Darci Marchese, wtop.com
WASHINGTON – True Food Kitchen, a restaurant that serves locally-grown foods and anti-inflammatory dishes in California and Arizona, is coming to the D.C. area.
Andrew Weil, director of the Arizona Center for Integrative Medicine and one of the founders of the True Food Kitchen, says he hopes to bring the restaurant to the D.C. area within the next year.
Weil says the menu includes dishes with fresh local ingredients and is based on his “anti-inflammatory diet,” which he describes as a “Mediterranean diet with Asian influences.”
The menus “are not horribly fancied-up,” he says. “We like bold flavors that come through very clearly.”
Weil’s book, “True Food: Seasonal, Sustainable, Simple, Pure,” offers 125 recipes that center around the anti-inflammatory diet.
Weil says his recommended diet and food pyramid are designed to help overall health. He adds that the diet can help counter chronic inflammation, which is a cause of heart disease as well as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease.
His food pyramid has vegetables and fruits at the bottom — with a daily recommendation of eating four or five vegetables and three to four fruits. Whole and cracked grains, pastas, beans and legumes come next, followed by healthy fats from foods such as olive oil and avocados.
The top of the pyramid includes some treats such as two to four cups of tea, one to two glasses of red wine and some dark chocolate.
See one of Dr. Weil’s anti-inflammatory recipes: salmon with a bed of lentils.
Follow @DMarcheseWTOP and @WTOP on Twitter.
(Copyright 2012 by WTOP. All Rights Reserved.)
