7 Rules for Eating

7 Rules for Eating

Choose Food Over Food-Like Substances, Food Writer Michael Pollan Tells CDC

By Daniel J. DeNoon
WebMD Health News

Reviewed by Louise Chang, MD

March 23, 2009 -- We Americans suffer a national eating disorder: our unhealthy obsession with healthy eating.

That's the diagnosis delivered by food author Michael Pollan in a lecture given last week to an overflow crowd of CDC scientists.

As part of an effort to bring new ideas to the national debate on food issues, the CDC invited Pollan -- a harsh critic of U.S. food policies -- to address CDC researchers and to meet with leaders of the federal agency.

"The French paradox is that they have better heart health than we do despite being a cheese-eating, wine-swilling, fois-gras-gobbling people," Pollan said. "The American paradox is we are a people who worry unreasonably about dietary health yet have the worst diet in the world."

In various parts of the world, Pollan noted, necessity has forced human beings to adapt to all kinds of diets.

"The Masai subsist on cattle blood and meat and milk and little else. Native Americans subsist on beans and maize. And the Inuit in Greenland subsist on whale blubber and a little bit of lichen," he said. "The irony is, the one diet we have invented for ourselves -- the Western diet -- is the one that makes us sick."

Snowballing rates of obesity, diabetes, and heart disease in the U.S. can be traced to our unhealthy diet. So how do we change?

7 Words & 7 Rules for Eating

Pollan says everything he's learned about food and health can be summed up in seven words: "Eat food, not too much, mostly plants."

Probably the first two words are most important. "Eat food" means to eat real food -- vegetables, fruits, whole grains, and, yes, fish and meat -- and to avoid what Pollan calls "edible food-like substances."

Here's how:

1. Don't eat anything your great grandmother wouldn't recognize as food. "When you pick up that box of portable yogurt tubes, or eat something with 15 ingredients you can't pronounce, ask yourself, "What are those things doing there?" Pollan says.
2. Don’t eat anything with more than five ingredients, or ingredients you can't pronounce.
3. Stay out of the middle of the supermarket; shop on the perimeter of the store. Real food tends to be on the outer edge of the store near the loading docks, where it can be replaced with fresh foods when it goes bad.
4.  Don't eat anything that won't eventually rot. "There are exceptions -- honey -- but as a rule, things like Twinkies that never go bad aren't food," Pollan says.
5. It is not just what you eat but how you eat. "Always leave the table a little hungry," Pollan says. "Many cultures have rules that you stop eating before you are full. In Japan, they say eat until you are four-fifths full. Islamic culture has a similar rule, and in German culture they say, 'Tie off the sack before it's full.'"
6. Families traditionally ate together, around a table and not a TV, at regular meal times. It's a good tradition. Enjoy meals with the people you love. "Remember when eating between meals felt wrong?" Pollan asks.
7. Don't buy food where you buy your gasoline. In the U.S., 20% of food is eaten in the car.

Is this good advice? Janet Collins, PhD, director of the National Center for Chronic Disease Prevention and Health Promotion, is one of the CDC officials who met with Pollan.

Collins agrees with Pollan that advice from health experts has to be simplified. And she loves the suggestions he makes.

"Some of the changes in our environment are the reasons behind our obesity epidemic," Collins tells WebMD. "Pollan's advice to eat at the table with your family and not the TV is excellent. And portions: During our grandmothers' era, plates were smaller. If you took the portions that filled their plates and put them on ours, it wouldn't look like much to eat."

 

Eat Foods, Not Nutrients

Pollan, author of In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto and The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals, is professor of science and environmental journalism at the University of California, Berkeley.

Pollan says that where we've gone wrong is by focusing on the invisible nutrients in foods instead of on foods themselves. He calls this "nutritionism" -- an ideology that's lost track of the science on which it was based.

It's good for scientists to look at why carrots are good for us, and to explore the possible benefits of, say, substance X found in a carrot.

What happens next is well-meaning experts tell us we should eat more foods with substance X. But the next thing you know, the food industry is selling us a food enriched with substance X. We may not know whether substance X, when not in a carrot, is good or bad for us. And we may be so impressed with the new substance-X-filled product that we buy it and eat it -- even though it may have unhealthy ingredients, such as high-fructose corn syrup and salt.

Pollan identifies four myths behind this kind of thinking:

• Myth #1: Food is a delivery vehicle for nutrients. What really matters isn't broccoli but its fiber and antioxidants. If we get that right, we get our diet right. Foods kind of get in the way.
• Myth #2: We need experts to tell us how to eat. Nutrients are invisible and mysterious. "It is a little like religion," Pollan said. "If a powerful entity is invisible, you need a priesthood to mediate your relation with food."
• Myth #3: The whole point of eating is to maintain and promote bodily health. "You are either improving or ruining your health when you eat -- that is a very American idea," Pollan says. "But there are many other reasons to eat food: pleasure, social community, identity, and ritual. Health is not the only thing going on on our plates."
• Myth #4: There are evil foods and good foods. "At any given time there is an evil nutrient we try to drive like Satan from the food supply -- first it was saturated fats, then it was trans fat," Pollan says. "Then there is the evil nutrient's doppelganger, the blessed nutrient. If we get enough of that we, will be healthy and maybe live forever. It's funny through history how the good and bad guys keep changing."

Pollan remembers that when fats were declared to be evil, his mother switched the family to stick margarine. His grandmother predicted that some day stick margarine would be the evil food. Today, we know that margarine was made with trans fats.

The trouble with the whole notion of "evil' and "blessed" ingredients is that they help the food industry sell us processed foods that are free of the evil thing or full of the blessed one. We buy them, not realizing they may contain many other ingredients that aren't good for us.

Collins agrees with Pollan's central theme that whole foods are vastly better for us than are processed foods. But our food system makes it hard for many Americans to get whole foods.

"If our food system made more whole foods at lower cost and made them more available, that would help with our public health," Collins says. "We need full-service groceries in urban centers, where people can get to them. Unfortunately, urban centers are getting filled with fast food stores and liquor stores. Pollan's rules are good, and it is one thing to eat by his rules, but making our environment such that people can live by the rules is not always easy."

Will the CDC be pushing for these kinds of changes? Yes, suggested Anne Haddix, chief policy officer at the CDC's Office of Strategy and Innovation, during the panel discussion following Pollan's remarks to the CDC.

"How we go forward on this will take some very different types of thinking than we have done in the past," Haddix said. "We have an opening we have not had for years. ... Of the federal agencies trying to address food issues, CDC is uniquely positioned. We have to step out as leaders. ... Now is the time to ramp up our efforts and reach out to people who make us uncomfortable and go for it."

Yawn, yawn, yawn, yawn!

Now, you know you've all done it.  You've all succumbed to a yawn upon seeing another person yawn.  You can't help it and why should you?  Yawning is the means by which your body gets extra oxygen when it is in need!  So yawn to your hearts content!

(Ok, how many of you yawned while reading this?)

SCORE!!

My babies

Who'd have thunk it?

You know, you go through life with certain beliefs about yourself and your health based on your percetion of yourself. I am a 'healthy' (code word for thick) woman and I, therefore, thought that I would have a 'healthy' cholesterol level and possibly a 'healthy' baseline bloodsugar to go along with it.

I had some bloodwork drawn and went home to await the results. My doctors office called me to tell me that they wanted me to start taking Fish Oil supplements twice a day because my cholesterol was "TOO LOW"!!!! I could not believe it!! How could a 'healthy' woman such as myself have LOW cholesterol?

So I decided to start keeping an eye on my bloodsugars since she didn't say anything about that (and both my father and my maternal grandfather have diabetes). I've not had a reading over 118!!!! Can you believe that?? If anything, I tend to run a little low (about 80 - 90) My blood pressure runs about 130/80 which is a tad bit more than the average of 120/70 but otherwise, I am a fairly healthy individual with a little extra baggage!!

Who'd have thunk it?!?

Wal-Mart Greeter Joke

Well I started my new job today as a Wal-Mart Greeter
 a good find  for many retirees, I lasted less than a day. 
About two hours into my first day on the job a very loud, unattractive, mean-acting woman walked into the store with her two kids, yelling obscenities at them all the way through the entrance. As I had been instructed, I said pleasantly, 'Good morning and welcome to Wal-Mart. Nice children you have there. Are they twins? The ugly woman stopped yelling long enough to say, 'Hell no, they ain't twins. The oldest one's 9, and the other one's 7. Why the hell would you think they're twins? Are you blind, or just stupid? So I replied, 'I'm neither blind nor stupid, Ma'am, I just couldn't believe you got laid twice. Have a good day and thank you for shopping at Wal-Mart. 
   
 My supervisor said I probably wasn't cut out for this line of work.

A Priest and a Rabbi

Heads up... Its a joke so please, no one take offense.

A priest and a rabbi were sitting next to each other on an airplane. After a while, the priest turned to the rabbi and asked, 'Is it still a requirement of your faith that you not eat pork?'

The rabbi responded, 'Yes, that is still one of our laws.'

The priest then asked, 'Have you ever eaten pork?'

To which the rabbi replied, 'Yes, on one occasion I did succumb to temptation and tasted a ham sandwich.'

The priest nodded in understanding and went on with his reading.

A while later, the rabbi spoke up and asked the priest, 'Father, is it still a requirement of your church that you remain celibate?'

The priest replied, 'Yes, that is still very much a part of our faith.'

The rabbi then asked him, 'Father, have you ever fallen to the temptations of the flesh?'

The priest replied, 'Yes, rabbi, on one occasion I was weak and broke with my faith.'

The rabbi nodded understandingly and remained silent, thinking, for about five minutes.

Finally, the rabbi said, 'Beats the shit out of a ham sandwich, doesn't it?

A SEVEN-HUNDRED-10... Anyone know what it is?

 
A few days ago I was having some work done at my local garage. A blonde came in and asked for a seven-hundred-ten. 

We all looked at each other and another customer asked, "What is a seven-hundred-ten?" 
She replied, "You know, the little piece in the middle of the engine, I have lost it and need a new one.." 

She replied that she did not know exactly what it was, but this piece had always been there. 

The mechanic gave her a piece of paper and a pen and asked her to draw what the piece looked like. 

She drew a circle and in the middle of it wrote 710. He then took her over to another car which had its hood up and asked "is there a 710 on this car?" 

She pointed and said, "Of course, its right there." 

If you're not sure what a 710 is CLICK HERE!

BEWARE OF OUTDATED PANCAKE MIXES

A student at HBHS (high school) had pancakes this week and it almost became fatal. His Mom (registered nurse) made him pancakes, dropped him off at school and headed to play tennis. She never takes her cell phone on the court but did this time and her son called to say he was having trouble breathing. She told him to go to the nurse immediately and proceeded to call school and alert the nurse. The nurse called the paramedics and they were there in 3 minutes and worked on the boy all the way to the hospital. He came so close to dying. Evidently this is more common then I ever knew. Check the expiration dates on packages like pancakes and cake mixes that have yeast which over time develop spores. Apparently, the mold that forms in old mixes can be toxic! Throw away ALL OUTDATED pancake mix, Bisquick, brownie mixes etc you have in your home.

You can check this website....... http://www.snopes.com/medical/toxins/pancake.asp

P.  S. You might want to tell this to your children, grandchildren, nephews, nieces and anyone else who keeps these types of mixes in the cupboard.
    
    

7 Steps to Happily Ever After

WebMD Feature from "Redbook" Magazine

By Marjorie Ingall

What makes love last a lifetime? Affection? Yep. Respect? Sure. But a great marriage is not just about what you have. It's about what you do to make a relationship stronger, safer, more caring and committed. Here's how to make your "forever" fantastic.

Marriage is a home, a refuge against the outside storms. And like any house, it requires a strong, lasting foundation. To build one, every couple needs to take certain steps — seven, to be precise — that turn the two of you into not just you and me but we.You may not move through all the steps in order, and you may circle back to complete certain steps again (and again and again). But if you make it through them all, you'll be well on your way toward creating a marriage that will be your shelter as long as you both shall live.

Step 1: Find a shared dream for your life together.

It's easy to get caught up in the small stuff of married life: What's for dinner tonight? Whose turn is it to clean the litter box? Did you pay the electric bill? But the best partners never lose sight of the fact that they're working together to achieve the same bigdreams. "Successful couples quickly develop a mindfulness of 'us,' of being coupled," says REDBOOK Love Network expert Jane Greer, Ph.D., a marriage and family therapist in New York City. "They have a shared vision, saying things like, 'We want to plan to buy a house, we want to take a vacation to such-and-such a place, we like to do X, we think we want to start a family at Y time.'"

This kind of dream-sharing starts early. "Couples love to tell the story of how they met," points out Julie Holland, M.D., a psychiatrist in private practice in New York City and a clinical assistant professor of psychiatry at the New York University School of Medicine. "It's like telling a fairy tale. But happy couples will go on creating folklore and history, with the meet-cute forming the bedrock of the narrative." As you write and rewrite your love story ("our hardest challenge was X, our dream for retirement is Y"), you continually remind yourselves and each other that you're a team with shared values and goals. And P.S.: When you share a dream, you're a heck of a lot more likely to make that dream come true.

Step 2: Ignite (and reignite) a sexual connection.

In any good relationship, sex is way more than just a physical act. It's crucial for the health of your emotional connection, too: It's something only the two of you share; it makes you both feel warm and loved; it draws you back together when you're drifting apart. And did I mention that it's a whole lot of fun?

Striking up those sparks when you first meet is easy. Nurturing a strong, steady flame? That's the hard part. When you've got a mortgage, a potbelly, and a decade or two of togetherness under your belts, it can be hard to muster up the fire you felt when you first got together. That's when it's even more important to protect your sex life and make it a priority. "You have to keep working to create allure and seduction for each other or your sex life will become lackluster," Greer points out. "Who wants the same turkey sandwich over and over? You want it on whole wheat! On toast! As turkey salad! On a roll!" (And now I will imagine my husband covered with Russian dressing. Thanks, Dr. Greer.)

As the years go by, you'll keep revisiting and realigning and reimagining the passion you have for each other. And if you keep at it, you'll have a sex life that transcends your marriage's lack of newness, the stresses of family and work, the physical changes that come with aging. Now that's something worth holding on to.

Step 3: Choose each other as your first family.

For years, you were primarily a member of one family: the one in which you grew up. Then you got married, and suddenly you became the foundation of a new family, one in which husband and wife are the A-team. It can be tough to shift your identity like this, but it's also an important part of building your self-image as a duo (and maybe, eventually, as three or four or...).

For me, making this transition meant stopping the incessant bitching to my mom when I was mad at my husband — my behavior was disloyal, and I had to learn to talk to Jonathan, not about him. My friend Lynn tells the story of her mother's reaction to a trip to the Middle East she and her then-boyfriend (now husband) had planned. Her mother hit the roof, calling incessantly to urge Lynn not to go. Eventually, Lynn's boyfriend got on the phone with Mom and explained why they were excited to share this experience. "It was clear then that we were the team," Lynn says now. "Not teaming up against my mother, but teaming up together to deal with her issues."

Whatever your challenges — an overprotective mom? an overly critical father-in-law? — you have to outline together the boundaries between you and all of the families connected to you. Not only will you feel stronger as a united front but when you stick to your shared rules, all that family baggage will weigh on you a lot less.

Step 4: Learn how to fight right.

I'm embarrassed to think of how I coped with conflict early in my relationship with Jonathan. I stormed out — a lot. I once threw an apple at his head. Hard. (Don't worry, I missed — on purpose.) I had a terrible habit of threatening divorce at the slightest provocation. But eventually I figured that this was pretty moronic. I didn't want out, and I knew that pelting someone with fruit was not a long-term marital strategy.

"Fighting is the big problem every couple has to deal with," says Daniel B. Wile, Ph.D., a psychologist and couples therapist in Oakland, CA, and author of After the Fight. That's because fights will always come up, so every couple needs to learn how to fight without tearing each other apart.

Fighting right doesn't just mean not throwing produce; it means staying focused on the issue at hand and respecting each other's perspective. Couples that fight right also find ways to defuse the tension, says Wile — often with humor. "Whenever one of us wants the other to listen up, we mime hitting the TV remote, a thumb pressing down on an invisible mute button," says Nancy, 52, an event producer in San Francisco. "It cracks us up, in part because it must look insane to others." Even if you fight a lot, when you can find a way to turn fights toward the positive — with a smile, a quick apology, an expression of appreciation for the other person — the storm blows away fast, and that's what matters.

Step 5: Find a balance between time for two and time for you.

Jonathan and I both work at home. This frequently leads to murderous impulses. Though I'm typing away in the bedroom and he's talking to his consulting clients in our small home office, most days it really feels like too much intimacy for me.

But that's my bias. When it comes to togetherness, every couple has its own unique sweet spot. "There are couples that are never apart and there are couples that see each other only on weekends," Greer says. With the right balance, neither partner feels slighted or smothered. You have enough non-shared experiences to fire you up and help you maintain a sense of yourself outside the relationship — not to mention give you something to talk about at the dinner table. But you also have enough time together to feel your connection as a strong tie rather than as a loose thread.

Your togetherness needs will also change over time, so you'll have to shift your balance accordingly. "My husband and I spend a lot of time together, but it's almost all family time," says Katie, 40, a mom of two in San Leandro, CA. "We realized a few months ago that we hadn't had a conversation that didn't involve the kids or our to-do lists in ages, so we committed to a weekly date. We were so happy just to go to the movies and hold hands, something we hadn't done in ages. It felt like we were dating again!"

Step 6: Build a best friendship.

Think about the things that make your closest friendships irreplaceable: the trust that comes with true intimacy, the willingness to be vulnerable, the confidence that the friendship can withstand some conflict. Don't those sound like good things to have in your marriage, too?

"Happy couples are each other's haven," says Holland. "They can count on the other person to listen and try to meet their needs." Greer adds, "When you're true friends, you acknowledge and respect what the other person is; you don't try to control or change them. This creates a sense of safety and security when you're together — you know you're valued for who you are and you see the value in your partner."

Then there's the way, when you've been with someone a while, that you become almost a mind reader. You have a shared history and inside jokes. Your guy knows what you'll find funny, you forward him links to articles you know he'll enjoy, and best of all, you two can make eye contact at a given moment and say volumes without opening your mouths. And is there anything more pleasurable than sharing the newspaper with someone? Sitting in companionable silence, absorbed in your respective reading, sipping coffee, occasionally reading something out loud, but mostly just lazing happily together, communing without needing to speak? Ahh....

Step 7: Face down a major challenge together.

You're sailing along through life, and suddenly you hit a huge bump. A serious illness. Unemployment. The loss of a home. A death in the family. How do you cope?

The truth is, you never know how strong your relationship is until it's tested. All too often, the stress of a crisis can pull a couple apart. But the good news is, when you do make it through in one piece, you might just find yourselves tighter than ever.

"What didn't happen to us?" says Daryl, 28, a preschool teacher in Harrisburg, PA. "My husband lost his job and took a minimum-wage job he was way overqualified for just to make ends meet. He was offered a better job in a mountain town outside San Diego, so we moved. Then during the California wildfires several years ago, our house burned down and we lost everything.We were living in a one-room converted garage with no running water and a newborn. But we found that this chaos somehow brought us even closer together. We took turns losing it. We really kept each other sane."

Hey, marriage is no roll in the hay. It's tough, real work. But the reward, the edifice you build together that will shelter you through years of tough times, is more than worth the effort. The small, friendly cottage you build — decorated with your shared history and stories, filled with color and laughter — will be the warmest and safest retreat you can imagine.

Tatoos...

I'll be perfectly honest... I've wanted to get a tatoo for a long time but my hubby is not so fond of the idea and his opinion means a lot to me. If I ever decided to change my mind and get a tatoo, it would have to be in a rather inconspicuous area due to the fact that I am a nurse and tatoos are frowned upon. So, you see, it would need to be in an area easily covered by my scrubs!

I was watching a show on tatoos last night and it was talking about the view on tatoos in Thailand. The citizens of Thailand get tatoos for protection against anything that would threaten their life whether it be bullets, knives or other things of that nature. Their belief is that a tatoo holds mistic powers that are put in place by the tatooer himself by "charging it" with mystic energy. A man would tatoo himself on any free expanse of skin and have it "recharged" during a yearly ceremony held at the temple by monks who are also the ones who do the tatooing using a single needle and their own hand power. They say that the pain experienced by the person being tatooed is entrancing. The tatooee falls into a trance from a combination of the pain and the power of the tatoo. Hmm... I wonder... A nurses worst enemy is a needle stick...