voyhere.com

Everyone should see this film. Take the red pill, and pass it to everyone you know.

Link

This is part of a BBC series called The Truth about Food. It’s a bit cheeky, but informative, mildly entertaining, and potentially inspirational for eating healthier.

This is from 2 years ago, but it remains highly relevant today.

If you need convincing that organic food is worth your extra $, these sites should make for some interesting reading.  Personally I see it as too scary, and too much work, so I’ll just keep buying organic when I can.  See also the lists of which 12 foods you really should buy organic, and 12 which you don’t as much need to.  Nowadays my ‘junk food’ intake consists of an occasional Subway sandwich, toasted, on wheat, with chicken/turkey, pepperjack, and the works.  Which, upon further investigation, may be worse than I thought.

What’s on my Food?

Pesticide Action Network – Pesticide Database

Food Additives ~ CSPI’s Food Safety

Foods to always buy organic (aka Dirty Dozen)  -  Foods you don’t need to buy organic

Subway ingredients list

Just learned about this site iHerb.com.  No it’s not just herbs, they have all kinds of supplements, health care products, toiletries, etc.  Good deals, check em out.  Their prices on some stuff pretty much blows away anywhere else.  Free shipping >$40, otherwise a $4 flat rate UPS ground.

Deals I especially recommend (big bottle=great deal):
SweetLeaf Stevia extract. It’s alcohol-free unlike most other stevia extracts. 0 cals, no glycemic, natural sweetener. Use it in tea, smoothies, cooking, whatever.
Singing Dog Organic Vanilla Extract: This price is unreal.  I paid this much for a tiny bottle of it at the grocery store.  Good stuff, I like to use it in my morning banana cacao sorbet concoction.
Dr. Bronner’s Almond 18in1 Soap: This soap is pretty amazing. I’ve only recently got into it, but I guess it can be used for all kinds of things, even in the dishwasher or clothes washer.  Little bit goes a long way. The almond scent is pretty delicious.
Earthrise Spirulina: I can’t speak for this product as I haven’t used it yet, but the price is very hot. Spirulina has many purported health benefits, it can be sprinkled on a salad or used in a smoothie.

Use Coupon Code GOT930 for $5 off:
iHerb.com

Some vids about just how terrible trans fats, MSG, and aspartame are.  So much evidence is known of how bad they are, yet they’re all still legal.  The whole of it just speaks to how sketchy the system is, and how we should be so wary of anything processed or artificial lest find ourselves guinea pigs of the FDA.  Not just with foods either but all kinds of chemicals that we are poisoning the earth with.

Trans fats: The scary thing about trans fats is that even if it says 0g on the label, the FDA allows it to be up to 0.4g and it’ll be rounded down to 0 for the label.  You very rarely see anything containing any grams of trans fat according to the label, but I’d be willing to bet that tons of products have it snuck in there and they get to round down to 0.  They probably lower the serving size to accomplish this too.  A person could eat 6 servings of such things in a day, that could be over 2g of trans fats all the while the label said 0.  Again it could also come at a restaurant and you’d never know it.  “hydrogenated” or “partially hydrogenated” oils.  Avoid them!  It’s a shame that whole cities (like NYC back in 2006) place bans before the FDA even thinks of it.

MSG: The scary thing about MSG (other than of course how bad it is for you) is how it’s disguised so innocuously as other things in ingredient lists.  Like “hydrolyzed vegetable protein”, “autolyzed yeast”, “hydrolyzed yeast”, “yeast extract”, “soy extract”, “protein isolate”, even just as “spices”, or “natural flavorings”.  Be deligent with your label reading, or better yet avoid that processed crap all together.  But it’s ALSO served up in restaurants, you gotta be diligent.

(watch parts 2a, 2b, 3, 4)

Aspartame:  This vid series is called Aspartame and MSG are Poisoning Us, but it’s really just about aspartame and how it causes brain tumors and various other things.  It’s kinda long but near the end is a pretty sad story about how a woman was convicted for poisoning her husband who died of methanol poisoning, the actual suspicion being that it was from the component of aspartame.  Stevia gets mentioned in the credits; it’s a joke how aspartame is still approved for food use but stevia isn’t.

(watch parts 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9)

Or this 60 Minutes piece which kind of sums up the above aspartame material in 10 minutes.

If you are interested in keeping track of your caloric and/or nutrient intake for the purposes of improving health or losing/gaining weight, I recommend taking CRON-o-meter for a spin.  It is free open source software for Windows, Mac, or Linux.  You input each item you eat and it tallies all the nutritional data for you.  You may find this too tedious to be doing long-term, but I recommend doing it for a few days or a week to see how some of the numbers look, you may be surprised at the results.  You can run a report which will show you daily averages.  It’s also very informative in that you can see the nutrient breakdowns of various foods, and learn to eat more of certain things if your diet lacks in certain nutrients.

It has a pretty large database of foods, but if you don’t find something, you can also add the food manually.  Keep in mind that if the food is not in the database, it may be a sign that you shouldn’t be eating it (i.e. processed crap).

You can also group a set of foods into a custom recipe for ease of adding later (but be aware that if you alter the recipe later it alters it in your previous days also).

You can alter your nutrient goals if you don’t like the predetermined RDA’s for you.  (Some RDA’s are BS, as influenced by the meat and dairy industries.  For instance the protein and calcium recommendations are too high in my opinion.)  It will show you what proportion of your calories come from Protein/Carbs/Fat.  You can alter this target ratio.  You can track your weight or other parameters on the Biomarkers tab and use it to graph them over time.  Remember: to lose a sustainable pound per week of fat, shoot for a daily 500 calorie deficit.

There are on-line solutions for this kind of thing as well, namely fitday.com and nutridiary.com, which I admittedly have not tried.  I like CRON-o-meter because it’s light, snappy, simple, powerful.  I don’t feel the need for any extra functionality.

Remember it’s best to eat whole fresh ripe raw organic fruits and vegetables, and not rely on supplements.  It’s best to avoid refined sugars and starches, processed foods, and dairy.

http://spaz.ca/cronometer/

This is a French documentary entitled The World According to Monsanto. It reveals how “the gigantic bio-tech corporation Monsanto is threatening to destroy the agricultural biodiversity which has served mankind for thousands of years.” Please watch the whole thing, and pass it on. And just say NO to GMO. Trouble is that Monsanto fought hard so that GM products don’t have to be labeled as such, so the only reliable way to know your food is GMO-free is to buy organic.

Support local farmers at farmer’s markets, join a CSA, start a garden. Stop drinking milk, cut way back on or eliminate your red meat intake, and stop being so fat. Wake up America!

Morgan Spurlock’s 2004 classic Super Size Me is up on Hulu for free right now.  In it he eats McDonalds three meals a day for 30 days. The experiment is interspersed with tons of shocking documentary bits highlighting the growing obesity epidemic in America. It’s a must watch if you haven’t, and probably worth a re-watch if you have.   Click here to go to the Hulu page, where it’s a little bigger, you can click HD, lower the lights, pop out, whatever.  Love you, Hulu!

edit: it’s now up on YouTube as well:

There’s a bill (H.R. 875) being moved swiftly in Congress right now about increasing food standards. But there are many who fear it could mean major problems for small organic farms, farmers markets, even your own backyard garden.  The one in the Senate is S. 425.  Read more for yourself, and call (202)-224-3121 or otherwise let your Congressman know you don’t like it. Contact the House Committee on Energy Commerce and House Committee of Agriculture.  Do this too.

H.R. 875 entirety and S. 425 entirety (www.govtrack.us)

Change We Can Believe In: How About the End of Farmers Markets? Say Hello to H.R. 875: Food Safetly Modernization Act of 2009

Stop Federal Takeover of Food Regulation in H.R. 875

Please Stop H.R. 875 and S 425 in their current form

HR 875: The End of Organic Farming?

Scary videos after the jump.
Read more »

Michael Pollan, author of In Defense of Food and The Omnivore’s Dilemma, stopped by the Google headquarters in California last year and delivered this talk.

See also my earlier post featuring an interview with this man.

(see other posts featuring Michael Pollan)

Another MUST SEE food industry doom-n-gloom documentary. It’s a little depressing, but there is some tunnel light in the last part. Buy organic!

edit2: here it is on Hulu.

Parts 2-9 after the jump Edit1: Here is only the first part remaining on youtube.. the pirated one got pulled.  buy the dvd or see it elsewhere but watch it!

More from my health/food “series”.  A powerful Peter Jennings piece on the nasty side of the American food industry. These phenomenon are now also creeping into the rest of world as its growing middle class starts eating more of a Western diet.

Part 1:

(Watch parts 2-5 after the jump..)

Read more »

Yes this guy looks slightly goofy but don’t let that put you off, this site rules.  If you’ve been following along with my food posts, you’ll know I’m on a bit of a health kick.   This site is a little wonky to navigate, but it’s been a sweet resource for me lately, particularly their list of:

World’s Healthiest Foods
and
Essential Nutrients.

Go there and be schooled.  Not sure about their book but FYI it’s a fair bit cheaper on amazon.

Link to whfoods.com

This is an interesting documentary about how a healthy diet is both the prevention and cure to most modern disease, and the medical profession and pharmaceutical companies don’t want you to know it.  It’s a bootleg, some guy filmed his TV screen.  Find parts 2-9 here.  Or better yet don’t be a pirate and go to foodmatters.tv and buy the DVD.