Eating Habits

The interior aisles of the supermarket scare Michael Pollen. That's where the "new" food resides. Processed versions of what humans used to eat--Splenda with fiber, Froot Loops (now a Smart Choice!), frozen meals that are more chemicals than calories.

Since we clearly can no longer count on manufacturers having our best interest or our health at heart, Pollan turned instead to the "tribe." In an article in the New York Times Pollan writes:

I was completely shocked and horrified when I came across an article recently in BBC News, stating some parents are attributing their children's dietary foibles to an eating disorder, rather than simply bad behavior.

In the interview, Dr Su Laurent discusses how she spends a significant amount of her clinical time seeing healthy young children whose parents are convinced their child has something seriously wrong with them.

According to a poll from Parade magazine - the family dinner together is still happening.

However just one out of four families eats together every night.

Buffets and other social functions can be trying when you want to eat healthy. It pays to have a strategy planned well in advance.

Are you a refrigerator raider? Do you raid your fridge numerous times throughout the days, and even more times in the evening and night?

Nothing takes away the pleasure of food, quicker than the feeling of guilt. Guilt is the “buzz-kill” of all disobedient activity.

But what if the feelings of guilt could be eliminated? What if consumption of your favorite food was no longer an act of disobedience?

One great tip I learned from reading French Women for All Seasons was the “half-trick.” Famous author, Mireille Guiliano, first became known through her book, French Women Don’t Get Fat. Her latest book provides more insights and numerous recipes for healthy French cuisines.

Hungry Planet is a book by photographer Peter Menzel and journalist Faith D'Aluisio. The book explores what families eat in a week and covers 30 families in 24 countries. Each family was asked to purchase--at the authors' expense--a typical week's groceries, which were artfully arrayed--whether sacks of grain and potatoes and overripe bananas, or rows of packaged cereals, sodas and take-out pizzas--for a full-page family portrait.

A study currently underway in Sweden is remarkably similar to Morgan Spurlock's SuperSize Me.

Healthy, normal weight students in their early 20s have been consuming as much as 6,000 calories per day, while associate professor Fredrik Nyström tracks their health.

What exactly does it mean to "eat healthy"? Does anyone really know? A recent telephone survey of 11,000 people found that more than three-quarters of obese people say they have healthy eating habits.

Constant travel makes it very tough to eat right and continue with an exercise program. USA Today looks at a new book from Peter Greenberg called "The Traveler's Diet : Eating Right and Staying Fit on the Road"

83 per cent of female college students (aged 18-24) diet... no matter how much they weigh. The research appears in the Nutrition Journal (abstract here).

The chief researcher acknowledges that the figure is up from 70% (in previous research) - but that may be due to how they classify dieting.

Eating often is the key to hunger management, however many weight loss regimes advocate a cut-off time for eating. WebMD reports on a study that looks at this very issue. Are meals eaten late at night more fattening than those eaten in the day? "The outcome was, there was no difference at all," Cameron tells WebMD. "Whether they eat by day or by night, monkeys have an equal probability of gaining weight. So weight gain depends on how many calories we eat, and not when we eat them."