Whack-a-mole

I do enjoy playing Whac-a-Mole when I bring my kids to the arcade. For those of you who don’t get out that much to participate in this sort of amusement, the Whac-A-Mole machine consists of a large, waist-level cabinet with five holes in its top and a large, soft, black mallet. Each hole contains a single plastic mole. Once the game starts, the moles will begin to pop up from their holes at random. The object of the game is to force the individual moles back into their holes by hitting them directly on the head with the mallet, thereby adding to the player’s score. The more quickly this is done the higher the final score will be. As the game goes, on the pace gets faster, sometimes with 2 moles at a time rearing up out of the holes. You’ve got to be fast and hit hard to beat the moles and win the game. Its good exercise and builds hand eye coordination.

As  a parent who is trying to feed their kids the right stuff, I feel we are playing Whac-A-Mole every day with the food industry.  Let me explain my metaphor and see if you agree.

Way back when I was growing up, it was somehow determined that fat made you fat. The food industry responded with loads of “low fat”  and even “fat free” food products. Everyone rushed out to get them. And everyone continued to get fatter, and sicker. Next came the no carb craze and just about over night, everything, even bread, became “low carb” And everyone continued to gain weight and lose their health.

These days, the moles that pop up in the food industry’s Whac-A-Mole game are things like trans fats. We pounded that one down with our mallets, but the food industry responded with palm oil and cottonseed oil: two ingredients that are hurt our health and the health of the planet (as I’ve written about in previous posts) . HFCS was the next bad boy ingredient that popped up in the Whack-A-Mole game, the food industry is responding by renaming high fructose corn syrup into corn sugar and replacing HFCS in some drinks with real sugar. Will that sneaky mole get by us, or will we pound it back into its hole with our mallets?

There is way to win this game. You see, the food industry wins every game as long as we keep putting our money into their system. Bang all the moles you want, but the machine gets your quarter no matter how high the score. What we all need to do is walk away from the Whac-A-Mole game that the food industry has set up.

Invest your money elsewhere in real food that you can believe in. Food that is grown closer to home, food that doesn’t have ingredients you can’t pronounce, food that doesn’t have a fancy marketing budget.  Don’t play their game anymore.

Watch this Whac-A-Mole action and see if you feel the same way when buying standard American food in the supermarket. There really is a better way to eat and to live besides being forced to play continual game of Whac-A-Mole…..

Earlier this week, I wrote a guest post in The Slow Cook and the Better DC School Food blogs about sugar in schools. In this article, I barely scraped the surface of this issue. Sugars are not just “empty calories”, sugar is a major anti-nutrient that can wreck havoc with your health.

The confusion over sugar continues. After all, fruit contains sugar, and what about beets and carrots?  My teacher and mentor Joan Gussow  once famously said  “I prefer butter to margarine because I trust cows more than chemists.”  I too, trust Mother Nature more than food companies. Carrots, beets and fruit are fine. In fact, they are really good for you!

Nowadays, many people understand that high fructose corn syrup (HFCS) is bad news. The beverage industry is responding by putting “cane sugar” into their drinks. Jones Soda boasts of having “pure cane sugar” in their soda, Pepsi is now boasting of “real sugar” in their Throwback brands that are being blasted all over Facebook and Twitter.  Vitamin Water with “crystalline fructose” is now showing up as a healthier alternative in school cafeterias (its not!).

Somehow consumers didn’t get the big picture message: refined sugar is bad for you! That refined sugar could have aliases like HFCS or cane sugar or crystalline fructose (found in Coca Cola’s Vitamin Water). All of this stuff will rot your teeth, expand your waistline, raise your cholesterol, the list goes on and on.

The World Health Organization defines free sugars as all monosaccharides and disaccharides added to foods by the manufacturer, cook or consumer, plus sugars naturally present in honey, syrups and fruit juices.

One other point worth mentioning: fruit juice = sugar hit. A glass of 100% juice is NOT the same as eating a piece of fruit! As a matter of fact, your morning glass of OJ can be contributing to your high cholesterol. Parents who think they are doing their kids a favor by giving them Minute Maid Lemonade or  Snapple 100% juice for an afterschool snack are damaging their kid’s livers, making them even more hungry, and of course, helping to make their dentists rich.

Apparently, fructose makes it so you don’t feel full. Makes complete sense that food manufacturers would want to use HFCS in their products. If you don’t feel full, you’ll keep eating and drinking. Great for a food company’s shareholders, not so great for your health.

NYC Mayor Bloomberg and the Center for Science in the Public Interest have declared war on salt. They claim salt is a major factor in heart disease and stroke.  Perhaps they should take a good long look at sugar! They’ll find a connection to diabetes, cancer, heart disease, and much much more.

Bottom line:

Eat Real Food. Drink Water.

Last night while most of the country was watching the Super Bowl, I was learning about fructose metabolism. A lecture by Dr. Robert Lustig, a pediatric endocrinologist held my attention for over 90 minutes as he explained how fructose, present in both fruit juice and most soda can act as a poison in our livers. This revelation makes loads of sense to me, both personally and professionally.

Since the popularity of Atkins and South Beach diets, many of us have understood how refined carbohydrates can lead to high trigylcerides and fat accumulation. But many nutritionists and health professionals  continue to believe that  a calorie is a calorie and all sugars act the same in the body.  Dr. Lustig proceeded to blast those theories out of the sky with his lecture, demonstrating that fructose metabolism is eerily similar to alcohol metabolism in the liver.

High levels of fructose do not just appear in our diets in the form of High Fructose Corn Syrup. Most people, with the exception of employees of Coke and Pepsi, now agree that our increased soda consumption plays a role in the obesity epidemic.  Fructose is also abundantly present in fruit juices, which have been promoted as a healthy beverage since the Nixon administration.

According to Dr. Lustig, fructose acts as a toxin in the liver resulting in a non alcoholic fatty liver and leads to gout and hypertension by creating excess uric acid. Not only are we seeing fat kids, we have increased incidence of hypertension and gout in young patients. Bottom line: we were never meant to be able to metabolize these abnormally high amounts of fructose.  By eliminating all forms of sugary beverages and adopting a water or milk only strategy, you can be on your way to reversing weight gain and other metabolic damage.

It will be very hard to pull fruit juice out of schools, now that the soda industry owns brands like Tropicana (Pepsi) and Minute Maid (Coca Cola), but after watching this lecture, many will agree its an important next step. Personally, I’ve never been a fan of juice thanks to the damage I’ve seen it create in children’s teeth. I’ve always advised parents to eat the fruit instead to get the entire benefit that Mother Nature intended: fiber, micronutrients all in the right proportions.

Don’t take my word for it. Watch this lecture yourself and see if you start to re-think your drinks. Warning: some complex biochemistry will be shown, that a science nerd like me loves. Just breathe and go with it, you’ll be glad you did!

She is fed up with school food and is taking it personally. Very personally.  An unidentified teacher somewhere in the mid-west has started a horrifying stunt. She will be eating (and photographing) her school’s lunch every day this year.  I greatly admire her bravery to put her health on the line to make a point.  School lunch in the USA is in need of a huge overhaul.

Thanks to the large number of concerned parents and health professionals here in the blogosphere, I expect that her  journey, which is reminiscent of  Morgan Spurlock’s Supersize Me film, will grow a huge following. The timing couldn’t be better.  The nation is starting to focus on the state of school lunch as  Congress is expected to update child nutrition programs this spring.  The re-authorization of the Child Nutrition Act will impact the health of 31 million children.

This  school lunch conversation needs to go beyond calorie counts and fat grams. We all know that a picture is worth a thousand words, the photos being uploaded daily to the Fed Up: School Lunch Project blog tell a lot. Viewing today’s posted lunch of a “bagel dog” along with some pale anemic looking tater tots made my stomach queasy and makes me wonder more about the health and well being of  kids who are eating this every day.

Our kids deserve real food in schools, not packaged processed chemicalized fare. We need to teach them more than just the USDA food pyramid by incorporating school gardens and food based education through out the curriculum. This is a most worthwhile investment in their future. Real food is preventative healthcare which will save all of us enormous amounts of money in the future.

What can you do to make some waves like this teacher?

Have kids and parents write letters: Slow Food’s Time for Lunch campaign offers some great tools that will help you to get this message across.  Letter writing can have a big impact that legislators can’t ignore.  Legislators who already understand the importance of better school food can refer to letters as evidence of support.

Visit your kids cafeteria and have some lunch. Better School Food has an action plan and a handy checklist that you can bring to the school cafeteria. Bring your camera to lunch and send the photos to your legislator. After all, a picture is worth a thousand words.

photo ©Nancie Battaglia

Bill McKibben is one of my heroes. He’s an author, educator and environmentalist who has done more than just about anyone I know to engage and inspire people to take a stand on climate change.   The world has tapped Bill for a big mission and he has stepped up beautifully. Thanks to Bill,   350.org has become a world wide phenomenon.  (If you don’t already know why 350 is the most important number on the planet, then click here to learn more.)

This guy is a powerful writer. After reading Deep Economy , my world view changed dramatically. His words hit me deep in my gut that we’ve got to change the way we’re doing things.  I’m currently reading The End of Nature (written back in 1998) as part of  a book group on Food & Capitalism.

Yesterday he wrote a very moving post, No Time for Tears in Copenhagen but the last paragraph caused me to see red.

So no more tears. Not now, not while there’s work to be done. Pass the Diet Coke, fire up the laptop, grab the cellphone. To work. We may not have done enough, but we’re going to do all we can.

Do you see the red I’m talking about? My green hero drinks Diet Coke. The Coca Cola corporation, known for it’s red containers filled with colored sugar water, has been working non stop lately to portray itself as a green company.  The products that this multinational corporation sells are not good for our health or the health of our planet.

Coke and Diet Coke negatively impact your health. Here are a few ways:

High fructose corn syrup (HFCS) has been correlated with obesity, high triglyceride levels which in turn impact LDL cholesterol. HFCS also decreases your feelings of fullness, so you’re more likely to eat and drink more.

Phosphoric acid found in soda tends to leach calcium from bones which results in decreased bone density. It’s acidic pH also accelerates tooth decay.

Aspartame is an artificial sweetener found in Diet Coke what has been linked to some significant health issues including migraine headache, ADHD, vertigo and even brain tumors. This chemical creates sweet cravings and many people have found it to be addictive.

In addition to being hazardous to your health, Coca Cola wrecks havoc on the environment, not just here in the US but around the world.  Mark Thomas’s book, Belching Out the Devil illustrates the real story behind Coca Cola. I highly recommend this book for further reading on Coca Colas misdeeds globally.

Let’s take a peek at the environmental impact of a few ingredients in a can of Coke

Corn grown for High Fructose Corn Syrup requires loads of  petrochemical derived fertilizer and pesticides. Nitrous oxide, a greenhouse gas 200 times more damaging than CO2, is liberated when those fertilizers are used.  Let’s not forget the dead zone resulting from fertilizer runoff in the Gulf of Mexico. Watch King Corn and Big River to learn more about this.

Aluminum cans require a huge amount of energy to create. While recycling is great and saves energy, less than one third of all aluminum cans come from recycled sources.

Water is 99% of Coca Cola’s product. This corporation has  gone all out to manufacture an image of itself as a global leader in water conservation. The water that goes into making soda comes from streams and aquifers. This water could be better used to irrigate sustainable agriculture or to hydrate thirsty people around the globe.  Also think for a minute about all that water that we are trucking  around in those big red Coca Cola trucks,  burning oil and creating exhaust that is adding more carbon into our atmosphere.

Bill, please re-think your drink! Your health is important, we all need you in tip top shape.  I’m sure you need some caffeine, after all, you’re working tirelessly to turn 350ppm CO2 into something as instantly recognizable as a Coca Cola logo.  But how about some green tea instead? In addition to a caffeniated boost, you’ll benefit from anti-oxidants. Tea bags are very portable, you just pop them in your re-usable stainless steel tea mug and add water. You can even enjoy it cold or room temperature.

Switching from soda to tea is a simple green strategy, one that we all can do, that will help to make the world a better place.