Don't Cut Yourself With The Torrijas At Easter: You Can Eat Them As Much As You Want

The coronavirus has taken away the trips and processions of Holy Week (for those who would like it), but you won’t be able to take the French toast. In fact, if there’s one thing this pandemic hasn’t taken from us, it’s the will to cook and eat pastries. Just look at how yeast flew out of the supermarkets during the first months quarantine.

But this extraordinary situation we are going through has not only launched us into baking bread. Some people also took 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 dates like these are reached, doubts arise. And now what about French toast?

For several days before Easter, social networks were already full of French toast recipes in good health, in shape, 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 brownies, banana and oatmeal pancakes… These recipes really are much healthier alternatives to the desserts they replace. However, they can sometimes make us fall into the error of thinking that if they are healthy, we can eat them uncontrollably. And, in fact, this is the main problem we encounter when we decide to move to a more in good health. The first step is to learn to control our diet. If we skip this step, we will do a change of habits incomplete that can lead us to make mistakes such as not enjoying the torrijas at Easter.

Are Semana Santa torrijas a good process?

To know if the torrijas are a processed good, in hypertextual we contacted the dietitian-nutritionist Daniel Ursua. First of all, he wanted to clarify 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 the categorization of foods into Good or badwhether they are prosecuted or not,” he said. “Even less of the real food demand, because it belongs to a movement with which I do not agree and outside of this movement it loses its meaning.”

“The torrijas are associated with specific dates and must therefore be consumed on time”

Daniel Ursúa, nutritionist

Focusing on French toast, there are all sorts of alternatives designed from the concept of movement real food: cooked 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 the implication it will have for the person who eats them, making them like that,” says Ursúa. “If by doing them that way you’re going to think you can eat more or that you’re eating a healthy dessert, it’s not better to do them that way.”

The main thing is therefore more to understand that it is a occasional 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

Tnarik Innael (Flickr)

In 2018, Carlos Ríos himself, promoter of Real Food in Spain, made a similar reflection on torrijas. This movement considers ten% of a person’s diet can correspond to ultra-processed. For this reason, he explained that there was no problem consuming French toast at Easter, as long as they did not exceed this percentage.

Math 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 stresses the importance of exercising and eating healthy regularly all year long.

“When someone takes nutritional advice from me, I hope they fully understand that what they are doing is more important the rest of April than these four days of Holy Week. The idea of changing habits should be to achieve long-term goals”.

Sorry, you shouldn’t eat cake every day

All these movements that have come to teach us how replace cooking ingredients by others in better health, they are doing quite well. But they can also do a lot of harm if they don’t properly disclose when it comes to nutrition.

This happens, for example, with trends such as the substitution of sugar for the aforementioned products date paste. “Date paste has a higher nutrient density than sugar, so it provides us with more nutrients”, specifies the nutritionist consulted in this way. “That doesn’t mean that, for example, a cake sweetened with this batter is going to be healthy and that we can eat it every day. We must keep in mind the directives of the harvard healthy plate and the proportion of food they offer us there”.

This dish to which it refers is a classification aimed at calculating the most appropriate proportions in a plate of healthy foods. In it, half should be represented by fruits and vegetablesa quarter of grainif possible whole, and the remaining quarter by protein. A sponge cake, regardless of the amount of date cream it contains instead of sugar, is not a balanced food. And neither do the torrijas. Therefore, we must eat them without fear or remorse. There is nothing wrong. The important thing is to know what they are: an occasional treat to be enjoyed 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 foods and consume them every day, because that would be a mistake. Call it the matrix, marketing, or just confusion.