Health
Habits
Food
Weight 
Better Than Butternut: Roasted Delicata Squash Recipe
10 Simple Ways To Eat Less Without Noticing
Juicing: Stupid and Pretentious or Nourishing and Enlightening?
10 Tasty Carbs That Won’t Make You Fat
How To Start Working Out When You Don’t Like To Exercise
Focus More on Your Brain and Less on Your Diet if You’re Serious About Losing Weight
Home Court Habits: The Secret to Effortless Weight Control
10 Reasons You Aren’t Losing Weight When You Think You’re Doing Everything Right
How To Burn More Calories Without Breaking A Sweat
The 7 Habits of Highly Effective Foodists
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.
In case you missed it, be sure to check out the first episode of Summer Tomato Live and vote on our next show topic. Voting closes tonight at midnight, PST.
(BTW, Summer Tomato Live is now on iTunes. If you have time to leave a review I’d be deeply grateful.)
This week: why vegans have more heart risks, McDonald’s new “healthy-food” chain, what Donald Rumsfeld has to do with Diet Coke, and more bad news for people who think exercise will solve their weight problems.
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 list of my favorite stories check out my links on Digg. I’m very active on all these sites and would love to connect with you.
Links of the week
- How to Master the Art of Seasoning: 5 Tips for Reinventing the Slow-Carb Diet <<Trying to make those beans and veggies more interesting? Here’s a great primer on seasoning. (Tim Ferriss)
- Vegans’ Elevated Heart Risk Requires Omega-3s and B12, Study Suggests <<I’ve mentioned before that I think a vegan diet can be healthy, it just requires more work than it does for an omnivore. Seems most vegans are getting it wrong. (ScienceDaily)
- Former McDonald’s Executives to Open a New Healthy-Food Chain <<Hahahahaha! McDonald’s execs are the first people I’d trust to offer a healthy diet. Nice one guys. BS of the week. (Time)
- Just how bad is aspartame? <<Great question. Sadly the politics around it are so twisted it’s hard to uncover the truth. (Grist)
- US group calls for FDA ban of soda ‘caramel’ <<Seems aspartame may not be the only thing in soda that can cause cancer. (Reuters)
- Think the gym’s gonna make you slim? Think again. <<This new study matches my experience very well. But Yoni explains why you should exercise anyway. (Weighty Matters)
- 10 Fresh, In-Season Vegetables the East Coast Should be Eating Now <<I frequently get complaints from East Coasters that my farmers market posts don’t reflect their reality. This one’s for you guys (and it’s not that different). (Treehugger)
- Obesity Alone Raises Risk of Fatal Heart Attack, Study Finds <<I’ve heard some people argue that obesity itself does not cause disease, it’s just a symptom of deeper metabolic problems or not a problem at all. This new study suggests otherwise. (Medline)
- Diet High in Fiber Might Lengthen Your Life <<Especially grains, they say. There are plenty of confounds in this study, but it’s not out of line with other research I’ve seen. (Medline)
- Rainbow Wheat Berry Salad <<And since we’re having a grain lovefest day, here’s a delicious looking recipe for a colorful wheat berry salad. Intact grains FTW! (Macheesmo)
What inspired you this week?
Hi there – I’m a fan of your blog, it’s insightful and inspiring.
I would like, however, to clarify your “BS of the week” here. I’m a fervent believer of healthy, nutritious, and whole food for everyone, and was involved in the initial planning meetings for the former-McDonald’s-exec-backed health food restaurant.
While the media LOVES a story like this (i.e. big bad fast food executives trying to trick the American people to eat healthily), I can say that the former execs are actually backing and funding a man who has the original idea. This man believes with all of his being exactly what people like you and me believe: that people can eat organic, unprocessed food that is good for the environment, without spending a lot of money. The “idea man” – we’ll call him – is as honest and passionate as anyone else in the food community, and it’s wonderful that he was able to get such enormous funding to make his dream a reality.
I do think it’s important to weed through the media sensationalism of this story, and see that these projects are precisely the type of endeavors that will (hopefully) inch this country towards more informed, accessible, and educated decisions in what they consume.
Thanks – N
Thanks for your insight, and you’re right we shouldn’t take this at face value. However I will always be skeptical of any attempt to mass produce “healthy”, though I would love to be proven wrong. I think I’ve read about this “idea man” before, and I agree he did seem passionate–but there are passionate people everywhere with bad ideas. To me this resembles the mass production of “organic,” which sounds nice but isn’t really helping much. I’d prefer to see the food system decentralized, instead this feels like putting lipstick on a pig. I’m not trying to be a downer, I’m just really skeptical. Hopefully he has a better vision of this than I do 🙂
LOL. Thanks for throwing us New Englanders a bone, Darya. 😉
But none of those vegetables are “in season”. You’d need a jack hammer to get a root vegetable out of the ground, and everything green is dead. Unless you want to eat a holly, I suppose. Funny stuff.
Haha, I tried :/
Much appreciated. Many’s the laugh I’ve had recently as you post the “spring” veggie updates from CA contrasting with what I see when I look out the window… 🙂
Darya, Keep an eye on that restaurant when it opens in Palo Alto. Since you’re closest, we need you to try it for us! We live in IL, so we gets lots of McDonald’s news here. I recall an article that mentioned several McDonald’s execs having had heart surgery. Perhaps he’s one? Maybe he’s seen the light?
Re the obesity alone raises risk of heart attack link, so yeah, obesity is linked to heart attack risk even when “other known risk factors for cardiovascular disease” are absent. But this doesn’t necessarily mean that obesity is the predominant cause — CV disease could still be a result, for example, of our crappy, industrial, highly inflammatory diet (which also leads to obesity, i.e., correlation, not causation).
That said, I don’t dispute that obesity can *contribute* to disease, as those fat cells (particularly in visceral fat) aren’t inert. I just suspect inflammation from diet is a bigger factor.
Agreed 🙂
Darya,
Consider this review of the whole-grain story:
http://www.marksdailyapple.com/will-eating-whole-grain-fiber-help-you-live-longer/#more-19756
The “whole grain eaters live healthier lifestyles (otherwise)” factor might truly be responsible for these effects, and his argument has some decent points. I’d like to hear your thoughts after reading Mark’s brief review.
Thanks for the tip on the vegan article, I enjoyed that link. Also, the exercise/weight gain article was also a nice tip. I hope to watch your interview with Tim in some free time (if I can find it) next week.
Best,
Ashley
Correction – Denise Minger was a guest author on this piece (that appeared on Mark’s website). I failed to make that clear.