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Archive for the ‘Food industry’ Category

Quote of the day

Posted in Food industry, QOTD on June 10, 2013 | 1 Comment »

How to make a fast-food executive very happy:

The holy grail of junk-food science is vanishing caloric density, where the food melts in your mouth so quickly that the brain is fooled into thinking it’s hardly consuming any calories at all, so it just keeps snacking. In the process, packaged-food scientists want to avoid triggering sensory-specific satiety, the brain mechanism that tells you to stop eating when it has become overwhelmed by big, bold flavors. Instead, the real goals are either passive overeating, which is the excessive eating of foods that are high in fat because the human body is slow to recognize the caloric content of rich foods, or auto-eating: that is, eating without thinking or without even being hungry. … Either way, if you end up with a food baby, a distended stomach caused by excessive overeating, you’ve made a fast-food executive somewhere very happy.

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Today’s annoying study: diet soda vs meth or crack

Posted in Health & wellness, Research, Food industry on May 29, 2013 | 4 Comments »

Annoyed woman Yee gads. I mostly ignored this study about diet soda being equivalent to meth or crack as far as your teeth are concerned when it showed up in my Twitter feed. I’ve mentioned here before I have periodically had a diet soda “problem” and at the time thought, well, good thing I’ve been drinking my diet soda through a straw … figured that made a big difference.

Well. This whole study is based on a dentist’s three person case study. As in three. One more than two. Seriously?!

The diet soda drinker in the study drank “two liters of diet soda daily for three to five years.” Well she’s got a long way to go to catch up to my 3+ decades! Not sure all the confounds (sorry Yoni, I’m writing this post without reading the full study), but after looking at the pics (click thru to HuffPo to see them), I call total BS. I’m sure the dentist has “observed hundreds of similar soda-caused erosion cases” over his career. That’s why he used just one in his case study.

Sigh. I am certainly not defending diet soda or the beverage industry, but puh-leeze. There are plenty of reasons for cutting back or eliminating diet soda, but “meth mouth” isn’t one of ‘em.

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THNKR on Pollan’s Cooked

Posted in Cooking, Food industry, Real food on April 24, 2013 | 14 Comments »

I wasn’t in a rush to pick up Michael Pollan’s Cooked, but after watching the review below from the folks at THNKR, I decided to move it up in my reading queue!

I like what Dan Barber of Blue Hill Farm has to say at the very end:

The most dangerous thing about the industrial food system is that the food doesn’t taste good. To have flavor you have to have all the minerals and micro-vitamins [sic] that come out of healthy soils. So flavor and nutrition are sort of the same subject.

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Paleo is not a panacea 4

Posted in Food addiction, Food industry, Obesity, Public health on March 29, 2013 | 5 Comments »

In an MDA post yesterday, Mark Sisson seems to say that if you’re fat or unhealthy, you’re lacking in integrity (emphasis his):

Sure, the massive health problems in our country are in part fueled by false medical messaging that leads well-intentioned people down the wrong roads in search of health. Much of it, however, can simply be attributed to an unwillingness to buck up, take responsibility choice by choice, and live with health integrity. By health integrity, I mean an honesty to one’s self, a commitment that begins and ends with one’s self, an inner compass that has nothing to do with the outside world.

I’m not sure, but I wonder if part of the genesis of this post is the regular posts by paleo users on various forums. You know, the ones where folks are doing great to a point … until they find themselves inexplicably (?) needing to cheat or even binge.

Anyways, as I said in paleo is not a panacea 2, if you’re overweight from overeating, you’re still on the hook … it’s your hand putting the food into your mouth.

But I don’t believe that the solution is to “buck up … and live with health integrity.” I like Mark and even his products (his chocolate protein powder plus Fage yogurt == yum!), but I refuse to attribute the rise in obesity and so-called lifestyle diseases (like diabetes) as a global failure of personal responsibility.

(more…)

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Quote of the day

Posted in Food addiction, Food industry, QOTD on March 23, 2013 | Leave a Comment »

And here’s a visual QOTD from one of my faves on Twitter!

You know who is really leaning in? Little Debbie. We have enough crap to eat. Dial it back a little.

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Quote of the day

Posted in Food industry, QOTD on February 21, 2013 | 2 Comments »

Michael Prager makes an important point about HFCS in responding to a recent “maize-pimping website Corn Commentary” blog post (emphasis mine):

The globesity pandemic did take off in the ‘70s, about the same time that HFCS was synthesized in an industrially scaleable way. This is why many people thought that the substance was more harmful than other processed sugars.

But the danger laid not in its chemistry but in its economy. Manufacturers had previously known that sweetness sells but had been economically prevented from sprinkling it over … everything. HFCS was cheaper to make, making that possible, which is why today it’s in soda, bread, hot dogs and other protein, salad dressing, condiments, and many other products in which it’s neither needed nor expected.

One more reason to cut back on processed foods when/where possible!

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Yoni Freedhoff on the food industry

Posted in Food industry on December 10, 2012 | 3 Comments »

Watch the talk that the PR firm Fleishman-Hillard decided the food industry didn’t need to hear at an Ontario Medical Association breakfast last week:

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The lost art of eating well?

Posted in Food industry on July 1, 2012 | 5 Comments »

There’s a great post today over at Screaming Fat Girl. The author is adjusting to life back in the US after “two decades of living in an Asian culture.”

My thought after reading the post was that it reminded me of the apocryphal story of the frog and the boiling water. Unlike those of us who’ve spent the last twenty years here seemingly not noticing the changes in our food supply, SFG has been dropped into the boiling water:

My husband and I have not had the time or mobility to visit a lot of the typical shopping haunts of people who live on lower incomes, but the biggest shock for us came when we made a trip to Target. … I was stunned by how cheaply one could eat food that wasn’t really food and how much pricier it was to buy real food. It’s not that you can’t buy “real” food cheaply, but that it’s far less attractive, far more troublesome, and requires pretty sophisticated knowledge of cooking.

Before you say, well, she was shopping at Target, she points out that this is not a phenomenon reserved for price-conscious shoppers. It’s really very much reflected in how our busy lives are making it far more likely we’ll choose processed ‘heat and eat’ foods over real, whole foods (emphasis mine):

I’m shocked at how easy it is to eat poorly and how even people who are educated are eating badly and convincing themselves otherwise. Lara bars, sugar-packed Greek yogurt (and most of it is!), frozen and canned processed vegetarian meals, and protein powder-based drinks and smoothies don’t make your diet a good one. It’s still not “real” food for the most part.

I’m certainly not one to pine about the “lost art of cooking”, but it has really come home to me that people have lost the art of eating well. …

The sickness of America’s food culture is so deep and wide that I have to wonder if there will ever be a cure.

A great read (go read the whole thing!) to complement Evelyn’s post today.

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BBC’s The Men Who Made Us Fat, Ep 2

Posted in Food industry, Policy on June 23, 2012 | 7 Comments »

Episode 2 of The Men Who Made Us Fat aired this past Thursday. You can watch part 1 (above) as well as parts 2, 3, and 4. You can also read Zoe Harcombe’s summary.

For a counterpoint, you can read Evelyn’s “rant” over at CarbSanity. Me, I don’t get (or agree with) Evelyn on this one. Her wheelhouse is science, and I think when she gets into history and policy, she’s just another person with an opinion that she’s making forcefully (I see similarities to Woo’s take on CIH between the two).

I do NOT think that nanny statism is the way to go. Frankly, I don’t think our government has the ability to create policy that wouldn’t be squashed like a bug by our food lobby.

But this decade is not like the 70s or 80s with more choices. Consider The Keg’s 2300-calorie carrot cake. I like what they had to say over at He Ain’t Heavy:

ordering carrot cake and ice cream after a steak may never have been a particularly healthy decision, but now it’s a mistake that costs you more than a day’s worth of extra calories. This up-ratcheting of caloric density is the result of specific, deliberate action by food companies. Rather than using food science to make food more flavorful with fewer calories, they’ve used it to manufacture food that is so calorific it practically has a gravitational pull.

I suspect that it’s really going to be a grass roots effort that will help to bring about change. Some food literacy work for sure, but more about putting market pressure on the food industry.

As they say over at He Ain’t Heavy, why aren’t we angrier?

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BBC’s The Men Who Made Us Fat

Posted in Food industry, Obesity, Policy on June 19, 2012 | Leave a Comment »

I watched the first part of this BBC production yesterday and recommend it (part 1 of the first episode above, also see parts 2, 3, and 4).

As an overall piece, I think it does a pretty good job at pointing out how our food environment has changed in the last 30 or 40 years. Yes, Lustig and Taubes are featured, but the series is not just about pointing the finger at one macronutrient.

Here are the men identified in the series:

  • Earl Butz — Secretary of Agriculture under Richard Nixon, he was responsible for changes in policy in the early 1970s that led to farmers growing more and more corn. The surplus of corn led to the increasing use of HFCS in foods, largely because it was much cheaper.
  • Ancel Keys — American scientist who was convinced that saturated fat was responsible for cardiovascular disease. Unfortunately for us, he was an arrogant SOB who had a lot of influence, which included leading the scientific community in scorning John Yudkin, a British scientist whose book, Pure, White and Deadly was published in 1972 pointing out sugar’s role in disease. [Note: see Denise Minger's The Truth About Ancel Keys: We’ve All Got It Wrong for her take on the Seven Countries study.]
  • George McGovern — McGovern was chairman of the US Select Committee on Nutrition and Human Needs, a group that was responsible for, among other things, the prominence of grains in the USDA guidelines and food pyramid. With Keys’ work, this helped pave the way to the phenomenon of low- and no-fat fuods (e.g., SnackWells). Turns out reducing the fat is not always a good thing.

Don’t have time to watch? Read Jacques Peretti’s summary of his documentary.

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