Pasta and Bread - Good and Bad

Pasta and bread have been the base of the food pyramid. I never agreed with the food pyramid, but that is not to say that pasta and bread are good or bad. While too much pasta and bread can lead to weight gain and aren't the best in terms of your blood sugar, eating some pasta and bread is OK. Just look at what pasta and bread you are eating.

You want to eat whole grain pasta and bread. Be cautious about how much you eat. This is where serving size plays a huge role. As I've gotten older, I look at the serving sizes in restaurants and found that my husband and I can usually order one entree and split it. We feel satisfied and not over stuffed.

Creating Serotonin - What Should I Eat?

Since we know that tryptophan is the building block for serotonin, that would be the first thing we need to produce serotonin. Most of us are familiar with one source of tryptophan - turkey! We all get very relaxed and sleepy after that big Thanksgiving turkey dinner. This is related to the tryptophan in the turkey. In this case however, the tryptophan goes to the pineal gland and melatonin is produced which makes us sleepy. Not the serotonin we were hoping to produce.

This is a complex issue, because the amino acids in proteins can get in the way of the tryptophan and keep it from converting to Serotonin. To help you understand this, if you are depressed and your Serotonin levels are low, you will crave and eat simple carbohydrates like sugar and sweets. This gives you a short burst of Serotonin but it is not sustained and requires more within an hour or two at most. We all know what eating sugar or sweets every 1-2 hours will do to your waist line. Complex carbohydrates will raise Serotonin levels to a lesser extent because they contain protein amino acids which get in the way.

To clear the protein amino acids, you need to have foods which stimulate the production of insulin which will clear the proteins out of the way. Best foods for this are whole grain breads or raw fruits.

Whole Grains - what does this mean?

If you haven't figured it out, I'm kind of doing the label thing for the past few days, so you know what to be looking for on labels and what they mean.

Today I'm going to talk about whole grain. When you go into the store to buy bread, you want to buy bread that is labeled "100% whole wheat or whole grain." The breads to avoid are those that are labeled "made with whole grain." If you look at the label, you may see something like wheat flour - this product is not made with whole grain. It is processed grain, and actually lacks the wheat germ which is one of the most beneficial components of Whole Wheat.

There is also a difference in fiber between wheat flour and Whole wheat flour. Reading the labels can be very beneficial to your health.