Is this soda serious?

Last week, I caught a few minutes of a news program dedicated to a Coca Cola machine that allows you mix your own flavor through the use of a touch screen (rather than the teenage tradition of just moving your cup around under each fountain nozzle). I thought the machine, called the Coca Cola Freestyle, was brand new but apparently it has been serving up empty calories and cavities since 2009.

Not to be outdone, Pepsi has kept up in the flavor game by offering their own array of unusual flavors that are sure to turn your stomach:

Ice cream flavored Pepsi is available in Russia. White yogurt flavored Pepsi is available in Japan. I can't believe people are really drinking this stuff. (See more here)

Disappointed in Paula Deen?

Me too.

In case you haven't heard, Paula Deen, Food Network star and Southern cook, has now confirmed reports that she was diagnosed with type-2 diabetes nearly three years ago. I have to admit that I know very little about Paula Deen apart from the fact that she has been criticized for promoting the type of high-fat and high-sugar diet that leads to weight gain and other 'western diseases' and that she chose to keep her diagnosis a secret for years. What I do know is that during her appearance on the Today Show yesterday, she announced her spokesman-ship deal with Victoza, a pharmaceutical company and dodged discussion about diet. Here's the footage:

Her announcement happened to correspond with Michael Pollan's talk last night at the Baltimore Speaker Series in which he addressed Paula Deen's decision to partner with the Victoza. He pointed out the larger "fork in the road" this exemplifies. We could go one direction towards a nation of acceptance and complacency regarding the epidemic of diet-related health problems (Deen's direction), or another - more active and change-effecting direction - towards reformation of the food system, our understanding of it, roles within, and conscious involvement in its evolution towards something healthier.

Can you imagine the positive impact Paula Deen could have on the American diet if she were to re-frame this?  As disappointed as I am, I'm not going to give up hope. Turn it around, Paula. Sacrifice a little pride for the greater good of your fans and followers.

This Should Be Illegal

Somehow, a hospital-themed restaurant advertising free meals for patrons who weigh more than 350 lbs, milkshakes with the "highest butter content in the world," and selling 8,000 calorie cheeseburgers with four patties (listed as a "Quadruple Bypass" on the menu) has opened up in Las Vegas, Nevada, despite the fact that the flagship Arizona location closed in May following the death of the grill's spokesperson, 29-year-old Blair River, pictured in the video above. The owner, Jon Basso, who is also featured in the video above - as "Dr. Jon" - spoke to the Las Vegas Sun last month:

“You’re intelligent if you don’t eat our food,” he said Thursday. “If people pondered what I’m doing, they’d realize I’m creating a mockery of this. When you hop on that scale and you’re 350 pounds and we give you a free burger and people cheer, what’s really going on? We’re singling you out as a freak. On the one hand, I could try to defend myself ethically and call myself a crusader that’s trying to wake up America and conduct an intervention on obesity. That’s half true. The other half is I’m an entrepreneur trying to make a buck, plain and simple.”

Basso stopped, thought for a minute, then added: “The only thing I can say in my defense is: If you compare me to Burger King and McDonald’s, I’m honest and they aren’t. It says right on my door: ‘Caution, bad for your health.’”

Read more here and here. This can't possibly be what our country's founding fathers had in mind. Ugh. 

2010 CalorieLab, Inc Obesity Stats

For the fifth year in a row, Mississippi has been ranked above all others in terms of obesity rates. What's more alarming, at least to me, is to see a graphic representation of the "one in four American adults are obese" statistic. Read a thorough analysis of CalorieLab's findings here. Also, kudos to Colorado, where only one in five people are obese therefore making them the "thinnest state."

Somewhat Topical

A few articles from earlier in the year that just surfaced and since blog = web + log and most of our readers are friends and family... I am logging my newly discovered web creds here for your reading enjoyment and my record-keeping.

How to Lower Your Blood Pressure Naturally

Home Detox Strategy

State Fair Fare

Year after year, state fair season brings surprising "recipes" to the forefront of our favorite homepages. Fried Coca-Cola, fried bacon, and even fried butter. But this year's most surprising fried selection comes from a restaurant, American Cupcake, in San Francisco. Their remake of a "Southern Classic" has somehow stayed under the Internet's "state fair fare" radar until now. Chicken fried in cake. Red velvet cake, actually. UrbanDaddy San Francisco reports:

"At first glance, it’ll look like a heaping plate of leg, thigh and breast. But upon further inspection, you’ll see that the chicken has taken on a slight reddish hue. That’s because your precious fried bird has been pre-soaked in AC’s signature red velvet cake batter, then dredged in toasted, crumbled bits of red velvet cupcake before being dipped in a frying pan. You know, as one does.

And because a regular red velvet cupcake is topped with cream cheese frosting—and in case this thing wasn’t crazy enough—this poultry version is accompanied by a hefty scoop of cream cheese-infused garlic mashed potatoes."

taxing soda

Kelly D. Brownell, Ph.D., and Thomas R. Frieden, M.D., M.P.H. recently published an article in the New England Journal of Medicine about the controversial debate of food taxes, specifically, the idea of a tax on sugar-sweetened beverages, which "may be the single largest driver of the obesity epidemic."

The co-authors propose that taxing beverages containing HFCS and sugar, i.e. increasing the cost of these drinks, will decrease the demand for and the consumption of them, which encourages consumers to switch to more healthful beverages and reduce caloric intake.

I think I'm on board with this. Why shouldn't the government step in? But then again, I don't drink soda. If folks start blaming Peanut MnMs... well... that's another story.

Really??

If ever you are feeling down, might I suggest visiting the grocery store with your nuclear family. It is sort of like going back in time. If you're lucky, your mom may even buy you the most awesome, roaring, LED T-Rex key chain you never knew you wanted. Another perk: You get to discover silly food-like-substances, like the one pictured below, and their equally absurd (and upsetting) marketing strategies.


There is so much that I want to say about this but perhaps it is one of those cases where a picture is worth a thousand words. But seriously, who thought this was a good idea?

slower-to-digest = lower blood sugar for diabetics

A study done by researchers at the University of Toronto suggests that eating a diet rich in foods like nuts, beans, pasta, parboiled rice and lentils helps to control blood-sugar in type 2 diabetes sufferers. Half of the 210 participants followed this low glycemic-index, slow-to-digest diet regimen while the other half were advised to consume a healthy brown diet with whole grain breads, cereals, brown rice, and potatoes. Not only did the slower-to-digest diet help control blood sugar, it also lowered cholesterol levels, which of course cuts the risk of cardiovascular disease.

If the larger study the researchers have applied for a grant to perform yields the same results, and diabetes sufferers are able to adapt to a diet rich in these recommended foods, then I suppose this is good news. I can't help but wonder, however, if the introduction of nuts, beans, and lentils in turn created an absence of say... fast food or anything that could be considered less than healthy, and if there might be some other variables worthy of examination. Read more about the study here.

drum roll please...

The NY Times reports that the non-profit cancer prevention organization, The Cancer Project, has debuted their list of the five unhealthiest items sold in our nation's fast food chains. Read Roni Caryn Rabin's full article here and read highlights below:

* Jack in the Box’s junior bacon cheeseburger topped the list as the worst offender. The burger costs just one dollar but is packed with 23 grams of fat, including 8 grams of saturated fat, 55 milligrams of cholesterol and 860 milligrams of sodium and just one gram of fiber.

* In second-worst place, the 89-cent Taco Bell cheesy double beef burrito, with 460 calories, 20 grams of fat and a whopping 1,620 milligrams of sodium.

* In third-worst place was the one-dollar Burger King breakfast sausage biscuit, with 27 grams of fat, including 15 grams of saturated fat and over 1,000 milligrams of sodium.

* Fourth worst went to the one-dollar McDonald’s McDouble, which contains 19 grams of fat and 65 milligrams of cholesterol.

* Last, and least-worst, was the Wendy’s junior bacon cheeseburger, for $1.53, with 310 calories and 16 grams of fat.

Not that I've ever doubted him...

... but a recent study pretty much confirmed that Michael Pollan is right and "fast food" is basically "corn." If you are wondering why this is awesome, let me explain. Or rather, let Wired explain. From the Wired post:

Chemical analysis from restaurants across the United States shows that nearly every cow or chicken used in fast food is raised on a diet of corn... Corn is an icon of unsustainable agriculture, requiring tons of fertilizer and pesticides, both of which require large amounts of fossil fuel to manufacture. Most of it is fed to livestock who didn't evolve to subsist entirely on corn. In cattle, eating corn increases flatulence emissions of methane — a potent greenhouse gas — and creates an intestinal environment rich in e. coli, a common cause of food poisoning. That necessitates mixing cow feed with antibiotics, in turn producing antibiotic-resistant disease strains... Many of those livestock end up in high-calorie, low-nutrition franchised fast foods... Fast food's biggest selling point is its low price — and that, say industry critics, is largely possible because of corn's ubiquitous cheapness.

And why is corn so cheap? Because it is subsidized by the government.

Corn is central to agriculture in the United States, where it is grown in greater volumes and receives more government subsidies than any other crop. Between 1995 and 2006 corn growers received $56 billion in federal subsidies, and the annual figure may soon hit $10 billion.

The $100-billion fast food industry has repeatedly been linked to obesity, heart disease, and diabetes (you know, the "western diseases"). So this is a pretty big deal. Something has got to change, right? Anyone else hoping that our new President Elect will spend some time with Michael Pollan or at least his books?

And speaking of kidney stones...

...the NY Times also reports that A Rise in Kidney Stones Is Seen in U.S. Children. From the article:

To the great surprise of parents, kidney stones, once considered a disorder of middle age, are now showing up in children as young as 5 or 6.

The increase in the United States is attributed to a host of factors, including a food additive that is both legal and ubiquitous: salt.

“What we’ve really seen is an increase in the salt load in children’s diet,” said Dr. Bruce L. Slaughenhoupt, co-director of pediatric urology and of the pediatric kidney stone clinic at the University of Wisconsin. He and other experts mentioned not just salty chips and French fries, but also processed foods like sandwich meats; canned soups; packaged meals; and even sports drinks like Gatorade, which are so popular among schoolchildren they are now sold in child-friendly juice boxes.

Must Read Michael Pollan

Can't even begin to express how grateful I am for Michael Pollan and essays/articles like this one that appeared in last week's NY Times magazine. Pollan's letter to the President-Elect focuses on the major issue underlying health care, energy Independence and climate change: the food issue.

Any attempts I would make to paraphrase Pollan's article won't do his points justice - so I urge you to read the article. I can attempt to summarize by saying: Pollan examines the past, present and possible future food system as well as the political relationship between food and just about every other sector of our world in such as way as to remind us that food is the core of our existence and well-being. It is essentially a condensed version of his latest book but with a stronger and bigger message regarding what to do next. In Defense of Food educated and empowered the individual. This piece picks up where the book left off and addresses the system from the top down by way of some brilliant, if a *tad ambitious, proposals:


I. Resolarizing the American Farm

II. Reregionalizing the Food System

III. Rebuilding America’s Food Culture

A few excerpts from the article:

"...Which brings me to the deeper reason you will need not simply to address food prices but to make the reform of the entire food system one of the highest priorities of your administration: unless you do, you will not be able to make significant progress on the health care crisis, energy independence or climate change. Unlike food, these are issues you did campaign on — but as you try to address them you will quickly discover that the way we currently grow, process and eat food in America goes to the heart of all three problems and will have to change if we hope to solve them..."

"We need to wean the American food system off its heavy 20th-century diet of fossil fuel and put it back on a diet of contemporary sunshine."

"First, your administration’s food policy must strive to provide a healthful diet for all our people; this means focusing on the quality and diversity (and not merely the quantity) of the calories that American agriculture produces and American eaters consume. Second, your policies should aim to improve the resilience, safety and security of our food supply. Among other things, this means promoting regional food economies both in America and around the world. And lastly, your policies need to reconceive agriculture as part of the solution to environmental problems like climate change."

"Today most federal messages about food, from nutrition labeling to the food pyramid, are negotiated with the food industry. The surgeon general should take over from the Department of Agriculture the job of communicating with Americans about their diet. That way we might begin to construct a less equivocal and more effective public-health message about nutrition. Indeed, there is no reason that public-health campaigns about the dangers of obesity and Type 2 diabetes shouldn’t be as tough and as effective as public-health campaigns about the dangers of smoking. The Centers for Disease Control estimates that one in three American children born in 2000 will develop Type 2 diabetes. The public needs to know and see precisely what that sentence means: blindness; amputation; early death. All of which can be avoided by a change in diet and lifestyle. A public-health crisis of this magnitude calls for a blunt public-health message, even at the expense of offending the food industry. Judging by the success of recent antismoking campaigns, the savings to the health care system could be substantial."

*tad ambitious = Pollan's suggestion to "tear out five prime south-facing acres of the White House lawn and plant in their place an organic fruit and vegetable garden."

Happy World Vegetarian Day!

To honor the day, I thought I would offer ten reasons to either go vegetarian or re-frame meat as a side dish eaten only occasionally. Check 'em out:

1.) 20:1 20 vegetarians can live off the land required by one meat eater. One acre of land could produce 50,000 pounds of tomatoes, 40,000 pounds of potatoes, 30,000 pounds of carrots or just 250 pounds of beef.
2.) Wheat versus Meat It takes 25 gallons of water to produce 1lb of wheat and 2500 gallons to produce 1lb of meat.
3.) Greenhouse Gases The 1,300,000,000 cattle in the world emit 60,000,000 tons of methane per year.
4.) Nitrous Oxide Fertilizer used to grow crops to feed to animals releases nitrous oxide - thought to account for 6% of the greenhouse effect.
5.) Endangered Forests Burning of forests, grasslands & agricultural waste associated with animal farming releases 50-100,000,000 tons of methane per year.
6.) Cow versus Car A family of four eating beef for a year uses enough gas to run a car for 6 months (obviously depending on how far you drive!)
7.) Steak versus Starvation 72 percent of all grain produced in the United States is fed to animals raised for slaughter. It takes 15 pounds of feed to get one pound of meat. But if the grain were given directly to people, there would be enough food to feed the entire planet.
8.) Not a Coincidence Meat is full of traces of antibiotics, hormones, toxins produced by stress and pesticide residues that become concentrated from all the crops the animals have eaten. Women who eat red meat are four times more likely than vegetarian women to develop breast cancer.
9.) $ave Money Replacing meat, chicken and fish with vegetables and fruits is estimated to cut food bills by an average of $4,000 a year.
10.) Slim Down On average, vegetarians are slimmer than meat eaters, and when dieting, they keep the weight off up to seven years longer. Diets that are higher in vegetable proteins are much lower in fat and calories.

And if you need a few more reasons, here are some alarming statistics:

- Each day, 22 million animals are slaughtered to support the American appetite for meat.
- The United States spends between $60 billion to $120 billion annually to treat the heart disease, cancer, obesity, and food poisoning that are byproducts of a diet heavy on animal products.
- 25 percent of all chicken sold in the United States carries salmonella bacteria and, the CDC estimates, 70 percent to 90 percent of chickens contain the bacteria campy-lobacter.
- Approximately 5 percent of cows carry the lethal strain of E. coli O157:H7 and 30 percent of pigs slaughtered each year for food are infected with toxoplasmosis.

Goghurt... lol

Some friends and I were just chatting about the "convenience" and "bulk" factors that attract food shoppers to major supermarket chains and Costcos and so forth versus the good-on-so-many-levels concept of buying locally and only enough food for a way or two. And then we got into how low cost for the consumer often equals even lower profits for the farmers, high profit for the middleman (processors, Walmarts, etc) and the highest cost for the planet. "For what?" we thought.

The answer (other than diabetes, high cholesterol and other western diseases) is: Crap like "goghurt."

Ellen Degeneres explains it best:


(thnx Alissa, Dennis)

No quite chindogu?

Hot topic on buzzfeed today, pulled from an older post on slashfood, is this "pizza."

In light of the changing economy of food and the growing percentage of overweight and obese children and adults in Asia, I feel like this pizza epitomizes the steady (and unfortunate) shift towards western eating habits in the Far East.

Diabetes, Obesity, and Heart Disease, what many call "western diseases" can't be far behind double roll, pepperoni/hot-dog-tots/hamburger/peas pizza. Yuck.