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.
This week’s top 10 require careful reading and a little extra thinking, but it’s worth it. Learn why daily activity is more important than formal exercise, how habits can affect your food intake, some encouraging news from the USDA and more.
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Links of the week
- Routine Chores Might Help Keep Dementia at Bay <<This title is misleading, because the most interesting part of this story is that daily activity is more effective than formal exercise for burning calories. Also, this preserves your mind. (Medline)
- People eat out of habit, a study finds, even when food is stale <<This is exactly why I’m always encouraging you to eat mindfully. Interestingly, in this study even eating with your non-dominant hand seemed to help. (Los Angeles Times)
- Nutrition: A Low-Calorie Meal Is Shown to Pay Off <<BS of the week. I’m all for eating less and I think you can be successful at it, but this is a poorly designed study using junk food as a meal and it only lasted 2 weeks. How that can be considered “effective” is beyond me. (New York Times)
- USDA seeks method to compensate farmers for GM contamination <<Remember in the movie Food Inc. when Monsanto sues an organic farmer because their seeds contaminated his crop? Hopefully this works out and puts and end to ridiculous things like that. (Food Politics)
- Why I never eat breakfast cereal. <<Breakfast cereal isn’t really food, and my friend Yoni who works with obesity patients for a living thinks it may also prevent weight loss. Worth considering. (Weighty Matters)
- Eating purple potato may lower blood pressure for the overweight <<This really isn’t necessarily restricted to purple potatoes. What it shows is that at least some potatoes aren’t as bad for you as bread. (Los Angeles Times)
- Helpful Gut Microbes May Differ Based on Diet <<I find this new area of research absolutely fascinating. This study shows heavy meat eaters have different microbial gut patterns than herbivores. At this point there’s no reason to prefer one to the other, but down the line it may help explain why dietary patterns are more important to your health than short-term changes. (Medline)
- Vitamin D levels tied to colon cancer risk <<Yet another reason to be sure your vitamin D levels are in a healthy range. Mine weren’t until I started taking supplements. (Medline)
- Hyperinsulinemia: Cause or Effect of Obesity? <<For geeks’ eyes only. Understanding this article requires a fairly sophisticated understanding of human metabolism and biochemistry, but if you have those things and are interested in exploring some of the fallacies of Gary Taubes’ carb argument, you’ll love this one. (Whole Health Source)
- roasted tomato and thyme soup <<A beautiful looking recipe, though I would personally leave out the sugar since tomatoes are so sweet right now. (the sophisticated gourmet)
What inspired you this week?
Great set of links Darya. Only had time to read the link about never eating cereals today (will get to the rest later). I think cereals can be nutritious and healthy as long as your not eating the Captain Crunches and Fruit Loops of the cereal category. Eating cereals made from whole wheat without any refined sugars is key. My favorite is Cascadian Farm’s Raisin Bran cereal! Yum!
I agree with you. I find that a small amount of cereal (carefully chosen – I now only pick cereals with a few natural ingredients and nothing else added) combined with fresh fruit and organic yoghurt (again, nothing artificial added) makes a very satisfying breakfast that keeps me going until lunchtime with no cravings.
Ah, nice to see Kamran’s recipe here 🙂 The pics of the soup are gorgeous. Peppermint would go perfectly with this soup as well.
And thanks for the list of course 🙂
That NY Times article is appalling. They must have been really, really desperate for something to write about that day.
Lucky Charms and the like aren’t very healthy or filling, but for those who enjoy cereal I highly recommend making your own muesli. I had the real thing for the first time in Vienna about 10 years ago; there are few things more delicious. I made some recently with oats, wheat germ, wheat bran, oat bran, sunflower seeds, almonds, raisins, brown sugar, and dried cherries.
Funny you should mention muesli, I’m posting my recipe next week.
Nice!