For The Love of Food

Welcome to Friday’s For The Love of Food, Summer Tomato’s weekly link roundup.

This week I found yet another great article on mindful eating, as well as several discussions about what to believe in nutrition science and why. Turns out television is not the best source of information. Crazy, I know.

I read many more wonderful articles than I post here each week. If you’d like to see more or just don’t want to wait until Friday, be sure to follow me on Twitter (@summertomato) or the Summer Tomato Facebook fan page. For complete reading lists join me on the social bookmarking sites StumbleUpon and Delicious. I’m very active on all these sites and would love to connect with you there.

I also invite you to submit your own best food and health articles for next week’s For The Love of Food, just drop me an email using the contact form. I am also accepting guest posts at Summer Tomato for any awesome healthstyle tips you’d like to share.

I’m also really excited to announce that I have joined the Audible.com affiliate program. Audible, which is essentially Netflix for audiobooks, is my new favorite thing in the world. As a scientist, blogger and all-around information glutton I consume more text by the time I finish breakfast than many people do all day.

Thus it always annoyed me that my commute to work and all the repetitive tasks in the lab (genotyping anyone?) took up so much idle mind time. For years I have secretly wished I could find a way to read while walking and loading gels.

With Audible, now I can and do.

I find Audible to be especially useful for “reading” non-fiction (usually health- and food-related books), because I am interested in simply absorbing the information as quickly as possible (you can set the audiobook speed to 2x in iTunes). Fiction I still prefer reading the old-fashioned way, curled up in my bed before going to sleep at night.

Audible titles I recently finished:

• The End of Overeating, by Dr. David Kessler

• Rethinking Thin, by Gina Kolata

The prices at Audible are fantastic (feel free to shop around), and I have discovered that they frequently have sales that include dozens of great titles for only $5.99 each. During the last sale I stocked up on over half a dozen titles of books I was considering buying anyway. Audible has a selection of free books available for download as well, and with a membership you also receive a free subscription to the audio digest of either the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal.

You can probably tell I’m completely smitten and excited to share this with you. In practical terms what this means is that in addition to recommending occasional Amazon books, I will also be including links to the Audible version. I hope you check out Audible and come back and let me know what you think.

This post is an open thread. Share your thoughts, writing (links welcome!) and delicious meals of the week in the comments below.

For The Love of Food

• A Powerful First Step To End Comfort Eating <<Dinneen from Eat Without Guilt wrote a brilliant piece on our topic of the week, mindful eating.
• TV health coverage: bad for your health? <<Do you get most of your health and medicine news from the TV? Well, turns out it is probably all wrong. (Los Angeles Times)
• A Diet High In Fat Increases Insulin Resistence? <<Monica Reinagel tackles one of the more controversial questions in nutrition science, the role of dietary fat in insulin resistence. (Nutrition Data)
• Late Night Eating Linked to Weight Gain <<What you eat is important, but when you eat may be another thing you should think about if you are worried about your body weight. (New York Times)
• Could the Obesity Fight Backfire? <<B.S. of the week Dr. Jon LaPook argues that the fight to reverse the obesity trend may land us with a nation of anorexics. Ha! Fat chance. Since the only way to effectively lose weight and keep it off is to redefine a healthy relationship with food, I’d wager that an effective national weight loss campaign would cut overall anxiety about food and reduce incidence of under-eating disorders as well. (Huffington Post)
• Do These Candies Look Pornographic to You? <<These candies aren’t just bad for your health, they are also NSFW!! Or are they? (Internet Food Association)
• Is it Safe to Eat Apricot Kernels? <<I’ve often wondered about the safety of eating apricot kernels. This is a great resource if you’re curious. (David Lebovitz)
• Research studies: Inconclusive doesn’t mean “unscientific” <<Another great piece of food for thought from Monica. A look at why so many people are skeptical of nutrition research and why studies seem to always contradict each other. (Nutrition Data)
• Sauteed Spinach and Arugula with Pine Nuts and Goat Cheese <<This recipe for sauteed spinach looks AMAZING! (Jenn Cuisine)
• You Asked: End of Summer Detox? <<Love that FitSugar shoots down the lameness of detox diets. Don’t do it!!

Have a great weekend!!