Here is a handy reference for baking by weight, versus volume, which I highly recommend for gluten-free baking! It will make all the difference and can make or break your baked goods!!
FLOUR TYPE 1 CUP WEIGHT (IN GRAMS)
Almond Flour 112
Amaranth Flour 120
Arrowroot 128
Brown Rice Flour 158
Buckwheat Flour 120
Chestnut Flour 100
Coconut Flour 112
Corn Flour / Masa Harina 112
Cornmeal (Medium) 128
Cornstarch 128
Fava Bean Flour 132
Garbanzo (Chickpea) 120
Millet 120
Oat Flour 120
Split Pea Flour 160
Potato Flour 180
Potato Starch 170
Quinoa Flour 112
Romano Bean 128
Soy Flour 112
Sorghum Flour 127
Sweet Potato 180
Sweet Rice 204
Tapioca Starch 125
Teff Flour 120
White Rice 158
Showing posts with label Information Station. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Information Station. Show all posts
Sunday, February 24, 2013
Friday, February 22, 2013
Wheat May Not Be Good For Anyone!
I was recently reading "Gluten-Free Cooking For Dummies", which I highly recommend, by the way, and I came across some information that I thought was worth sharing! Here is an excerpt from the book:
WHEAT MAY NOT BE GOOD FOR ANYONE
You've probably been raised to believe that wheat - especially whole wheat - is really good for you. Although wheat does offer some health benefits, the same benefits can easily be found in other foods without the unpleasant side effects that many, if not most, people experience. But here's the bottom line: I believe wheat's not good for anyone, whether you have gluten sensitivity or celiac disease or not. Move over, David Letterman - here's my top-ten list of the problems with wheat.
1) Humans don't fully digest wheat
Let's start with some basic biology. It's a simple fact that the human stomach doesn't fully digest wheat. Cows, sheep, and other ruminant animals do just fine with wheat because they have more than one stomach to complete the digestion process. When the partially digested wheat leaves their stomach, it goes to another stomach where it is further broken down, then to another and another until the process is complete.
Unlike our bovine buddies, we humans have only one stomach. When the wheat leaves our tummies, it's not fully digested. Those undigested portions begin to ferment, and do you know what the byproduct of fermentation is? Gas. Icky, belchable, fart-forming gas. For many people, this accounts for the gas and bloating they feel after they eat wheat, whether they have gluten sensitivity or not.
2) Wheat is a pro-inflammatory agent
Recently, lots of books and articles have been written on the subject of pro-inflammatory foods. These foods are rapidly converted to sugar, causing a rise in the body's insulin levels (read more about this in number nine on my top-ten list), causing a burst of inflammation at the cellular level. Almost everyone knows that blood sugar rises from eating sweets (cakes, cookies, and candy). But lots of foods not considered sweets have pro-inflammatory effects - foods that have wheat in them, like cereal, pasta, breads, and bagels. These foods can be high in simple starches; when these are broken down, they act the same as sweet foods, raising blood sugar levels, releasing insulin, and causing inflammation. Bear in mind that the inflammation occurs in all people, not just those with wheat or gluten sensitivities.
It turns out that inflammation, once thought to be limited to "-itis" conditions like arthritis, may actually be at the root of a number of serious conditions, including heart disease, Alzheimer's, and some types of cancer. And if vanity is the only way to prove a point, consider this: Dr. Nicholas Perricone, renowned author of The Wrinkle Cure, considers inflammation to be the "single most powerful cause of the signs of aging."
One great tool for identifying pro-inflammatory foods is the glycemic index (remember this term; I'm going to use it again in number nine). The glycemic index measures how fast your blood sugar rises after you eat a food that contains carbohydrates (like pasta, potatoes, and bread). It rates foods on a scale from 0-100, where water is 0 and table sugar is 100. The lower the glycemic index rating, the less likely the food is to be pro-inflammatory. Foods made from wheat, especially refined wheat, have a glycemic index in the 50 to 80-plus range, putting them on the high side and classifying them as pro-inflammatory.
3) Wheat can cause leaky gut syndrome
So what is leaky gut syndrome? Good question - I'm glad you asked. The simple-and-not-perfectly-correct-but-close-enough answer is that leaky gut syndrome is a condition whereby stuff is leaking from your gut into your bloodstream - stuff that shouldn't be there, like toxins (and large molecules like gluten!).
So how does it happen? When people eat wheat, their bodies produce extra amounts of a protein called zonulin.
The lining of the small intestine is basically a wall of cells that most materials can't pass through on their own. When important vitamins and minerals are present, zonulin tells the passageways in the intestinal wall to open so those nutrients can pass into the bloodstream. The blood then carries the nutrients to other parts of the body, where they can be used to nourish the body.
But when people eat wheat - not just people with celiac disease, but all people - their zonulin levels rise too high, and the passageways open too much and let things into the bloodstream that shouldn't be there. This increased permeability of the lining of the small intestine, known as leaky gut syndrome, can cause a variety of problems health-wise.
For people with celiac disease, leaky-gut syndrome starts the cascade of events that lead to health problems. Gluten is a large molecule that really shouldn't be able to get into the bloodstream, but it does because zonulin levels are too high, and the body allows it in. After it's in the bloodstream, the body sees the gluten molecule as an invader - a toxin - so it launches an attack, and in doing so, it damages the area around the gluten molecule, which includes the lining of the small intestine. The villi, which are short hair-like structures that are designed to increase the surface area of the small intestine so it can absorb more nutrients, are damaged in the attack. That's why people with celiac disease who continue to eat gluten often have serious nutritional deficiencies.
For a lot more details on how gluten affects a person who can't tolerate gluten, grab a copy of my book Living Gluten-Free For Dummies (Wiley).
4) Refined wheat has little nutritional value
Most of the wheat people eat is "refined." That means manufacturers take perfectly good wheat - which has some nutritional value, especially in the bran and germ - and they take the good stuff away, leaving "refined" (read "little nutritional value") wheat. Sadly, that's the form that most of our wheat-based products use - refined wheat nearly void of nutritional value, making it a high-glycemic index food that just makes you fat and messes with your insulin production.
Did you know that manufacturers actually have to enrich refined wheat because they've taken out all the nutrients? And even then, the wheat's not that valuable, nutritionally speaking. Whole wheat provides more nutritional value than non-whole wheat, but it's still wheat, and there are more than just a few reasons that wheat may not be good for anyone.
5. Wheat may cause wrinkles
Aha! Not that got your attention! Okay, so you can live with the gas, bloating and leaky gut syndrome, but wrinkles? I think not! Well then put down that bagel, or buy stock in Botox, because according to some experts, the inflammatory effect of wheat - especially refined wheat - can cause wrinkles (see number two in this top-ten list for more on pro-inflammatory foods).
The most famous of these experts is Dr. Nicholas Perricone, a dermatologist and adjunct professor of medicine at Michigan State University, who maintains that inflammation contributes to accelerated aging and that through diet (and supplements and creams), you can erase scars and wrinkles, increase the production of collagen and elastin, enjoy radiance and glow, and develop a dewy, supple appearance to your skin.
Of course, this wouldn't be relevant unless the "diet" he refers to has something to do with being gluten-free. Although Dr. Perricone doesn't pinpoint gluten as a culprit per se, he does say that the pro-inflammatory response caused by wheat causes the skin to age more quickly, and he maintains that avoiding foods like wheat may help reverse the aging process.
6. Wheat may contribute to menopausal symptoms
Menopause, the time in a woman's life between about ages 45 and 55 marking the completion of her childbearing years and the end of her menstrual cycles, is often a time of marked hormonal changes. Depression, anxiety, headaches, leg cramps, varicose veins, irritability, and the famous "hot flashes" that occur are some of the more common symptoms.
But many doctors believe that lifestyle changes can minimize these symptoms, and one of those lifestyle changes is diet. Although there is some debate over wheat's role in these lifestyle changes, many experts, including Christiane Northrup, MD, author of The Wisdom of Menopause, believe that eliminating wheat from the diet - especially refined wheat - can help relieve menopausal symptoms.
7) Wheat is one of the top-eight allergens
Millions of people are allergic to wheat - so many, in fact, that it has made it onto the top-eight allergen list. Keep in mind that an allergy to wheat is different from celiac disease or other forms of gluten sensitivity - we'll talk more on that later in this chapter.
Allergic reactions to wheat can include gastrointestinal distress (stomach upset), eczema, hay fever, hives, asthma, and even anaphylaxis (a severe whole-body allergic reaction), which is life-threatening.
Other than the anaphylaxis, these symptoms sound a lot like gluten sensitivity or celiac disease, don't they? That's why sometimes it's hard to tell the difference. That's also why sometimes people get allergy testing and find out they're not allergic to wheat - so they're told to go back to a normal diet of pizza, bread, and bagels. Not necessarily good advice, because they could actually have gluten sensitivity or celiac disease. So it's important to be properly tested. (Yep, you guessed it - we'll talk more about that later in this chapter, too.)
8) Wheat can mess up your blood sugar levels
Remember in number two when I talked about the glycemic index? Well, dont' worry - it's not really that complicated (and there's no pop quiz). All you need to know is that some foods cause your blood sugar levels to spike, which causes your body to produce insulin. That, in turn, causes your blood sugar to fall dramatically. Basically, your blood sugar levels go from the even keel they should be on, to being the best roller coaster ride in the park. Easy, Evil Knievel. That's not a good thing in this case.
Our bodies are designed to work with stable blood sugar levels. When they're up, then down, and all around, it causes a domino effect of no-so-healthy things to occur. Lots of people talk about hypoglycemia - a weak, shaky feeling that usually goes away after eating, especially after eating sweet foods. Although most people don't have "true" hypoglycemia, they may feel hypoglycemic when their blood sugar drops too much. The problem with the idea of "fixing" this feeling with sugary foods is that it just continues this roller coaster of blood sugar levels that are too high, and then too low. One of the most serious conditions that can result from blood sugar whiplash is insulin resistance and diabetes.
9) Wheat can make you fat
I'm not talking about the kind of "make you fat" that you deserve if you sit around eating donuts all day. I'm talking about the kind that sneaks up on you when you think you're doing everything right, but those getting-tighter-every-day jeans say otherwise.
It could just be the wheat - especially refined wheat. That's because of what it does to your blood sugar - yeah, you can cheat and look back at number eight if you didn't read it well enough the first time - but again, it's not that complicated. Refined wheat is a high-glycemic index food that causes your blood sugar to spike. That makes our body produce insulin, which, by the way, is often referred to as the "fat-storing hormone."
Yikes. Just when you thought you were being so good by leaving the cream cheese off the bagel - you should probably ditch the bagel altogether.
10) Many people have gluten sensitivity or celiac disease and don't know it
I hear things like, "I think I'm allergic to dairy because the cheese on my pizza makes me bloat." Oh, really? What makes you think it's the cheese? Because more people have heard of lactose intolerance than gluten intolerance, they figure that must be what's making them feel icky.
Truth is, most people have no idea that they have a gluten sensitivity or celiac disease, so they usually start pointing to all the wrong culprits; cheese (dairy), tomato sauce (acids), or soy. But they're blaming the wrong foods. These people have no idea that the typical American diet comprised of bagels, pasta, pizza, cakes, cookies and pretzels could be wreaking havoc on nearly every system in their bodies, so they continue to eat them and wonder why they don't feel good.
So how many people fall into this category? No one knows fur sure. We do know that 1 in 100 people has celiac disease - but most don't know it. No one knows how many people have gluten sensitivity, but estimates are that it may be as high as 50 percent, or even 70 percent, of the population. Top that with those who have a wheat allergy, and - here, let em get my calculator out - tons of people + gobs more = an astoundingly high percentage of the populations!
WHEAT MAY NOT BE GOOD FOR ANYONE
You've probably been raised to believe that wheat - especially whole wheat - is really good for you. Although wheat does offer some health benefits, the same benefits can easily be found in other foods without the unpleasant side effects that many, if not most, people experience. But here's the bottom line: I believe wheat's not good for anyone, whether you have gluten sensitivity or celiac disease or not. Move over, David Letterman - here's my top-ten list of the problems with wheat.
1) Humans don't fully digest wheat
Let's start with some basic biology. It's a simple fact that the human stomach doesn't fully digest wheat. Cows, sheep, and other ruminant animals do just fine with wheat because they have more than one stomach to complete the digestion process. When the partially digested wheat leaves their stomach, it goes to another stomach where it is further broken down, then to another and another until the process is complete.
Unlike our bovine buddies, we humans have only one stomach. When the wheat leaves our tummies, it's not fully digested. Those undigested portions begin to ferment, and do you know what the byproduct of fermentation is? Gas. Icky, belchable, fart-forming gas. For many people, this accounts for the gas and bloating they feel after they eat wheat, whether they have gluten sensitivity or not.
2) Wheat is a pro-inflammatory agent
Recently, lots of books and articles have been written on the subject of pro-inflammatory foods. These foods are rapidly converted to sugar, causing a rise in the body's insulin levels (read more about this in number nine on my top-ten list), causing a burst of inflammation at the cellular level. Almost everyone knows that blood sugar rises from eating sweets (cakes, cookies, and candy). But lots of foods not considered sweets have pro-inflammatory effects - foods that have wheat in them, like cereal, pasta, breads, and bagels. These foods can be high in simple starches; when these are broken down, they act the same as sweet foods, raising blood sugar levels, releasing insulin, and causing inflammation. Bear in mind that the inflammation occurs in all people, not just those with wheat or gluten sensitivities.
It turns out that inflammation, once thought to be limited to "-itis" conditions like arthritis, may actually be at the root of a number of serious conditions, including heart disease, Alzheimer's, and some types of cancer. And if vanity is the only way to prove a point, consider this: Dr. Nicholas Perricone, renowned author of The Wrinkle Cure, considers inflammation to be the "single most powerful cause of the signs of aging."
One great tool for identifying pro-inflammatory foods is the glycemic index (remember this term; I'm going to use it again in number nine). The glycemic index measures how fast your blood sugar rises after you eat a food that contains carbohydrates (like pasta, potatoes, and bread). It rates foods on a scale from 0-100, where water is 0 and table sugar is 100. The lower the glycemic index rating, the less likely the food is to be pro-inflammatory. Foods made from wheat, especially refined wheat, have a glycemic index in the 50 to 80-plus range, putting them on the high side and classifying them as pro-inflammatory.
3) Wheat can cause leaky gut syndrome
So what is leaky gut syndrome? Good question - I'm glad you asked. The simple-and-not-perfectly-correct-but-close-enough answer is that leaky gut syndrome is a condition whereby stuff is leaking from your gut into your bloodstream - stuff that shouldn't be there, like toxins (and large molecules like gluten!).
So how does it happen? When people eat wheat, their bodies produce extra amounts of a protein called zonulin.
The lining of the small intestine is basically a wall of cells that most materials can't pass through on their own. When important vitamins and minerals are present, zonulin tells the passageways in the intestinal wall to open so those nutrients can pass into the bloodstream. The blood then carries the nutrients to other parts of the body, where they can be used to nourish the body.
But when people eat wheat - not just people with celiac disease, but all people - their zonulin levels rise too high, and the passageways open too much and let things into the bloodstream that shouldn't be there. This increased permeability of the lining of the small intestine, known as leaky gut syndrome, can cause a variety of problems health-wise.
For people with celiac disease, leaky-gut syndrome starts the cascade of events that lead to health problems. Gluten is a large molecule that really shouldn't be able to get into the bloodstream, but it does because zonulin levels are too high, and the body allows it in. After it's in the bloodstream, the body sees the gluten molecule as an invader - a toxin - so it launches an attack, and in doing so, it damages the area around the gluten molecule, which includes the lining of the small intestine. The villi, which are short hair-like structures that are designed to increase the surface area of the small intestine so it can absorb more nutrients, are damaged in the attack. That's why people with celiac disease who continue to eat gluten often have serious nutritional deficiencies.
For a lot more details on how gluten affects a person who can't tolerate gluten, grab a copy of my book Living Gluten-Free For Dummies (Wiley).
4) Refined wheat has little nutritional value
Most of the wheat people eat is "refined." That means manufacturers take perfectly good wheat - which has some nutritional value, especially in the bran and germ - and they take the good stuff away, leaving "refined" (read "little nutritional value") wheat. Sadly, that's the form that most of our wheat-based products use - refined wheat nearly void of nutritional value, making it a high-glycemic index food that just makes you fat and messes with your insulin production.
Did you know that manufacturers actually have to enrich refined wheat because they've taken out all the nutrients? And even then, the wheat's not that valuable, nutritionally speaking. Whole wheat provides more nutritional value than non-whole wheat, but it's still wheat, and there are more than just a few reasons that wheat may not be good for anyone.
5. Wheat may cause wrinkles
Aha! Not that got your attention! Okay, so you can live with the gas, bloating and leaky gut syndrome, but wrinkles? I think not! Well then put down that bagel, or buy stock in Botox, because according to some experts, the inflammatory effect of wheat - especially refined wheat - can cause wrinkles (see number two in this top-ten list for more on pro-inflammatory foods).
The most famous of these experts is Dr. Nicholas Perricone, a dermatologist and adjunct professor of medicine at Michigan State University, who maintains that inflammation contributes to accelerated aging and that through diet (and supplements and creams), you can erase scars and wrinkles, increase the production of collagen and elastin, enjoy radiance and glow, and develop a dewy, supple appearance to your skin.
Of course, this wouldn't be relevant unless the "diet" he refers to has something to do with being gluten-free. Although Dr. Perricone doesn't pinpoint gluten as a culprit per se, he does say that the pro-inflammatory response caused by wheat causes the skin to age more quickly, and he maintains that avoiding foods like wheat may help reverse the aging process.
6. Wheat may contribute to menopausal symptoms
Menopause, the time in a woman's life between about ages 45 and 55 marking the completion of her childbearing years and the end of her menstrual cycles, is often a time of marked hormonal changes. Depression, anxiety, headaches, leg cramps, varicose veins, irritability, and the famous "hot flashes" that occur are some of the more common symptoms.
But many doctors believe that lifestyle changes can minimize these symptoms, and one of those lifestyle changes is diet. Although there is some debate over wheat's role in these lifestyle changes, many experts, including Christiane Northrup, MD, author of The Wisdom of Menopause, believe that eliminating wheat from the diet - especially refined wheat - can help relieve menopausal symptoms.
7) Wheat is one of the top-eight allergens
Millions of people are allergic to wheat - so many, in fact, that it has made it onto the top-eight allergen list. Keep in mind that an allergy to wheat is different from celiac disease or other forms of gluten sensitivity - we'll talk more on that later in this chapter.
Allergic reactions to wheat can include gastrointestinal distress (stomach upset), eczema, hay fever, hives, asthma, and even anaphylaxis (a severe whole-body allergic reaction), which is life-threatening.
Other than the anaphylaxis, these symptoms sound a lot like gluten sensitivity or celiac disease, don't they? That's why sometimes it's hard to tell the difference. That's also why sometimes people get allergy testing and find out they're not allergic to wheat - so they're told to go back to a normal diet of pizza, bread, and bagels. Not necessarily good advice, because they could actually have gluten sensitivity or celiac disease. So it's important to be properly tested. (Yep, you guessed it - we'll talk more about that later in this chapter, too.)
8) Wheat can mess up your blood sugar levels
Remember in number two when I talked about the glycemic index? Well, dont' worry - it's not really that complicated (and there's no pop quiz). All you need to know is that some foods cause your blood sugar levels to spike, which causes your body to produce insulin. That, in turn, causes your blood sugar to fall dramatically. Basically, your blood sugar levels go from the even keel they should be on, to being the best roller coaster ride in the park. Easy, Evil Knievel. That's not a good thing in this case.
Our bodies are designed to work with stable blood sugar levels. When they're up, then down, and all around, it causes a domino effect of no-so-healthy things to occur. Lots of people talk about hypoglycemia - a weak, shaky feeling that usually goes away after eating, especially after eating sweet foods. Although most people don't have "true" hypoglycemia, they may feel hypoglycemic when their blood sugar drops too much. The problem with the idea of "fixing" this feeling with sugary foods is that it just continues this roller coaster of blood sugar levels that are too high, and then too low. One of the most serious conditions that can result from blood sugar whiplash is insulin resistance and diabetes.
9) Wheat can make you fat
I'm not talking about the kind of "make you fat" that you deserve if you sit around eating donuts all day. I'm talking about the kind that sneaks up on you when you think you're doing everything right, but those getting-tighter-every-day jeans say otherwise.
It could just be the wheat - especially refined wheat. That's because of what it does to your blood sugar - yeah, you can cheat and look back at number eight if you didn't read it well enough the first time - but again, it's not that complicated. Refined wheat is a high-glycemic index food that causes your blood sugar to spike. That makes our body produce insulin, which, by the way, is often referred to as the "fat-storing hormone."
Yikes. Just when you thought you were being so good by leaving the cream cheese off the bagel - you should probably ditch the bagel altogether.
10) Many people have gluten sensitivity or celiac disease and don't know it
I hear things like, "I think I'm allergic to dairy because the cheese on my pizza makes me bloat." Oh, really? What makes you think it's the cheese? Because more people have heard of lactose intolerance than gluten intolerance, they figure that must be what's making them feel icky.
Truth is, most people have no idea that they have a gluten sensitivity or celiac disease, so they usually start pointing to all the wrong culprits; cheese (dairy), tomato sauce (acids), or soy. But they're blaming the wrong foods. These people have no idea that the typical American diet comprised of bagels, pasta, pizza, cakes, cookies and pretzels could be wreaking havoc on nearly every system in their bodies, so they continue to eat them and wonder why they don't feel good.
So how many people fall into this category? No one knows fur sure. We do know that 1 in 100 people has celiac disease - but most don't know it. No one knows how many people have gluten sensitivity, but estimates are that it may be as high as 50 percent, or even 70 percent, of the population. Top that with those who have a wheat allergy, and - here, let em get my calculator out - tons of people + gobs more = an astoundingly high percentage of the populations!
Wednesday, February 20, 2013
How To Work With Gluten-Free Flours
I referred to this information this morning when making some oatmeal cookies. I didn't have one of the types of flour that the recipe specified, so I was able to refer to this list to choose something comparable. Great information to keep close by when you're baking gluten-free!
Happy Baking!
Kirsten
HOW TO WORK WITH GLUTEN-FREE FLOURS
When you first start working with gluten-free flours, expect to be confused. I had grown used to baking with regular flour, with a few forays into cake flour, or tipo 00 flour for homemade pasta. Mostly, I just sifted white flour into a bowl and never thought about it.
There are more gluten-free flours in the world than there are flours with gluten. At first, this may feel overwhelming. Eventually, you might feel like we do - time to play!
The main difference between gluten-free baking and the more traditional kind is that you must combine flours to bake gluten-free. There are a few exceptions - chickpea flour for socca, sorghum flour for rotis - but for the most part, you will need at least three flours.
One of the three should be a whole-grain, a solid base: sorghum flour, brown rice flour, garfava flour. The next should be a starch, to lighten up the mixture, since gluten-free baked goods tend to be dense: potato starch, tapioca starch (also known as tapioca flour), cornstarch, or arrowroot powder. The third flour should have a particular personality you want to add to your baked goods. Amaranth flour has a soft texture and slight malt flavor. We like it in cookies and cinnamon rolls. Almond flour adds protein and a bit of fat for flavor. Coconut flour adds taste to baked goods, but it sucks up all the moisture around it, so you have to play with the amount of liquids in your treats. Millet flour makes a great crumb. Quinoa flour is savory and great in quiches. Teff flour is the finest-textured flour in the world, so during baking it almost melts, which helps to bind together muffins and quick breads. You can have more than three flours, but work with at least three.
We have learned from years of experimenting and failed baking attempts, along with cookies and brownies everyone loves. However, if you are just starting your gluten-free life, you might find all of this overwhelming. If so, you can make a flour mix of equal parts sorghum flour, tapioca starch, potato starch, and sweet rice flour. You'll see that combination in some of the recipes in this book (Gluten-Free Girl and the Chef). Or, you could also try our other favorite all-purpose mix: forty percent superfine brown rice flour and sorghum flour, sixty percent potato starch, tapioca flour, sweet rice flour and cornstarch.
Simply open bags of flour, or weigh them out, then dump them into a large container in your kitchen. (We buy food storage containers at a restaurant supply store, where they are surprisingly inexpensive.) Whisk the flours together until the flour mix is one even color. Now you can use this as the flour in your kitchen. Play with the flours and learn your favorites.
Most of these flours need to be stored in either the refrigerator or the freezer.
Happy Baking!
Kirsten
HOW TO WORK WITH GLUTEN-FREE FLOURS
When you first start working with gluten-free flours, expect to be confused. I had grown used to baking with regular flour, with a few forays into cake flour, or tipo 00 flour for homemade pasta. Mostly, I just sifted white flour into a bowl and never thought about it.
There are more gluten-free flours in the world than there are flours with gluten. At first, this may feel overwhelming. Eventually, you might feel like we do - time to play!
The main difference between gluten-free baking and the more traditional kind is that you must combine flours to bake gluten-free. There are a few exceptions - chickpea flour for socca, sorghum flour for rotis - but for the most part, you will need at least three flours.
One of the three should be a whole-grain, a solid base: sorghum flour, brown rice flour, garfava flour. The next should be a starch, to lighten up the mixture, since gluten-free baked goods tend to be dense: potato starch, tapioca starch (also known as tapioca flour), cornstarch, or arrowroot powder. The third flour should have a particular personality you want to add to your baked goods. Amaranth flour has a soft texture and slight malt flavor. We like it in cookies and cinnamon rolls. Almond flour adds protein and a bit of fat for flavor. Coconut flour adds taste to baked goods, but it sucks up all the moisture around it, so you have to play with the amount of liquids in your treats. Millet flour makes a great crumb. Quinoa flour is savory and great in quiches. Teff flour is the finest-textured flour in the world, so during baking it almost melts, which helps to bind together muffins and quick breads. You can have more than three flours, but work with at least three.
We have learned from years of experimenting and failed baking attempts, along with cookies and brownies everyone loves. However, if you are just starting your gluten-free life, you might find all of this overwhelming. If so, you can make a flour mix of equal parts sorghum flour, tapioca starch, potato starch, and sweet rice flour. You'll see that combination in some of the recipes in this book (Gluten-Free Girl and the Chef). Or, you could also try our other favorite all-purpose mix: forty percent superfine brown rice flour and sorghum flour, sixty percent potato starch, tapioca flour, sweet rice flour and cornstarch.
Simply open bags of flour, or weigh them out, then dump them into a large container in your kitchen. (We buy food storage containers at a restaurant supply store, where they are surprisingly inexpensive.) Whisk the flours together until the flour mix is one even color. Now you can use this as the flour in your kitchen. Play with the flours and learn your favorites.
Most of these flours need to be stored in either the refrigerator or the freezer.
Gluten-Free Baking
Here is some great information from a cookbook called "Gluten-Free Girl and the Chef"!
Gluten-free baking is not like your mother's baking. Traditional baking is elastic and easy. You can stretch pizza dough, form air pockets in crusty bread and make cookies in ten minutes without thinking too much.
But gluten-free baking, at first, seems far more difficult. You know why? There's no gluten in it. However, if you give yourself some patient time to play, you'll figure it out. We have. Don't expect gluten-free baked goods to match the taste and texture of the original. Let them be themselves. Some of those treats might taste better to you than those with gluten flours, like banana bread with teff. Some baked goods might never match your conception of them, but does that mean you give up? What are you doing to do, go without muffins the rest of your life?
You might need to add a bit more protein (an extra egg white, a splash of milk), as well as a binder like xanthun gum, to replace the gluten in a recipe. We usually use 1 teaspoon of xanthun gum plus 1/4 teaspoon of guar gum for each cup of flour. Sift each flour before you combine them all in a bowl, and then sift them again before you bake. This makes the final mixture on coherent flour.
Cookies, crisps, quick breads, and pie doughs are fairly easy to make gluten-free. Pie doughs are actually easier to make without gluten, because you can't overwork the crust, and you can just pat any spare pieces into the pan when you are done.
Refrigerate pie doughs, cinnamon roll dough, and cookies before you bake them. They need to rest for at least an hour and ideally overnight. Let them sit out a bit before you work with them, to make the dough more pliable.
Be gentle with the doughs. The first time you roll out a gluten-free dough, it's not going to do what you want it to do. When you make gluten-free cookies, don't over cream the butter and sugars. Mix them until they are just combined. This helps prevent spreading.
The hardest baked goods to make gluten-free are those that require a certain structure: some cakes, bread, puff pastry, croissants. Those are where gluten is especially necessary. We're still working on those. That doesn't mean you will never eat bread again. we make bread from the recipe in this book three times a week. But just expect a lot of interesting mishaps at first. You'll want to blame the recipe if it all goes woppy-jawed. Keep trying.
If you bake by weight instead of by volume, measuring out grams or ounces instead of scooping flours into a cup, your baking will be more successful and satisfying. Buy yourself a kitchen scale and start baking.
In short, you will have to do some tasks differently, creating new muscle memory, and playing with different ingredients than you did before. However, once you have learned, it will all feel familiar.
Gluten-free baking is not like your mother's baking. Traditional baking is elastic and easy. You can stretch pizza dough, form air pockets in crusty bread and make cookies in ten minutes without thinking too much.
But gluten-free baking, at first, seems far more difficult. You know why? There's no gluten in it. However, if you give yourself some patient time to play, you'll figure it out. We have. Don't expect gluten-free baked goods to match the taste and texture of the original. Let them be themselves. Some of those treats might taste better to you than those with gluten flours, like banana bread with teff. Some baked goods might never match your conception of them, but does that mean you give up? What are you doing to do, go without muffins the rest of your life?
You might need to add a bit more protein (an extra egg white, a splash of milk), as well as a binder like xanthun gum, to replace the gluten in a recipe. We usually use 1 teaspoon of xanthun gum plus 1/4 teaspoon of guar gum for each cup of flour. Sift each flour before you combine them all in a bowl, and then sift them again before you bake. This makes the final mixture on coherent flour.
Cookies, crisps, quick breads, and pie doughs are fairly easy to make gluten-free. Pie doughs are actually easier to make without gluten, because you can't overwork the crust, and you can just pat any spare pieces into the pan when you are done.
Refrigerate pie doughs, cinnamon roll dough, and cookies before you bake them. They need to rest for at least an hour and ideally overnight. Let them sit out a bit before you work with them, to make the dough more pliable.
Be gentle with the doughs. The first time you roll out a gluten-free dough, it's not going to do what you want it to do. When you make gluten-free cookies, don't over cream the butter and sugars. Mix them until they are just combined. This helps prevent spreading.
The hardest baked goods to make gluten-free are those that require a certain structure: some cakes, bread, puff pastry, croissants. Those are where gluten is especially necessary. We're still working on those. That doesn't mean you will never eat bread again. we make bread from the recipe in this book three times a week. But just expect a lot of interesting mishaps at first. You'll want to blame the recipe if it all goes woppy-jawed. Keep trying.
If you bake by weight instead of by volume, measuring out grams or ounces instead of scooping flours into a cup, your baking will be more successful and satisfying. Buy yourself a kitchen scale and start baking.
In short, you will have to do some tasks differently, creating new muscle memory, and playing with different ingredients than you did before. However, once you have learned, it will all feel familiar.
Sunday, January 20, 2013
What is a "Baby Carrot" anyway?
I really didn't know what a baby carrot was exactly and I wanted to make sure that I wasn't feeding my family another GMO product - so I "dug" into the history of the baby carrot and here is what I found! It's everything you could ever want to know about baby carrots - and more!
Happy Reading!
Kirsten
In the 1980's supermarkets expected carrots to be a particular size, shape, and color. Anything else had to be sold for juice or processing or animal feed, or just thrown away. One farmer wondered what would happen if he peeled the skin off the gnarly carrots, cut them into pieces, and sold them in bags. He made up a few test batches to show his buyers. One batch, cut into 1-inch bites and peeled round, he called "bunny balls." Another batch, peeled and cut 2 inches long, looked like little baby carrots.
Bunny balls never made it. But baby carrots were a hit. They transformed the whole industry.
A "true" baby carrot is a carrot grown to the "baby stage", which is to say long before the root reaches its mature size. The test is can you see a pr
oper "shoulder" on each carrot. These immature roots are preferred by
some people out of the belief that they are superior either in texture,
nutrition or taste.
They are also sometimes harvested simply as the result of crop thinning, but are also grown to this size as a specialty crop. Certain cultivars of carrots have been bred to be used at the "baby" stage. One such cultivar is 'Amsterdam Forcing'. You will see them in the stores and are normally very expensive and displayed with some of the green showing to "prove" they are a "real" carrot.
There is also a baby variety called Thumbelina, or Paris Market shaped like a golf ball.
"Manufactured" baby carrots , or cut and peel, are what you see most often in the shops - are carrot shaped slices of peeled carrots invented in the late 1980's by Mike Yurosek, a California farmer, as a way of making use of carrots which are too twisted or knobbly for sale as full-size carrots. Yurosek was unhappy at having to discard as much as 400 tons of carrots a day because of their imperfections, and looked for a way to reclaim what would otherwise be a waste product. He was able to find an industrial green bean cutter, which cut his carrots into 5 cm lengths, and by placing these lengths into an industrial potato peeler, he created the baby carrot. The much decreased waste is also used either for juicing or as animal fodder. Perhaps most important, the baby-cut method allows growers to use far more of the carrot than they used to. In the past, a third or more of a carrot crop could have been easily tossed away, but baby-cut allows more partial carrots to be used, and the peeling process actually removes less of the outer skin that you might imagine. They are sold in single-serving packs with ranch dressing for dipping on the side. They're passed out on airplanes and sold in plastic containers designed to fit in a car's cup holder. At Disney World, and McDonald's burgers now come two ways: with fries or baby carrots.
There is nothing "wrong" with manufactured baby carrots. They are a food that humans have enjoyed for centuries, probably millennia, chock-full of goodness that we need to keep our bodies functioning. Mr Yurosek died in 2005. Read the full story here.
Transformed to the core The baby-cut boom also transformed the industry from its roots up. Before, growers were more interested in a bulky carrot with more of a tapered shape. But those were hard to chop into baby shape, so plant breeders worked to create varieties that were longer and narrower, allowing a producer to get four cuts instead of three on each carrot root, which is the part of the plant we eat.
They also found they could limit the diameter size of carrots by increasing the density with which they were planted — a discovery that helped them harvest more carrots per acre. (This sort of change wasn’t new for carrot growers: Up to the 1950s, when carrots were sold with their leaves intact, they were bred for hearty leaf growth. That stopped after grocers started selling just roots.)
What is perhaps most important, the baby-cut method allows growers to use far more of the carrot than they used to. In the past, a third or more of a carrot crop could have been easily tossed away, but baby-cut allows more partial carrots to be used, and the peeling process actually removes less of the outer skin that you might imagine — in part because growers, who are selling by weight, don’t want to take off more than they need to.
And what’s left over after the initial processing can still be used in even smaller products, or squeezed for juice.
There is no doubt that baby carrots are a fun snack and are a great way to introduce healthy foods into the often French fry and fast food driven diets of children and teenagers, because from the snacking perspective, they are convenient and satisfying. Even in the busiest jobs, like agents working in a business answering service or doctors treating patients at a hospital, the baby carrot has almost universal appeal. Want a little crunch with your lunch? Try a carrot!
What happens to the left over pieces of carrots?
It mainly goes to animal feed, though I also know of some, where it can go to juice and for pulping into baby foods/soups etc. There seems to be two attitudes - 1. it is "waste" (for animal feed). 2. It has a commercial value and is passed on to the food processing industry.
The problem is that the cutting down/shaving process is designed to do just that, it is rarely commercially viable to ensure the shavings are collected effectively to remain clean and safe to pass on to the food industry. It's ok for animals!.
Because it is not a consistent left over, in terms of size, the cuttings do not go to salads or other fresh products. The carrot cake producers buy shredded carrot made from whole big carrots as it easier to process that way and you get more for your money.
The "waste" is becoming less and less as the machines get more efficient. For example many of the modern computer/laser guided machines can make 3 babies out of one carrot.
Some Statistics:
From Field to Supermarket Shelf
Strictly "baby" means immature, pulled from the ground before
they reach full size. Originally that was the case, nowadays they have developed
miniature strains which are mature when small in stature!
Real baby carrots (miniature version of full size) are what they are, about 3 or 4 inches in length.
Baby "style" cut carrots (those whittled down from larger carrots) started off by the "inventor" as being approx 2 inches in the 1980's, and have remained so, more or less, ever since.
Happy Reading!
Kirsten
The Origin and Evolution of Baby
Carrots
In the 1980's supermarkets expected carrots to be a particular size, shape, and color. Anything else had to be sold for juice or processing or animal feed, or just thrown away. One farmer wondered what would happen if he peeled the skin off the gnarly carrots, cut them into pieces, and sold them in bags. He made up a few test batches to show his buyers. One batch, cut into 1-inch bites and peeled round, he called "bunny balls." Another batch, peeled and cut 2 inches long, looked like little baby carrots.
Bunny balls never made it. But baby carrots were a hit. They transformed the whole industry.
A "true" baby carrot is a carrot grown to the "baby stage", which is to say long before the root reaches its mature size. The test is can you see a pr
oper "shoulder" on each carrot. These immature roots are preferred by
some people out of the belief that they are superior either in texture,
nutrition or taste. They are also sometimes harvested simply as the result of crop thinning, but are also grown to this size as a specialty crop. Certain cultivars of carrots have been bred to be used at the "baby" stage. One such cultivar is 'Amsterdam Forcing'. You will see them in the stores and are normally very expensive and displayed with some of the green showing to "prove" they are a "real" carrot.
There is also a baby variety called Thumbelina, or Paris Market shaped like a golf ball.
 |
| Tired of the wastefulness he was seeing, Mike Yurosek whittled "babies" from grown-up cast off carrots. |
"Manufactured" baby carrots , or cut and peel, are what you see most often in the shops - are carrot shaped slices of peeled carrots invented in the late 1980's by Mike Yurosek, a California farmer, as a way of making use of carrots which are too twisted or knobbly for sale as full-size carrots. Yurosek was unhappy at having to discard as much as 400 tons of carrots a day because of their imperfections, and looked for a way to reclaim what would otherwise be a waste product. He was able to find an industrial green bean cutter, which cut his carrots into 5 cm lengths, and by placing these lengths into an industrial potato peeler, he created the baby carrot. The much decreased waste is also used either for juicing or as animal fodder. Perhaps most important, the baby-cut method allows growers to use far more of the carrot than they used to. In the past, a third or more of a carrot crop could have been easily tossed away, but baby-cut allows more partial carrots to be used, and the peeling process actually removes less of the outer skin that you might imagine. They are sold in single-serving packs with ranch dressing for dipping on the side. They're passed out on airplanes and sold in plastic containers designed to fit in a car's cup holder. At Disney World, and McDonald's burgers now come two ways: with fries or baby carrots.
There is nothing "wrong" with manufactured baby carrots. They are a food that humans have enjoyed for centuries, probably millennia, chock-full of goodness that we need to keep our bodies functioning. Mr Yurosek died in 2005. Read the full story here.
Transformed to the core The baby-cut boom also transformed the industry from its roots up. Before, growers were more interested in a bulky carrot with more of a tapered shape. But those were hard to chop into baby shape, so plant breeders worked to create varieties that were longer and narrower, allowing a producer to get four cuts instead of three on each carrot root, which is the part of the plant we eat.
They also found they could limit the diameter size of carrots by increasing the density with which they were planted — a discovery that helped them harvest more carrots per acre. (This sort of change wasn’t new for carrot growers: Up to the 1950s, when carrots were sold with their leaves intact, they were bred for hearty leaf growth. That stopped after grocers started selling just roots.)
Today’s carrot is also now bred for uniform color. Because
the cutting process exposes much of the root to the buyer’s eye, producers don’t
want their bags of carrots to be colored like a paint palette. With baby
carrots or cut-and-peel carrots, you can see the core of every chunk,. The
growers would like every carrot in that bag to look like every other one.
Growers also obsess about texture and taste. You might find carrots far sweeter
than they were in the past, and that’s intentional. Researchers found much of
their appeal as a snack came from their sweetness, especially for perennially
sweet-toothed kids, and bred them to have more natural sugar and less of the
harsh taste that comes if you do a poor job of peeling.
The new varieties’ names reflect the change in growers’
needs: Prime Cut, Sweet Cuts, Morecuts.
What is perhaps most important, the baby-cut method allows growers to use far more of the carrot than they used to. In the past, a third or more of a carrot crop could have been easily tossed away, but baby-cut allows more partial carrots to be used, and the peeling process actually removes less of the outer skin that you might imagine — in part because growers, who are selling by weight, don’t want to take off more than they need to.
And what’s left over after the initial processing can still be used in even smaller products, or squeezed for juice.
There is no doubt that baby carrots are a fun snack and are a great way to introduce healthy foods into the often French fry and fast food driven diets of children and teenagers, because from the snacking perspective, they are convenient and satisfying. Even in the busiest jobs, like agents working in a business answering service or doctors treating patients at a hospital, the baby carrot has almost universal appeal. Want a little crunch with your lunch? Try a carrot!
What happens to the left over pieces of carrots?
It mainly goes to animal feed, though I also know of some, where it can go to juice and for pulping into baby foods/soups etc. There seems to be two attitudes - 1. it is "waste" (for animal feed). 2. It has a commercial value and is passed on to the food processing industry.
The problem is that the cutting down/shaving process is designed to do just that, it is rarely commercially viable to ensure the shavings are collected effectively to remain clean and safe to pass on to the food industry. It's ok for animals!.
Because it is not a consistent left over, in terms of size, the cuttings do not go to salads or other fresh products. The carrot cake producers buy shredded carrot made from whole big carrots as it easier to process that way and you get more for your money.
The "waste" is becoming less and less as the machines get more efficient. For example many of the modern computer/laser guided machines can make 3 babies out of one carrot.
Some Statistics:
 |
In the US over 172 million tonnes of carrots are processed into baby peeled carrots. |
|
In the US baby peeled carrots sales exceed US$400 million per annum. |
|
Overall carrot consumption in the US has increased by 33% through the introduction of baby peeled carrots. |
|
In the US annual consumer spending on baby peeled carrots exceeds US$2.00 per head. |
|
In 1999 baby peeled carrot purchases passed whole carrots. 94% of US consumers purchased baby peeled carrots |
|
90% had bought whole carrots. Purchases of baby peeled carrots were even ahead of fresh salad mixes. |
|
Baby peeled carrots have the lion's share of the carrot category accounting for over 80% of all retail carrot sales. |
|
Up until 2000 baby carrots have
dominated US produce department's with excellent growth ahead of all other
produce items.
|
 |
In the field, two-story carrot harvesters use long metal
prongs to open up the soil, while rubber belts grab the green tops and pull.
|
|
The carrots ride up the belts to the top of the picker, where
an automated cutter snips off the greens.
|
|
They're trucked to the processing plant, where they're put in
icy water to bring their temperature down to 37 degrees to inhibit spoiling.
|
|
They are sorted by thickness.
|
|
Thin carrots continue on the processing line; the others will
be used as whole carrots, juice or cattle feed.
|
|
An inspector looks for rocks, debris or malformed carrots that
slip through.
|
|
The carrots are shaped into 2-inch pieces by automated
cutters.
|
|
An optical sorter discards any piece that has green on it.
|
|
The pieces are pumped through pipes to the peeling tanks.
|
|
The peelers rotate, scraping the skin off the carrots.
|
|
The carrots are weighed and bagged by an automated scale and
packager.
|
|
Finally placed in cold storage until they are shipped.
|
Real baby carrots (miniature version of full size) are what they are, about 3 or 4 inches in length.
Baby "style" cut carrots (those whittled down from larger carrots) started off by the "inventor" as being approx 2 inches in the 1980's, and have remained so, more or less, ever since.
Here is the full story of the popular Baby
Cut & Peel carrot:
It all began in the mid 80's ago when Mike Yurosek of Newhall, California got
tired of seeing 400 tons of carrots a day drop down the cull chute at his
packing plant in Bakersfield. Culls are carrots that are too twisted, knobbly,
bent or broken to sell. In some loads, as many as 70% of carrots were tossed.
Yurosek had always been a "think outside the carrot patch" guy. In the 1960s, Yurosek and Sons was selling
carrots in plastic bags with a
Bunny-Luv logo, a cartoon that got the farmers in trouble with Warner Bros.,
which was protective of its Bugs Bunny brand. Instead of bringing in lawyers and
spending a fortune, Yurosek recalls, "I said to my wife who is a pretty good
drawer, 'Hey, draw me up about 50 bunnies, would you? Then we'll send them to
Warner Bros. and ask them to tell us which ones we can use.' "
The entertainment giant picked one, and Bunny-Luv lived on for the price of a
pencil. The farmer continued growing carrots, and throwing them out, for
decades. But in 1986, Yurosek had the idea that would change American munching
habits. California's Central Valley is dotted with farms, fruit and vegetable
processors, and freezing plants. Yurosek knew full well that freezers routinely
cut up his long, well-shaped carrots into cubes, coins and mini-carrots. "If
they can do that, why can't we, and pack 'em fresh?" he wondered.
First he had to cut the culls into something small enough to make use of their straight parts. The first batch was done in a potato peeler and cut by hand. Then he found a frozen-food company that was going out of business and bought an industrial green-bean cutter, which just happened to cut things into 2-inch pieces. Thus was born the standard size for a baby carrot.
Next, he sent one of his workers to a packing plant and loaded the cut-up carrots into an industrial potato peeler to take off the peel and smooth down the edges. What he ended up with was a little rough but still recognizable as the baby carrot of today.
After a bit of practice and an investment in some bagging machinery, he called one of his best customers, a Vons supermarket in Los Angeles. "I said, 'I'm sending you some carrots to see what you think.' Next day they called and said, 'We only want those.' "
The babies were an economic powerhouse. Stores paid 10 cents a bag for whole carrots and sold them for 17 cents. They paid 50 cents for a 1-pound package of baby carrots and sold them for $1. By 1989, more markets were on board, and the baby-carrot juggernaut had begun. Today, these "babies" come from one main place in the US: Bakersfield, California. The state produces almost three-
quarters of U.S. carrots because of
its favourable climate and deep, not-too-heavy soil. Every day, somewhere in the
state, carrots are either being planted or harvested (20 million pounds in
2006).
Which is why Bakersfield is home to the nation's top two carrot processors: Grimmway Farms and Bolthouse Farms. In the early 1990s, Yurosek sold his company to rival Grimmway. The Bunny-Luv logo still can be found on Grimmway's organic carrots. But it's Bakersfield's other carrot producer, Bolthouse, that carries on the Yurosek tradition. Yurosek's grandson Derek is Bolthouse's director of agricultural operations.
The Industry calls them "Minis" and have brought about a carrot-breeding revolution, says the USDA's Simon, who also teaches horticulture at the University of Wisconsin. Carrots originally were sold in bulk, straight from the farm. The first advance was the "cello" carrot. Introduced in the 1950s, these were washed and sold in newfangled (at the time) cellophane bags. "Cello carrots had to look like a carrot, and that was enough," Simon says.
Enter the baby carrot. Suddenly carrots were "branded." Instead of just carrots, they were Bunny-Luv or Bolthouse or Grimmway carrots. Consumers could remember the name, and if they got a bad carrot, they wouldn't buy that particular brand any more. Breeders got to work, getting rid of woodiness and bitterness. They also bred for enhanced length, smoothness and a cylindrical quality that lets processors clip off as little of the tip as possible.
Balancing these with the desirable sweetness and juiciness is a delicate task, Simon says. The faintly bitter taste is essential to what makes a carrot taste like a carrot. "I've had carrots that have more of a flavour note of peas or corn," he says.
Get the carrot too juicy and it breaks in the field. "There are some carrot varieties so succulent they're amazing, but they're like glass," Simon says. "Consumers like juicy carrots, but if they're all broken, you can't sell them."
None of this was done with fancy genetic engineering. "You just grow lots of carrots and look at them and taste them," Simon says. Breeders started experimenting with seed from varieties culled in the past for being too long to fit into the plastic bag.
"Prior to baby carrots, the ideal length for a carrot was somewhere between 6 and 7 inches," Simon says. Now they're typically 8 inches long, a "three-cut" that can make three 2-inch babies. And breeders are edging toward fields of even longer carrots. "You make it a four-cut, and you've got a 33% yield increase," Simon says.
The baby-cut boom transformed the industry from its roots up. Before, growers were more interested in a bulky carrot with more of a tapered shape. But those were hard to chop into baby shape, so plant breeders worked to create varieties that were longer and narrower, allowing a producer to get four cuts instead of three on each carrot root, which is the part of the plant we eat. They also found they could limit the diameter size of carrots by increasing the density with which they were planted — a discovery that helped them harvest more carrots per acre. Mr Yurosek is often referred to as the "Father of Baby Carrots". By simply cutting carrots into 2-inch sections, he won a well-earned place in agricultural history. Equally deserved is his legacy in business lore. Yurosek transformed an industry by addressing a common problem. Whereas most growers focused their energies on production excellence, Yurosek addressed another ingredient required for success: customer relevance. Sadly he died of cancer in 2005.
Why is one little carrot so important?
Some children refuse to eat vegetables and many won’t touch a carrot unless it can be used as a sword during playtime. Sometimes it can feel like it’s just not worth the bother to try and feed them vegetables at every meal. But according to the World Health Organization, eating vegetables like carrots can help prevent blindness caused by vitamin A deficiency.
Vitamin A deficiency
partially or totally blinds nearly 350,000 children from more than 75 countries
every year. Roughly 60 percent of these children die within months of going
blind.
However, vitamin A deficiency is preventable. One cooked carrot has approximately 150% of the Recommended Daily Amount of beta-carotene, which is converted into vitamin A. Vitamin A helps to prevent night blindness, dry skin, poor bone growth, weak tooth enamel, diarrhoea and slow growth.
The greatest health benefits come from eating a wide variety of fruits and vegetables. The American Institute for Cancer Research has estimated that a diet high in a variety of fruits and vegetables may prevent 20 to 33 percent of lung cancers.
The cartenoids found in greens, broccoli and spinach may help protect against other cancers. Eating 5 servings of fruits and vegetables supplies a whole range of nutrients, which provide the kind of protection originally attributed to betacarotene alone. Unfortunately, most children are not interested in cancer and disease prevention so it is parents who have to resort to sneaking nutrition in the foods kids love. And the Baby Carrot plays it part.
Over 40 brands are sold, marketed under such names as Premier and Bunny-Luv, and more modern names to reflect what the consumer wants, like Prime Cut, Sweet Cuts, Morecuts. The market now also covers things such as baby-cut but also sticks, chips, dipping packages, shredded carrots and juice. The Future Packaged carrot products have become so ubiquitous that the industry has levelled off in per-capita consumption. Americans are still eating 50 percent more carrots than they were, but ironically, the carrot has regained such an important position on the shopping list that some in the industry worry it could be losing its value as a premium product. (And some of that drop, they point out, could also be because peeled products actually offer more edible carrot per pound. Buying less doesn’t mean eating less.)
In 2009, after a decade of steady growth, Bolthouse's carrot sales went flat. Sales of baby carrots, the company's cash carrot, actually fell, sharply, and stayed down. Nobody knew why. This was a big problem. After a series of focus groups and surveys something interesting was discovered. People said they were eating as many carrots as they always had. But the numbers clearly showed they were buying fewer. What people meant, it turned out, was they were as likely as ever to keep carrots in the fridge. When the recession hit, though, they became more likely to buy regular carrots, instead of baby carrots, to save money. But people used to eating baby carrots weren't taking the time to wash and cut the regular ones. And unlike baby carrots, which dry out pretty quickly once a bag is opened, regular carrots keep a long time. So people were buying regular carrots and then not eating them, and not buying more until the carrots they had were finally gone or spoiled.
Bolthouse had never marketed its baby carrots. It just sent truckloads to supermarkets, where they got piled up in the produce aisle. A new advertising campaign was needed.
The concept was "To have a great advertising idea, you have to get at the truth of the product. The truth about baby carrots is they possess many of the defining characteristics of our favourite junk food. They're neon orange, they're crunchy, they're dippable, they're kind of addictive - They're just cool and part of your life. If Doritos can sell cheeseburger-flavoured Doritos, we can sell baby carrots." A new jazzy packaging portfolio was created, aimed primarily at junk food addicts and it soon became a roaring success.
$25m campaign to Get Kids to Eat Carrots by branding them like junk food - According to USA Today, a group of producers will unveil a sophisticated media campaign designed to drive a wedge between the munching public and our snack foods, a wedge in the shape of a carrot. This campaign will include repackaging carrots for school vending machines in bags that resemble Doritos (both orange, little-finger size, crunchy, so consumers probably won't even notice the difference, right?) (Left, Halloween "Scarrots" 2010)
What about the chlorine? Some carrots are washed with chlorinated water. This
water must have a pH (acidity) between 6.0 and 7.0. The concentration of
chlorine in the water should be between 100 and 150 ppm (parts per million). The
time of contact between the carrots and the chlorinated water should not exceed
5 minutes. This must be removed from the carrots by rinsing with potable water
or using a centrifugal drier. According to the Canadian Food Inspection Agency,
the use of chlorine as a antimicrobial treatment is a current accepted practice
in the processing for all fresh cut ready-to-eat vegetables.
This ‘Chlorine’ is most likely sodium hypochlorite also known as chlorine bleach. It is used as a disinfectant and antimicrobial in many industries. It is made by reacting a sodium hydroxide solution (also know as caustic soda or lye) with elemental chlorine gas. All of these chemicals are made from sodium chloride, also known as salt. Next time do some research look up cholera if you want a glimpse of what the world was like before the wide availability of chlorine disinfection!
Like other ready-to-eat fresh vegetables, baby-cut carrots are rinsed or sprayed with very diluted chlorine to reduce the risk of bacterial contamination, and then thoroughly washed and bagged. This process is approved by the FDA and accepted by the Canadian Food Inspection Agency, with strict rules for what concentration of chlorine can be used and how long the carrots can be exposed. Chlorine is similarly used as a disinfectant in public water supplies and sometimes in poultry processing. It is toxic at high concentrations, but there is no evidence that trace amounts left on food and in water are harmful to health.
Is this dangerous? Chlorination is a well-known and well-tested way to disinfect food products. Our tap water is chlorinated as well. When you disinfect something, that means that you kill the bacteria that are present. Chlorine kills bacteria. It can also kill us, or be very bad for us. The bleach you use to clean and disinfect your toilet, contains chlorine. Do not drink it. This will kill you because it is far more concentrated than we can safely ingest. The diluted chlorine in your tap water and in your baby-carrots, presents no proven danger whatsoever. It is precisely to make the carrots safe that the chlorine is used.
As a side-note, it is interesting to know that the term "chlorine" is something of a misnomer. Chlorine, in its natural state, is a highly reactive gas that forms compounds with other products. When chlorine is added to other products, it will react virtually immediately to form compounds such as hypochlorous acid (when chlorine is added to water) and sodium hypochlorite (when chlorine is added to a sodium hydroxide solution). These compounds in turn disinfect the water. When we talk about chlorine, and even about free chlorine, these compounds are usually what we are referring to.
Note: there are certain compounds of chlorine that do cause cancer. Does chlorine cause cancer? No. While medical science is not an exact science, and we must always be vigilant, there is at present no evidence whatsoever that chlorine causes cancer or could be a facilitator for cancer. The Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC), and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) have not classified chlorine as to its human carcinogenicity.
The solution used to wash carrots is NOT the same as in swimming pools.
More on White Blush
It is caused by drying of the damaged (peeled) tissue as the
carrots are exposed to air. During storage air can dry out the surface of
carrots due to lack of humidity. The carrots may also shrivel due to the lack of
moisture. In contrast, whole carrots retain their protective peel, so it takes
longer for this problem to occur in them.
It is simply the carrot drying out. Try it out for yourself. Take a fresh, normal carrot and cut it in half. Wait. The same white covering (which is officially called white blush) will appear on the cut. Baby carrots will show a lot more white blush for a very simple reason: their skin has been removed and therefore, the entire carrot dries out. Methods of inhibiting the formation of white blush discoloration on freshly processed carrots.
When many fruits (i.e., apples, pears, peaches, avocados, and bananas) and vegetables (i.e., beans, potatoes, mushrooms and many root crops) are bruised, or are cut, peeled, or processed in any other way that causes tissue injury, a black or brown discoloration appears at the site of the tissue injury within a few minutes due to enzymes of the melanosis reaction. This discoloration problem has been the subject of much study, because of its obvious economic importance to the food processing industry.
Yurosek had always been a "think outside the carrot patch" guy. In the 1960s, Yurosek and Sons was selling
carrots in plastic bags with a
Bunny-Luv logo, a cartoon that got the farmers in trouble with Warner Bros.,
which was protective of its Bugs Bunny brand. Instead of bringing in lawyers and
spending a fortune, Yurosek recalls, "I said to my wife who is a pretty good
drawer, 'Hey, draw me up about 50 bunnies, would you? Then we'll send them to
Warner Bros. and ask them to tell us which ones we can use.' "
The entertainment giant picked one, and Bunny-Luv lived on for the price of a
pencil. The farmer continued growing carrots, and throwing them out, for
decades. But in 1986, Yurosek had the idea that would change American munching
habits. California's Central Valley is dotted with farms, fruit and vegetable
processors, and freezing plants. Yurosek knew full well that freezers routinely
cut up his long, well-shaped carrots into cubes, coins and mini-carrots. "If
they can do that, why can't we, and pack 'em fresh?" he wondered.First he had to cut the culls into something small enough to make use of their straight parts. The first batch was done in a potato peeler and cut by hand. Then he found a frozen-food company that was going out of business and bought an industrial green-bean cutter, which just happened to cut things into 2-inch pieces. Thus was born the standard size for a baby carrot.
Next, he sent one of his workers to a packing plant and loaded the cut-up carrots into an industrial potato peeler to take off the peel and smooth down the edges. What he ended up with was a little rough but still recognizable as the baby carrot of today.
After a bit of practice and an investment in some bagging machinery, he called one of his best customers, a Vons supermarket in Los Angeles. "I said, 'I'm sending you some carrots to see what you think.' Next day they called and said, 'We only want those.' "
The babies were an economic powerhouse. Stores paid 10 cents a bag for whole carrots and sold them for 17 cents. They paid 50 cents for a 1-pound package of baby carrots and sold them for $1. By 1989, more markets were on board, and the baby-carrot juggernaut had begun. Today, these "babies" come from one main place in the US: Bakersfield, California. The state produces almost three-
quarters of U.S. carrots because of
its favourable climate and deep, not-too-heavy soil. Every day, somewhere in the
state, carrots are either being planted or harvested (20 million pounds in
2006). Which is why Bakersfield is home to the nation's top two carrot processors: Grimmway Farms and Bolthouse Farms. In the early 1990s, Yurosek sold his company to rival Grimmway. The Bunny-Luv logo still can be found on Grimmway's organic carrots. But it's Bakersfield's other carrot producer, Bolthouse, that carries on the Yurosek tradition. Yurosek's grandson Derek is Bolthouse's director of agricultural operations.
The Industry calls them "Minis" and have brought about a carrot-breeding revolution, says the USDA's Simon, who also teaches horticulture at the University of Wisconsin. Carrots originally were sold in bulk, straight from the farm. The first advance was the "cello" carrot. Introduced in the 1950s, these were washed and sold in newfangled (at the time) cellophane bags. "Cello carrots had to look like a carrot, and that was enough," Simon says.
Enter the baby carrot. Suddenly carrots were "branded." Instead of just carrots, they were Bunny-Luv or Bolthouse or Grimmway carrots. Consumers could remember the name, and if they got a bad carrot, they wouldn't buy that particular brand any more. Breeders got to work, getting rid of woodiness and bitterness. They also bred for enhanced length, smoothness and a cylindrical quality that lets processors clip off as little of the tip as possible.
Balancing these with the desirable sweetness and juiciness is a delicate task, Simon says. The faintly bitter taste is essential to what makes a carrot taste like a carrot. "I've had carrots that have more of a flavour note of peas or corn," he says.
Get the carrot too juicy and it breaks in the field. "There are some carrot varieties so succulent they're amazing, but they're like glass," Simon says. "Consumers like juicy carrots, but if they're all broken, you can't sell them."
None of this was done with fancy genetic engineering. "You just grow lots of carrots and look at them and taste them," Simon says. Breeders started experimenting with seed from varieties culled in the past for being too long to fit into the plastic bag.
"Prior to baby carrots, the ideal length for a carrot was somewhere between 6 and 7 inches," Simon says. Now they're typically 8 inches long, a "three-cut" that can make three 2-inch babies. And breeders are edging toward fields of even longer carrots. "You make it a four-cut, and you've got a 33% yield increase," Simon says.
The baby-cut boom transformed the industry from its roots up. Before, growers were more interested in a bulky carrot with more of a tapered shape. But those were hard to chop into baby shape, so plant breeders worked to create varieties that were longer and narrower, allowing a producer to get four cuts instead of three on each carrot root, which is the part of the plant we eat. They also found they could limit the diameter size of carrots by increasing the density with which they were planted — a discovery that helped them harvest more carrots per acre. Mr Yurosek is often referred to as the "Father of Baby Carrots". By simply cutting carrots into 2-inch sections, he won a well-earned place in agricultural history. Equally deserved is his legacy in business lore. Yurosek transformed an industry by addressing a common problem. Whereas most growers focused their energies on production excellence, Yurosek addressed another ingredient required for success: customer relevance. Sadly he died of cancer in 2005.
Why is one little carrot so important?
Some children refuse to eat vegetables and many won’t touch a carrot unless it can be used as a sword during playtime. Sometimes it can feel like it’s just not worth the bother to try and feed them vegetables at every meal. But according to the World Health Organization, eating vegetables like carrots can help prevent blindness caused by vitamin A deficiency.
Vitamin A deficiency
partially or totally blinds nearly 350,000 children from more than 75 countries
every year. Roughly 60 percent of these children die within months of going
blind. However, vitamin A deficiency is preventable. One cooked carrot has approximately 150% of the Recommended Daily Amount of beta-carotene, which is converted into vitamin A. Vitamin A helps to prevent night blindness, dry skin, poor bone growth, weak tooth enamel, diarrhoea and slow growth.
The greatest health benefits come from eating a wide variety of fruits and vegetables. The American Institute for Cancer Research has estimated that a diet high in a variety of fruits and vegetables may prevent 20 to 33 percent of lung cancers.
The cartenoids found in greens, broccoli and spinach may help protect against other cancers. Eating 5 servings of fruits and vegetables supplies a whole range of nutrients, which provide the kind of protection originally attributed to betacarotene alone. Unfortunately, most children are not interested in cancer and disease prevention so it is parents who have to resort to sneaking nutrition in the foods kids love. And the Baby Carrot plays it part.
Over 40 brands are sold, marketed under such names as Premier and Bunny-Luv, and more modern names to reflect what the consumer wants, like Prime Cut, Sweet Cuts, Morecuts. The market now also covers things such as baby-cut but also sticks, chips, dipping packages, shredded carrots and juice. The Future Packaged carrot products have become so ubiquitous that the industry has levelled off in per-capita consumption. Americans are still eating 50 percent more carrots than they were, but ironically, the carrot has regained such an important position on the shopping list that some in the industry worry it could be losing its value as a premium product. (And some of that drop, they point out, could also be because peeled products actually offer more edible carrot per pound. Buying less doesn’t mean eating less.)
With that in mind, researchers are always looking for ways to
spice up the carrot. Producers want to darken the color of carrots, not just
for aesthetics but also because the deeper orange signals more beta-carotene, an
antioxidant that serves as one of the best sources of vitamin A, for which
carrots are renowned. Scientists are pushing the color curve -
producing white, red and purple carrots that are actually the colors of the
roots of carrots that were originally grown 1,000 years ago. The rainbow colors give growers
still more marketing options - especially for kids, who seem drawn to items that
look like someone was having fun with crayons - and could even be mixed together
in a variety pack. Look for a Rainbow Pack at a store near you!
In 2009, after a decade of steady growth, Bolthouse's carrot sales went flat. Sales of baby carrots, the company's cash carrot, actually fell, sharply, and stayed down. Nobody knew why. This was a big problem. After a series of focus groups and surveys something interesting was discovered. People said they were eating as many carrots as they always had. But the numbers clearly showed they were buying fewer. What people meant, it turned out, was they were as likely as ever to keep carrots in the fridge. When the recession hit, though, they became more likely to buy regular carrots, instead of baby carrots, to save money. But people used to eating baby carrots weren't taking the time to wash and cut the regular ones. And unlike baby carrots, which dry out pretty quickly once a bag is opened, regular carrots keep a long time. So people were buying regular carrots and then not eating them, and not buying more until the carrots they had were finally gone or spoiled.
Bolthouse had never marketed its baby carrots. It just sent truckloads to supermarkets, where they got piled up in the produce aisle. A new advertising campaign was needed.
The concept was "To have a great advertising idea, you have to get at the truth of the product. The truth about baby carrots is they possess many of the defining characteristics of our favourite junk food. They're neon orange, they're crunchy, they're dippable, they're kind of addictive - They're just cool and part of your life. If Doritos can sell cheeseburger-flavoured Doritos, we can sell baby carrots." A new jazzy packaging portfolio was created, aimed primarily at junk food addicts and it soon became a roaring success.
(The above information is taken from a more detailed piece
by Douglas McGray writing for the Fast Company - read the full article )
$25m campaign to Get Kids to Eat Carrots by branding them like junk food - According to USA Today, a group of producers will unveil a sophisticated media campaign designed to drive a wedge between the munching public and our snack foods, a wedge in the shape of a carrot. This campaign will include repackaging carrots for school vending machines in bags that resemble Doritos (both orange, little-finger size, crunchy, so consumers probably won't even notice the difference, right?) (Left, Halloween "Scarrots" 2010)
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A few words of warning, and the viable alternative -
Citrox!
Baby carrots are not as nutritious as full whole carrots,
because a lot of the goodness in carrots is contained in the skin and just below
it. This is removed in the baby carrot making process.
After harvesting, the carrots are mainly washed in
chlorinated water, just like our drinking water, and cleaned to remove dirt and
mud. Some finished baby carrots are washed, or dipped, by a further chlorine
solution to prevent white blushing once in the store. There is no evidence that
this is harmful, but it is worth knowing about!. However organic growers use a
citrus based non toxic solution called Citrox (The ProGarda™), the
natural alternative to synthetic biocides for the decontamination of fresh
produce, food and beverages. Citrox technology incorporates a truly holistic
approach designed to increase the effectiveness and profitability of food and
beverage production processes. A brief overview of this product here.
All Citrox products are made from natural extracts or
naturally derived compounds. Some of them are permitted for use in organic
production (e.g.: fruit & vegetable decontaminant) or certified organic
(e.g.: pre-harvest treatment products). All the Citrox derivatives are
completely non-toxic, non-carcinogenic, non-corrosive, and non-tainting in use.
They can actually be added to foodstuffs. They are formed by the bioflavonoid
extracts and a range of completely natural organic acids, this combination
having highly synergistic effects in all their many applications. The ProGarda™
decontaminant range has been specifically formulated for the decontamination of
fruits and vegetables. These products are viable alternatives to the use of
chlorine (or other compounds or systems) for decontaminating fresh fruits and
vegetables. More
about Citrox here.
According to Randy Worobo, an associate professor of food
microbiology at Cornell University, you need not worry. As reported in
Prevention magazine, he says carrots are not preserved in bleach but rinsed in a
chlorine wash that's recommended by the FDA to kill bacteria such as salmonella
and E. coli. Most pre-cut produce, including frozen vegetables and fruit salad,
is washed with this or similar sanitizers.
Baby Cut and Peeled Carrots are treated with chlorine. It is
used as an anti-microbial treatment to control potential contamination in the
finished product. Carrots that are treated with chlorine are subsequently soaked
and rinsed with potable water to remove the excess chlorine before being
packaged.
Sanitizers that can be used to wash or to assist in lye peeling of fruits and
vegetables are regulated by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration in accordance
with the Federal Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act as outlined in the Code of Federal
Regulations, Title 21, Ch. 1, Section 173.315.
Chlorine is routinely used as a sanitizer in wash, spray, and flume waters
used in the fresh fruit and vegetable industry. Anti-microbial activity depends
on the amount of free available chlorine (as hypochlorous acid) in water that
comes in contact with microbial cells. The effectiveness of chlorine in killing
pathogenic micro organisms has been extensively studied." For more information
on the use of Chlorine as a routine anti-microbial sanitizer, you can visit the
following government web site;
http://www.cdc.gov/ncidod/EID/vol3no4/beuchat.htm
http://www.cdc.gov/ncidod/EID/vol3no4/beuchat.htm
This ‘Chlorine’ is most likely sodium hypochlorite also known as chlorine bleach. It is used as a disinfectant and antimicrobial in many industries. It is made by reacting a sodium hydroxide solution (also know as caustic soda or lye) with elemental chlorine gas. All of these chemicals are made from sodium chloride, also known as salt. Next time do some research look up cholera if you want a glimpse of what the world was like before the wide availability of chlorine disinfection!
Like other ready-to-eat fresh vegetables, baby-cut carrots are rinsed or sprayed with very diluted chlorine to reduce the risk of bacterial contamination, and then thoroughly washed and bagged. This process is approved by the FDA and accepted by the Canadian Food Inspection Agency, with strict rules for what concentration of chlorine can be used and how long the carrots can be exposed. Chlorine is similarly used as a disinfectant in public water supplies and sometimes in poultry processing. It is toxic at high concentrations, but there is no evidence that trace amounts left on food and in water are harmful to health.
Is this dangerous? Chlorination is a well-known and well-tested way to disinfect food products. Our tap water is chlorinated as well. When you disinfect something, that means that you kill the bacteria that are present. Chlorine kills bacteria. It can also kill us, or be very bad for us. The bleach you use to clean and disinfect your toilet, contains chlorine. Do not drink it. This will kill you because it is far more concentrated than we can safely ingest. The diluted chlorine in your tap water and in your baby-carrots, presents no proven danger whatsoever. It is precisely to make the carrots safe that the chlorine is used.
As a side-note, it is interesting to know that the term "chlorine" is something of a misnomer. Chlorine, in its natural state, is a highly reactive gas that forms compounds with other products. When chlorine is added to other products, it will react virtually immediately to form compounds such as hypochlorous acid (when chlorine is added to water) and sodium hypochlorite (when chlorine is added to a sodium hydroxide solution). These compounds in turn disinfect the water. When we talk about chlorine, and even about free chlorine, these compounds are usually what we are referring to.
Note: there are certain compounds of chlorine that do cause cancer. Does chlorine cause cancer? No. While medical science is not an exact science, and we must always be vigilant, there is at present no evidence whatsoever that chlorine causes cancer or could be a facilitator for cancer. The Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC), and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) have not classified chlorine as to its human carcinogenicity.
The solution used to wash carrots is NOT the same as in swimming pools.
More on White Blush
It is simply the carrot drying out. Try it out for yourself. Take a fresh, normal carrot and cut it in half. Wait. The same white covering (which is officially called white blush) will appear on the cut. Baby carrots will show a lot more white blush for a very simple reason: their skin has been removed and therefore, the entire carrot dries out. Methods of inhibiting the formation of white blush discoloration on freshly processed carrots.
When many fruits (i.e., apples, pears, peaches, avocados, and bananas) and vegetables (i.e., beans, potatoes, mushrooms and many root crops) are bruised, or are cut, peeled, or processed in any other way that causes tissue injury, a black or brown discoloration appears at the site of the tissue injury within a few minutes due to enzymes of the melanosis reaction. This discoloration problem has been the subject of much study, because of its obvious economic importance to the food processing industry.
Unlike other fruit and vegetables as detailed above, carrots
do not develop black or brown discolorations after suffering tissue injuries due
to enzymes of the melanosis reaction. Consequently, the carrot is an ideal
vegetable to process shortly after harvest into a form that is ready for
consumption. Of the estimated 3 billion pounds of carrots that are marketed in
the United States each year, approximately 20% are peeled soon after harvest to
be sold as fresh miniature carrots, carrot sticks, carrot coins, carrot shreds,
and other forms of fresh processed carrots.
Whole, unprocessed carrots may be stored under refrigeration
for many weeks without significantly deteriorating. However, freshly processed
carrots that have been in refrigerated storage for just a few days begin to
develop a whitish, chalk-like appearance on their abraded surfaces. In the
carrot processing industry, this whitish, chalk-like appearance is known as
"white blush."
The rate at which white blush appears on processed carrots is
a function of the physiological condition of the whole carrots prior to
processing, the degree of abrasiveness that was present in the processing, the
chemical treatments that were applied to the carrots, if any, and the humidity
levels and the temperatures at which the carrots have been stored. For example,
variations in the physiology of the whole, unprocessed carrots caused by
different degrees of environmental stresses during the growing period, such as
heat stress and drought stress, will result in variations in the onset of white
blush formation under given storage conditions. Carrots that were grown in
poorly irrigated fields tend to form white blush discoloration more rapidly,
than do processed carrots that were grown in well irrigated fields.
White blush discolourisation is unsightly and unappetizing.
As a result, consumers invariably associate white blush with distastefully old
carrots, even though the taste and nutritional value of processed carrots are
not affected by the appearance of white blush. This fact leads to significant
commercial waste when processed carrots are pulled from the shelf due to the
appearance of white blush even though taste and nutrition are not being
effected.
To date, white blush has been controlled primarily by washing
freshly processed carrots with chilled water, usually in a hydrocooler, followed
by refrigeration and/or by packaging of the freshly processed carrots in
specialised containers, including some that maintain modified atmospheres within
the containers. Chlorine has also been added to the chilled water treatments for
sanitation purposes, and primarily to control microbial bacteria growth on the
processed carrots. However, depending upon the above variables, the onset of
white blush may only be delayed for a few days. Therefore baby carrots tend to
have a shorter shelf life.
Friday, January 18, 2013
Tilapia - is it good for you?
I recently read some things about tilapia that concerned me. I read that a huge number of them are farmed in China and many of these farms are feeding the fish feces, yes, that's poop! As if that weren't bad enough, I read that they not only contain the healthy Omega-3 fats, but they also contain an even higher amount of Omega-6 fats, which are not good for you! So I dug a little deeper and here is what I've found! The second article below is very lengthy, but it has a wealth of information and I highly recommend reading it! You will be a tilapia expert when you are done!
Here is my take on tilapia, after reading both of these articles, so if you don't have time to read them, consider this a summary:
Most tilapia is farmed, either in Latin America or Asia. The majority of the tilapia consumed in the U.S. is from China and their farms are virtually unregulated.
Seafood Watch lists tilapia raised in the United States as a “best choice,” tilapia from Latin America as a “good alternative” and tilapia from China as “to be avoided.”
The tilapia coming from Latin America is fresh, but that number is quickly declining. The tilapia coming from China is frozen and that number is rapidly increasing.
Much of the fish that China exports is what producers call “refreshed,” which means it is frozen and packed in carbon monoxide to preserve color so it can be thawed and sold in fish displays, where it will appear to have been recently caught. Fish can also be fed hormones including testosterone, and as for the "poop", who knows what China is feeding them. I'm not sure if that fact is true or not, but I do know that many of the farmed fish are being fed diets of mainly corn and soy, which as you may know, is almost all GMO (genetically modified organism), which raises other concerns.
While many types of fish have the healthy Omega-3 fatty acids and healthy fish oil that we can benefit from, Tilapia's levels of Omega-3 are minimal and the amount of fish oil in them is unclear based on the fact that the amount of Omega;3's and fish oil is directly related to their diet - it comes from them consuming algae and other naturally occuring aquatic plants in lakes. Farmed fish are not eating naturally occuring vegetation. Tilapia also contains a higher amount of Omega-6 fatty acids, than it does Omega-3's.
You may not have heard so much about Omega-6 fatty acids. Like Omega-3s, these are polyunsaturated and help lower blood cholesterol levels, however they are thought to play a role in clotting function, are inflammatory and susceptible to oxidation — thereby possibly increasing risk for blood clots, arthritis, inflammatory bowel disease and cancers.
The article states: "While a portion of tilapia (wild) has 135 milligrams of omega-3 fatty acids, a portion of salmon has over 2,000 milligrams. And farmed tilapia may have even less than wild tilapia because fish acquire omega-3s by eating aquatic plants and other fish."
So, will I be serving tilapia to my family? Here is my own personal opinion, I will not purchase tilapia that is farmed in China. I will try to buy fresh if possible and if I find a good source for fresh tilapia, I will let you know! I might look into a healthier option for our weekly fish dinner. I think tilapia is okay (except what's coming from China), but if you can substitute a fish that is much healthier for you, why wouldn't you?
You can decide what is best for your family and I hope these articles make that choice a little easier for you!
Kirsten
This article comes from the Mayo Clinic website and was written by 2 Mayo Nutritionists:
There's an interesting discussion in this month's "Journal of the American Dietetic Association." What it boils down to is this: Is the fatty acid mix in catfish and tilapia healthy or harmful? The debate has even reached the popular press. Why all the fuss?
First off, since 2000, catfish and tilapia rank as two of the most popular fish consumed in the United States thanks mainly to their taste and relatively low expense. And both contain heart-healthy omega-3 fatty acids.
Consumption of these types of fatty acids is thought to be associated with reduction in blood pressure and reduced risk for certain cancers, inflammatory conditions such as rheumatoid arthritis, and even mental decline.
You may not have heard so much about a second ingredient they contain, omega-6 fatty acids. Like omega-3s, these are polyunsaturated and help lower blood cholesterol levels, however they are thought to play a role in clotting function, are inflammatory and susceptible to oxidation — thereby possibly increasing risk for blood clots, arthritis, inflammatory bowel disease and cancers.
The National Institutes of Health funded study by Weaver and colleagues looked at the favorable omega-3 fatty acid content and unfavorable omega-6 contents of commonly eaten fish and found that while catfish and tilapia contain both, they contain a high amount of unfavorable omega-6 fat.
They report that a 3-ounce portion of catfish or tilapia contains 67 and 134 milligrams respectively of the bad fat (the same amount of 80 percent lean hamburger contains 34 milligrams, and bacon 191 milligrams).
Does this mean you should give them up? No! The rebuttal by Harris is in the same journal. He says the logic of judging fatty fish by the amounts of omega-3 and omega-6 fat contents is flawed. Governmental and professional organizations haven't used such a ratio for years.
He also says that to think that eating catfish or tilapia — because of its high omega-6 content — is more risky in terms of heart disease than eating bacon or hamburger is "flawed."
My take? I'm going to continue to eat fish — at least twice weekly. I'm going to choose a variety of fatty fish — including tilapia and catfish along with others especially high in the good fats such as salmon, tuna and mackerel.
P.S. When you see this on the evening news you can say that you got the scoop here.
I also found a very lengthy article from the NY Times on Tilapia and I found it very informative and worth the read!!
Americans ate 475 million pounds of tilapia last year, four times the amount a decade ago, making this once obscure African native the most popular farmed fish in the United States. Although wild fish predominate in most species, a vast majority of the tilapia consumed in the United States is “harvested” from pens or cages in Latin America and Asia.
Known in the food business as “aquatic chicken” because it breeds easily and tastes bland, tilapia is the perfect factory fish; it happily eats pellets made largely of corn and soy and gains weight rapidly, easily converting a diet that resembles cheap chicken feed into low-cost seafood.
“Ten years ago no one had heard of it; now everyone wants it because it doesn’t have a fishy taste, especially hospitals and schools,” said Orlando Delgado, general manager of Aquafinca.
Farmed tilapia is promoted as good for your health and for the environment at a time when many marine stocks have been seriously depleted. “Did you know the American Heart Association recommends eating fish twice a week?” asks the industry Web site, abouttilapia.com. But tilapia has both nutritional and environmental drawbacks.
Compared with other fish, farmed tilapia contains relatively small amounts of beneficial omega-3 fatty acids, the fish oils that are the main reasons doctors recommend eating fish frequently; salmon has more than 10 times the amount of tilapia. Also, farmed tilapia contains a less healthful mix of fatty acids because the fish are fed corn and soy instead of lake plants and algae, the diet of wild tilapia.
“It may look like fish and taste like fish but does not have the benefits — it may be detrimental,” said Dr. Floyd Chilton, a professor of physiology and pharmacology at Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center who specializes in fish lipids.
Environmentalists argue that intensive and unregulated tilapia farming is damaging ecosystems in poor countries with practices generally prohibited in the United States — like breeding huge numbers of fish in cages in natural lakes, where fish waste pollutes the water. “We wouldn’t allow tilapia to be farmed in the United States the way they are farmed here, so why are we willing to eat them?” said Dr. Jeffrey McCrary, an American fish biologist who works in Nicaragua. “We are exporting the environmental damage caused by our appetites.”
Defenders of tilapia aquaculture point out that this young and rapidly growing industry has begun improving standards and toughening regulation. The two-year-old Aquaculture Stewardship Council, the brainchild of the conservation organization WWF and I.D.H., a Dutch sustainable trade program, is rolling out an inspection program for tilapia farms independent of the industry. Those that choose to participate — and pass — will receive labels identifying their product as “responsibly farmed.”
In a nod to its growing popularity, this year tilapia’s will be the first of 10 fish certification programs to be initiated. Aquafinca, which began adopting more environmentally friendly cultivation in 2006 to better appeal to large corporate customers like Costco, this year became the first farm to pass an initial inspection.
Proponents say tilapia aquaculture will only grow in importance because it provides food and jobs in a world of declining fish stocks and rising population. “There are going to be more farmed fish each year,” said Kevin Fitzsimmons, a biologist at the University of Arizona. “Think about it: if we tried to get beef from hunting, there would be a lot of hungry people.”
From Africa to the World
Native to lakes in Africa, this versatile warm-water fish was deployed by many governments in poor tropical countries around the world in the second half of the 20th century to control weeds and mosquitoes in lakes and rivers. In a cistern or pond, a few fish yielded dietary protein.
In retrospect, that global dispersal “maybe was not the best idea,” said Aaron McNevin, a WWF biologist who is coordinating the development of standards for tilapia farms, because tilapia “is one of the most invasive species known and very hard to get rid of once they are established.” Today, wild tilapia has squeezed out native species in lakes throughout the world with its aggressive breeding and feeding.
By the 1990s, businesses saw opportunity in farming this hearty species, which tolerates crowding and does not need expensive meat-based feed. Using selective breeding, scientists created today’s industrial strains: big, fleshy fish with tiny heads and tails, and intestines that allow them to absorb food faster. Farmed tilapia reaches its sales weight of about two pounds in roughly nine months of intensive feeding.
“Nature is for maintaining species; what we do is make fillets,” said Danilo Sosa, a technician at the tilapia breeding pens of Nicanor Fish Farms, outside Managua, Nicaragua, plopping a tilapia used for breeding on a wooden table and scanning the chip in its gut that identifies its breeding line.
Last year, more than 52 million pounds of fresh tilapia were exported to the United States, mostly from Latin America, as well as 422 million more pounds of frozen tilapia, both whole and fillet, nearly all from China, according to the United States Department of Agriculture.
The growth has been abetted by the creation and marketing of new products like fleshy “tilapia loins” — even though fish do not possess that anatomical feature.
For United States shoppers picking up tilapia from China or Honduras or Ecuador, there is little guidance. “It’s such a complicated job for consumers to decide what to eat, with aquaculture production expanding so rapidly,” said Peter Bridson, aquaculture research manager of the Monterey Bay Aquarium, which produces the popular Seafood Watch, an independent consumer guide to buying sustainable fish.
The new sustainability standards being developed for aquaculture will be tailored by species to address their diverse environmental risks. For tilapia, that means fish cages can be placed only in lakes where tilapia already live, and must be designed to prevent escapes. To limit overtaxing of lakes, the new guidelines establish water quality rules for oxygen and phosphorus, a product of fish waste.
Fish farms may not use prophylactic antibiotics. But even the new rules allow for some practices considered unacceptable in the United States, where cage farming in lakes is generally forbidden. In many states, tilapia must be housed in specially designed pens with roofs to prevent birds from carrying the fish elsewhere; their waste is often collected to use as fertilizer rather than released. Also, the new standards allow for baby fish to be fed testosterone even though markets like Whole Foods will not buy hormone-treated seafood.
For the moment, Seafood Watch lists tilapia raised in the United States as a “best choice,” tilapia from Latin America as a “good alternative” and tilapia from China as “to be avoided.” Less than 5 percent of the tilapia consumed in the United States is farmed within its borders, and that is mostly whole fish. Dr. Bridson said these rough ratings were largely based on the presence of effective monitoring in those places and how farms disposed of their waste.
The Pollution Problem
But many biologists worry that the big business of tilapia farming will outweigh caution, leaving dead lakes and extinct species.
Dr. McCrary has spent the past decade studying how a small, short-lived tilapia farm degraded Lake Apoyo in Nicaragua. “One small cage screwed up the entire lake — the entire lake!” he said of the farm, which existed from 1995 to 2000.
Waste from the cages polluted the pristine ecosystem, and some tilapia escaped. An aquatic plant called charra, an important food for fish, disappeared, leaving the lake a wasteland. Today, some species of plants and fish are slowly recovering, but others are probably gone forever, said Dr. McCrary, who works for the Nicaraguan foundation FUNDECI.
That experience explains why Dr. Salvador Montenegro, director of Nicaragua’s Center for Aquatic Resource Investigation, has spent a decade fighting to close the much larger Nicanor tilapia farm in a remote corner of Lake Nicaragua. “This kind of intensive fish farming jeopardizes a lake that is a national treasure, already under stress from pollution,” he said, once comparing its effect to allowing 3.7 million chickens to defecate in the water. Weaker fish, like the rainbow bass, have been disappearing from Lake Nicaragua as the number of tilapia has increased, said Ben Slow, a local fisherman.
But David Senna, the manager of Nicanor, said the company’s cages occupied only a tiny fraction of the lake, in an area with deep water and strong currents sufficient to carry away fish waste; it has taken monthly water samples to prove it. While he acknowledged that early on there were some escapes — one involving 10,000 tilapia — he noted that tilapia were introduced to Lake Nicaragua in the 1980s, “so if they’re going to take over, it was already doomed.”
Nutritional Concerns
For doctors, the debate has centered more on tilapia’s nutritional benefits, or lack thereof. Like all fish, tilapia is a good source of protein, with few of the unhealthy saturated fats in red meats. But unlike most other fish, tilapia contains relatively little of the fish oils that medical research has shown assist brain development and protect against heart disease, stroke and abnormal heart rhythms: a pair of omega-3 fatty acids.
“When people talk about the need to eat more fish, they are using that as a metaphor for fish oil, DHA and EPA,” said Edgar R. Miller III, associate professor of medicine and epidemiology at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. “So what do we do about the fact that tilapia and catfish, which are farm raised, have very low levels of these compounds?”
While a portion of tilapia has 135 milligrams of omega-3 fatty acids, a portion of salmon has over 2,000 milligrams. And farmed tilapia may have even less than wild tilapia because fish acquire omega-3s by eating aquatic plants and other fish. “They are what they eat,” Dr. Bridson said.
In farmed tilapia, raised largely on corn and soy, omega-3 levels depend on how much fish meal or fish oil the farm’s breeders mix in. While most fish species need a good helping of these fatty acids to grow, herbivorous tilapia grow decently with little or none. And there are compelling reasons to skimp on fish meal or oil additives: they are costly and create more pollution.
“The content can vary dramatically and the consumer won’t know it,” said Bruce Holub, a professor of nutritional science at the University of Guelph in Ontario, who said that omega-3 levels should appear on every fish label.
He and other experts echo the industry’s message that tilapia is nonetheless beneficial to eat as a lean source of protein and one that still contains some omega-3, where protein alternatives like red meat and chicken have none. But others are concerned about research showing that another type of fatty acids, the so-called omega-6 acids, outnumber the beneficial omega-3s in farmed tilapia by a factor of 2 to 1. Some research suggests that ratio increases the risk of heart disease; in salmon and trout the ratio is reversed.
With this in mind, the Mayo Clinic advises patients that some typically farmed fish, like tilapia and catfish, “don’t appear to be as heart-healthy.” More research will be needed to see whether improving fish feeds enhances tilapia’s health benefits, and whether the omega-6 levels in tilapia are significant relative to its already high prevalence in the American diet.
The Choice
Although environmentalists long battled to shut down Nicanor, the Nicaraguan fish farm is failing for another reason: cheap frozen tilapia fillets from China.
Imports of frozen tilapia to the United States rose 30 percent in 2010, as fresh fillet imports dropped 2 percent, reducing demand from smaller producers like Nicanor. Much of the fish that China exports is what producers call “refreshed,” which means it is frozen and packed in carbon monoxide to preserve color so it can be thawed and sold in fish displays, where it will appear to have been recently caught. Even in Managua, the capital of Nicaragua, the tilapia on supermarket shelves is from China.
“People wanted to pay $3.99 a pound for this frozen stuff rather than $5.99 for fresh, especially during the recession,” said Mr. Senna, the Nicanor manager. Chinese fish farms are regarded as poorly regulated, Dr. Bridson said, which is why the world needs clearer standards for sustainable fish farming and consumer labeling. Until then, the biggest producer offering the cheapest product is poised to win.
“If I have 100 tilapia in a pond, I may have happy tilapia because they have room to swim, but I won’t be able to sell them since I won’t get access to the global market,” Dr. McCrary said, adding that, for now, “there’s no tilapia equivalent of free-range chicken.”
Here is my take on tilapia, after reading both of these articles, so if you don't have time to read them, consider this a summary:
Most tilapia is farmed, either in Latin America or Asia. The majority of the tilapia consumed in the U.S. is from China and their farms are virtually unregulated.
Seafood Watch lists tilapia raised in the United States as a “best choice,” tilapia from Latin America as a “good alternative” and tilapia from China as “to be avoided.”
The tilapia coming from Latin America is fresh, but that number is quickly declining. The tilapia coming from China is frozen and that number is rapidly increasing.
Much of the fish that China exports is what producers call “refreshed,” which means it is frozen and packed in carbon monoxide to preserve color so it can be thawed and sold in fish displays, where it will appear to have been recently caught. Fish can also be fed hormones including testosterone, and as for the "poop", who knows what China is feeding them. I'm not sure if that fact is true or not, but I do know that many of the farmed fish are being fed diets of mainly corn and soy, which as you may know, is almost all GMO (genetically modified organism), which raises other concerns.
While many types of fish have the healthy Omega-3 fatty acids and healthy fish oil that we can benefit from, Tilapia's levels of Omega-3 are minimal and the amount of fish oil in them is unclear based on the fact that the amount of Omega;3's and fish oil is directly related to their diet - it comes from them consuming algae and other naturally occuring aquatic plants in lakes. Farmed fish are not eating naturally occuring vegetation. Tilapia also contains a higher amount of Omega-6 fatty acids, than it does Omega-3's.
You may not have heard so much about Omega-6 fatty acids. Like Omega-3s, these are polyunsaturated and help lower blood cholesterol levels, however they are thought to play a role in clotting function, are inflammatory and susceptible to oxidation — thereby possibly increasing risk for blood clots, arthritis, inflammatory bowel disease and cancers.
The article states: "While a portion of tilapia (wild) has 135 milligrams of omega-3 fatty acids, a portion of salmon has over 2,000 milligrams. And farmed tilapia may have even less than wild tilapia because fish acquire omega-3s by eating aquatic plants and other fish."
So, will I be serving tilapia to my family? Here is my own personal opinion, I will not purchase tilapia that is farmed in China. I will try to buy fresh if possible and if I find a good source for fresh tilapia, I will let you know! I might look into a healthier option for our weekly fish dinner. I think tilapia is okay (except what's coming from China), but if you can substitute a fish that is much healthier for you, why wouldn't you?
You can decide what is best for your family and I hope these articles make that choice a little easier for you!
Kirsten
This article comes from the Mayo Clinic website and was written by 2 Mayo Nutritionists:
Catfish and tilapia: Healthy or harmful?
By Jennifer Nelson, M.S., R.D. and Katherine Zeratsky, R.D.
There's an interesting discussion in this month's "Journal of the American Dietetic Association." What it boils down to is this: Is the fatty acid mix in catfish and tilapia healthy or harmful? The debate has even reached the popular press. Why all the fuss?
First off, since 2000, catfish and tilapia rank as two of the most popular fish consumed in the United States thanks mainly to their taste and relatively low expense. And both contain heart-healthy omega-3 fatty acids.
Consumption of these types of fatty acids is thought to be associated with reduction in blood pressure and reduced risk for certain cancers, inflammatory conditions such as rheumatoid arthritis, and even mental decline.
You may not have heard so much about a second ingredient they contain, omega-6 fatty acids. Like omega-3s, these are polyunsaturated and help lower blood cholesterol levels, however they are thought to play a role in clotting function, are inflammatory and susceptible to oxidation — thereby possibly increasing risk for blood clots, arthritis, inflammatory bowel disease and cancers.
The National Institutes of Health funded study by Weaver and colleagues looked at the favorable omega-3 fatty acid content and unfavorable omega-6 contents of commonly eaten fish and found that while catfish and tilapia contain both, they contain a high amount of unfavorable omega-6 fat.
They report that a 3-ounce portion of catfish or tilapia contains 67 and 134 milligrams respectively of the bad fat (the same amount of 80 percent lean hamburger contains 34 milligrams, and bacon 191 milligrams).
Does this mean you should give them up? No! The rebuttal by Harris is in the same journal. He says the logic of judging fatty fish by the amounts of omega-3 and omega-6 fat contents is flawed. Governmental and professional organizations haven't used such a ratio for years.
He also says that to think that eating catfish or tilapia — because of its high omega-6 content — is more risky in terms of heart disease than eating bacon or hamburger is "flawed."
My take? I'm going to continue to eat fish — at least twice weekly. I'm going to choose a variety of fatty fish — including tilapia and catfish along with others especially high in the good fats such as salmon, tuna and mackerel.
P.S. When you see this on the evening news you can say that you got the scoop here.
I also found a very lengthy article from the NY Times on Tilapia and I found it very informative and worth the read!!
Another Side of Tilapia, the Perfect Factory Fish
By ELISABETH ROSENTHAL
Published: May 2, 2011
AGUA AZUL, Honduras — A common Bible story says Jesus fed 5,000 people with five loaves and two fish, which scholars surmise were tilapia.
But at the Aquafinca fish farm here, a modern miracle takes place daily: Tens of thousands of beefy, flapping tilapia are hauled out of teeming cages on Lake Yojoa, converted to fillets in a cold slaughterhouse and rushed onto planes bound for the United States, where some will appear on plates within 12 hours.
Known in the food business as “aquatic chicken” because it breeds easily and tastes bland, tilapia is the perfect factory fish; it happily eats pellets made largely of corn and soy and gains weight rapidly, easily converting a diet that resembles cheap chicken feed into low-cost seafood.
“Ten years ago no one had heard of it; now everyone wants it because it doesn’t have a fishy taste, especially hospitals and schools,” said Orlando Delgado, general manager of Aquafinca.
Farmed tilapia is promoted as good for your health and for the environment at a time when many marine stocks have been seriously depleted. “Did you know the American Heart Association recommends eating fish twice a week?” asks the industry Web site, abouttilapia.com. But tilapia has both nutritional and environmental drawbacks.
Compared with other fish, farmed tilapia contains relatively small amounts of beneficial omega-3 fatty acids, the fish oils that are the main reasons doctors recommend eating fish frequently; salmon has more than 10 times the amount of tilapia. Also, farmed tilapia contains a less healthful mix of fatty acids because the fish are fed corn and soy instead of lake plants and algae, the diet of wild tilapia.
“It may look like fish and taste like fish but does not have the benefits — it may be detrimental,” said Dr. Floyd Chilton, a professor of physiology and pharmacology at Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center who specializes in fish lipids.
Environmentalists argue that intensive and unregulated tilapia farming is damaging ecosystems in poor countries with practices generally prohibited in the United States — like breeding huge numbers of fish in cages in natural lakes, where fish waste pollutes the water. “We wouldn’t allow tilapia to be farmed in the United States the way they are farmed here, so why are we willing to eat them?” said Dr. Jeffrey McCrary, an American fish biologist who works in Nicaragua. “We are exporting the environmental damage caused by our appetites.”
Defenders of tilapia aquaculture point out that this young and rapidly growing industry has begun improving standards and toughening regulation. The two-year-old Aquaculture Stewardship Council, the brainchild of the conservation organization WWF and I.D.H., a Dutch sustainable trade program, is rolling out an inspection program for tilapia farms independent of the industry. Those that choose to participate — and pass — will receive labels identifying their product as “responsibly farmed.”
In a nod to its growing popularity, this year tilapia’s will be the first of 10 fish certification programs to be initiated. Aquafinca, which began adopting more environmentally friendly cultivation in 2006 to better appeal to large corporate customers like Costco, this year became the first farm to pass an initial inspection.
Proponents say tilapia aquaculture will only grow in importance because it provides food and jobs in a world of declining fish stocks and rising population. “There are going to be more farmed fish each year,” said Kevin Fitzsimmons, a biologist at the University of Arizona. “Think about it: if we tried to get beef from hunting, there would be a lot of hungry people.”
From Africa to the World
Native to lakes in Africa, this versatile warm-water fish was deployed by many governments in poor tropical countries around the world in the second half of the 20th century to control weeds and mosquitoes in lakes and rivers. In a cistern or pond, a few fish yielded dietary protein.
In retrospect, that global dispersal “maybe was not the best idea,” said Aaron McNevin, a WWF biologist who is coordinating the development of standards for tilapia farms, because tilapia “is one of the most invasive species known and very hard to get rid of once they are established.” Today, wild tilapia has squeezed out native species in lakes throughout the world with its aggressive breeding and feeding.
By the 1990s, businesses saw opportunity in farming this hearty species, which tolerates crowding and does not need expensive meat-based feed. Using selective breeding, scientists created today’s industrial strains: big, fleshy fish with tiny heads and tails, and intestines that allow them to absorb food faster. Farmed tilapia reaches its sales weight of about two pounds in roughly nine months of intensive feeding.
“Nature is for maintaining species; what we do is make fillets,” said Danilo Sosa, a technician at the tilapia breeding pens of Nicanor Fish Farms, outside Managua, Nicaragua, plopping a tilapia used for breeding on a wooden table and scanning the chip in its gut that identifies its breeding line.
Last year, more than 52 million pounds of fresh tilapia were exported to the United States, mostly from Latin America, as well as 422 million more pounds of frozen tilapia, both whole and fillet, nearly all from China, according to the United States Department of Agriculture.
The growth has been abetted by the creation and marketing of new products like fleshy “tilapia loins” — even though fish do not possess that anatomical feature.
For United States shoppers picking up tilapia from China or Honduras or Ecuador, there is little guidance. “It’s such a complicated job for consumers to decide what to eat, with aquaculture production expanding so rapidly,” said Peter Bridson, aquaculture research manager of the Monterey Bay Aquarium, which produces the popular Seafood Watch, an independent consumer guide to buying sustainable fish.
The new sustainability standards being developed for aquaculture will be tailored by species to address their diverse environmental risks. For tilapia, that means fish cages can be placed only in lakes where tilapia already live, and must be designed to prevent escapes. To limit overtaxing of lakes, the new guidelines establish water quality rules for oxygen and phosphorus, a product of fish waste.
Fish farms may not use prophylactic antibiotics. But even the new rules allow for some practices considered unacceptable in the United States, where cage farming in lakes is generally forbidden. In many states, tilapia must be housed in specially designed pens with roofs to prevent birds from carrying the fish elsewhere; their waste is often collected to use as fertilizer rather than released. Also, the new standards allow for baby fish to be fed testosterone even though markets like Whole Foods will not buy hormone-treated seafood.
For the moment, Seafood Watch lists tilapia raised in the United States as a “best choice,” tilapia from Latin America as a “good alternative” and tilapia from China as “to be avoided.” Less than 5 percent of the tilapia consumed in the United States is farmed within its borders, and that is mostly whole fish. Dr. Bridson said these rough ratings were largely based on the presence of effective monitoring in those places and how farms disposed of their waste.
The Pollution Problem
But many biologists worry that the big business of tilapia farming will outweigh caution, leaving dead lakes and extinct species.
Dr. McCrary has spent the past decade studying how a small, short-lived tilapia farm degraded Lake Apoyo in Nicaragua. “One small cage screwed up the entire lake — the entire lake!” he said of the farm, which existed from 1995 to 2000.
Waste from the cages polluted the pristine ecosystem, and some tilapia escaped. An aquatic plant called charra, an important food for fish, disappeared, leaving the lake a wasteland. Today, some species of plants and fish are slowly recovering, but others are probably gone forever, said Dr. McCrary, who works for the Nicaraguan foundation FUNDECI.
That experience explains why Dr. Salvador Montenegro, director of Nicaragua’s Center for Aquatic Resource Investigation, has spent a decade fighting to close the much larger Nicanor tilapia farm in a remote corner of Lake Nicaragua. “This kind of intensive fish farming jeopardizes a lake that is a national treasure, already under stress from pollution,” he said, once comparing its effect to allowing 3.7 million chickens to defecate in the water. Weaker fish, like the rainbow bass, have been disappearing from Lake Nicaragua as the number of tilapia has increased, said Ben Slow, a local fisherman.
But David Senna, the manager of Nicanor, said the company’s cages occupied only a tiny fraction of the lake, in an area with deep water and strong currents sufficient to carry away fish waste; it has taken monthly water samples to prove it. While he acknowledged that early on there were some escapes — one involving 10,000 tilapia — he noted that tilapia were introduced to Lake Nicaragua in the 1980s, “so if they’re going to take over, it was already doomed.”
Nutritional Concerns
For doctors, the debate has centered more on tilapia’s nutritional benefits, or lack thereof. Like all fish, tilapia is a good source of protein, with few of the unhealthy saturated fats in red meats. But unlike most other fish, tilapia contains relatively little of the fish oils that medical research has shown assist brain development and protect against heart disease, stroke and abnormal heart rhythms: a pair of omega-3 fatty acids.
“When people talk about the need to eat more fish, they are using that as a metaphor for fish oil, DHA and EPA,” said Edgar R. Miller III, associate professor of medicine and epidemiology at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. “So what do we do about the fact that tilapia and catfish, which are farm raised, have very low levels of these compounds?”
While a portion of tilapia has 135 milligrams of omega-3 fatty acids, a portion of salmon has over 2,000 milligrams. And farmed tilapia may have even less than wild tilapia because fish acquire omega-3s by eating aquatic plants and other fish. “They are what they eat,” Dr. Bridson said.
In farmed tilapia, raised largely on corn and soy, omega-3 levels depend on how much fish meal or fish oil the farm’s breeders mix in. While most fish species need a good helping of these fatty acids to grow, herbivorous tilapia grow decently with little or none. And there are compelling reasons to skimp on fish meal or oil additives: they are costly and create more pollution.
“The content can vary dramatically and the consumer won’t know it,” said Bruce Holub, a professor of nutritional science at the University of Guelph in Ontario, who said that omega-3 levels should appear on every fish label.
He and other experts echo the industry’s message that tilapia is nonetheless beneficial to eat as a lean source of protein and one that still contains some omega-3, where protein alternatives like red meat and chicken have none. But others are concerned about research showing that another type of fatty acids, the so-called omega-6 acids, outnumber the beneficial omega-3s in farmed tilapia by a factor of 2 to 1. Some research suggests that ratio increases the risk of heart disease; in salmon and trout the ratio is reversed.
With this in mind, the Mayo Clinic advises patients that some typically farmed fish, like tilapia and catfish, “don’t appear to be as heart-healthy.” More research will be needed to see whether improving fish feeds enhances tilapia’s health benefits, and whether the omega-6 levels in tilapia are significant relative to its already high prevalence in the American diet.
The Choice
Although environmentalists long battled to shut down Nicanor, the Nicaraguan fish farm is failing for another reason: cheap frozen tilapia fillets from China.
Imports of frozen tilapia to the United States rose 30 percent in 2010, as fresh fillet imports dropped 2 percent, reducing demand from smaller producers like Nicanor. Much of the fish that China exports is what producers call “refreshed,” which means it is frozen and packed in carbon monoxide to preserve color so it can be thawed and sold in fish displays, where it will appear to have been recently caught. Even in Managua, the capital of Nicaragua, the tilapia on supermarket shelves is from China.
“People wanted to pay $3.99 a pound for this frozen stuff rather than $5.99 for fresh, especially during the recession,” said Mr. Senna, the Nicanor manager. Chinese fish farms are regarded as poorly regulated, Dr. Bridson said, which is why the world needs clearer standards for sustainable fish farming and consumer labeling. Until then, the biggest producer offering the cheapest product is poised to win.
“If I have 100 tilapia in a pond, I may have happy tilapia because they have room to swim, but I won’t be able to sell them since I won’t get access to the global market,” Dr. McCrary said, adding that, for now, “there’s no tilapia equivalent of free-range chicken.”
Monday, January 14, 2013
What the heck is Ghee?
Definition: Ghee is the pure butterfat left over after the milk solids and water are removed from butter. It's used widely in Indian cooking, and the word ghee is the Hindi word for fat. Ghee might as well be a synonym for clarified butter, although there is one slight difference.
Like clarified butter, ghee is made by melting butter, cooking off the water and separating the clear, golden butter fat from the milk solids. The only difference is that in some traditions, ghee is simmered for a little while, thus browning the milk solids and adding a slightly nutty flavor to the finished product. Not all ghee recipes necessarily specify the browning of the milk solids, however, so for all practical purposes ghee is clarified butter with an Indian name.
So there ya go!
Like clarified butter, ghee is made by melting butter, cooking off the water and separating the clear, golden butter fat from the milk solids. The only difference is that in some traditions, ghee is simmered for a little while, thus browning the milk solids and adding a slightly nutty flavor to the finished product. Not all ghee recipes necessarily specify the browning of the milk solids, however, so for all practical purposes ghee is clarified butter with an Indian name.
So there ya go!
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