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Yet another post on my series on Food. This time it’s a video by Mark Bittman who talks about our food system, what we’ve lost and what we should be doing. (I love his focus on real food – not most of the imitation food we have today.)
Original Post. Licensed as CC-BY-NC-ND.
(Thanks to Deb for finding this!)
Recently, I’ve been doing some posts on food. This is another one.
A friend of mine recently posted a link to a pretty interesting article about an animal model meant to observe the effects of artificial sweeteners on rats. Here’s the money quote:
Even though the saccharin-sweetened yogurt group actually got fewer calories from their yogurt, they gained more weight than the group fed yogurt sweetened with glucose (Swithers & Davidson, 2008; Swithers, Baker, & Davidson, 2009). At the end of 5 weeks of study, the saccharin-fed rats had also gotten significantly fatter than the glucose-fed rats.
With my own body I know that there is some kind of expectation created by texture and flavor when you’re eating a specific food. In my experience, eating artificial sweeteners often makes me hungrier. And after eating a relatively natural diet based on foods that I can recognize, eating something that includes processed ingredients and artificial sweeteners is a shocking experience once I’ve consumed it. I can tell my body doesn’t really know how to react.
If this is something that interests you I also strongly suggest watching the video in my post on sugar by Dr. Robert Lustig as well as the video of Michael Pollan speaking at the Long Now Foundation. These are both long attention span posts, but they are worth your time to understand the world of food we live in.
(I’m aware that there’s some Confirmation Bias in my selection here, but evidence does seem to be aligning with my own personal experience, the experiences of my peers and large groups of people as well – see the videos for more information on the effects of sugar and processed foods.)
I’ve been posting recently about food and nutrition and I feel like the information in this video was a huge piece that I was missing.
In this video, Dr. Robert Lustig goes through the science behind how sugar and its component parts, glucose and fructose, are processed in the body and what that means for everything we know about the US’s (and the world’s, for that matter) ever growing waistline. This talk shows why all calories are not created equal.
Like many good things in this world, it’s a long story, packed with information so you will have to put aside time to absorb it. But it’s worth your time if you ever wanted to understand why sugar makes you feel the way that it does and why it specifically results in weight gain vs. other types of carbohydrates, fats or protein.
Watch it on YouTube if you don’t see a video above. Licensed as CC-BY-NC-ND.
Today is Thanksgiving in the United States. A day where we say thanks for all of the good things that we’ve been lucky enough to be graced with over the last year.
It’s also a day that we eat a lot of food.
Earlier today I watched this talk on Deep Agriculture given by Michael Pollan given at The Long Now foundation. He’s best known for his books which include The Omnivore’s Dilemma. This video is long, but worth listening to. It contains some absolutely fascinating anecdotes about our food system today and feels about right for the day when we celebrate the harvest.
Enjoy!
Michael Pollan: “Deep Agriculture”. Available under BY-NC-SA, copyright The Long Now Foundation.
interesting stuff