everyonce in a while

I actually read something that makes me want to share with everyone.

Yeah. So I found one. The headline that got me to click was "How fat saves lives." It isn't a short read. But then again it is in an Ivy League Alumni magazine, a place that by design or demand often has long, in-depth and complete articles. I think there's a bit of overlap in those three adjectives, no?

despite my fumbling with the written word, that article is great. Now bittman and others have been pushing the no meat thing. CCC pushes back with his woody for the paleo fad. And then you have the folks saying gluten protein is like sand paper to your guts and screws you up even if you don't have celiac's.

There is information, mostly opinion sadly, proliferating itself supporting all aspects of what we should eat, shouldn't eat, when we should eat, how we should cook things (or not cook them).

My first nugget that sucked me further in was this:

Flynn, a nutritionist who studies the relationship between diet and disease, believes strongly that most physicians are poorly equipped to give their patients nutritional advice or to help them lose weight.

Bombshell.

Physicians seem to primarily spend their whole time as med students focused on diagnosis and treatment of acute medical issues. Common chronic issues become not so much how to prevent them and what people really should do and how they should fix them but more how to manage these. Type II diabetes for example. Treatment vs cure. Type I could almost fall under the acute conditions because it is very specific, and the cause is something you can put a finger on. Type II not so much.

Food.

All comes back to food.

Last night, trying to wind down and fall asleep, I grabbed the latest issue of Gastronomica and read the article (a memoir) titled 'Bodily Souvenirs' by Alexis Schaitkin. It is a chronical of dealing with an intestinal parasite and reviewing the potential sources and all the food that was consumed that may have lead to the invasion.

Big clincher there for me, we are what we eat... the drugs that cleared out the parasite killed her appetite and as such it acted like a transition, a cleansing or a real manifestation of change from being made up of thai food to being back into USA food.

We are what we eat. Every word on the ingredient label you cannot pronounce becomes part of you. Do you want that all to be part of you?

back to the original article, the catalyst for this extra post today (one that actually gets a label for the first time in a long time), it is a pretty crazy low amount of "animal" protein as my friend Mark pointed out over in G+. Yes 6oz of poultry and 8 oz of seafood a week is not much. Hell how many people essentially eat that much every day? There is probably a balance somewhere between, but if you are looking for ways to reduce the food budget, or to make room for fancy organic fruits and veggies (in season or flown in from Chile), animal protein is a good place to cut back.

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