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 | Mar 16, 2012
For The Love of Food
Welcome to Friday’s For The Love of Food, Summer Tomato’s weekly link roundup.
Why you shouldn’t tweet and eat, fake chicken is not ethical and orange juice isn’t good for you.
Want to see all my favorite links? Be sure to follow me on on Digg. I also share links on Twitter (@summertomato), Google+ and the Summer Tomato Facebook page. I’m very active on all these sites and would love to connect with you.
Links of the week
- Shout it From the Rooftops: Juice is Not Natural <<I’m going to continue posting articles about Tropicana until people stop asking me about it, which will probably be never. (Obesity Panacea)
- The Dangers of Tweeting While Eating <<Some data on all that mindful eating stuff I keep talking about. (Men’s Health)
- A Chicken Without Guilt <<BS of the week. I’m no supporter of industrial or inhumane animal farms, but to propose that a product made from Monsanto’s GMO soy beans is ethical is just ignorant. I’m super disappointed in Mark Bittman for this. (New York Times)
- Walking May Lessen the Influence of Genes On Obesity by Half <<Your health is a reflection of both nature and nurture. Never throw in the towel just because you think you have “bad genes.” (ScienceDaily)
- Reinventing the Office: How to Lose Fat and Increase Productivity at Work <<Some really innovative ideas here about how to create a healthier office space. Love it. (Tim Ferriss)
- Reasons That Vitamin D May Matter <<Nothing revolutionary here, but if you need a primer on why myself and many others recommend vitamin D supplements for many people this is a decent explanation. (New York Times)
- Food Is Important <<This is a cool story, well worth reading. (Michael Ruhlman)
- What the Grave of a Listeria Cantaloupe Victim Looks Like <<Proof that industrial produce can be (and often is) just as dangerous as industrial meats. (Bill Marler)
- BREAKFAST TACOS WITH AVOCADO RADISH SALSA <<I met Kimberley last weekend at the Edible Institute conference in Santa Barbara, and I’m already in love with her blog. (The Year In Food)
What inspired you this week?
I’ve been so enjoying your smart, engaging articles, Darya. Thanks so much for the shout out this week; the feeling’s mutual!
I’m skeptical of the purported evils of packaged orange juice. There are many articles on the subject online, but the majority of them seem to rely on quotes from Alissa Hamilton, author of “Squeezed: What You Don’t Know About Orange Juice.” She may or may not be an expert on the subject, but there don’t seem to be a lot of facts floating around out there from sources other than her.
Many articles from different media outlets use exactly the same descriptive phrases, leading me to believe they’re just repurposing Ms. Hamilton’s words. I did find one article quoting an orange juice manufacturer stating that their “flavor packets” are made out of concentrated oils that are extracted during the squeezing process.
The crux of the matter is that fresh orange juice will spoil rapidly, and as such it can’t be mass-produced and shipped around the world. In order to make it last, it needs to be pasteurized and stored in an oxygen-free, sterilized environment. To ensure consistency, it is apparently flavored with the oils extracted during squeezing (so-called “flavor packets”).
What really sets my skepticism alarm off is the charge that the stored orange juice tastes only like sugar water and is then flavored with a chemical cocktail. If that’s really true, why on earth would manufactures bother with actual oranges at all? Surely dumping some sugar in a vat of water and pouring in some chemicals would be WAY cheaper. Yet, they still grow oranges and squeeze them, a massively labor-intensive process.
Anyway, until there is a definitive exposé on the subject I’m going to withhold judgment. If in fact commercial orange juice is nothing more than sugar, water, and chemicals, then I think nutritional labels should communicate that information to consumers. However, it seems to me at this point that the reality of the situation isn’t so cut-and-dried.