Monday, January 12

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Whats Good: Sugar Detox? Cutting Carbs? A Doctor Explains Why You Should Keep Fruit On The Menu
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Whats Good: Sugar Detox? Cutting Carbs? A Doctor Explains Why You Should Keep Fruit On The Menu

One of my patients – who had been struggling with obesity, uncontrolled diabetes and the cost of her medications – agreed in June 2019 to adopt a more whole-food plant-based diet. Excited by the challenge, she did a remarkable job. She increased her fresh fruit and vegetable intake, stopped eating candy, cookies and cakes and cut down on foods from animal sources. Over six months, she lost 19 pounds and her HbA1c – a measure of her average blood sugar – dropped from 11.5% to 7.6%. She was doing so well, I expected that her HbA1c would continue to drop and she would be one of our plant-based successes who had reversed diabetes. Her three-month follow-up visit in March 2020 was canceled because of COVID-19 lockdowns. When I eventually saw her again in May 2021, she’d regained some of the ...
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Free Soul Food Recipes Breaking New Ground
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Free Soul Food Recipes Breaking New Ground

Free soul food recipes continue to break new ground. While more health experts are complaining about the high calorie, salt and fat content in soul food, more websites are heading the call for healthier recipes. The huge (pardon the pun) problems with obesity is blamed on the high fat and calorie content in much of the food we eat. To respond to this growing demand, more soul food recipe publishers, websites and restaurants are offering healthier recipes. The response? A growing resurgence in the popularity of this southern cuisine. An added bonus is attracting the interest of new people to this southern comfort food. Examples of Healthy Changes Examples of healthier changes is replacing many of the high fat seasonings, such as fat back, ham hocks and bacon drippings. These traditional ...
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Is Chocolate The Temptation Of Sin
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Is Chocolate The Temptation Of Sin

Temptation lives across the street in a two story contemporary building where the chocolatier resides. His passion and zest for cocoa makes his heartstrings sing. His lust for creating passion drives him each day back into the boiling cauldrons. Melting and mixing the exquisite aromas flutter into the air wafting out into the streets below. Mouths salivate as their nostrils pick up the sweet scent sliding by on the airfoils of the day. Imaginations fire up pondering the delicate treats the chocolatier has conjured up for the display. He has no menu but there are plenty of pictures hanging around taunting and teasing every patron's brain. The cocoa is mixed, pounded and patted, melted and shaped, then sprinkled, and swirled until it is molded into chocolate treats. The treats come out in ...
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Like Cigarettes Addictive And Unhealthy – Foods High In Added Fats And Refined Carbs
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Like Cigarettes Addictive And Unhealthy – Foods High In Added Fats And Refined Carbs

Ashley Gearhardt, University of Michigan Every year millions of Americans try to cut down on ultra-processed foods – industrial formulations that are typically high in added fat, refined carbohydrates or both. Think cookies, cakes, potato chips and pizza. For many, the desire to change what they eat is triggered by concerns about potentially life-threatening health conditions, like diabetes and heart disease. The impact of diet on health is not a small problem. In fact, a recent multidisciplinary commission of 37 leading scientists from around the globe identified unhealthy diets as a greater risk to human health than unsafe sex and alcohol, drug and tobacco use combined. Many people know that most ultra-processed foods are not healthy. But the goal of cutting down on them can be so cha...
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Want To Persuade Americans To Swap Out Beef For Plant-Based Burgers, Taste Alone Won’t Do It
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Want To Persuade Americans To Swap Out Beef For Plant-Based Burgers, Taste Alone Won’t Do It

The big idea Consumers are more likely to choose a plant-based meat substitute when the restaurant’s advertising highlights the social benefits of doing so rather than its taste, according to recently published research I conducted with a colleague. We also found that showcasing the social costs of meat consumption also leads to a preference for plant-based “meats.” To reach this conclusion, we conducted two online experiments to examine the advertising of plant-based burgers and meatballs. Participants were recruited via the crowdsourcing website Amazon Mechanical Turk. In the first one, 156 participants were shown one of three commercials for a plant-based burger. They saw either a social appeal (“good for the environment and animal welfare”), a health appeal (“good for your health – n...
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The Fermenting Microbes – Chocolate’s Secret Ingredient That Make It Taste So Good
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The Fermenting Microbes – Chocolate’s Secret Ingredient That Make It Taste So Good

Whether baked as chips into a cookie, melted into a sweet warm drink or molded into the shape of a smiling bunny, chocolate is one of the world’s most universally consumed foods. Even the biggest chocolate lovers, though, might not recognize what this ancient food has in common with kimchi and kombucha: its flavors are due to fermentation. That familiar chocolate taste is thanks to tiny microorganisms that help transform chocolate’s raw ingredients into the much-beloved rich, complex final product. In labs from Peru to Belgium to Ivory Coast, self-proclaimed chocolate scientists like me are working to understand just how fermentation changes chocolate’s flavor. Sometimes we create artificial fermentations in the lab. Other times we take cacao bean samples from real fermentations “in the ...
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How SNAP can help people during hard economic times like these
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How SNAP can help people during hard economic times like these

A record number of Americans are seeing their hours cut or losing their jobs due to the initial economic repercussions of the coronavirus pandemic. How will millions of newly jobless families keep putting food on the table? They might get some help from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. The nation’s largest anti-hunger system helped about 35 million low-income people buy groceries in 2019, down from a peak of over 47 million in 2013 in the aftermath of the Great Recession. After repeatedly trying to scale back SNAP the White House recently agreed to Congress’s efforts to ramp it back up. The Families First Act, which President Donald Trump signed into law on March 18, included an additional US$1 billion in funding for other nutrition programs and will let more people enroll ...
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Pull off a stress-free Thanksgiving dinner with this turkey day menu and timeline
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Pull off a stress-free Thanksgiving dinner with this turkey day menu and timeline

Let’s face it, no matter how wonderful it is to be surrounded by family and friends on Thanksgiving, cooking for a group of people is an incredibly daunting task. For most people, prepping for turkey day takes days to mentally and physically prepare. In order to pull off a successful dinner that you’ll actually enjoy, planning ahead is key. That means shopping well in advance, cooking dishes in advance that hold well in the refrigerator and following our Thanksgiving menu and timeline. Here’s the menu the Southern Kitchen team will be whipping up come Thanksgiving: The Mains Oven-Roasted Turkey Virginia Willis’ Bourbon Baked Ham The Sides Grilled Kabocha Squash Salad with Maple Vinaigrette Oyster Cornbread Dressing Bebe’s Green Beans Bourbon Collard Greens Extra Cheesy Mac and Cheese...
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Eating bugs: Nutrition is proven but not their effects
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Eating bugs: Nutrition is proven but not their effects

Nytimes.com last September shared that the American market for edible insects exceeded $55 million in 2017 and is expected to keep climbing as more companies create nutritionally appealing products. Bugs: We squish them, spray them and shoo them. But eat them? A large percentage of the world’s population — an estimated 2 billion people, in fact — already eat insects because of nutritional content and accessibility, according to anthropology resource sapiens.org: “In Thailand, street vendors push carts stocked with trays of deep-fried grasshoppers, water bugs and other seasoned insects. In Mexico, chefs mix cream-colored ant eggs into omelets and whip up guacamole with crunchy grasshoppers. In Zambia, the Congo and other parts of Africa, locals snack on insects harvested from the wild.” How...
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How Southern Communities Tackle Summertime Food Scarcity
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How Southern Communities Tackle Summertime Food Scarcity

Without free and reduced school lunch programs during the summer, many children go hungry. Local organizations and churches are stepping up to help to narrow the food gap. Jasmine Caston’s weekdays begin before the sun rises. A single mother of two daughters, Caston works full time and goes to school. Every day is a juggling act. To be sure it goes well, she and her children need to be out of the house no later than 6:20 a.m. Nine months of the year, this isn’t a big problem. The girls are in school. But summertime? That’s a different story. A mythology surrounding school’s summer vacation days is that they’re fun and restorative for children and their families. But this mythology has rarely applied to low-income families of color, especially across the American South, whe...
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