Paul Szmal: It's 8.15 on FLX Morning on Finger Lakes News Radio, time to talk nutrition, and for that we turn to our correspondent from Cornell Cooperative Extension, Candice Regal. Candice, good morning. How are you this morning?
Candice Reigel: Good morning, Paul. I'm good. How are you?
Paul Szmal: Doing well. Doing well. And I wanted to start off with the month of February being Heart Health Month with the goal from a nutritional standpoint of lowering the risk of heart disease. How does one go about doing that?
Candice Reigel: Yeah, so improving heart health lowers the risk of heart disease, like you said, and it can be attained through a heart-healthy diet. That's like a really big component of this, right? So changes in diet might seem overwhelming when you're just thinking of it as a whole, but they don't have to be. You can make small changes and just choose healthier alternatives to other things that you might like, right? So just big things are limit sugary drinks and salty processed foods as much as you can and go for more homemade meals.
Specifically, I like and what's gotten more important to me lately is a Mediterranean-style eating habit, and that's considered the healthiest diet for your heart, and it can help prevent heart disease and stroke and may even help you live longer. And that is a plan that emphasizes healthy fats, whole grains, fruits, vegetables, beans, nuts, seeds, and lean meats or fish, which is something that we focus on a lot when we talk nutrition anyway, just doing whole foods, single-ingredient foods, healthy fats, lots of fruits and veggies.
Paul Szmal: So for instance – I'm sorry. I didn't mean to cut in on you there, Candice, but I'm glad you mentioned the term healthy fats because that's not something that people, I think, hear or registers in their brain very often, that there are some fats that are healthy that are important to a balanced diet.
Candice Reigel: Yes, exactly. So for instance, if you're thinking healthy fats, like the top ones are usually like avocados are a great source of healthy fat. If you're using olive oil when you're cooking, that's a really good one. You can do salmon. Salmon's a really good one that has really healthy fats in it, and that's like a top choice that you want to choose for when you're thinking of like your healthy fats and your meats, right? And then other things are like choose wild rice, steel-cut oats for your whole grains. For fruits, berries are a really great option. They're really heart-healthy. Dark leafy greens are one of your top choices, and garbanzo beans or other legumes are really, really good, and they're like a main component of a Mediterranean diet. Walnuts and pecans, really heart-healthy. Those are your nuts. Choose like flax and chia seeds. You can put that on top of yogurt or mix it in with other baking things that you might make, right? And then salmon, like we said, is like that really good choice that's also like your meat but also has a really good amount of healthy fats.
But just some great tips to make it like practical when you're thinking of just how to start out. It's like try for a savory breakfast to start your day, and that could be like an egg with avocado, and that gets your healthy fat. That gets your protein. Your egg is really good for like vitamins and minerals, and so is the avocado. And then just maybe have like a little bit of yogurt and top it with berries, which is a really good choice. But have fresh fruits and veggies easily available all day long, and really try to drink a lot of water.
Paul Szmal: Yeah, it's important to stay hydrated for sure. How about the February harvest of the month, Candace?
Candice Reigel: Yeah, before we jump to that too, Paul, I want to make sure I don't leave out that physical activity is a really good important. I know we're doing mostly nutrition, but just make sure you're moving like throughout the day, like even getting up to take a short two-minute walk every 30 minutes can improve metabolic health, and it can like lower your blood sugar and kind of maintain those blood sugar and insulin levels. So if you can try to just set a timer maybe to get up, walk every 30 minutes, it could be just that short two minutes, and then still maybe try to do like a higher intense workout that gets your heart going, maybe like multiple times a week or once a day. But just try to get that 7,000 to 10,000 steps a day where you're just kind of like moving all day long, and that helps as well, especially after meals. But I just wanted to make sure I got that in there as well, because movement is really a large component of keeping your heart healthy as well.
Paul Szmal: Understood. Understood. So the harvest of the month this month is local proteins.
Candice Reigel: Yes. So we like to focus on beef, local beef, or dry beans for our New York harvest of the month for February, and that gets featured on our school menus for like our New York Thursdays for farm to school. But proteins are the building blocks of your bones, your muscles, your skin, blood, hormones, all those components in your body. And proteins are great because they take longer than carbohydrates to break down in your body, so you can get that longer lasting energy source and make you feel fuller longer. And if you're looking for alternatives to meat, which some people are, and they want to be more plant-based, those dry beans are like a great component to have because they have a higher protein level than a lot of your other vegetables that you could choose. But yeah, so beef and dry beans is our February, really great source of vitamins and minerals.
And then looking ahead to March, we focus on maple syrup.
Paul Szmal: Ah, yes. One of my favorites, maple syrup, absolutely.
Candice Reigel: Also in March...
Paul Szmal: Yep, and perfect for the time of year.
Candice Reigel: Yeah, oh, definitely. And also in March is the New York Agricultural Literacy Week.
Paul Szmal: Yeah, so we do this every year through 4-H in our office, and it's Agricultural Literacy Week, and it's usually the second, yeah, it's the 17th to the 21st. So we celebrate New York agriculture by reading a book, The Pie That Molly Grew This Year, by Sue Heavenrich, which she's actually a local author in Tioga County. And our volunteers come in, we read to second grade classrooms usually, sometimes we do kindergarten and first if we have a lot of interested classrooms. And this year, readers are going to learn how to grow a pumpkin as they follow Molly in the book on her journey from bringing a pumpkin to harvest. And at the end, it gets turned into a delicious pie, pumpkin pie, to celebrate. And yeah, it's going to be a great book for kids to learn about growing something and celebrating with other people and sharing. And then our volunteers read it, and then the book gets donated to the classroom or school library.
Paul Szmal: Nice, very nice. We're talking with Candace Riegel from Cornell Cooperative Extension, we're talking nutrition this morning. Speaking of which, to flashback to Heart Health Month and trying to eat healthy, you can do that and eat great local content at the same time.
Candice Reigel: Oh, yeah, yeah, definitely, like, even though it's winter, there's great options that are still out there, right? There's things that store well, that are local, like veggies, so some potatoes, sweet potatoes, some squash and cabbage and onions and garlic around here really great, but you can also do things like make soups and bone broths from local veggies and meats or meat bones. And then other things that are easy to come by around here are local eggs, flour, those dry beans we were talking about, dairy products like milk and cheese, and then our honey and maple syrup is usually available, like, all year long, right?
Paul Szmal: Oh, yes, and I love local, love a lot of local products, use a lot of them in my kitchen. There's an upcoming event for the 4-H Crafts and Fiber Arts Workshop Series coming up. Can you tell us a little bit about that?
Candice Reigel: Yeah, so they had one, I think, last week or a couple weeks ago, but they do them every couple of weeks, and you can go and register on our website, but so 4-H is doing a Crafts and Fiber Arts kind of series, and the next one is on Wednesday, February 26, so this next week coming up, and it's from 6 to 8pm. This one is going to be all things beads, and that's going to be kind of led and directed by a 4-H youth leader, Iris Enslow, and they're just going to be learning to do different things with beads, and then I also added a couple other events that we have coming up as well, so there's Alette's Garden Day is coming up on March 1st, that's a Saturday, and you can join Master Gardener volunteers from 8.30 to 2.30 at the Obed Fire Department to learn interesting new garden-related information. It's $30 a person, and you can also register online, and then I also have one more. This kind of goes along with our nutrition quite a bit, it's a Seed to Supper gardening session where, well it starts April 1st, you can join Master Gardener volunteers again for a free beginner gardening course to learn how to build, plant, and care for a successful vegetable garden, and then that kind of involves all the aspect of nutrition as well, right, so Seed to Supper, how you're going to grow all that, maintain your garden, take care of it, and then use all that wonderful produce as well, and you can register online at our website too.
Paul Szmal: And let's go ahead and give out that website for people that are maybe thinking about registering for one of these events that we're talking about.
Candice Reigel: Yeah, so it's SenecaCountyCC.org, right, it's our Cornell Cooperative Extension Seneca County website. We have many different pages on there that you can go for specific information, but we have all our events listed, you can register for anyone that you're interested in, and we also have our nutrition page, What's Up with Nutrition, and we do a monthly page where you can go back through and see all of our main topics for nutrition for that month, and we put a lot of this information that we're talking about right now up on our website so everybody can go back, check it out, and find recipes and all other great information on there as well.
Paul Szmal: Wonderful. Candice, thank you so much for sharing this morning. Much appreciated.
Candice Reigel: Yeah, thank you so much. I hope you have a good day.
Paul Szmal: You too.
