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.
Holy smokes was it a great week for reading around the web. Not only should you read all these articles, I strongly recommend glancing through my StumbleUpon and Delicious lists (see below) to browse all the stuff that didn’t make it here today (feel free to ignore the articles about basketball).
In other news I added Facebook Like buttons to my posts this week, so go nuts 🙂
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
- 7 Harsh Truths that Will Improve Your Health <<I really like the points made in this article, even if the writing style is a bit annoying. We all have the power to improve our health, and it can be enlightening to see how lame our excuses sound when spelled out for us. (Dumb Little Man)
- Doubt Is Cast on Many Reports of Food Allergies <<I’ve suspected for quite awhile that this whole food allergy business was being blown out of proportion. If you’ve been “diagnosed,” you may want to get a second opinion. (New York Times)
- Is Free-Range Meat Making Us Sick? <<BS of the week. Of all the sources of dangerous food, the struggling farmers who actually do it right shouldn’t be shouldering any of the blame. How much faith do you put in food studies from China and Mozambique anyway? (The Atlantic)
- Diet and Exercise to the Extremes <<Cool story about a vegan ultra marathoner. I love meat, but I always smile when someone tells me they need it because they workout. Ha. (New York Times)
- Eating Nuts May Help Cholesterol Levels <<I posted about how to optimize cholesterol this week and recommended eating nuts. Here’s some new data that further supports nuts (you probably aren’t allergic to) for heart health. (Medline)
- Red meat and cancer: dumbing down the science <<Watch as Monica Reinagel tears conventional wisdom a new one with her analysis of studies that claim “red and processed meats” cause cancer. Rock on! (Nutrition Data)
- Vitamin D Best Taken With Largest Meal of Day, Study Finds <<Good info, especially since there is a very good chance you are vitamin D deficient. (Medline)
- Rapid weight loss is the best way to keep it off? <<Yoni Freedhoff explains why reading headlines is hazardous to your health. I’d listen to him. (Weighty Matters)
- Chicken and Radish Salad with Creamy Avocado Dressing <<Just this week I discovered how wonderfully avocado goes with chicken salad. Couldn’t resist sharing this recipe from Chocolate & Zucchini.
- My Ikagai <<Mark Bittman recently re-launched his personal blog, and so far I absolutely love it. Thanks to guest writer Pam Anderson for sharing this amazing TED talk by Dan Buettner: How to live to be 100+. You don’t want to miss this.
Enjoy!
I found the food allergy article particularly interesting. My daughter has something called FPIES to soy. It’s technically not an allergy. Her body doesn’t produce IgE antibodies in response to eating soy, but she has a life threatening reaction of continuous vomiting every 10 – 15 minutes for about 4 – 6 hours. The first time it happened she had consumed maybe two tablespoons of tofu. We took her to the emergency room, where they insisted it wasn’t the soy that caused the reaction. Three months later we tried a small amount of tofu again with the same reaction. We took her to an allergist who specializes in children’s allergies, and he diagnosed her with FPIES to soy. She should grow out it, and hasn’t had a reaction since because we are very careful, but it is amazing how many processed foods have soy in them. Pretty much all of them do…that’s really what has made us change our eating habits. After looking at all the ingredient labels and realizing how much weird stuff was in all our food, we made huge changes to our family diet.
Just read the article “Is free-range meat making us sick?” and i must admit I’m rather shocked, but I have to wonder if the statistics are accurate due to the fact that there are more caged farms than free-range farms across the US. I actually just started an all organic diet and I like the fact that I’m not eating additives, hormones, and antibiotics. I guess you make compromise no matter what diet you choose.
If I were you I wouldn’t worry too much about the article. As I mentioned in the post, the studies he cites are not from the beautiful, healthy, free-range farms we have here in California, but in obscure countries that are notorious for bad food handling practices. From everything I’ve read, free range animals are far safer than anything from an industrial lot that is festering with bacteria and antibiotics. I don’t eat organic meat (usually, but I’m not dogmatic about anything) because it requires animals to be fed certified organic feed (aka organic industrial corn/soy) and they still live on industrial farms. I prefer free range animals that eat their natural foods (grass for beef or seeds and bugs for poultry), even though they can’t be certified organic (farmers can’t buy organic bugs to feed chickens).