Tips for finding healthy options in convenience stores, airports, fast food restaurants, and strange cities.
Nutrition Diva is hosted by Monica Reinagel, MS, LDN. Transcripts are available at Simplecast.
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Welcome to the Nutrition Diva podcast. I’m your host, Monica Reinagel, and this episode was inspired by a question that Lola sent about eating healthy on the road.
“I travel at least two days a week,” she writes, “which leads to countless fast-food and airport meals. Do you have any advice for travelers?”
Eating healthy when you’re at home can be challenging enough. Sticking to your good habits when you're traveling can be even tougher. But there's no need to arrive home from your trip with a junk food hangover. Here are some tips to help you stick to your healthy eating habits when traveling.
Whenever possible, arm yourself with healthy snacks for the car or plane so that you're not stuck with the limited offerings available at gas stations and airports. If you're traveling with a cooler, stock it with yogurt, hard-boiled eggs, string cheese, fruit, cut-up vegetables, and hummus.
Dried fruit, nuts, sunflower seeds, or trail mix travel well without refrigeration—and you’ll usually find a good selection of that sort of thing at the airport newsstand if you don’t have time to shop before you leave.
And, although I try not to rely on protein or meal-replacement bars in my regular day-to-day life, I do like to tuck a few in my carry-on or suitcase when I’m traveling. They can really come in handy when, for example, a delay of one sort or another means that you will not have access to, or time to stop for, a proper meal.
When choosing a bar, it’s important to distinguish between a protein bar and an energy bar. Energy bars were originally designed to provide a portable source of calories, or energy, to fuel physical exertion or exercise. They tend to be higher in simple carbohydrates, which can be more quickly absorbed than fats and proteins.
Protein bars, on the other hand, are usually lower in carbohydrates and higher in protein. Although this makes them less useful as a source of quick energy during exercise, it makes them a better choice to replace a meal or snack.
Of course, even if you're carrying plenty of healthy snacks for the trip, eventually you'll need to find a proper meal and when you’re traveling, your options may be limited to fast food restaurants and convenience stores. The good news is that it’s easier than it used to be to find healthy options at these kinds of places. In addition to the usual snacks and candy, rest stops and convenience stores are now more likely to offer hard boiled eggs, string cheese, carrots and hummus, or veggie wraps. And while it used to be hard to find much besides fried chicken, burgers and fries, fast food restaurants are now much more likely to include salads, veggie burgers, yogurt, and fresh fruit on the menu.
Most fast food restaurants also now provide nutrition information for the various menu items, which makes it a lot easier to zero in on the better choices. When vetting the calorie counts on fast food items, be sure to pay attention to extras like cheese, sour cream, or guacamole.
Apps like OpenTable and Yelp can also help you suss out highly-rated local restaurants that accommodate diners who are vegetarian, gluten-free, or have other dietary considerations.
Once you're at your destination, try to stick to your usual eating habits as much as possible. If your hotel room has a small fridge, for example, stop at a grocery store and pick up whatever you usually eat for breakfast. Starting the day with your usual yogurt or high-fiber cereal rather than the Grand-Slam pancake breakfast will help set the tone for the rest of the day. Eating some yogurt every day when traveling can also help you avoid irregularity, which certainly takes a little of the fun out of traveling.
We also have time for a quick listener Q&A!
Gwyn writes:
“I have been vegetarian for about 3 years. I eat a lot of plant-based meats and wonder if they are actually healthy or not. I want to eat less processed foods and I'm thinking that plant-based meats are actually super-processed. What’s your take?”
Gwyn is right: It takes a lot of processing to turn a soybean or wheat kernel into something that resembles ground beef or Italian sausage! In fact, plant-based meats would all be categorized as “ultra-processed foods” in the NOVA classification system.
Recently, there’s been a lot of talk about whether the Dietary Guidelines for Amercians should include specific guidance on limiting the consumption of ultra-processed foods, based on some high-profile research that has linked consumption of UPFs with various health concerns.
However, I think the NOVA criteria are not a completely reliable guide to which foods are healthful and which are not. (Earlier this year, I profiled some equally high-profile research that demonstrates this very vividly.)
In medical testing, we say that a good diagnostic test is both sensitive and specific. Sensitive means that it actually catches most cases of whatever it is that it’s trying to screen for. Specific means that it doesn’t accidentally catch things that are actually fine. A very sensitive test minimizes false negatives. A very specific test minimizes false positives. A very good test does both.
In my view, the NOVA classification is very sensitive but not very specific–very few false negatives but far too many false positives. As a result, a lot of perfectly healthy foods get thrown under the bus. That’s not the kind of bias and error that we want to bake into our dietary guidelines. (There’s enough bias and error in there already!)
But back to Gwyn’s question about whether plant-based meats are too processed to be considered healthy. Despite the extensive processing involved, the environmental impact of producing plant-based meat analogues is still less than that of raising animals. And obviously, no animals are harmed in the process. For a lot of people, that’s enough to justify including plant-based meats in their diet.
Some types of processing are actually quite beneficial. Take yogurt, for example. Milk is first pasteurized to kill harmful bacteria. It’s then inoculated with active cultures and warmed to promote the growth of probiotic bacteria. As they multiply, these bacteria break down much of lactose in the milk, making the milk more digestible. They also prevent the milk from spoiling as quickly as it otherwise would. Yogurt is clearly a processed food and yet I would say that the processing actually improves its value.
If you're looking to reduce processed foods, I'd start with things like snacks, desserts, beverages–foods that aren't adding much nutrition or that tempt you to overeat. But there’s no need to get overly dogmatic about avoiding processed foods.
Thanks to both Gwyn and Lola for their thought-provoking questions. If you have a question you'd like me to answer, you can email me at nutrition@quickanddirtytips.com You can also leave me a message at 443-961-6206.
Nutrition Diva is a Quick and Dirty Tips podcast and is supported by a fantastic team, which includes Brannan Goetschius, Nathan Semmes, Davina Tomlin, Holly Hutchings, Morgan Christianson, and Kamryn Lacy.
Thanks to all of them and thanks to you for listening!