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 | Oct 4, 2013
For The Love of Food
Welcome to Friday’s For The Love of Food, Summer Tomato’s weekly link roundup.
This week thinking too hard ruins our workouts, environmental toxins threaten pregnant women and why Big Food hates Chipotle.
Want to see all my favorite links? (There’s lots more). Be sure to follow me on on Delicious. 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. (And yes, I took that pepper heart pic myself).
Links of the week
- How Intense Study May Harm Our Workouts <<Fascinating new research about how concentrating too hard can decrease your workout endurance. Maybe time to move those workouts to morning instead of after work? (NY Times)
- Online Obamacare marketplaces offer ample options, report says <<Alright everyone, now go get yourself some health insurance. And let’s start focusing on prevention and early detection, OK? Thanks. (LA Times)
- The Washington Post is Wrong About Farmed Salmon <<Ocean advocacy group calls BS of the week on the Washington Post’s recent claims that farmed salmon is becoming a better option. (Oceana)
- Why the agriculture industry hates Chipotle <<This is incredibly amusing. Big Food is accusing Chipotle of deceptive advertising. Ha! (Politico)
- An Official Statement on Environmental Toxins and Pregnancy <<There are some compelling data suggesting that environmental chemicals like BPA, fire retardants and phthalates are harming fetuses and pregnant women. Scary stuff. (The Atlantic)
- Concerns Over Mercury Levels in Fish May Be Unfounded <<Some better news for pregnant women, mercury exposure from fish does not appear to be as big a concern as previously thought. This is good, because omega-3 fatty acid consumption (fish oil, not the kind from plants) is important for proper neural development in children and to fight depression in pregnant women. (ScienceDaily)
- 6 Reasons to NOT Count Calories <<Pretty much exactly what I recommend in Foodist. (Stone Soup)
- Resveratrol, Found in Red Wine, Worsens MS-Like Symptoms <<It seems the anti-aging molecule found in red wine, resveratrol, is potentially dangerous for MS patients. On the plus side, it still seems to be good at fighting cancer. Will someone please ask biology to stop being so complicated already?! (ScienceDaily)
- SECRET DANGER OF RETIREMENT <<Keep challenging yourself mentally if you want to maintain a healthy brain (and physically if you want a healthy body). (Dr. Weil)
- Tasty tasty sous vide <<An audio-visual demo of how we cook steaks at home, courtesy of my fabulous raccoon-tossing husband, Kevin Rose. We use our sous vide machine a few nights a week, and consider it one of the best purchases we’ve ever made.
What inspired you this week?
Darya, the cheapest plan available to me starting in 2014 is $325.59 a month. I can’t afford that. The same insurer used to offer plans for as low as $96.71. I’m looking at the quotes right now. That’s a 3-fold increase because of the “Affordable” Care Act. How do you suggest I “get myself some health insurance” when I’ve been priced out of the market? And no, I don’t qualify for a meaningful subsidy.
Re: overfocusing harms workouts — I get my @$$ out of bed to make a 6am workout session most days for this very reason. I’m basically toast at the end of the day, and working out during lunchtime makes me feel like “health” is an afterthought (because I’m squeezing it in between other things). Better that I treat it as part of my morning ritual.
Talking about the dangers of retirement and aging, I would recommend strongly reading this article about brain plasticity:
http://www.forbes.com/sites/nextavenue/2013/08/06/how-you-can-make-your-brain-smarter-every-day/
Many people realize that our bodies must be taken care of to ensure our health and well being, but the dangers arising from the lack of brain training are too often forgotten. However, they are huge… not only the rising risks of Alzheimer or Parkinson diseases, but also the fact that so often aging individuals become somewhat caricatures of their former selves. Wish more people knew that many of those things can be prevented.
Just like Summer Tomato and ‘Foodist’ made a huge impact on my eating habits and attitude towards food, ‘The Brain that Changes Itself’ by Norman Doidge and ‘Softwared’ by Dr. Michael Merzenich (he is one of the scientists responsible for our current understanding of brain plasticity) reversed my way of thinking about how our brain works.