Female Speaker: From the Library of Congress, in Washington, DC.

Constance Carter: Good morning.
I'm Constance Carter, head of the science reference section,
and I'm delighted to welcome you to the Library
of Congress, and to today's program.
This event is one in our series, in which we invite authors,
practitioners, and writers to talk to us in the fields of science,
technology, business and economics.
As these programs are also a means for introducing you
to the extensive collections of the Library of Congress,
I hope you'll take a moment after the program to cast your eyes
on the books on healthy eating and thrifty cooking
that we've displayed in the foyer.
One of them is a facsimile of Lydia Child's
"The American Frugal Housewife," first published in 1829,
when the country was going through a depression.
She writes, "there was never a time when the depressing effects
of stagnation in business were
so universally felt all the world over as they are now."
Today's speaker is going to brighten your day with advice
and thrifty ideas for healthy eating, just as Mrs. Child's did
in her day, in the 19th century.
Sally Squires is best known as the award-winning journalist
for the Washington Post and for her syndicated column,
"The Lean Plate Club."
But she is truly a woman for all seasons.
I first met Sally as a reader.
She and her husband John, who's here today, were writing a documentary
on leprosy, entitled "Triumph at Carville."
This is a gripping tale of a group of patients, doctors
and caring nuns, that came together on a plantation in Louisiana
to create a community that dealt with this public health issue
over many decades, and ultimately found a cure.
I was immediately taken by Sally's verve enthusiasm
and dedication to her craft.
I became an enthusiastic reader of this nutritionist column,
and I joined the Lean Plate Club, a weekly chat and social network,
so I could send tidbits gleaned from my annual visits
to the Tennessee Fitness Spa, such as beefing up your protein intake
by adding Silk and tofu to your oatmeal.
A sought-after speaker on issues ranging from obesity
to overall wellness and health, Sally is a frequent guest
on television shows and radio, including NPR and XM Radio.
She also spoke at the 2000 National Book Festival,
and has roamed the library stacks, used material from its collections,
and is really a great supporter of this institution.
As director of health and wellness at Powell Tate,
a public relations firm representing a diverse group
of food industry organizations, Sally is now creating a forum
for her colleagues in science, government, business, and libraries,
to address today's increasingly complex food issues.
As The New York Times recently noted,
even the high-end food magazines are beginning
to consider cooks' budgets, and are writing
about cheap eats and leftovers.
In the spirit of this economic time, where thrift
and healthy eating are the order of the day,
Sally will share her secrets and suggestions for putting a spring
in your step without putting a hole in your pocket.
And, she is going to sign her books, she'll personally autograph them
for you, "Secrets of the Lean Plate Club," after the lecture.
So please help me welcome Sally Squires to the Library of Congress.
[applause] Sally Squires: Thank you so much.
I am delighted to be here.   I need to do just a quick...

there we go.   So we're back.

We just had a little technical glitch there.
Connie Carter, I have to say, is not only a treasure in a treasure,
but she has been so enormously helpful to me
in so many different ways.
I can't tell you the days that I would be writing a column
at The Washington Post, and I'd say, "gosh,
I wonder if anybody's done something on this?"
And I would call Connie, and she would say, "Oh!
I know what books we could use for that!"
And she would send them to me, and it had everything to do
with whether it was barbecue, or it was old cookbooks,
or it was remedies for colds.
And so my husband and I do love researchers, we love libraries,
and so it is just such an honor and a privilege to be here today,
and I am really, really delighted.
So, I am in a new position, and I help to do strategies for companies,
for government agencies, for non-profits,
and it's really a wonderful new playing field, and I do miss many
of my Lean Plate Club members, but we're slowly aggregating
to a site called SallySquires.com.
So, if you haven't found us yet, and it is still a work in progress,
cause I now have another day job, but it is a place
that I hope will gradually develop.
So, we're here today, to talk about healthy bites.
And I think Connie's introduction
about that 1829 cookbook couldn't hit home more.
Because here we are, in a really serious economic time,
probably the most serious in our lives, but I think there are a lot
of really great messages to convey, and there are a lot of healthy
and economical ways to eat.
And that's what I hope you'll take from this.
So, I was once on a panel, with an unnamed,
really well-known restaurateur, in Washington,
and someone who was pretty young, and new, and didn't make a lot
of money, said, "Well, I'd really love to buy organic,
and I'd really love to eat healthfully,
but I just can't always afford it."
And this woman responded and said, "Oh, but you must,
you must do what I do, and here's what I do every day.
Every day at lunch I walk into my full-sized refrigerator
at my restaurant, I walk in
and I get the organically-grown local raspberries and the arugula,
and I make myself a perfect salad with goat cheese."
And I thought, well yeah, that really resonates with me,
I don't know about the rest of you, but, gosh,
that's something I can do every day.   So, it got me to thinking, "ok,

so you can you eat healthfully on a budget?"
And certainly, and there's a researcher named Adam Chernowski
[spelled phonetically], who is at the University of Washington
at Seattle, and he says, "of course you can eat healthily,
when you're buying wild salmon, raspberries and arugula."
But, does healthy food really cost more?
Now, I have to admit, that I'm one
of those that's said you can eat healthfully on a budget.
But I've thought, well, you know, a lot of fruits
and vegetables do seem to be kind of expensive.
That wild salmon is sometimes 22 dollars a pound,
and sometimes too rich for my budget too, and so, what can you eat?
And I got some interesting answers from the US Department
of Agriculture's Economic Research Service.
Last year, and this really didn't get much publicity,
they took a look at this very issue.   And I thought it was fascinating.

And what the fellow who did this,
and who I heard speak, was Fred Cooper.
And he basically said that he thought
that this would be a rather simple study.
Because he said, "let's face it.
Earlier in the century, in the 20th century, we didn't weight very much,
and we were eating a bit differently than we are today.
Here we are today, and we know how easy it is
to get food everywhere, right?
Where can you not get food these days?
Almost nowhere."
So he wanted to see, since the obesity epidemic has started,
since the 1980's, roughly, and food and vegetable prices,
have they been more or less compared to those foods that we all love?
Now, I don't know about you, but, you know, chocolate chip cookies,
ice cream, cola, different things
that are very much favorites of a lot of people.
So he looked at the Bureau of National Labor statistics
from 1980-2006, and these are the kinds of foods he compared,
and he found that, interestingly, chocolate-chip cookies, ice cream,
cola, and potato chips actually decreased from 0.5
to 1.75% annually, from 1980-2006.
Ok, that fits very much with, this was the state of the Union in terms
of obesity, this is from the Center for Disease Control and Prevention,
and you can see that the blue states,
in this case it's not politics, the white states
and the blue states are leaner,
you notice there are no red states in this case, right?
Well, the other results, which were very interesting from this survey,
are that he looked at Red Delicious apples, bananas, Iceberg lettuce,
dried beans, and he found, surprise, this was a surprise to him,
that those also dropped in price from 0.8 to 1.6 per year.
And so did cabbages,carrots, celery, onions, cucumbers and peppers.
This was not what anybody expected.
This is what has happened to the nation.
So clearly, it's not that food prices are a problem.
If anything, we have more food than we've ever had in our lives,
and you can think about it, and I know that there are segments
of the population, particularly now, who are hungry.
But if you really think about it,
how often in the United States do you see the kind
of really terrible malnutrition that we see in places like Africa,
you know kids with swollen bellies,
really that doesn't exist very often in the US.
And obviously there are people who are suffering greatly
and don't have enough to eat.   But it's a different kind of hunger.

And I would contend in some times, that it's over-nutrition
of the wrong kinds of foods.
So, the only thing that did rise slightly
in price were broccoli and tomatoes.
Now, here's the other interesting part about this: they rose partly
in price because of the way they were packaged.
So now, in the grocery store, for example, you didn't used
to get tomatoes all year-round, right?
We didn't even used to get raspberries, or strawberries,
or a lot of things all year-round.
We actually have more produce available year-round,
in a better quality, than we've ever had before.
Broccoli was slightly higher in price because it's packaged,
you know those packages that you can throw into the microwave,
it's pre-washed, pre-cut, all that stuff?
Same thing with tomatoes.
So, and there are a lot of variety of tomatoes, the Heritage tomatoes,
the, you know, all kinds of things.
That's what accounted for the increase in price.
So, in 2007, Congress weighed into this, in a little bit of a way,
if you remember that there were some members of Congress who said, "well,
how do you eat on what we give people for food stamps?"
And, it is a lot of money that we give people for food stamps.
But, members of Congress, they were faint with hunger,
because they took their 21 dollars,
which is what you get per week per person, and its actually allocated
in a monthly way, so it's a little bit disingenuous,
but they took their 21 dollars, and for a week,
they tried to live on it.
And most of them didn't do it very successfully.
Well, I got to thinking, and I know 21 dollars isn't much,
but I got to thinking, you know, it seems to me that in our history,
we haven't always had a lot of money for food, and I got an email also
from a fellow in Takoma Park who is a Lean Plate Club member,
who said that he had been inspired by people who live in a lot of parts
of the world who don't get 21 dollars a week for food,
and they do exist, and they do exist pretty well, and so he had tried
to live on this, and said it was possible.
So I went to the grocery store, and we did this feature,
and I took what was, it's actually 120 dollars is what it is
for a family of four, remember food stamps are additive,
it's not what you're only supposed to live on.
So, and I went to see, what could I buy, and this is the range of food
that I could buy, it's a month's worth of food.
And it worked out to this: So, I figured out,
what could you eat for breakfast?
Well, if you make your own oatmeal, or you have eggs, 25 dollars
and 83 cents, and this included calcium-fortified orange juice
and calcium is a shortfall nutrient, we know that for the country, milk,
non-fat, cause we want to not have that saturated fat
which isn't healthy, yogurt, another good non-fat,
and there's some healthy bacteria in it for our digestive systems, bread,
and I got the kind that's whole grain, large eggs,
which are frankly, I don't know why the egg has been so demonized,
but I think it's coming back, and it has an awful lot of great nutrition
in it, margarine, raisins, dried, and then oatmeal.
And I looked at lunch and snacks, and for 32 dollars and 30 cents,
remember this is four people, these are the kinds
of things that I could find.
Peanut butter, now obviously, if you've a peanut allergy,
this is gonna be out, but there are other things like soy butter
and other different kinds of spreads that are very rich in protein,
jelly, cheese slices, remember those grilled cheese sandwiches that were
so popular, if you go to Founding Farmers down on Pennsylvania Avenue,
they actually serve a lunch now of tomato soup
and grilled cheese sandwiches, it's coming back, whole-wheat tortillas,
romaine lettuce, salsa, dried navy beans,
you're going to hear a theme here, with these beans.
And fruit was a little bit of a challenge.
Nightly meal, I looked at chicken legs, because meat was, frankly,
a little bit expensive, olive oil, that was a splurge for $7.59,
lots of frozen vegetables, which are often on sale,
and I'm going to tell you more about that, shredded cheese,
again cheese was a little bit of a stretch, tofu, so we could get
in some things that were not meat-related and high in protein,
canned salmon, all different kinds of things.
And I found that the budget busters were that fresh produce,
especially fruit, and even when it was in season,
I found cheese-prepared foods, calorie-dense,
less nutritient-rich foods, so that would be things
like chocolate cookies, the things that really are extra calories.
But what was a surprise was that produce was a little hard,
even in season, and milk and yogurt, as opposed to cheese,
were less expensive alternatives for getting that calcium.
Or, actually, the calcium-enriched orange juice was another good thing.
And also, deli, the deli was really out in this kind of a budget.
It was just too expensive.
Even frozen entrees, and I don't know if you,
Kashi makes some fantastic frozen entrees, Healthy Choice does too,
Smart Ones, there are all kinds of them.
But they're getting pretty pricy these days.
Particularly if you're trying to stick to this 120 dollars.
And cookies, cake and candy and soft drinks, well,
you wouldn't really buy those with food stamps,
but they were very expensive.
So, how can you stretch your food dollars?
Well, one of the best ways to do that are beans.
And I think that these are the neglected food group of our country.
They're cheap, they're plentiful, they're varied,
and they work with almost every cuisine.
So, they literally are, particularly if you're buying beans
that are dried, they are pennies per serving, they are rich in flavor,
fiber and most of us are falling short on that,
protein, complex carbohydrates.
Even you can make them into a fast food, if you get them in the can,
so a can of beans, I've even seen them, it's about 14 1/2
to 16 ounces, I've seen them for as little as 89 cents.
Now, sodium is a problem.
And so, that, and you're going to hear a lot about sodium
in the coming year, because the US Dietary Guidelines,
the Advisory Committee, is working again for 2010,
and it's about an 18 month process, and one of the things
that is very much on their agenda is sodium.
Because in the United States, most of us are consuming between 2-4,
maybe even 5 times what we should be getting.
And for people who are 50 and older,
that means about 1500 milligrams a day.
So, as you can see, 480 is a third of that.
And that's in a part of that can.   So it's hard.

But, even if you use canned beans, there's a simple fix.
Rinse them.
And if you rinse them, and you rinse them pretty well,
and I know that's using water, and that's not necessarily green, but,
you know, you make these tradeoffs, and so if you rinse these well,
there are studies to show that you can rinse a lot of that sodium away.
And so you take a can of beans and for 89 cents to a dollar,
you suddenly have the beginning of a very interesting and healthful meal.
Now, no time, if you want to make things
from scratch, well, slow cookers.   Slow cookers are the best.

And I would be remiss in mentioning beans, if I didn't also say
that some people may need Beano with them,
because they are the musical fruit.   Or something else.

[laughter] So, I do understand that this is sometimes a problem.
But that slow cooker is a great way to make beans, or oatmeal,
or all kinds of things, soup, and you can buy them
for about 30 dollars, and maybe up to 50 if you really want to splurge,
and they can have a meal ready for you when you get home,
or cook over weekends, cook overnight, whatever you want to do.
Okay, so, and that leads me to my next tip.
Which is, take a lesson from Grandma.
And if you do go out and peruse those books, and I got a chance to,
that are out on display, before this talk, they really are wonderful.
And you know, we think that we are the first ones to go
through an economic crisis.   Well, you know, think about it.

We're really not.
You know, I know it's tough and I know there are many many people
out there suffering, and nobody wants to see that happen.
But look at all that we also do have, and it really is striking.
And there are a lot of things that we can do, if we're willing
to open up and consider them.   So, from bouillabaisse to wonton,

soup and stews are such a great way to go.
And I say, bring back the first course.
Now, most of us probably don't sit that often in our dining rooms.
But if you did sit, wherever you're sitting, if you have,
as a first course, a cup of soup, studies from Penn State,
from Barbara Rolls' laboratory, show very very clearly
that you'll end up, not only feeling fuller, but eating less
with the rest of the meal.
So, here's a simple, inexpensive way to feel full, not feel deprived,
and you can see that even Progresso Soup has played on this;
I saw an ad last night that talked about this woman,
she's in a new dress, and she says, "look,
it's the Chicken and Wild Rice Diet!"
Well, Campbell's Soup, which is a client of my new company,
they've got a lot of great information
on soups being a terrific way to help with appetite, and the variety,
my gosh, the variety is so wide.
Also, it can fit every diet, from vegans to carnivores,
and flexitarians in between, and in addition, I have a friend
who actually is on the faculty of a school,
St. Catherine's in Minnesota.
And she says that her husband used to work for some kind
of a food company, and he came home with these soup starters,
and she said, "soup starters?   You don't need soup starters.

You start a soup with whatever is in your refrigerator.
So basically, soups, if we know how to cook, are wonderful ways
to use leftovers, and to throw in all kinds of things.
It's an easy way to add vegetables, tomato soup?
Vegetable!   Split pea soup?

Vegetable!
You don't have to just think vegetarian soups.
They can be a first course, they can be a main course,
they can be a snack.
I now take a soup hand [spelled phonetically],
and I have it in the afternoon, I was inspired
by a Lean Plate Club member who went from 250 pounds to 125,
and part of that, she was eating split pea soup as a snack,
and I thought, you know, snacks, soups are a great way to snack.
You can have it, it's hot, you have to sip it,
you can't consume it too fast, and it's extremely filling.
So now at about 4 or 5 o clock, if I'm getting hungry,
I have a cup of tomato soup.   And it really is delicious.

And again, they can be, you can make them from scratch,
or let the grocer be your sous-chef.
And I like this idea, because your sous-chef could be broth
that you buy at the grocer, sometimes we buy a red pepper
and tomato soup and we add beans to it, and brown rice, and sausage,
or you can get some of those soup starters,
where you can have vegetables are now cut up, I mean there are
so many different things you can do.
And plus, these are low-cost meals in minutes.
And so, I've told you some of these things, but leftover spices,
brown rice, beans, vegetables, with a side salad, a loaf of bread
and fruit for dessert, you've got a meal.
And it's really really fast.   And it's one that'll be, that lots

of different people in your family can like.
Okay, so we hear lots about produce.
And we are about to enter the best season of the year for produce,
I mean, how can it get any better, with all these wonderful things
that are about to come to market.
And when we think produce, we think fresh.
But I'm going to tell you why you don't have to think fresh.
And in fact, if you're trying to stay on a budget and be healthful,
you ought to go beyond fresh.
These are dried fruit, canned fruit, and particularly
if you can get canned fruit in juice, or in light syrup.
You want to skip the heavy syrup, reach for those products
that are packed in juices, and frozen, frozen.
Most people don't think about this, but particularly
when it doesn't have added sugar, frozen is equal to fresh,
nutritionally, as are dried and canned.
So, if you're looking for ways to add fruit, because sometimes,
at the market, it can be expensive, that's something to do.
Same advice for fish.
Now, you're going to hear a lot about fish, in the coming months,
because fish is on the minds, or at least it's been in the discussion
of the advisory committee for the 2010 Dietary Guidelines.
And fish is on their mind because it's heart healthy,
it's got good Omega-3 fatty acids, which are great for your heart,
they're also good for your joints, they're good for your brain,
and there's some evidence from Harvard
that they might also be good for your mood.
And we certainly know that they're good
for developing brains of babies.
And so you're going to hear a lot about that.
And the current recommendation is to eat fish twice a week.
But that doesn't have to mean this expensive and beautiful,
I think that this is red snapper.   Doesn't that look inviting?

I mean, it really, really looks good.
But it's expensive!
And we don't have unlimited amounts of money.
And the same thing with salmon.
So, what are some of the fish winners?
And why these are fish winners, not because of the Omega-3s they contain
and their cost, but they also tend to be lower in mercury,
expect for tuna, and you want to go with light tuna.
But tuna, sardines, canned salmon is what this is here, anchovies, clams,
they are great ways to add healthy Omega-3s and flavor.
Let's not forget that.
Because that's the most important part of a healthy diet.
If you don't like it, you're not going to eat it.
And it doesn't matter how much money you spend on it.
If you don't like it, you're not going to eat it.
And then it just goes bad, and you feel even worse
when you've had to throw it away.
And the nice thing about canned fish is, its shelf life.
It's there.
You don't have to worry about using it really quickly,
because you've got it, and it's not going to go bad.
So, the dollar menu, or basically, how to have it your way.
Well, boost protein, and there are some really easy ways to do that.
Eggs, again, how did we go, well, I know how we got
around demonizing eggs, because I probably helped do it.
But it was the cholesterol.
And we know that an egg yolk has about 300mg of cholesterol.
And for some people who are at risk of heart disease,
that's probably their day's worth.
And as a matter of fact, the current recommendation is
to limit it to that.
An egg yolk, and egg producers have worked on this, an egg yolk has
about 270mg of cholesterol.
So, yes, if you're eating a lot of eggs,
you're getting a lot of added cholesterol.
But there's also some science suggesting that maybe,
we know it's not just the cholesterol,
it's also the saturated fat in your diet, particularly unhealthy fats,
so that's something else that you want to think about.
And eggs are, for about 2 dollars a dozen,
depending on where you buy them, and whether you get free-range
or organic, or go with the regular stuff, you can get 12 eggs
that are packed with protein, packed with great flavor, very, again,
versatile, great things to do.
Pasta, another fast meal, my gosh, how fast can you make pasta?
In about 10 minutes, 15, maybe.   And so, for those who want to guy

with whole-grain, that's a great choice.
But you don't have to.
And here's why: pasta is already a dehydrated food.
So there's been some concern that when you eat foods
that are carbohydrates, that are more processed, like white bread,
or white rice, that you raise your blood sugar levels afterwards.
Well since pasta is a dehydrated food,
it doesn't actually raise your blood sugar very much.
So if you want to go with regular pasta, fine,
if you want to try all the different kinds, then,
one of my new colleagues just brought me quinoa pasta,
which I'm looking forward to trying.
But there are so many different varieties, and, again,
it's inexpensive, pennies per serving, goes a long way.
Same thing, meat substitutes, great way to add protein,
and the reason you want to add protein, very few people
in the US are protein-deficient.
But we know that protein boosts metabolism a little bit.
And it turns out that two thirds, remember that chart from the CDC,
two thirds of Americans are now overweight or obese.
So, if we're trying to move the needle in the other direction,
or at least not add any weight, maybe we just want to flatline it,
that's ok, too, then we've got to watch those calories.
And that's why protein is a great partner in doing that.
Because protein makes you feel fuller,
it raises your metabolism a little bit, so you burn a few more
of those calories, makes you feel fuller than carbohydrates,
and it's about equal to fat in that.
Another great protein source, nuts, though,
because they're concentrated, you can't eat too many of them.
And if you ever want to know how many to eat,
there's a place called the Human Performance Institute,
and I learned this trick from them.   They're down in Orlando, Florida.

And basically, use your hand as your measuring cup.
It comes, it's exactly sized for you.
So if you use your hand as your measuring cup,
and a handful of nuts, it's about 160-170 calories, same thing holds
for the other foods you eat.
It gets a little messier with the other foods.
But it's a good thing to have, and you can kind of eyeball it.
And you never have to carry a measuring cup,
because you always have your hand with you.
So, and the, of course, beans, which I've already mentioned.
Okay, so, let's talk about what you really do need.
And by the way, one of the things I used to love to do
on the Lean Plate Club, and you're all part of this
because I suspect many of you are federal employees, I used to love
to point out to readers, your federal tax dollars at work.
Because often, Congress gives money to do all kinds of good things,
but they forget to give the money to publicize the good things.
And that's where I used to see my role as a journalist,
as this wonderful partnership between news
and public health and public service.
And so, mypyramid.gov is one of those great sites.
There are, if you go there, it's mypyramid.gov,
you can do so many things at this particular site,
it's really rich, and it's really deep.
Including, you can track your food, it will help, guide your diet,
if you're a recent mom, or you're recently pregnant,
it will tell you how much to eat, and how to protect your health
for your new baby, and also how to take weight off that you want
to lose after you've given birth, there's a new pyramid
for preschoolers, so if you're a parent or grandparent,
there's all kinds of things there, and you just have
to have a little bit of time and a little bit of persistence to dig,
because you do go a little bit deep into it.
But it really is a rich site.
So there you would find out that the average adult,
and there'll be some changes there depending on your size,
but basically the current recommendations are to eat two cups
of fruit daily, to have two and a half cups of vegetables,
three servings of dairy, five to six and a half ounces of protein,
and that's about, if you think about it, a chicken breast,
that's a about a chicken breast.
130 grams of carbs, now, how would that work out?
Well that's about three whole-wheat slices of bread, and two apples.
Now, that's really probably not the way most
of us would eat those calories,
but that kind of puts it into a food perspective.
And also, it's really important, as you're eating breads and pastas
and cereals, make half your grains whole.
So that means make half of those grains from whole grains.
And the way you can tell that is if you look at the label,
and if the first ingredient says "whole rye," or "whole wheat,"
or "whole rice," or whatever else "whole,"
you know it's a whole grain.
If it just says, "wheat flour," it's not a whole grain.
And it's really tricky these days to tell from the label.
So, you have to look.
And the reason you want to make half your grains whole, is one,
whole grain have a lot of fiber, which I'll tell you about in second,
we often fall short on, and, two, by eating some of the grains
that aren't whole, you're getting folic acid,
which is a very good thing,
particularly for women of child-bearing ages.
Because we've shown that, since we've fortified our food supply
with folate, or folic acid, we now have reduced the incidence
of spina bifida and other neural tube defects and birth defects.
And that's been a huge success, public health success story.
So, fiber is another shortfall nutrient.
Most of us don't get enough.
For women, it's 25 grams, for men, it's 38 grams of fiber per day.
Healthy fat, and that 30 calories that crept in, that's not supposed
to be there, but basically, healthy fat, it's about two
to three teaspoons of healthy fat per day,
and also the two servings of seafood per week.
Okay, so in this dollar menu, the way that you can really take hold
of it and get your arms around it, is,
the more you can make things ahead, the better.
So, for example, at our house, on weekends, because I'm busy
like everybody else, but I make a big batch
of steel-cut [spelled phonetically] oatmeal,
I make almost the entire container, and that cooks,
and it cooks in the same time that one serving would have cooked,
and then scoop it out and put it in individual plastic bags, seal those
and just put them in to one plastic thing, and stick it in the freezer,
and then every morning, we can have steel-cut oatmeal if we want.
I do the same thing with brown rice, it's really easy, and I took,
I actually got that idea from Trader Joe's, because I saw brown rice
in the freezer section, and it's in these packages,
and I thought, "I can do that!"
So, and for a lot less money, believe me.
Beans, the same deal, in those slow cookers, or in the cans,
I just stock up, I usually go to Costco and I buy six or eight cans
at a time of black beans, they're less than a dollar a can
and we just have them on hand.
Bulk purchases, and I know many of you may not have the places
to store extra food, but you can team up with family members
or neighbors, and split these things, farmers markets,
you probably know that not too far from here, at USDA,
every Friday there's a great farmers market.
And that's a really terrific place to go.
And you can also get, if you go on to the USDA website,
you can find out and look for farmers markets by zip code.
And you can also sign up for CSA,
which is community sponsored agriculture,
and you can help sponsor a farmer, and get the produce in return.
And it's a really great thing to do.
Planning ahead and making ahead, I cannot emphasize that more.
Learn to cook: now I suspect that most of the people
in this audience know how to cook.
But, surprisingly, fewer and fewer people really know their way
around the kitchen.
Right before I left the Post, I did an article on,
I'd like to start a movement bringing back home-ec.
I'm a home-ec graduate.   I learned how to make biscuits.

First we had to make our apron in sewing class, we wore hairnets,
the boys went to shop, but I think those are really fantastic skills,
and, interestingly, they're not called home economics anymore,
but they still exist, and do you know who the most,
the majority of students are in those classes?
Anyone want to wager a guess?   [inaudible] Yes, thank you!

You knew! More than 50 percent are boys.
They want to know how to cook.   And I think it's a great thing.

So, the more we know how to cook, and we can do these things
for ourselves, the more money we can save.
Here are some helpful websites that I don't want you to miss,
and one of them at the top, that I forgot to list, is sallysquires.com.
There's mypyramid.gov, mypyramidtracker.gov,
the World's Healthiest Foods, which is a really neat site because,
what you can do is you can put in a food that you're currently eating,
and then ask it to search,
and it will give you another alternative which might be better.
And you might be at the top of your game, but just in case you're not,
it gives you an opportunity to see what your other options might be.
If you want to know more about vegetarian eating, whether you want
to go fully vegetarian or be a flexitarian,
or just add more vegetables into your daily life,
the vegetarian resource group is a great place to go.
American Heart Association has a slew of resources and information,
American Dietetic Association is another, and, frankly, I could go on
and on, so if you have more questions about those,
please e-mail me, because I'd be happy to provide those,
or watch for them as I update sallysquires.com,
and that will give me the impetus to do that.
And I just wanted to say, thank you for inviting me, I would very much
like to entertain your questions, and I really, again, am so,
feel so proud and privileged to be here at the Library of Congress
which just has so many wonderful resources, and I thank you very much
for joining me at this time.   So, thank you.

[applause] Constance Carter: So, do we have questions?
Yes. Female Speaker: Okay, I know that frozen food is often as healthy
as fresh, assuming the fresh is actually more local
than transported forever.   But I didn't think canned was.

Sally Squires: Yes.
Canned, they have shown that nutritionally,
and you have to remove the sodium factor,
but a lot of canned foods are now lower in sodium, or,
I've even been seeing at Trader Joe's, some canned soup
that is higher in potassium to balance, so you get the taste,
it's potassium chloride instead of sodium chloride.
And they are nutrionally, nutritionally they are equal.
So, it's a great way to stretch those food dollars.
And in fact the fish that are caught at sea, and the frozen vegetables
that are flash-frozen, may sometimes be fresher
than what you're getting in the market.
Not as we, in terms of produce, maybe not as we head
into the peak season of locally grown things.
But, in general, throughout the year,
those are really great choices.
Yes? Male Speaker: [unintelligible] evidence
that organic food is [unintelligible] Sally Squires:
It's such a great question.
And after I was on this panel with this restaurateur
who will still go unnamed, I looked it up.
I wanted to see, what's the research.
And, in terms of the environment, organic is definitely the way to go.
It seems to be much better.
Nutritionally, there's a lot less evidence to support that.
And so, if you balance, and I remember having this discussion
with the woman who studies organic food in North Carolina.
She said, in her own mind, she balances.
She'd buy the locally grown strawberries
that were conventionally grown, or pay the extra for the organic
that came from California.
And so, you know, it's the trade-off.
And I think that, in terms of nutrition, there's been maybe one
or two studies that, last I looked,
that said Vitamin C might be slightly higher in some produce,
but it's not a huge amount.
So, it's really a lifestyle, and lifestyle choice,
and an environmental choice.
Male Speaker: What exactly is organic?
Sally Squires: Well, organic, there's certified organic,
and if you go on to the USDA.gov website,
it'll give you all the various criteria for that.
But, basically, these farms, or producers,
go through a very rigorous process that means
that they are not using pesticides,
and it's a very involved process to become certified.
So I won't pretend to tell you every last detail of that.
But you can see the full definition on USDA.gov.
And that's what allows them to use the certified label.
And if you're caught using that label,
and you haven't done that, you're in trouble.
Yes? Female Speaker: What's the skinny on vitamins?
Sally Squires: Vitamins.   Such a great question.

Okay, so, again, our tax dollars at work, National Institutes of Health,
Office of Dietary Supplements, fantastic office.
Just really, really good.
It has a great, actually, a great search engine
on it that is called ibids.
And if you want to go look and see how your vitamins stack up.
You can search them both in literature that is just out there,
or you can search it in literature that is peer-reviewed.
So, it's a really great and powerful source.
The office held a meeting about a year and a half to two years ago,
to look at the latest status of vitamins.
And they made this conclusion: and I wrote about it in the Post.
And it was that, there is neither evidence to recommend
or warn against taking vitamins.
So, how do you, that's not very helpful, right?
And that's not their fault.   They were going by the evidence.

So, the National Academy of Sciences, which has a Food
and Nutrition Board, they're a quasi-governmental agency,
and they basically set up what, they do the research
that says what everything else will be based on.
So they have said that for people over 50, one of the things
that you might want to think about is B12.
Because as you over 50, you are, you have less acid in your stomach,
and you're less able to draw the B12 from food, and so, if you can,
but the supplement may help.
Calcium, another thing that people over 50
in particular might want to think about.
Because most of us don't get enough.
And so, and that's up around 1200 milligrams,
or about at least 3 glasses of skim milk.
Because we don't want to have that extra fat.
But at least 3 glasses of milk, and maybe not,
there are about 300 milligrams in a glass of skim milk.
So, of calcium.
So you're still not quite reaching it.
So calcium supplements might be something else.
For women of childbearing ages, iron might be something that they'll want
to think about, or at least discuss their doctor,
and Vitamin D is likely to get a very close look, because it turns
out that it's another really important shortfall nutrient.
I once interviewed a fellow who said that he thought that Linus Pauling,
the Nobel Prize winner,
got the research right, but the vitamin wrong.
And what he said was that he thought that it should have been vitamin D
that was important for immunity, and not vitamin C. Now, the people,
my friends at the Linus Pauling Institute will disagree with that,
but, vitamin D is becoming a very important nutrient.
And we're seeing, it's important not for strength
of bones, but also for immunity.   And there's some growing evidence

that women might have some protection from breast cancer,
for having more vitamin D. But it's still evolving.
And it is something that is very much on the minds
of both the 2010 Dietary Guidelines Advisory committee,
and also of the National Academy of Sciences, which has a group
that is now studying both Calcium and Vitamin D as we speak.
So, those are some of the vitamins to think about.
The more you can get your vitamins and minerals from food sources,
the better, because most of the studies that have been done,
have been done in populations.
And the biggest example is of beta-carotene,
which is the precursor, you find it, if you eat anything that has carrots
or pumpkin or anything, what makes it orange is beta-carotene.
In your body, it gets converted to vitamin A.
And vitamin A's a terrific vitamin.
The problem is, they thought beta-carotene was going
to be this great answer to a lot of things.
And they did a study in Scandinavia to test that.
And they gave it to a lot of people.
And they found that smokers who took beta-carotene supplements,
actually had an increased risk of lung cancer.
So, when we start to play with these nutrients, figuring out how to do
that well, and that is hard, and that's why nature packages it best.
And we know that there are a lot of things that come in foods
that aren't necessarily a vitamin or a mineral.
But they're phytonutrients, all different kinds of things.
So it's that synergy that's so important.
And that's why, the more you can get from a variety of foods, the better.
In Japan, the dietary guidelines are to eat 30 different foods a day.
A day. [laughter] So try it.   I challenge you.

And let me tell you, coffee and tea,
all those things can count, but only once.
Okay. Female Speaker: How do you spell ibids?
Sally Squires: I-b-i-d-s.   Female Speaker: Thank you.

Sally Squires: Yes?
Male Speaker: I was wondering about meat.
Eating organic or free-ranged and not getting the hormones,
and about, is that working?
Sally Squires: Meat is a very interesting issue,
and the World Congress of Cancer Research, it's WCRF,
the World Cancer Research Fund,
has just come out with a new report within the last week.
And one of the things that they've said, again, is to balance,
and not eat too much processed meat.
That has been one of the recommendations.
What's processed meat, though?
Does that mean it's the chicken that you had in the grocery store
that was, you know, already deboned, or is it the salami?
That you're eating?
So, the question of meat, first of all, how much should you eat,
and then whether you eat organic or free-range, and, again,
if you want to go in terms of the environment,
organic is better for the environment.
If you're going to go for nutritional reasons,
there's no evidence that these meats that are organic
or free-range are better.
But, if you're worried about hormones, for example,
chicken isn't supposed to have hormones, I mean,
I urge you to go to the USDA.gov.
Look for organic certification, and it will give you all of the details
about what can be in your meat and what can't be.
It's very helpful.   One more, yes.

Female Speaker: Should we be worrying about consuming pesticides
on [unintelligible] Sally Squires: Well, it's very interesting,
the question about pesticides.
Again, if you look organic versus fruit or produce with pesticides,
I mean, sure, nobody's going to say that you should go out
and put a whole bunch of pesticides on your table and consume it.
But, the truth is that even if there's an organic farm next
to a conventional farm, when the wind blows,
some of that stuff blows over.   So it's out there.

I mean, we're all getting it to a certain degree.
And I've heard Mike Jacobson, who's the head of the Center for Science
in the Public Interest, say, "worry about the things
that you can do something about."
So, you may not be able to really, I mean,
pesticides aren't going to go away, right?
So, maybe you make, again, that balance.
It really seems, the message that comes through loud and clear,
whether you're going for free-range meat
or conventionally-grown produce, is that, the more variety you can have
in your diet, the more you've hedged your bets against everything.
Because if you're just eating one thing again, and again and again,
whatever is in it or not in it is all that you're getting.
But when you have variety, you have spread the risk,
and you have spread the benefits, and it really seems like,
of all the research that I've seen through the years,
that's one of the most important take-home messages.
So, I thank you so much for being here,
and really appreciate your attention.

[applause] Female Speaker: This has been a presentation
of the Library of Congress.
Visit us at loc.gov.   [end of transcription]