- Buy the book
- Buy an inscribed copy
- Buy the eBook
- Also for sale at Brookline Booksmith, Harvard Book Store, and the Book Rack, Arlington, Mass.
From
The humanitarian stimulus they want to kill
I do not get why the farm bills being contemplated this week by Congress would slash food-stamp aid.
Dude, what were you thinking?
If there ever was a sober voice in this world’s considerable madness around weight loss, it’s the National Weight Control Registry. Based in Rhode Island, it tracks more than 10,000 people who’ve been keeping an average of 70 pounds off for more than 6 years, and its purpose is to learn what helps these people keep it off.
Doctor, an addictions specialist, explains food addiction
Here's a great rundown of food addiction as it interacts with, and sometimes substitutes for, addictions that most everyone acknowledges more easily. The writer is Dr. Vera Tarman, medical director of a Toronto treatment center.
What we can glean from the Christie lap-band story
I'm not exactly sure why, but I feel it's part of my portfolio at least to acknowledge yesterday's story that New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie had "secret" lap-band surgery. This is what I got:
"Please don't deny my experience"
If you've visited here before, you may have read this recent post in which I reacted to a Ragen Chastain post the deployed some of the same illogic that Big Food uses to undercut its foes.
Assaults on the innocence of children — but at least it's only for money
One of the greatest harbors for sanctimony is when something is “for the children.” Children are the future, you know.
It’s not that I object to child protection as a motivation. I have a child, and I take seriously my role as one of his caregivers, guides, and educators. It’s going to take a lot more than me to care for, guide, and educate him, but it has to start with my wife and I.
What I object to, other than rank sanctimony of any kind, is how horribly unevenly “child protection” is defined.
Cookies are still cookies, no matter what you say about them
Mom instructed me that if you can’t say anything nice, to not say anything at all. But at least one corollary just doesn’t hold up, as exemplified by an ad for cookies that Dr. Yoni Freedhoff highlighted on his blog.
Taco Bell peddles crap, as usual
When I saw the tweet a few mornings ago that Taco Bell would offer healthier fare, I RT’ed in a knee-jerk way, celebrating it and even claiming it as progress against the flood of food-like substances.
In a window-dressing sort of way, it was progress. Taco Bell puts sugar in its meat and is the contemptible promoter of “fourth meal,” so even if they're only flapping their gums about healthy food, it acknowledges that not everyone wants to eat total crap.
Against obesity, not obese people
I used to skewer the brazen flaks at the Center for Consumer Freedom a lot more than I do now — or perhaps I just think that's true because of all the times I feel moved to expose their flabby logic, and then allow my cooler self to prevail. How many times can I link to an organ I want to disappear before I realize I'm making them more visible?
Front-of-package labeling: Barely worth the bother
Friday, I argued against soda-tax proposals because I don’t see how proponents could win a high-enough tax to affect consumer behavior, which should be their only justification. And while weaker versions that were doomed to failure were being tried, industry would use them as justification to not try other measures.
For friends of the apple, a must-read
In my waning days as an editor at the Hartford Courant in 1993, I was invited into the uber-geeky, somehow uber-cool Les Amies du Pomme (that's French, and I'm not, so I'm sure at least part of that is wrong). It was a cabal of nature-loving colleagues who would buy heirloom apples from rural Connecticut roadside stands and bring them to our private sampling table in the break room.
Tired of asking for stuff that won't work
Sorry, but I just don’t believe in them. Not penny-per-ounce soda taxes, not front-of-nutrition labeling, not vague industry pledges to make their food healthier ... at some specified time far enough into the future that everyone will have forgotten.
Take refuge in the truth instead of taking offense
There’s a saying at the poker table that “cards speak.” Doesn’t matter what anyone thought was there; only the facts matter. I recalled the aphorism while reacting to this tiny tempest on HuffPost Women:
Woeful misunderstanding of food, addiction
Over at medicaldaily.com, the writer Evan Winchester shows severe gaps in his understanding of the food experience of tens of millions of Americans in his April 22 piece, "Is Food Addiction a Real Eating Disorder?"
I was moved by his piece to offer three points of rebuttal, which I then decided to expand on and share beyond just the readers of his post. I hope the context will be sufficient...
Correlation isn't causality, but it's enough to act
I often score the ugly mouthpieces of Big Food for faulty logic, especially when they recast reasonable positions as absolutes, so they can then “prove” their falsity. (Example: “There is no evidence that sugary soda is the sole cause of obesity, so soda taxes or other curbs are unreasonable.” Except, no one (except them) says it’s the sole cause. Just that it’s an egregious, unredeemable cause, and therefore a good place to begin attacking the obesity problem.)
Another take on the Coca Cola polar bear
I'm a little dismayed to say that I don't know how to use the coding provided to embed this graphic, which is why not all of it is viewable. But if you mouse over it, you'll see a button to enlarge it, which you'd want to do to read all the text anyway.
Big Soda's shill grasps at scientific straws
One of the tactics that Big Food's paid apologists deploy is class warfare. The pointy-headed, Ivy League liberals conspire with parentally support Berkeley students to take away gosh-darn good eatin' from simple folks like us.
Soda isn't the sole cause, but it's a great place to start
Note to devious mouthpieces of Big Food ("Always with the negative waves, man."):
Something needn't the sole cause of a problem to be a cause of a problem. So when you fault any attempt to curb consumption of sugary sodas because soda isn't the sole cause of obesity, you're just obscuring the truth.
No, sugary soda is not solely responsible. The problem and its contributors are varied, confusing, and sometimes conflicting.
Buried under mountains of sugar
The onslaught of sugar in the American diet and its effect on our ability to sense sweetness — and other outcomes — is the subject of this speech I gave to my Toastmasters club last week. The assignment was to present a researched and sourced contention.
Please love and share!
Just because we can, should we?
I was reading a lengthy-but-completely-on-target article in the British newspaper The Telegraph on sugar dependence — boy, the Brits are much more on top of this topic than American media is — when I noticed this "top stories" box at its bottom.
Sex and food, yes, but the last entry is what moved me to share it.
"Low sugar hot fudge sauce" exemplifies what I consider some of the most pernicious threads of modern humanity: