Dr. Jonny Bowden, one of my favorite authors on the subject of nutrition, provides another datapoint for something I’ve telling anyone who will listen:

A landmark research study by Dr. Michael Shechter of Tel Aviv University’s Sackler School of Medicine and the Heart Institute of Sheba Medical Center, with collaboration of the Endocrinology Institute, shows exactly how high carbohydrate foods increase the risk for heart problems.

Researchers looked at four groups of volunteers who were given different breakfasts:

• cornflake mush mixed with milk- not unlike the typical American breakfast
• a pure sugar mixture
• bran flakes
• a placebo (water).

Over four weeks, Dr. Shechter applied a test that allows researchers to visualize how the arteries are functioning. It’s called “brachial reactive testing” and it uses a cuff on the arm, like those used to measure blood pressure, which can visualize arterial function in real time.

The results were dramatic. Before any of the patients ate, arterial function was essentially the same. After eating, except for the placebo group (who drank water), all had reduced functioning. Enormous peaks indicating arterial stress were found in the high glycemic index groups: the cornflakes and sugar group.

Nearly everything we eat originates from corn, but Corn Flakes is so heavily processed and denatured that – like the study shows – it’s literally like eating a bowl of sugar.  Don’t let the texture and ingredients fool you: from your metabolism’s perspective, you’re eating refined sugar.  And your resulting biochemistry proves it.

I’ve been recruiting for my (as Ian put it) food+happiness blog, Eat. Grow. Live., and I’m wonderfully excited to have a whole slew of new contributors.  Ian will be writing about whisky, Darcy’s first post might be about lipstick or tabouli (not entirely sure -she was pretty drunk when she told me), Tala will be writing about sustainability in Alaska, and Micha will be continuing posts about food (and if I can convince her, wine).  I’m very pleased that people seem to be excited about something like this, and that we can all join our knowledge and interests together.  I mean, let’s be honest -I’ve got some pretty cool friends.

If anyone has any ideas for posts, wants to see us research and post about something or wants to be a contributor, let me know! I am also a comment whore.

"At eat. grow. live. we’re interesting in eating (and drinking) with pleasure, growing our communities, our relationships, and our experiences, and living well.  We believe that living well necessitates taking care of our friends, loved ones, communities, and planet, and we do our best to live responsibly and sustainably, with gusto and enthusiasm.  Try it.  You’ll like it."

So maybe you heard I run a local foods co-op. Let me ’splain.

No, no -there is too much.  Let me sum up. This excerpt from a recent Virginia Informer article does it pretty well:

“According to legend, Williamsburg’s co-op initiative began in 2005, when William and Mary student Abigail Adams (‘05) founded a food co-op based on natural and organic dry goods -pastas, chips, juices, and canned food. The co-op faded upon her graduation, but the idea behind it remained, and activists reunited in the Spring of 2007 during adjunct professor Charlie Maloney’s Sustainability and Agriculture course as part of a final project that was meant to be “something real.” When Lea Brumfield (‘08), Josh Wayland (‘08), and Jimmy McDonough (‘07) got together, they took this suggestion literally, and the RealFood Williamsburg Food Cooperative was born.
With a focus on local, organic, and small-farm food, RealFood’s three-fold goal is to reconnect members with what they eat through buying local and naturally-grown food, to provide sustainable agriculture education, and to provide opportunities for participation in the production and preparation of food. From the time of its inception to the meeting on March 28, RealFood has continued to blossom. Its Spring 2009 listserv reaches 350 members, and is currently growing by about 2-3 members per week…”

Molly, one of our managers, wrote the article, I helped edit it, and now the WHOLE CAMPUS KNOWS. It was published in print as well as online. Read the rest of the article here.

Regular RealFood updates to follow. We’re doing a lot of cool stuff!

(Photo : Heather)

Cet article est maintenant disponible sur le nouveau site de La Grande Bouffe Ethique en cliquant ici.

I can’t argue with a single thing Jack LaLanne says in this video. The coming trend is to eat natural foods, exercise vigorously, and live simply. I think we’ve lost our way, and no matter how affluent you may be, there is a movement afoot to get back to solid ground — for our health, quality of life, and happiness.

[via BB]

Michael Pollan, author of The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals and In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto, offers a compelling interview with AlterNet’s Amy Goodman on what we should be eating:

Goodman: Shouldn’t people be concerned, for example, about cholesterol?

Pollan: No. Cholesterol in the diet is actually only very mildly related to cholesterol in the blood. It was a — that was a scientific error, basically. We were sold a bill of goods that we should really worry about the cholesterol in our food, basically because cholesterol is one of the few things we could measure that was linked to heart disease, so there was this kind of obsessive focus on cholesterol. But, you know, the egg has been rehabilitated. You know, the egg is very high in cholesterol, and now we’re told it’s actually a perfectly good, healthy food. So there’s only a very tangential relationship between the cholesterol you eat and the cholesterol levels in your blood.

It’s a long read, but a mini-education in 10 minutes. We’d all be better served heeding Pollan’s advice.

Link

[via Lifehacker]

I thought I found Nirvana with Smucker’s Natural Peanut Butter with Honey, but apparently there’s one more to try:

Parkers Family Farms Peanut Butter is the best peanut butter in the world.

It’s all natural. But wait. Don’t squirm. I am not going for health here. I am not talking to the parental, or nurturing or healthful, caring, responsible person inside you. I am talking to the dirty, nasty, caution to the wind you. The one who came home a little too buzzed, got rid of the baby-sitter, put the wife to bed and sat down in front of the TiVo with a joint, a boda bag of Don Julio and six hours until daylight. Parkers Farms Peanut Butter is all natural, yes. But it’s also in your refrigerated section so it requires no stirring (an accomplishment that is right up there with the invention of the phone, the printing press, the original Mosaic web browser and at most one notch below fire and the wheel). Is this sinking in? The best taste. All natural. And no stirring, bitch.

Sigh.

It really never is the destination; it’s the journey.

Link

[Via DF]

Serious Eats’ Ed Levine posts his thoughts on food/culinary trends that are welcome to stay and those that could go off a cliff.

I’m especially in favor of restaurants dressing down and continued efforts to promote local food sourcing and sustainable agriculture, but almost everything Levine likes is right up my alley (especially the idea of serious pizza joints opening up across the nation).

You want to make sure your body gets all the nutrients it needs to function well, then quit loading up on vitamins and start loading up on real foods.  This is the new message. For me it makes commonsense.  The nutrients they try to package in tablets comes from natural products. Scientists extract certain parts of it, package them and say they are better for us, but do they know, have they isolated all the subtle nutrients in an orange.  Yes orange has a lot of vitamin C and my grandmother could have told you that orange is good for you when you have a cold, but what other trace elements do an orange has?  The effectiveness of real food can never be replaced by an artificial concoction.  The real food offers a holistic combination of all the trace elements that makes it potent and better for us.

Recent research shows that “after several vitamin studies have produced disappointing results, there’s a growing belief that food is more than just a sum of its nutrient parts. In a recent commentary for the journal Nutrition Reviews, University of Minnesota professor of epidemiology David R. Jacobs argues that nutrition researchers should focus on whole foods rather than only on single nutrients. “We argue for a need to return to food as the source of nutrition knowledge,’’ writes Dr. Jacobs with co-author Linda C. Tapsell, a nutrition researcher at the University of Wollongong in Australia.

There you go!

And this, kids, is why 80%+ of the food I buy is organic.

Effective Jan. 1, dairies selling milk in Pennsylvania, the nation’s fifth-largest dairy state, will be banned from advertising on milk containers that their product comes from cows that have never been treated with rBST, or recombinant bovine somatotropin.

Translated: Monsanto uses rBST, and they’ve lobbied the PA state government to prohibit dairies that don’t use the hormone from advertising the fact on their packaging.

Without getting too deep into the epic amount of bullshit this represents and the continued deception foisted upon consumers as it relates to the industrialized, processed “food” most of us eat every day, the bigger point is Monsanto’s arrogance.

Instead of adapting and changing their business practices to be congruent with consumer demands, they instead choose to use  their agribusiness political power to lobby governments to change the market to their business practices.  This is the exact inverse of a capitalistic free market system where goods live and die on their own merits, but it’s time we stopped pretending that this doesn’t happen everywhere around us.

It does, and Monsanto is one of the biggest bullies around.

(If you’ve seen the movie Michael Clayton, it’s not difficult to deduce that uNorth is a symbol for today’s agribusiness reality, namely Monsanto.)

This ruling is likely to spread, with Ohio and New Jersey falling in line with Monsanto next.  From there, where it goes next is anyone’s guess.  But know one thing: this will spread.  Monsanto’s political muscle and lobbying power is well known.

I’m so passionate about this topic that I can’t reiterate this strongly enough, and I’m naturally biased towards hyperbole: if you knew what you were eating every day under the guise of health and nutrition, you’d be appalled.  The food we eat, coupled with the prevailing “wisdom”  of the health system as it relates to diet, exercise and wellness, is the primary reason the United States is so sick as a population.

Time has a fascinating photo essay depicting what various cultures around the world eat in a given week. As someone who strongly believes that — at least here in America — the abuse of food, lack of nutrition education and willingness of food conglomerates to trick you out of your money and make food decisions as hard as possible for you, this sort of thing interests me.

I try to hold to a fairly basic precept about food as I approach 40: eat real food, pay more for it, eat less of it. The least celebrated foods are often the ones that are the best for you; if you did your shopping around the perimeter of a grocery store, you’d do reasonably well assuming you have a modicum of knowledge of what to get and avoid. The middle aisles? Not so much. Good luck; you’ll need it.

The American diet is a celebration of an entrenched commercial sugar culture: almost every American is consuming sugar at a simply ridiculous rate. Processed foods are engineered to taste good, invoke cravings, and suppress ‘fullness’ instincts so that consumers eat more. It’s a ratrace whose main attraction is ongoing experimentation by food conglomerates about to get you to eat as much of their product as you can and wanting to do it again and again.

In America, I’d argue that we routinely trade our health for convenience and engineered flavor. You don’t need to look much past our skyrocketing cancer, obesity and heart disease rates for validation.

Looking at these pictures, I can’t help but be envious of the cultures to stick to a native diet: something simple, regional, pure. Food in these diets is often whole, obtained at local outlets and minimally processed (if at all). I really think Dr. Weston A. Price was on to something.

(This is not to say that I don’t like a fine steak and bottle of Hope Estate The Ripper every now and again, but I’m fairly dogmatic about eating pure foods that are what they’re supposed to be — not what some food chemist engineered them to be.)

Japan


Italy

Chad

United States

You can’t help but notice the garish colors on the American table — it’s the only way American foodstuffs can survive overabundant shelves and effectively vie for your attention. The paradox of choice is every food manufacturer’s worst enemy in the United States.

Be sure to check out the entire photoessay. Powerful stuff.

I had no idea I could make homemade butter by simply shaking the hell out of a jar containing regular whipping cream.  I am going to try this. I will, however, add salt, because I can’t get with unsalted butter.

Without even trying this, I can all but promise you that this will be probably the best-tasting butter you’ve ever had.  And if you don’t make a habit of eating real butter (as opposed to all the processed shit that’s out there), you should.  Protip: salted butter also stays fresh (doesn’t go rancid) when left at room temperature.

Full instructions on how to do this here.

I am about to reveal to you an ANCIENT butter making secret, to make butter it requires, shaking, shaking, shaking, MORE shaking, lots of shaking, but the end result is FANTASTIC.

[thx Consumerist]

In the past, I asked my readers if I should do a mini-series on food/nutrition, and I had a lot of positive responses.  So today I will begin that mini-series, which will carry a “RealFood” tag in the headline as well as a new WordPress category.

The premise of the ReadFood series is simple: you probably think you eat well.  You’re wrong.  I thought the same thing at one time, and only after seeing a nutritionist and doing dozens of hours of research did I realize I was falling for a lot of the marketing that the industrialized food business was impressing upon me.

You’re probably doing the same.

There’s a better way, and it can be sustainable.  It might require you to spend a bit more money on food, but for something you put into your body three to six times per day, I don’t see how it’s not worth it.  To be sure, all of us willingly absorb increased spending in other areas that are not so vital to our health and overall well-being.  If you’re truly interested in giving your body real food instead of industrialized, processed nutrients, this decision should be a slam dunk for you.

I will be mixing the RealFood posts in with my regular content, so please don’t think that I will be ignoring my usual blend of Apple/tech and oddity news.

Thanks, and as usual, I look forward to your comments.