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 | Aug 22, 2014
For The Love of Food
Welcome to Friday’s For The Love of Food, Summer Tomato’s weekly link roundup.
This week breakfast and salt are back under fire, how to count your bites, and a possible risk in hand sanitizers.
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. (Yes, I took that picture of the pepper heart myself.)
Links of the week
- Breakfast Downgraded From ‘Most Important Meal of the Day’ to ‘Meal’ <<People are fighting about breakfast again. Good times. I maintain that the reason breakfast is important is because it is the easiest meal of the day to automate. Making 30% of your weekly meals healthier is a huge win. (The Atlantic)
- Are We Overdoing Salt Restrictions? <<People are fighting about salt again. Good times. I maintain that all you need to know is that 75-80% of our sodium intake comes from processed foods, making it a huge confounder in the anti-salt argument. Ditch the crap and you don’t have to worry about salt. (Medline)
- Fish as Brain Food <<New evidence suggests that eating fish is good for your brain. Please note that the benefits don’t appear to be related to omega-3s, so don’t make the mistake of assuming popping a pill is the same as eating food. (NY Times)
- How Many Bites Do You Take a Day? Try for 100 <<I don’t know about the 100 bites thing, but it seems several companies are working on ways to help you improve how you eat, include eating slower and more mindfully. (WSJ)
- Common household chemicals responsible for reproductive declines in mice <<This is preliminary research, but I’ll be keeping an eye on it. Hand sanitizers are wildly popular, and seem to decrease fertility in mice. (ScienceDaily)
- Stretching Is Overrated <<After a long diatribe against stretching, we are told that warming up is great to do before a workout. Stay healthy, my friends. And don’t be neurotic. (The Atlantic)
- Smart Fuel: Mushrooms <<I’m a big fan of mushrooms and consider them an underrated health food. Here’s some fun facts and health benefits. (Mark’s Daily Apple)
- Vitamin D Tied to Alzheimer’s Risk <<I still don’t know what to make of all the vitamin D research, but it certainly seems important. One more reason to eat those mushrooms. (NY Times)
- HOW NOT TO HELP YOUNG GIRLS LOSE WEIGHT <<This is really sad, and shows just how powerful psychology can be in influencing behavior. (Dr. Weil)
- smoky eggplant dip <<I’ve been sort of obsesses with eggplant the past few weeks. Tis the season. (smitten kitchen)
What inspired you this week?
Hi. I’m a massage therapist.
I was ready to tear into that stretching article. Of my active clients, the ones who mess themselves up the worst are all non-stretchers. The worst of those are manly men who won’t do anything that resembles yoga because… girl germs as far as I can tell. I definitely perform better when I stretch, mostly because I don’t hurt like blazes by mile two. (Running is my go-to stress relief.)
But they’re only coming down on static stretching. Dynamic stretching, they’re fine with; and from what I can tell is significantly better anyway. I just hope my clients read the fine print, or this is going to be a long, long, lucrative but exhausting fad.
“75-80% of our sodium intake comes from processed foods…”
One thing to remember about this comment is that while it’s probably true of the average person in North America, it’s almost certainly not true of people who have fully committed to the “Foodist” way of eating unless they add very little salt when cooking. Even if you cook your own meals and don’t use many processed ingredients, if you season your food the way most chefs do (as you might see on the Food Network), you could still have high sodium intake.
Personally, I actually use more salt in my cooking now than I did years ago (and my food tastes a lot better because of it), but I don’t use as much salt as the chefs I see on TV except on special occasions.