Bluebird

New Year's resolutions in the works?

Small steps are best

If you're aiming to get healthy in the new year, be realistic about the changes you can make in diet and exercise. Often, starting small can lead to big things

Allan Marion works out at Muscle Under Fitness in West Hollywood. (Gary Friedman / Los Angeles Times / December 23, 2011)

By Jeannine Stein, Los Angeles Times

December 31, 2011, 8:52 p.m.

So, you've made a New Year's resolution to get healthy. No doubt you've banished all cookies and chips from the house and plan to hit the gym every single day.

Let's get real. In three months, you're going to be comatose on the sofa with a telltale ring of orange Cheetos crumbs around your mouth.

Most people start off the new year by making grand, sweeping changes — and the changes never stick. What does stick? Thinking small: setting modest, attainable goals and slowly chalking up petite successes as you steadily build confidence. It's a strategy that can lead to substantial and sustainable health improvements over time, as fitness and nutrition experts well know.

Not that there's anything wrong with wanting to run a marathon or lose 50 pounds — but it's not going to happen in a month, and when it doesn't, people often feel a huge letdown and then throw in the towel.

"We're guilty of that all-or-nothing mentality in so many areas of our lives," says Jessica Matthews, an exercise physiologist and spokeswoman for the San Diego-based American Council on Exercise. "We have to be doing something at 100 miles an hour or not at all."

If you want to ramp up physical activity but are currently about as energetic as a tree sloth on a slow day, you'd be better off adding easy routines — even something as minor as parking far away from your destination. "Every step really adds up," Matthews says.

Or just take a walk while at work. If you can't afford the luxury of a 40-minute march, do it in manageable five-minute batches every hour, says Felicia Stoler, a New York-based registered dietitian and exercise physiologist and author of "Living Skinny in Fat Genes: The Healthy Way toLose Weight and Feel Great." You'll still increase your physical activity by 40 minutes a day.

Dietary first steps can also be ridiculously small, says San Francisco-based registered dietitian Manuel Villacorta, a spokesman for the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics (formerly the American Dietetic Assn.). The person who eats no fruits or vegetables might add one serving a week. Those who never cook can make a simple, healthful meal from a prepared roasted chicken, frozen rice and canned beans.

"Start with things you can measure — amounts, frequency," he says. "Once you know you've done it, then you can go to the next level."

Why small steps? When you drastically cut out all fattening foods, you may bust out with a great big binge. Exercise too much and your unaccustomed muscles can suffer overuse injuries such as strains and sprains.

Or even more likely, psychological burnout sets in.

Before even the first tiny step is taken, people need to forge a plan to make sure it happens, says Marion Jacobs, a psychologist in private practice in Laguna Beach and adjunct professor emeritus ofpsychology at UCLA and author of "Take-Charge Living: How to Recast Your Role in Life ... in Six Acts."

"Change is a process," she says. "You don't go straight from 'A' to bikini. You have to make a plan for each step you have to take [and] you also have to look at the obstacles you're going to run into for each of these steps."

So think, and plan. Want to start running? Make sure your clothes are set out before you go to bed. Want to eat more home-cooked meals? Have a grocery list, a menu and a date to go shopping. Goals should be attainable — and pragmatic. "If you're not a morning person," Matthews says, "don't schedule exercise for 6 a.m."

You should anticipate difficulties before they happen. If you're going to visit a family member who constantly pushes food, avoid a major setback by explaining beforehand that you're watching what you eat. If you need to keep tempting and potentially derailing foods in the house for your kids, figure out how you're going to handle that.

When people don't have a plan, they may decide "I'm going to the gym every day," but when that doesn't happen, they don't see the results they want and they quit, Jacobs says. "And then they say, 'It's just not my personality. Other people can do this, but I can't.'"

Making small changes can be easier and more rewarding if progress is documented, be it keeping track of food and exercise in a notebook or using smartphone apps or computer programs that track calories, nutrition and activity.

"One of the best things people can do is monitor themselves," says Villacorta, who likes the apps for their immediate feedback and instant information. "You can see your progress."

Having people in your corner is also important — but choose whom you turn to for encouragement with care. "If your husband is overweight and doesn't want to lose weight, he may not be a source of support," Jacobs says. "He could be a source of sabotage."

When you backslide, don't beat yourself up and use it as an excuse to throw everything away. Think of change as a week-to-week development, Villacorta suggests. "One [indulgent] meal isn't going to destroy your entire week."

After a while, he adds, certain once-loved treats may not taste as wonderful. "The cleaner people are eating, the more they feel it when they eat something processed or with a lot of sugar in it," Villacorta says.

You may feel you need to wait till just the right moment to make changes. But the notion that readiness is all-important is a myth, Jacobs says.

"It's unlikely you're going to feel ready to do what you need to do," she says. "If you did, you'd have already done it." If you wait until you feel motivated, you may wait forever. Get started anyway.

Feelings — the ones telling you you can't change — are tough to deny, but you can alter the way you think and behave, Jacobs says. "When you start to move forward, even in small steps, your brain starts to say, 'Well, what do you know, I can do that.'"

Soon, one walk around the block turns into two. And from there, even a marathon is possible.

"Little behavior changes count — if you count them," Jacobs says.

 

Nigella, Goddess of Pleasure: Erotic? How dare you says a caramel dripping Ms Lawson who furiously denies she dishes up food porn...

By Catherine Ostler

Last updated at 8:54 AM on 8th December 2011

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-2071324/Nigella-Lawson-Erotic-Ms-Lawson-furiously-denies-dishes-food-porn.html#ixzz1gLLX2ZE7

 

What an exquisite riposte to those who criticised her for wearing that frumpy burkini on Bondi Beach: Nigella Lawson has posed for a magazine cover, heavily made up and looking ‘rapturous’ with salted caramel sauce dripping down her face.

That pale penguin-lookalike, photographed in a full cover-up against the late-summer Sydney sun, is ancient history.

Nigella, on the cover of the free magazine Stylist, has become a human toffee apple. They should release the image as an Athena poster for hungry men everywhere.

Saucy: Nigella Lawson professes her love of salted caramel on the cover of Stylist magazine

Nigella insists that anyone who thinks this shot — her lips are slightly parted, her eyes shaded dark, her painted nails grasp her temples in ecstasy, and masses of sugary goo dribbles down her face — is in any way erotic, has a problem. She denies it’s remotely sexual.

Renowned for her flirtatious manner of presenting, Lawson has been called the ‘queen of food porn’, yet with faux outrage she claims: ‘I’ve never done double entendre in my life, I’m not that kind of person.’

She has a point — ‘double entendre’ suggests a kind of subtlety. The truth is that Nigella is about full-frontal hedonism. As for not flirting, we will draw a (Salome-type) veil over the fact that one of the cocktails in the magazine is called a Flirtini, or that she suggests ‘being barefoot’ is the best way for a hostess to relax.

Cupcake? Nigella is renowned for her famous curves

If any of that’s at all suggestive, she just can’t help it. Nigella was created that way. Anyway, as she says, having an appetite is seen as ‘hearty’ in a man, but ‘slightly wanton and lascivious’ in a female.

So how seriously should we take Nigella? Even when she writes about her ‘love affair’ with salted caramel sauce, she describes the combination of ‘sugar, salt and fat’ as ‘a menage a trois’ that will set pulses racing.

Her rampantly suggestive language certainly isn’t going to be mistaken for the observations of grandmotherly Mary Berry (doyenne of The Great British Bake Off) or blokeish Jamie Oliver either.

When not dripping with caramel sauce, sporting a tight-fitting top or an apron, Nigella is usually to be found poured into one of her many Vivienne Westwood corset dresses, which only serve to accentuate her gloriously curvy figure.

Recently it was noted that she had lost weight, but she denied she’d been on a diet. Which is lucky, because if Nigella goes on a diet, Britain may as well forego Christmas Day and declare the death of self-indulgence.

Mamma, mia! The TV chef, pictured looking slimmer last month, left, than in April, right, puts her weight loss down to researching Italian food

Seductive? Nigella is sometimes accused of 'flirting' on camera

She has been quoted as saying that she avoids trying to lose weight because it would age her about ten years. At 51, she looks about 25 in the flesh, so she probably has a point.

Nigella is a not a snob — she uses Quality Street as Christmas decorations, and then eats them. She recently recalled sitting on her bed when her children were little, letting them experience ‘a white chocolate Magnum in one hand and tangy salt and vinegar crisps in the other’ — an image which would reduce anti-obesity campaigners to quivering palpitations.

Her brother, Dominic, once wrote that she even drank water to excess, sometimes getting through three litres a day and being told off by her doctor for being an ‘aquaholic’.

In truth, Nigella is the goddess of pleasure, and, boy, does she know it! Here she is on eating: ‘I am greedy. I always like the thought of eating more . . . I need to take food with me everywhere. I often have a packet of Twiglets in my bag and always Colman’s mustard.’

On her high-fat policy: ‘I don’t think there’s anything wrong with cream and butter — I see them as moisturiser for the insides.’

And on alcohol: ‘I never taste the wine first in restaurants, I just ask the waiter to pour.’

Here she is, summing up her own figure: ‘Bosomy and bottomy with quite a small waist.’

And on the relationship between eating and sex: ‘I do think that women who spend all their lives on a diet probably have a miserable sex life: if your body is the enemy, how can you relax and take pleasure? Everything is about control, rather than relaxing, about holding everything in.’

Anyone who makes her ‘drop-dead’ cappuccino pavlova or new Nutella cheesecake will find it impossible to hold everything in, even in a cleverly constructed Vivienne Westwood corset dress. Of course, when it comes to Christmas, no one looks to Nigella for restraint.

S  he says: ‘There are two Christmas traditions I’ve inherited from my mother. One is the feeling that Christmas isn’t complete if you haven’t got a ham as well as a turkey.

Dishing it out: According to Nigella, women on a diet can't enjoy sex because their body is the enemy

Nigella Lawson, in a full body burkini, attracted lots of attention at Bondi Beach in Sydney, Australia

‘It means that the leftovers are much better. And in a curious way, despite the fact that we’re talking about Christmas and ham, it’s a very Jewish thing to want to provide a huge spread. I always cook for eight, but make enough to feed 30 . . .’

Mention of her mother is a reminder that Nigella’s life has been punctuated with tragedy as well as privilege. Her mother, Lyons’ heiress Vanessa Salmon, died from liver cancer in her 40s. Nigella’s sister and her first husband, journalist John Diamond, also died young of cancer.

Her mother suffered both bulimia and anorexia, which gave Nigella a determination to enjoy food rather than let it torture her.

Admitting that food is a ‘narcotic’, she argues that her more-is-more attitude is a reaction to her experiences. ‘I think that when you live with someone who is really very ill for a long time, it somehow gives you more of a greedy appetite for life and maybe, yes, you are less measured in your behaviour than you would otherwise be,’ she has said.

Sadly, her second husband, advertising-magnate-turned-art-collector Charles Saatchi, doesn’t appreciate her cooking, once spitting out her prawn dansak and telling her it was the most disgusting thing he’d ever tasted.

He did once eat nine eggs a day for nine months to lose weight, so he can’t claim to be Mr Normal about food, either.

As her current passion for salty caramel sauce illustrates, mixing sweet and salty is her latest crush, although I imagine that only hard-core Nigella fans will be trying her new ‘badass bacon brownies’.

Everyone else will just have to enjoy the view. 

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-2071324/Nigella-Lawson-Erotic-Ms-Lawson-furiously-denies-dishes-food-porn.html#ixzz1gLLQIXo7

Canless = Safer

November 22, 2011, 4:00 pm BPA Lurks in Canned Soups and Drinks

By ANAHAD O'CONNOR

Is there BPA in your canned food?

A new study by Harvard researchers may provide another reason to skip the canned pumpkin and cranberry sauce this Thanksgiving. People who ate one serving of canned food daily over the course of five days, the study found, had significantly elevated levels — more than a 10-fold increase — of bisphenol-A, or BPA, a substance that lines most food and drink cans.

Most of the research on BPA, a so-called endocrine disruptor that can mimic the body’s hormones, has focused on its use in plastic bottles. It has been linked in some studies to a higher risk of cancer, heart disease, diabetes and obesity, and health officials in the United States have come under increasing pressure to regulate it. Some researchers, though, counter that its reputation as a health threat to people is exaggerated.

The new study, which was published Tuesday in The Journal of the American Medical Association, is the first to directly measure the amounts that are ingested when people eat food that comes directly out of a can, in this case soup. The spike in BPA levels that the researchers recorded is one of the highest seen in any study.

“We cannot say from our research what the consequences are,” said Dr. Karin Michels, an associate professor of epidemiology at Harvard Medical School and an author of the study. “But the very high levels that we found are very surprising. We would have never expected a thousand-percent increase in their levels of BPA.”

As part of the study, Dr. Michels and her colleagues recruited a group of 75 staff and students at the Harvard School of Public Health, split them into two groups, and then followed them for two weeks. During the first week, one group ate a 12-ounce serving of vegetarian soup from a common brand of canned soup every day for five days; the other group, meanwhile, ate 12 ounces of vegetarian soup made from fresh ingredients each day. Then, after a two-day, soup-free “wash out” period, the groups switched roles and were followed for five more days. At the end of each five-day period, the subjects provided urine samples.

Dr. Michels noted that all the participants were fed amounts of soup that were smaller than what people probably would consume on their own. “One serving of soup is a not a lot,” she said. “They were actually telling us that that wasn’t even enough for their lunch.”

In general, most studies have found that urinary BPA levels in typical adults average somewhere around 2 micrograms per liter. That was roughly the levels the Harvard researchers found in the subjects after a week of eating the soup made from fresh ingredients. After eating the canned soup, though, their levels rose above 20 micrograms per liter, a 1,221 percent increase.

Dr. Michels said that her co-authors, including one researcher at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention who regularly analyzes BPA levels in studies, were stunned when the results came back. “She called me and said something’s funny with these levels,” she said. “She didn’t know what she was looking at.”

Dr. Michels said that the increases in BPA were most likely temporary and would go down after hours or days and added, “We don’t know what health effects these transient increases in BPA may have.”

But she also pointed out that the findings were likely applicable to other canned goods, including soda and juices. “The sodas are concerning, because some people have a habit of consuming a lot of them throughout the day,” she said. “My guess is that with other canned foods, you would see similar increases in bisphenol-A. But we only tested soups, so we wouldn’t be able to predict the absolute size of the increase.”

Many companies began phasing out BPA in baby bottles and other plastic food containers in recent years to ease public anxieties, but it is still widely used in the linings of metal cans because it helps prevent corrosion and is resistant to high heat during the sterilization process.

“I don’t know how important bisphenol-A is to the lining of these metal cans,” Dr. Michels said. “Can you make the lining to protect the contents of the can without bisphenol-A? If this is the case, then we would suggest taking it out, because then you would eliminate the problem.”

Sugar Frosted Fat

Urban Intervention of the Day

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Urban Intervention of the Day: Ron English placed a few of his honest cereal boxes on the shelves of a Ralphs-brand supermarket in Venice.

If you find a box and send it to Ron he’ll sign it and send it back.

From: The Daily What:

Porcine thievery

Midwest Farmers Are on Alert Against Pig Thieves

By MONICA DAVEY

Published: September 23, 2011

LAFAYETTE, Minn. — Here in pig country, the pigs are vanishing.

Enlarge This Image

Allen Brisson-Smith for The New York Times

Ryan Bode, whose family has raised pigs for decades, said thieves broke into this barn in Lafayette, Minn., by cutting straight down some ventilation netting. 

Enlarge This Image

Allen Brisson-Smith for The New York Times

“Hundreds of pigs don’t just disappear,” said Marc Chadderdon, a sheriff’s investigator in Nicollet County.

This month, 150 pigs — each one weighing more than an average grown man — disappeared from a farm building in Lafayette despite deadbolts on its doors. Farther north near Lake Lillian, 594 snorting, squealing hogs disappeared last month, whisked away in the dark.

And in Iowa, with added cover from the vast stretches of tall cornfields, pigs have been snatched, 20 or 30 at a time, from as many as eight facilities in the last few weeks, said the sheriff of Mitchell County, adding that among other challenges, the missing are difficult to single out.

“They all look alike,” said Curt Younker, the sheriff, who said he had only rarely heard of pig thefts in his decades on the job. “Suddenly we’re plagued with them.”

Some livestock economists pointed to the thefts in this hog-rich region as one more sign of the grim economy, a reflection of record-high prices for hogs this year and the ease of stealing pigs from the large barns that are often far from the farmer’s house.

“This is the hot commodity of the moment, like copper a few years ago and gold,” said Ryan Bode, whose family company, Rebco Pork, discovered that 150 of its pigs were missing last Friday, shortly before they were to be taken to market.

The loss was $30,000, he said, on top of the “ungodly high” price of corn that he had paid to feed those pigs for six months until they were fat enough to be sold. “And after all that, they’re not here,” he said.

The Nicollet County sheriff’s investigator was swapping details with law enforcement authorities in other places where pigs have been taken and calling for tips of any sort, but Mr. Bode seemed doubtful about seeing his pigs again.

“My guess is that they’re bacon and pork chops already,” he said.

For the moment, as worried hog producers around the region pledged to strengthen their security systems and considered offering rewards to solve the string of cases, investigators in Iowa and Minnesota, which are among the nation’s top hog producers, were left with a tangle of complicated questions.

Was this all the work of a single roving band of pig thieves, or were they isolated incidents with separate culprits, all driven by the high price of pigs (which were going for about $200 apiece right now, and were even higher last month)?

And who would have enough experience with 270-pound pigs (a group that would not, for instance, simply march out of their barns with a whistle and a “come here, boy”) and sufficient equipment (at least a large livestock trailer) to pull off such heists?

And where exactly would they have taken the pigs?

“Hundreds of pigs don’t just disappear,” said Marc Chadderdon, a sheriff’s investigator who has worked in Nicollet County, home to about 33,000 people, since 1994 and said he had never before received a similar crime report.

“It’s not exactly like stealing a pot of gold,” he added. “You have to do something with them.”

Investigators suspect that the pigs may have been taken to meat-processing plants or affiliated “drop-off” facilities or that they were sold at auction barns, which are less common these days as more large pig producers have direct arrangements with food-packing companies.

But that has raised an uncomfortable suggestion in an industry where many of the biggest farmers and pork buyers know one another personally and where a stranger pulling up to sell 100 hogs should give pause.

“Someone in the business somewhere has the answer as to who’s doing this,” Mr. Chadderdon said.

Changes in the way pigs are raised have probably made stealing them easier.

The large, low-slung buildings that often house thousands of pigs, known as “finishing barns,” are often off gravel roads, far from most houses and busy towns, in part to avoid complaints about the smells of pig waste and other environmental concerns.

In some, workers tend to a facility only a few times a day, but mostly leave it operating on its own, with automated feeding and water systems.

As word of the thefts has spread, some farmers in both states said they were keeping closer count of their animals, considering adding more security systems or even tattooing their pigs as a way of identifying them, a practice already used by some farmers (though not in the cases of the missing pigs).

In truth, no one here is precisely sure on what evening (or evenings) the 150 pigs were taken from this facility in Lafayette.

It was not until the pigs here were heavy enough to be sold that Mr. Bode’s family company — which raises 60,000 pigs a year at eight such buildings — noticed that they were missing. Strangely, the doors were always locked and there had been no sign of a break-in.

Finally, after searching the entire building from top to bottom, workers spotted a razor-straight opening — just enough for a person to slip through — sliced all the way down heavy bird netting on a side of the building that automatically opens slightly to let air in on hot nights.

“They definitely did their homework,” Mr. Bode said the other day, running his fingers over the gap in the netting. “And they definitely knew what they were doing.”

Mr. Bode, 37, whose family has farmed around here for generations, recalled stories of a missing pig, perhaps even two, years ago.

“In the past, that would have been just for himself, maybe, a way to fill the freezer,” Mr. Bode said. “But now, it’s different. This isn’t about putting food on the table.”

On locavores and soapboxes

Findings

Fresh and Direct From the Garden an Ocean Away

By JOHN TIERNEY

Published: August 29, 2011

Charles C. Mann has faced up to the locavore’s dilemma. At his home in the Berkshires, he likes to eat food that has traveled directly from his own garden: heirloom tomatoes, eggplant, bell peppers, kale, chard, lettuce and other foods for his table. He and his family belong to a farm-share program in which they advance money each year to a farmer a few miles away in return for the farm’s crops. He loves local food, but he knows too much about it to be a truly devout locavore.

 

Viktor Koen

 

Mr. Mann realizes that none of the foods in his garden or at the local farm originated within 1,000 miles of his home. They grow today in the Berkshires only because of farmers and plant breeders and traders throughout the world. While today’s locavores worry about the sustainability of the globalized modern system of agriculture, Mr. Mann sees today’s food system as nothing new.

The foods we consider local are results of a globalization process that has been in full swing for more than five centuries, ever since Columbus landed in the New World. Suddenly all the continents were linked, mixing plants and animals that had evolved separately since the breakup of the ancient supercontinent Pangaea.

What resulted, Mr. Mann argues in his fascinating new book, “1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created,” was a new epoch in human life, the Homogenocene. This age of homogeneity was brought on by the creation of a world-spanning economic system as crops, worms, parasites and people traveled among Europe, the Americas, Africa and Asia — the Columbian Exchange, as it was dubbed by the geographer Alfred W. Crosby.

“The Columbian Exchange,” Mr. Mann writes, “is the reason there are tomatoes in Italy, oranges in the United States, chocolates in Switzerland and chili peppers in Thailand. To ecologists, the Columbian Exchange is arguably the most important event since the death of the dinosaurs.”

The consequences were devastating for many ecosystems and people conquered by Europeans. Before the exchange, Beijing was the world’s largest city, and nearly all the other large ones were in warm regions outside Europe. Columbus was seeking a new route to Asia because of the technologically advanced economies that were thriving there.

After the Columbian Exchange, the cities of Europe became the planet’s boom towns, and it wasn’t just because of the Europeans’ culture and guns. Europeans prevailed by changing ecosystems, often in inadvertent ways that have only recently been measured by scientists.

The earthworms that traveled with the English settlers to Jamestown played havoc with the forests and the crops of the Indians. The island of Hispaniola was overrun by fire ants after the Spanish arrived. Throughout the Americas, the settlers introduced organisms that spread horrific epidemics of malaria, yellow fever, smallpox and other diseases.

Meanwhile, people in Europe were reaping nutritional benefits from the Columbian Exchange. Europeans’ diets improved radically from the introduction of potatoes and what Mr. Mann calls the first green revolution: the widespread use of fertilizer, made possible by the importing of guano from Peru.

As always, there were trade-offs. In China, the introduction of maize and sweet potatoes to the highlands provided vital sustenance — and erosion that flooded rice paddies. A ship carrying guano fertilizer to Europe was probably also the source of the organism that blighted the potato crops in Europe and led to the great famine in Ireland in the 1840s.

Mr. Mann has come to sympathize with both sides in the debate over globalization. The opponents of globalization correctly realize that trade produces unpredictable and destructive consequences for the environment and for society, he says, but globalization also leads to more and better food, better health, longer life and other benefits that affluent Western locavores take for granted.

“There are these huge catastrophes that constantly threaten the gains, but I think they only threaten the gains,” he said in an interview. “The lesson of history is that the costs are high — and higher than the advocates of free trade often admit — but the gains are higher still.”

That lesson, though, has always run counter to the intuition of people all over the world. Like today’s locavores, monarchs in Spain and China during the 16th century were deeply suspicious of becoming dependent on foreign food (although the rulers kept failing in their attempts to restrain trade). The monarchs also resented parting with their own crops, a feeling that persists today.

“People in Brazil still talk bitterly about the Brits stealing their rubber seeds and planting them in Asia,” Mr. Mann said. “Brazilians will denounce this horrible ‘bio-piracy’ while they’re standing in front of fields of bananas and coffee — plants that originated in Africa.” Two other leading crops in Brazil, soybeans and sugar, he noted, are from Asia.

Of course, the 19th-century rubber barons of Brazil had good personal reasons to resent losing their monopoly. But those seeds transplanted to Asian plantations increased the world’s supply of a product essential for the belts and gaskets in machines.

“There’s no way the Industrial Revolution could have so occurred so quickly and so widely if the world had depended solely on Brazilians tapping rubber trees,” Mr. Mann said. Indeed, the Asian plantations proved crucial when Brazilian trees were struck by blight.

“On the whole, there are lots more winners than losers from the Columbian Exchange,” Mr. Mann said. “I don’t want to tell Italians they can’t have tomatoes, or people in Sichuan they can’t have peppers. People have a way of taking things and making them their own. I know nothing in my garden is native, but I still have this idiotic feeling that it’s my home.”

How does he reconcile this feeling with this book? What’s a locavore to do? Mr. Mann doesn’t presume to dictate anyone’s food preferences, but he does offer one piece of advice for locavores: go easy on the preaching.

“I’m willing to pay more to get fresh vegetables grown by nice people farming nearby,” he said. “It’s incredible to eat lettuce an hour after it was picked.

“But if your concern is to produce the maximum amount of food possible for the lowest cost, which is a serious concern around the world for people who aren’t middle-class foodies like me, this seems like a crazy luxury. It doesn’t make sense for my aesthetic preference to be elevated to a moral imperative.”

Big surprise

 

 

WEDNESDAY, Aug. 24 (HealthDay News) -- American college students aren't eating anywhere near the recommended five daily servings of fruits and vegetables, a new study finds.

In fact, they aren't even eating one serving per day, according to an Oregon State University survey of 582 college students.

Males ate about five servings of fruit and vegetables per week while females consumed only four servings per week. Males had more fat in their diet than college women, but females had lower fiber intake.

Overall, females had better eating habits than males, including reading food labels, skipping fewer meals, and eating in college dining halls more frequently, the results showed.

"We found that students skipped meals fairly frequently, which could account for some of the lack of fruits and veggies," Brad Cardinal, a professor of exercise and sport science at Oregon State University, said in a university news release.

"Still, even accounting for fewer meals consumed, the students were on average not always eating even one serving of fruits or vegetables per day, far below USDA [U.S. Department of Agriculture] guidelines," he added.

The study was released online in advance of publication in an upcoming print issue of the Journal of Nutrition Education and Behavior.

"We are not teaching youth how to be self-sustaining," Cardinal said. "Home economics and nutrition classes have all but disappeared from our schools in the K-12 system. There is a fundamental lack of understanding on how to eat well in a very broad sense."

More information

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention outlines the health benefits of fruits and vegetables.

Better to eat than to burn

Did the Puritans Enjoy Dinner?

By NICK FOX

Steve Legato for The New York TimesDid early Americans — like the original residents of the 1696 Thomas Massey House in Pennsylvania — eat better than we do?

Grub Street notes that in an interview about food books at The Browser, Ruth Reichl took a dim view of America’s food history:

If you go back to the roots of America, we were founded by Puritans who had no pleasure in food. There is an almost anti-epicurean tradition at the very base of America. For much of the middle part of American history, people who wanted to overcome that went to France. For me, what’s exciting about what is happening today in food is that we’re finally embracing America. We have become a food culture, but we very much were not.

It’s safe to say that Karen Hess and John L. Hess would have disagreed. Of course, the Hesses disagreed with almost every major food writer.

She was a culinary historian who died in 2007. He was a former food writer and reporter for The New York Times who died in 2005. Their book “The Taste of America,” first published in 1977, was a history of American cuisine, based largely on her research, that savaged the notion that experts like Julia Child, Craig Claiborne and James Beard had rescued the American palate from terminal dullness.

Beard and others, they wrote, “assure us that we have never had it so good — that colonial Americans were primitives and ignoramuses in matters gastronomic…

The truth is almost precisely the contrary. The Founding Fathers were as far superior to our present political leaders in the quality of their food as they were in the quality of their prose and of their intelligence. And if we leave aside for the moment the most depressed urban and rural slums of nineteenth-century America, no class of Americans — rich, middle-class, or even poor — eats as well today as its counterpart did a century ago. A millionaire today cannot at any price buy, in commercial channels, many of the pleasures of the middle-class table of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, nor the skilled and loving cookery that enhanced them.

“The Taste of America” went on to describe an early American cookery, enriched by native, African and European sources, that was open-minded and sophisticated. One recipe cited in the book came from an English work published in 1699 that was read by the colonists: Choose a blend of greens from scores of possibilities and toss with a dressing that should be a “discreet choice and mixture, neither the Prodigal, Niggard, nor Insipid” of olive oil from Lucca, and the “best Wine Vinegar …impregnated with the infusion of Clove-gilly-flowers, Elder, Roses, Rosemary, Nasturtiums,” etc., or verjuice from green grapes, and “the brightest Bay grey-Salt.”

“Let us in passing bury the myth that our Puritan heritage is responsible for the lamentable state of American food today,” the Hesses wrote. “It would seem, on the contrary, that the various more or less Calvinist strains of our society adopted the sensual pleasures of the table as a subliminal replacement for the other joys that they abjured. It was better to eat than to burn.”9:21 p.m. | Updated

8 Mountain Dews a Day

A sad fate for some Southern women

In one Virginia town, where there are more churches than bars and hush puppies are served with lunch, women are likely to die nearly a decade earlier than their sisters in the next county. Smoking and obesity are largely to blame.

Mary Baird, center, rests for a second between clients at her salon, the Hair Station. She gave up fried chicken, fried potatoes and greens cooked with ham hocks when her mother’s heart gave out. (Carolyn Cole, Los Angeles Times / August 3, 2011)

By Faye Fiore, Los Angeles Times

August 3, 2011

Reporting from Emporia, Va.—

Every one of the 13 chairs at the Hair Station is occupied this afternoon by women getting a wash and set or soaking their tired feet. Their chatter is louder than the bubble-top dryers. Miss Janie has decided to eat a slice of mixed berry pie with ice cream and call it lunch; the bridesmaids at Mary Baird's daughter's wedding will be wearing short yellow dresses and cowboy boots.

You wouldn't know it from the cheerful talk, but this little Southern town has lately acquired a sad distinction: Women here are likely to die nearly a decade sooner than their counterparts less than 200 miles away.

Virginia has the widest longevity gap of any state: In Fairfax County, an upscale exurb of Washington, a woman on average can expect to live to age 84. Here in Greensville County, a three-hour drive down Interstate 95, she can expect to die by 75, according to research conducted by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington.

Photos: Women of

Smoking and obesity are greatly to blame, twin culprits with deep roots in rural Southern towns like this one, where about 5,000 people are served by two McDonald's and just one YMCA. (The Curves exercise salon across from the diner closed.)

People smoke and gain too much weight all across America; childhood obesity is First Lady Michelle Obama's signature cause. But here, the cost of a nation's bad habits is in evidence around every corner.

You'll find it in Mary Baird's bustling shop on Main Street and in her family legacy. One of the regulars in today is battling cancer. Most of the others have high blood pressure or diabetes, or are related to someone who does. Mary's brother, two sisters and her mother needed heart surgery before they hit 60.

"I'm 56 and holdin' my breath," she says in the back room mixing the color for Miss Janie's hair between bites of a tossed salad. She gave up fried chicken, fried potatoes and greens cooked with ham hocks when her mother's heart gave out. "I have never cooked food for my children with fat-backed meats and all that stuff."

"But that's the stuff that makes it good!" protests Miss Janie, 86, scraping the last of her berry pie lunch and declining to provide her last name because her feet hurt too much.

"Yeah," Mary agrees. "That's also the stuff that'll kill ya."

The health and prosperity boom that lifted northern Virginia bypassed parts of the rural South, leaving towns like Emporia with the charm of Mayberry and the challenges of Appalachia.

The cocktail peanut, a staple crop, is hailed with an annual festival. Some local ladies still start their sentences with, "I declare …" So many Emporians turned out for hot dogs and lemonade at Circuit Court Clerk Bobby Wrenn's annual Fourth of July party, they clogged up the sewer.

Yet for all of its quaint traditions, much here has changed in recent years and most of it has been stressful. Small farms and factories vanished, pushing unemployment to double digits well before the rest of the country crashed. The tobacco fields that were once the South's economic base are mostly gone, but not the habit; the smoking rate in this region is well above the rest of the state and nation. Deaths from cancer exceed the national average; lung cancer is the deadliest.

The numbers came as some surprise to many of the women interviewed on a sticky Friday afternoon as they lunched at the diner, waited tables or sat for a comb-out. Emporia, which has far more churches than bars and a high school where everybody knows everybody else, is a friendly place to live. But none of these women — comfortable or poor, black or white, insured or not — quarreled with the message the data carried: The very conventions that have defined them as Southern are costing some their golden years.

Outside Logan's Diner, four rocking chairs sit empty under a yellow-striped awning. It's too hot even to rock. Inside, the lunch special is fried trout with hush puppies and the bologna burger comes with a guaranteed 5-ounce slice.

Shirley Doyle, 75, and Jean Moss, 72, are at a table by the window. They are sisters who grew up on a farm in this county. Their mother was Jean's age when she died of diabetes; both women were diagnosed 15 years ago — it's hereditary. They put away the fry pan and lost more than 100 pounds between them. Jean cut her cigarettes to three a day.

"The only thing we fry anymore is chicken tenders. We broil and bake," Shirley says, pushing aside the rest of the BLT she ordered, mayo oozing out the edges. Jean left her hush puppies — deep-fried fingers of corn meal — on the plate.

That's how it goes here. Women tend to eat wiser, smoke less and exercise at least a little — after they get sick. Every conversion bucks culinary traditions that are deep and ever-present. There is always mac and cheese at grandma's house. You can get a fried pork chop for $1.59 at Logan's. Indeed, pork is as celebrated as the peanut, warranting an annual festival of its own. Some Southerners still talk of eating "every part of the pig but the squeal."

The diner closes at 2, and by 2:45 Melanie Barrett, who waited on Shirley and Jean, is almost through for the day. She eats an order of onion rings and heads out to the rocking chairs for a smoke. She is 33 years old. Her parents both died of diabetes — her mother at 54, her father at 57. She hasn't seen a doctor in years. Can't afford it. No health insurance.

"If you don't work at a factory or the prison, minimum wage is all there is," she says, referring to the state prison in Jarratt that is one of the area's biggest employers and one of the few local jobs that provides healthcare. "It's hard to get into those state doctors. You can call today and it could be two months before you see them."

Access to healthcare is a major hurdle in the rural South. One hospital serves Emporia, but most state-of-the-art treatment is a good 90 minutes away. Cancer care is imported from the Massey Cancer Center at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond. A travelingoncologist and nurse diagnose patients and help primary care physicians carry out treatment plans.

A study in the works will ask local residents why they think the cancer rate is so high; outreach workers believe self-awareness can foster change. Emporians will tell you most people know what they're doing wrong — they're just stubborn. It's hard to defend eight Mountain Dews a day.

At Uptown Beauty Styling Salon a block off Main Street, owner Eletha Gillus steps out to pick up her 4-year-old daughter, Arica, before her afternoon appointments arrive. Time is short so they bring back McDonald's.

Eletha is raising her daughter differently than the way she was raised. She seasons with smoked turkey instead of ham hocks, watches the salt, no lard. She works out at the Y.

Her aim is to break the pattern of diabetes that killed her grandmother at 72, plagues her mother at 64 and was diagnosed in her aunt, just four months ago, at age 60.

"I don't know if it has to do with how we eat or the lack of exercise," she says.

The bad news from the life expectancy study was that women's vices are robbing them of valuable years. The good news is the data gathered over the last two decades showed that a community can change its stars. In Fulton, Ga., a woman's life expectancy grew from 75 to 80; in Yuma, Ariz., it shot from 77 to 84.

Eletha considers the prospect of better days for Emporia's next generation.

"I hope so," she says, optimistic but unconvinced, as her daughter dances by with a carton of fries.

Sometimes, change is hard.

Yogurt and nuts

Still Counting Calories? Your Weight-Loss Plan May Be Outdated

By JANE E. BRODY

Published: July 18, 2011

It’s no secret that Americans are fatter today than ever before, and not just those unlucky people who are genetically inclined to gain weight or have been overweight all their lives. Many who were lean as young adults have put on lots of unhealthy pounds as they pass into middle age and beyond.

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Yvetta Fedorova

 

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It’s also no secret that the long-recommended advice to eat less and exercise more has done little to curb the inexorable rise in weight. No one likes to feel deprived or leave the table hungry, and the notion that one generally must eat less to control body weight really doesn’t cut it for the typical American.

So the newest findings on what specific foods people should eat less often — and more importantly, more often — to keep from gaining pounds as they age should be of great interest to tens of millions of Americans.

The new research, by five nutrition and public health experts at Harvard University, is by far the most detailed long-term analysis of the factors that influence weight gain, involving 120,877 well-educated men and women who were healthy and not obese at the start of the study. In addition to diet, it has important things to say about exercise, sleep, television watching, smoking and alcohol intake.

The study participants — nurses, doctors, dentists and veterinarians in the Nurses’ Health Study, Nurses’ Health Study II and the Health Professionals Follow-up Study — were followed for 12 to 20 years. Every two years, they completed very detailed questionnaires about their eating and other habits and current weight. The fascinating results were published in June in The New England Journal of Medicine.

The analysis examined how an array of factors influenced weight gain or loss during each four-year period of the study. The average participant gained 3.35 pounds every four years, for a total weight gain of 16.8 pounds in 20 years.

“This study shows that conventional wisdom — to eat everything in moderation, eat fewer calories and avoid fatty foods — isn’t the best approach,” Dr. Dariush Mozaffarian, a cardiologist and epidemiologist at the Harvard School of Public Health and lead author of the study, said in an interview. “What you eat makes quite a difference. Just counting calories won’t matter much unless you look at the kinds of calories you’re eating.”

Dr. Frank B. Hu, a nutrition expert at the Harvard School of Public Health and a co-author of the new analysis, said: “In the past, too much emphasis has been put on single factors in the diet. But looking for a magic bullet hasn’t solved the problem of obesity.”

Also untrue, Dr. Mozaffarian said, is the food industry’s claim that there’s no such thing as a bad food.

“There are good foods and bad foods, and the advice should be to eat the good foods more and the bad foods less,” he said. “The notion that it’s O.K. to eat everything in moderation is just an excuse to eat whatever you want.”

The study showed that physical activity had the expected benefits for weight control. Those who exercised less over the course of the study tended to gain weight, while those who increased their activity didn’t. Those with the greatest increase in physical activity gained 1.76 fewer pounds than the rest of the participants within each four-year period.

But the researchers found that the kinds of foods people ate had a larger effect over all than changes in physical activity.

“Both physical activity and diet are important to weight control, but if you are fairly active and ignore diet, you can still gain weight,” said Dr. Walter Willett, chairman of the nutrition department at the Harvard School of Public Health and a co-author of the study.

As Dr. Mozaffarian observed, “Physical activity in the United States is poor, but diet is even worse.”

Little Things Mean a Lot

People don’t become overweight overnight.

Rather, the pounds creep up slowly, often unnoticed, until one day nothing in the closet fits the way it used to.

Even more important than its effect on looks and wardrobe, this gradual weight gain harms health. At least six prior studies have found that rising weight increases the risk in women of heart disease, diabetes, stroke and breast cancer, and the risk in men of heart disease, diabetes and colon cancer.

The beauty of the new study is its ability to show, based on real-life experience, how small changes in eating, exercise and other habits can result in large changes in body weight over the years.

On average, study participants gained a pound a year, which added up to 20 pounds in 20 years. Some gained much more, about four pounds a year, while a few managed to stay the same or even lose weight.

Participants who were overweight at the study’s start tended to gain the most weight, which seriously raised their risk of obesity-related diseases, Dr. Hu said. “People who are already overweight have to be particularly careful about what they eat,” he said.

The foods that contributed to the greatest weight gain were not surprising. French fries led the list: Increased consumption of this food alone was linked to an average weight gain of 3.4 pounds in each four-year period. Other important contributors were potato chips (1.7 pounds), sugar-sweetened drinks (1 pound), red meats and processed meats (0.95 and 0.93 pound, respectively), other forms of potatoes (0.57 pound), sweets and desserts (0.41 pound), refined grains (0.39 pound), other fried foods (0.32 pound), 100-percent fruit juice (0.31 pound) and butter (0.3 pound).

Also not too surprising were most of the foods that resulted in weight loss or no gain when consumed in greater amounts during the study: fruits, vegetables and whole grains. Compared with those who gained the most weight, participants in the Nurses’ Health Study who lost weight consumed 3.1 more servings of vegetables each day.

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But contrary to what many people believe, an increased intake of dairy products, whether low-fat (milk) or full-fat (milk and cheese), had a neutral effect on weight.

And despite conventional advice to eat less fat, weight loss was greatest among people who ate more yogurt and nuts, including peanut butter, over each four-year period.

Nuts are high in vegetable fat, and previous small studies have shown that eating peanut butter can help people lose weight and keep it off, probably because it slows the return of hunger.

That yogurt, among all foods, was most strongly linked to weight loss was the study’s most surprising dietary finding, the researchers said. Participants who ate more yogurt lost an average of 0.82 pound every four years.

Yogurt contains healthful bacteria that in animal studies increase production of intestinal hormones that enhance satiety and decrease hunger, Dr. Hu said. The bacteria may also raise the body’s metabolic rate, making weight control easier.

But, consistent with the new study’s findings, metabolism takes a hit from refined carbohydrates — sugars and starches stripped of their fiber, like white flour. When Dr. David Ludwig of Children’s Hospital Boston compared the effects of refined carbohydrates with the effects of whole grains in both animals and people, he found that metabolism, which determines how many calories are used at rest, slowed with the consumption of refined grains but stayed the same after consumption of whole grains.

Other Influences

As has been suggested by previous smaller studies, how long people slept each night influenced their weight changes. In general, people who slept less than six hours or more than eight hours a night tended to gain the most. Among possible explanations are effects of short nights on satiety hormones, as well as an opportunity to eat more while awake, Dr. Hu said.

He was not surprised by the finding that the more television people watched, the more weight they gained, most likely because they are influenced by a barrage of food ads and snack in front of the TV.

Alcohol intake had an interesting relationship to weight changes. No significant effect was found among those who increased their intake to one glass of wine a day, but increases in other forms of alcohol were likely to bring added pounds.

As expected, changes in smoking habits also influenced weight changes. Compared with people who never smoked, those who had quit smoking within the previous four years gained an average of 5.17 pounds. Subsequent weight gain was minimal — 0.14 pound for each four-year period.

Those who continued smoking lost 0.7 pound in each four-year period, which the researchers surmised may have resulted from undiagnosed underlying disease, especially since those who took up smoking experienced no change in weight.