Oh you pesky water bottles.

I'm in for this "Federation of Canadian Municipalities" group who are encouraging municipalities from selling bottled water--in part just to educate people on how safe tap water is here, and how much tax money is spent dealing with water bottle waste.

When I strangely listened to my father, in Cegep, and took a MATH course (I still can't believe I did that!) and of course FAILED (though it was the best math teacher I'd ever had, and I enjoyed listening to the lecture part)... I had to take an extra course in the summer. A counsellor suggested Chemistry of the Environment, which I loved, so I've never regretted the math thing.

Anyway, he spent a whole section on bottled water. (This was in 1992.) He said the only thing to be found in bottled water, other than tap, was the minerals--potassium and such. If you're not checking that out, there's no other reason to be drinking it.

(He also dissed Brita filters.)

So I never got into the whole bottled water thing. Thanks to early Cegep science teacher brainwashing. Yay for higher learnin'!

Those Skinny Bitches make me bitch bitch bitch!

I can't read people's diet blogs and judge whether they sound unhealthy or not, because I've never had an eating disorder. My analysis tends to be more along the sophisticated lines of: That's stoopid. So it interests me when others can bring that sort of light to their critiques.

I was reading amazon reviews of Skinny Bitch the other day (because I wanted to revel in the low-star reviews, of which there were many), and one commenter said the entire book sounded like the diary of an anorexic. (See below.)

...Whereas when I read the book, all I could think was: What a bunch of unconscionable, unsupported BULLshit. Most of the negative reviews on amazon simply say: This is veganism, which is fine, but (a) they shouldn't disguise that fact, and (b) it's a shitty book about veganism. Which was my opinion too when I read it.

I work at a bookstore and whenever a customer buys it, I TELL them it's a vegan diet. "Really??" (And from the cashier next to me: Really??) And I make sure to stress our 14 day return policy.

The other day I had the absolute pleasure of dissuading a woman from even looking at Skinny Bun in the Oven, their Shitty Vegan Pregnancy Book. (Grrrrrrr!!!!!!!) When the woman learned it promoted a vegan diet, she was uninterested... as well she should be. I'm a vegan, but if I were pregnant I'd at least go vegetarian for the duration. I don't believe in risking another person's life for my political choice.

I then helped her pick out books on pregnancy nutrition, and recommended a Michael Pollan book.

*

As an ex-anorexic friend of mine said, this book is awesome for people in the throes of the disease because it basically gives you permission to food-restrict and negatively self-talk all you want, two of the behaviors that therapists try to eliminate in eating-disorder patients.

I truly believe this book is not about veganism. This book is about how to practice a special brand of anorexia in which you view food as evil and avoid putting it into your body, but you still eat enough of certain things to avoid criticism from friends and family, under the guise of this pro-animal-rights philosophical viewpoint. The language they use is very similar to the language you see on pro-anorexia websites maintained by women whose goal is to trade tips for how not to eat and reinforce each other's philosophy and behavior. Those websites have the same "us against the world" and "other people think we're crazy but we're doing the right thing" tone. [Gadgetchick on amazon.com]

More worms! More dirt! More more!

I read a recent article (don't remember where) about the detrimental effects of eliminating peanuts from the public space--that it may instead result in more or more severe peanut allergies. It reminded me of a study I'd heard of years ago, that children who grow up on farms have less asthma and such than kids who grow up in cities; that a little dirt goes a long way.

Apparently there are more and more studies supporting this latter fact. They're especially finding that not enough exposure to worms might be causing "inflammatory diseases — multiple sclerosis, Crohn’s disease, ulcerative colitis and asthma," and they're using worms to lessen people's symptoms. (From NYT article.)

Oh the weird relationship to the foods...

I happened across a blog about an opera singer whose been losing weight and tracking it. I haven't read the details, but I gather she had Type II diabetes, and has managed to reverse that.

But I came across a posting where she Confesses to having binged. This is her idea of a binge: She made cookies, ate "too much" of the batter, and then ate one of the cookies.

She goes on and on, in the post and in her comments, that this isn't about having eaten dessert--it's that she ate when she wasn't hungry, and in an unplanned manner, and didn't listen to her body, etc. Whatever. But quel use of the word "binge." ...It's like an alcoholic having one drink and calling it a Lost Weekend.

My pen! They took my pen!!

"Starting Jan. 1, the pharmaceutical industry has agreed to a voluntary moratorium on the kind of branded goodies — Viagra pens, Zoloft soap dispensers, Lipitor mugs — that were meant to foster good will and, some would say, encourage doctors to prescribe more of the drugs."(from New York Times article)

I'm in for the moratorium, even if these things aren't on the same level as the big money the pharms give to doctors--the fancy trips to tropical islands in order to watch an Education Presenation, for example. And I'm in, even if many doctors scoff at the idea that these pens influence them. Let's at least preserve some sort of veneer of impartiality.

The horror, the horror

Come on guys, a little healthy anti-Americanism, please.

From a New York Times article:

The fact is that the Mediterranean diet, which has been associated with longer life spans and lower rates of heart disease and cancer, is in retreat in its home region. Today it is more likely to be found in the upscale restaurants of London and New York than among the young generation in places like Greece, where two-thirds of children are now overweight and the health effects are mounting, health officials say.

“This is a place where you’d see people who lived to 100, where people were all fit and trim,” Dr. Stagourakis said. “Now you see kids whose longevity is less than their parents’. That’s really scaring people.”

...

In Greece, three-quarters of the adult population is overweight or obese, the worst rate in Europe “by far,” according to the United Nations. The rates of overweight 12-year-old boys rose more than 200 percent from 1982 to 2002 and have been rising even faster since.

Yay! Less dieters! Amaaazing!

Excerpts from a nice good-news story in the New York Times about the decrease in dieting, and increase of home-cooking. Especially interesting is this idea that cooking is a practice we've lost and need to pick up again. I used to think I was "not a good cook" (except baking!) until two summers ago when I said to myself: Self, you is an academic. And if academics are good at anything, it's learning the basics of ANYTHING... from a book.

So I started picking up vegan cookbooks that were well reviewed on amazon, and that looked quick, and I taughts myself how to cook well. I've been so amazed at the results, Eating Out doesn't hold much allure for me anymore, because good vegetarian food is so hard to find--even what I cook is usually better. And I've followed the books enough now that I can experiment a little without things going horribly wrong. (I toyed with a black bean salad recipe this week and it worked! I toyed with spaghetti sauce and it worked!)

The bottom line is... if I can learn to cook decent (and often delish) meals in one summer, so can any fool. It can't be that much of a lost art. I will add, however, that it requires lots of base ingredients to be on hand, and to have an organized kitchen.

*

AFTER decades of obsessing about fat, calories and carbs, many dieters have made the unorthodox decision to simply enjoy food again.

... The percentage of those consumers who are on a diet is lower than at any time since information on dieting was first collected in 1985. At the peak in 1990, 39 percent of the women and 29 percent of the men were dieting. Today, that number has dropped to 26 percent of women and 16 percent of men.

The diarists also report eating more organic foods and whole grains, said Harry Balzer, an NPD vice president.

...In May, the market research firm Information Resources reported that 53 percent of consumers say they are cooking from scratch more than they did just six months ago, in part, no doubt, because of the rising cost of prepared foods.

...“We need to demystify cooking,” Ms. Waters said. “It creates feelings about food that make you feel cared for, and that’s the kind of food that really changes habits.”

The cookbook author and television personality Rachael Ray has attracted both loyal followers and harsh critics for creating food that doesn’t focus on calories, fat, carbohydrates or even portion control. She intentionally doesn’t include calorie information with her cookbook recipes.

“I think that puts your head into science and away from what I think the experience of food should be,” Ms. Ray said.

...“If everyone ate more plant-based and more whole foods and unprocessed foods, that would be major,” said Arlene Spark, associate professor of nutrition at Hunter College in New York. “But that would mean people going back to cooking, and what we’ve lost is people’s ability and knowledge of how to cook.”

...Last year, the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition reported on a study of 97 obese women, all of whom were avoiding high-fat foods. Half the women were instructed to increase their consumption of fruits and vegetables. By the end of a year, the women who were focused on adding vegetables lost an average of 17 pounds, 20 percent more than the women who were just paying attention to fat consumption.

Also, the more time people spend on tasks like food shopping, cooking and kitchen cleanup, the more likely they are to be of average weight. The Economic Research Service of the United States Department of Agriculture found that people of normal weight spend more time on meal-related tasks than people who are overweight or underweight.

yet another randomly discovered reason for eschewing factory meat

Oh yay, more reasons to be a vegetarian. Sigh. Once you involve huge numbers of animals in industrial production, many many bad things are going to happen.

*

"Ascites—a common condition in factory-raised broilers—causes severe distress...

Forcing meat chickens to grow quickly, which is standard industry practice, can result in heart failure or "ascites." The underlying problem is that the chickens develop so rapidly that their heart muscles cannot keep pace. Ascites kills millions of birds worldwide and costs the industry an estimated $500 billion per year.

The toll is not just financial. Canadian researchers investigating the course of the disease determined that during the final stages of ascites, birds are severely distressed. "In advanced stages, the birds are unable to reach the drinkers and become dehydrated. Death is usually preceded by prolonged agony, and is likely a result of dehydration, starvation, respiratory failure, and heart failure. Given the severity of symptoms and chronic nature of this condition, the ascites syndrome must be addressed as an animal welfare problem.""

("Ascites in Broiler Chickens from a Welfare Point of View" A. A. Olkowski and H. L. Classen. Department of Animal & Poultry Science, University of Saskatchewan, Saskatoon, SK, S7N 5B5, Canada)

http://www.eatwild.com/animals.html

CBC Calories

30% of people count calories (well... at least, 30% of CBC Online readers... who read articles on calories.)

Question at cbc.ca: Do you count calories?

The genetics of comfort food!

Apparently higher status female monkeys eat more than lower status monkeys, who are always stressed out by their status. But when offered junk food (sugary banana pellets) the higher status females will munch on a few, whereas the lower status females will binge.

!!

(New York Times article)

Getting off the grid... the Corn Grid

Side Project: Finding an alternative drink.

Right now I drink Crystal Light, not for diet reasons, but for sugar-sitting-on-the-teeth reasons. But I've always known I need to find an alternative, and now that I'm conducting my anti-corn experiment, this must be The Time. Corn dextrin is the main ingredient.

I know, I know, I should just drink water. Well... I can't. It makes my stomach glurgly! And I can't just add some lemon to water, because I'm allergic to citrus--I get cankers like a moze-foze. So I'm experimenting with herbal tea, and then I'll experiment with adding a little sweetener (agave or maple syrup)... juuuust enough to give it some pizazz. Will keep you updated.

I've got to work on my hot drinks too. Right now I use faux sugar (probably made from CORN!) to sweeten my hot chocolates or chai lattés, but I think I'll switch over to Stevia. It's a real sugar, but doesn't rampage through your blood sugar the way refined sugar does.

It's all very exciting.

I Have No Mind and I Must Eat

Besides reading my book on the Evils of the Military Industrial Corn Complex (I just finished the chapter on organic farming), I picked this up for free:

Mindless Eating: Why We Eat More Than We Think by Brian Wansick

This is the guy who actually did the studies on how people eat unconsciously, with the refilling soup bowls, and the stale popcorn. (All the Good Diet Gurus are quoting his studies, like Bob Greene and Paul McKenna.)

It's just a fun book full of scientific studies, including some of the things that go wrong with them. (For example... subjects are bound to be suspicious when their chicken noodle soup is making gurgling and sucking noises.) Very entertaining.

Some of the studies are summarized here.

Write Diet Books for Fame and Fortune!

Peter Walsh, the throw-out-your-junk guy, has a book out on weight loss: Does This Clutter Make My Butt Look Fat? He says he wrote it because he noticed that after helping people de-clutter their homes, they often lost weight, and we wanted to explore the connection between the two.

Alright. Sensible enough. But I was in the Self Help section of the bookstore I work at, and I'm noticing a new trend... applying your Self Help Expertise to weight loss. The two books that struck me were:

The Four Day Win: End Your Diet War & Achieve Thinner Peace by Martha Beck
"Breaking down the weight-loss marathon into 4-day intervals, Dr. Beck provides effective strategies for changing the behaviors that make us fat."

The Writing Diet: Write Yourself Right-Size by Julia Cameron
"Cameron illuminates the relationship between creativity and eating to reveal a crucial equation: creativity can block overeating."

Martha Beck is a life organizer, and Julia Cameron has for years written books about freeing your creativity. Innnteresting. Are these 3 writers just trying to ride a trend--take the same basic advice from your other books, and give it a food twist? Will the Dog Whisperer write a diet book next? Money managers? Anyway, I'll try to follow up with some book reviews.

Side Note: Every time there's a new bestselling self help book, just watch out for the deluge of related books that follows. My favourite one these days is David Bach, who takes his advice from The Automatic Millionaire and applies it to every conceivable situation:

The Automatic Millionaire Workbook
The Automatic Millionaire Homeowner
Smart Women Finish Rich
Smart Couples Finish Rich
Start Late, Finish Rich
Finish Rich Workbook
--and his latest?-- Go Green, Live Rich

I'm still expecting: Live Rich, Die Thin, Smart Pets Finish Rich, and The Automatic Millionaire Cookbook.

High Fructose Corn Syrup: The Devil's Baby?

I'm reading Michael Pollan's previous book, The Omnivore's Dilemma. I borrowed it from work, but I'm going to have to buy it because it is blowing my little pea sized brain.

I have so many thoughts about this... I don't know where to start. Aiiiieeee. I'll try to post short thought-updates on my Practically Moral page, where I like to blab about politics and food. If you don't read them... well... you'll just have to suffer through me speechifying you every time we meet. ...I'll have to carry a script around with me, so I don't forget all my speechify points.

But here's one.

1. The US government (under the influence of food production industries) encourages farmers to grow as MUCH corn as physically possible.

2. Farmers grow corn like mozefozes.

3. There is so much corn on the market, that its value is low.

4. It costs farmers more to produce corn than the price it sells at, which is why the government has to subsidize them; this is also why farmers need to produce tons and tons of corn, to make back enough money to stay afloat.

5. The beneficiaries of cheap corn are the food producers--those who take corn and turn it into corny weirdo products; and then those food companies that buy the corny weirdo products to make new breakfast cereals.

7. SO: If you're an American, your taxes (about a quarter, I think he said) to subsidize farmers aren't really subsidizing farmers (at least re. corn and soy beans, the biggest sector of the industry) -- you are really subsidizing corporations.

8: And added to this, the glut of cheap corn means that every industry possible tries to use corn every which way they can, which is why beef cows are fed corn even though it makes them so sick, they also have to be fed antibiotics with their feed.

And presumably this is the same in Canada. And this type of economy is affecting the countries the US sells corny weirdo products to. They sell corn to MEXICO for God's sake, the home of corn! Because no small farmer can compete with this, growing corn the old way, or the old old way. (Old way=growing less corn, using chemical fertilizer. Old old way=using farm animals and bean crops to enrich the soil, on self-sufficient farms with multiple animals and crops.)

Dr Oz has been on Oprah a lot in the past couple years denouncing high fructose corn syrup, which is found in almost every processed food. I wasn't too freaked out because when you eat vegan you naturally gravitate away from processed food, so what little I consume probably isn't that bad for my health. The only change I made was to increase the amount of food I cook at home.

But now I see high fructose corn syrup as demon spawn! I'm not anti-corporation by default, but what the industrialization of food has done to animals, peoples, economies, and the environment is just immoral. I'm sure there are many, many lovely people who work in the food industry... but ah! ah! ah! Ahhhh!

A little Michael Pollan...

From: "Our National Eating Disorder"

Carbophobia, the most recent in the centurylong series of food fads to wash over the American table, seems to have finally crested, though not before sweeping away entire bakeries and pasta companies in its path, panicking potato breeders into redesigning the spud, crumbling whole doughnut empires and, at least to my way of thinking, ruining an untold number of meals. America's food industry, more than happy to get behind any new diet as long as it doesn't actually involve eating less food, is still gung-ho on Low Carb, it's true, but in the last few weeks, I can report some modest success securing a crust of bread, and even the occasional noodle, at tables from which such staples were banned only a few months ago.

...What is striking is just how little it takes to set off one of these applecart-toppling nutritional swings in America; a scientific study, a new government guideline, a lone crackpot with a medical degree can alter this nation's diet overnight. As it happened, it was an article in this magazine two years ago that almost singlehandedly ushered in today's carbophobia, which itself supplanted an era of lipophobia dating back to 1977, when a controversial set of federal nutritional guidelines (''Dietary Goals for the United States,'' drafted by a Senate committee led by George McGovern) persuaded beef-loving Americans to lay off the red meat. But the basic pattern was fixed decades earlier: new scientific research comes along to challenge the prevailing nutritional orthodoxy; some nutrient that Americans have been happily chomping for years is suddenly found to be lethal; another nutrient is elevated to the status of health food; the industry throws its marketing weight behind it; and the American way of dietary life undergoes yet another revolution.

If this volatility strikes you as unexceptionable, you might be interested to know that there are other cultures that have been eating more or less the same way for generations, and there are peoples who still rely on archaic criteria like, oh, taste and tradition to guide them in their eating decisions. You might also be interested to know that some of the cultures that set their culinary course by the lights of pleasure and habit rather than nutritional science are actually healthier than we are—that is, suffer a lower incidence of diet-related health troubles. The ''French paradox'' is the most famous such case, though it's worth keeping in mind the French don't regard the matter as a paradox at all; we Americans resort to that word simply because the French experience—a population of wine-swilling cheese eaters with lower rates of heart disease and obesity?!—confounds our orthodoxy about food. Maybe what we should be talking about is an American paradox: that is, a notably unhealthy people obsessed by the idea of eating healthily.

Nalgene bottles not so hippy after all? Doh!

The Canadian government is probablhy going to ban the use of BPA--a type of hard plastic--in food-related products. The main concern is with baby bottles, Nalgene type bottles, and sometimes it's used to line cans. It has been shown, in good old animal studies (sigh), to act like a female hormone.

I take it it's not something to freak out about (though if I had a baby I would not use baby bottles and sippy cups made of this), but it's probably worth it to look at other bottle alternatives, and to throw out any Nalgene bottles that are too old (someone recommended--when the label/writing on the outside has worn off.) And it's not good to wash them in the dishwasher. (Doh!)

One woman I know uses a big glass jar as her drinking bottle. Ah yes... funny how it's The Old Ways that we have to come back to time and time again. I'm not anti-science, but... oh plastic... thou art a fickle friend.

Blueberries and squash

I made a butternut squash based sauce the other day, to eat with spaghetti. The recipe was from the Karen Claffey book, though Sarah Kramer has one too. The sauce tasted good on its own, like a soup, but I wasn't crazy about combining it with pasta.

That's the extent of my cooking this week, because I've been sick. At least, thanks to Doc Oz being on Oprah all the time, it's possible to get things like blueberry and pomegranate juice at the local corner store!

those poor carrots

Watching a tv news bit about the carrot botulism scare last year. Holy crap what a scary illness. It took 6 weeks before the doctors diagnosed, even though there had already been US cases--Canada didn't give out a warning. Yikes. Whenever I see Bolthouse Farms carrot juice I get the shivers, and now I'll get super-shivers!

Awww this couple used to be ballroom dancers, and now they're super sick.

I've never actually bought carrot juice. Only time I drank that was when my step-mother went through a juicing phase.

Don't eat like a crapitude!

From New York Times:

' Researchers have found a correlation between drinking diet soda and metabolic syndrome — the collection of risk factors for cardiovascular disease and diabetes that include abdominal obesity, high cholesterol and blood glucose levels — and elevated blood pressure.

The scientists gathered dietary information on more than 9,500 men and women ages 45 to 64 and tracked their health for nine years.

Over all, a Western dietary pattern — high intakes of refined grains, fried foods and red meat — was associated with an 18 percent increased risk for metabolic syndrome, while a “prudent” diet dominated by fruits, vegetables, fish and poultry correlated with neither an increased nor a decreased risk.

But the one-third who ate the most fried food increased their risk by 25 percent compared with the one-third who ate the least, and surprisingly, the risk of developing metabolic syndrome was 34 percent higher among those who drank one can of diet soda a day compared with those who drank none.

“This is interesting,” said Lyn M. Steffen, an associate professor of epidemiology at the University of Minnesota and a co-author of the paper, which was posted online in the journal Circulation on Jan. 22. “Why is it happening? Is it some kind of chemical in the diet soda, or something about the behavior of diet soda drinkers?” '

Michael Pollan: In Defence of Food

The skinny: Good book, or try some of his articles. This is probably the best nutrition/diet book you could buy (even though it is purposely neither.) Basically a confirmation that Ye Aulde hippie crunchy granola diet/way of living is, indeed, the healthiest you can choose... only Pollan is bringing in the latest science and information to prop up that fact.

***

I think I read a Pollan article last year, online, and found him too sort of *extreme* for my taste. The whole organicee-buy local-cook-all-from-scratch thing... it seems A-OK for those with money and education, but those aren't the people at the most risk health-wise. But I sped-red through his latest book, and I really liked it. --> And he does address the fact that not everyone can afford to live the way he talks about in the book, considering that crappy fast food is highly subsidized by the US government (foods based on corn and soy) and therefore cheap. And he does address the connection between poor health, poor eating and class.

There's nothing too radical in this book--it's the same crunchy granola information that hippies have been touting for decades (and when you're a vegan, you're massively exposed to Crunchy Granola-ism.) But he puts a spin on the topic that I liked.

The big mystery we hear about these days is why Americans have only become more unhealthy / obese over the decades, despite the big push for low-fat foods, diets, etc. Pollan criticizes the way nutrition scientists look for answers by isolating one nutrient component of food at a time, and trying to find the *magic bullet* that reduces cancer, heart disease, cholesterol, weight gain etc. He recognizes that their approach is understandable--it's the only way you can test things scientifically--but he suspects that by looking at one nutrient away from its food (omega-3 from the flax seed -- the flax seed away from the bagel), and a single food away from its buddy-foods (eg. the bagel away from its peanut butter), and food away from its culture (how people have cooked and eaten for 1000s of years) you're going to have trouble finding out The Secret to healthy eating.

His proposal is that you don't need to find out What Makes the Carrot Tick--why certain foods impart health benefits--in order to benefit. You just need to eat carrots. Preferably ones grown with love (in good soil, eaten fresh.) And you need to eat carrots along with other plants, and in the ways people have eaten them for generations.

He cites some forgotten researcher type dentist guy from the 30s, who stopped dentistry and ran around the world instead, studying people's teeth. Because of the period in which he did his research, there were still many cultures relatively untouched by western foods, and he found that they ALL had better teeth than Americans. And this was across a variety of cultures, from the blood-and-milk drinking Masai, to the fish-and-few-greens Inuit... they just had very few signs of wear and decay.

Pollan goes on to describe the scientific search for The Mystery behind the health benefits of a Mediterranean diet, or the French diet, or the Okinawan diet (he says if you search those terms in PubMed you gets 100s of hits)--and Pollan's point is that there's little point in isolating the Secret Formula in those diets, and then building it into white bread... you should instead just adopt a similar diet, in all its complexity, and including the way of life that goes with it. (I think you should also be adopting a diet etc. that matches your genes, however. If little ole celtic me started eating an Inuit diet, I'm pretty sure I'd die.)

So. This is where the information is Nothing New. Eat less meat, eat less of these corn and soy derivatives, stay away from Yea Aulde High Fructose Corn Syrup, eat lots of plants, a variety of them, preferably fresh, cook your meals, set aside a lot of time for cooking a cleaning up, sit down to eat, eat in company with others, eat less, enjoy your food. (He doesn't address exercise at all, but I would assume that all kinds of Walking and Biking go along with the Okinawa and French and Greek diet.) And he's in for gardening.

Like I said, nothing radical. He brings in the latest research, but I've already read most of it on CSPI. But what I like is his perspective... which is basically that almost every regional diet in the world is good for you, except our recent Western diet--which emerged from the industrialization of food.

Which leads us to... tum tee tum... our entire way of life in North America?

One of my profs, who I otherwise quite like, is one of these "ohhh you think grad school is busy, wait until you're in the real world" or whatever. This irritates me on many levels, but one of the interesting things is this built in Protestant Work Ethic that our culture is built on. That if you're not busy all the time, there's something wrong. I mean, I understand why we do this--it's surely part and parcel of being (for Americans) one of the strongest economies in the world. But personally I think you've got to be aware of the trade-offs you're making when you choose that 50 hour a week job.

I want to work enough to live on, enough to be able to retire one day, but I also want time to live pretty much as Pollan describes. I want time to cook (and recycle, and read, and write etc bla bla bla.) And I don't want to live the kind of life where I'm always Counting Calories and calculating fat grams and feeling guilty for eating something nice. (Pollan cites a study where Americans associated a photo of chocolate cake with the word "guilty" while the French associated it with "celebration.") So basically Pollan just confirmed me in a new Way de Vivre that I'm already starting to live.

From all I've read, and from all my following of the nutrition since the 80s, I suspect that Pollan's got the right end of the stick. Stop looking for the miracle nutrient (conventiently baked into your pasta and cereal and bread) and eat like a hippie cookbook. I'll continue baking cookies instead of buying them (and then ENJOYING them), I'll continue trying out vegan cookbooks, I'm going to sign up for one of those vegetable delivery programs (but er maybe when school is done) and once this school foolishness is over, I'm going to make an effort to be Less Involved in the future, have Less projects, be Less the Super Employee, and jealously guard as much spare/fun/personal time as possible. And this is probably the best *diet* I could be on.

And since my ancestors survived on potatoes, I will no longer apologize for my starch addiction! ;-)