Nutrition Wonderland

If you ever wondered about who owns your favorite organic brands, look no further. Our comprehensive list covers most of the brands you will find in the grocery store as you shop - and our list is up to date. (Thanks goes to Nicholas_T over at Flickr for that killer preview photo)

Recently, a reinterpretation of an original Monsanto GMO study was published in the International Journal of Biological Studies which appeared to demonstrate that some aspect of Monsanto's GMO corn – potentially just additional pesticides – was causing kidney problems in their reexamination of the data. But what do most people really know about GMOs? This subject is complex – so complex I have prepared a three part series that helps explain what is going on underneath the heated debates.

Childhood obesity is becoming a hot topic in health circles, even to the point of being called an epidemic. Experts estimate that 20% of children between the ages of 6 and 17 are overweight, predisposing them to terrible diseases like diabetes and heart disease. Why have the world's children ballooned over the past hundred years? (photo by photomequickbooth from flickr).

In animals, cell get energy by directly eating foods with sugar, or by digesting more complex starches, such as the carbohydrates found in pasta and rice, into the simpler sugar, glucose, which is then easily absorbed into the bloodstream. But how the body handles those sugars - and how many sugars you bombard yourself with - can have wide ranging implications. Let's take a closer look at exactly how glucose gets into cells - and how that could eventually lead to alzheimers. (Thanks to flickr user alain_boucheret for the shot)

Effective January 1st, 2010, California became the first state to ban restaurants from using trans fats in restaurants.

Certified organic sales are now $52 billion/year, worldwide. The large market is fueling a lot of myths out there about organic foods and there is even more propaganda supporting these organic methods that is rarely understood. It's like your mother used to say: just because everyone is jumping off a bridge doesn't mean you should do it, too. I only want to point out that not everything is as it seems. So here are some of the myths of organic produce, and the realities behind them.

The breath of the obesity epidemic being witnessed in the United States is troubling. Theories have been entertained to determine what is causing the obesity problem in children. Sedentary activities like video games and television regularly are brought out to the whipping post as the cardinal reason for the rapid rise but another view, that of food marketing to youth, has received increasing attention. That attention culminated in a summit put together by the FTC called Sizing Up. We attended - check out what happened.

The book FoodSmart: Understanding Nutrition in the 21st Century is a new title from award-winning author Diana Hunter that is designed to help navigate the complex world of nutrition. It explains basics like terminology and types of food with ease and, yet, is still able to present the various sides of much more complex topics like of GMOs (Genetically Modified Organisms) and what it means to be "organic" to a nutrition newbie. All and all, it's not a bad book, especially if you're just starting out in the world of nutrition and want a strong understanding of what is being talked about by everyone else. For me though, this book had its ups and downs.

The Monterey Bay Aquarium has released a new 'super green' list of the best seafood choices you can make as a consumer. We have the list annotated here for you.

You have a lot of choices as a consumer. Those choices alter the marketplace. You influence what kind of movies Hollywood produces when you stand in line to buy tickets, debating between an action thriller and a romantic comedy. And the choices you make when it comes to your dinner, particularly which fish you pick for the 16 pounds of seafood the average American eats every year, drive the fisheries hauling in over 11 billion pounds of fish annually. Choices make a difference, not only from an economic perspective, but from a nutritional and ecological one.

Are antioxidants good for you? To answer that question, you have to understand reactive oxygen species, or ROS. And to do that, you have to understand how your cells produce energy. In this article, we uncover the processes of oxidation and explain it in the context of your health and well being.

What is the price of food? $3.99 for a gallon of milk? $0.99 for an energy bar? Complex market and policy forces make those prices. Its a process that starts far from the point of sale. Centralizing our food into fast food chains and supermarkets causes the farms that feed the system to scale up into mega-sized operations. The idyllic, diverse farms of American lore were long ago converted into monocrop fields of staple grains, hog farms with hundreds of thousands of head and distribution centers bigger than football fields. But how do you make food scale back to something more reasonable, a new system in which communities connect with the food being grown there? Is it even possible, nay desirable? We saw a couple examples of new approaches to these questions in the San Francisco area during our Tour of America recently. One deals with technology while the other with community. Both are necessary components in what should become Food System 2.0. (Thanks to Flickr User Fazen for the cool shot).

If you read the nutrition science headlines, you might have seen these: "Giving in to pester power can make your child a thug" or "Daily sweets 'linked to violence'". They refer to a new paper that just came out which claims that eating sugary snacks every day as a child has an impact on your behavior as an adult. The idea seems impossible. I mean, sure, we all have thought about slugging that really slow guy in the line in front of us at the ice cream parlor when we're craving a nice, double scoop of Death by Chocolate. But giving my child a piece of chocolate after dinner every night can't make him into a violent person... Or can it?

Nutrition Wonderland marches eastward towards Arizona, New Mexico and Colorado after an incredibly interesting time in California learning about development + agriculture in Oxnard, food safety in Monterey, sustainable farming in Watsonville, and a few other stories we are still putting together.

When looking for books about nutrition and eating, it's hard not to stumble up Michael Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma and In Defense of Food. But this is not a review of those books. While both interesting and worth the a read by anyone nutrition-conscious, it is one of Michael Pollan's other books that is one of the best books I've ever read, and simply I cannot bring myself to discuss In Defense of Food or Omnivore's Dilemma when there is a more stunning work to be mentioned. Published in 2001, The Botany of Desire: A Plant's-Eye View of the World is . It looks at the interplay between humans and plants. It's not a nutritional guide, it's an exploration of our own nature and, more importantly, the plants that exploit it.