Why is Food News restricted to Wednesday anyway? Who came up with that rule, huh? I was out Wednesday, enjoying some fine weather. But I do have some links saved up:
All those scary "soy is baaaad!" stories out there basically are the work of one group, the Weston Price Foundation, who are the nutritional equivalent of the global warming skeptics, paid for by meat and dairy. (Soy is no better or no worse for you than broccoli, which contains cyanide. But for a reason.) Here's a good article rebutting the latest from the Guardian. (via)
And here's a video in which Dr. T. Colin Campbell discusses the Weston Price Foundation.
The news media is all over this: Dietary hopes dashed for breast cancer patients. Well, not exactly. The study says that women diagnosed with breast cancer who increased their intake of vegetables had about the same recurrence rates as women who did not. But, the women didn't exactly follow the diet. Yes, they increased their intake of vegetables, but they did not, as directed, reduce their overall fat intake. That's probably because they were not told to stop eating meat and dairy, which are high in fat, making it virtually impossible to stick to a 15-20 percent fat intake. Yet the media jumps all over it, causing sales of veggies to fall worldwide. Or something like that. Quit paying so much attention to these over-hyped one-off studies, folks, despite what you read here. Nutrition really is complicated. Yet my best advice, having followed nutrition news for years, remains: Eat lots of different colors.
Here, for instance, is a similar study on 3000 women with slightly different results.
Or maybe the dieters were just eating too many cheap sausages.
On the Guardian's foodie blog Word of Mouth, I noticed the other day there was a discussion about just how ethically challenging foie gras really is. What's so bad about force feeding geese, the writer asked. Well, now we know. (If you have a sensitive bone in your body, you probably don't want to go there. I couldn't watch the whole thing, and I'm pretty inured to this sort of thing.)
But you might want to watch this video, that is if you're still in grade school.
Again, via Avedon, the World's Best Candy Bars. Except as she says, it's all a pack of lies. British candy bars are crap. If you've ever eaten the dried-out and very flaky Flake bar, you know what I mean. The others are no better. But here I disagree with Avedon; it's not Swiss bars that are the best, it's German.
Cheese prices are soaring. They've actually broken the 2000 pounds per tonne mark. Remarkable.
The real story here is not that pre-packaged sandwiches are high in salt, it's that there's such a thing as the British Sandwich Association.
How would you like to be a cow flatulence researcher?
Although turning your peanut butter into diamonds seems like a better use of your time.
Bacon mints? That's almost as bad as sushi air freshener.
I need some chocolate.
