Michael Pollan has written several books, but is perhaps best known for his two most recent: The Omnivore’s Dilemma and his latest, In Defense Of Food.
In the former book, Pollan discusses problems with the food supply and food industry in the US, and the challenges faced by consumers who actually care about what they eat. In the latter book, he addresses the same issues, but from the perspective of answering the question: “What can we do about it?”
Central to his perspective is that food isn’t very profitable to companies as a commodity. A bunch of celery or a simple piece of beef doesn’t sell for very much (unless we’re talking organic, then all bets are off), relative to the prices and profit margins companies can get from making products out of the celery or beef. Pollan calls these products “edible, food-like substances” in contrast to real food.
In this video of a lecture he gave at Google, he gives the example that while cut oats are pennies to the pound, if General Mills, Post or Kellog add high-fructose corn syrup, salt and additives and process the oats so as to remove some of the fiber, they end up with a product costing tens or hundreds of times the cost of the oats themselves.
He also talks about what he calls “Nutritionism,” or a belief that nutrients are important and sources of nutrients are not. Food companies use this to encourage people who want to be healthy eaters to buy premium healthier versions of their products that have vitamins, minerals and/or fiber artificially added back in. This can make them almost as healthy as the original food item was when it came out of the ground and before it was converted into frankenfood!
Highlights:
Eat locally
Eat organic
Eat grass-fed
Shop the perimeter of the grocery store, not the middle.
Don’t eat it if:
You can’t pronounce the ingredients
Your great grandmother (or someone else’s) wouldn’t recognize it as food.
The whole philosophy boils down to seven words: “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.”
Popular U.S. sub shop “Quizno’s” has been stonewalling the public on their mandatory nutritional data factsheets. In the U.S. restaurants are required to provide this information to customers, and many actually feature their data sheets right on the walls of their dining areas.
Mysteriously though, Quizno’s seems to be willing to just pay any fines and NOT release this information. Apparently it was once available on their website, but has since been removed. A recent thread on MeFi has turned up one place where this data can still be found: About.com’s Calorie Count web site.
What does it mean to be part of the movement? Very simple:
1. Blog your weight/thoughts about weight loss each day (you don’t have to put the number in the subject line if you don’t want… but I think that’s fun).
2. Search for Fatbloggers daily (i.e. on Technorati or Google Blog Search)
3. Link to and comment on blog posts by other fatbloggers. Share your ups, downs, and tips.
Jason was kind enough to respond to a post I wrote about this over at the GNMHealth.com blog.
One key to better health is to eat more meals at home. The humble crock pot is a great tool to help squeeze more home-cooked goodness into our busy lives.
Here are two quick tips to hack your crock pot cookery:
1) Freeze all ingredients the night before cooking. Put them in before leaving for work and your food won’t be mush by dinner time, though it will be cooked. Great for roasts.
2) Don’t have a fancy model with a timer? Use a cheap lamp timer available at any hardware store. Set it to turn off an hour before you get home and the food will be cool enough to feed your kids as soon as you walk through the door.
Grasshopper New Media is very proud to present, GNMHealth’s first Video Podcast, Healthy Helpings TV.
Host Michelle Koen will be taking classic recipes like burgers and treats like pudding and cake and showing you how to adapt them to your diet, whether it’s a low-fat approach like Weight Watchers or Jenny Craig, or a carb-controlled plan like the South Beach diet or Atkins.
In the premiere episode, Michelle will be taking the humble yet fatty hamburger and re-inventing it as a delectable yet quite healthy Asian-style lunch or dinner entree!
Join us each Monday for another healthy culinary delight!
There has been a major shift in the restaurant industry away from the use of once-prevalent trans fats. An optimist would say this is because of good corporate citizenship, a pessimist might say this is due to threats of lawsuits and changing regulations. In truth, there is more to the picture.
KFC (formerly Kentucky Fried Chicken, now ashamed of the word “fried”, apparently) will have dropped its current trans-fat laden cooking oil in favor of soybean oil by April ‘07. They are not alone; recently, Wendy’s removed trans fat from its fries, earlier this year Disney announced it will eliminate trans fats from food sold at its theme parks, McDonalds is actively experimenting to find the tastiest way to make trans-fat free cuisine a staple at the golden arches, as well. Kraft, ConAgra and Frito-Lay have also reduced trans fat use in their products.
Since the NYC Board of Health is holding hearings on a potential city-wide ban on trans fats, and companies like KFC have been targets of lawsuits by the likes of the Center for Science in the Public Interest over non-disclosure of trans fat use, it seems that corporate America has been forced to act by forces outside of the boardroom. That is only part of the story, though.
The real movement seems like it may be coming from within these organizations. Pollsters working for KFC, for instance, have determined that they will actually sell more product if they make the switch. That’s a pretty compelling argument. It seems that 25% of KFC customers said they would eat MORE fried chicken if they didn’t have to worry about trans fats.
Consider the strength of that factoid- this is not a boycott. This isn’t some potentially disinterested group of people saying “don’t eat at KFC”, and picketing with banners and cardboard signs. These are people who are already money-in-the-bank customers claiming they’d eat MORE. From an Aesopean perspective, the bird in the hand is worth two in the picket line.
Can capitalism save our collective health? I doubt it, but then again… every little bit helps.
AND PLEASE DON”T EAT MORE CHICKEN JUST BECAUSE YOU CAN!!
A community-based portal to encourage weight loss.
From the splash page:
* Stay accountable, reach your goals!
Been to the gym today? Record this in a couple of clicks and see how many calories you burned. traineo will report your totals to your motivators at the end of each week.
* Keep your diet on track
Have you stuck to your diet today? traineo will give you a daily ‘training diet rating’ to easily gauge how good you’ve been.
* Visualize your progress
See how your workouts and diet compare over time with intuitive graphs and see if you’re on target to reach your goals.
*
Keep in touch with your ‘motivators’
Exchange messages with your ‘traineo motivators’ straight from your online account.
* Meet others in the traineo community
Share weight loss tips, give your fellow members encouragement or talk about anything else!
* Get your personal traineo.com page!
You’ll have your very own traineo.com domain where you can leave comments on your progress or comment on other pages with ease!
Virtual teams compete against each other by maintaing an exercise regimen.
Currently invitation only. Sorry! On the upside, they even have a Shovelglove team!
From the site:
Regular memberships are FREE and include these features:
* Join up to 3 teams
* Create your own team
* Enter workout activity stats:
o Walking
o Running
o Swimming
o Cycling
o Situps
o Pushups
o and more…
* Easily track your weight and stats over time
A free, online food diary system with food count lookups available.
From the site:
A diet coach, nutritionist, and food plan at your fingertips, just a click away.
Food Journal Food Journal
Keep track of what you eat
Calorie Calculator Calorie Calculator
Determine your daily goal
Fitness Log Fitness Log
Calculate and log the calories you burn each day
Since I began my new position as Executive Producer for Health Content at Grasshopper New Media, my life has opened up in different ways.
I’ve been accustomed to merely reporting on health news since this blog launched in January of 2005. Now, it seems that I’m something of a public figure. Weird.
In the course of promoting the Health Hacks Podcast, and GNM in general, I’ve participated in public forums like PodCamp Boston, where I lead a (very small) session, befriended some pretty interesting people and saw my boss, Chris Brogan, catapult into the limelight.
So, while I’m not signing autographs or writing my memoirs (yet) I am at least now interview-worthy. Well, at least in the eyes of my compatriot Jimmy Moore of the Livin’ La Vida Low Carb blog. You can read the interview here.
Giving this interview was an awakening because it made me articulate some things that were only loosely formed in my mind. It has sparked a lot of interest, and many people have contacted me about contributing either to the Health Hacks Podcast, or possibly to a new show (Interested? let me know!).
Anyway, in this interview I was asked about being a “former low carber”. I haven’t really discussed my own diet path much here on HHDC, so I wasn’t really expecting the question.
I reponded that I don’t feel like a “former low carber”, but perhaps like a former Atkins dieter. Really, when it comes to diets, I tend toward being “platform agnostic”. One reason I gave for moving on to other Low carb/controlled carb concepts was that BDK, or Ketosis wasn’t very attainable for me and that BDK is one of the major points seperating Atkins from other similar plans.
One reader asked how that made sense, and here is my response:
If I could, I’d like offer a response to Low Carb Tennis Guy’s questions.
First, I’ll answer his second question. Dr. Atkins was not the only person to develop a low-carb diet. William Banting was promoting a LC plan his doctor developed back in the 1800’s. Today there are many low carb plans, most of which differ in small ways. If you include “controlled carbohydrate” diets then you can even lump in the South Beach diet and other similar plans.
One major difference between the plan developed (as a work in progress over decades of gradual evolution) by Dr. Atkins and many of the other plans is the “Atkins Metabolic Advantage”, a physiological response triggered by a near absense of carbs. It is more commonly known as Ketosis, but Dr. Atkins, in his later years, favored the term Beneficial Dietary Ketosis, or BDK.
The reason for the new term is that many DOCTORS (gasp!) didn’t realize that there is a difference between ketosis and a very harmful but completely unrelated condition called ketoacidosis. These doctors would tell patients to avoid the Atkins plan like the plague, out of ignorance.
Now the problem with ketosis is that while it makes your body burn fat rather than other fuels, it can be really hard to trigger ketosis. Moreover many LC dieters found they could lose significant amounts of weight without reaching ketosis.
I, myself had much trouble reaching ketosis, and was blowing a fortune on ketone test-strips, even though I was losing weight at a good clip. I did find, though, that while Atkins stressed that you wouldn’t need to conciously limit your food intake that didn’t work for me.
You see, in theory, he had a great idea. Atkins was relying on the hunger/fullness mechanism to kick in, which is likely to happen because fats and proteins are filling. However, a certain portion of americans (like me) had such a screwed up way of eating (thanks, McDonald’s!) that we no longer really understood these concepts of “full” and “hunger”.
So, anyway, I found that I did need some external control on portion sizes, which is why I now pair low-carb dieting with the No-S diet (and the Shangri-La diet, but using oil, not sugar).
I still support the Atkins diet both in theory and, for those it suits, in practice. Look at Jimmy- who can argue with that kind of success?!
For more great info on different Low Carb diets, please read Dana Carpender’s excellent “How I Gave Up My Low Fat Diet And Lost 40 Pounds”.
For my fellow USians (and others if you feel it applies to you):
Isaac Mizrahi, fashion designer extrordinaire has a new job- he designs for Target.
In that capacity, he seems to be trying to curry favor with his new demographic- Middle America (or possibly James Lileks who seems to spend 12 hours a day in the Bullseye Boutique).
Last week Mizrahi appeared on the NPR game show (Yes! They exist!) “Wait, Wait…Don’t Tell Me”. Pointing to popular actor Vince Vaughn, Mizrahi stated that “Fat is the new black.”
Hrmph.
If you thought it was sad living in a country where everyone is on a diet, imagine one where everyone has simply given up.
The two main weight loss systems I’ve been discussing while developing over at the Health Hacks Podcast are the Health Hacks Amalgamated Frankendiet and the Park Far From Work exercise system.
Here are some new insights and factoids:
I counted the steps in the parking garage; 92
Weight loss as of this morning (since last week); 4 LBS
Decrease in pants size in 2 weeks; 1
Another new diet rule; no reading at lunch- just sit and eat, preferably with eyes closed.
Sample menus are under development. This Wednesday, you’ll be able to hear me brainstorming a few on the new podcast, Episode 4.
All original content covered under a Creative Commons license.