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.
There were so many awesome stories this week narrowing them down to the top 10 was difficult. Several studies were published on environmental factors that influence healthy food choices, Monica Reinagel shares an interesting method on breaking weight loss plateaus and I found one of the most inspiring videos I’ve ever seen.
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Links of the week
- Home Is Where the Healthy Meal Is <<A fascinating new study suggests that setting the right mood before cooking at home results in healthier food choices. I always try and light candles and play Miles Davis over dinner. (ScienceDaily)
- The Paleo Diet: Caveman Cure-All or Unhealthy Fad? <<I expected to hate this article, but I actually enjoyed it. My only gripes are that he doesn’t seem to know that paleo folks don’t eat dairy (he refers to butter) and do eat potatoes (not Atkins). (The Atlantic)
- Group puts hot dogs on hit list <<BS of the week. A vegan activist group wants you to believe hotdogs are as dangerous as cigarettes, which is ridiculous. Even the American Cancer Society disagrees. (Indy Star)
- Think Healthy, Eat Healthy: Scientists Show Link Between Attention and Self-Control <<Cool study shows that remembering that health is important helps people make better decisions. (ScienceDaily)
- How to Break a Weight Loss Plateau <<I’d never heard of calorie cycling, but you might want to give it a try if you’re stuck in the weight loss thing. (Nutrition Over Easy)
- Do Your Grocery Shopping With a Cart Instead of a Basket: You’ll Make Healthier Choices <<I’d guess this is because the healthier foods require you go put down the basket, find a plastic bag, sort through produce that is often wet and do other tasks that require both hands. (TreeHugger)
- What About Triglycerides? <<Apparently the American Heart Association put out a new statement about triglycerides. Worth a gander. (Advanced Mediterranean Diet)
- charred corn tacos with zucchini-radish slaw <<I’ve never seen corn cooked this way and I’m very intrigued. In other news: I love summertime. (smitten kitchen)
- Second Act: Ernestine Shepherd <<One of the most inspiring videos I’ve ever seen. This woman is 74 years old. (Yahoo!)
What inspired you this week?
Wow! Thanks for the uplifting video, Darya. Ernestine Shepherd is now my hero! Whew! Must do more reps with those weights.
The author of the hot dog article made a nice stab at being literary at the very end. Still, it fell a little flat. If I was an editor I’d try to punch it up a bit: “Then he ate lunch, casually allowing the icy specter of a painful death to take one step closer.” That’s probably too grim… How about: “Then he ate lunch, tragically oblivious to the financial and emotional turmoil he was guaranteeing both for himself and the nation.” Yeah, that’s the ticket!
I kid, I kid. But I thought the article was impossibly lame. How many hundreds of thousands of dollars did they spend on those billboards? Unless somebody can tell me personally that I’m 100% guaranteed to suffer ill effects from a certain behavior then they can just shut up. It’d do more damage to my health to worry about hot dogs than it would to actually eat them.
Calorie cycling is definitely very very effective, but it requires a LOT of discipline, as well as close monitoring of calories. So while it works very well, I think it’s sort of the opposite of what you’d normally promote in the sense of not being obsessive, not really counting calories etc. I was prone to abuse this myself, so I’m a bit leery of it.
Butter (fermented dairy) is pretty widely accepted among paleo/primal circles (Wolf and Sisson included). Potato can me enjoyed but not as a staple.
I thought the article pointing to sources such as the laughable US News report was silly. The fact of the matter is, if any diet can force you to remove or limit refined sugars and gluten from your life, you’re going to feel better and lose weight.
Darya, you’ve just shown me what’s for dinner tonight – that Charred Corn Taco recipe sounds like heaven on a plate! 🙂 Have you had a chance to try it yet?
In case anyone wants to know, I made the corn tacos the day Deb posted them, and they are AWESOME. (I did the corn in a very hot skillet instead of the burner, and it charred just fine.) We put cotija and tomatillo salsa (also on Smitten Kitchen) on them, and even though I usually don’t like leftovers, I ate these for three more meals.