Great Retirement Places

Your Fruity Duty is to make it a point to eat fruit every day. Who doesn’t like fruit? Juicy peaches, crisp apples, bright yellow bananas–yum! Fruit not only tastes great, but it’s also good for your health, your digestion, and your waistline. Fruit is loaded with vitamins, minerals, and fiber. Those are important at any age, but in our thrifty retirement, they gain increasing importance.

No matter how we try, the simple fact of aging tends to slow our metabolism, and without any change in diet or exercise, we will almost inevitably gain weight. Making fruit a larger part of your diet can help offset that. Fruit can become part of every course and every meal you prepare.

Fruit for breakfast might be easiest. Top your cereal, hot or cold, with fruit. If you’re having pancakes, waffles, or French toast, top it with berries or chunky applesauce. For those on the run, grab a banana or apple as you head out the door.

For the rest of the day, let’s start with fruit in salads. Yes, there’s the common fruit salad. We all used to open a can of fruit cocktail, add sliced bananas, and call it fruit salad. Of course, there are tons of options to that today. You can cut up virtually any combination of fruits and it will be delicious. That’s a great idea to take to a family dinner or a potluck, where gooey casseroles and fatty desserts often rule.

But fruit in salad doesn’t stop there. The mandarin chicken salad, popular for over 25 years already, is just the beginning of a wonderful world that has opened up lately. Try a basic mix of greens with a fresh orange and a fresh apple diced into it. Add toasted pecans and you have a delicious salad. Add diced chicken and you have a main course that is wonderfully healthy, as well as tasty.

Dried fruit, grapes, or fresh berries can be added to a number of salads. Think as simple as raisins or dried cranberries, to as exotic as dates or dried mango. All these work well with a bit of diced celery and bell pepper in tossed greens. Your thrifty retirement likes the cost of these juicy salad ingredients, too.

Fruit works surprisingly well when added to a main course. Cook a beef roast with prunes. Serve chopped apples and pecans over pork chops. Combine dried cranberries and apricots in a sauce to serve over salmon. Glaze chicken with orange juice and honey, and surround with slices of fresh orange.

One element of the Mediterranean diet that is often overlooked is fruit as dessert. Everybody knows about the red wine and olive oil parts, but fruit as dessert is a critical component. Let’s face it: most American diets don’t include grapes and brie as a last course. We choose cakes, cookies, brownies, and other sweets. A single serving of “death by chocolate” can destroy a week of careful eating. Instead, try fruit. Core and quarter a bright red apple and serve it with a tablespoon of caramel sauce, or serve a luscious pear with chocolate sauce. Add the tiniest dash of nutmeg for garnish.

An elegant dessert that is much simpler to prepare than it looks is chunks of fruit served in a martini glass. Cut up cantaloupe, honeydew, pineapple, bananas, kiwi, berries, peaches, or almost any fruit and pile it in a stemmed glass. Drizzle it with a tablespoon of rum, Grand Marnier, or Chambord, and your whole meal has new flair. It’s a show-stopper that will light up the table.

It seems that each week we read about a new super fruit: first, cranberries, pomegranate, and blueberries, followed by exotics like gogi berries, açai, and noni. Claims have been made that this fruit or that fruit can fight urinary infections, promote prostate health, prevent colds, retard coronary vascular disease, or stave off cancer. There seems to be promising evidence to support some of those claims. But until science shows us proof, what we know for sure is that fruit is full of fiber to help regularity and promote digestion, and loaded with vitamins and other compounds that are essential to good health. So do your Fruity Duty and eat fruit every day!

The word flexitarian is a combination of flexible and vegetarian, and it describes a person who eats a primarily plant-based diet, but who occasionally enjoys chicken, fish, or red meat. More of us in retirement should follow this eating style if we are interested in better health, lower weight, a longer life, and reduced chances of chronic and deadly diseases. Flexitarians live almost four years longer than non-vegetarians live, according to an article in The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition.

The American Institute for Cancer Research estimates that eating a vegetarian diet could prevent a third of all cancers, certainly a concern for us as retired folks. So many clinical studies have found a connection between red meat and colorectal cancer that the fact is no longer disputed. A March issue of The New York Times headlined an article with “Eating Meat May Increase Risk of Early Death, Study Finds.” The NIH-AARP study it reported tracked over half a million older Americans just like us for five years. Those who ate the most red meat were almost 30% more likely to die during the study than those who ate the least red meat. The most common causes of death were cancer and heart disease.

The flexitarian lifestyle is easier to adopt than a strictly vegetarian diet. The nonprofit Vegetarian Resource Group estimates that only about 3% of Americans are true vegetarians. Although adherents would claim otherwise, a strictly vegetarian diet can be difficult to manage, and disciples must be ever vigilant, lest some animal product sneak into their food. Flexitarians are relieved from that concern and instead can concentrate on reducing the meat in their diet and increasing the proportions of beans, whole grains, nuts, fruits, and vegetables.

This substitution is an easier process than you might think, even at our age. A good place to begin is to rid yourself of the idea that a piece of meat must be at the center of the plate at a meal. Although most of us were raised with this notion–and raised our families the same way–in our thrifty retirement, we can change our habits. Instead, when present at all, meat, fish, or poultry should be an ingredient in a veggie-rich dish, such as a salad or stir-fry. When you load a salad with nutritious and interesting ingredients such as dried fruits or berries, toasted nuts, chunks of vegetables such as zucchini, squash, or broccoli, and a variety of leafy greens, you have a spectacular dish. One great salad recipe includes a fresh apple and a fresh orange chopped up in it. Add low-fat, high-fiber crackers or flatbreads and you won’t even miss meat.

Favorite recipes can be adapted by substituting half the meat for an equal amount of beans. Think of chili with less meat and extra beans, or burritos with less chicken and more pinto beans, as well as brown rice. Spaghetti can be served with extra peppers, onions, and zucchini diced into the sauce, and less (or no) ground beef. Add shredded carrots or mashed garbanzo beans to meatball or meatloaf mixture.

Additional benefits of eating a flexitarian diet include lower weight, lower food costs, and lower contributions to climate change and global warming, a concern for our grandchildren’s future. Nutrition Reviews analyzed dozens of studies and found that people who eat a vegetarian style diet weigh about 15% less than do those who eat a more conventional American diet, which is higher in meat.

Once for ounce, meat is probably the most expensive food we purchase. Meat averages from a low of about 15 cents an ounce to as much as $1.00 per ounce or more. Compare that to beans, which can cost as little as 2 or 3 cents per once, or fresh veggies, which are around 5-20 cents per ounce.

Production of meat has a startling influence on climate change. The Archives of Internal Medicine cited a report from the United Nations, which stated that not only do live cattle produce more methane during digestion each year than all transportation combined, but U.S. livestock production generates a billion tons of manure annually, causing well over half of world emissions of nitrous oxide. In addition, U.S. livestock accounts for “55% of erosion, 37% of pesticides applied, and 50% of antibiotics consumed,” as well as “32% of nitrogen load and 33% of the phosphorous load into freshwater resources.” Additional impacts on global warming include production of the grain to feed animals raised for food and the fuel used to transport the meat first to processing plants and then to markets.

Reducing human contributions to climate change is critical if we want our children and grandchildren to enjoy the same benefits of the planet that we have found. Losing weight, saving money, and improving your retirement health while doing those through flexitarian eating sounds like a win-win-win situation.