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.
Next week I’ll be celebrating my 31st birthday. If you appreciate the work I do for this site and would like to give back, I’m donating all cakes, presents and well wishes to Charity Water. Charity Water helps bring clean water to children and families in Africa who desperately need it. Follow the link to learn more.
http://mycharitywater.org/darya
How to make food taste better without cooking skills, the best geek food article of all time and why Twinkie’s won’t make your life better.
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 Digg. I’m very active on all these sites and would love to connect with you.
Links of the Week
- Hard Work Improves the Taste of Food, Study Shows <<Proof that shopping at the farmers market and going to the gym makes vegetables taste better. (Science Daily)
- When Video Games and Butchery Collide, You Get 8-Bit Nose to Tail <<The best story I’ve ever found on the internet. Ever. (Serious Eats)
- Twinkie diet helps nutrition professor lose 27 pounds <<BS of the week. Is anyone here surprised that you can lose weight and improve cholesterol when you barely eat anything (even if that “thing” is complete junk food)? You shouldn’t be. And this is a great example of why we have bigger fish to fry than weight and cholesterol. (CNN)
- Why I don’t cook at home <<This is cute and worth reading, but I hope Summer Tomato readers know better. (The Oatmeal)
- DHA Improves Memory and Cognitive Function in Older Adults, Study Suggests <<Fish is by far the best source of DHA omega-3 fatty acids. (Science Daily)
- Latest egg recall over salmonella affects 228,000 eggs <<Just when you thought it was safe to eat industrial eggs. (Los Angeles Times)
- While Warning About Fat, U.S. Pushes Cheese Sales <<Great example of how special interests can influence government policy. Personally I wouldn’t trust my health to recommendations by the US government. (New York Times)
- Red meat: Not so bad after all? <<You might be surprised by the science behind meat consumption. (Nutrition Data)
- Roasted Brussels Sprouts with Sriracha and Mint <<I recently tried a similar recipe at a local restaurant and it was amazing. This will be appearing in my kitchen soon. (White On Rice)
What inspired you this week?
re the “B.S. of the week”: yes, I think many, many people are surprised by this, including yourself. He’s clearly not claiming that this is a useful diet for anyone. But there is very useful information to be gleaned. Once again you demonstrate that facts are of little use to you if they don’t align with your personal mythology. A science degree does not a scientist make!
Sorry Phlip, I think you missed my point. I know that the scientist did not recommend anyone try this diet, but all he is really demonstrating is that if you eat fewer calories than you burn (in this case he’s eating substantially less), then you lose weight. Weight loss is known to be linked to better cholesterol and other measures of health (like blood pressure) in the short term. I suppose that is useful information, but it is not surprising.
Besides that calorie restriction is well-documented to induce weight loss, this same exact experiment was done by Brian Wansink back in 2007 in a project called Portion Size Me. So no, I’m not surprised that the finding can be replicated. I wrote about it back then.
I called this BS not because this point is invalid, but because the press it received completely ignores long term nutrition and health. A person can get either thin or fat eating absolutely anything, healthy or unhealthy, depending on how much they eat. But how long their body will hold up under the various conditions is far more important in the long term than any other measure.
If your complaint is with the press coverage, then criticize the press coverage.
I think this is important for all the people who are claiming that it’s not calories at all that are relevant to weight loss, it’s carbs, sugar, fat, processed, whatever the evil of the day is. No, it’s not, it’s calories. And also, for everyone who decides that the only way to lose weight is to completely go organic, clean, eating. There’s a lot of people who can learn from this, and I haven’t heard anyone claim that it’s healthy, outside the effect of change in weight, though I don’t spend my time looking for editorials on it.
I can’t get any of the links in this article to work…..would love to read them!
That’s odd. You could right click and copy the link address.