The coronavirus has taken away the trips and processions of Holy Week (for those who would like it), but you will not be able to take away the French toast. In fact, if there is something that this pandemic has not taken away from us, it has been the desire to cook and eat pastries. You just have to see how yeast flew from supermarkets during the quarantine of the first months.
But this extraordinary situation that we are going through has not only launched us to make bread. Some people have also taken the opportunity to get on the healthy life car. Of course, exercising more and improving your diet is always a good decision. The problem is that, when reaching dates like these, doubts arise. And now what about the French toast?
For several days prior to Easter, social networks had already been filled with French toast recipes healthy, fit, real food or whatever we want to call them. This is something that can be extrapolated to other desserts. Healthy Nutella with pure cocoa and dates to stop a train, bean brownie, banana and oatmeal pancakes… These recipes are really much healthier alternatives than the desserts they replace. However, sometimes they can make us fall into the mistake of thinking that if they are healthy we can eat them uncontrollably. And, actually, that is the main problem that we find when we decide to move on to a more healthy. The first step is learning to be in control of our diet. If we skip this step, we will be doing a change of habits incomplete that can lead us to make mistakes such as not enjoying the torrijas at Easter.
Are the torrijas de Semana Santa a good process?
To know if the torrijas are a good processed, in hypertextual we have contacted the dietician-nutritionist Daniel Ursua. First of all, he wanted to make it clear that making certain classifications is not always the best way to start having a healthy relationship with food.
“As a general rule, I am not in favor of categorizing foods into good or badwhether they are prosecuted or not,” he says. “Less still from the real food claim, as it belongs to a movement I don’t agree with and outside of that movement it loses its meaning.”
Focusing on French toast, there are all kinds of alternatives conceived from the concept of movement Real Food: baked instead of fried, skimmed milk or vegetable drink instead of whole milk, alternative sweeteners to sugar or honey… But is all this really necessary?
“It depends on what implication it will have for the person who eats them, doing them like this,” explains Ursúa. “If by making them that way you are going to think that you can eat more or that you are eating a healthy dessert, it is not better to make them that way.”
The key, therefore, is more to understand that it is a punctual consumption than looking for healthy alternatives. “Torrijas, like many other foods, are associated with specific dates, in this case Holy Week. Therefore, they should be consumed in a timely manner throughout the year.”
The importance is in the dose
In 2018, he himself Carlos Rios, promoter of Real Food in Spain, made a similar reflection on torrijas. This movement contemplates that 10% of a person’s diet can correspond to ultraprocessed. For this reason, he explained that there was no problem with consuming French toast at Easter, as long as they did not exceed that percentage.
Mathematics aside, taking care of your physical health is as important as taking care of your mental health. Therefore, we must avoid guilt and understand that the occasional consumption of these sweets will not harm us. In this regard, Ursúa highlights the importance of exercise and eat healthy regularly throughout the year.
“When someone takes nutritional advice from me, I hope that they understand perfectly that what they do is more important the rest of April than those four days of Holy Week. The idea of a change of habits should be to achieve long-term goals”.
Sorry, you should not eat cake every day
All these movements that have come to teach us how substitute baking ingredients by others healthier they do quite well. But they can also do a lot of harm if they don’t disclose properly when it comes to nutrition.
This occurs, for example, with trends such as the substitution of sugar for the aforementioned date paste. “Date paste has a higher nutritional density than sugar, so it gives us more nutrients”, clarifies the nutritionist consulted by this means. “This does not mean that, for example, a cake sweetened with this paste is going to be healthy and we can eat it every day. We must keep in mind the guidance of the harvard healthy plate and the proportion of foods that they suggest to us there”.
East plate to which it refers is a classification aimed at calculating the most appropriate proportions in a plate of healthy food. In it, half should be represented by fruits and vegetablesa quarter of grainif possible integral, and the remaining fourth by proteins. A sponge cake, no matter how much date cream it includes instead of sugar, is not a balanced food. And neither are the torrijas. Therefore, we must eat them without fear or remorse. There is nothing wrong in it. The important thing is to be aware of what they are: an occasional sweet to enjoy during Holy Week. And if you feel like eating French toast in August, nothing happens either. The problem would be to replace the ingredients with real food and consume them every day, because there we would be making a mistake. Call it the Matrix, marketing, or simply confusion.