Archive for the ‘Diet’ Category

The Brutally Honest Coca-Cola Commercial You'll Never See On The Air

Posted: February 27, 2013 in Diet, Eating, Food, Food Contamination, Uncategorized
0

Reblogged from digger666:

The Brutally Honest Coca-Cola Commercial You'll Never See On The Air.  Reblogged from Upworthy, 26 February 2013

'Nuff said...

There Is No Biological Reason to Eat Three Meals a Day — So Why Do We Do it?

Posted: September 26, 2011 in Diet, Eating, Fasting, Food, Lifestyle
Tags: , , , , ,
0

There Is No Biological Reason to Eat Three Meals a Day — So Why Do We Do
It?
For most of history, meals were very variable.
September 23, 2011  |
 We grew up believing in three meals a day.

When we skip meals, eat extra meals or subvert paradigms — spaghetti
breakfasts, pancake suppers — we feel naughty, edgy and criminal. “Three meals
a day” resonates like a Bible phrase.

But it’s a cultural construct.

People around the world, even in the West, have not always eaten three
squares. The three-meals model is a fairly recent convention, which is now being
eclipsed as, like everything else, eating becomes a highly personalized matter
of choice. What and when and how frequently we eat is driven less and less by
the choices of our families, coworkers and others, and more and more by impulse,
personal taste and favorite nutrition memes, and marketing schemes such as Taco
Bell’s promotion of late-night
eating known as “Fourthmeal: the Meal Between Dinner & Breakfast.” Selecting
how and when we eat is like loading our iPods.

A torrent of new studies explores the health effects of eating three squares.
Their findings are far from conclusive. A US Department of Agriculture study
found that eating just one large meal a day versus three normal-sized meals
lowers weight and body fat but raises blood pressure; three meals per day lowers
blood pressure. A National Institute
on Aging study found that eating one large meal a day rather than three
raises insulin resistance and glucose intolerance: two key features of type-2
diabetes.

A University of Maastricht study found that eating at least four small meals
daily reduces obesity risk by 45 percent. This Dutch study also found that
people who skip breakfast are five times as likely to become obese as regular
breakfasters. Yet a University of Ottawa study found that eating many small
meals doesn’t promote weight loss. So did a French National Center for
Scientific Research study, which trashed grazing: “Epidemiological studies which
have suggested that nibbling is associated with leanness are extremely
vulnerable to methodological errors,” its authors warn.

A UC Berkeley study
found that “alternate-day fasting” — feasting one day, fasting the next, ad
infinitum — might decrease the risk of heart disease and cancer.

Researching the effects of meal frequency is notoriously tricky, because it
involves so many variables: nutritional content, time of day, exercise,
genetics. So the scientific jury is still out.

“There is no biological reason for eating three meals a day,” says Yale
University history professor Paul Freedman, editor of Food: The History of
Taste (University of California Press, 2007).

The number of meals eaten per day, along with the standard hour and fare for
each, “are cultural patterns no different from how close you stand when talking
to people or what you do with your body as you speak. Human beings are
comfortable with patterns because they’re predictable. We’ve become comfortable
with the idea of three meals. On the other hand, our schedules and our desires
are subverting that idea more and more every day,” Freedman says.

For most of history, meals were very variable. A medieval northern European
peasant “would start his morning with ale or bread or both, then bring some sort
of food out into the fields and have a large meal sometime in the afternoon,”
Freedman says. “He might have what he called ‘dinner’ at 2 in the afternoon or 6
in the evening, or later” — depending on his work, the season and other
factors.

“He wouldn’t have a large evening meal. He would just grab something small
and quick. Dinner back then tended not to be as distinct as it has become in the
last two centuries.”

And it tended to be eaten in daylight — not because eating earlier was
considered healthier, but because cooking, consuming and cleaning up is
difficult in the dark or by firelight.

“People who were not rich tried to get all their meals eaten before dark.
After electricity was discovered, initially only the rich could afford it,”
Freedman says. “From that point onward, one mark of being rich became how late
you ate. Eating way after dark because you could afford electric lights was a
mark of high status, urbanity and class.”

Eating late — or at random times, or more or less than thrice daily — also
reflects one’s distance from the two main forces that standardized three squares
in America: conventional work schedules and traditional family life.

Throughout most of the 20th century, most workers could eat only at specific
times.

“When that factory whistle blew at five o’clock, it was time to go home and
be fed. But now all kinds of Americans are eating later and later because they
work longer hours than they used to, or because their hours are now more
flexible. We are very much losing the three-meals-a-day model, thanks to grazing
and thanks to different members of a household having different schedules, and
to the fact that the kids might not want to eat what their parents are
eating.”

The idea of children being allowed to choose their own meals and mealtimes
would have been shocking a few decades ago, when “Eat what’s on your plate” and
“Eat your peas or no dessert” were family dinner-table mantras. But the family
dinner table is verging on the obsolescent. Which came first: the dissolution of
the standard nuclear family or the dissolution of three meals a day?

“American parents have a particular kind of guilt about the disappearance of
family meals,” Freedman says. Perhaps for good reason: A recent University of
Minnesota study found that habitual shared family meals improve nutrition,
academic performance and interpersonal skills and reduce the risk of eating
disorders.

Electronic devices are also undermining the three-meals model. They’re at
once entertainment centers, workspaces and almost-human companions. Their
portability and nonstop availability let us eat whenever we like without having
to stop working, without having to be bored, and without having to feel that we
are eating alone.

“The disappearance of family meals antedates the invention of hand-held
electronic devices,” Freedman says. “It was not initiated by them, but it is
exacerbated by them. These days, even if everyone’s sitting around a table
together, it’s not clear that they’re all paying attention.”

The three-meals model is also being fought by the food industry.

“The food industry wants you to buy more food,” thus it urges us to eat as
much and as often as possible. It’s an easy sell, “because Americans have always
liked snacks.”

A snack boom began in the mid-20th century and hasn’t stopped. Thriving
through a wrecked economy, the global snack
industry is predicted to be worth $330 billion by 2015. In the US alone,
retail sales of packaged snacks increased from $56 billion to $64 billion
between 2006 and 2010, and are expected
to reach $77 billion by 2015.

The blurred borderline between snacks and meals has changed everything.

“The long-term effect is that any time of day has become a time to eat. The
decline of three meals a day and the rise of snacks are related, although I
wouldn’t say there’s a direct causal relationship,” Freedman says.

Another food-industry strategy is the creation of food niches, based on age,
ethnicity, gender, lifestyle and locale. A few decades ago, everyone ate the
same foods.

“But now there’s kid food, there’s teenager food and there’s grownup food, so
some parents end up buying three times as much food” as their own parents
did.

“They’re being manipulated into it, guilted into thinking: I’m so busy all
week and I have so little quality time with my kids that the least I can do for
them is let them eat as they like rather than making a stand and insisting that
we all eat the same thing together.”

Related articles

Why ‘good’ sugar is the secret to a slim figure

Posted: September 26, 2011 in Bad Sugar, Brain, Diet, Dieting, Good Sugar, Slimming, Vegetables, Weight, Weight Loss
Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
0

Why ‘good’ sugar is the secret to a slim figure

Eating fresh fruit and vegetables helps people resist the temptation of  waist-expanding treats, scientists have found.

Fruit

‘Good’ carbs, such as fresh fruit and vegetables, can help in the battle with obesity
Nick Collins

By , Science Correspondent

12:19AM BST 20 Sep 2011

When our supplies of glucose – found in carbohydrates – drop we begin to lose   our ability to control desire, while our urge to eat increases.

The lack of glucose – which is used to power the brain – makes us helpless against the urge to reach for high-calorie foods, researchers said.

Obese people are particularly vulnerable, with even the slightest drop in   glucose prompting irresistible cravings for carbohydrates, from which we get   most of our sugar.

These can be “good” carbs, such as fresh fruit and vegetables, brown   rice and pasta and wholemeal bread, or “bad” varieties which   include white bread and sugar, fizzy drinks, cakes, crisps and other packet   snacks.

Making sure the brain’s glucose levels do not drop could be the secret to   staying slim, a study published in the Journal of Clinical Investigation   suggested.

Prof Rajita Sinha, of Yale University in America, said: “The key seems to   be eating healthy foods that maintain glucose levels.

“The brain needs its food.”

Volunteers were given injections of glucose and their brains were scanned   while they were shown pictures of high and low calorie foods, as well as   other objects.

When glucose levels were lower, two areas of the brain which regulate pleasure prompted the desire to eat while the prefrontal cortex – which gives us self-control – lost its ability to control the impulses.

Related articles