Food is something the Napa Valley is truly blessed with. Alongside our delicious food comes delightful pairings of beer, cocktails, and wine. We feed our glutinously hedonistic approach to setting our taste buds to lightspeed by pairing the Napa Valley’s award-winning wine with our world class food. It can be irresistible to ignore such culinary delights with restaurants like R+D Kitchen, Morimoto, and the eateries at The Oxbow featuring their iconic food that will leave a monument of unforgettable tastes in your memory banks.
The food from Napa is amazing. I take in pride in the pedigree of food culture I’ve been raised in while growing up in Napa. However, we enter an issue with our unparalleled food and wine we have been blessed with in our valley. Alongside our beautiful food comes butter, cream, flour, and fat. Lots of fat. The words duck fat and bacon come to mind. Duck confit or pork belly, anyone?
The bread set at our tables while we are out to lunch, dinner, or just a social gathering before we order comes from our local bakeries. Bouchon, Model, and ABC know what they’re doing when it comes to making a baguette. Hard to resist when you’re probably not making that in your home kitchen.
Lastly, we Napans live in an ocean of the world’s finest wines. Similar to how the people of San Diego live a stone’s throw from their breath-taking beaches. The combination of a juicy filet mignon from Cole’s Chop House with a glass of award-winning cabernet is enough to send your palate on a one way to trip to Turks and Caicos.
The combination of food and wine from Napa is a pretty picture for those of us who enjoy the celebration of food. However, just like many things in our lives, too much of a good thing can lead to destructive situations to our well-being. Many locals work for the food and wine industry. It’s common to dine at local restaurants and pair lunch with beer, wine, or a cocktail. While promoting food and wine might be part of the job, an underlying vicious cycle is present with eating too much food and drinking too much alcohol. The leading cause of cardiovascular disease, metabolic disease, and obesity is caused by suboptimal eating decisions. Eating bread, pasta, or risotto more than three times per week imposes the threat of diabetes due to the insulin spiking properties from starchy carbohydrate based food. The increased concentration of insulin throughout the week from frequent high glycemic index carbohydrates will decrease insulin sensitivity and increase insulin resistance, which is essentially pre-diabetic conditions. Foods with high fat content and cholesterol from animal sourced protein increase the concentration of fat and cholesterol circulating in our blood stream, promoting the build ups of plaques in arteries and increasing the likelihood of cardiovascular disease. Drinking wine can easily be an Olympic sport in the Napa Valley. Before we know it, we can be consuming as much as 18 glasses of wine per week. The overindulgence of alcohol can not only decrease fat metabolism and cause additional caloric input, but it also leaves us in a foggy, lethargic state of mind that can last a week and compound over years.
It’s important not to demonize from the good food and wine we are blessed with and that has given Napa success. We wouldn’t enjoy all of the features Napa offers if the people withing the industry had not worked so hard to offer this amazing food and wine available at restaurants and wineries. To help mitigate indulgence, there are healthy tactics to develop a balance between our good food and wine and the well being of our bodies. Our personal training clients in the Napa Valley learn to manage such struggles by developing weekly tactics to maintain balance of their alcohol and food consumption and the integrity of their body. Examples include setting a weekly goal to have one to two days a week of being alcohol free. Declining bread at lunch and dinner helps decrease extra carbohydrate consumption. The awareness to always ensure there is a colorful vegetable on the plate helps fill the stomach as to not overeat. Developing systems and tactics to ensure we are not overindulging is a critical component to anyone’s success who is regularly in the environment of good food and wine.
We are fortunate to be in this unique, amazing place of the world. Let’s cherish the resources we have in the amazing food and wine culture by truly appreciating it as a gift. By doing this, we can improve our well-being and live strong, happy, and healthful lives.
Sean McCawley, the founder and owner of Napa Tenacious Fitness in Napa, CA, welcomes questions and comments. Reach him at 707-287-2727, napatenacious@gmail.com or visit the website napatenaciousfitness.com.
