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 interesting health and nutrition stories this week. I particularly love the piece about how exercise impacts cognitive performance, and the bits about the health benefits of grains. I’m not in the mood to focus on any BS this week, but if I did it would have certainly been the Monsanto court decision.
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 a complete reading list join me on the new Digg or StumbleUpon. I’m very active on all these sites and would love to connect with you.
Links of the week
- Cooking Is As Easy As Being a DungeonMaster <<The ultimate geek cooking lesson. If you’ve ever mastered anything, you can conquer your kitchen. (Geek’s Dream Girl)
- Phys Ed: Your Brain on Exercise <<Really cool new research explaining how exercise makes you smarter. My goal, of course, is to turn you all into a bunch of super geniuses (wahahahaha). (New York Times)
- Low acid diet may not prevent bone loss <<I’m always confused when I hear people mention the health benefits of “alkaline diets,” since there is almost no science backing those bogus claims. As usual, Marion Nestle does an awesome job explaining why. (SFGate)
- Who’s Behind Those Trader Joe’s Generics? You’d Be Surprised <<I must admit, I’ve always wondered how Trader Joe’s private label put out such awesome products. Turns out, they are awesome products I already knew about. (SFoodie)
- How do you know you’re on a “good” diet? <<I love Yoni’s answer to this: “Simple. You like it.” He really nails what it means to find your own healthstyle with this article. (Weighty Matters)
- Add onion and garlic to “unlock” the nutrients in grains <<Somehow I doubt Atkins or paleo dieters will pay any attention to this, but it’s interesting news for the rest of us. (Nutrition Data)
- Experts Believe Many Birth Defects Are Preventable <<I like the title of this article because it makes me sound like an expert. Turns out you should try to be healthy before you even start thinking about maybe getting pregnant. (Medline)
- Wine for Tomato Season: Grechetto <<Don’t know that I’ve ever tried Grechetto, but it has skyrocketed to the top of my summer to-do list. (Good Wine Under $20)
- High-fibre breakfast enhances fat burning during exercise <<Cereal burns fat? Only when you exercise, which of course you do regularly because you’re a super genius. This article also provides a good excuse to laugh at the way Canadians spell fiber. (kidding!) (Obesity Panacea)
- Strawberries. Balsamic. Cacao Nibs. <<Uber healthy seasonal dessert FTW!! (Vanilla Garlic)
What inspired you this week?
Hi Darya:
Hope you don’t mind me tossing in one I thought was pretty amazing. Denise Minger demolishes The China Study over months of work using and crunching the original raw data.
http://rawfoodsos.com/2010/07/07/the-china-study-fact-or-fallac/
It’s an excellent lesson too on the rigors of real science and how to think about associations vs. causations. I know you’re big on sound science.
Thx, looking forward to reading through it. Funny, I barely associate that study with the book since it was such a small part of it. I was most impressed with the work he presented on dairy and aflatoxin, which of course has almost zero relevance to us in Western society. But it was interesting data 🙂
Onions and garlic and grains, oh my!
Good, and good for you. Need to go make some Mujadarrah now!
Anybody know where to get cacao nibs to go with the strawberries? Would commercial cocoa powder work just as well?
-Steve
You definitely don’t want to use cocoa powder. A huge part of the wonderfulness of nibs is their crunch; they’re almost nutty. I have seen them at Whole Foods and artisan chocolate stores. You can probably find some online too. Protip: add them to chocolate chip cookies to turn them from awesome to mind-bogglingly awesome!