Healthy Eating, With Rural Food Availabilities

It’s Q&A Day at 10almonds!

Have a question or a request? We love to hear from you!

In cases where we’ve already covered something, we might link to what we wrote before, but will always be happy to revisit any of our topics again in the future too—there’s always more to say!

No question/request too big or small 😎

❝Informtation about healthy food that doesn’t need obscure ingredients, things we can’t get in rural areas❞

Great suggestion, as we do have many readers who (like yourself, presumably) live in such places!

Generally speaking, what we try to do is give the most universally applicable health information possible, and trust people to apply that in the context of what’s available to them.

One of the reasons it’s hard to tailor dietary information to exclude “obscure” ingredients is that “obscure” is relative and subjective. Sometimes, one reader’s “what is this weird food I’ve never heard of?” is another reader’s everpresent staple!

So, while we can’t whip up a menu based on the products available in your local store without having an inventory of your local store, what we can do is offer some guiding principles:

Do what you can

It’s tempting to be sad that certain things aren’t locally available. This writer has a friend who often sends recipes that call for locally unavailable specific Middle Eastern and/or Surinamese* ingredients, and yes, it’s unfortunate.

^{*Which this writing software thinks is so obscure it did not even recognize the word “Surinamese” and highlighted it as a spelling mistake.}

However, it’s best to focus on what is available, and work with that where possible.

Substitute or skip?

Sometimes, if you can’t get something fresh, canned or frozen or dried is fine. Sometimes it isn’t (in culinary terms, anyway; it’s almost always fine in nutrition terms, unless it’s lettuce or something in which case yes, only fresh will do).

Experiment, find out what works and what doesn’t. In the worst case scenario, you’ll have a disappointing meal once and not repeat that one.

Sometimes, the “inferior” choices work better! See for example: Super-Nutritious Shchi ← in this one, those dried herbs? They work better than fresh. The fresh herbs would give it a slightly sweeter taste that’s not appropriate here. And guess what, the Russian peasants who invented this dish did not have fresh rosemary and thyme (which grow nicely in a Mediterranean climate, and not so well in Siberia, say). Those tomatoes? We use fresh in the recipe there and it’s fine, but actually canned cherry tomatoes work great too.

On which note…

People think of “canned foods” as meaning “processed foods” and therefore bad. But the reality is it’s all dependent on what’s in the can (check the ingredients!). And as for nutrients?

Many canned fruits and vegetables contain more nutrients than fresh ones! This is because the way they’ve been stored preserves them better. For example:

• Canned tomatoes contain more bioavailable lycopene than fresh
• Canned spinach contains more bioavailable carotene than fresh
• Canned corn contains more bioavailable lutein than fresh
• The list goes on, but you get the idea!

Learn more: Nutrient Retention During Canned Food Production

Count the plant types

Getting at least 30 different types of plant in your diet each week is associated with much better health outcomes than not doing that.

It is not, in fact, a number out of a hat. It’s from a big (n=11,336) study into what things affect the gut microbiome for better or for worse. It was an observational population study, championing “citizen science” in which volunteers tracked various things and collected and sent in various samples for analysis.

The most significant finding of this study was that those who consumed more than 30 different kinds of plants per week, had a much better gut microbiome than those who consumed fewer than 10 different kinds of plants per week (there is a bell curve at play, and it gets steep around 10 and 30):

American Gut: an Open Platform for Citizen Science Microbiome Research

You can read more about it, here: What’s Your Plant Diversity Score?

Does it sound hard to get in 30 different plants, without good local availability?

In this writer’s pantry alone (so, only shelf-stable goods), there are (by coincidence, literally just counted them now) precisely 30 different kinds of plants, mostly in the form of various canned, jarred/fermented, or dried goods.

And that’s without counting herbs and spices (which would add another 21 to the tally).

Now, your local availability will differ from this writer’s, but we’re willing to bet that your local stores have a lot of different canned, jarred/fermented, or dried goods.

It’s easy to forget a lot of them are plants, if you’re only thinking of greenery and such. For example, nuts are plants! Canned beans/pulses are plants! Lentils are plants! Grains are plants! And so forth.

Minimize the bad

We generally advocate for focusing on adding healthy things more than eliminating unhealthy things, and we stand by that as a generally more useful principle, and certainly one that’s a lot easier to act on (and after all, dietary information is only useful if you actually implement it).

That said, there’s a strong case to be made for skipping alcohol, reducing sugar and salt, things like that. And those tweaks are usually things that one can do almost anywhere.

Keep your menu fresh, even if the ingredients aren’t

Variety’s important psychologically, not just nutritionally, and at the end of the day you’ll probably only do what doesn’t feel like a terrible chore.

So, with that in mind…

Sick of eating the same things? 5 ways to boost your nutrition and keep meals interesting and healthy

Enjoy!