SASKATOON – The average Canadian knows why Swiss chard is good for you but doesn’t know how to cook it.
“We are segmenting our knowledge,” says Montreal nutritionist Louise Lambert-Laglace who spoke at the University of Saskatchewan recently. Canadians have some facts about nutrition but can’t be bothered to work in the kitchen.
While cooking shows are popular, they are usually televised during the day when the ones who need it are away working.
Avoiding cooking illiteracy is complicated by the fact “we don’t even want to take time to eat,” Lambert-Laglace said. Fast foods mean people spend less time enjoying food, don’t converse with others over meals and “gulp” what they do eat.
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Her answer is to rediscover the rituals and have families eat together. But Lambert-Laglace is not sure that will happen soon. At her clinic in Montreal, she is treating a 20-year-old woman who has been on a diet since she was 14. There are 200,000 to 300,000 Canadians suffering from anorexia or bulimia eating disorders and 10 percent of them die.
“It goes much beyond nutrition,” she said, adding it is a sign people aren’t comfortable with themselves.
As a nutritionist Lambert-Laglace is not promoting vegetarianism. While people “overindulged” in animal foods and research has shown plant foods are winning ones, meat is OK. “It doesn’t need to leave the plate but it doesn’t need to fill it,” she said.
And as to the debate over whether fat or sugar is worse for people, she said bad fats are definitely worse. Bad are the hydrogenated processed oils found in margarines, cookies and pastry products. Good fats are in canola and butter that have little refining.
