severe depression also have the highest levels of inflammatory markers. Among Type 2 diabetes, depression and inflammation go hand in hand, with the latter appearing to play a causative role in the former.
There’s considerable evidence that the causation goes both ways: depression can increase inflammation, and inflammation can increase depression. Thus, treating one may treat the other. Since omega-3s are potent and broad-reaching anti-inflammatories, could fish oil treat depression?
Yes.
Fish oil has proven effective with EPA having a greater effect than DHA. It’s even effective in patients with and without an official diagnosis of major depressive disorder. It’s effective in type 2 diabetics with depression.
The stress response is an inflammatory one. A healthy omega-3:omega-6 ratio—the foundation of our inflammatory response system—should produce a healthy stress response. Does it?
In response to mental stress, fish oil promotes a healthy, less reactive neurovascular response. It lowers resting heart rate, a good indicator of general stress resilience. When taken post-trauma, it even reduces psychophysiological symptoms (like pounding heart) in car accident survivors. And in alcoholics, fish oil reduces both perceived (subjective) stress and basal cortisol (objective).
Name a disease and “elevated inflammation” or “exaggerated immune response” is probably part of the pathology. What effect does fish oil have on some of these inflammatory pathologies?
I could go on and on. And these are just studies done in the last year or two.
Not everything is so cut and dry. When it comes to certain conditions, like cardiovascular disease, the fish oil literature is confusing. Sometimes it helps, sometimes it doesn’t. What are we to make of it?
One thing that is unequivocal is that a high omega-3 index—the proportion of omega-3 fatty acids in the red blood cell membrane—is protective against cardiovascular disease (see the chart; as omega-6 content goes up, so does cardiovascular mortality). So the question isn’t if long chain fatty acids from fish oil are helpful. It’s: Are those fatty acids reaching your red blood cell membranes and being incorporated?
Several factors affect whether fish oil will increase omega-3 index and thus have the effects we’re looking for:
Omega-6 fats and omega-3 fats compete for space in the red blood cell membranes. If omega-6 intake is too high, fewer omega-3s will make it into the membranes, thereby inhibiting or even abolishing the positive effects of fish oil.
If omega-3 index is low, we’ll see effects. If it’s high enough, further fish oil has no additive effect. We see this in studies such as this one, where only older adults with a low omega-3 index experienced cognitive benefits from omega-3 supplementation. In another study of older adults and cognition that didn’t control for omega-3 index, they found no benefit.
Or in this study, where fish oil had benefits in congestive heart failure patients because they had low baseline levels of omega-3.
Or this study, where autistic patients—who tend to have lower omega-3 statuses than the general population—improved some behavioral measures after taking fish oil.
To take advantage of the full effects of fish oil, however, one must also limit the amount of omega-6 fats they eat. In one study, taking fish oil with saturated fat increased incorporation of omega-3s into red blood cell membranes, while taking it with omega-6 prevented omega-3 incorporation. The best way to do it is to eliminate seed oils—the most concentrated source of omega-6 fatty acids in the modern diet. If you don’t limit seed oils and other dense sources of omega-6s, you’ll have to consume extremely high doses of fish oil to make a dent in your inflammatory status.
Thanks for reading today, folks. I take this information very personally in my life and business. To that end, this week I just released a new formula of Primal Omega-3s that enhances bioavailability and adheres to stricter environmental sustainability standards—all in a smaller capsule. The idea was to optimize benefits and maximize ease. And right now I’m also offering a deal to make this level of quality more affordable….
I’m kicking off the new formula with a BOGO deal. Buy one new Primal Omegas, get the second bottle free now through 8/10/18 at midnight PDT. Just add two Primal Omegas to your cart and use code NEWOMEGAS at checkout. Limit 1 per customer. One-time purchase only.
Thanks again, everybody. Have a great end to the week.
The post Omega-3 for Health: What the Latest Research Shows appeared first on Mark’s Daily Apple.
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Getting dinner on the table on busy weeknights is a challenge no matter who you are — yes, even if you’re an editor for a food website! Here at Kitchn, we struggle just as much as everyone else does to churn out dinner when our schedules are stacked.
There are a handful of things that help us, though. A little foresight or a bit of assistance can make all the difference when dinner seems impossible. Here are seven simple tricks our editors rely on to get dinner on the table on busy nights.
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Did you know that you can buy IKEA stuff through Amazon? I learned this a few years ago, when searching for a kids’ table and chairs for my girls. I’m honestly not sure whether IKEA has authorized sellers or there are a few entrepreneurial souls who have made a living doing this (seems like the latter!), but I’m grateful!
Until fairly recently, IKEA products weren’t available online, and even now, not everything can be bought through their site. Plus, their shipping costs range from $9 to $59 for the very largest items. So while the Amazon prices are always higher than those on the IKEA site, they might not be that much more with home delivery in mind. And, there’s the sheer convenience of seamlessly adding these items into your cart alongside your gluten-free bread and diapers — and not having to make a day-long trip to the maze-y store.
Here are 10 totally-worth-the-extra-money IKEA finds you might not have realized you can buy on Amazon.
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According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), Cyclospora cayetanensis is a nasty microscopic parasite that can cause an intestinal infection called cyclosporiasis. We won’t go into the details about what cyclosporiasis does – although the CDC uses the words “sometimes explosive” to describe it.
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I have vivid childhood memories of my mom standing over the kitchen sink on Christmas day squeezing the water out of defrosted packs of spinach to make her famous spinach casserole. Later my sister took over the task and she’d be shuddering from the semi-thawed clumps in her hands. It always seemed like such a nuisance — and so cold!
So as an adult, I sort of tried to avoid frozen spinach all together. Only recently, however, I found out, thanks to my colleague Kelli, that you don’t always have to bother defrosting and draining it. It turns out there are a handful of instances that you can use spinach straight from the freezer without an ill effect on the dish you’re making.
Here’s when you don’t have to bother defrosting frozen spinach.
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Kitchn’s Delicious Links column highlights recipes we’re excited about from the bloggers we love. Follow along every weekday as we post our favorites.
Can we please discuss the following: How is it already August?! This summer is absolutely flying by, so I’m coping the only way I know how… by throwing everything under the sun on the grill (and eating it all under the sun, too). I think it’s fair to say that this calls for a smorgasbord of skewered sirloin. And this recipe for steak kebabs with garlic butter from Dinner at the Zoo is calling my name.
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The freezer is sort of the unsung hero of the kitchen. It’s the one place you can turn when you’re fresh out of dinner ideas (and fresh produce, too) and need to whip up a meal without going to the grocery store. You can stash something in there and pull it out in desperation many months later.
So we asked you, our readers, what items — aside from homemade leftovers — are always in your freezers. Here are some of the best, most common, and most surprising responses. Are your favorites listed?
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