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.
Just FYI next Tuesday March 8, at 6pm PST, I’ll be participating in a live chat hosted by Monica Reinagel, the Nutrition Diva.
I’ll be joining Monica, Ben Greenfield of BenGreenfieldFitness.com, and Gloria Tsang of Healthcastle.com to discuss the pros and cons of breakfast. I’ll be broadcasting the event here at Summer Tomato. For more info check out Nutrition Over Easy.
This week around the web people are learning to love fat again, disrupted sleep cycles can mess with your metabolism and how your thoughts can influence your habits.
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
- Once a Villain, Coconut Oil Charms the Health Food World <<I adore coconut oil, and it’s good to see people being nice to fat again. The saturated kind even! (New York Times)
- ‘Round-the-Clock’ Lifestyle Could Disrupt Metabolism, Brain and Behavior <<Circadian rhythms are essential to feeding cycles, and can be disrupted by light exposure. Messing with these systems isn’t a good idea. (ScienceDaily)
- Rich Americans flock to fast food <<BS of the week. This isn’t talking about you guys, right? Seriously someone in this article says she’ll gladly eat poison food if it means she can continue buying $400 shoes. Oy. (CNN)
- Happiness Improves Health and Lengthens Life, Review Finds <<Science says you should chill out. Stop and smell the roses for a better, longer life. (ScienceDaily)
- Better than a BMI? New obesity scale proposed <<Wouldn’t it be nice if we stopped using standards that don’t make sense? (Medline)
- Think Like a Hater to Help Break Bad Habits and Addictions <<Habits are the foundation of your health. Luckily good ones are just as sticky as bad ones. (Lifehacker)
- Higher Vitamin D Intake Could Cut Cancer Risk <<I’m not convinced supplements are the answer, but I can’t see any way around it at this point. (Medline)
- High good cholesterol linked to long life in men <<This article was great until it says at the bottom we need a pill to fix it. Want higher HDL? Eat fat, exercise and drink a little alcohol. (Medline)
- 15 Perfect Recipes for Peas <<Woohoo! Springtime! (Saveur)
- Spicy Smoky Kale Chips <<I’ve never met anyone who doesn’t love kale chips. Easy and delicious. (White On Rice)
What inspired you this week?
Why is it that you can’t see any way around Vitamin D supplementation? You live in sunny California, right?
I live in foggy San Francisco at a high latitude. Even with my best attempts at sunning in the brief breaks in the clouds, I still tested at way below healthy levels.
If you live very far north or south (+/- 40 degrees), even when the sun shines the light isn’t direct enough to get you most of the vitamin D production you need.
Ah yes, forgot about the fog thing. That does make things difficult.
Here’s an interesting article about D and lattitude. Apparently in non-foggy areas you still ought to be able to get enough sun at higher lattitudes, although here in sunny New England 😉 some supplementation during the winter months are probably a good idea…
http://www.westonaprice.org/blogs/vitamin-d-problems-with-the-latitude-hypothesis.html
I was able to get my levels up to normal here in NE over the summer just through getting adequate sun.
RE: New adiposity scale
Very interesting. But we already have an easy measurement that requires no calculations – waist circumference. BMI has its drawbacks, but I’m skeptical that clinicians will ever use an anthropometric test that requires more measurements and more calculations (it’s hard enough getting them to calculate/discuss the ones we already have). Unfortunately the problems with BMI – the fact that there are large ethnic and inter-individual variations in disease risk for a given value – will probably be there for BAI as well (I could be wrong on this one, so I’m eager to see how it performs in larger studies).
I’m curious to see how the new BAI scale pans out, and I think it’s smart to keep working on better ways to use anthropometric measurements to calculate chronic disease risk, but I’m skeptical about its longterm impact on the way that we assess risk.
Either you need to get out and meet a wider variety of people, or I really need to try kale chips.
Haha, I know a good number of people 😉
Kale chips are tasty. Highly recommended.