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.
Lots of great healthy eating tips this week on the interwebs. I love the news that slow eating can help you eat less. How often are we told that enjoying food more helps us lose weight? (OK, all the time here at ST, but I’m a weirdo.) There’s also an interesting article about sodium worth reading.
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. (Note: If you want a follow back on Twitter introduce yourself with an @ message).
Links of the week
- To Cut Calories, Eat Slowly <<Best diet news ever. I’ve always been a big advocate of slow, mindful eating and culinary appreciation. A new study suggests people really do eat less when they slow down, and it is related to the release of satiety hormones. (New York Times)
- Seven Tips for Losing – and Keeping Off — Weight <<I love this post by Holly Hickman about weight loss and maintenance. She’s kept 40 lbs off for 8 years and is gorgeous! She also loves food. (Holly Hickman)
- When It Comes to Salt, No Rights or Wrongs. Yet. <<I don’t write much about sodium even though it is a popular topic in food politics these days. Why don’t I mention it? I’m not convinced by any of the data. I have yet to see a study that separates sodium consumption from processed food consumption. Personally I don’t worry about salt and have awesome blood pressure. (New York Times)
- Coca-Cola promotes more active lifestyles <<BS of the week How could you read that headline and not laugh? If you don’t get it, also check out Yoni Freedhoff’s editorial on why Coke might not be great over at Weighty Matters. (Ottawa Citizen)
- More veggies while pregnant reduces allergies in babies <<Vegetables are good for you. They really are. (Nutrition Data)
- The FDA should put an end to bogus health claims on packaged foods, experts say <<And when they say “bogus health claims” I think they mean all health claims. Since if a food is in a package, there’s probably very little that is healthy about it anyway. (Los Angeles Times)
- Navigating the maze of sugar and artificial sweeteners <<I get asked about sweeteners all the time. I don’t use any, but this is a good resource if you’re curious. (SF Gate)
- Change Your Brain, Change Your Body <<Interesting take on differences in weight loss success strategies. I think healthstyle is more complicated than this, but it is another example of how we each need to find our own path to health. (The Huffington Post)
- A Dinner Date With India and Spain (Fried chickpeas with chorizo video recipe) <<I love Mark Bittman’s The Minimalist video recipes. Doesn’t this look scrumptious?
- Baked Kale Chips <<For some reason I’ve been asked about kale chips a thousand times in the past month, so here’s an easy recipe. Who needs potato chips? (Shutterbean)
What goodies did you find online this week?
I think you mean to say that you are a genius, not weirdo! 😉 I think it is great advise to eat slowly. My GI use to tell me to chew each bite of my food 20x for easy digestion as I had a colon issue at the time. It is really hard to do this especially when you are really hungry but it caused me to eat really slow and I often ate less.
I strongly dislike how the Times article was written, and the conclusions that have been drawn from that study. I came to a different conclusion when consulting a larger body of the research than the selected studies cited in the article. Like anything, it is a complex topic. http://recomp.com/blogma/2009/11/eating-speed-and-calorie-control-weight-of-the-evidence/
The best controlled interventional studies suggest that the issue requires more research in different contexts because there are clearly conflicting results in some of them.
If you don’t want to take my word for it, here is proof that not all experts will suggest that we need to slow down eating for weight management as the Times article suggests (article written by a researcher): http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/22491387/ns/health-diet_and_nutrition/
Great points, and I agree the data is still inconclusive. However I still encourage people to slow down while eating, more for the sake of appreciating and reconnecting with food. Having a positive relationship with food can help some people make better choices and opt for foods of higher quality.
I agree with that. Especially since some research associates certain dieting behavior (e.g. rigidity) with certain adverse behaviors. e.g. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10336790
Identifying and retraining negative food relationships is probably a much better plan than telling people to make small changes like eating slow for weight and health.
Have to rephrase; identifying and retraining negative food relationships, which may lead people to eat slower, is probably a much better plan than only telling people to eat slow.