May You Be Forever Young

The International Herald Tribune has One man’s 3-year experiment in eating organic food - all the time. Not surprisingly, the guy found it hard to be 100% organic 100% of the time.

He chose three years as a goal because that was the amount of time it took to have a breeding animal certified organic by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. While food growers comply with organic regulations every day, Greene wondered whether a person could meet the same standards.

It hasn’t been easy.

“This isn’t a way of eating I could recommend to anybody else because it’s so far off the beaten food grid,” said Greene, 49, the founder of a popular Web site about children’s health, drgreene.com. “It was much more challenging than I thought it would be, and I thought it would be tough. There were definitely days where there was nothing I could find that was organic.”

And the results:

Greene said he was inspired to go all-organic after talking to a dairy farmer who noted that livestock got sick less after a switch to organic practices. He wondered if becoming 100 percent organic might improve his own health.

Three years later, he says he has more energy and wakes up earlier.

As a pediatrician regularly exposed to sick children, he was accustomed to several illnesses a year. Now, he says, he is rarely ill. His urine is a brighter yellow, a sign that he is ingesting more vitamins and nutrients

Good for him.

Photo by aymlis

Slate has a look at why vegans can’t decide whether they’re allowed to eat honey. It is, as they say, an old debate.

A fierce doctrinal debate over its status has raged for decades; it turns up on almost every community FAQ and remains so ubiquitous and unresolved that radio host Rachel Maddow proposed to ask celebrity vegan Dennis Kucinich about it during last year’s CNN/YouTube presidential debate. Does honey qualify as a forbidden animal product since it’s made by bees? Or is it OK since the bees don’t seem too put out by making it?

I fall into the it’s OK camp.

What was perhaps more interesting is coming across the term “flexitarian”.

Five years ago, the American Dialect Society honored the word flexitarian for its utility in describing a growing demographic—the “vegetarian who occasionally eats meat.” Now there’s evidence that going flexi is good for the environment and good for your health.

BTW, one can ignore the “dangers of a vegetarian diet” stuff toward the bottom of the article. Sheesh.

CNN brings us the story of Angela Stokes, who half her body weight by embracing a raw food diet.

Two summers after she reached her heaviest weight, Stokes was working at a greenhouse in Iceland, when a friend lent her a copy of a book about the health benefits of eating raw foods. Stokes, who had never been interested in diets, says she was completely “absorbed” by the approach.

She started eating raw the very next day.

“Everything in my life completely shifted. It was like a light bulb moment to be like … ‘this is what I was waiting for to reclaim my health,’ ” said Stokes.

Somewhat obvious, but still inspiring, is how it turned all aspects of her life around.

In Killer Carbs: Scientist Finds Key To Overeating As We Age, Science Daily reports on research that shows that carbs appear to kill off the cells that suppress appetite.

A Monash University scientist has discovered key appetite control cells in the human brain degenerate over time, causing increased hunger and potentially weight-gain as we grow older. The research by Dr Zane Andrews, a neuroendocrinologist with Monash University’s Department of Physiology, has been published in Nature.

And:

“The more carbs and sugars you eat, the more your appetite-control cells are damaged, and potentially you consume more,” Dr Andrews said.

Dr Andrews said the attack on appetite suppressing cells creates a cellular imbalance between our need to eat and the message to the brain to stop eating.

“People in the age group of 25 to 50 are most at risk. The neurons that tell people in the crucial age range not to over-eat are being killed-off.

Photo by rachel is coconut&lime.

According to Boing Boing, this gigantic horrifying hotdog weighs in at 3.5 lbs, and is free if you can snork it down in less than four minutes. Best of all, it’s called the Hillbilly Homewrecker. BB called it a “weapon of cardiovascular mass destruction”.

*Shakes head in disbelief.*

OK, this is just scary. The Sun Herald gives us Who We Are: The Land of Big Buyers, which outlines the top 100 purchases by Australians (that is, the products that make the most money in Aussie supermarkets), presented in story form. Look at the food choices (along with the other choices, like spraying weekly with bug spray).

For lunch Julie makes herself a can of Campbell’s. Jessica has an Uncle Toby’s muesli bar and a couple of squares of Cadbury’s. When he gets some from school Ben has a packet of Smith’s and a glass of Milo. When she gets home from work, Jessica has two Tim Tams and a can of Diet Coke. Julie’s afternoon tea is Arnott’s Shapes.

And:

For dinner, Julie makes a sauce with Leggo’s tomato paste, McCain frozen peas and John West tuna, to put over San Remo rigatoni. Michael drinks a can of VB, Julie has a glass of Jacob’s Creek chardonnay. For dessert they eat Goulburn Valley tinned fruit with Peter’s icecream.

Fresh food? Whole foods? Apparently, this fictional family says “pass”.

Photo by he who shall

Slate gives us a glimpse of new research on how fat cells work:

The authors of the study showed that by the time we end adolescence, our number of adipocytes has been set. Heavy people begin adulthood with more fat cells, and lighter people with fewer, and the numbers won’t change as we age or as we become more obese or leaner. The only thing that does change, if we gain or lose weight, is how plump with fat each cell becomes. Meanwhile, however, even though the total adipocyte number remains constant, the cells themselves don’t just sit there getting bigger and smaller. Instead, they constantly turn over. Whether you are heavy or lean, losing weight or gaining it, the same rule applies—every year about 10 percent of your body’s fat cells die, and they are replaced by the same number of new ones.

This would appear to help explain why fat children become fat adults, and the importance of good diet early on.

Food Matters, an upcoming Australian documentary, looks like it’s going to be great. Here’s their blurb:

With nutritionally-depleted foods, chemical additives and our tendency to rely upon pharmaceutical drugs to treat what’s wrong with our malnourished bodies, it’s no wonder that modern society is getting sicker. Food Matters sets about uncovering the trillion dollar worldwide ‘Sickness Industry’ and gives people some scientifically verifiable solutions for curing disease naturally.

Here’s the trailer:

The web site has good info on it as well. Check it out.

For those who measure their food, RoyalVKB has these nifty-looking Balance Bowls. Simply put, they tip when filled on one side with a specified weight of food (100 gm, 250 gm). They look handy, especially for on the road.

The moral of this story - that humans do better on food that’s as close to its original state as possible - is the subject of In Defence of Food the latest book from US writer Michael Pollan. author of The Omnivore’s Dilemma . In Defence of Food is partly about how progress in food processing created the western diet which in turn helped fuel new epidemics - like diabetes - which modern medicine is now trying to fix.

The book is also about what he calls the rise in nutritionism - our habit of focussing on what single nutrients or components in food - like fibre - can do for us rather than on the benefits of eating the whole food itself. ‘Nutritionism’ makes us think that you can make a processed food healthy simply by tossing in some extra nutrients - think refined breakfast cereals with some added fibre and vitamins.

I still like Pollan’s advice for escaping the processed diet:

- Don’t eat anything your great grandmother wouldn’t recognise as food

- Avoid food products containing ingredients that are a) unfamiliar, b) unpronounceable c) more than five in number.

- Avoid food products that make health claims (food products making health claims are in packets and more likely to be processed, he points out)

- Shop the peripheries of the supermarket and stay out of the middle - processed foods dominate the center aisles, while fresher food is around the walls.

- Get out of the supermarket whenever possible. Pollan’s advice here is to try and shop at farmer’s markets whenever you can.