Our Drive For Convenience Is Killing Us

water 2

Yep, my grocery store is now selling their own water with a few slices of cucumber. Are we really that hard up for convenience? Why do we resist making things for ourselves?

I was in the grocery store the other day and something caught my eye at the checkout counter. Next to the tabloids and junk food, my store also has a few refrigerators with cans of soda and bottles of water. It was the fridge that caught my eye…or actually something floating in the bottles of water.

Cucumbers!

That’s right, my grocery store is now selling cucumber water. You can have all 12 ounces for $2 just bucks.

Cucumber water certainly is healthier and far better to drink than the store’s homemade pure fruit juices it sells (fruit juice is just sugar without the fiber).

It reminded me of the story the Washington Post ran about the reasons why millennials are not eating cereal — too much clean up.  Of course, Livescience.com tries to debunk this saying that people are now avoiding carbs. Yet, in the same article, they claim that pre-made breakfasts and breakfast sandwiches are all the rage (great way to avoid carbs in those breakfast delights, right?). Read More



Want To Lose Weight? Eat Butter!

New review of studies on the dangers of saturated fat show that the evidence is seriously flawed. Image courtesy of SOMMAI and FreeDigitalPhotos.net.

Turns out butter is healthy after all. A new review of studies on the dangers of saturated fat show that the evidence is seriously flawed and the guidelines against fat should never have been issued. Image courtesy of SOMMAI and FreeDigitalPhotos.net.

Yesterday the news spread far and wide that the low-fat diet pushed on us by nutritionists, the weight loss industry and the US government, lacked any evidence that it was healthy.

Yep, they told us to cut saturated fat out of our diets. As a result, Americans reduced their fat intake, which lead to a dramatic increase in their calorie consumption due to low-fat foods being loaded with carbs and sugars.

Yet there was no scientific evidence that a low-fat diet was actually healthy. Basically, we were guinea pigs in a 40+year experiment conduced by our government. The result? We got fatter and sicker. Read More


Are Carbs, Sugars Really Addictive? “Fed Up” Zeros-in On Sugar

Is sugar really addictive? A new documentary - Fed Up - is coming out and it's gunning for the Sugar and food industry.  But is it more a hatched job or an unbiased look at obesity in America?

Is sugar really addictive? A new documentary – Fed Up – is coming out and it’s gunning for the Sugar and food industry. But is it more a hatched job or an unbiased look at obesity in America? Image courtesy of Grant Cochrane and FreeDigitalPhotos.net.

There’s a lot of talk of food being addictive. I’m not sold on it. Unlike drugs, you actually need food to survive. I know there is “research” showing that carbs and sugar trigger the same area of the brain that drugs do, but so does sex and a whole host of other things that give us pleasure.

The study in question just showed that when faced with choosing between rice cakes and Oreos, rats picked the Oreos. Hell I would too. They are tasty little treats, but that doesn’t equal addiction in my book.

Now, I’m not a fan of fast digestive carbs (breads, grains, pastas) and believe carbs make us fat. But addiction is too easy an explanation and lets the diet industry off the hook for pushing junk science supporting today’s high carb/low-fat diet myth. Fig Newtons may activate my brain’s pleasure areas, like crystal meth, but that doesn’t mean they are addictive.

Read More