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
by Darya Rose | Jun 3, 2011
For The Love of Food
Welcome to Friday’s For The Love of Food, Summer Tomato’s weekly link roundup.
The USDA release a new “Nutrition Plate,” cell phones might cause cancer (but probably don’t), the uselessness of genetically modified salmon and more. A great week for food and health reading.
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
- Nutrition Plate Unveiled, Replacing Food Pyramid <<Not bad, though I’m sad there’s no emphasis on healthy fats. (New York Times)
- If cellphones cause cancer, how do they do it? No one knows (i.e. don’t panic) <<A rare dose of critical thinking and rational reporting from a major news source. (Los Angeles Times)
- MSG linked to weight gain <<BS of the week. Is MSG actually causing weight gain, or does fattening processed food tend to be full of MSG? Let’s not jump to conclusions. (Medline)
- Connecting Dots: Fruit is Real Food; Eat It <<Love this post for many reasons. It always makes me cringe when people tell me they avoid fruit because of sugar. Fructose ≠ fruit. (Free The Animal)
- Eating Fat, Staying Lean <<A little more evidence that dietary fat won’t kill you. (New York Times)
- Ten ways to get kids to eat their veggies <<These tips for kids (foreign to me) are much more creative than I expected them to be. Thx to the reader who sent it my way. (CNN)
- Genetically Engineered Salmon’s Empty Promises <<Awesome analysis of the uselessness of GMO salmon. (Gilt Taste)
- Scientists Discover ‘Ultra-Bad’ Cholesterol <<We’re learning that heart disease is more nuanced than a simple cholesterol measurement can tell us. (Medline)
- Where Food Is God <<I found this article about how health food was invented by religious cults to be very entertaining and well worth a read. (Slate)
- spring salad with new potatoes <<A beautiful spring recipe by one of my favorite blogs. (Smitten Kitchen)
What inspired you this week?
Thanks for the shout out, Darya and glad you liked the post.
Thanks for the great article!
One of the best way to get kids to eat their veggies is to lead by example. Kids are watching what their parents are doing all of the time and modeling the behavior that they see. If I’m snacking on veggies and enjoying them it’s pretty likely that my son is going to ask me for some.
I’ve managed to get kids from the ghetto who eat plastic, processed food most of the time to eat arugula, wheat berries, turnips, and swiss chard, to name a few things, without a problem. It’s not that hard to get kids into veggies. Yes, there are a few die hards who won’t touch the stuff but chances are, they have picky parents who can’t cook.
Learn to cook and eat tasty food, and cook with your kids. Also make sure they aren’t stuffed from snack foods or hoping you will pull out the chicken nuggets if they don’t eat what is served.
Getting kids to eat veggies starts in mind of the mom or caretaker. If they love veggies, and will serve them, kids will eat them. They will not eat them if their palate is ruined with over processed foods. No one does. But, if they are hungry and their sugar intake is limited, they will want to eat them, provided they are cooked properly. Kids love broccoli with toothpicks (call it trees), frozen peas with butter and sea salt) as long as it’s in separate cute bowl, and green beans almost anyway even overcooked. Kids have their limitations, but nothing wrong with them eating the same veggies over and over with plenty of fresh real fruit. Every time I serve veggies and fruit, I envision fighting off disease in their bodies, and giving them brain foods. Sadly, this country has too many mac and cheese moms.
I view the MSG study as very interesting actually. I don’t see how it qualifies as BS- as near as I can tell, they are measuring the amount of soy sauce Chinese people consume. Processed foods may not enter into it to the same degree they would in a US population.
I view it as possible that the MSG modulates leptin though more likely that it increases consumption (although it would seem the study controlled for that). However, I think it’s also entirely possible- the people who choose more MSG have more trouble tasting their food. They eat more because they get *less* enjoyment out of it. This would fit with some of the other hedonistic analysis out there on food.