Selected Podcast
Getting More Variety in Your Diet
Let's be honest, food is delicious and can also be a great connector for people but sometimes, we can get stuck in the same food routines without much variety and it's always good to shake things up. Jodi Dalyai discusses how you can get more variety into your diet by using foods from a variety of cultures.
Featured Speaker:
Jodi Dalyai, MS, RD, CDE
Jodi Dalyai, MS, RD, CDE has been a dietitian for 10 years. She has worked with a variety patients focusing on weight management, diabetes management, and plant based nutrition. Jodi is excited to bring her love of food and years of experience to Henry Mayo. Transcription:
It's Your Health Radio, a special podcast series presented by Henry Mayo Newhall Hospital. Here's Melanie Cole.
Melanie Cole, MS (Host): Food is one of my favorite things. It can be amazing or boring. And I think during the pandemic, we may have looked to our comfort favorites. But now things are opening back up, we can really shake things up a bit. There are so many variety of foods and the more the variety and the more the colors, the better it is for us.
Welcome to It's Your Health Radio with Henry Mayo Newhall Hospital. I'm Melanie Cole. Today, we're talking with Jodi Dalyai. She's a registered dietician in the Community Education Department at Henry Mayo Newhall Hospital to tell us how to get more variety in our diet.
Jodi, thank you so much for joining us again. You are such a great guest as always. So before we get into variety and diets, there are a lot of fad diets and you and I have talked about some of them, but one of the ones that's sort of making the rounds is intermittent fasting. And so I just want to ask you about that because people have questions about it. Can you tell us about that?
Jodi Dalyai, MD: Thanks for having me on.
You know, there's lots of great research that intermittent fasting is good for all of us. It gives the body time to take a break. But I think we can look at it at its most simple way, is going back maybe 30 years, 50 years when people didn't snack all the time or people worked more traditional hours and we ate breakfast and we had dinner and we didn't snack until 11:00 PM.
So even just keeping your eating window to, you know, a 12-hour period with 12 hours of sleep and not eating time is a really realistic way for people to do intermittent fasting. The idea is, you know, you should have breaks where you aren't giving your body food. And there's research that's shown a four-hour window, six-hour window, eight-hour window for eating and lots of good results from that, but not always practical for people's routines and work schedules and family schedules. I usually suggest people just start to try to have their dinner earlier and try to tell themselves to cut off eating after, you know, 7:00 PM. Because if you cut off eating by then and then maybe wake up and do your stuff in the morning and don't eat until 7:00 or 8:00 AM, you've given your body a long period of fasting. So that's a practical way to use intermittent fasting as a way to give your body a chance to lower inflammation, get better at blood sugar control and potentially help with some weight loss.
Melanie Cole, MS (Host): Well, thank you for that. Such interesting information. So now let's talk about getting variety. As I said in the intro, Jodi, during the pandemic, I think a lot of people were looking to their comfort favorites. You know, a lot of mac and cheese and pizza and things along those lines, but we really want to get that variety in. So tell us a little bit about what that means. When we say variety, that doesn't just mean hamburgers instead of pizza and mac and cheese, right? It means we're looking at all of the different things and the vegetables and the fruits and all of those things.
Jodi Dalyai, MD: I think variety oftentimes means trying to change up what you eat from the normal, maybe switching out the ingredients, cooking in a different way. And, you know, we always want to start where we're at. So if you're only used to eating, you know, red, delicious apples, maybe for you, variety is just trying a new apple. And that can be a good way to get your taste buds interested in a new food. It can be also trying to eat with the seasons and looking at what produce is coming into the farmer's market and the supermarket and switching out apples, you know, we'll be getting very soon and then we'll start to get towards more summer produce like peaches and plums and other stone fruit.
So variety, often we think of fruits and vegetables, but I also think you can bring it into the other foods you eat. Maybe you are used to more fast food or comfort foods, as you mentioned. So switching up your pasta meal, maybe trying a different dish. Even if you have pizza, could you try making it at home? Just giving your taste buds and giving yourself a little challenge with trying some new foods.
Melanie Cole, MS (Host): Well, that is really great information. And I must just say a little thing, because last night, I really made an amazing meal with salmon and I tried a different, you know, glaze on top, but I did brussels sprouts and little mini roasted potatoes with beets. I mean, it was just really a meal fit for the gods.
Jodi Dalyai, MD: Sounds like it.
Melanie Cole, MS (Host): Oh, so awesome. And they just, of course, swallowed it right down, so barely even tasted any of it. But they're, you know, teenagers and such. But when we think of cultures, now, that's one of the places where they do eat these variety of foods. But can you tell us a little bit about some of the cultures. Mediterranean, which we know is a healthy way to eat; Middle Eastern; Mexican, everybody eats Mexican food these days. Tell us how those cultures bring that variety and how we can utilize. Tell us some of your favorite foods from those cultures that we can bring into ours.
Jodi Dalyai, MD: Yeah. I mean, I think that's something that I usually tell people, is maybe take a minute and think about the cultural foods you grew up with. You know, a lot of times we think, "Oh, I don't have a background in food. You know, my family's been living in California or Texas or Georgia forever." But I think if you take a minute and think about it, that's not true. You know, my family's from the south, so I grew up eating things like, you know, fried catfish and collard greens and black eyed peas. My father's family was Russian way back when, so I grew up with some more traditional Russian or Jewish food. So everyone probably can lean back on maybe some cultural foods. And if you never grew up with them, maybe talking to family members or even just researching yourself to look and see what cultural foods might be part of your heritage is a great thing to maybe explore this month. But like you said, we all maybe eat out or have just foods we know we enjoy, like Mexican cuisine, so that's another good place to try to get some variety.
In my home, I feel like all types of Latin influenced food is tasty to me. I love spicy. So I love anything I can put jalapenos on whether that's a version of Thai food or other Southeast Asian food. So looking to those flavors you like and seeing how you can incorporate them more. And it doesn't have to be complicated. It can be really kind of a halfway homemade, making your own, you know, Asian style stir fry by buying some already cut up Asian vegetables or just cutting up some mushrooms and some bok choy and stir frying them with some ginger and garlic, using a little soy sauce, having some tofu or shrimp.
You know, it doesn't have to be complicated, but I think looking at the foods you already enjoy. Looking at the restaurants you enjoy going to if you go out to eat, looking at your heritage and finding a way to incorporate those foods are good ways to shake it up a bit and make sure you're getting the variety for taste, but also for health. That is obviously an important part of keeping our bodies healthy. Getting different colors, as you mentioned in the intro, does give our body different antioxidants that help us fight oxidative stress and cancer risk. And not just fruits and vegetables, but also different kinds of herbs. Using fresh herbs for their amazing flavor, right? Cilantro and basil. Those intense flavors, that dark green that comes with many of our herbs is so good for our body. So maybe even just making something you'd normally make, but maybe putting instead of a dried or no herbs at all, putting on some fresh basil, putting on some fresh mint, putting on some fresh cilantro and see the really strong smelling and tasting flavor that that brings to your food.
Anything that brings the idea of preparing more at home to people makes it easy, makes it accessible is a win, right? Anytime we cook at home, even if we're using some pre-prepared items, we're usually providing a little bit more nutrition than getting it in a restaurant. It's not because restaurants are purposely trying to give us less healthy food, it's just to keep food over days, to make food that can be prepared in large quantities day after day. A lot of time, that means higher sodium. To make you want to come back and really enjoy it, it's going to mean a little more sugar, some more fat. But if you do it at home, it's probably a little bit more nutritious. You might be more likely to be like, "Oh, I don't have this, but I do have this. Maybe I'll use this ingredient instead." So I encourage everyone to use whatever resources work for them. You know, online websites and blogs. I tend to go more for some blogs that I enjoy, but TikTok videos. I subscribe to newspapers, so the LA times and New York times both have awesome recipes that they put out every day. Lots of focus, I think too, in then last couple of years on more vegetarian and plant forward fare, which again benefits everyone and is so inexpensive, right? Prices are going up not just for gas, but we know food prices have gone up exponentially and make it very difficult for many people maybe to eat the way they used to. But if you're doing plant-forward foods and using things like beans or legumes instead of meat, you're going to have nutritious and also like much less expensive tasty food to eat.
Melanie Cole, MS (Host): And the farmer markets are starting to open back up and that sort of thing is happening. So really buying local, sustainable, that's great way to get more variety because you walk around those farmer's markets and you say, "Oh look, there's bok choy. What do I do with that?" And so you can make it even a family affair, right, Jody? You can like have your kids look up some recipes, have a little contest who can make something with kale. It's just a great way to mix it all up. Use tahini, use vegetables and colors. So wrap it up for us. If you were to tell somebody the best way to get variety into their diet, to break out of their same old patterns, what would you tell them?
Jodi Dalyai, MD: I tell them just to get out to the supermarket or the farmer's market, like you mentioned, and explore. Look for something that catches their eye or something maybe they realize" I haven't had an artichoke in a while. Maybe I want to buy artichokes today." And if it's something new and you've never made it, like you said, look up online, go on TikTok. Google it. Find a recipe. There's tons of easy things that you could try to incorporate something new and then really just try to eat a few different colors every day from your plant foods. Try to get something orange, try to get something green, something red or purple. And it'll benefit your health and hopefully reinvigorate those taste buds.
Melanie Cole, MS (Host): Certainly great advice. And thank you so much. I love artichokes. I'm so glad you mentioned that. Now, I'm going to go out there and look for one of those to roast up too. And you can find more nutrition tips on the Henry Mayo Nutrition Blog. Go to henrymayofitness.org and type the word nutrition in the search box. That wraps up this episode of It's Your Health Radio with Henry Mayo Newhall Hospital. For more health tips and updates, follow us on your social channels. Go get some more variety in your diet. Pick something new. Do it today. I'm Melanie Cole.
It's Your Health Radio, a special podcast series presented by Henry Mayo Newhall Hospital. Here's Melanie Cole.
Melanie Cole, MS (Host): Food is one of my favorite things. It can be amazing or boring. And I think during the pandemic, we may have looked to our comfort favorites. But now things are opening back up, we can really shake things up a bit. There are so many variety of foods and the more the variety and the more the colors, the better it is for us.
Welcome to It's Your Health Radio with Henry Mayo Newhall Hospital. I'm Melanie Cole. Today, we're talking with Jodi Dalyai. She's a registered dietician in the Community Education Department at Henry Mayo Newhall Hospital to tell us how to get more variety in our diet.
Jodi, thank you so much for joining us again. You are such a great guest as always. So before we get into variety and diets, there are a lot of fad diets and you and I have talked about some of them, but one of the ones that's sort of making the rounds is intermittent fasting. And so I just want to ask you about that because people have questions about it. Can you tell us about that?
Jodi Dalyai, MD: Thanks for having me on.
You know, there's lots of great research that intermittent fasting is good for all of us. It gives the body time to take a break. But I think we can look at it at its most simple way, is going back maybe 30 years, 50 years when people didn't snack all the time or people worked more traditional hours and we ate breakfast and we had dinner and we didn't snack until 11:00 PM.
So even just keeping your eating window to, you know, a 12-hour period with 12 hours of sleep and not eating time is a really realistic way for people to do intermittent fasting. The idea is, you know, you should have breaks where you aren't giving your body food. And there's research that's shown a four-hour window, six-hour window, eight-hour window for eating and lots of good results from that, but not always practical for people's routines and work schedules and family schedules. I usually suggest people just start to try to have their dinner earlier and try to tell themselves to cut off eating after, you know, 7:00 PM. Because if you cut off eating by then and then maybe wake up and do your stuff in the morning and don't eat until 7:00 or 8:00 AM, you've given your body a long period of fasting. So that's a practical way to use intermittent fasting as a way to give your body a chance to lower inflammation, get better at blood sugar control and potentially help with some weight loss.
Melanie Cole, MS (Host): Well, thank you for that. Such interesting information. So now let's talk about getting variety. As I said in the intro, Jodi, during the pandemic, I think a lot of people were looking to their comfort favorites. You know, a lot of mac and cheese and pizza and things along those lines, but we really want to get that variety in. So tell us a little bit about what that means. When we say variety, that doesn't just mean hamburgers instead of pizza and mac and cheese, right? It means we're looking at all of the different things and the vegetables and the fruits and all of those things.
Jodi Dalyai, MD: I think variety oftentimes means trying to change up what you eat from the normal, maybe switching out the ingredients, cooking in a different way. And, you know, we always want to start where we're at. So if you're only used to eating, you know, red, delicious apples, maybe for you, variety is just trying a new apple. And that can be a good way to get your taste buds interested in a new food. It can be also trying to eat with the seasons and looking at what produce is coming into the farmer's market and the supermarket and switching out apples, you know, we'll be getting very soon and then we'll start to get towards more summer produce like peaches and plums and other stone fruit.
So variety, often we think of fruits and vegetables, but I also think you can bring it into the other foods you eat. Maybe you are used to more fast food or comfort foods, as you mentioned. So switching up your pasta meal, maybe trying a different dish. Even if you have pizza, could you try making it at home? Just giving your taste buds and giving yourself a little challenge with trying some new foods.
Melanie Cole, MS (Host): Well, that is really great information. And I must just say a little thing, because last night, I really made an amazing meal with salmon and I tried a different, you know, glaze on top, but I did brussels sprouts and little mini roasted potatoes with beets. I mean, it was just really a meal fit for the gods.
Jodi Dalyai, MD: Sounds like it.
Melanie Cole, MS (Host): Oh, so awesome. And they just, of course, swallowed it right down, so barely even tasted any of it. But they're, you know, teenagers and such. But when we think of cultures, now, that's one of the places where they do eat these variety of foods. But can you tell us a little bit about some of the cultures. Mediterranean, which we know is a healthy way to eat; Middle Eastern; Mexican, everybody eats Mexican food these days. Tell us how those cultures bring that variety and how we can utilize. Tell us some of your favorite foods from those cultures that we can bring into ours.
Jodi Dalyai, MD: Yeah. I mean, I think that's something that I usually tell people, is maybe take a minute and think about the cultural foods you grew up with. You know, a lot of times we think, "Oh, I don't have a background in food. You know, my family's been living in California or Texas or Georgia forever." But I think if you take a minute and think about it, that's not true. You know, my family's from the south, so I grew up eating things like, you know, fried catfish and collard greens and black eyed peas. My father's family was Russian way back when, so I grew up with some more traditional Russian or Jewish food. So everyone probably can lean back on maybe some cultural foods. And if you never grew up with them, maybe talking to family members or even just researching yourself to look and see what cultural foods might be part of your heritage is a great thing to maybe explore this month. But like you said, we all maybe eat out or have just foods we know we enjoy, like Mexican cuisine, so that's another good place to try to get some variety.
In my home, I feel like all types of Latin influenced food is tasty to me. I love spicy. So I love anything I can put jalapenos on whether that's a version of Thai food or other Southeast Asian food. So looking to those flavors you like and seeing how you can incorporate them more. And it doesn't have to be complicated. It can be really kind of a halfway homemade, making your own, you know, Asian style stir fry by buying some already cut up Asian vegetables or just cutting up some mushrooms and some bok choy and stir frying them with some ginger and garlic, using a little soy sauce, having some tofu or shrimp.
You know, it doesn't have to be complicated, but I think looking at the foods you already enjoy. Looking at the restaurants you enjoy going to if you go out to eat, looking at your heritage and finding a way to incorporate those foods are good ways to shake it up a bit and make sure you're getting the variety for taste, but also for health. That is obviously an important part of keeping our bodies healthy. Getting different colors, as you mentioned in the intro, does give our body different antioxidants that help us fight oxidative stress and cancer risk. And not just fruits and vegetables, but also different kinds of herbs. Using fresh herbs for their amazing flavor, right? Cilantro and basil. Those intense flavors, that dark green that comes with many of our herbs is so good for our body. So maybe even just making something you'd normally make, but maybe putting instead of a dried or no herbs at all, putting on some fresh basil, putting on some fresh mint, putting on some fresh cilantro and see the really strong smelling and tasting flavor that that brings to your food.
Anything that brings the idea of preparing more at home to people makes it easy, makes it accessible is a win, right? Anytime we cook at home, even if we're using some pre-prepared items, we're usually providing a little bit more nutrition than getting it in a restaurant. It's not because restaurants are purposely trying to give us less healthy food, it's just to keep food over days, to make food that can be prepared in large quantities day after day. A lot of time, that means higher sodium. To make you want to come back and really enjoy it, it's going to mean a little more sugar, some more fat. But if you do it at home, it's probably a little bit more nutritious. You might be more likely to be like, "Oh, I don't have this, but I do have this. Maybe I'll use this ingredient instead." So I encourage everyone to use whatever resources work for them. You know, online websites and blogs. I tend to go more for some blogs that I enjoy, but TikTok videos. I subscribe to newspapers, so the LA times and New York times both have awesome recipes that they put out every day. Lots of focus, I think too, in then last couple of years on more vegetarian and plant forward fare, which again benefits everyone and is so inexpensive, right? Prices are going up not just for gas, but we know food prices have gone up exponentially and make it very difficult for many people maybe to eat the way they used to. But if you're doing plant-forward foods and using things like beans or legumes instead of meat, you're going to have nutritious and also like much less expensive tasty food to eat.
Melanie Cole, MS (Host): And the farmer markets are starting to open back up and that sort of thing is happening. So really buying local, sustainable, that's great way to get more variety because you walk around those farmer's markets and you say, "Oh look, there's bok choy. What do I do with that?" And so you can make it even a family affair, right, Jody? You can like have your kids look up some recipes, have a little contest who can make something with kale. It's just a great way to mix it all up. Use tahini, use vegetables and colors. So wrap it up for us. If you were to tell somebody the best way to get variety into their diet, to break out of their same old patterns, what would you tell them?
Jodi Dalyai, MD: I tell them just to get out to the supermarket or the farmer's market, like you mentioned, and explore. Look for something that catches their eye or something maybe they realize" I haven't had an artichoke in a while. Maybe I want to buy artichokes today." And if it's something new and you've never made it, like you said, look up online, go on TikTok. Google it. Find a recipe. There's tons of easy things that you could try to incorporate something new and then really just try to eat a few different colors every day from your plant foods. Try to get something orange, try to get something green, something red or purple. And it'll benefit your health and hopefully reinvigorate those taste buds.
Melanie Cole, MS (Host): Certainly great advice. And thank you so much. I love artichokes. I'm so glad you mentioned that. Now, I'm going to go out there and look for one of those to roast up too. And you can find more nutrition tips on the Henry Mayo Nutrition Blog. Go to henrymayofitness.org and type the word nutrition in the search box. That wraps up this episode of It's Your Health Radio with Henry Mayo Newhall Hospital. For more health tips and updates, follow us on your social channels. Go get some more variety in your diet. Pick something new. Do it today. I'm Melanie Cole.