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: How to overcome procrastination, a victory for GMO labels, and why you shouldn’t work before 10am
by Darya Rose | Mar 25, 2016
For the Love of Food
Welcome to Friday’s For The Love of Food, Summer Tomato’s weekly link roundup.
This week how to overcome procrastination, a victory for GMO labels, and why you shouldn’t work before 10am.
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
- The Evolution of Anxiety: Why We Worry and What to Do About It <<Anxiety is certainly a bummer, but this article is more about how to focus on and accomplish what is important. A great read. (James Clear)
- The Healthiest People In The World Eat A Lot Of Carbs <<With this headline I expected this article to go in one of two directions: nuanced science or vegan propaganda. I was pleasantly surprised. (Huffington Post)
- In defence of genetically modified food <<Speaking of nuance, I’m happy to see that we’re (just barely) starting to move beyond good vs evil in the GMO talk. In other news I just learned that Canadians and Brits spell defense with a “c”. (Macleans)
- GMO labeling: it’s happening! <<Previous statement aside, I’m still a big fan of transparency and labelling. Thank you, Vermont. (Food Politics)
- Shannon’s Method: Overcome Habit Procrastination <<You know this is important but you’re just so tired, why not just start fresh tomorrow? Here’s a great reason. (Zen Habits)
- Less Than 3 Percent of Americans Live a Healthy Lifestyle <<I’m sorry, what?! You guys, stop what you’re doing and go tell 10 people you know about Summer Tomato. The nation needs you. (Medline)
- 6 Surprising Lessons from Having Gestational Diabetes <<Great insights even if you don’t happen to be pregnant (or even female). Note that quantity and speed matter big time. (Stone Soup)
- Blown Away By How Much Ultra-Processed Food North Americans Eat <<Ultra-processed foods are where I draw the line. I don’t touch them (willpower not required), but apparently I’m a rare egg. (Weighty Matters)
- 7 Game-Changing Things We’ve Learned About Sleep This Past Year <<Your work day should start at 10am? This article is a tad sensational, but still fascinating stuff worth exploring. (Huffington Post)
- Phat Phrik Khing: Smash Your Way to a Spectacular Dry-Style Thai Curry <<Making Thai food from scratch may sound intimidating, but if you have access to the ingredients it is a fabulous way to empower yourself in the kitchen. It really isn’t that hard, and what you create will destroy any take out you’ve eaten in your entire life. (Serious Eats)
What inspired you this week?
Thank you for these links as always, Darya! I only took a brief look at the BMJ paper on the study in Japan, but I’d love to hear your thoughts on the study findings and how it affects (if at all) your attitudes toward grains.
It’s exactly what I would expect, I wrote a similar article 7 years ago.
I was curious what NHANES considered to be “normal” body fat, and all I could find (the number wasn’t in the abstract) was 25% for men/35% for women. But it seems like more than 10% of the population would fit this description.. even when I was obese, I was 34% body fat.
And it’s worth mentioning that the data was collected from 2003-2006. 29% of people don’t smoke anymore — the latest numbers I could find put this at 18%.
Good sleuthing. They had to meet all four criteria to qualify as having a “healthy lifestyle.”
Here’s what I found on the body fat info:
“Normal weight was defined as 5% to 20% for men and as 8% to 30% for women.”
http://www.mayoclinicproceedings.org/article/S0025-6196(16)00043-4/fulltext
The problem with GMO is not GM technology itself. The problem is how it is being used. It is used for patenting the living, biopiracy and locking agriculture in the usage of biocides (pesticides, herbicides…).
Biocides are chemicals that kills the living, which is actually needed by the plants to grow. The soil is a living organism. Since the soil is killed they have to put even more artificial fertilizers (chemicals) and GMO. With the soil killed and the biodiversity killed monoculture is even more vulnerable to bad events like droughts, which pushes again for more GMO.
Mechanized monoculture is a very inefficient way to grow food. It relies deeply on fossil fuels and chemicals.
Organic farming and permaculture are efficient and sustainable. There are many studies that show organic farming can feed the world population up to 12 billion people.
For further information on the subject, google:
– Soil biology
– Permaculture
– Vandana Shiva
The sleep article does not explain the logic behind the sleep deprivation claim and the work day starting at 10am. Simply says that sleep deprivation is bad. Huh? Even if people go to bed at a reasonable hour and get a deep 8+ hours?? I thought our circadian rhythms were aligned to sunlight patterns…
I read James Clear’s article, then followed the links within. The paperclip strategy is great for daily habit formation, but the Seinfeld strategy was a mind-blower for me: I’ve been looking for a way to build consistency with diet and exercise, and I think this is it. Using a wall calendar, mark off the day with a big red “X” every day you follow through on your task. The object is to, over time, build a “chain” of big red Xs and NOT BREAK THE CHAIN. So simple, it’s elegant. But most importantly, it takes away the emotional, judgmental aspect – you aren’t focusing on motivation, willpower or anything else but not breaking the chain. Brilliant!!
I’m really taken aback by your “vegan propaganda” remark above. Some of us are trying to improve our health and eat a certain way, but that doesn’t mean we are all mindless puppets. In some ways anything that is blogged or posted is “propaganda” of some sort. I have never seen you mention anything against vegans in the past so this is very surprising and disappointing to me.
Hi Darya, This is unrelated perhaps to this article. I have been reading your stuff, Michael Pollan’s stuff, watching great documentaries etc. I know my pitfalls and I am working on discovering them, adjusting them etc. I know my strengths and I love real food and love to cook. Everythings been going well for about 1.5 months now but I still can’t seem to be the 2pm feeling that I want to sleep and since I am at work and can’t I want to eat. Eat everything in front of me, leave the office to go get something to eat. I feel like some of it is boredom or due to a tedious task at work…but its pretty consistent daily. I start to get cravings then though and they plague me all day afterwards whether I give in or not. If I give in…it doesn’t stop, it starts a wth cycle and makes me want more of everything. Can you help offer up something I could be missing?!