Archive | Food

friend of mine sent me an article from a publication called Zocalo that reviews American Terroir: Savoring the Flavors of Our Woods, Waters, and Fields by Rowan Jacobsen. A good book but it only makes things harder I’m not going to review this title (you can read the one from the Zocalo here) nor am I going to…

The October 2010 edition of Popular Science landed in my mailbox today with a brief overview of the genetically modified Enviropig.  I would give you a direct link but, for some reason, Popular Science does not publish its magazine articles online.  It’s not that big of a deal because the article isn’t even good enough to carry…

There was an article in the Cleveland daily today about The Corn Refiners Association, the lobbying arm of corn agribusiness, petitioning the FDA to rename high fructose corn syrup, ‘Corn Sugar’. From the article (emphasis mine): The bid to rename the sweetener by the Corn Refiners Association comes as Americans’ concerns about health and obesity have…

Organic food sales have increased exponentially over the past decade, largely due to consumer perceptions of improved nutritional quality and taste. However, as I’ve explained before, there is scant scientific evidence that growing food organically improves its quality on either front. Since people have a wide array of intellectual biases, some scientists have decided to ask…

ost of us already know that we should be eating fiber – according to the Institute of Medicine, adults should be eating 20-35 grams of it per day. But why? What’s so important about fiber anyway? What does it do for us physiologically? And does it matter what kind of fiber we eat? I can hear…

The most common advice as to how to lose weight given my doctors to people that are overweight or obese is to cut calories. Reduced caloric intake has been lined to all kinds of health benefits, from extended life span to reduced risk of heart disease. But the primary goal of people who slice their…

Why Don’t We Just Eat Better? It’s estimated that ninety-eight percent of attempts to lose weight fail. Ninety-eight percent. That’s a sobering statistic, especially in a country where sixty-seven percent of adults and almost twenty percent of children are overweight. It’s even more shocking to think that the secret to losing weight and getting healthier isn’t a secret…

Environmentally speaking, eating meat is an awful thing to do. Whether is beef, pork, chicken or fish, meat is costly to our natural world to produce. Forests must be plowed into fields for grazing, even more food must be grown to feed the beasts, which produce more agricultural waste and, by and large, it’s a…

The public’s biggest concern when it comes to GMOs is their safety. There are a lot of misconceptions about genetic engineering. When pressed on science of GMOs, I have often heard people fear that the genetically modified material in the foods they are eating will somehow mutate their DNA too. While logically it sounds like…

My first article on Nutrition Wonderland focused on the food crisis in East and Sub Saharan Africa and how the use of better agro technology and programming could enhance regional food production, through programs like the Backpack Farm Initiative I’m involved with. As this series expands, I want to shift your perceptions of a food crisis away from…