Health
Habits
Food
Weight 
Better Than Butternut: Roasted Delicata Squash Recipe
10 Simple Ways To Eat Less Without Noticing
Juicing: Stupid and Pretentious or Nourishing and Enlightening?
10 Tasty Carbs That Won’t Make You Fat
How To Start Working Out When You Don’t Like To Exercise
Focus More on Your Brain and Less on Your Diet if You’re Serious About Losing Weight
Home Court Habits: The Secret to Effortless Weight Control
10 Reasons You Aren’t Losing Weight When You Think You’re Doing Everything Right
How To Burn More Calories Without Breaking A Sweat
The 7 Habits of Highly Effective Foodists
For The Love of Food
For The Love of Food
Welcome to Friday’s For The Love of Food, Summer Tomato’s weekly link roundup.
Thanks to everyone who voted for me for A Really Goode Job! I ended up with over 100 votes in just a couple days, which is very flattering. The top 50 were announced this morning and I was not among them. I guess my other two jobs will have to suffice for now. 😉
This week around the internet I found several reminders of why heart disease is not the only reason to worry about excess body weight and how industrial food is a threat to your health. I also discovered a fantastic article about how psychological barriers prevent us from being healthy.
B.S. of the week, once again, goes to Diets in Review for promoting a new “tomato pill.” Because eating real tomatoes for health is SO 1909!
If you would like to see more of my favorite articles each week or just don’t want to wait until Friday, be sure to follow me on Twitter (@summertomato) or the Summer Tomato Facebook fan page. I am also experimenting with the social bookmarking sites StumbleUpon and Delicious, and would love to share articles with you there.
Submissions of your own best food and health articles are also welcome, just drop me an email using the contact form. I am currently accepting guest posts at Summer Tomato for any healthy eating and exercise tips.
For The Love of Food
- Obesity Greatly Raises Endometrial Cancer Risk <<In case you thought heart disease was the only problem with excess weight, don’t forget about cancer and all the other fun diseases out there. (HealthDay)
- Pancreatic cancer and obesity linked <<Got that? Most cancers are related to diet and body weight. (Los Angeles Times)
- Excess Pounds, but Not Too Many, May Lead to Longer Life <<In light of the last two articles, I’m a bit frustrated with the New York Times for spreading misleading information about the dangers of excess body weight. Correlations do not prove cause and effect, and this is a dangerous message.
- Tomato Pill for Heart Health <<This horrific article by Diets in Review beat out the New York Times for B.S. of the week. As you probably know, this defies all the logic of the Summer Tomato philosophy, especially the role of supplements in health.
- Fast Food: Would You Like 1,000 Calories with That? <<Interesting discussion of the value of food labels at restaurants. Would more information stop you from over-indulging? (Time)
- What makes the Mediterranean diet work? <<According to this study, alcohol is the only significant contributor to increased health from the Mediterranean diet. Not sure I believe this one quite yet, but it is an interesting study. (Los Angeles Times)
- A Food Safety Update: 41,000 Lbs of Ground Beef Recalled <<Have you had your E. coli today? Another reason to go see Food, Inc. (La Vida Locavore)
- How could E. coli O157:H7 get into cookie dough? <<Fascinating look at the flaws in industrial food. These outbreaks are particularly baffling to me because packaged foods don’t even taste good compared to real foods. Are we really that lazy? (Food Politics via @marionnestle)
- The Psychology of Passive Barriers: Why Your Friends Don’t Save Money, Eat Healthier, or Clean Their Garages <<This is an older article, but it completely fascinated me. What psychological barriers are preventing you from having good habits? (Get Rich Slowly)
- Summer Squash Gratin Recipe <<The perfect solution for my abundance of summer squash from the farmers market. (101 Cookbooks)
What great articles did you read or write this week? Leave your links in the comments.
Just wanted to say I’m in total agreement regarding your assessment of the NYT article. Pretty poor piece of journalism any way you slice it.
Sorry to hear you didn’t get the job — but I applaud you for stepping up & doing that video! Really great work!
Also want to let you know I love these Friday posts. Though I read a LOT of articles on health, nutrition & wellness, I always find something new in interesting in what you share. So thanks.
Thanks for your support, Dinneen. I’m glad you like my reading lists, ironically I put more time into them then I do writing posts!
The study reported by the NY Times is not advocating obesity. It is saying that being both obese and underweight are dangerous to our health. However, being a few pounds overweight, defined as having a BMI in the overweight category rather than the obese category, is not necessarily detrimental to health, especially later in life.
What is more important to health is following a healthy lifestyle by making good food choices, taking regular exercise and keeping blood pressure, cholesterol and blood sugar under control.
It is possible to be thin and unhealthy as well as overweight and unhealthy (and vice versa). Health is far more complicated than just weight.
Thanks for your thoughtful comment, Jan. You are right, the Times is not advocating obesity. However, they are sending a very confusing message by suggesting “overweight was protective” in response to an observational study. This study can only determine an association between BMI and mortality, not causation.
As you suggest, the health data is actually much more complicated than any one study can convey. I’m going to expand on this in an article I’m preparing for next week.
I think the B.S. of the week is that you didn’t make the Top 50 for the Goode job. They’re totally missing out…
Awwww shucks!
I remember that NYT article. The most ridiculous thing, I thought, was that the writer used the phrases “more likely to die” and “less likely to die.” I don’t know how it was phrased in the study. But last time I checked, everyone is 100 percent likely to die.
Full disclosure: I’m the director of publishing for DietsInReview.com. We were by no means advocating that people take such a supplement as a tomato pill, only sharing news of its existence. We do our best to share a broad scope of health news and information, allowing our readers to make decisions for themselves. You’ll find on DIR that we spend a lot of time encouraging our readers to get their nutrients from whole foods, avoiding supplements when possible, consuming fruit and vegetables instead of their juices, and that extends to eating tomatoes off of a vine rather than popping a pill.