High Treason

When I was a kid, we ate the same basic meals all the time. I was a picky eater, but my mom was good in the kitchen and she taught me how to cook at an early age.

I left home when I was 14 (There's a point to all this reminiscing, I'm getting there.) and had to learn to eat slightly different foods, but basically I was the cook so I could keep making the same things as I grew up with.

When I was in my early 20's I was living very close to my mom again, and we started having Sunday dinners together. My mom made a cabbage stew which I had always loved, so I asked her to make it one week.

Imagine my shock and horror when I took a big bite and it tasted drastically different than my memory! It wasn't what I had expected at all. While I wasn't mad, I did find myself upset, and I felt a little betrayed. How could she ruin it like that?

Turns out she had learned from her previous husband to add a can of V-8 juice to the recipe. Well, my tender taste buds thought that was a really bad idea. I don't think I ate any of the offending stew.

Why would I feel betrayed? I've been thinking about it. We form memories and attachments to certain smells and tastes. Taste and smell seem to get locked in.

For example, I went outside yesterday and that distinctive spring rain smell was in the air. You probably know it. It's really clean and fresh. I used to think it was ozone but I heard on The Naked Scientists that it's actually spores released by the rain into the air. That smell makes me feel optimistic and happy, maybe because Spring is my favorite time of year.

It seems that my mood can be changed by what is in the air, especially when it involves food. If it evokes good memories, like pumpkin pie or cookies baking in the oven, it's just the best thing ever. I guess that's what people call Comfort Food -  stuff that evokes good memories.

I thought it was interesting that it seemed like high treason for my mom to just change her age old recipes. We had many discussions after that regarding food. I wanted to make sure she would make her pumpkin pies exactly like she used to, or not put anything funny in the mashed potatoes.

Bless her heart, she never tried to make the cabbage stew with V-8 juice again, when I was there. Now I live far away again, but every holiday season, I make sure to ask her how she is making the sweet potatoes. I don't tolerate insurrection lightly!

Do you have any foods that you need and expect to taste a certain way, especially if made by your mother/father/grandmother/etc? Has a parental figure ever changed the way they made a food suddenly? If so, did you find it discomfiting? Or am I just overly sensitive?

I'm Curious!

The other day I shared my favorite podcasts, one of which was the SGU. Well, I just found a new one! From Skepchick.org with Rebecca Watson comes a new podcast called Curiosity Aroused. There's one episode up now which is about calorie restriction for long life. The episode is about 20 minutes long and you can subscribe through iTunes.

In the first episode, they talk to Monica Reinagel who is pretty neat in her own right. She's a nutrition expert and through her short podcast and blog she helps weed through the hype and nonsense of nutrition. As a person who wonders what is fact and what is bullshit when it comes to food, diet and the like, it's very cool to find a resource for good information.

Here are her sites:

www.nutritiondata.com: her blog is on here along with a wealth of information.

http://nutritiondiva.quickanddirtytips.com/: Her podcasts are on here. If you go to listen or read and episode, you can then find the link to iTunes to subscribe and get them all. They are each about 5 minutes long.

Do you have any great resources for good nutrition and diet that are based in science and research? Please feel free to share! :)

Why Does God Hate Pigs?

More to the point, why do Jews and Muslims hate pigs, since god doesn't exist. But for the sake of argument, let's look at the bible and quran to see what they say about the other white meat.

Question: Are pigs native to the Middle East, then? If no decent jew or muslim could eat them, why were they raised and by whom?

God seems quite fickle about what were were to eat:

• Adam and Eve are supposed to eat a vegan diet: Genesis 1:29: And God said, Behold, I have given you every herb bearing seed, which is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree, in the which is the fruit of a tree yielding seed; to you it shall be for meat.


• Noah and his sons can eat any living thing, but they have to drain the blood first: Genesis 9:2-4: And the fear of you and the dread of you shall be upon every beast of the earth, and upon every fowl of the air, upon all that moveth upon the earth, and upon all the fishes of the sea; into your hand are they delivered. Every moving thing that liveth shall be meat for you; even as the green herb have I given you all things. But flesh with the life thereof, which is the blood thereof, shall ye not eat.

That didn't last long because in Deuteronomy and Leviticus he gets into all the things that are forbidden. Here I'll highlight the references to swine.

• Leviticus 11:7: And the swine, though he divide the hoof, and be clovenfooted, yet he cheweth not the cud; he is unclean to you.


• Deuteronomy 14:8: And the swine, because it divideth the hoof, yet cheweth not the cud, it is unclean unto you: ye shall not eat of their flesh, nor touch their dead carcase.

Delusions of Calories Dance In Our Heads

As a typical person trying to watch my weight, I count calories. Not obsessively, but I try to keep an eye on how much I eat. Like a lot of people, even though I watch what I eat, I'm still always fighting to not gain weight, and getting more frustrated all the time.

New Scientist put together a 3 page article called The Calorie Delusion: Why food labels are wrong today and I wanted to share it with you. Here are the main points that I got out of it:

• Basically, it's good to balance calories in and calories out to maintain your weight. Common sense, right?


• Some food labels over or underestimate how much energy your body will get from a food by as much as 25%


• Eat a meager 20 kcal a day more than you need and you'll gain about a kilogram - or about 2.2 lbs - of fat per year


• Wilbur Atwater, a chemist, came up with how to calculate energy in food in the late 19th century, and we still use that system today
  
  
  
  • The Atwater method determines the energy content of food through incineration, not digestion
  
  
  
  


• Dietary Fiber: provides energy for gut microbes (which is good), is more resistant to mechanical and chemical digestion than other kinds of carbs, and therefore gives us lower energy than previously thought  (The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, vol 51, p 617)


• Protein also apparently takes more energy to convert to amino acids than previously thought (British Journal of Nutrition, vol 85, p 271)


• Softer foods lowers the energy cost of digestion! Food texture can greatly affect weight gain
  
  
  
  • A 2003 study in Japan found that feeding one group of rats hard pellets and the other group soft pellets (same flavor and calorie content), after 22 weeks the rats on the softer food were obese with more abdominal fat (Journal of Dental Research, vol 82, p 491)
  
  
  • A similar study in people had similar results: women who ate the hardest foods had significantly slimmer waistlines than those who ate the softest foods (American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, vol 86, p206)
  
  
  
  


• The Atwater system assumes that the proportion of food that doesn't get digested is more or less constant, around 10%, but actually we've known for the last 60 years that this isn't the case
  
  
  
  • So while processed foods like white flour and white sugar are able to be almost completely converted to energy in the body, complex carbohydrates like course-ground wheat flour will only give up about 30%