diet Archives - Page 8 of 8 - Respect Food Roles

Who’s Your Sugar?

January 21, 2018August 19, 2015 by Debi Simons

Fed Up, a documentary produced by Laurie David (who also produced An Inconvenient Truth), directed by Stephanie Soechtig, and narrated by Katie Couric. Available through Amazon, YouTube, and Netflix. All of these links are to paid services. You can watch a trailer here on YouTube.

I owe my viewing of this documentary to the fact that I got bored watching an episode of Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. and started browsing. Since Netflix knows all, the documentaries I was presented with mostly had to do with food, and this one sounded interesting. I started watching and was completely captivated; about a week later I re-watched it, this time with Jim and Gideon.

Hunger Is the Best Sauce

September 5, 2019June 18, 2015 by Debi Simons

Did your mother ever say, “Don’t spoil your dinner!” when you were asking for a snack at 5:00 in the afternoon? Mine did, I’m sure, although there wasn’t much in the way of snack food at our house. (I would sometimes eat a spoonful of crunchy peanut butter if I got hungry between meals; as snacks go, that wasn’t too bad of a choice.) The specific reason for waiting until dinner was that you were going to have real food then, something nicely prepared, and it would be a shame not to be hungry for it.

Don’t Make Food into an Idol or an Addiction

April 23, 2018June 12, 2015 by Debi Simons

I just finished lunch a little while ago. a totally scrumptious bowlful of lentil-and-vegetable-and sausage salad with my homemade creamy Italian dressing. I enjoyed every bite. And now, if I’m wise, I’ll consider myself to be off the eating bandwagon until dinner, at which time there will be another good meal, perhaps some spinach lasagna with whole-wheat pasta. Or we might go out, it being Friday night and all.

Some good news, but . . .

April 20, 2018February 13, 2015 by Debi Simons

. . . no free pass.

I wrote early in January about my higher-than-expected blood sugar levels and my intention to be very strict about sugar intake during the month and then get the further testing the doctor recommended. The second test was done on Feb. 3 and I got the results later in the week. Fasting blood glucose was 99, which is just one point below the 100-125 range that is considered pre-diabetes, so I’ve apparently moved back down out of the danger zone. But not by much. My insulin level was 2.6, which is apparently quite good. If you have high fasting insulin levels, especially above 5.0, you almost certainly have insulin resistance; that is, your cells don’t take up glucose easily and so your pancreas has to pump out more and more insulin to get blood sugar down. But of course you have to have enough insulin. I’ve been finding it difficult to get a good take on how low is too low. There was no indication in the report that anything was amiss with this number, though, so I guess I’ll take it as okay.

“God made the food . . .

April 18, 2018January 20, 2015 by Debi Simons

. . . and he wanted people to take it and thank him for it” (I Timothy 4:3b Worldwide English trans.).

My husband is fond of quoting Martin Luther’s description of humankind as a drunkard on a horse: he goes down the road for awhile and then falls off and rolls into the ditch on the right. Then he staggers back up on the horse and stays on for awhile until he falls off again and this time rolls into the ditch on the left. He spends very little time in the saddle actually going down the middle of the road.

How two small medical scares . . .

December 21, 2018January 12, 2015 by Debi Simons

. . . are helping me keep some of my New Year’s resolutions. We “obligers” need lots of outside prods. (Don’t know what an “obliger” is? Read about the “Four Rubin Tendencies” here. I think she’s really onto something.)

I write about my efforts to quit my small-but-annoying habit of picking at my fingers and chewing on hangnails in the chapter on habits in my book. I’ve been doing pretty well, but there have been some slips. A couple of weeks ago I had to get a filling redone at the gumline, third bottom tooth over from the center on the right. I hate getting fillings! Hate it, hate it, hate it. It takes forever. And those needles!

Eating Lean Is Pretty Mean

March 31, 2018July 30, 2014 by Debi Simons

Cover for "The Big FAT Surprise"

The Big FAT Surprise: Why Butter, Meat & Cheese Belong in a Healthy Diet by Nina Teicholz, Simon and Schuster, 2014.

Let me say that I hope Teicholz makes a ton of money from this book. She deserves that, having spent the past nine years doing the research for the 337 pages of text plus 100+ pages of notes that comprise this book. And the message is: Whatever you think you know about what current research tells us constitutes healthy eating, you’re almost certainly wrong. If you go back and actually look at the original data for the studies that have been so influential in our dietary thinking over the past few decades, as Teicholz has done, you’ll find that they don’t actually say what it’s been said that they say.

So, for example, take a look at the so-called “Mediterranean Diet,” beloved in song and story. What does it consist of? Lots of vegetables, lots of whole grains, fish, and the very occasional serving of red meat. The fat of choice is olive oil, gallons of it.

The Truth About Sugar

January 4, 2019July 10, 2014 by Debi Simons

Book cover for "Sweet Poison, why sugar makes us fat" Sweet Poison: Why Sugar Makes Us Fat by David Gillespie, Penguin Books, 2008. Link is to the book’s page on the author’s website. Some parts of this website are subscription only.

You’ll find quite a few books about food and nutrition as this book blog continues. (I’m reading a book titled The Big Fat Surprise: Why Butter, Meat & Cheese Belong in a Healthy Diet; it should show up soon.) David Gillespie is the most accessible writer I’ve found on the subject of the evils of sugar. Robert Lustig’s Fat Chance and Gary Taubes’ Why We Get Fat: and What to Do About It are both good resources but very dense. You have to be pretty interested in the subject already in order to be motivated to plow through them. Gillespie, on the other hand, is funny, smart, and brief, and he plentifully illustrates his ideas from his own experience. I have to admit that I did a little skipping in the chapter “Biochemistry 101,” but he does an admirable job of explaining the actual processes by which our bodies transform food into energy.