Embrace Seasonal Eating: A Journey to Mindful Nutrition for Women’s Health and Well-Being

Have you ever wondered how the foods you eat can influence your mood, energy, and overall well-being? In this enlightening episode of Real Food Stories, host Heather Carey dives deep into the transformative power of seasonal eating—an approach that not only nourishes the body but also aligns with the rhythms of nature. Heather, a passionate culinary nutritionist, shares her personal food journey, revealing how embracing seasonal ingredients has helped her make peace with her eating habits and cultivate a healthier lifestyle.

Seasonal eating is more than just a trend; it’s a practice rooted in traditional Chinese medicine that connects specific foods to the characteristics of each season. Heather explains how this holistic approach can enhance women’s health, particularly during midlife and menopause. By understanding the five seasons and their corresponding foods, listeners can learn to make mindful eating choices that support their emotional states and overall health.

Throughout the episode, Heather provides practical and actionable healthy eating tips for embracing seasonal eating. From growing your own food to joining a Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) program and shopping at local farmers’ markets, she offers insights that make seasonal cooking enjoyable and accessible for everyone. As she shares her personal food stories and the influence of family food traditions, listeners are encouraged to reflect on their own food beliefs and the joy of eating in harmony with nature’s cycles.

Additionally, Heather addresses common diet myths and food fads that can cloud our understanding of nutrition, especially for women navigating the complexities of midlife. She emphasizes the importance of being aware of our dietary choices and how they can impact our health and wellness, particularly during menopause. With insights on mindful eating practices and the seven pillars of abundance, Heather empowers listeners to take charge of their nutrition and make healthy lifestyle choices that resonate with their personal values.

To cap off this enriching conversation, Heather invites you to join her Summer Inspired Recipe Club, a delightful initiative aimed at making seasonal cooking both fun and easy. Whether you’re looking for cooking techniques or simply want to explore the intersection of food and culture, this episode of Real Food Stories is your gateway to a more mindful and fulfilling relationship with food. Tune in to discover how seasonal eating can not only transform your plate but also uplift your spirit and nurture your body.

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Transcript:

Speaker #0
Hi everybody and welcome back. I’m so glad you are here with me again today. What a treat. I am your host Heather Carey, nutritionist, chef, mom, and a woman who has been around the block with food. I want to open up about real food in relationship to health, weight, and our bodies so you can make peace with what you eat. If this is your first time listening, you might want to circle back to listen to the first two podcasts where I talk about my story around food, my years of dieting, and how I finally made peace with my weight, and how I choose to nourish myself today. Today, I’m switching gears for a bit to jump out of my past and talk about something specific that is so important to me, and really important for all of us, and that is the significance of seasonal eating. I know, you might have heard these words before. that seasonal eating is good for you, but what is it exactly? And well, who cares? Do we really have to care about eating with the seasons? And is this just another thing we need to worry about or feel like we’re just not doing good enough, as many of us often can feel like we’re doing? But I’m going to give you my take today on why eating with the seasons is so important, especially for women, and then talk about some you ways to embrace eating with the natural rhythms of the seasons so you can enjoy and really actually love what you eat and be more mindful and aware. Awareness is the first key step to making changes to your health, diet, and weight. And this one could actually be your easiest and most enjoyable task. So, okay. The world has become a very small place, right? We can literally source food from anywhere in the world. I mean, just click on Amazon to realize that things you might have had an impossible time finding in stores years ago are now accessible to anyone at any time. And in some ways, this is a great thing. The other day, for example, I wanted to get a very specific Korean dried chili pepper to make kimchi. which is a really great fermented sauerkraut dish. Super easy, by the way, and really good for you. Anyway, I had read about this chili pepper that you can only find in specialty stores. And I thought, before I even start driving around or searching Google for the closest locations and start making phone calls, I’m just ordering from Amazon. Point, click, done. I had it in two days. No big deal. So. I get it. We’re not living in the 1940s, but the importance of staying in close proximity to where we live and what the seasons are giving us as much as possible is important, and maybe even more than ever. And it’s not so we can feel better about helping out the farmers in our town or doing good with the environment, although these things are extremely important and things I totally advocate. I think of seasonal eating, though, as really honoring who we are as women in the kindest of ways. And I’m going to share with you why and what I have learned over the years about just being connected with my food in a very present way. So let’s get on to why it’s so important to honor the seasons when it comes to our food. If you heard my last podcast, you know that I went to a cooking school that was based on a health supportive food and a food as medicine philosophy. This was when I first learned about why seasonal eating was so important to our health, when I really began to cook in earnest. And I learned about the Asian philosophy of the five seasons. This might be totally foreign to you, but if you have dabbled at all with traditional Chinese medicine, such as using acupuncture or herbs or anything of the sort, for example, you might know exactly what I mean. I’m going to give you a brief explanation, and this topic might actually warrant even another podcast on the subject, so we’ll see, because I’m going to just sum this up a little quickly. In traditional Chinese medicine, there is a approximately 3,000-year-old belief of physical and environmental health. that honors the natural cycles of the seasons. The seasons are actually divided into five areas, and those areas are surrounded by five energy fields. Wood for spring, fire for summer, earth for Indian summer, metal for autumn, and water for winter. So there’s five seasons, Indian summer getting a special mention. These energy fields really dictate things such as our emotional states and correspond to specific areas of the body. The fields also correspond to our tastes and senses and Therefore, to the food choices, we could be gravitating towards in a particular season. I’m going to put a link in the show notes of this chart so you can see exactly what I’m talking about. I think it will help make a little bit more sense and be really, really clear. The wood phase, which we are technically in right now, corresponds with spring. And we are about to phase out of this season. at least here in the Northeast, and go into the fire phase, which corresponds with summer. In spring, according to traditional Chinese medicine, green foods like lettuces, dark leafy greens such as kale and spinach, green peas, string beans, broccoli are all emphasized. And this makes sense when growing your food, if you think about it. These are the foods that grow best in a cooler spring environment. They’re what I am growing right now in my own garden. Other foods that are highlighted during the wood season are sour foods, like all kinds of citrus. These all make sense in the spring. The organ we focus on in spring is the liver. And spring is all about cleansing, right? Detoxing, starting new, starting a new diet if you’re used to doing that. And the liver is our body’s natural detoxifier. So it can be argued, and I would argue this emphatically, that rather than go on some questionable spring juice cleanse, focus on the foods that support your liver and let your liver do the work. Again, I’m going to have this chart in the show notes so you can see if this resonates with you, but it very much resonates with me. We are now… ready to enter an entirely new phase of the seasons, the fire phase. And our hot, humid days are certainly a reflection of that. Fire is all energy. You might feel that you’re at your most energetic in the summer. I certainly do. And that you don’t need as much sleep or your energy is better. I definitely feel all of these in the summer. I feel most awake and alive when it’s hot and humid out. And if you don’t, there might be some kind of an imbalance. And this five-season chart can also help address that too. You might be leaning more towards foods that are not in balance with the summer season. The fire phase supports our circulation, our heart, our small intestines. The taste that correspond with the fire phase is bitter and the color is red. So think. red lentils, bitter dandelion greens, corn can be a little bitter, cornmeal, asparagus, escarole, tomatoes, raspberries, strawberries, sunflower seeds, chocolate, very bitter. The five-phase theory really honors the mindfulness needed to be with the season we are in, be it hot and humid in the summer, cool and dark in the winter. And it encourages us to eat in tune with what nature is giving us. Now, in Western culture and Western medicine, we tend to resist and even fight nature cycles. In winter, we want to feel warmer. In summer, we sit inside in the air conditioning all day. We’re eating raw salads when it’s 20 degrees out, when we should be eating warm, slow-cooked foods. And… Really anything that we want from anywhere in the world is available to us. Again, the five seasons theory has helped me with meal planning. It’s taught me to be just more aware of what I am eating so I can stay in harmony and honor the time of year my body and the planet are in. I would love to know in the comments if the five seasons resonates with you. And if it does, please let me know that. It really does with me and it helps me to stay so much more mindful to the food I am eating. Okay, so let’s turn a little bit to the science and look at some nutrition. Does food really need to be seasonal? Do we really need to eat with the seasons and only eat what we were meant to be eating then and there? And more importantly, as a woman, what does this even mean? Can it help us stay in harmony with our bodies? I mean, if you think about it, after all, women are the most season-full humans and animals on the planet. Women naturally flow with the seasons. We get our periods monthly. We follow the moon phases. Or we… no longer get our periods and we’re somewhere in between and this is the end to our season of periods. But nonetheless, women, I think, very much flow and ebb with seasons. In our ever-growing mindless eating world, seasonal eating should not be taken for granted. Watermelon, a fresh ear of corn from the farmer’s market, growing tomatoes on your deck all have special meaning and give us something to look forward to. Seasonal food holds memories. Picking blueberries in the summer in Minnesota, my grandmother’s cabin, for example, and then turning those into blueberry muffins can only happen in the heat of the season. And it’s something that I used to look forward to every single summer. So it helps to make me more mindful and to have something to look forward to rather than the instant gratification that we can sometimes get with our food. Same goes for the holiday seasons. Pumpkin pie on Thanksgiving, a hot dog in July. These all match up with each other. Seasonal eating is calming to our bodies and our minds. And back to the five seasons, you know, eating with the seasons helps us cultivate joy in our food and gratitude. We cannot take for granted the variety of juicy summer tomatoes at the farm stand. because we know they will only be around for so many weeks. Seasonal eating helps to spur on awareness of our food rather than just the dreary, mindless eating. In the spring and summer, we go for lighter, more raw foods, and in the fall and winter, we lean towards warming, slower-cooked foods. Consider that our grandparents and generations before them had to eat seasonally with what was available to them at the time and around them. So I want to consider what we can do to you day to start eating seasonally so that you can enjoy every bite of what you’re eating and be in the moment with it. So there are things to consider when you start eating more seasonally that become really important so that you can enjoy every bite of what you are eating rather than just eating more mindlessly. So the first thing I want to do is talk about the nutritional and environmental all. impact, and nutrient density. So I’m just going to get a little science-y for a minute. We have to consider things such as the quality of our soil, the amount of sunlight, and climate that contributes to nutrient composition of foods, no matter where your food is grown, right? So if it’s grown in your backyard or if it’s grown 3,000 miles away, this all takes into account how nutrient dense your food is going to be. But when our food is out of season and therefore grown a thousand miles away and then picked early so it ripens during transport, and more importantly, it doesn’t spoil during transport, the quality of your food is greatly compromised. So I think in short, the food that has grown more local to you and harvested when it is ripe is at its peak for vitamins, minerals, and phytonutrients. It’s just… better for you. So it’s something to really consider about eating seasonally because you are probably going to be eating more locally. I wanted to mention just a side note about organics because I get this question asked to me all the time, and it’s a valid one, of course. And if you are wondering if organic matters, and many of us do these days, The short answer is that the jury is really still out. That might not be what you want to hear, but the jury is still out on whether or not organics are better for you than conventional food. From a nutritional standpoint, when comparing organic, which just basically means fruits and vegetables and herbs that are not sprayed with any pesticides, And when we compared those to conventional, which would be sprayed with some pesticides, both do retain the same amount of nutrients. So from that point of view, there is really no advantage to spending the extra money on organic foods. The pesticide residue on conventional produce is pretty minimal, especially to the number of pesticides that were used back in the 70s or when pesticide use really first came out. There were not a lot of regulations with that. That all said, I am certainly not downplaying investing more on organic foods. I think organic foods are definitely better. Who wants to eat anything with any pesticides whatsoever? But if you’ve only bought organic, you could be spending a small fortune. And I just don’t believe that you need to do that. There’s two ways I want to talk about that can really help save you money and where you can still eat very healthfully and not eat lots of pesticides in your food. The first way is to get your hands on the dirty dozen list from the Environmental Working Group. And I will link this in the show notes. The Dirty Dozen is a list of the top 12 foods that are the highest in pesticides. So berries, for example, things with very thin skins that you probably just eat whole. The list is updated yearly, and these are definitely the things that you would want to buy and spend your money on organically. Alternatively, there is another list that the Environmental Working Group comes out with called the Clean 15. which are foods that are lowest in pesticides. And those are the ones you can easily buy conventional. They’re usually tropical fruits, things with very thick skins, things that you have to peel. And you can typically tell what they are, but not always. So it’s always a good idea to check the list. There’s always some surprise things on both of those lists too. You think that things that were organic are not organic. And so it’s always a good idea to check those lists. The other and most obvious things you can do is grow your own food. You cannot get any more local, more in season, or organic than this. Now, you might have heard me say that I describe myself as a slightly obsessive gardener with a very large vegetable, fruit, and herb garden. I think I got this gardening bug from my grandparents, my Brooklyn-raised Jewish side of my family, which is it. Just always a little surprising and something we always kind of get a laugh over. My Jewish grandparents from Brooklyn always had a dream, and that was to own a farm. And there’s a joke in my family that my grandfather was the least handy person on the planet. I don’t even think he owned a hammer or a screwdriver. But nonetheless, he wanted to own a farm as long as someone else was watching over it. So buy a farm he did in upstate New York. And it turns out, I don’t even think he was aware of this, though I need to verify, that the farm was formerly Yazgar’s Farm, which was the site of where Woodstock played back in the 60s. Anyway, half the farm was leased to a cow farmer, but there was a caretaker who raised chickens and grew vegetables. And my grandparents, you know, all of us got to visit and kind of play farm when we were there. And I think… I can safely say that through my experiences of visiting the farm, I got my first real taste of local vegetables, eggs, meats. Growing your own food seemed like such a novelty. And by the time I got married and was well past cooking school, my husband Mark and I were hooked. Better than going to the farmer’s market is going into your own backyard and picking lettuce and other vegetables for tonight’s dinner. I know that not everyone has the space for a garden. But you would be surprised by what you can grow in a few small containers on your deck. One other option as well is to join a CSA, which is short for Community Supported Agriculture. It’s basically a membership type service through local farms in which you receive a weekly box of produce that has a different variety of whatever seasonal foods are available then and there. It’s a really fun way to experiment with different foods, especially if you are up for the creative challenge. Every week you will get a box of surprises and you have to figure out then what to do with all those vegetables and fruits. So if you like that kind of cooking, then this is definitely for you. And in this way, then you are doing your part to reduce your carbon footprint. I get it. Having access to year round fruits and vegetables is totally convenient. especially in places like the Northeast where we live in a very cold climate for most of the year. I mean, we have to get our fruits and vegetables from outside sources. I have read though that about A third of the vegetables and half the fruit that is eaten in the United States is imported from other countries. And this requires the vehicles to move all that produce around, the gas, the oil, and not to mention the detriment to the environment. I think it’s important to just do our part when we can in the season that we are in and able to do that. Another thing I want to talk about is the importance of eating seasonally and helping to create community. If you buy from a farm, a farmer’s market, or a CSA, choosing seasonal produce means not only supporting local agriculture, but also giving you the opportunity to connect with the people who are actually growing your food in your community. At a farmer’s market, you have the opportunity to meander. talk to the farmers, ask specific questions, and gather with like-minded people. I can’t think of a better time than right now during the craziness of COVID and isolation. We are all craving community. And just to get outside and get to a local farm stand and connect, I think, is really important for all of us. There’s also studies that have shown the connection between you social interaction and longevity. If you’re familiar with the blue zones, this is a study that was done that showed that the largest population of people who live 100 years or more are the people who have the closest communities to each other. So there is definitely a social health benefit to being in community and being in touch with, I think, your food and where it’s grown as much as possible. Now, with all of this, I want to say that any fruits or vegetables are better than no fruits or vegetables. So please don’t mistake my encouragement of seasonal eating with saying it’s local or nothing, or it’s, you know, seasonal or nothing. We all definitely need to eat as much produce as possible for our health. And we could always lean in the winter to frozen or, you know, other sources and just simply do our best. And on this note, I wanted to tell you about my upcoming summer inspired recipe club. Now, all of this talk on seasonal eating might sound fun, but if you don’t have a clue as to how to use fresh herbs or creative ways to cook fresh peaches, for example, then I have something really, really fun for you. Beyond the simple sign up for the Summer Inspired Recipe Club, joining and participating in the club takes almost no effort. I’m not asking you to put another task on your busy to-do list. All you have to do is sign up and each week you will receive a packet of at least five recipes that highlight a vegetable, a fruit, or an herb that is in season that very week. There are recipes for breakfast, lunch, dinner, treats, and snacks. And if you’ve ever wondered, for example, if you can use tomatoes in a dessert, sign up for the club to find out how. We have two optional Zoom meetings during the summer to ask questions and to talk to me live, plus lots of bonuses. I hope you will consider adding you some fun and creativity into your summer by joining and really getting in touch with what it means to eat seasonally in a fun and nutritious and delicious way. It will be a great experience and a chance to really get seasonal with your eating. We begin on June 29th and our Zoom calls will be in July and August. And again, this is a no pressure, laid back summer recipe club that is pretty much all done for you except for the cooking. I hope you have a great week and visit your next farmer’s market. And if you loved this podcast, please rate and review. It would mean the world to me. I will see you next time. Bye for now.