Why Processed Food is Better

Heh.



(Source: Buzzfeed)

Kangaroos Are For Eating

There are plenty of reasons to start chomping on kangaroos:

Kangaroos aren't factory farmed! In fact, kangaroos -- which are 100 percent wild game meat -- may be "the most ethically and environmentally sound source of meat on the planet":

The animals whose flesh ends up on supermarket shelves live wild before dying a humane death... What's more, one kangaroo consumes about a third as much plant material as a sheep, and just 13 per cent of the water. This is a significant benefit in [Australia,] a country that suffers periodic droughts, which climate change may worsen.

It cuts down on greenhouse gases! According to a report commissioned by Greenpeace, switching from beef to kangaroo meat would help cut 15 megatons of greenhouse gas emissions by the year 2020. Why? Because their farts are virtually methane-free. Way to go, kangaroo farts!

Eating kangaroos saves polar bears. Why? Because this video says so. And personally, I think polar bears are way awesomer than kangaroos.

There's too damn many of them! Australian authorities are "culling" kangaroos to curtail their destruction of the environment and harm to other species. Side note: "Culling" sounds an awful lot like "killing," which I guess is appropriate:

By law, adult kangaroos must be killed by a shot to the head from a high-powered rifle. A report published this year by the animal welfare group RSPCA Australia says this leads to instant insensibility quickly followed by death. Kangaroo harvesters are good shots: according to the report, around 95 per cent of carcasses were indeed shot in the head.

Things get more complicated if the roo is female. A doe usually has a young joey in her pouch, and by law it must be dispatched by a blow to the head. In practice, it is coshed with a metal pipe or swung against the side of a truck. "Blunt trauma is an aesthetically displeasing procedure, but when done correctly is an acceptable method of euthanasia," says the RSPCA report.

(On second thought, maybe it's better to focus less on the murder of kangaroo mommies, and more on the sweet, sweet taste of marsupial flesh.)

Kangaroo is tasty! Esquire Magazine says it tastes like "sweet filet mignon." There's nothing like a delicious steak to distract me from killing an animal by bashing its head against the side of a truck.

It's paleo-friendly! Just like grassfed meats, kangaroo is lean, healthy, low in polyunsaturated fat and loaded with long-chain omega-3 fatty acids and conjugated linoleic acid (CLA).

Even vegetarians are making exceptions for kangaroo meat! I shit you not: They're calling themselves "kangatarians." (I prefer "vegeroos.")

You can pretend you're eating something else! Just as you find the notion of eating "pork" and "beef" more palatable than chowing on "pigs" and "cows," you can just close your eyes and tell yourself you're dining on "australus" meat. Yum!

It's available in the U.S.! You can order kangaroo australus meat from a bunch of places online, like Exotic Meats USA, Fossil Farms, or -- if you're looking to buy in bulk -- Marx Foods. Some butcheries specializing in exotic meats (like San Francisco's Polarica) carry kangaroo. Or, if you're in New York and want someone else to do the cooking, try the kangaroo skewers at Eight Mile Creek.

The final reason: Kangaroos have faces and souls. I get that Tony Horton is a vegan and doesn't like ingesting things with faces. But I've gone over to the paleo side of the fence, and Robb Wolf's my guru now. And I believe him when he says I should eat animals -- even cute ones.

Amen

(Where do you think you're going? Come back and clean up this mess!)

From Serious Eats:

[The image of the USDA food pyramid] was hung on the walls of elementary schools, doctors' offices, and supermarkets nationwide. Unchanged for more than 30 years, the pyramid was familiar and recognizable to most.

Then in 2005, the United States Department of Agriculture released a newly designed food pyramid. This pyramid was shockingly different, featuring merging rays of color, each representing a food group, and an active man ascending a staircase (headed towards excellent health, one assumes). While more streamlined and eye-catching than the graphics-heavy original, the new pyramid has also been criticized for lack of clarity and poor nutritional recommendations.

On October 1, a new critique was published in the science journal Nutrition. The authors of the article, researchers and experts from a number of universities, were responding to a recent report by the Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee. They claim that the DGAC does not appropriately utilize recent scientific findings in their recommendations. Vague language in the pyramid encourages eaters to "eat more" fruits and veggies but "go easy" on high-sugar fruit juices. Such information is of limited help to those seeking concrete advice, and the report does little to address public health issues such as obesity and diabetes.

My favorite comment was posted by Serious Eater Simon:

Sorry, but 11 slices of bread per day is freakin ridiculous. And really bad for you. Hello, hypoglycemia, obesity, diabetes, high blood pressure and colon cancer.

The food guidelines are biased towards grain products because this are the most heavily subsidized agricultural sectors, a holdover from Cold War policies.

If the food pyramid took our health into account, the base would be protein and veggies. Above that would be nuts and fruit. Above that would be dairy and starchy tubers. The very top, the things you should very little of, would be grains and sugars. The two things that are the most profitable. Fat chance.

Sounds like Simon's my kind of caveman.

Pollan On Being a Locavore

Michael J. Fox's brother-in-law was interviewed by the Wall Street Journal about the importance (and economics) of buying and eating seasonal, locally-grown whole foods:

WSJ: Is eating well just an indulgence for people who can afford it?

Mr. Pollan: If you're in the supermarket buying organic versus not buying organic, you are going to spend more. But buying food at the farmer's market, if you compare it to the prices at Safeway for stuff that's in season, it actually beats the prices in my experience. People shouldn't assume that they are going to go broke at the farmer's market.

WSJ: What do you wish people here understood about their food that they don't now?

Mr. Pollan: We've been conditioned by artificially cheap food to be shocked when a box of strawberries costs $3.

But it's important to know that farmers aren't getting wealthy. When you see strawberries being sold for $1 a box, picture the kind of labor it takes to pick those strawberries and the kind of chemicals it takes to produce those kinds of strawberries without hand weeding.

Eight dollars for a dozen eggs sounds outrageous, but when you think that you can make a delicious meal from two eggs, that's $1.50. It's really not that much when we think of how we waste money in our lives.

Read the full interview here.

HFCS Makes You Fat(ter)

I'm sure you've seen the Corn Refiners Association's television ads in support of high fructose corn syrup (HFCS), arguing that it's a "natural" product (albeit super-processed) that comes from corn (duh) and no worse for you than table sugar (which is like saying a piano dropped on your head is no worse for you than being hit by a car):



Surprisingly, when these ads started airing a year or two ago, many experts voiced agreement with the central premise of these commercials -- though they decried the overconsumption of both HFCS and regular old refined sugar. As noted nutritionist and author Marion Nestle put it:

"Lots of people think high-fructose corn syrup is the new trans fat. It isn't. ... Biochemically, it is about the same as table sugar (both have about the same amount of fructose and calories) but it is in everything and Americans eat a lot of it — nearly 60 lbs. per capita in 2006, just a bit less than pounds of table sugar. High-fructose corn syrup is not a poison, but eating less of any kind of sugar is a good idea these days and anything that promotes eating more is not."

The question of whether HFCS has been unfairly vilified has been around for years. But now, Princeton researchers have found that HFCS isn't as innocuous as Big Corn's commercials would have us think:

[In one study,] male rats given water sweetened with high-fructose corn syrup in addition to a standard diet of rat chow gained much more weight than male rats that received water sweetened with table sugar, or sucrose, in conjunction with the standard diet. The concentration of sugar in the sucrose solution was the same as is found in some commercial soft drinks, while the high-fructose corn syrup solution was half as concentrated as most sodas.

And that's not all:

In addition to causing significant weight gain in lab animals, long-term consumption of high-fructose corn syrup also led to abnormal increases in body fat, especially in the abdomen, and a rise in circulating blood fats called triglycerides. The researchers say the work sheds light on the factors contributing to obesity trends in the United States.

"Some people have claimed that high-fructose corn syrup is no different than other sweeteners when it comes to weight gain and obesity, but our results make it clear that this just isn't true, at least under the conditions of our tests," said psychology professor Bart Hoebel, who specializes in the neuroscience of appetite, weight and sugar addiction. "When rats are drinking high-fructose corn syrup at levels well below those in soda pop, they're becoming obese -- every single one, across the board. Even when rats are fed a high-fat diet, you don't see this; they don't all gain extra weight."

But regardless of whether this study settles the debate, our best bet is to avoid both refined sugar and HFCS.

Link Dump

Time for a dump:

• Dove, take note: Plus size models make women feel bad about themselves.

• To all compulsive bodybuilders: Do you have muscular dysmorphic disorder?

• According to the U.S.D.A., Americans' eating habits have changed quite a bit over the past 100 years.

• But are the U.S.D.A.'s guidelines trustworthy (or even understandable) in the first place?

• Does your baby need to lose some weight?

• If a blind guy can train twice a day to complete a full Ironman triathlon, you and I have no excuses.

• We've already learned that Fiji Water is evil, but unless you happen to be in a place where tap water is truly non-potable, don't waste your hard-earned dollars on any brand of bottled water:

 

Check It Out: Good Calories, Bad Calories

If the members of the American medical establishment were to have a collective find-yourself-standing-naked-in-Times-Square-type nightmare, this might be it. They spend 30 years ridiculing Robert Atkins, author of the phenomenally-best-selling ''Dr. Atkins' Diet Revolution'' and ''Dr. Atkins' New Diet Revolution,'' accusing the Manhattan doctor of quackery and fraud, only to discover that the unrepentant Atkins was right all along. Or maybe it's this: they find that their very own dietary recommendations -- eat less fat and more carbohydrates -- are the cause of the rampaging epidemic of obesity in America. Or, just possibly this: they find out both of the above are true.

So begins Gary Taubes' thought-provoking and spectacularly polarizing July 2002 cover article for the New York Times Magazine entitled "What If It's All Been a Big Fat Lie?" Taubes, an award-winning science journalist, points out that well into the 1970s, the scientific consensus was that diets high in "sugars and starches" -- in other words, carbs -- caused obesity. Up until that point, "the accepted wisdom was that fat and protein protected against overeating by making you sated, and that carbohydrates made you fat." Thirty years ago,

you could still find articles in the journals describing high rates of obesity in Africa and the Caribbean where diets contained almost exclusively carbohydrates. The common thinking, wrote a former director of the Nutrition Division of the United Nations, was that the ideal diet, one that prevented obesity, snacking and excessive sugar consumption, was a diet ''with plenty of eggs, beef, mutton, chicken, butter and well-cooked vegetables.'' This was the identical prescription Brillat-Savarin put forth in 1825.

But over the past three decades, "we've been told with almost religious certainty by everyone from the surgeon general on down, and we have come to believe with almost religious certainty, that obesity is caused by the excessive consumption of fat, and that if we eat less fat we will lose weight and live longer."

What explains the shift in conventional wisdom? In 1977, "a Senate committee led by George McGovern published its 'Dietary Goals for the United States,' advising that Americans significantly curb their fat intake to abate an epidemic of 'killer diseases' supposedly sweeping the country," and "peaked in late 1984, when the National Institutes of Health officially recommended that all Americans over the age of 2 eat less fat." But according to Taubes, the reported increase in heart diseases that triggered these conclusions was wrong, and there was (is) no evidence to support the hypothesis that consumption of meat and dairy products had led to a dramatic uptick in heart disease. In the 1980s, the N.I.H. spent hundreds of millions of dollars trying -- and failing -- to link fatty diets with heart disease, but on a "leap of faith," posited nonetheless that the link existed. And "once the N.I.H. signed off on the low-fat doctrine, societal forces took over":

The food industry quickly began producing thousands of reduced-fat food products to meet the new recommendations. Fat was removed from foods like cookies, chips and yogurt. The problem was, it had to be replaced with something as tasty and pleasurable to the palate, which meant some form of sugar, often high-fructose corn syrup. Meanwhile, an entire industry emerged to create fat substitutes, of which Procter & Gamble's olestra was first. And because these reduced-fat meats, cheeses, snacks and cookies had to compete with a few hundred thousand other food products marketed in America, the industry dedicated considerable advertising effort to reinforcing the less-fat-is-good-health message. Helping the cause was what Walter Willett calls the ''huge forces'' of dietitians, health organizations, consumer groups, health reporters and even cookbook writers, all well-intended missionaries of healthful eating.

The message was loud and clear: Go low-fat. Eat carbs instead. For decades, this mantra was pounded into our heads by academics, health professionals, agribusiness and marketers alike. But these days, it's become widely accepted that carbs spike insulin production, which in turns triggers weight gain. And "[f]ew experts now deny that the low-fat message is radically oversimplified."

If nothing else, it effectively ignores the fact that unsaturated fats, like olive oil, are relatively good for you: they tend to elevate your good cholesterol, high-density lipoprotein (H.D.L.), and lower your bad cholesterol, low-density lipoprotein (L.D.L.), at least in comparison to the effect of carbohydrates. While higher L.D.L. raises your heart-disease risk, higher H.D.L. reduces it...

But it gets even weirder than that. Foods considered more or less deadly under the low-fat dogma turn out to be comparatively benign if you actually look at their fat content. More than two-thirds of the fat in a porterhouse steak, for instance, will definitively improve your cholesterol profile (at least in comparison with the baked potato next to it); it's true that the remainder will raise your L.D.L., the bad stuff, but it will also boost your H.D.L. The same is true for lard. If you work out the numbers, you come to the surreal conclusion that you can eat lard straight from the can and conceivably reduce your risk of heart disease.

I'm not saying you should immediately run screaming from carbs and start stocking up on lard. But it's worth checking out Taubes' claims for yourself.

I've just begun reading Taube's 2007 book, Good Calories, Bad Calories, and will post a review when I'm done. So far, I'm finding it an engaging read. If nothing else, it encourages intellectual curiosity: Taubes challenges readers to look askance at conventional wisdom and to question whether there's evidence to support what many of us have been taught about diet and nutrition. A healthy dose of skepticism is always a good thing. (It certainly helped color my reading of the New York Times' recent article on the "obesity-hunger paradox.")

Just like his controversial New York Times Magazine article, the talking heads are split on Taube's book. (Michael Pollan and Andrew Weil are fans; Jillian Michaels and Mehmet Oz are not.) And not all reviewers agree with Taube's conclusions. But regardless of where you land on this issue, there's certainly a lot of food for thought here.

After the jump: Video of Taube's 2007 lecture at U.C. Berkeley (in case you don't feel like reading his 468-page book, but want to get the gist of what he's saying).

Ever Wondered Why Big Macs Cost Less Than Salads?

Here's why:

(Source: NY Times' Economix Blog)