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 | Jul 1, 2011
For The Love of Food
Welcome to Friday’s For The Love of Food, Summer Tomato’s weekly link roundup.
A lot of interesting new science this week. BPA makes male mice less attractive, diet soda may cause weight gain and diabetes, and the “good” cholesterol is more complicated that we suspected. All this and more in my top 10 food and health picks for this week.
Want to see all my favorite links? Be sure to follow me on on Digg. I also share links on 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
- BPA-Exposed Male Deer Mice Are Demasculinized and Undesirable to Females, New Study Finds <<Keep an eye out for those BPA-containing cans (including soda/beer), they may decrease your manliness (and I don’t want to find out what they do to women). (ScienceDaily)
- Really? The Claim: Exercising on an Empty Stomach Burns More Fat <<Some went ahead and looked at the data and decided no, no it doesn’t. (New York Times)
- Study Comparing Local To Meat-Free Diet Is Dated and Debunked <<I’m proud of TreeHugger for stepping up and calling BS of the week on this study.
- Diet soda associated with weight gain and symptoms of pre-diabetes <<I found this so interesting I wrote about it for my story today at KQED Quest, which will be up around 10am PST. (ScienceDaily)
- ‘Good’ Cholesterol Function as Important as Its Levels <<Drugs that raise HDL cholesterol have been ineffective so far at reducing heart disease, even though high HDL is one of the best markers of heart health available. New studies about HDL function may explain why. (ScienceDaily)
- USDA’s new food safety campaign: it’s all about YOU <<You would hope that a food safety campaign would be about producing safer food. Unfortunately this one is about proper storage and overcooking your meat. (Food Politics)
- TV Food Advertising Increases Children’s Preference for Unhealthy Foods, Study Finds <<For the gazillionth time, kids are easily influenced by advertising and it makes it very difficult to parents to resist. Sigh… (ScienceDaily)
- Soluble Fiber Strikes a Blow to Belly Fat <<It is not particularly surprising that eating more vegetables and beans is good for you, but it’s nice to have some quantitative numbers to attach to it. (ScienceDaily)
- INFOGRAPHIC: Lots Of Depressing Facts About How Fat America Is <<Really worth a gander. (Business Insider)
- Cioppino: The Other San Francisco Treat <<I absolutely love cioppino, and not just because it has my name in it. It’s seriously one of the most delicious seafood dishes I’ve ever had. Why have I never tried to make it myself??? (Food Thinkers)
What inspired you this week?
Thanks for your note “I’m proud of TreeHugger for stepping up and calling BS of the week on this study.”
It means a lot to me!
Regards, Lloyd Alter
My pleasure! I mean every word of it. It’s great to see someone other than me calling BS!
Darya,
Thank you much for taking the time to put together this list every week. Stating the obvious, but these Friday ‘For the love of food’ posts are extremely useful in staying abreast of the latest research.
All your hard work is much appreciated.
– Raj
Thanks Raj! They are a ton of work, but they keep me up on the latest as well 🙂
Two questions about the diet soda/aspartame article:
1. What other reasons could there have been for the increase in waist size in the diet soda group? People that drink diet soda tend to be those who are concerned about their weight to begin with. The article mentions that the results were adjusted for “waist circumference, diabetes status, leisure-time physical activity level, neighborhood of residence, age and smoking status at the beginning of each interval, as well as sex, ethnicity and years of education.” But what about overall diet and presence of metabolic disorders aside from diabetes? It seems there are a lot of variables being left out here.
2. How much aspartame were the mice being given? The quote mentions “heavy” exposure. Is this one of those studies in which they gave the subjects a dosage orders of magnitude higher than most people would ever normally consume?
Yes, there could be many confounding factors in the human study. We know overweight people tend to prefer diet soda, but this was a longitudinal study so it is graphing change over time. More data is needed for sure.
Regarding the mouse study I cannot check on the dosage because the findings are not yet published and have not been peer reviewed. It could have been the the aspartame simply increased the appetite of these mice, which led to the insulin problem. Remember, these were mice with a pre-disposition to diabetes, a model that may not be ideal for estimating the impact on human subjects.
In my opinion, the jury is still out on aspartame. This is just an interesting glimpse of something that might be going on.
The fact that the study of diet soda intake and waist circumference tracked change over time does not address the unmeasured confounding going on in this study that several people have questioned. I think what this study is identifying is that diet soda intake is a marker of people struggling (and losing) the battle of weight gain, not that diet soda causes the weight gain.
Totally. It was much more interesting in conjunction with the mouse data.
Fascinating, thanks!
Thanks for that infographic, especially the map really helps visualize the extent of the problem. As 58% of people attribute their obesity to bad eating habits, seems that more information on food and nutrition and how to integrate a healthy diet into daily life (like this blog) tackles the problem at its root!