“Live Dirty, Eat Clean” is a popular contemporary mantra. People who live dirty make a concerted effort to increase the diversity of the microbes in their gut by using less household cleaning products and fewer antibiotics while exposing themselves to more microbes in their daily lives. Eating clean has many different connotations, but generally refers to eating more whole foods and avoiding “processed foods,” particularly … Continue reading How Big Food hides undesirable chemicals in its clean labels

Late last Fall, my wife pointed out an ad in the local paper about a subscription service for a veggie box to be delivered down the street each Wednesday. All the veggies would be fresh, organic and grown locally (one farm about 65 miles away by car). We decided to subscribe for the twenty-week period at a cost of a little less than $30.00 per … Continue reading Twenty weeks of fresh organic veggies

  Simon Kadwill-Kelly provides a unique view of the threat chemicals in our food pose in Chemicalism: 12 Steps to Being Free from Addiction to Artificial Chemicals Used in Processed Food and Drinks . His mission in life is to maintain a healthy lifestyle by eating high nutrition foods and avoiding artificial chemicals. To this end he drinks only purified water and prepares frozen meals … Continue reading Chemicalism by Simon Kadwill-Kelly

I am changing the organizational structure of this blog. To this point I have attempted to produce one posting a week. The topics have been primarily related to a nutritional and health perspective without a major theme from week to week. Once a month I have provided a book review. In the coming months I will post my book review early in the month, and … Continue reading Back to the future: An update on sugar, black and brown food, and soda taxes

In addition to containing too much sugar, many processed foods contain too much salt, or, more appropriately, too much sodium. Sodium is an essential mineral. Sodium chloride is particularly effective as a preservative, a seasoning agent and a flavor enhancer. Among the essential minerals the Daily Value (DV) that appears on the Nutrition Facts statement is the upper limit of what we should consume. For … Continue reading Too Much Salt

I can’t recall a time in my life when sugar was considered a healthy ingredient. Throughout my lifetime I have heard that we are consuming too much sugar with refined sugar being the worst! It seems now, however, that the volume of criticism about sugar has been raised and is being addressed in the US Dietary Guidelines and by the World Health Organization. As I … Continue reading My personal journey with sugar

Gary Taubes hypothesis in the Case Against Sugar is simple and straightforward: Sugar is toxic and the primary cause of diabetes and obesity. He readily acknowledges that scientific research in the area of nutrition is complex and does not easily result in clear-cut answers. As a result he believes that such a hypothesis can neither be proved nor disproved. He does accuse nutrition research, however, … Continue reading The Case Against Sugar by Gary Taubes

When I was young, one of my favorite bedtime stories was Goldilocks and the Three Bears. Apparently there are several versions of the story that date back to the 19th Century, but the one I remember was of a little girl, Goldilocks, who enters the house of the three bears and finds the freshly prepared porridge in one bowl to be too hot, one to … Continue reading Nutrient content and the Goldilocks effect

          Last week I wrote about real foods and edible, foodlike substances. Now I turn to the topic of superfoods. We are now not only encouraged to avoid the foodlike substances, we should make sure the foods we are about to consume are real, and we would be better off if we get more than our share of superfoods. David Wolfe defines … Continue reading Superfoods—miraculous or overhyped?

Which of these products are real and which are mere foodlike substances? We now live in the era of fake news. Even before being warned about consuming fake news, we were warned about consuming fake foods. Daily we are bombarded by food evangelists1 who are not shy about telling us which foods are real and which ones are not real. Obviously we are not real … Continue reading Are we eating real food or edible, foodlike substances?