Welcome to Friday’s For The Love of Food, Summer Tomato’s weekly link roundup.

This week the benefits of eating early, alternative milks lose their status, and the best time to exercise.

Next week’s Mindful Meal Challenge will start again on Monday. Sign up now to join us!

Too busy to read them all? Try this awesome free speed reading app to read at 300+ wpm. So neat!

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.

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Welcome to Friday’s For The Love of Food, Summer Tomato’s weekly link roundup.

Next week’s Mindful Meal Challenge will start again on Monday. Sign up now to join us!

This week nutrition is not as complex as you think, backyard chickens spreading Salmonella, and diseased farmed salmon infest wild population.

Too busy to read them all? Try this awesome free speed reading app to read at 300+ wpm. So neat!

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.

Read the rest of this story »

Monica has a demanding job with hours that are continuously changing. She is responsible for producing original ideas at a moment’s notice, which is very intellectually demanding. Although she enjoys her work, the stress of the job causes her to snack constantly whether she is hungry or not.

It doesn’t help that her job is copywriting for fast food and snack companies and there are always plenty of treats around for her to indulge in whenever good ideas are not flowing.

Monica knows that she needs to deal with work anxiety in a healthier way. In general, she has a very healthy lifestyle. At home she eats mindfully, has a regular exercise routine and cooks healthy foods. However, when she gets to work she compares it to a “black hole” where she disappears into “non-healthstyle land.”

The overeating at work caused by stress ends up making her tired, hurting her stomach and does not align with her values. Together we come up with ideas for how Monica can resolve her anxiety using her mind instead of food.

Wish you had more time to listen to the podcast? I use an app called Overcast (no affiliation) to play back my favorite podcasts at faster speeds, dynamically shortening silences in talk shows so it doesn’t sound weird. It’s pretty rad.

Related links:

How to Eat More Mindfully in 19 Seconds

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If you’d like to be a guest on the show, please fill out the form here and tell us your story.

Photo by donnierayjones

One of my hobbies is asking every random person I talk to how they feel about their health. The stories I hear range from super sad to downright hilarious. Yet despite the diversity, a few common themes emerge.

Most people agree that health is important. And while answers may vary about what actually constitutes “good health,” few people believe they have achieved it or are satisfied with where they are at.

Where things really get interesting though is when I ask someone what stops them from being healthier. Surprisingly few people give hedonistic reasons such as “I love junk food too much” or “I just don’t want to cut back on TV,” although I do hear it occasionally.

Instead, the majority of people I speak with give one of two answers:

1. Family responsibilities take up too much time and energy
2. Work (or school) responsibilities take up too much time and energy

Sometimes they say both.

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For the Love of Food

Welcome to Friday’s For The Love of Food, Summer Tomato’s weekly link roundup.

This week the food industry buys the support of scientists, Chipotle might be evil, and the myth of the before-and-after photo.

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 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.

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Photo by Yarden Sachs

Len Markidan writes about productivity and work/life balance at Home Office Hero. He’s also the Director of Marketing at Groove. To get his latest posts, sign up for his newsletter or follow him on Twitter.

How To Have Healthier Lunch Meetings (Willpower Not Required)

by Len Markidan

A few years ago, I decided to start making healthier food choices.

I threw out the cookies and processed junk in my house and went on a farmers market shopping spree, where I finally learned to properly pronounce “jicama.”

I felt GREAT. I was a new man.

For the first eighteen hours or so, anyway.

Because eighteen hours later, you see, I had to meet a client for lunch.

And while I walked in confident about my commitment and eager to pick the healthiest salad on the menu, here’s what actually happened:

Len: [Open the menu and catch myself lingering on the cheeseburger description. Quickly flip to the salads.] Mmm, the spinach and chicken salad looks good. The avocado jicama one, too. [Look up to make sure everyone caught me pronouncing jicama like a boss.]

Client: I’ll have the bacon cheeseburger.

Len: [Slam menu closed, hate myself.] Make that two, please!

Willpower has never been my strong suit.

To deal with that, I’ve had to build systems to make myself less dependent on willpower, in all areas of life.
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Photo by bark

I’ve always considered myself an active person. I joined my first gym at age twelve (my mom lied and told them I was fourteen to get around the age limit––a terrible idea, but that’s another story), and spent my high school years as a ballerina dancing nearly 20 hours per week. In college I stopped dancing but focused more on the gym, then dabbled in tennis, then long-distance running in graduate school.

As an adult I settled into a comfortable routine of working at my desk or lab bench, then spending at least an hour at the gym 5-6 days per week. Most of us would not consider this a sedentary lifestyle, and indeed it is far more active than most Americans. Unfortunately, spending long stretches of time sitting throughout the day is considered sedentary and has been shown to increase metabolic risk and mortality, even in normal weight and otherwise active people. And that meant me. Scary, right?

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For The Love of Food

Welcome to Friday’s For The Love of Food, Summer Tomato’s weekly link roundup.

Why you shouldn’t tweet and eat, fake chicken is not ethical and orange juice isn’t good for you.

Want to see all my favorite links? Be sure to follow me on on Digg. 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.

Links of the week

• Shout it From the Rooftops: Juice is Not Natural <<I’m going to continue posting articles about Tropicana until people stop asking me about it, which will probably be never. (Obesity Panacea)
• The Dangers of Tweeting While Eating <<Some data on all that mindful eating stuff I keep talking about. (Men’s Health)
• A Chicken Without Guilt <<BS of the week. I’m no supporter of industrial or inhumane animal farms, but to propose that a product made from Monsanto’s GMO soy beans is ethical is just ignorant. I’m super disappointed in Mark Bittman for this. (New York Times)
• Walking May Lessen the Influence of Genes On Obesity by Half <<Your health is a reflection of both nature and nurture. Never throw in the towel just because you think you have “bad genes.” (ScienceDaily)
• Reinventing the Office: How to Lose Fat and Increase Productivity at Work <<Some really innovative ideas here about how to create a healthier office space. Love it. (Tim Ferriss)
• Reasons That Vitamin D May Matter <<Nothing revolutionary here, but if you need a primer on why myself and many others recommend vitamin D supplements for many people this is a decent explanation. (New York Times)
• Food Is Important <<This is a cool story, well worth reading. (Michael Ruhlman)
• What the Grave of a Listeria Cantaloupe Victim Looks Like <<Proof that industrial produce can be (and often is) just as dangerous as industrial meats. (Bill Marler)
• BREAKFAST TACOS WITH AVOCADO RADISH SALSA <<I met Kimberley last weekend at the Edible Institute conference in Santa Barbara, and I’m already in love with her blog. (The Year In Food)

What inspired you this week?

Since summer ended I have been searching for the perfect winter lunch to bring to work. I want something healthy, delicious and, given the season, warm.

Roasted vegetables are a pretty good choice, but I learned the hard way that they don’t quite have the long-term appeal of summer salads (i.e., I got sick of them really fast).

My latest experiment is soup.

Soup appeals to me for many reasons:

1. It stores and transports easily and can be heated up in a minute or two in the microwave. This makes it a perfect food for the office.
2. Almost any recipe can be turned into a soup, so you can enjoy cuisines from all cultures–you could eat soup every day for the rest of your life and never eat the same one twice.
3. Soups are easy to modify, and hard to mess up.
4. As many of you know, I have a lot of experience making soup.

I accepted the challenge.

The first place I turned was my faithful Splendid Soups, by James Peterson. I can’t imagine there is a better soup recipe book on the planet. Not only have I used it to make dozens of spectacular soups, but it has made me a better overall cook as well. This book is truly a treasure.*

I had several goals for my first soup:

First, I wanted it to be healthy and light, meaning it should have something green (e.g. chard) in it and be broth based rather than cream based.

Second, I wanted to use the whole chicken I bought at the farmers market. I don’t normally eat meat for lunch, but I had been wanting to experiment with whole chicken and this seemed like the perfect opportunity.

I ended up modifying one of the vegetable recipes in the book to include chicken. Peterson gives detailed instructions on how to use chicken in any soup, so I simply followed his technique.

My soup turned out divine, but preparing it took longer than I had hoped.

Word of advice: Ask the butcher to quarter the chicken for you (unless you are planning on roasting it). This was only the second time I had quartered a chicken, and though it wasn’t very difficult it definitely cost me 20-30 minutes because of my inexperience. Oops.

Chicken Chard Soup

Ingredients:

• 1 medium chicken, quartered
• 1 large bunch of Swiss chard, trimmed
• 3 garlic cloves, minced
• 2 medium sweet onions, diced
• 2 jalepeno peppers, seeded and chopped
• 1 28-0z can of diced tomatoes, drained
• 4 cups (1 box) chicken broth
• 2 cups water
• 1 tsp fresh thyme, finely chopped
• 0.5 cup parsley, finely chopped
• Juice of 1 Meyer lemon
• 2-3 tbsp olive oil

Heat some olive oil in a pan just large enough for the chicken to cover the bottom. Add the chicken skin-side down and cook on medium heat for about 8 minutes. Turn with tongs and cook for another 5 minutes, remove from heat and set aside. If at any point the chicken begins to burn, lower the heat.

Shred the chard by cutting out the stems (I like to leave a few in, but I cut them in half), stacking and rolling the leaves, then cutting them in thin, 0.25 inch strips. This is the same chiffonade technique we use on basil, sage and mint leaves.

In a 4-quart pot, cook onions, garlic and chilies in olive oil on medium heat for about 10 minutes. Allow the onions to become translucent, but not brown. Add thyme and cook 2 more minutes.

Add broth, water, tomatoes and chicken and bring to a simmer. Simmer gently for 15 minutes or until the chicken feels firm to the touch. Remove chicken and set it aside to cool. Add chard to the soup and simmer 10 more minutes.

Remove chicken skins and cut chicken into bite-sized chunks. Return chicken meat to the soup, add parsley and simmer 2 more minutes. Add lemon juice, salt and pepper to taste and serve with crusty bread.

This soup will keep up to 5 days in a cold refrigerator.