Link Dump: Food-That-Will-Kill-You Edition

Food linkage from around the Interwebs:

The Daily Beast presents a gallery of the "20 Unhealthiest Cereals." (As if any of 'em are healthy.)

The most shoplifted food in the world? Cheese.

Rainn Wilson loves Del Taco for a reason.

Speaking of fast food tacos, it's not a good idea to firebomb your local Taco Bell because your Chalupa was insufficiently meaty. (Besides, it's debatable how much of Taco Bell's "meat" is actually meat in the first place.)

Okay -- one more taco-related item: Why the hell would anyone propose marriage with a cake made to look like a packet of Taco Bell hot sauce?

Professor Mark Post is being paid €300,000 to create a hamburger without using any meat from an animal. Instead, he's trying to grow meat in a lab using muscle stem cells. "We want to turn meat production from a farming process to a factory process," he says. Barf.

Dr. William Davis, the author of "Wheat Belly," summarizes his case against triticum aestivum, or modern wheat, on Boing Boing. "Wheat-consuming people are fatter than those who don't eat wheat," he concludes.

But is Davis overstating the case against wheat? Check out what Dr. Emily Deans has to say about "Wheat Belly," and also Chris Masterjohn's detailed review of Davis's book.

Deen: Diabetes Denier?

Paula Deen has reportedly been concealing her Type II diabetes to avoid charges of hypocrisy for foisting her obesity-promoting recipes on us fat Americans.

Not surprisingly, media reports are pointing to the high fat content in her cooking -- but no one's seems to bat an eye about the truckloads of sugar that she dumps into her gut-rotting concoctions.

Case in point: Deen's "Krispy Kreme Bread Pudding with Butter Rum Sauce." Back in 2009, when I first wrote about this stupifyingly trashy sugar bomb, I, too, ignored the sugar content, focusing instead on the fat and calories:

This barf-tastic recipe contains 10,460 calories and 718 grams of fat. It's supposed to feed 12, so if you're one of the dozen people digging into this heart attack of a dish, you'll be consuming 870 calories and 60 grams of fat. It's a nutritional Chernobyl.

If I'd have been more diligent (and enlightened), I would have pointed out that this five-star rated recipe also contains 1,280 grams of carbs and 1,082 grams of sugar. That's 90 grams of sugar per serving -- the equivalent of stuffing your face with three full-sized Snickers bars. Or five scoops of chocolate ice cream. Or slurping up a cuppa coffee with 22 sugar cubes in it.

My two cents: Deen should just re-brand herself as an out-and-proud Type II diabetic. After all, she clearly doesn't have a problem pushing nutritional garbage on TV and sickening her audiences (regardless of whether they actually end up cooking and eating her recipes). (See, e.g., Deen's Cheesy Ham & Banana Casserole -- which features, among other incongruous ingredients, crushed potato chips and white bread). And besides: No one believes that eating her food's going to lead to anything other than metabolic syndrome and early death anyway.

Note to the Epic Meal Time guys: Hire her now, before she's too sick to show you how to make Twinkie Pie and Peanut Butter Cheese Fudge dipped in Shrimp & Chocolate Tortilla Soup.

Oh gawd -- I think I just barfed a little in my mouth.

What About Dairy?

"OH MY GAWD -- YOU STILL EAT DAIRY?!? WTF?!? HOW DARE YOU CALL YOURSELVES "PALEO"! CAVEMEN DIDN'T DRINK COW'S MILK, YOU BLASPHEMERS! [*HYSTERICAL SOBBING*]"

I'm exaggerating (a little). But we've gotten a couple of testy emails from hyper-orthodox Paleo readers who check out M's site and freak out over the trace amounts of dairy that remain in our diets. To them, I have this to say:

Please chill out.

It's been a long time since I last wrote at length about milk. And in that time, our dairy consumption has dramatically decreased. Cutting out grains and added sugar already meant getting rid of many of our favorite dairy-delivery vehicles, like breakfast cereals, pizza, grilled cheese sandwiches, frozen yogurt and ice cream. We stopped buying big tubs of fresh mozzerella di bufala, and I no longer devour huge plates of cheese. I don't drink milk (and haven't since I was a kid), and I take my coffee black. And M managed to abstain from dairy altogether during her month on the Whole30.

But we do still eat a small amount of dairy from time to time, including pastured butter, ghee, and a bit of cheese and full-fat Greek yogurt. Frankly, this is a personal choice. We're not saying that you ought to follow our example, or that cow juice is super-awesome for you. We're continuing to learn from others about the physiological effects of the stuff, and it's very possible that one day, we'll decide to eliminate all dairy from our diet. But given that we continue to receive questions about why bovine dairy still pops up in M's recipes, I thought I'd explain our current thinking behind the decision not to go cold-turkey.

In a nutshell:

• We don't care that cavepeople didn't drink cow's milk.
• There are proposed mechanisms that suggest that cow dairy is bad for you.
• But there's still a lack of consensus -- even within Paleo circles -- about whether full-fat dairy actually poses health risks to folks without leaky gut or other autoimmune issues.
• Plus, on the whole, there may actually be a net benefit to eating some high-quality, full-fat dairy.
• Still, to be on the safe side, we've cut out most dairy -- but we've made room for certain exceptions.

Let's take these one by one (after the jump)...