health + diet

Life Has Become One Continuous Snack

Janice | May 14, 2013 - 10:26 am

It’s official: we’re a nation of noshers.
We kick off the day with breakfast—no skipping that most important meal of the day—but then we pretty much leave our mouths open and graze straight through to dinner. So says the most recent analysis of government data from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Surveys (NHANES).

We graze.
In the late 1970′s, 40% of Americans said that they didn’t typically eat between-meal snacks. With 3 meals a day for most, the average number of eating occasions was 3.9 per day. Today we’re skipping more meals but snacking so frequently that we have pushed daily eating occasions up to 10. Just 4% of Americans say they don’t regularly snack, with most reporting 3 or more snacks a day.

What lunch break?
Americans are now more likely to skip lunch than breakfast. 85% reported eating breakfast the previous day, while only 80% reported eating lunch.

We like pizza. A lot.
In the late 1970′s, just 6% of kids and teens and 3% of adults reported eating pizza the previous day. Today those numbers have more than tripled for all of us, with 10% of adults and 20% of 2-19 year olds reporting a pizza snack or meal in the last 24 hours.

We eat pitifully little fruit.
That’s been consistent. Since the late 1970′s, fruit consumption has held steady at 0.9 portions per day, and that includes fruit juices.

More of us are eating our vegetables.
Just not so many of them. While 25% of Americans today report eating fruits or vegetables in the previous 24 hours, the average is just a combined 1.9 servings in a day. In the 1970′s only 12% ate their fruits and veggies, but they typically consumed 2.6 portions.

Got milk? Not much.In the 1970′s, 64% of the population (children and adults) had drunk a glass of milk in the previous day. Today the majority of Americans, 54%, don’t regularly drink milk.

You can find the full report at the National Health and Nutrition Examination Surveys. NHANES is part of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and has produced vital and health statistics for the nation for 50 years.

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Not Pushing Caffeine to Kids? Yeah, Sure.

Janice | May 6, 2013 - 3:06 pm

Which of these is being marketed to children?

clockwise from top: Energy Gummi Bears, Nixie Tubes candy powder, Brain Bits watermelon candy, Cracker Jack’d

According to their manufacturers, none of them.

The Food and Drug Administration announced last week that it’s launching an investigation into the safety of caffeine in food products, particularly its effects on children. Surprisingly, the agency doesn’t have any rules for caffeine in food. It classifies caffeine as a GRAS, an acronym for food additives that are Generally Recognized As Safe. Any additive with the GRAS designation—and there are more than 4,500 of them—is exempt from safety testing when a manufacturer adds it to a new product.
Caffeine’s GRAS designation dates back to 1958.

The proliferation of caffeinated foods, not beverages, is something new.
Caffeine has been popping up in the most unlikely of places. You can find it added to breakfast foods like instant oatmeal, frozen waffles, and pancake syrup. It’s being added to snack foods like potato chips, marshmallows, sunflower seeds, beef jerky, Jelly Belly ‘extreme sport’ jelly beans, and most recently a new line of caffeinated Wrigley’s chewing gum.

Caffeine is now consumed at levels that the FDA could have never anticipated when it first classified the additive as a GRAS.
In 1958, there were no energy drinks, sports beverages, or caffeinated ‘smart’ waters. Per capita soda consumption was one-third of today’s level. And now we have caffeine’s appearance in a wide range of new products, including foods that are especially appealing to children and teens.

We keep things loose when it comes to kids and caffeine.
The United States doesn’t have dietary guidelines for caffeine consumption for adults or children. Since we don’t know how much is too much, there’s little effort made to limit it. In theory, caffeine-added products aren’t supposed to be marketed to children, but it’s up to the manufacturers, advertisers, and trade associations to regulate it. Most manufacturers insist that they don’t target kids. Apparently they’re using kid-friendly cartoon mascots and logos to push caffeinated gummy bears and pixy stix to adults.

Where have we heard that one before?

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Kids Drinking Coffee. Why Not?

Janice | April 23, 2013 - 2:38 pm

[image via the New Yorker]

Of course kids are drinking coffee.
What else is left?
Soda is out—high fructose corn syrup, you know. Sports drinks are, as the British press put it, just lolly water. Ditto for juice boxes. Certainly not milk with all that lactose-intolerance going around.
Coffee it is.

And what exactly is so wrong with that?

Coffee doesn’t stunt anyone’s growth. That turned out to be a giant fallacy.
And it has health benefits, reducing the risk for Parkinson’s disease, liver cirrhosis, and gallstones. Not exactly pediatric ailments, but it can’t hurt. More intriguing is growing evidence to support years of anecdotal claims from parents that the caffeine in coffee actually calms down children with ADHD.

Gunning their little engines with caffeine.
Coffee does of course rev kids up, and it can leave them with jittery nerves and insomnia. And children are already getting plenty of caffeine from sources like soda, candy, hot chocolate, ice cream, and even cold medicine.

Tolerances and responses to caffeine differ widely among individuals, but it’s pretty safe to assume that the younger they are, the less coffee they probably should drink. The United States hasn’t developed dietary guidelines for kids and caffeine, but Health Canada recommends no more than 45 mg/day for 4 – 6 year olds; 62.5 mg/day at 7 – 9 years; and 85 mg/day for 10 – 12 year olds— compared with moderate adult intake of around 400 mg. (about 3 coffees’ worth).

The real problem isn’t even the coffee.
It’s the fat and calories of the vanilla syrup and the caramel drizzle, the steamed milk and whipped cream. It’s all the frozen, blended mochafrappacappalattaccinos that masquerade as coffee. There are coffee concoctions that hover in burger-and-fries territory in terms of fat and calories. For a child, that can add up to breakfast, lunch, and dinner all in a single to-go cup. And there aren’t many kids who take it black.

Best is to watch the sugar and keep a tally of caffeine from all sources.
And at four bucks a pop for a fancy latté drink, no one should be in a hurry to cultivate their kid’s coffee habit.

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Should Hot Dogs Come With Cigarette-Style Warning Labels?

Janice | March 26, 2013 - 4:21 pm

The medical reform group Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine likes to stir up the hot dog debate with its billboards. Every spring it brings its cancer awareness message to billboards outside of baseball stadiums, race tracks, and other hot dog-friendly venues. PCRM is on a crusade to bring cigarette-style warning labels to hot dogs.

A steady diet of hot dogs can send you to an early grave.
According to a recent study from the Harvard School of Public Health, a daily hot dog raises the risk of heart disease by 42 percent and diabetes by 19 percent. Research from the American Institute for Cancer Research found that the risk of colorectal cancer rises by 21 percent, and the Cancer Research Center at the University of Hawaii linked hot dog consumption to a 67 percent increase in the risk for pancreatic cancer. Hot dogs have also been linked with prostate cancer, ovarian cancer, and childhood leukemia. All told, a multi-nation meta-study of 450,000 participants headed by the University of Zurich concluded that the overall risk of mortality increases by 18 percent for each hot dog consumed per day.

The problem with hot dogs.
There’s plenty of salt and saturated fat in hot dogs, but it’s the nitrites that’ll kill you. And all hot dogs have them—regardless of what it says on the package.

The salty preservative that’s added to conventional hot dogs is sodium nitrite. It develops flavor, keeps the meat’s pink color, and inhibits bacterial growth. A hot dog isn’t going to taste like a hot dog without sodium nitrite. So what about the premium and organic hot dogs that are labelled ‘no-added-nitrates’ or ‘naturally cured’? Brands like Applegate and Niman Ranch get around it with a little additive sleight-of-hand plus some arcane labeling loopholes courtesy of the FDA. They pour on the celery juice, which happens to be loaded with naturally occurring nitrate, then they add a naturally-derived bacterial culture that converts the harmless nitrate into harmful nitrite.

Alas, nitrite is nitrite. It makes no difference if it’s added directly or formed later, synthetic or naturally-derived. Take any kind of nitrite, add any kind of meat and heat, and it’s going to form cancer-causing compounds. When the Journal of Food Protection looked at popular hot dog brands, it found that the natural hot dogs had anywhere from one-half to 10 times the amount of nitrite that conventional hot dogs contained.

About those warning labels
The PCRM wants graphic labeling that would make consumers think twice about what they’re eating. Other public health organizations like the American Institute for Cancer Research and the World Cancer Research Fund call hot dogs “unfit for human consumption” and would like to see an outright ban. Even the USDA has been trying to rid the meat industry of nitrites since the 1970′s.

Meanwhile, the American Meat Institute, the meat industry’s oldest and largest trade association, has taken a stand against additional labeling requirements with the publication of its own sodium nitrite Fact Sheet. The AMI dismisses much of the research as “old myths” and the work of vegans and animal rights activists. It refers to sodium nitrite as ”an essential public health tool,” and points to a 2005 animal study suggesting therapeutic uses for nitrites in the treatment of heart attacks, sickle cell disease, and leg vascular problems.

Most experts say that the occasional hot dog isn’t going to kill you. The choice is yours. And if there is honest and accurate labeling, you can make an informed choice.

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Chia: So Much More Than Mr. T’s Hair

Janice | March 25, 2013 - 12:15 pm

You can keep your kale, and flax, and goji berries; chia seeds are the hot new superfood.
Yes, chia, as in ch-ch-ch-Chia Pets ™, famous for stuttering infomercials that made a fad out of growing sprouts on ceramic doggies.

Chia seeds are making the leap from the healthy fringe into the mainstream.
Last year you had to look for them in health food stores. Now you’ll find them on the shelves of your local supermarket. They’re being added to frozen waffles, peanut butter, pasta, chips, and juice drinks, and companies like Dole are lacing entire product lines with chia seeds.

Why? Because chia seeds are unbelievably good for you.
Just look at this nutritional profile:

A complete protein with more fiber content than bran
Twice the omega-3 fatty acids as salmon
Five times the amount of calcium in milk
Three times the amount of antioxidants in blueberries
Three times the amount of iron in spinach
Three times the amount of fiber in oatmeal
Two times the amount of potassium in a banana

Even among superfoods chia seeds are extraordinary.
Foods like pomegranates, almonds, goji berries, green tea, blueberries, and now chai seeds are considered ‘super’ because they pack a big nutrient punch in a small package. They’re dense sources of disease-fighting nutrients like antioxidants, minerals, vitamins, amino acids, and essential fatty acids, and are often thought to confer health benefits. Chia seeds are all of that plus they’re gluten-free, easy to digest, and rarely cause allergies.

Are you already thinking this is too good to be true? Hang on, there’s more.
Chia seeds can also help you lose weight. The seeds are like little sponges that sop up nine times their weight in liquid. When you eat cereal or muffins that are spiked with chia it does a bit of that inside you, so even your morning coffee can become one with a belly-filling, slow-burning ball of dietary fiber.

And the taste?
It’s fine. Really. The seeds have a tiny bit of crunch and a very subtle nutty flavor if you look hard enough for it. You’re not going to get excited about your morning chia, but it’s a perfectly neutral addition to just about anything.

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Bloomberg’s Soda Ban Would’ve Worked

Janice | March 18, 2013 - 12:05 pm

[image via Diets in Review]

Love it or hate it, Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s public health initiative to ban the sale of large sugary drinks in New York would have worked. And a ban might be the only thing that will work.

I’m no fan of the so-called Nanny State, when the government uses its power to restrict something that should be a matter of individual choice. And I agree with the judicial ruling that the ban is “arbitrary and capricious” in the way that it singles out specific beverage categories while ignoring other equally sugar-laden products, and because it applies only to restaurants and venues that are regulated by the Board of Health and not to convenience stores and other vendors that are regulated by the state. But I still would like to see a soda ban succeed.

We can all agree that there is an obesity crisis in this country, and it affects every one of us.
Yes, all of us. You might not struggle to squeeze into your jeans or suffer from asthma, diabetes, or any of the host of medical conditions associated with obesity, but it’s a burden shared by all of us. According to Reuters obesity adds roughly $190 billion to annual national health care costs. A Duke University study calculated the cost to employers of obesity-related absenteeism as $6.4 billion a year, and it’s estimated that the added weight to passenger vehicles releases nearly 20 billion extra gallons of carbon dioxide into the earth’s atmosphere every year. The Department of Defense has even called its overweight recruits a national security issue.

We can also agree that soda is a part of the problem.
In the 1970′s, the calories in the beverages we drank added up to a mere 2-4% of the total calories we consumed. Then we entered the super-size-me-venti-big-gulp era when the 16 oz. ‘large’ soda size of yore became the present-day ‘small.’ Now we can chalk up one-fifth of all calories consumed to the beverages we drink.

We recognize the problem, we know the solution, how tough can this be to fix?
Unfortunately we have a terrible track record when it comes to behavior changes that mitigate health risks, and knowledge and warnings—especially coming from public health campaigns— are among the least effective measures to change behaviors. Three in four smokers with respiratory disease continue to smoke, and a diagnosis of heart disease or diabetes has been shown to have virtually no effect on the consumption of fruit and vegetables.

Soda bans are our seat belts.
They save lives and prevent serious injury; it’s indisputable. Still, for decades the PSA campaign promoting seat belt use was mostly ignored. There were roadside billboards and radio and television spots urging us to use seat belts. They tried every approach from catchy jingles to graphic car wreck images, but what ultimately got us to buckle up were seat belt laws. 49 states (all but live-free-or-die New Hampshire) currently mandate their use and they all back up the law with stiff fines for non-compliance.

Mayor Bloomberg has a proven history with controversial food and health-related regulations.
In 2005 he banned most trans fats from all restaurants within the city limits, successfully cutting the typical restaurant meal’s content of the killer fat by more than 80%. Then in 2008 he forced chain restaurants in the city to post calorie counts resulting in a 6% reduction in calories consumed at these outlets.

Bloomberg’s current initiative is more of a cap than an outright ban. It aims to limit the size of sugary drinks to no more than 16-ounces at movie theaters, restaurants, food carts, and sports arenas. The difference drinking a single 16-ounce drink rather than a 20-ounce one every day saves 14,600 calories a year, which amounts to four pounds of body fat.

It’s an imperfect plan. It’s riddled with inconsistencies—the 50-ounce 7-Eleven Slurpee with four Snickers-bars’ worth of sugar slips through loopholes—and it doesn’t make a dent in the regular after school soda and chips habit of children who swing by their neighborhood bodega on the way home. Detractors warn of the slippery slope of regulation wondering what this could open the door to (chips? bacon?), and the beverage industry claims scapegoating.

Of course soda isn’t solely responsible for the obesity epidemic.
Obesity results from a complex matrix of diet, environment, genetics, and a myriad of other factors. But sugared beverages are the single largest source of calories in our diet. If we’re going to tackle the obesity problem, soda is a pretty good place to start.

Soda’s impact on our bodies goes beyond tooth decay from the sugar and the elevated risk of diabetes, asthma, and heart disease associated with obesity. See all the risks in Gigabiting’s Here’s Why You Shouldn’t Drink Soda

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Cats and Pork, Latex and Pickles: Cross Triggers for Food Allergies

Janice | February 14, 2013 - 2:37 pm

Hay fever sufferers take note.
You might want to skip the swiss chard and sunflower seeds. You should also avoid munching on celery sticks in the shade of a birch tree.
Do you react to latex? Then skip the dill pickles.
Steer clear of tropical fruit if dust mites make you sneeze, and yes, pork and cat dander can be problematic.

Cross-allergies are on the rise.
The medical community calls it Oral Allergy Syndrome, and like the recent rise of food allergies, it’s becoming more common. About a third of seasonal allergy sufferers will cross-react to certain foods, and that number is closer to two-thirds if birch or alder pollen are your triggers.

Here’s how it works:
The same chemicals that cause hay fever and other airborne allergies can also be found in some foods. There’s a whole grocery list of reactive foods, but the culprit is usually a raw fruit or vegetable that contains the same protein as the airborne allergen. Eat the wrong food, and it sends the immune system into overdrive and triggers an allergic reaction. Instead of the sneezing and itchy eyes you get when you inhale the allergen, you’ll end up with a tingly mouth, hives, difficulty swallowing, or even anaphylaxis—all food allergy symptoms.

These are the most commonly occurring cross-allergies and their offending foods:

Dust/Dust Mites: mangos, shellfish, plums, melons, tomato, avocado, pawpaw, pineapple, peaches, and kiwis.
Latex: almonds, apples, bananas, kiwis, avocado, dill, oregano, ginger, and sage.
Birch/Alder Tree Pollen: celery, apples, apricots, cherries and other stone fruits, parsnips, buckwheat, caraway seeds, and coriander.
Hayfever (Ragweed/Grasses): cantaloupe, watermelon, honeydew, bananas, sunflower seeds, zucchini, cucumber, and chamomile tea.
Cat Dander: pork.

Some foods contain more of the troublesome proteins than others—peaches more than plums, apples more than pears. And there can be differences between varieties—Gala and Golden Delicious apples cause more allergic reactions than Braeburns, and Crenshaw melons are benign while cantaloupe and watermelon are powerful triggers.

Not every pollen produces cross-allergies; some trees like maple, oak, and poplar don’t share reaction-causing proteins with foods. Nor does having one of these allergies mean you’ll necessarily cross-react with any of the implicated foods. And, if you do react, you may not be allergic to every food on the list.

You can learn more at FAAN, the Food Allergy and Anaphylaxis Network.

Posted in food safety, Health, health + diet | 2 Comments

The Super Bowl of Snacking

Janice | February 1, 2013 - 8:04 am

On Super Bowl Sunday we’re not so much armchair quarterbacks as snack bowl linebackers.
For most fans the broadcast is an excuse to eat a full day’s worth of calories one tortilla chip and chicken wing at a time.

Of course you’re no linebacker bulking up for the big game. But if you were— or a cheerleader, or even just a wildly enthusiastic fan—these are the football-related activities that it would take to burn the calories.

We’ll consume 27 billion calories just from potato chips. Forget about the carbs; the fat content alone contributes the calories to create four million new pounds of fat on American bodies. To burn off just a small handful of chips with French onion dip you’d have to ride a bicycle from the New Orleans airport to the Super Dome and back.

Who doesn’t love a good pig in a blanket? It takes about a half hour of tossing around a football to burn off each little pastry-wrapped sausage.

You’re looking at a graph of 52 weeks of chicken wing sales. Note the spike? That would be the week leading up to the last Super Bowl. Paint the faces of eight rabid Ravens fans and you’ll burn the calories contained in a single chicken wing that’s been fried and drenched in Buffalo sauce. Unfortunately there aren’t enough football fans on the planet to make up for the 1.23 billion wings that will be eaten this Super Bowl Sunday.

Once the hors d’oeuvre of choice for Grandma’s bridge club, deviled eggs have become a Sunday staple during football season. Jogging the length of the football field 20 times will burn the calories from two stuffed halves of an egg.

Guacamole has risen through the Super Bowl snack ranks in short order. From a mere 8 million pounds a decade ago, this year we’ll be mashing 79 million pounds of avocados into dip, helped by having San Francisco in this year’s championship. Figure on 10 minutes of climbing stadium stairs to burn a quarter cup of guacamole.

Pizzerias are always the big winners. Super Bowl Sunday is their busiest day of the year by leaps and bounds. One in seven Americans orders take-out and most of it is pizza. If you played the French horn in a marching band for the duration of the game, the exercise would earn you a couple of slices.

The nation’s beer tab will be more than $10 billion for Super Bowl Sunday. That’s 50 million cases, but it’s still only good enough to rank eighth on the list of beer-drinking holidays, mostly due to the season. The warm weather holidays of 4th of July, Labor Day, Memorial Day, and Fathers Day hold down the top spots. If you do your part with a 12 oz. beer each quarter, you’d have to do ‘the wave’ 2,853 times to burn the calories in those four bottles of beer.

Chips, dips, wings, beer… it’s no wonder that 6 percent of Americans will call in sick for work on Monday morning.

Posted in Entertainment, health + diet, snack foods | Leave a comment

We’re Too Fat For Our Cars

Janice | January 22, 2013 - 2:37 pm

image via Hive Health Media

It’s known to automakers as Plump My Ride.
A little wordplay from the MTV show Pimp My Ride inspired the industry’s nickname for the super-sized cars it builds to accommodate ever-fatter drivers. It’s not just larger interiors and bigger carseats. Grab handles above the doors have to be reinforced so they won’t pull off, and buttons need to be bigger for pudgy ‘sausage fingers.’ Those electrically-powered adjustable steering columns were developed because drivers were getting trapped behind the wheel, wedged in by their big bellies, and video back-up screens and blind spot detectors had to be added because necks are too thick for drivers to turn around and look.

There are major safety issues for fat drivers.
You might think that carrying extra weight would be an advantage in a crash, with the extra padding providing protection for bones and organs. In fact studies show that drivers with moderate obesity are at a 21% greater risk and drivers with morbid obesity are at a 56% greater risk of being killed in a car accident. Most car safety features are designed to protect an average-sized driver of 163 pounds. An overweight driver tends to be propelled further forward in a collision because seat belts don’t tighten properly against so much soft tissue and airbags don’t deploy in the right location.

Driving while obese has been compared with driving while intoxicated.
Overweight drivers are more likely to have underlying health problems that put them at higher risk for car accidents. A recent study found that 800,000 car accidents a year on American roads are caused by drivers with obesity-related sleep apnea. The reaction times of these drivers is even worse than that of drivers who are over the legal limit for alcohol.

All the extra weight has an environmental impact as well.
According to the U.S. Department of Energy, for every additional 100 pounds a car carries its fuel economy drops by as much as 2 percent. Auto makers are busy cutting vehicle weight, using less steel and lighter plastic, as they monitor every ounce in a race toward the 2025 federal target of 54.5 miles per gallon. But it’s a seesaw battle with Americans gaining pounds as fast as the manufacturers are shedding them. It’s estimated that it takes an extra billion gallons of gasoline every year to haul around new weight gain.

The secret of the New York minute.
A surprising story was recently told by the New York City Department of Health: New Yorkers are living longer than most people in the country, and their life expectancy continues to increase at a rate faster than almost anywhere else. Since 1990, the average American has added about two and a half years to his life, while New Yorkers have added a stunning 6.2 years. New Yorkers also weigh less than their demographically identical suburban counterparts—10 pounds less among 40-year-old white men—with correspondingly lower rates of heart disease and cancer.

Health experts call it the ‘urban health advantage,’ and single out walking as a primary factor. New Yorkers walk more than the rest of us. The city demands it with its urban frenzy and streets that are hostile to cars but welcoming to pedestrians. And New Yorkers walk fast, jogging up and down subway station staircases and plowing through slow-moving tourists. New Yorkers are the nation’s fastest walkers, and rank eighth among the world’s quickest steppers.

Lose the car, lose the weight.
The message is clear. Do it for your health, your safety, and for the environment.

One car, 15 cup holders. Read about the Big Gulp lifestyle in Gigabiting’s How Big is Your Cupholder?

Posted in health + diet | 1 Comment

Shame On You, Cheesecake Factory

Janice | January 17, 2013 - 3:52 pm

What’s wrong with this picture?
Another day, another crowd waiting for a table at The Cheesecake Factory.
The Cheesecake Factory is, after all, America’s favorite casual-dining restaurant, according to Nation’s Restaurant News.

The chain serves 80 million diners a year in its 160 wildly popular outlets. Dining rooms are stocked with Disney-fied signifiers of ‘fancy restaurant’ like plush booths, faux columns, vaulted ceilings, and crisply-costumed servers. Everything on the menu is bigger and richer than it needs to be. Tastier too, relying heavily on flavorful crowd-pleasers like butter, cream, cheese, sugar, and salt. Table settings are over-sized, the better to accommodate the gargantuan portions.

No big shocker
This is not health food. It’s amped-up comfort food, hearty, soothing, and indulgent. Caveat emptor, right? It’s not like it’s named The Melba Toast Factory.

Does that mean The Cheesecake Factory gets a free pass?
The Cheesecake Factory has been singled out in new reports from both Men’s Health magazine’s ‘Eat This, Not That!’ and the health advocacy group Center for Science in the Public Interest for dishing up the absolute worst food in America.

At 2,530 calories, the French Toast Napoleon is a breakfast bomb of cream-drenched bread, butter, and sugar that contains the calories of three dozen eggs.

Crispy Chicken Costoletta crams 2,610 calories (along with 4½ days’ worth of saturated fat) into its ‘lightly breaded’ cutlets with mashed potatoes and asparagus; the same as an entire 12-piece bucket of fried chicken from KFC.

Bistro Shrimp Pasta tops every other entree option with 3,020 calories of battered and fried shrimp, butter, and cream atop enough noodles for a family of four. Even at the Olive Garden, hardly a dieter’s haven itself, you’d have to eat three orders of Lasagna Classico plus a serving of tiramisu to reach the same nutritional profile.

When the Center for Science in the Public Interest gave top ‘honors’ to The Cheesecake Factory in this year’s Xtreme Eating Awards, it noted that ”No establishment better represents the confluence of factors that have saddled America with an ever-worsening obesity crisis.’ The CSPI identified just eight Cheesecake Factory dishes as ‘fit for consumption’ from its vast menu of literally hundreds of items.

Let me be very clear: I am no fan of the Nanny State.
The right to choose what we eat is as much a cornerstone of a free and democratic society as free speech and a free press. Ditto for The Cheesecake Factory’s right to pile on the salt, fat, and sugar.
But just because they can, it doesn’t mean they should.

The Cheesecake Factory crosses the line.
It’s not merely catering to a willing public with a taste for fats; it’s pushing the boundaries of our taste, and pushing harder than any other restaurant out there. The Cheesecake factory creates permutations of fat and calories that are without precedent, and serves them forth in eye-popping portions.

Where’s the social contract?
Is there no sense of social responsibility at The Cheesecake Factory? The low nutritional standards seem to be rivaled by the abysmal ethical standards of its corporate leaders.
You can say that that nobody’s twisting my arm to eat there. You can say that it’s beyond the scope of corporate responsibility to provide a solution to society’s ills. But I still say that it’s unconscionable to be an intentional part of the problem.
Shame on you, Cheesecake Factory.

Posted in health + diet, restaurants | 1 Comment

Got Alt-Milk?

Janice | October 3, 2012 - 12:26 pm

Calvin and Hobbes via United Feature Syndicate

Got milk?
Gotten milk recently? It’s no easy feat.
The dairy case used to hold a couple of cow’s milks with varying fat contents. Then soy milk appeared as a non-dairy alternative. Now we have a slew of non-dairy and non-soy milk alternatives crowding the case, made from nut varieties, grains, and even law-skirting hemp seeds.

Why all the milk alternatives?
We know that a cow’s life on a dairy farm is hardly the bucolic idyll of our imaginations. Supporters of animal rights and those looking to avoid growth hormones and antibiotics have already moved on from large-scale, conventional milk producers. Then there are vegans, the allergic and lactose intolerant, and other dieters looking to reduce fat and cholesterol.

The first stop for most was soy milk, but there is growing awareness that soy is a high spray, intensively farmed, rain forest-depleting crop, and most of the soy grown in the U.S. is genetically-modified. There are also concerns that soy protein can interfere with your body’s ability to absorb potassium, and it may be linked to breast cancer.
Now what are we supposed to put on our cereal?

Rice milk is often the alt-milk gateway because it tastes closest to cow’s milk, but sweeter. It’s low in fat but high in carbohydrates (rice, y’know) and thin as water so it’s not the most pleasing replacement for your usual splash of half-and-half in your morning coffee, but it can hold a decent cappuccino foam.

Almond milk is low in fat and high in protein. It’s creamy and slightly sweet with slightly bitter undertones. It foams impressively, although in an off-white shade, and makes a good dairy substitute for cooking and baking. It’s dairy-free, but commercially produced almond milk isn’t always soy-free.

Hazelnut milk is light in consistency but has a rich flavor, a powerful nutty fragrance, and just a tiny touch of sweetness. The hazelnutty taste is boosted when it’s made from roasted nuts, rather than the more common raw nuts. Not everyone is a fan of the hazelnut taste, but if you are it’s a good choice in sweet coffee drinks and desserts. If you’re not, have it warmed—hazelnut milk holds a credible foam for espresso drinks and the flavor dissipates in the heat.

The coconut milk you find in half gallon cartons is not the same as the unctuous cooking ingredient that comes in a can. It’s also not the same beverage as coconut water. It falls somewhere between the two when it comes to fat content, sweetness, and creaminess; this means it’s still pretty sweet, fatty, and lush. It tastes undeniably of coconut, so use it where you want the flavor. It’s perfect for non-dairy smoothies and creamy desserts, and has the virtue of being made from just one ingredient: coconut.

I’ll warn you that oat milk is a bit thick. It doesn’t go down like porridge, but it’s not what you would call light and refreshing. Oat milk is not the best option for coffee, but it’s great on cereal and in baking where the grainy flavor is welcome. It’s low in fat, when compared with nut or dairy-based milks, and actually has more calcium than cow’s milk. It also avoids the natural sweetness of most of the dairy substitutes, making it a good option for savory dishes like mashed potatoes.

Hemp milk is made from the same seeds as pot plants. It’s not legally grown in most parts of the U.S., so most is brought over the border from Canada. It will not have you playing Pink Floyd and eating vast quantities of pizza—the hemp used in milk is bred and processed to contain almost no THC, the active ingredient in marijuana. The milk is, shall we say, an acquired taste—off white, slightly chalky, with tart, grassy notes. It’s as high in fat as cow’s milk, but the good kind, with lots of healthy Omega-3 and Omega-6 fatty acids. It holds a respectable foam for cappuccino.

If you’re new to the alt milks category, you need to know a few general rules that always apply to the milk alternatives:

they’re always more palatable when served chilled, especially if you’re drinking them straight-up
shake them up; they all separate like crazy
read the labels— the ingredients aren’t always organic, and they can even contain dairy in the form of casein and other milk-derived additives
you don’t want to dive headfirst into hemp or oat milk; ease into the category by trying some of the flavored milk varieties or maybe a nice almond milk ice cream

Posted in food knowledge, health + diet, vegetarian/vegan | 3 Comments

Slower than a Canadian, Faster than a Swede

Janice | September 19, 2012 - 8:18 pm

image via Harvey Ralph

Americans spend less time eating than just about anyone else on the planet. We’re also among the most overweight.

A graph has been making the rounds.
Taking data from a study conducted by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, it plots minutes spent eating per day versus national obesity rates (based on a body mass index of 30 or more). In the U.S. our eating and drinking add up to 75 minutes a day. We edge out portly Mexicans and Canadians, but don’t come close to the 2+ daily dining hours of the slender French.

Most of us have been hearing about this correlation for decades. Doctors and diet books have always warned us about the health hazards of eating too quickly; your own mother probably used to plead with you to slow down at the dinner table. Now we see it playing out on a global level.

With hunger and fullness, like every other sensation and experience, we need our brains to tell us what our bodies are feeling.
It turns out that it’s not our stomachs telling us when we’re full, but our intestines. It takes a while for food to work its way down there—about 20 minutes from the time we start eating until the fullness trigger is tripped. The faster we eat, the more likely we are to overshoot the point of satiety. By the time our brains catch up, we’re stuffed.

Our bodies have a second mechanism built in to prevent overeating. It’s a hormone called leptin that drops when we’re hungry and rises when we’re full, also with a lag before the signal reaches the brain. When we eat quickly, the leptin hits our bloodstream too late to control our appetites; do it enough and we become resistant to its effects. The problem is that we still respond to the hunger cue of low leptin levels, so it becomes a constant cycle of overeating.

Breakfast to go, fast food drive-throughs, lunch at the keyboard, dinner in front of the television. It’s not that our brains are out of synch with our bodies. The problem is that our lifestyle is out of sync with healthy eating.

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Starbucks Promotes Its New Coffee That Doesn’t Taste Like Coffee

Janice | August 23, 2012 - 4:12 pm

roasted and unroasted coffee beans image via Smithsonian.com .

Customers have long complained that Starbucks coffee tastes burnt. Apparently, the company has been listening. Maybe a little too well. Starbucks is rolling out new beverages made from unroasted, green coffee beans.

What, you might ask, does unroasted coffee taste like? Apparently not much. According to Starbucks’ vice president of global beverage Julie Felss Masino, “It’s coffee that doesn’t taste like coffee.” In fact, the company refers to the green coffee extract as ‘flavor neutral.’ It also doesn’t have a coffee aroma, and contains a mere fraction of the caffeine. And the point of this new beverage is…?

Starbucks is selling two flavors of the iced, green coffee beverage called Refreshers. Cool Lime and Very Berry Hibiscus get their flavor from added fruit juice and are sweetened with stevia.

Green coffee bean beverages aren’t exactly new. Like green tea, green coffee beans are the youngest and least processed form that, on their own, produce a grassy, astringent brew. And like green tea, they have a longer history in Eastern cultures where they are prized mostly for medicinal uses. Recently, green coffee and its extracts have been available in weight-loss aides, and Nestlé has been selling its Nescafé Green Blend, containing one-third green beans to two-thirds roasted, which it promotes for the health benefits provided by high levels of naturally-occurring antioxidants.

Next time you want a cup of coffee that doesn’t taste like coffee, smell like coffee, or pack much of a caffeine punch, you know right where to go.

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Foods That Make You Pretty

Janice | August 20, 2012 - 2:25 pm

image via Real Moms, Real Views

There is no magic potion to stop the clock. No instant beauty in a jar.
But there are foods you can eat that can help. They can be just as effective as any anti-aging–ultra-hydrating–cell-regenerating–alpha hydroxy–retinoid cream, and you’ll shell out a lot less in the produce section than you would at the cosmetics counter.

Whiter teeth
Scrub your teeth with raw celery, carrots, green beans, and cauliflower. Each contains cellulose which acts as an abrasive to polish the tooth surface and remove stains and bacteria.

A healthy tan
Shiitake mushrooms are high in minerals like copper that boost the production of melanin, the pigment that darkens your skin in the sun.

A blackhead-free nose
The zinc in sunflower seeds helps clear oil-clogged pores where blackheads grow.

Clear eyes
Spinach is rich in the carotenoids that keep the whites of your eyes looking bright.

Soft skin
Switch out some of your olive oil with newly-fashionable, vitamin E-rich grapeseed oil.

Reduce puffiness
Counter dark circles and puffy bags under the eyes by seasoning dishes with parsley, sage, and oregano instead of bloat-inducing salt.

Clear skin
Purple cabbage is high in sulfur and iodine—much more than green varieties—and helps rid your body of the toxins that contribute to acne.
If you have dry patches, add swiss chard to your diet for its natural retinol, a key ingredient in pharmaceutical compounds for psoriasis.

Thick, shiny hair
The iron and sulfur in eggs can help prevent hair loss and soften and smooth your hair.

Fight broken blood vessels
Pomegranate juice helps stop the formation of spider veins by strengthening the walls of blood vessels.

Self-tanning
Give your skin a healthy golden glow with orange foods: cantaloupe, apricots, sweet potatoes, and carrots are all loaded with plant-based pigments that can tint the skin.

We can’t stop the clock, but a healthy, plant-rich diet will radiate a youthful glow from every pore.

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Rich or Thin? Pick One

Janice | August 9, 2012 - 4:37 pm

How did rich and fat become rich and thin?
We tend to forget that this has not always been so.

Richer, thinner, smarter.
What if you could change one thing about yourself. Which would you choose?
A recent Harris Poll asked this question.

Not surprisingly, given the current economic climate, richer was the top choice. But thinner came in a strong second picked by one in five respondents overall, and one in four women.

The complete poll results are:

richer 43%
thinner 21%
smarter 14%
9% seem to like themselves just fine, and another 12% picked other qualities

Thinness was, for most of recorded time, the fate of the lower classes with their inadequate diets and physical labor. Traditionally, only the rich could afford to be well-fed. Fat was a status symbol.

Not any more. The terrible irony is that these days, thinness is a luxury reserved for the rich. As income and education falls, obesity rises– both the rate of obesity and the amount of excess weight. The poorest Americans, those living below the poverty level, are the most likely to be morbidly obese.

The underlying causes are many, especially for the urban poor who see pork rinds and Dr. Pepper for sale on every corner but have to leave the neighborhood to find a head of lettuce. In general, the lower your income, the fewer the food options, and the less likely you are to cook your own meals or exercise. But the real culprit is our out-of-whack food system that makes it possible to sell highly refined, fat and sugar-laden, processed foods at far lower prices than fresh, whole foods.

Poverty is fattening; fat is impoverishing.
According to The Fat Studies Reader, obese women earn 9% less than the height-weight proportionate, are half as likely to have attended college, and are 20% less likely to have a working spouse. They’re also more likely to have health issues that lead to missed work, lost wages, and less professional advancement. It’s a dense web of poverty-obesity-poverty; an endless cycle of cause and effect and cause and effect.

Richer, thinner, smarter. Pick one and the others pick you.

The Rich & Thin Club claims to simultaneously whip your waistline and your bank account into shape by monitoring calories coming in and dollars going out. It theorizes that small, unnecessary, everyday indulgences are the undoing of both. Calculators demonstrate the impact of 10 years of Starbucks lattés or restaurant appetizers in terms of accumulated pounds versus an early mortgage payoff or the compounded interest of savings. It’s an eye-opener.

Posted in community, health + diet | 1 Comment

5 Brain Foods That Really Work

Janice | July 20, 2012 - 12:44 pm

We’re having a national senior moment.
Baby boomers, those born between 1946 and 1964, are a demographic time bomb. Making up nearly one-third of the population, they’ve reached the age of memory loss, slowed reflexes, and synaptic glitches. That’s 75 million boomers who can’t remember what they went upstairs for.

And kids, you’re not off the hook either.
Brains peak in size around age 20 and then they start the long downhill slide. From that point on they shrink about 2.5% every decade, losing neurons all along the way. Men’s brains shrink a little faster than women’s brains, but since alcohol does more damage to the female brain, women who drink can easily catch up.

The good news is that brain foods really work.
In the same way that a low cholesterol diet can keep plaque from forming in arteries, there are foods that can keep plaque from forming in your brain. You can unclog your cognitive functions just like you can unclog your arteries.

There are also foods that can sharpen your focus and concentration, enhance your memory, and speed your reaction times. Add them to your diet early enough and you can stave off cognitive decline later in life.

Here are five foods that can make a real difference. If you’re one of those baby boomers, maybe you should write them down.

Nothing preserves cognitive ability like wild salmon. That’s right, wild— not just any salmon will do. Farmed salmon doesn’t develop the same quality or level of essential fatty acids that make wild salmon the ultimate brain food.

In the same way that the wild variety of salmon is the high-test variety, matcha is souped-up green tea. Matcha is a type of Japanese green tea that is ground into a powder; instead of drinking an extract like you do when tea leaves are brewed, with matcha you down the whole thing dissolved into the water or milk. The brain buzz of focus and clarity is exponentially greater, and immediately noticeable. And the Kermit-green shade? That’s how it’s supposed to look.

The brain boost from caffeine or sugar is short-lived but real. They both can make you alert and focused. Too much sugar, though, can actually interfere with your memory.

The acai berry is this year’s pomegranate; the ‘it’ fruit that is showing up everywhere, blended into smoothies and dressings, flavoring teas, juices, and sodas. Oddly, for a fruit, its nutritional profile resembles that of fish, high in protein and the essential fatty acids our brains desire.

The newest brain food discovery is turmeric. Turmeric is a mildly-flavored, deep yellow spice that’s always found in curry powder, and is often used as a less costly alternative to saffron. It’s such a powerful brain plaque-remover that it’s being tested as a treatment for Alzheimer’s disease.

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The Strange Diets that Fuel Olympic Athletes

Janice | July 18, 2012 - 12:31 pm

Michael Phelps with hamburger via Sports by Brooks

The elite athlete is a finely-tuned machine.
It starts with good genes. There are years of training and conditioning. Coaching and facilities are top-notch. And of course nutrition, which fuels the energy and stamina needed to achieve peak performance, is managed with the same precision as the rest of the training regimen.

Olympic athletes might consider every bite, but for all that care and attention, some athletes make bizarre dietary choices. They are often obsessive and superstitious about the foods they eat. Like anyone, they’ve been known to give in to their unhealthy tastes and predilections; unlike the rest of us they can easily rationalize a big haul from the fast food drive-through because they’re training so hard.

Here’s the eccentric consumption that is taking some Olympians to London:

Michael Phelps has swum his way to enough Olympic gold that it’s tough to knock his his 8,000+ daily caloric intake that treats McDonald’s as a major food group.

American marathon runner Michael Arnstein is a full-time raw fruitarian- uncooked fruits and vegetables only.

The Olympic team from Kazakhstan is fed a protein-rich diet of horse meat sausages. Britain’s import controls on horse meat are posing a challenge to their mealtime.

Sprinter Usain Bolt, a.k.a. the world’s fastest human, eats yams: steamed yams, roasted yams, yam stew, yam soup, yam cakes; and not just any old yams, but the Trelawny yam from his native Jamaica. Presumably he likes yams, but this particular yam contains high amounts of naturally occurring steroid alkaloids and have been used to synthesize testosterone since the 1930′s.

Team USA gymnast Jonathan Horton fires up his blood sugar with swigs of honey straight from the jar.

South Korean gymnast Son Yeon-jae must have the strictest diet of the Olympic Village. Her coaches monitor the teenager’s weight down to the gram (that would be 3/100ths of an ounce), and in an interview with Korea’s daily paper, The Chosun Ilbo, she said she ‘eats a sparrow’s breakfast and lunch and skips dinner.’

At 71, Japanese equestrian Hiroshi Hoketsu will be the oldest athlete at the London Olympics and the second oldest Olympian ever to compete, surpassed only by a 72-year old Swedish shooter who won a silver medal in the 1920 Summer Olympics. And he eats whatever he wants.

Posted in Entertainment, health + diet | 2 Comments

How to Eat Roadkill

Janice | July 10, 2012 - 10:26 am

Guinea Fowl crossing the road via My Retirement Chronicles

Should we eat roadkill?
In theory, it’s an excellent exercise in ethics, environmentalism, and self-reliance.
Why leave it to rot when you can take it home and cook it for dinner?

According to PETA, roadkill is a better choice than the factory-farmed, shrink-wrapped product you find in the supermarket. The group recommends it from a health standpoint, because it doesn’t contain antibiotics, hormones, and growth stimulants. And it’s the more humane option because the animals haven’t been castrated, dehorned, debeaked, or suffered through any of the other horrors of intensive animal agriculture.

Perhaps you prefer the term flat meat.
Roadkill is fresh, organic, and free. It was clearly free-ranging, as some unlucky driver knows all too well. It’s sustainable and supportable through an enlightened political ideology, and there’s plenty of it—according to estimates by Animal People Online, the annual roadkill toll tops 100 million animals, and that’s not even counting the species categorized ever so delicately as indiscernible.

The legality of taking home roadkill varies by state.
Alaska considers it state property but residents can get on a waiting list for a moose, caribou, or bear; Illinois says the driver gets first dibs, though the privilege is only extended to state residents; Texas had to outlaw roadkill because of too many not-quite accidents; and in Tennessee, on the day that the legislature legalized the taking of roadkill, the state senator who had introduced the bill was presented with a bumper sticker: Cat—The Other White Meat.

Tastes just like chicken.
Steve Rinella, who collided with and then stewed up a raccoon for an episode of his now surprisingly defunct Travel Channel show The Wild Within says that “[roadkilled] meat is actually much fresher than what you might find in a grocery store.” The wiki How to Eat Roadkill recommends that you “learn the signs of healthy roadkill”: it should be freshly killed, preferably from an accident you witness, although you get some slack time in the winter months; you want a fresh stench, since the impact can force excrement rapidly through the animal’s digestive tract; and fleas are a good sign, maggots are not. And not to worry about rabies—sure, it’s a deadly communicable virus that infects the central nervous system, but the wiki tells us that it dies off quickly with the animal.

Should we eat roadkill?
Waste not, want not, right?

Posted in cook + dine, sustainability, vegetarian/vegan | Leave a comment

Fast Food Chains Push Soda for Breakfast

Janice | July 9, 2012 - 4:29 pm

The vaguely mimosa-like Mountain Dew A.M.

Some rules really aren’t made to be broken.
Like the one about eating a healthy breakfast. It’s not like it’s one of the Geneva Conventions, but this is important stuff none the less. Which is why the latest promotion from three major fast food chains has mothers, nutritionists, public health advocates, and dentists cringing: at Steak ‘n Shake, a 28-ounce morning Coca-Cola lands you a free breakfast taco; Sonic’s ‘Morning Drink Stop’ features 99-cent sodas; and Taco Bell is test marketing a proprietary concoction called MTN Dew A.M., combining soda and orange juice.

There have always been those who like a cold, sharp, fizzy jolt of caffeine in the morning, but it took the breakfast menus at fast food restaurants to bring it into the mainstream. Soda is rarely served with with home-cooked breakfasts—perhaps it’s Mom’s influence that has kept it to less than 3% of the time. Go out for breakfast though, and it’s five times as likely that soda will be ordered.

This isn’t the first time that food marketers have tried to chip away at the morning soda taboo. Coca-Cola launched a major Coke in the Morning ad campaign in 1988, and the next year Pepsi pumped up the caffeine for a trial run of a morning cola dubbed Pepsi A.M. As recently as 2008, Coca-Cola was running print ads showing a Diet Coke can wrapped in a take-out coffee sleeve with the tagline ‘Good Morning.’

Wake up and smell the soda
Too much soda makes people fat and sick. And if tooth decay, diabetes, asthma, and heart disease aren’t enough, there are plenty of other reasons not to drink soda.

Read Gigabiting’s Here’s Why You Shouldn’t Drink Soda

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A Book Club is as Good as a Health Club: Highbrow is Lowfat

Janice | May 24, 2012 - 12:39 pm

image via WeightLossPopularTips

The heath community is baffled by this one: a massive 17 nation study shows that leisure time readers are thinner than non-readers. Same for museum, theater, and movie-goers. In fact an interest in ideas, art, and knowledge is associated as strongly as exercise with a lower body-mass index.

You’re probably wondering what’s new about that? It’s a widely-known fact that obesity is related to income and education through better nutrition, gym memberships, and the like. But the surprise is that this study controlled for education and other measures of socioeconomic status. Regardless of background, highbrow is lowfat.

Everything you do burns calories: taking a shower, making a sandwich, even sleeping; but sedentary activities don’t burn very many. The less intellectual activities in the study— card playing, socializing, watching tv, and shopping—log in at less than 100 calories an hour, about the same as an hour with a documentary film or flipping through the pages of The New Yorker. Yet the lower brow pursuits all correlate with a higher BMI.

Here’s a theory: it’s the food labels.
Healthy-sounding labels are duping dieters. The Center for Science in the Public Interest calls it food label chaos. All those little black squares and big red check marks on the backs of boxes and fronts of cans have us fooled. Maybe avid readers have better diets because book literacy translates into health literacy.

Not so smart, not so good for you
Phrases like ‘Smart Choices’ and ‘Better for You’ can be emblazoned on products with no nutritional merits. These phrases are not informational but merely marketing fluff; not a tool for the buyer but for the seller.

For a survey published in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine, 89% of respondents (most of whom were college-educated) described themselves as competent, informed label readers. When tested, only 69% could actually interpret labels correctly. And even those that understood label claims were stymied by nutrient counts and serving sizes—you know, the single juice box with 56 grams of sugar that is labeled for 1.4 servings, or the 7.5 servings in a bag of 26-cookies.

Americans on average spend $60 a year on books and $60 a month to look good—things like gym memberships, hair cuts, and skincare. More than 45 million of us belong to heath clubs, and the number keeps growing, but so do obesity rates. At the same time, we’re dropping an hour of reading every year, and attendance at museums, concerts, theater, and other cultural events is in a steady decline.
Maybe we should be hitting the books, not the gym.

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