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 the case for a national food policy, a simple way to increase your commitment to exercise, and making veggies as good as chips.
Too busy to read them all? Try this awesome free speed reading app I just discovered to read at 300+ wpm. So neat!
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Links of the week
- How a national food policy could save millions of American lives <<If for some reason you missed this landmark piece by Mark Bittman, Michael Pollan, Ricardo Salvador and Olivier De Schutter on the importance of creating a US National Food Policy, you should remedy that immediately. (Washington Post)
- NOW FRENCH FRIES …CAUSE CANCER!!! <<Despite his lack in scientific training, I love Michael Ruhlman’s ability to consistently call BS on scientific arrogance with good ol’ fashioned common sense. (Ruhlman)
- To Exercise More, Sign a Contract <<A simple trick to help yourself commit to a more active lifestyle. (WSJ)
- Exercising but Gaining Weight <<Why should you exercise? Because being sedentary is the worst thing you can do for your health. If you’re relying on exercise for weight loss though, you may be disappointed. Diet trumps there. (NY Times)
- The Dreadful Inconvenience of Salad <<I’m curious what you guys thing of this? Would you be stoked to have salad vending machines? (The Atlantic)
- Preschoolers eat healthy when parents set rules about food, study finds <<Here’s a shocker. What impressed me though was how long the effects lasted. (ScienceDaily)
- The Quickstart Guide to Quitting a Bad Habit <<Excellent advice for breaking bad habits. (Zen Habits)
- 6 Ways to Make Vegetables Taste as Good as Potato Chips* <Everyone’s a winner! (Stone Soup)
- 5 Tips to Help You Start Cooking Again After Having a Baby <<I hear the baby excuse a lot. And it’s a valid one. But there’s a way back, and it doesn’t hurt to take some shortcuts. (The Kitchn)
- Chickpea Squash Tagine <<Tagine is one of my favorite foods in the world. And it’s perfect for cold weather. (Not Eating Out in New York)
What inspired you this week?
Thank you again for sharing! Since it looks like the preschooler paper isn’t published yet, I don’t know the details of the study design, but I’d be curious to see how these rules are communicated and enforced and a similar study over a longer follow-up period.
Yep. I almost never share abstracts, but it was intriguing enough.
From the salad article:
He points out that the number of people drinking milk—particularly whole milk—has plummeted in the past few decades. Per-capita consumption of whole milk has tumbled by 78 percent since 1970—this in spite of aggressive “Got milk?” ad campaigns sponsored by the dairy industry.
“People can switch their taste preferences, but it takes time and a concerted effort by the government,” Brownell told me. The USDA began pushing the skim variety in the fat-wary 1980s. “In the beginning, people thought ‘yuck!’ whenever they had skim milk. Now people find whole milk unpleasant.”
Thus proving that government action can be effective … as long as they’re not recommending the exact wrong thing.
Interesting article about weight gain and exercise. I’ve read similar ones as well that discuss how we overinflate the role of exercise when it comes to losing weight. It makes sense – I can eat 500 calories worth of donuts in 5 minutes but it would take me an hour or so to burn off that amount!
When I actively exercise, I tend to eat healthier. And when I eat better, I have more energy and want to work out. For me the two go hand in hand. But I will admit sometimes I think too much about how many calories I’m burning. I try to focus on the health benefits and how good I feel after a workout. Thanks for the informative links!