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
For The Love of Food
Welcome to Friday’s For The Love of Food, Summer Tomato’s weekly link roundup.
Exciting announcement! Prevention Magazine has launched a new site dedicated to healthy living called EatClean, and I’m one of their featured writers. Check out my first article, This Is Why Your Attempts to Eat Healthy are Backfiring. If you like Summer Tomato it will be totally up your alley. (Don’t forget to subscribe).
This week why you’ll never eat Thai shrimp again, new rules on preventing peanut allergies, and how the food industry has gotten even shadier.
Too busy to read them all? Try this awesome free speed reading app I just discovered to read at 300+ wpm. So neat!
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 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
- WARNING: AFTER READING THIS POST, YOU WILL NEVER EAT A SHRIMP FROM THAILAND AGAIN. <<And if you eat shrimp, you probably are eating shrimp from Thailand. This is an atrocity. (Politics of the Plate)
- Is It Really Safe to Give Babies Peanut Butter? <<In case you missed it, turns out all the advice we were given about how to protect your children from getting a peanut allergy (i.e. don’t give them peanuts) wasn’t just wrong, it actually promotes peanut allergies. Reason no. #544 not to base your actions on the advice on half-baked “scientific” evidence. (The Atlantic)
- Psychology To Go: How Restaurants Get You to Spend More <<Another reason your willpower is doomed to fail. (Inc.)
- Inside the food industry: the surprising truth about what you eat <<I’ve been growing every more suspicious about the number of products––that by all accounts look like processed foods––starting to have squeaky clean ingredients labels. Of course, this is intentional marketing by the food industry. Buyer beware. (The Guardian)
- Eggs Are Back: The Earnest Simplicity of the New Nutrition Guidelines <<Nutrition guidelines are actually starting to become sensible?! Be still my beating heart. (The Atlantic)
- Unraveling the Gluten-Free Trend <<If you’ve been curious about the explosion of interest in gluten-free diets, this is a deep dive. (Eating Well)
- Can High-Fiber Foods Fight the Metabolic Syndrome? <<A more sober interpretation (compared to this) of the new study showing the benefits of a “high-fiber” diet. My favorite point: “The high-fiber diet group increased its intake of high-fiber foods, not simply dietary fiber.” (Whole Health Source)
- Salads Don’t Have to Be Green <<Amen to this. (NY Times)
- Why Is Regaining Weight So Common? <<Fascinating discussion of the impact of HOW body fat is formed, and why it makes a difference in your ability to lose weight. (Mark’s Daily Apple)
- Skillet Lemon Rosemary Chicken <<I’m all about chicken thighs. In fact, I made a version of this dish earlier this week. (Simply Recipes)
What inspired you this week?
Darya, thanks for all the links!!! It’s like a science fest!! I enjoyed the fiber one. BTW, the gluten-free review looks suspiciously similar to this I’ve seen nearly 3 months ago http://thehealthsciencesacademy.org/health-tips/gluten-free/ or it could just be that everyone is talking about it now? By the way, I’m really struggling with my cooking habits. I feel so tired at the end of my working day and have very little energy left to cook from scratch. I remember your blog post about introducing variety and being bored with the same choices but are there any other tips you could give me? Are there things that are okay to cook in advance for example? Just worried they would lose nutritional value? Thanks a lot!!!
“Inside the Food Industry”…. Honestly, it makes me afraid to eat anything I didn’t, grow, cut, and cook myself. Ugg!
Obsessed with your weekly link round ups, the best out there. Food nerds unite!
Thanks so much, Andrea! It’s a ton of work (I worked hours yesterday and had to wake up at 4am to finish by 10:40a), so I appreciate the appreciation xo
Oh my goodness! Well if you’re ever in a pinch and need some extra link love let me know know what I can do.
“Inside the Food Industry” is fascinating, but I feel conflicted. On the one hand, disingenuous food labeling is alarming (what exactly is “natural flavours?”) On the other hand, are food preservatives not a boon to mankind? It wasn’t long ago that our diets consisted of more spoiled food dressed up to not taste bad, and were restricted by what was available in season (i.e. less veggies and fruits in the winter.) I do avoid some things like HFCS because in my opinion it tends to make food taste kind of vaguely terrible (why do is there HFCS in canned tomatoes?)
I think preservatives are a response, in part, to our lifestyle (for better or for worse.) I cook dinner 2-3 times a week and when I do I try to use as many whole, unprocessed ingredients as possible, but the rest of the week I have to rely on more processed food. I’m reminded of a customer (I work in food service) who was going to order a pre-cooked turkey for Thanksgiving, but then changed her mind when she saw that it had carageenan in it. On the one hand, I agreed with her and would not buy a pre-cooked turkey for that reason; on the other hand, how does one expect to buy a pre-cooked turkey that isn’t spoiled and inedible if it doesn’t have preservatives?
Then, there is the question that I can’t answer because I’m not a scientist: is the fear of preservatives due to our ignorance and therefor our fear of the unknown, or is it justified? Does this vary from preservative to preservative? And how do we feed a massive population without the use of preservatives? These are massive questions.
You bring up some interesting points. One thing to consider is that there are a number of natural preservation methods that have been used for millennia and are considered safe and even healthy, such as fermentation, pickling, drying, etc. However these take more time and are therefore more expensive.
On the other hand, chemically created additives (many aren’t preservatives but are meant to make processed foods more palatable, since they are naturally devoid of flavor and have weird textures) aren’t really developed to feed more people, but to save money for food manufacturers who lose money when food spoils quicker or takes longer to prepare to make it taste good. Health is certainly not their concern, and they aren’t afraid to take untested shortcuts to save some cash.
I shared the article not so much to show that all food additives are bad. My point was to show that they’re intentionally manipulative and secretive. THAT makes me more angry than their use of chemicals that may or may not be a problem.
I agree re: the manipulation and secrecy. Certainly, adding things like HFCS and MSG (as the most well-known examples) is motivated by greed, not out of a desire to healthily nourish consumers (as opposed to adding vitamin D to milk to eliminate rickets, for example.) It’s depressing to reflect upon, and I wonder what can be done to prevent such manipulation. Obviously, we have the FDA and other agencies for things like this, but banning certain additives doesn’t mean manufacturers won’t keep coming up with new ones to replace them. 🙁
Also, awhile I bought a chicken from a local butcher. Thinking “hey, it’s a local butcher shop, it must be good!” I hurried home and roasted it, anticipating the results. Well, the chicken came out hard, dry, and, well… it tasted disgusting. It was inedible and I had to throw it out. It wasn’t for lack of cooking skill, as I have roasted many a delicious chicken, but it was then I reviewed the ingredients listed on the package and saw a litany of additives, including something with silicone in it, I think. Yeeeuck.
Normally, I buy air-chilled chickens from whole foods for this reason. They never come out gross like that one did. Additives in fresh meat are really horrible.
Sorry for the typos and grammatical errors, I wrote this in a hurry.
I am a family physician. I have always known that dietary cholesterol is not dangerous because of science. When you eat cholesterol, it simply becomes part of the large pool of bile acids in the gut. Your gut can’t tell the difference between cholesterol and bile acids so eating cholesterol laden food is like spitting in the ocean.
Amen that salads don’t have to be green. I have many friends from Russia and Ukraine who like to refer to the typical American salad as “grass”. The only thing green in an Eastern European salad is cucumbers or parsley. The rest is tomatoes, radishes, turnips, carrots, etc.