Ron Zernicke (dean of University of Michigan’s School of Kinesiology) and Cy Frank (executive director of the Alberta Bone and Joint Health Institution) have verified that sugar and fat intake plays a role in the development of conditions like osteoporosis through the weakening of bones, which is done in two ways. Diets high in sugar and saturated fats prevent calcium absorption, and saturated fats can form insoluble “soaps” that coat the intestines. Both of these effects on the body don’t allow the necessary quantity of calcium to keep bones strong.

Unfortunately, the problems don’t just lie with the sweets. Salt is just as much a culprit. Linda K. Massey, PhD, RD, and professor of human nutrition at Washington State University in Spokane, says that the heavy intake of salt in the typical American diet is a big reason why daily calcium requirements are so high. Sodium is a necessary part of the human diet, and 90 percent of our sodium is consumed via salt. However, table salt specifically causes calcium loss. In fact, 40 mg of calcium is lost through urine for every 2,300 mg of sodium (one tsp. of salt) consumed – and the average American takes in at least 4,000 mg daily.

Soda is an obvious source of sugar, but another osteoporosis-related problem comes from soda: caffeine. Massey says that 100 mg of caffeine is a loss of six milligrams of calcium. Coffee and soda are the prime sources of caffeine in the American diet, though tea is also caffeinated. Studies have shown, though, that tea does not harm, and it is suggested that tea can actually promote bone density in older women.

Think of the Pollo Bravo mini-chain as mom-and-pops, Houston style.

Mom Maribel Bravo is Peruvian; Pop Enrique Bravo is Mexican. The food at their four homey rotisserie-chicken spots — including a new one that recently opened on the Rice Military end of Memorial Drive — is a blend of both cultures.

The Bravos bill them as “hybrid Peruvian-Mexican restaurants,” which makes them uniquely suited to our increasingly hybrid city, where cultural cross-currents and borrowings make the food scene dynamic. Such were my thoughts as I sat at the latest Memorial Drive shop, converted from a Hartz Chicken outlet, dunking crackly little Peruvian-chicken-stuffed taquitos into a creamy, electrifying green sauce that makes the sacred Ninfa’s archetype seem like mere baby food.

The whole $9.99 plateful was gorgeous when it hit my unclad wooden table. On a square yellow plate bordered in flowers and leaves sat four little tacos rolled tight as cigars, each painted carefully with ribboned tomatillo sauce and sour cream, a light snow of Monterey Jack shavings drifting on top, where it slowly melted to a delicate mesh. To one side sat a salad crowned with avocado slices, nudged up against the sweet fried plantains I had swapped out for the regulation French fries.

That late lunch (or was it an early supper?) tasted as good as it looked.

The taquitos delivered the brisk crunch of finely made flautas. Their shredded-chicken filling shone rich and clear through the light-handed gilding of sauces and cheese. The sweet-tartness of the plantains — their deeply caramelized edges like some brittle, sticky candy — contrasted keenly with the taquitos’ savor. (So keenly, in fact, that I recommend you order the sweet fried plantains without fail here, whatever else you’re having.)

Even the iceberg lettuce salad passed muster, crisp and jumpy with a sharp vinaigrette, lashed with color: red cabbage, red onion, carrot and those all-important avocado slices. I’ve eaten variants on that salad in a slew of Central and South American restaurants, and this one did its job, which was mostly textural, better than most.

I sucked down a watery-tasting chicha morada — the Peruvian purple-corn-and-pineapple beverage that’s the equivalent of Mexican aguas frescas — wishing the clovey spices had more depth and thinking that Houston’s recent flowering of Peruvian places had turned me into a chicha morada snob.

Then, because I was having such a pleasant time in this modest little room with its persimmon-colored walls, folk-arty Peruvian landscape paintings and snug small bar, I ordered the house-made lucuma ice cream for dessert. Three yellow scoops arrived in a fluted goblet, tasting of that distinctive maple/sweet potato blend that is the calling card of this fibrous South American fruit.

That lucuma ice cream tasted like Thanksgiving. I’m putting it in my holiday pantheon right along with the sweet-potato pie flavor at Hank’s Ice Cream.

My whole experience at the Memorial Drive shop set the standard for subsequent visits to the Richmond and Hillcroft Pollo Bravo locations. The food was consistently good, the prices reasonable, the table service fast and friendly, the surroundings warm and lovingly detailed.

In short, Pollo Bravo is head and shoulders above most chicken joints. These are wonderfully useful restaurants for takeout, a quick meal on the go (attested to by lots of working guys swigging yellow Inka Kola, the Peruvian national soft drink), or a more relaxed meal with the family (attested to by numerous groups speaking Spanish and English, their tables shoved together to accommodate multiple generations).

I like just knowing I can duck in for a whole rotisserie chicken to go, the plump birds hacked into quarters moist and steamy under their deeply bronzed skins. The spice rub that makes them “Peruvian” is low key, probably a mix of paprika and cumin and salt, a little garlic and maybe a dash of vinegar. It leaves the skin irresistible: not crisp, but taut with a rich tack to it, so that stripping it off and just eating the meat would be a sin.

I even approved of the white meat on Pollo Bravo chickens I’ve sampled, although I am a dark-meat person all the way. At $10.99, these Peruvian chickens cost more than your basic grocery store rotisserie bird, but they’re much better, and Pollo Bravo offers some combo packages with sides that make the cost for a meal quite affordable.

Not to mention that you go home with little plastic tubs of that galvanic green sauce. It seems to be a mayo-based blend of Peruvian aji peppers and some fierce green Mexican chiles, and boy, is it fun to eat. Just remember that a little goes a long way and that you should start out tasting your chicken and chicken dishes plain to enjoy their subtleties before going on to the hot-sauce zone.

For a sit-down meal, it’s hard to beat the ingenious chilaquiles verdes plate I sampled at the Richmond location, a sort of make-your-own green chicken chilaquiles affair that combines a quarter chicken with a lovely soft heap of pan-fried corn tortillas swaddled in tomatillo sauce, sour cream and squiggles of Jack cheese.

You coax off strips of chicken and skin to eat with forkfuls of the tart-hot tortilla casserole, alternating with gently earthy stewed pinto beans and exclamation points of green hot sauce. For my money, this is one of the best plates of food in town — not to mention an example of culinary hybridization at its finest.

I was less enamored of the quesadillas de pollo I tried at the Hillcroft shop. It was a textural thing: inside the folded corn-tortilla half moons, which had been fried just to a light exterior crisp, was a thick cache of chicken that had been rather too thoroughly minced, so that the effect was dryish and crumbly. I kept wishing that the Bravos had chosen to use the kind of moist strips I had torn off that quarter chicken to add to the chilaquiles.

But that’s a quibble in light of the overall goodness of the chicken program at Pollo Bravo.

Assorted non-chicken Peruvian specialties are offered, but I am spoiled enough by our Peruvian spots that the prospect of ceviche made with bland farmed tilapia or lomo saltado made with frozen waffle fries did not tempt me.

I did check out the causa rellena, that layered Peruvian mash-up of mashed potato and chicken salad, and while I found it serviceable, it had none of that mayonnaise-and-aji-amarillo-laden voluptuousity displayed by the version from Chuyo’s Peruvian Deli in League City. Nor did the chicha moradas I tried equal Chuyo’s, although one afternoon’s tumblerful at the Richmond location was better than my two samples from the Memorial Drive store.

Yet it’s a measure of the ways in which my Pollo Bravo visits surprised me that one night, at the Hillcroft restaurant, I sipped a frothy Pisco Sour that was in every way the equal of those served at our city’s fancy cocktail meccas, from its graceful texture and meticulous balance of the tart with the sweet, to the way the potent grape-brandy edge of the Pisco came out to play with the dots of bitters on top. It was 7 bucks and worth it.

Curiously, this classic Peruvian cocktail is only offered at the Hillcroft location. The other locations offer sangria, a few wines by the glass and a selection of Mexican and Peruvian bottled beers. But the Richmond restaurant, the largest and fanciest of the lot — where a big wall mural urges customers “Don’t miss the Pisco Sour!” — doesn’t make them.

The new Memorial Drive spot, where the Bravos have made their beachhead inside the Loop, seems like a good bet for offering Pisco Sours, and I hope things work out that way.

In the meantime, however, I plan to use the latest store as a convenient source of some of the best alfajores I’ve ever tasted. These short-crusted cookies sandwiched with dulce de leche and dusted with powdered sugar offer high-contrast textures that I found riveting: sandy on the cookie end, sticky on the filling end.

Although I didn’t care for the stodgy pionono cake roll or the heavy lucuma flan, those alfajores haunt me. I’ve decided there are few sights sadder than an empty alfajores tray at Pollo Bravo, powdered sugar ridging the blank surface like some mournful topography seen from a plane window.

But then, there are few smells more cheerful than a car driving homewards with a whole Pollo Bravo Peruvian chicken scenting the interior. So there’s that.

When he arrived on United States soil approximately 16 years ago, he didn’t know that his dream was to own a restaurant. “I was almost 20 years old. I didn’t know anything about business. I had planned on coming to New York for two years to work and make money, then go back to Mexico and buy a house or something” he says. One of his employers told him to have bigger dreams than that, and so he changed his plan: “I had to make a decision: Go to school or work hard to make my own business. So I took the decision to work hard for three years, every single day, to save all the money to open a business.”

For three years, he held three jobs: working as a dishwasher in two restaurants, and as a janitor in a nightclub. “I just worked and saved my money. I didn’t spend money on anything, not even to buy a bottle of water,” he remembers.
Going into the restaurant business wasn’t his original plan. His first business venture was in a nightclub, but a burglary left them without anything. This was the twist of fate that turned him into a restaurant owner. His partner in the club owed him money, and gave him a small restaurant in lieu of paying him back.

Bravo turned the struggling little restaurant into a successful Mexican restaurant until the tragedy of 9/11 left all of New York in tatters. After that, he says business came to a standstill. He lost a lot of money. He had to start over. Eventually, he opened a restaurant in New Jersey, but expenses were high, and he found himself working 15 to 16 hour days just to pay the bills. His sister lived in Houston, and after a few visits, he made an executive decision to sell everything and move to Houston.

Bravo opened Pollo Bravo on Hillcroft near Hwy 59 in December of 2006. The restaurant offers a mix of Peruvian pollo a la brasa, or Peruvian rotisserie chicken, and Mexican food from his hometown of Puebla. He says that when he first opened, there was nobody. There were days when he would only sell two chickens.

With little in terms of advertising budget, Bravo did what he could to spread the word by passing out flyers to businesses and offering a free meal. “Just stop by and try our food,” he recalls telling people, “because everyone can use a free meal.” It took a good six months for word of mouth to spread about the quality of his food, especially among Peruvians and Latin Americans, and little by little, business at the restaurant picked up.

Fast forward six years. Bravo is a restauranteur who now owns two locations of Pollo Bravo outright, one at Hillcroft, and one at Richmond. He also has franchise stake in two other locations, one on Memorial, and another in Katy on South Mason Road. The popularity of Peruvian food is at an all time high, and Pollo Bravo is often cited by Latin American chefs like Roberto Castre of Latin Bites as one of their favorites.

With no PR to speak of and nothing but the strength of excellent word-of-mouth reviews, his restaurants have gained the attention of, and merited positive reviews from restaurant critic Katharine Shilcutt of the Houston Press, who described it as “the kind of place where you can relax over a Cristal beer or a potent sangria, its vibrantly saffron-colored walls and joyful atmosphere encouraging you to linger over a meal of rotisserie chicken or ceviche.”

More recently, Alison Cook of the Houston Chronicle also gave it a positive review, saying “The food was consistently good, the prices reasonable, the table service fast and friendly, the surroundings warm and lovingly detailed. In short, Pollo Bravo is head and shoulders above most chicken joints.”

What does he do?

“Now, it depends. I could work 10, 12 hours, or I could work only two or three hours. I love my job. I can do anything. Dishwasher — I have one day every week that I work as a dishwasher. I am in charge of the kitchen, employees, advertising. I can be the cook on the line. I do whatever the business needs.”

Why does he love his job?

“Why? How can I explain… I like to talk with the customers, I like to talk with the employees. I really love what I do because I can move all around. I can be here one day, and at the other location another day. I love it, because I’m free.”

If not here, then where?

“I think I would be in my hometown in Puebla, Mexico. Before I moved to the States, I was really happy in my hometown. My parents were farmers — they farmed corn and watermelons. I loved this kind of life.”

If not this, then what?

“If I had taken another decision to go to college, I think I would have been a lawyer.”

What’s next?

“For me, my future is to take the name on top of other chicken restaurants. I want to be famous in chicken. So my next step is to build a franchise business. I feel very confident that I can move forward with this name and with this concept. I would also like to keep at least one store and keep working in my own restaurant. That’s important because if your employees see you around, they are more confident, they are more professional, and they’ll follow you. When my employees see me, they are happy.”

We are now a culture that is very distant from where our food comes from. We are alienated from our food industry. We don’t see how the food is made or what chemicals, food coloring or fillers are added to them and this can be very dangerous for us.

Fast food companies are especially guilty of wanting to hide information of how their food was made. Many would be in disbelief if they knew where their burgers and chicken nuggets really came from.

With the popularity of the fast food chains and trying to make meals faster and cheaper, animals are now raised different. Birds now live in one building for their entire life until slaughter.

Chickens are fed grains with antibiotics and arsenic to help them to grow faster and bigger. Chickens have become so obese from the feed and not having any space to walk in, they are having heart attacks and dying among the other chickens.

In the hog facility, you will see thousands of hogs in one building their entire life. They will never breathe the fresh air outside nor spend time in the outdoor sun and eat off the land. In addition, the cattle are given growth hormones in their ears to help them grow faster.

What are the health concerns of eating fast food?

Many of us are familiar with the film documentary called Super Size Me. Morgan Spurlock’s film follows a 30-day period in 2003 during which he only eats food off of the McDonald’s menu.

The film documents this lifestyle’s drastic effects on both Spurlock’s physical and psychological health, and explores the fast food industry’s corporate influence, including how it encourages poor nutrition for its own profit. Spurlock dined at McDonald’s restaurants three times per day, and ate every item on the chain’s menu at least once.

As a result, Spurlock gained 24.5 pounds, had a 13% body mass increase, saw an increased cholesterol level of 230, and experienced mood swings, sexual dysfunction, and fat accumulation to his liver. With all the damage done to his body, it took him fourteen months to lose the weight gained from his 30-day experiment.

Fast food is loaded with calories from refined sugars and hydrogenated fats (trans fat). It is also very high in sodium, but very low in dietary fiber and essential vitamins and minerals.

Cost Per Serving (1 tea bag): 10¢
Why tea is so good for you: While we’re on the subject of tea, there’s no doubt it’s a super-healthy, budget-friendly addition to your diet. Tea, especially green tea, has lots of health boons. Both green and black tea are loaded with antioxidants, which may boost your immune system and promote heart health. In fact, scientists have found that those who drink 12 ounces or more of tea a day were about half as likely to have a heart attack as non-tea drinkers.

Oranges

Cost Per Serving (1 orange): 34¢
Why oranges are so good for you: You can get your entire day’s worth of vitamin C in a single orange. Plus, oranges deliver fiber (3 grams in one orange) and water to keep you full for only 70 calories. Not only that, the orange color means it delivers vision-boosting beta carotene.

Tuna

Cost Per Serving (3 oz.): 48-77¢ Why tuna is so good for you: Sure, salmon gets a glowing (and well-deserved) rep for being a megasource of omega-3s. But did you know that lowly canned tuna also delivers omega-3s? Plus, the 2010 Dietary Guidelines recommend cutting back on meat—eating tuna up to twice a week is one way to do that. Look for chunk light tuna, which comes from smaller tuna fish and is lower in mercury than white albacore tuna.

Such is the case with Pollo Bravo, a small Houston-based chain of Mexican-Peruvian restaurants with its crown jewel sandwiched between a Jack in the Box and a gas station in a wholly unmemorable strip mall on Richmond. Unlike the upscale Latin Bites and its stiffly formal dining room, Pollo Bravo is the kind of place where you can relax over a Cristal beer or a potent sangria, its vibrantly saffron-colored walls and joyful atmosphere encouraging you to linger over a meal of rotisserie chicken or ceviche. It encourages you to eat slightly silly things like salchipapas and enjoy them with abandon, dipped into the omnipresent ají sauce that will box your ears with its spiciness. It encourages you to learn more about the Peruvian dishes scattered throughout the hybrid Mexican-Peruvian menu: What is chicha morada? What is a causa rellena?

At Pollo Bravo, the waitresses and the owner, Maribel Bravo, will gleefully explain each dish and its ingredients, its history, its cultural connections with other countries both near and far. They’re eager to write down names of items you were interested in, eager to remember your face for the next visit and ask about your family. You feel like family yourself eating here.

At some other Peruvian restaurants in Houston, the service doesn’t encourage this type of interaction. At Lemon Tree, the service is perfectly nice — when you can get a waiter to your table at all. And at Latin Bites, it’s hesitant and reserved, making each breakthrough with a quiet waiter a weary triumph.

Much of that can be attributed to Maribel herself, one half of the husband-and-wife team that founded Pollo Bravo in 2006 and runs the chain today. The slim, pretty blond is almost always found at the Richmond location — my favorite of the three — waiting tables and greeting nearly every patron by name, with a hug and a kiss. It’s telling that most of the patrons are Peruvian, like her, or Mexican, like her husband.

“These chilaquiles are just like my mom used to make,” my friend Marco remarked over lunch one day. “Soft, you know?” He gestured to the pile of verdant tortilla strips on his plate, weighed down with salsa verde and ribbons of sour cream. The chilaquiles special at Pollo Bravo is one of the most compelling reasons to eat there during lunch, as it’s only served from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. Along with that pile of chilaquiles, you also get a gracious serving of pinto beans and a quarter of Pollo Bravo’s best item: its rotisserie chicken.

Peruvian restaurants are known throughout the United States for the succulent, juicy chicken that rotates on spits for hours, fat cooking gently into the white meat, its skin crisping in the heat. Yet there are distressingly few restaurants in Houston where one can find South American-style rotisserie chicken, despite the presence of more than a few Peruvian places.

Pollo Bravo has been successfully filling that void for the past four years to great success, however, and it shows in the packed dining room that greets you at lunch and dinner. I introduced my friend to the stuff a few weeks ago; ever since, he’s been requesting it like a punch-drunk toddler who’s been given his first taste of sugar. It’s that good.

The restaurant won’t reveal exactly what goes into the mix of 25 spices that coat the chicken, but the result is a garlic-and-cumin-spiked bird that is surprisingly mild until you dunk the tender pieces into that green ají sauce. Screamingly hot thanks to the inclusion of plenty of jalapeño peppers, the ají amarillo, as it’s called, is the Peruvian answer to Mexican salsa verde, save one luscious trait: It’s creamy. This creaminess can come from vegetable oil, mayonnaise or a combination of the two, but — like the chicken spices — the exact in-house recipe is guarded at every Peruvian restaurant. And like nearly everything else at Pollo Bravo, the ají sauce is made fresh in-house.

It also goes great on the aforementioned salchipapas, something which the kid in you (or any kids you bring along with you) will surely greet with glee: slightly curled strips of hot dogs sliced on top of French fries, mixed up with ketchup or mayonnaise if you see fit. Yes, that’s it. But it’s the kind of comfort food that Peruvian transplants to Houston seek out and have difficulty finding; to my knowledge, Pollo Bravo is the only place that serves salchipapas (although it’s not a hard dish to replicate at home).

“We’ve been adding more and more Peruvian dishes to the menu,” Maribel mentioned one day as she came by the table to inquire after our meal. “All the people who come in have been demanding it,” she added. She was referring to the currently off-menu causa rellena, which my dining companion and I had devoured quickly before our meal.