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Mar. 6th, 2013
Reading Meme
Mar. 6th, 2013 01:08 pmSeen all over my flist :
What I just finished reading
Warm Bodies by Isaac Marion
Boy meets girl. Boy is eaten by Zombie. Zombie gets boy's memories which reawaken his humanity. Zombie protects boy's girl and falls in love with girl. Humans are wigged out. And the whole thing is far more existential and enjoyable than it sounds. Honest.
Fat Chance by Robert Lustig
Written by a Pediatric Endocrinologist and contributing board member of the American Heart Association regarding the likely causes of the obesity epidemic which, in his estimation, boils down to processed foods that have:
1) Ever increasing amounts of sugar (be it sugar, fructose, sucrose, 'condensed fruit juice' [Sounds like fruit -- it's not. It's just processed sugar that originated from pears and apples rather than sugar cane or beets, but chemically it's the exact same thing. There is absolutely nothing left from the fruit but the sugar], caramel, dextrose, galactose, or high fructose corn syrup. They're all more or less the same)
2) the systematic replacement of omega-3 fats with more durable (but worse for you) industrialized fats (isolated soy protein/soybean oil does not occur in a digestible form in nature, and neither did corn oil or canola oil (aka rape seed oil) 100 years ago.) Omega-6 decoupled from Omega-3 also increases inflamation, which is a factor in heart disease.
3) the systematic removal of fiber (fiber spoils. Processed foods eliminate as much fiber as they can. And the post-production soluble fiber in 'fiber fortified' is not the same thing and does not function in the same way).
Then he delves into the regulatory capture of the FDA, USDA, and the Farm Bill / Farm Subsidies by big agri-business and the processed food corp giants.
Worth the read for the way he explains the science behind digestion, hormones, and weight. Not a diet book as the only dietary suggestion he makes in the book is to NEVER drink a sugared beverage with a meal (apparently, our bodies don't properly judge the sugar in liquid, so we're adding calories that in no way aid the satisfying of our hunger and may in fact increase hunger or at least speed how quickly you are hungry again).
What I'm reading now
Salt, Sugar, Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us by Michael Moss.
This one doesn't really examine why certain things are unhealthy for us (and is in fact a tad outdated on the science of fats) and is absolutely in no way a diet book. It's the chronicle of food industries in the 20th/21st century and how we've arrived at the current state of industrialized processed food stuffs. Lots of interesting anecdotes re: the Mad Men-like workings of food companies such as Coke, Kraft, Kellog's, General Foods, etc. Including many having been taken over by Big Tobacco in the 70s, 80s, and 90s with the resulting 'synergies' as the infrastructure of the tobacco industry began guiding the food companies.
Real Food by Nina Planck
She seems to have a rather odd fixation on raw milk, given that raw milk is not commercially available (commercially sold milk is pretty much REQUIRED to be pasteurized). I also tend to be a bit more wary of her science when she keeps quoting pre-WWII studies. Still, she has pretty much convinced me that when buying milk, I'm going to try to buy pastured cow milk (brands such as Organic Valley are always grass-fed cows). Other than that... I'm still waiting to go beyond the milk chapters. Less interesting than Fat Chance or Michael Pollan's In Defense of Food.
What I'm Reading Next
Don't know. Any recs?
What I just finished reading
Warm Bodies by Isaac Marion
Boy meets girl. Boy is eaten by Zombie. Zombie gets boy's memories which reawaken his humanity. Zombie protects boy's girl and falls in love with girl. Humans are wigged out. And the whole thing is far more existential and enjoyable than it sounds. Honest.
Fat Chance by Robert Lustig
Written by a Pediatric Endocrinologist and contributing board member of the American Heart Association regarding the likely causes of the obesity epidemic which, in his estimation, boils down to processed foods that have:
1) Ever increasing amounts of sugar (be it sugar, fructose, sucrose, 'condensed fruit juice' [Sounds like fruit -- it's not. It's just processed sugar that originated from pears and apples rather than sugar cane or beets, but chemically it's the exact same thing. There is absolutely nothing left from the fruit but the sugar], caramel, dextrose, galactose, or high fructose corn syrup. They're all more or less the same)
2) the systematic replacement of omega-3 fats with more durable (but worse for you) industrialized fats (isolated soy protein/soybean oil does not occur in a digestible form in nature, and neither did corn oil or canola oil (aka rape seed oil) 100 years ago.) Omega-6 decoupled from Omega-3 also increases inflamation, which is a factor in heart disease.
3) the systematic removal of fiber (fiber spoils. Processed foods eliminate as much fiber as they can. And the post-production soluble fiber in 'fiber fortified' is not the same thing and does not function in the same way).
Then he delves into the regulatory capture of the FDA, USDA, and the Farm Bill / Farm Subsidies by big agri-business and the processed food corp giants.
Worth the read for the way he explains the science behind digestion, hormones, and weight. Not a diet book as the only dietary suggestion he makes in the book is to NEVER drink a sugared beverage with a meal (apparently, our bodies don't properly judge the sugar in liquid, so we're adding calories that in no way aid the satisfying of our hunger and may in fact increase hunger or at least speed how quickly you are hungry again).
What I'm reading now
Salt, Sugar, Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us by Michael Moss.
This one doesn't really examine why certain things are unhealthy for us (and is in fact a tad outdated on the science of fats) and is absolutely in no way a diet book. It's the chronicle of food industries in the 20th/21st century and how we've arrived at the current state of industrialized processed food stuffs. Lots of interesting anecdotes re: the Mad Men-like workings of food companies such as Coke, Kraft, Kellog's, General Foods, etc. Including many having been taken over by Big Tobacco in the 70s, 80s, and 90s with the resulting 'synergies' as the infrastructure of the tobacco industry began guiding the food companies.
Real Food by Nina Planck
She seems to have a rather odd fixation on raw milk, given that raw milk is not commercially available (commercially sold milk is pretty much REQUIRED to be pasteurized). I also tend to be a bit more wary of her science when she keeps quoting pre-WWII studies. Still, she has pretty much convinced me that when buying milk, I'm going to try to buy pastured cow milk (brands such as Organic Valley are always grass-fed cows). Other than that... I'm still waiting to go beyond the milk chapters. Less interesting than Fat Chance or Michael Pollan's In Defense of Food.
What I'm Reading Next
Don't know. Any recs?