Health
Habits
Food
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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
by Darya Rose | Apr 15, 2011
For The Love of Food
Welcome to Friday’s For The Love of Food, Summer Tomato’s weekly link roundup.
This is probably the best week of the year so far for food and health writing. Taubes’ provocative piece on sugar and its possible role in cancer is a must read. Also check out the latest consensus on saturated fat, the power of exercise, and the lovely ingredient found in processed ice creams.
Want to see all my favorite links? Be sure to follow me on on Digg. I also share links at Twitter (@summertomato) and the Summer Tomato Facebook fan page. I’m very active on all these sites and would love to connect with you.
Links of the week
- Is Sugar Toxic <<This is the first I’ve seen Gary Taubes emphasize the unique danger of sugar (particularly fructose) over other carbs. Does sugar cause cancer? We aren’t sure yet, but it is time to start having this discussion. (New York Times)
- A consensus paper on dietary fats and cardiovascular disease <<It seems all the most important nutrition scientists got together to discuss the real data on saturated fat. So far? Not guilty. Processed meats though? Not so good. (Nutritional Blogma)
- Vegetarians May Be at Lower Risk of Heart Disease, Diabetes and Stroke <<BS of the week. The only reason I’m mentioning this weak paper is because it made so many headlines. I just want to point out that in the first Adventist Study (this is the 2nd) when they compared vegetarians to healthy omnivores (as opposed to people on the standard American diet, which we already know kills people) there was no difference. Here they didn’t bother to be so rigorous. (ScienceDaily)
- Obstacles Seen in Poor Areas for New Farmers’ Markets <<BS of the week part deux. This just makes me sad. The regions that need farmers markets the most are getting nothing but red tape. (New York Times)
- Diet Plus Exercise Is More Effective for Weight Loss Than Either Method Alone <<We already know diet is much more effective than exercise for weight loss (this confirms it), but when used together it seems to be a powerful combo. (ScienceDaily)
- Eating more carbs at dinner may help with weight loss and cholesterol levels, a study finds <<Not sure why this headline doesn’t mention that the participants also ate more protein at breakfast. (Los Angeles Times)
- Changing Trends in Hip Fracture Incidence Around the World <<Since we talked about dairy and osteoporosis this week, here are the latest trends worldwide. (ScienceDaily)
- Organic label makes foods seem tastier, more healthful <<Food companies use this to sell more (organic) junk food, but you can use it to justify shopping at the farmers market. (Los Angeles Times)
- Lessons of guacamole <<One of my all time favorite seasonal dishes. Great tips here by Michael Ruhlman.
- Jamie Oliver: There’s Beaver Anal Gland in Ice Cream <<Look what Jamie Oliver told David Letterman. Yummy right? (Eater)
What inspired you this week?
It’s so hard to take this trendy vilification of sugar seriously. Describing sugar as “evil” is possibly the farthest one could get from a stance of scientific objectivity.
The scientific community has told us not to eat eggs because of cholesterol; oh wait, eggs turned out not to be so bad after all. Scientists told us to eat less saturated fat; oops, that turned out to be incorrect too. What’s the likelihood that the anti-sugar bandwagon is going to turn out any differently?
As far as I can tell, the only rational thing that can be said about sugar (at least as it pertains to fat loss) is that it is calorically dense and makes caloric restriction more difficult. Drinking a sweetened iced tea provides as many calories as a steak, but the latter is much more satiating and makes it easier to stay on a “diet.” Same goes for vegetables. No human being could eat the pounds and pounds of vegetables that it would take to achieve a caloric surplus and theoretically gain fat.
I highly recommended the writings of Lyle McDonald for perspective on this particular issue.
I agree. I imagine that sugar, like all things (saturated fat, cholesterol, etc.) is perfectly fine in natural forms like fruit and it is really just the high-dose processed kind that gets us into trouble–at least at high quantities. I seriously doubt anyone who has ever lived to 100 yrs did so without taking a bite of dessert in his/her entire life.
Yes, it seems like quantity is a very important element here. The NY Times article covers a lot of ground, but something that jumped out at me was that one criticism of the referenced fructose toxicity studies was that the subjects were given dosages of fructose far higher than anybody would ever get in their normal diet.
The argument was made that even with lower doses the same metabolic symptoms would still appear over time. But how do we know that’s true? Based just on the information in this article, that conclusion seems like conjecture. If I drink one glass of wine each day for 30 days, the effect on my body would be quite different than if I drank 30 glasses in a single day.
With all this anti-sugar zealotry/anti-carb, I think we are in the grips of yet another food fad. Most of these trends have a core truth in common–eat more real food, be it whole grains or meats or fresh vegetables, and cut out all the processed crap. But then it’s like they have to reduce it to some magical formula, “Just don’t eat any carbs/sugar/meat/dairy/fill in the blank and you will magically lose weight and never get a serious illness.” Then comes the processed food products to go with the diet. Personally I’d rather chew on a sugar cane than eat a low carb breakfast bar. I have a long-term interest (almost obsession, at times) in nutrition but I’m starting to think we would do better to ignore all new studies and just head to the farmer’s market.
Sounds like a true Summer Tomato fan 🙂 I totally agree, but think articles like this will be our ammo to show people and say, “See, it’s only when we process the foods that they’re dangerous.” Farmers markets FTW!
I volunteer at a farmer’s market that our food bank put together in a low income neighborhood four months ago. I have to say that New York is not alone in making the process as difficult and costly as possible. Unlike the other markets the food bank has, we have to charge each of our vendors quarterly just to set up. Not only has this made it difficult to tempt new vendors to the market but now the city is taking a hard look at the other markets and placing a fee on them too. They have also started to nickel and dime the market to death. Do you want to put signs up during the market to announce where it is? Assess a fee per sign! It is not like we leave them all week either; we set them out as the market begins and put them back in the truck at the end. If we had not had a grant to start this market the fees would of killed it straight away a couple months ago. There is some fear that once the grant is gone that the market will be too. I have great hope that our customers will continue to grow and save the market from that fate.
Thanks for posting this story. It is somewhat comforting to see we aren’t alone (though I think I’d prefer we were 🙂 )
Wow that’s nuts. Hate to hear that and hope it works out for your market.
It took me until today to find smoked paprika, 4th store was the charm. I couldn’t wait until tomorrow morning to try it on the eggs after smelling and tasting it. My review can be boiled down to one word, awesome. I have so many ideas how I’m going to use the smoked paprika now. Thanks for this awesome idea.
Whoops, commented on the wrong page, you can delete that.