Honey On My Lips

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Hello, this is my body diary.
I'm trying to figure out what works best for me, and how to live sustainably in Metro Manila and everywhere else.
♥ Feanne

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April 9, 2013

Three years and three months of boycotting Mcdonald’s

I haven’t had Mcdonald’s since December 2009. Cool!

I know it’s just a small act by one person, and won’t really make a difference in the world. It’s more of a symbolic act, a starting point, and just a personal refusal to spend any more money on a huge fast food corporation that advertises to children and takes advantage of people who don’t know any better. They spend millions of dollars on research and marketing, and they deliberately use psychology, biology, and economics to get people to consume way more of unhealthy foods than they should. Their advertising even targets children. Mcdonald’s is not alone in this; fast food corporations in general are all guilty of this. In my opinion though Mcdonald’s is the worst— probably a personal bias stemming from the fact that they innovated supersizing to overcome people’s instinctive portion control. Michael Pollan wrote about that in his book The Omnivore’s Dilemma. In a more recent book, Salt Sugar Fat by Michael Moss, it is revealed how junk food companies use science to get us addicted to junk food… and perhaps more importantly, that junk food companies know exactly what they’re doing. I haven’t read the book yet but I really want to, based on this excerpt from NYTimes:

—- —- —-

The Extraordinary Science of Addictive Junk Food

I first met Moskowitz on a crisp day in the spring of 2010 at the Harvard Club in Midtown Manhattan. As we talked, he made clear that while he has worked on numerous projects aimed at creating more healthful foods and insists the industry could be doing far more to curb obesity, he had no qualms about his own pioneering work on discovering what industry insiders now regularly refer to as “the bliss point” or any of the other systems that helped food companies create the greatest amount of crave. “There’s no moral issue for me,” he said. “I did the best science I could. I was struggling to survive and didn’t have the luxury of being a moral creature. As a researcher, I was ahead of my time.”

Moskowitz’s path to mastering the bliss point began in earnest not at Harvard but a few months after graduation, 16 miles from Cambridge, in the town of Natick, where the U.S. Army hired him to work in its research labs. The military has long been in a peculiar bind when it comes to food: how to get soldiers to eat more rations when they are in the field. They know that over time, soldiers would gradually find their meals-ready-to-eat so boring that they would toss them away, half-eaten, and not get all the calories they needed. But what was causing this M.R.E.-fatigue was a mystery. “So I started asking soldiers how frequently they would like to eat this or that, trying to figure out which products they would find boring,” Moskowitz said. The answers he got were inconsistent. “They liked flavorful foods like turkey tetrazzini, but only at first; they quickly grew tired of them. On the other hand, mundane foods like white bread would never get them too excited, but they could eat lots and lots of it without feeling they’d had enough.”

This contradiction is known as “sensory-specific satiety.” In lay terms, it is the tendency for big, distinct flavors to overwhelm the brain, which responds by depressing your desire to have more. Sensory-specific satiety also became a guiding principle for the processed-food industry. The biggest hits — be they Coca-Cola or Doritos — owe their success to complex formulas that pique the taste buds enough to be alluring but don’t have a distinct, overriding single flavor that tells the brain to stop eating.

Read the whole story: The Extraordinary Science of Addictive Junk Food

—- —- —-

My boycott is unnecessary. I can probably still eat Mcdonald’s occasionally and it would be fine… But I don’t need to and I don’t want to. Also, I don’t push my boycott on other people and I don’t get mad at other people if they choose to eat Mcdonald’s. If I’m with people who want to eat at Mcdonald’s, I still go with them and just politely decline to eat. It’s really important to me that I don’t make other people feel uncomfortable about that, so I go to great lengths to let people know that yes, it’s really ok if you eat that burger in front of me. I’m going to continue with my boycott and will probably break it only if I’m very hungry and there are really no other options.

So… I can live without Mcdonald’s. I can probably live without a lot of those other junk foods! I started that boycott as an easy “baby step” so maybe it’s about time to step up and add a second corporation. I’m thinking of Coca-Cola.

9:30pm | URL: http://tmblr.co/Zs1qQyiHTFD-

(Notes: 2)

September 28, 2012

How To Tell If Any Food Is Healthy: Assess Dosage, Form, & Culture

People often ask me whether this or that food is healthy, and why or why not. I’m not a scientist or doctor or farmer, so I’m not a licensed expert, and I don’t have all the answers. I’ll try my best to figure it out, though! I do have plenty of curiosity, and a large vested interest in preserving my health, my community’s health, and my planet’s health. These, along with an open and critical mind, are great tools in figuring out answers.

Here’s a basic guide for figuring out the health value of any food:
Assess dosage, form, and culture.

Read more on Sustainable Manila.

6:47pm | URL: http://tmblr.co/Zs1qQyUEGGxo

Filed under: food research

September 10, 2012

Alzheimer’s may be a type of diabetes

Food for thought: eat your way to dementia excerpt:

Poor sensitivity to insulin is typically associated with type 2 diabetes, in which liver, fat and muscle cells fail to respond to the hormone. But results such as de la Monte’s have led some researchers to wonder whether Alzheimer’s may sometimes be another version of diabetes - one that hits the brain. Some have even renamed it “type 3 diabetes”.

115m people globally will get Alzheimer’s by 2050.

If they are right - and a growing body of evidence suggests they might be - the implications are deeply troubling. Since calorific foods are known to impair our body’s response to insulin, we may be unwittingly poisoning our brains every time we chow down on burgers and fries. People with type 2 diabetes, who have already developed insulin resistance, may be particularly at risk. “The epidemic of type 2 diabetes, if it continues on its current trajectory, is likely to be followed by an epidemic of dementia,” says Ewan McNay of the University at Albany in New York. “That’s going to be a huge challenge to the medical and care systems.”

All of which highlights the importance of eating healthier foods and taking exercise to reduce your risk of dementia. It may even be possible to reverse - or at least decelerate - some of the cognitive decline in people who already have Alzheimer’s, by targeting the underlying insulin resistance. If so, that would suggest new treatments for the disease, which has so far evaded any attempt to treat it.

4:56pm | URL: http://tmblr.co/Zs1qQyT7OWXG

Filed under: food research

July 31, 2012

Does Meat Rot In Your Colon? No. What Does? Beans, Grains, and Vegetables!

“Humans can’t actually digest meat: it rots in the colon.”
“Meat takes 4-7 days to digest, because it has to rot in your stomach first.”

J. Stanton corrects these ideas by explaining that plants are actually very difficult to digest due to their tough cellulose walls. That’s why ruminant animals (grass-eaters such as cows) have four stomachs and a lot of bacteria friends to help them digest the stuff.

Here’s an excerpt:

—- —- —-

Most of the edible part of a plant is cellulose, a polysaccharide (i.e. a very long chain of sugars) that is very difficult to break down. In fact, no digestive enzyme, in any animal, is capable of breaking down cellulose! So the only way that any animal can fully digest plants is for its gut bacteria to break down cellulose, and its intestines absorb the waste products.

Ruminants, including cattle, bison, deer, antelope, goats, and other red meat, have a special “extra stomach” called the rumen. They chew and swallow grass and leaves into the rumen, ferment it some, barf it back up again, chew it some more (called “chewing the cud”), and swallow it again, where it is digested a second time. Hindgut fermenters, like horses, have an extra-long gut. And rabbits run their food through twice: they eat their own poop in order to get more food value out of the plant matter they eat.

Humans, in contrast, don’t have gut bacteria that can digest cellulose. That is why we can’t eat grass at all, why there is so little caloric value for us in vegetables, and why we call cellulose “insoluble fiber”: it comes straight out the back end.

This fact alone proves that humans, while omnivores, are primarily carnivorous: we have a limited ability to digest some plant matter (starches and disaccharides) in order to get through bad times, but we cannot extract meaningful amounts of energy from the cellulose that forms the majority of edible plant matter, as true herbivores can. We can only eat fruits, nuts, tubers, and seeds (which we call ‘grains’ and ‘beans’)—and seeds are only edible to us after laborious grinding, soaking, and cooking, because unlike the birds and rodents adapted to eat them, they’re poisonous to humans in their natural state.

Read the full article

8:17pm | URL: http://tmblr.co/Zs1qQyQTA-yk

(Notes: 1)

Filed under: food research

July 9, 2012

Fast food workers of Reddit tell us what we shouldn’t eat at restaurants

GROSS! :( Here are some excerpts:

—- —— —-

“When I was a young buck, I worked at Burger King. Here is how the oil rotation went. You had four vats of oil that you cooked fries in. And boy did you cook fries. Tons of them. After about 2 days worth, the oil got too dark for fries. So we switched it over to the ones for chicken. Since it was darker, it was ok. Then that goes on for a week. After a week of massive frying. The oil is black as motor oil. At that point, it’s switched to the Fish Filet vat. That’s the only thing you cook in that vat.”

—- —- —-

“My mom is the regional director for 7 counties health departments. One day we were eating at Quizno’s and the guy that made our sandwich did everything right with changing his gloves. After he finished our purchase the phone rang. He answered it with the gloves on then he started making a sandwich without changing his gloves. She politely reminded him that he should be changing his gloves after touching other things and he just turned around and shrugged it off. While we ate she kept watching and he was handling money and food without changing his gloves so she had enough. She got out her health department badge and got the manager and told her that she even had reminded him to change his gloves and that the very next morning her crew was coming out to officially write them up…

Oh there were definitely places we weren’t allowed to eat under any circumstance. The only one that stands out in my memory was a local chinese restaurant failed inspection because their buffet was holding food at too low of a temperature. It was mandatory that they throw all the food out seeing as how it could be dangerous to eat. The inspector was finishing up and he walked around the back of the building to find one of the employees pulling bags out of the trash dumpster and taking them back inside. So he made his way back inside to the kitchen to find them scooping the food out of the bags that were previously in the dump, and putting it back into the buffet. They had a mandatory 30 days closure after that when they opened they claimed it was “new management” but it was definitely all the same people.
I don’t know if other health departments do this, but in Virginia they list the inspections and violations of EVERY restaurant in the state, even including all school cafeteria’s inspections. They have it all listed by city/county.”

(Why isn’t there a list like this for the Philippines too?? - F)

—- —- —-

650 calories in a Starbucks white mocha frap. 680 in a Carrot Cake Muffin. 550 in a Green Iced Tea. 760 in a White Chocolate Frap… check out complete Starbucks’ food and beverage calorie content here.

—- —- —-

“McDonald’s employee here. A lot of people choose to be healthy and order our grilled chicken instead. Not a lot of people realize that they’re eating at a fast food joint and we WILL find a way to make anything unhealthy. Anything grilled chicken, on principle, I wouldn’t eat and here’s why: to keep it from sticking to the grill, we use three squirts of liquid margarine on the bottom of it. To keep it juicy, once we’ve lain the frozen blocks of chicken, three more squirts of liquid margarine are applied to the tops.
TL;DR: You can’t eat healthy at a fast food joint. Even if you order grilled chicken.”

(Margarine is evil. Real butter FTW. - F)

—- —- —-

Read everything at Reddit

3:53pm | URL: http://tmblr.co/Zs1qQyO_hT9z

Filed under: research food

July 9, 2012

Weston A. Price Foundation, Manila Chapter

Weston A. Price Foundation is a worldwide non-profit organization that posts free scientific journals online, mostly about the wisdom of traditional food processes, the benefits of consuming meat from healthy happy animals, the importance of sustainable agriculture, and the dangers of vegetarianism. I’m so excited to be in touch with Tess Young, the leader of the WAPF Manila Chapter. She’s emailed me a shopping list of local healthy pastured food products which I’ll share soon! Was thrilled to discover that Down To Earth is a major part of that list. :D I’m trying to help Tess set up free talks on food and health here in Manila. In the meantime, check out the WAPF Dietary Guidelines:

- Eat whole, natural foods.
- Eat only foods that will spoil, but eat them before they do.
- Eat naturally-raised meat including fish, seafood, poultry, beef, lamb, game, organ meats and eggs.
- Eat whole, naturally-produced milk products from pasture-fed cows, preferably raw and/or fermented, such as whole yogurt, cultured butter, whole cheeses and fresh and sour cream.
- Use only traditional fats and oils including butter and other animal fats, extra virgin olive oil, expeller expressed sesame and flax oil and the tropical oils—coconut and palm.
- Eat fresh fruits and vegetables, preferably organic, in salads and soups, or lightly steamed.
- Use whole grains and nuts that have been prepared by soaking, sprouting or sour leavening to neutralize phytic acid and other anti-nutrients.
- Include enzyme-enhanced lacto-fermented vegetables, fruits, beverages and condiments in your diet on a regular basis.
- Prepare homemade meat stocks from the bones of chicken, beef, lamb or fish and use liberally in soups and sauces.
- Use herb teas and coffee substitutes in moderation.
- Use filtered water for cooking and drinking.
- Use unrefined Celtic sea salt and a variety of herbs and spices for food interest and appetite stimulation.
- Make your own salad dressing using raw vinegar, extra virgin olive oil and expeller expressed flax oil.
- Use natural sweeteners in moderation, such as raw honey, maple syrup, dehydrated cane sugar juice and stevia powder.
- Use only unpasteurized wine or beer in strict moderation with meals.
- Cook only in stainless steel, cast iron, glass or good quality enamel.
- Use only natural supplements.
- Get plenty of sleep, exercise and natural light.
- Think positive thoughts and minimize stress.
- Practice forgiveness.

❤

2:11pm | URL: http://tmblr.co/Zs1qQyO_T6CT

(Notes: 1)

Filed under: research food

July 6, 2012

Someday I can paint a mural artwork that doubles as a solar panel? :D

Rice University’s Carbon Nanotube Paint Turns Any Surface Into A Solar Battery

Carbon nanotubes have been used in everything from energy-free lights to oil spill clean-up technology, and now a team from Rice University has used them to develop a paint that transforms any surface into a lithium-ion battery! This transformative paint holds the potential to create a functional, rechargeable solar battery on just about any surface.

(by Timon Singh, 06/29/12)

(via Carbon Nanotube Paint Turns Any Surface Into A Solar Battery | Inhabitat - Sustainable Design Innovation, Eco Architecture, Green Building)

9:33am | URL: http://tmblr.co/Zs1qQyOnLKsG

(Notes: 1)

Filed under: research energy

July 4, 2012

Plastic bag ban fuels packaging wars

Should we allow our rivers and seas to be littered with plastic bags just because we’re too lazy to carry reusable shopping bags and water jugs? Furthermore, plastic contains toxic chemicals such as BPA and VOCs which leach into our beverages and indoor breathing air. All while drawing from a non-renewable resource (fossil fuels), in ways that often destroy natural environments and harm local communities. No excuse. Plastic use needs to be heavily regulated.

3:12pm | URL: http://tmblr.co/Zs1qQyOgKE66

(Notes: 1)

Filed under: research pollution

July 4, 2012

Science proves that BACON IS HEALTHY

Only when it’s from a happy healthy pastured pig, prepared in the traditional manner with sodium chloride, natural sweeteners, and no nitrates or nitrite salts, of course. :) Here is an excerpt from the Weston A. Price Foundation’s article about various pork preparation methods and how these affect the blood.

—- —- —-

What is most notable, however, is that the results demonstrate the wisdom of traditional food preparation. The processing of pork in customary ways by salts and acidic marinades makes pork safe for consumption— not only by inactivating parasites, killing off noxious bacteria that may cause food poisoning, and promoting safe fermentations in the meat that add flavor; traditional processing of pork also seems to prevent the inflammatory and blood clotting effects as observed here through live blood analysis, although we do not know why. We speculate that raw pork contains a toxin, unidentified to date, and that heat alone from cooking cannot destroy it, but that fermentation with salt, and also acid plus heat, do so. This toxin in pork, if it exists, is therefore heat-stable and requires further denaturation by salt or acid in order to detoxify it. This is exactly what traditional pork preparation provides.

2:37pm | URL: http://tmblr.co/Zs1qQyOgEoyZ

(Notes: 2)

Filed under: research food bacon

July 4, 2012

There are no vegan or vegetarian tribes

When Dr. Weston Price embarked on his worldwide investigations of nonindustrialized peoples, he did so with an open mind. When his patients asked him that all-important question, “What is a healthy diet?” he did not know the answer. He knew that a healthy diet produced freedom from dental decay, attractive facial structure, protection against disease and ease of reproduction, but he could not, before his investigations, tell his patients with assurance what to eat.

Dr. Price was a highly spiritual individual with leanings towards vegetarianism. He had hoped to find healthy peoples whose diets contained only plant foods. What he discovered instead was that all so-called primitive cultures consumed animal foods in one form or another. In some cultures, such as native tribes in Alaska and northern Canada, animal foods comprised almost 100 percent of calories; in others, such as the agricultural tribes in Africa, animal foods comprised only a small portion of the diet. However, all of the cultures he studied valued certain foods as sacred, necessary for healthy reproduction and the optimal growth of children, and these sacred foods were always animal foods. This discovery has been called “Dr. Price’s greatest disappointment.” He did not, as he had hoped, find a single vegan culture.