What stroke survivors feed themselves has a profound impact on their recovery and prevention of future strokes. All too often, diet is glanced over in recovery.
Food is the most basic necessity for human life, and its impact on the emotional, physical, and mental well being is profound. Food’s impact is even more profound after a medical trauma like a stroke, and while the road to recovery is long and arduous, the greatest weapon in a survivor’s arsenal is proper nutrition. Wading into the waters of nutrition and proper eating can be a daunting task, especially for a survivor grappling with the life changing circumstances of a stroke.
- Will acai help boost my metabolism?
- Will cutting carbs and counting calories help me lose weight?
- Do organics make a difference?
Deciphering fact and fiction out of all these questions can lead even the best Google browser down a rabbit hole that would make even Alice jealous. In general it’s best to keep it simple and focus on the most important aspects. Even that is a vast improvement.
What should I not eat?
I am often asked, “What should I eat?” The more important question is, “What should I NOT eat?” A survivor should not be eating fast food and processed food. Lack of endurance and the paralysis of one or both arms, which frequently follows a stroke, make fast foods and processed foods very appealing because they are quick and fill an immediate need. Processed foods are any shelf-stable food that has added preservatives. These are most of the foods that you find in the middle isles of a grocery store. Potato chips, hot dogs, ready-made soups, and anything in a box in the freezer section are all examples of processed foods. Unfortunately the bulk of the American diet is processed, directly reflected in the declining health of its citizens. If there are more than three items in a food’s ingredient list that your mother did not cook with, it is a processed food. Don’t eat it.
These foods are detrimental to the human body, but they are especially destructive for a stroke survivor. They are often packed with sodium and unhealthy fats, which lead to further cardiac duress. As a population already grappling with a weakened cardiac system, fast foods and processed foods are a one-way ticket to additional cardiac incidents.
Many people believe that sandwich shops are healthy fast foods. Unless it is a veggie sandwich, they are not. The deli meats used in sandwich shops are packed with sodium, which is harmful to the cardiac system.
Fast and processed foods almost always are packed with excessive amounts of sugar, which cause sugar spikes and crashes in the body. The spike and crash flow in the body wreak havoc on the entire system. The sugar spike gives off an endorphin rush in the brain, which creates a temporary feeling of pleasure that leads to an addiction to high sugared foods. The spike also triggers a storage mechanism in the body, making the body convert any carbohydrate or fat into body fat.
The resulting crash, after the spike, will worsen any existing depression and endurance issues a survivor grapples with after a stroke. During the crash, the body is in such a freefall that it craves the endorphin boost from high sugar foods, continually feeding the cycle. The sugar cycle is exacerbated by an increase in body fat and declining sustained energy. All in all, these foods should be avoided at all cost.
What should I eat?
The simple answer is real food. Many well-respected researchers assert that the human digestive system has not evolved much farther than the digestive system of cavemen. What does this mean? Modern man should be eating foods that our early predecessors were eating.
Monosodium glutamate wasn’t around then, and it shouldn’t be on your plate. Natural foods are what should be on the plate, not necessarily organic. Organic foods are safer. They do not always have more nutrients, just less potentially harmful agents. Organic foods are expensive and not always the boon to health that they are perceived. In the purest sense, these are luxury foods, and for a population living on a fixed income, they are not always the best food source.
Natural foods are the idea that the food should occur naturally in the wild. It is what humans ate before the 20th century: vegetables, fruits, foods that only have a handful of ingredients, animal products that aren’t ground up and formed into neat little shapes. At the grocery store, these are the foods shoved all the way to one side and the back. If nothing else, just replacing fast or processed foods with natural foods will significantly increase physical health, mental prowess, and emotional stability.
That is the big secret everyone has been keeping locked away. Eating real foods makes the body function better. Think about a car. Gasoline is what makes the engine run. Without the gasoline, the engine doesn’t turn, all the fancy gadgets won’t work, and the car won’t move. Food is the gasoline for the human machine. Without food, the chemical reactions won’t take place, nerves won’t transmit impulses, and the heart won’t beat.
To eat foods with additives and preservatives is like adding dirt and bleach to your gasoline. The car continues to run but not at optimal levels. If you continue giving it bad gas, eventually the motor stops working, it seizes. Bleach and dirt would definitely make our gasoline cheaper, but the long-term damage is more expensive. You must think of your food in this way. Preservative and additives are impurities in our fuel.
The four letter word….
Cook. In this day in age, who has time to cook? Who has the energy? Our parents, who now are projected to have a longer life span than the current generation. There is a connection. Cooking is a scary thing to jump into at first, but humans have been doing it for as long as humans were humans. Unfortunately, modern man has not evolved enough to make cooking obsolete, no matter what the big food companies tell you. Preparing your own food is the only way to completely guarantee that you know what you are going to eat. To effectively incorporate natural foods into a diet, a skill set of cooking must be present.
Aside from increasing health by eliminating processed foods, cooking increases brain activity, creativity, endurance, and it’s sexy. Nothing is more attractive than a man or woman that can whip up a tasty meal.
Where do you start?
- Food Network is the best suggestion for beginning chefs. The recipes the on-screen chefs create are not always beginning level, but it is a free demonstration on basic skills like sautéing, roasting, broiling, pan-frying, steaming, and stewing. It is also a great place to get new ideas for meals.
- Cookbooks are another great resource for a beginning chef. There are books targeted to beginners and experts and every level in between. Plus, many cookbooks explain techniques and kitchen lingo in the preface.
- Finally, there is a wonderful invention called the Internet. There are great sites with fun recipes, many of which are submitted and commented on by home cooks. Foodnetwork.com, cooks.com, and allrecipes.com are great jumping off points. Epicurious.com and foodandwine.com are great resources for more challenging recipes. Each website has a whole host of recipes dedicated to quick and easy meals for the survivor on the go.
There are tough challenges to tackling a foray in the kitchen as a stroke survivor. Paralysis makes cutting and manipulating the food difficult. Lack of endurance makes long recipes impossible. Mental fatigue make following complicated recipes hard. There is a way, and if there is a will, healthy cooking is possible.
There are host of special tools that are stroke survivor friendly. Flexible cutting boards make it easy to move food from the counter to the pan with one hand. Hand held dicers, like the Slap Chop, make dicing quick and easy. Teflon pans make it harder for food to stick and easier to flip using that fancy-chef-by-the-handle-toss.
Prepare the food before it’s time to cook it. It takes a bit of foresight, but cooking becomes easier when everything is cut up and ready. Do your prep (industry term for preparing food before cooking) earlier in the day or even the day before. When the hunger starts to rumble in the stomach and the energy levels are low, it’s usually a quick couple of minutes to bring everything together in a pan to heat it up. Slow cooking is a great asset too. Stews and soups are very tasty. They also are not very labor intensive. Once everything is in the pot, slow cooking it over a period of time not only brings out the flavors, it allows the chef a break.
Take advantage of your support networks. When family and friends visit, ask for help prepping or cooking a recipe. Cooking brings people together. There is something magical about preparing and breaking bread with other people. It will enrich existing relationships and will build new ones. Home nurses or care providers are good resources too. Make them help you, that is why they are there. Plus, sharing recipes is one of the great joys of cooking with strangers.
Moral of the Story?
The take away would be this: recovery is about regaining control of your life and taking back the independence that was lost during the stroke. Whether the skill set was there or not before the stroke, cooking is a life-skill that every recovering stroke survivor should have. If you don’t want to spend your life having someone else dress you, why spend your life having someone make your food.
Food manufacturers don’t have anything invested in your recovery. You can regain much of what was lost if your body has the proper fuel to run. Proper nutrition is the most important aspect of your recovery. There is no air conditioner if the car doesn’t run. You won’t want to try and get dressed if you have no energy. It’s the most basic connection and all too often over looked.
You are what you eat.
You eat what you are.
Be healthy.
Be strong.
It will only get better.
Author: Matthew Everett
Matthew is a Certified Culinarian with Johnson & Wales University. He is currently pursuing his Registered Dietician license and a degree in Culinary Nutrition. He is actively involved with Operation Frontline, which brings cooking and nutrition lessons to lower income families. Matthew has worked with Denver Public Schools to overhaul their lunch program, with an emphasis on better nutrition and local sustainability. His passion for working with nutrition and the community is directly tied to his childhood in Louisiana, where he witnessed firsthand the impact of poor nutrition on families.
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