Archive for the ‘Healthy eating’ Category

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Watch this movie! Food, Inc.

Saturday, January 2nd, 2010

Last night, we followed a friend's suggestion (she knew I'd been reading on diet and lifestyle topics) and watch Robert Kenner's gripping movie, "Food, Inc." A lot of the movie's background came from two books I've read recently: Michael Pollan's, The Omnivore's Dilemma, (I've blogged on one of his other books before), and Eric Schlosser's Fast Food Nation. It's an amazing movie and my wife, after watching it, said she wants us to change our shopping habits even more than we have already.

Pollan narrates much of the movie with vignette's from others. He leads us through the changes in our diets made in the last fifty years, largely guided by the food industry, how a few multinational corporations make up an amazingly large proportion of it  and the issues with the "foods" we now eat as a result. One of the spotlighted exceptions is a wonderful farm in Virginia, Polyface Farms, run by Joel Salatin. I remembered reading about this farm in Pollan's book; he'd tried to order from them and was told they wouldn't ship ourside their immediate region. I Googled this farm and found links to organic-food buying clubs in Virginia and elsewhere

The majority of the film talks about and shows us the mega-farm and huge CAFO-dominated American food industry (CAFO means concentrated animal feeding operation) and Pollan describes in considerable detail some of the potential dire consequences of our eating food produced by them. A typical hamburger, Pollan says, for example, has pieces from thousands of cows, some of which could have been ill. He also tells of the interweaving of senior personnel between these huge food producers and the agencies (USDA and FDA especially) that are charged with regulating them. A moving section of the movie shows a woman who recounts how her young son died after eating a burger tainted with E Coli O157H7 http://www.cdc.gov/nczved/dfbmd/disease_listing/stec_gi.html#3 She was filmed visiting a Congresswoman to try to influence food-safety regulation.

I'd rate this as a "Don't Miss" movie; it may change your life.

Posted in Healthly lifestyle, Healthy eating, Healthy food shopping | 5 Comments »

Worth reading: The New York Times Magazine 10-11-09

Tuesday, December 29th, 2009

A DC-area friend joined us recently for snowshoeing in Rocky Mountain National Park. We had a cabin at the nearby YMCA camp and everyone brought reading material for the evenings. Lee brought me the October 11th edition of The New York Times Magazine, titled "The Food Issue: Putting America's Diet on a Diet."

Mark Bittman, A NYT regular columnist wrote on "Faster Slow Food," advocating the concept of focused, individualized, online grocery announcements, allowing consumers to buy the kind of food they wanted, when and where they were ready to shop.  Michael Pollan, author of The Omnivore's Dilemma and In Defense of Food will be publishing Food Rules; An Eater's Manual soon and contributed some of 2,500 answers NYT readers gave him in response to a request for their guidelines for eating.

Douglas McGray contributed an article, "A Fresh-Food Bank," about California's leading the charge to hand out fresh foods, rather than canned foods, to food-bank recipients. Their efforts have been ongoing since a 2005 agreement was established between CA food banks and growers + packers statewide.

There are a variety of viewpoints and issues discussed in this fascinating collection of short, pithy articles about diet, dietary quirks and preferences and nutrition problems, mostly but not exclusively, in the United States. I found this edition to be well worth reading, not the least for a provocative article on long-term calorie-restriction research and its beneficial effects on health and, potentially, on longevity.

Posted in Dieting, Healthly lifestyle, Healthy eating, Healthy food shopping, Life Expectancy | 4 Comments »

The shorter answer to a reader's comment on eating organic

Saturday, December 26th, 2009

I'm heading out for a family event 80 miles away, but wanted to post a brief answer to reader Jayraj's question on eating all or partly organic. First, I'd like to clarify his comment that the age of puberty has dropped from 17 to 12. I'll drop in a link I found on the National Library of Medicine website, (NLM.org). I think of puberty as a process with a number of stages; NLM says the onset of the initial stages in girls (early breast development and pubic hair) varies from age 8 to 13 and typically precedes onset of menstruation by 2 to2.5 years. (http://kidshealth.org/parent/growth/growing/understanding_puberty.html# There has been some change in the timing of puberty, but I'll need to spend some more time researching if there's a consensus on the linkage to hormones and antibiotics in food and milk.

In the meantime, both from my reading and my own personal views, I think buying organic is a good idea, if you can afford it, if the food products are locally produced and if they are available during the season you're stocking your larder for.  I could go to a large food store in town, part of a huge chain, that has many additional organic products, essentially year-round, but lots of them come from hundreds or even thousands of miles away. There's a cost, often a hidden cost, to buying these. Some of the transportation costs are likely subsidized and therefore invisible to us. There's also the cost to our planet in emissions that I think clearly contribute to global warming (I do believe in it; I've seen pictures of the glaciers receding and the Arctic ice sheet going away). So it's a balancing act, depending on where you live, what your finances are and what season of the year it is. I don't eat as much organic fruits and vegetables as our Boulder-based friend does; we do buy organic milk and eggs through a local dairy and, as I've said before, have purchased lamb, beef and bison that are organic. In answer to Jayraj, I'd say go as far along the organic pathway as you can logically do.

Posted in Healthly lifestyle, Healthy eating, medically-oriented background info | 1 Comment »

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