The Checklist: Health, nutrition and safety advice for July

It’s the peak of summer. Here are ways to stay at your personal best through July.

Pick a pepper:

Jennifer LaRue Huget

Writes the Eat, Drink & Be Healthy column and Lean & Fit e-newsletter, and blogs for The Checkup.

Archive

• Twitter

• 
• 

( istockphoto.com / ) - Bell pepper

Bell peppers, now coming into season at area farms and backyard gardens, are nutritious summer vegetables – and they’re pretty, too.

Angela Ginn, a spokeswoman for the American Dietetic Association, says peppers are “rich in antioxidants,” vitamins that are thought to help fight disease by disarming inflammation-causing rogue oxygen molecules in the body.

Fairfax County dietitian Danielle Omar points out that a red pepper has 1.5 to two times as much Vitamin C as an orange; similar size green peppers also have more than oranges. The red variety, which is really just a ripened green pepper, also has lycopene, which may help reduce the risk of some cancers.

Peppers of all varieties make great summer snacks, Ginn says, because their taste and crunch are satisfying, but their calorie count — about 25 to 30 per medium pepper — is so low, you can even splurge a few calories on a dip.

Alas, peppers aren’t nature’s highest-fiber vegetables. But Ginn says they play well with fiber-rich foods such as salad, whole-grain pasta, brown rice and barley.

Both Ginn and Omar love roasting peppers. Ginn suggests removing the stem and seeds, brushing the outside of the peppers with a little olive oil or spraying with a vegetable-oil spray such as Pam, and placing them in the oven on a roasting pan for 40 to 50 minutes till they “have lost their shape and are tender and pliable.” Eat them as is or use them to top one of the fibery foods above.

For more ideas on cooking with peppers, go to The Washington Post’s Recipe Finder at washingtonpost.com/recipes and look up the following: Avocado Bravado, Paprikish Pork Skewers, Beef and Black-Bean Picadillo, Grilled Vegetable Salad, Jalapeno-Spiked Corn Chowder With Red Pepper Coulis, Nutty Beefy Noodles and Penne With Grill-Roasted Peppers.

Look up the Yellow Book:

If you plan to travel abroad this summer (and maybe even if you don’t), you’ll want to spend time skimming through the Yellow Book. The publication, issued every other year by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and so named for the color of its cover, tells you everything you need to know about the potential health perils of travel.

The publication, officially named CDC Health Information for International Travel 2012, is available for $45, but it just went up online at wwwnc.cdc.gov/travel, where you can consult it free of charge.

Phyllis Kozarsky of the CDC has worked on the Yellow Book since its inception in the 1960s, when it was “a booklet that outlined just what was required for international travel, like smallpox vaccination,” she says. Today the book is “mainly written for the provider of health care or clinician,” she says, but laypeople might also find plenty of relevant material.

The book takes a broad view of how to stay not just healthy but also safe when visiting parts afar. That means common-sense information about everything from motor-vehicle safety to getting tattooed in foreign lands, Kozarsky says. “You would never get in the back of a pickup truck on the New Jersey Turnpike,” she says. “But somehow, when you’re in Mexico and everybody’s doing it, you have a few beers and you find yourself in the back of a pickup truck.” The Yellow Book, naturally, advises against such behavior.