Indian-Style Lentils - Healthy Food Tip and Recipe

healthy food tip and recipe
August 10, 2013

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Today's Recipe

If you don't know what to serve for dinner tonight ...

Combine this tasty lentil dish with rice for a hearty meatless meal to add to your Healthiest Way of Eating. It will provide you with a complete protein as well many other health-promoting nutrients.

Indian-Style Lentils

Prep and Cook Time: 20 minutes

Ingredients:

• 1 medium size onion, diced
• 1 TBS vegetable broth
• 2 cloves garlic, minced
• 1 tsp ginger
• 1/2 tsp turmeric
• 1/2 tsp salt
• 1 cup canned diced tomatoes
• 2 cups or 1 15-oz can (BPA free) lentils
• 1 cup frozen spinach

Directions:

1. Dice onions and mince garlic and let sit for at least 5 minutes to bring out their health-promoting properties.
2. Healthy sauté onion in 1 TBS broth for 3 minutes.
3. Add garlic, ginger, turmeric, salt, tomatoes and lentils.
4. Simmer covered for 5-7 minutes.
5. Add 1 cup frozen spinach and continue simmering for 2 more minutes.

Serves 2 Serve over brown rice.
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In-Depth Nutritional Profile for Indian-Style Lentils

Healthy Food Tip

Can you tell me how to convert the grams of omega-3 fatty acids on your omega-3 chart into teaspoons of oil?

Unfortunately, there is no simple way to convert grams of omega-3 fatty acids in our omega-3 chart into teaspoons of oil. There are two problems that get in the way here. First, remember that grams are units of measurement involving weight and teaspoons are units of measurement involving volume. (Weight is something you measure on a scale, and volume is the amount of space that something fills.) These two different categories of measurement don't have any simple relationship when it comes to food and nutrients. Second, remember that oil is only one component contained in a nut or seed. For example, you cannot make one tablespoon of flaxseed oil from one tablespoon of flaxseeds! Both of these problems leave you with no simple way to convert from grams of omega-3s in flaxseeds into grams of omega-3s in oil. However, here are some general principles you might find helpful:
On average, one teaspoon of oil weights 4.5 grams. This rule applies to all food oils, including flaxseed oil, olive oil, sunflower seed oil, and many others. Since no plant oil consists of 100% omega-3s, one teaspoon of a plant oil can never contain a full 4.5 grams of omega-3s. In fact, even a very omega-3 rich oil is seldom more than 50% omega-3, or about 2-3 grams of omega-3s per teaspoon (at the most). So right off the bat, you know that it's going to take more than one teaspoon of a plant oil to give you more than 2-3 grams of omega-3s.
With the above context in mind, let's look at one specific plant food and one specific oil, which are known to contain omega-3 fatty acids. In this case, we'll use flaxseeds and flaxseed oil as an example since flaxseeds stand at the top of our omega-3 chart. (We could also use other omega-3 containing foods and oils, including rapeseeds and canola oil, walnuts and walnut oil, soybeans and soybean oil, and others.)
In our omega-3 chart, we show flaxseeds as containing an average of 3.51 grams of omega-3s in every 2 tablespoons. As discussed previously, there's no simple way to convert from tablespoons of seeds into an equivalent amount of oil. The only solution is to look up flaxseed oil in a nutrient database (like the U.S. Department of Agriculture's free nutrient database that can be accessed online at www.nal.usda.gov/fnic/foodcomp/search/).
In a nutrient database, you'll find flaxseed oil to contain about 7.25 grams of omega-3s per tablespoon. You can already see here that half of that amount (1/2 tablespoon) would contain approximately 3.6 grams of omega-3s-very close to the 3.51 grams found in 2 tablespoons of seeds. So, using a nutrient database as your information source (in this case the SR19 version of the USDA database), you can see that it only takes ½ tablespoon of flaxseed oil to provide you with the same amount of omega-3s found in 2 tablespoons of flaxseeds. Once again, while there is no direct way to convert back and forth between our omega-3 chart into teaspoons of plant oil, you can use a nutrient database as a way to make the conversion.
If you are only wanting omega-3 fatty acids and nothing more, you can see that flaxseed oil will provide you with a higher amount of omega-3s more quickly than flaxseeds themselves. However, it is also important to remember that flax oil is not a whole food, and that whole foods like flaxseeds provide you with a far greater variety of health-supportive nutrients. If you are seeking optimal overall nutrition and not simply omega-3s, flaxseeds are the way to go. Because flaxseeds are very small, difficult to chew, and can often pass all the way through your digestive tract without getting digested, I also encourage you to consider ground flaxseeds instead of whole flaxseeds. You can purchase flax that has already been ground. It usually comes in a vacuum-sealed pouch, and just be sure to keep it refrigerated and observe the expiration date. You can also grind your own flaxseeds, and in this case, I recommend grinding only the amount you will be consuming that day.