Diet Tips - Incorporating Whole Grains

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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, Im going to show you how to incorporate whole grains into your healthy lifestyle. Were going to cook some chilly, and put it over brown rice. Were going to make a wonderful salad with barley and black beans. Im also going to show you a countertop steamer and how you can use it to make cooking whole grains very simple. Im going to explain to you why you should be incorporating whole grains into your diet. Lets get started with some information about the whole grains. Most of us eat lots of grains everyday. We eat breakfast cereal, 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. You have probably heard that its 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. Were just going to toss out the white flour cereals, and the corn chips and the white bread, and the pasta, and the rose, and everything else that you have in your kitchen thats made with white flour, and instead were going to look for whole grain products; whole wheat pasta, cereals made from whole grains, breads from whole grains. You may think that thats easy, but its really not as easy as it sounds, because manufacturers of food know that youre looking for healthy things, so sometimes they try to trick you. They will put things on their labels, like multi-grain or cracked-wheat, or stone-ground wheat, and you think youre getting whole grains when youre 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 youre not getting the whole grain in that list of ingredients, youre 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 youre getting the whole grain is to eat the whole grains themselves. Whole grains before they get grounded 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 grounded into flour. So, these when you buy seeds that you could actually sprout and grow into a plant, you know youre really eating the whole grain. In just a minute Im going to show you how to cook these whole grains.

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