Diet Tips - Incorporating Whole Grains

Diana Mirkin: Hello, I am Diana Mirkin, author of the Good Food Book. With my husband Dr. Gabe Mirkin I have taught thousands of people how to eat more healthfully through our radio shows, books, website and cooking classes.

Today, I am going to show you how to incorporate whole grains into your healthy lifestyle. We are going to cook some chili and put it over brown rice. We are going to make a wonderful salad with barley and black beans. I am also going to show you a countertop steamer and how you can use it to make cooking whole grains, very simple. I am going to explain to you why you should be incorporating whole grains into your diet.

Let's get started with some information about the whole grains. Most of us eat lots of grains every day, we eat breakfast cereals, we probably have pasta and bread and chips and cake and bagels and all of those things made with flour or milled corn or white rice are grain products and you have probably heard that it's a good idea to make most of those grain products whole grains instead of refined grains. I would like to show you how to tell the difference.

Almost all of the junky foods that we eat are made with refined flour and you really want to eat as few of those as possible. We are just going to toss out the white flour cereals and the corn chips, and the white bread, and the pasta, and the rolls and everything else that you have in your kitchen that's made with white flour and instead we are going to look for whole grain products.

Whole wheat pasta, cereals made from whole grains, breads made from whole grains. You may think that that's easy but it's really not as easy as it sounds because many factories of food know that you are looking for healthy things. So sometimes they try to trick you and they will put things on their labels like Multigrain or cracked wheat or stone ground wheat and you think you are getting whole grains when you are actually not. You always want to look at the list of ingredients and see if the very first ingredient says 100% whole wheat or 100% whole corn or whole oats because if you are not getting the whole grain in that list of ingredients, you are not eating a whole grain product.

So when you buy pasta or breakfast cereal or bread, look at the list of ingredients. Now an even easier way to make sure that you are getting the whole grain is to eat to whole grains themselves. Whole grains before they get ground into flour look like little seeds and you can find some of them right in your supermarket. Brown rice for example or barley or wild rice or even our old friend popcorn. Those are real whole grains that have not been cracked and opened and ground into flour.

So if these, when you buy seeds that you could actually sprout and grow into a plant, you know you are really eating the whole grain and in just a minute I am going to show you how to cook these whole grains.