Beyond erosive acidity, soda is a high fructose corn syrup bomb that spikes blood sugar within 20 minutes.  This results in a massive insulin release into the blood stream, causing the liver to convert much of the sugar you just drank straight into fat.

How much sugar is in a soda?  One 20 oz. Dr. Pepper has 64 grams. Next time you order a Venti coffee at Starbucks, imagine adding 64 sugar packets. That’s how much sugar is in a Dr.P.  Just say no.

For more mindboggling stats about soda, including how much of it Americans consume each year, check out the infographic below, created by Peter Kim.

Will Wister, investment fund manager, health advocate and intellectual philanthropist, explains how free range eggs are not necessarily from chickens raised on a pasture:

It’s important to distinguish between “free range eggs” and “pastured eggs”

According to the law, “free-range” doesn’t really mean much of anything. The thing that makes eggs healthy and nutrient-dense is when hens have access to the outdoors, to sunlight, to bugs. If a label says “free-range,” it guarantees none of those things.

In fact “free-range” can simply mean that the hens have “access” to the outside for as little as five minutes a day! They may not even choose to go outside, and when they do, they may simply be walking out into a concrete slab devoid of any bugs, larvae, or grass.

A similar thing can be said for the “cage-free” label. All that means is that rather than being crammed into cages stacked on top of each other, hens are cage-free. They can still be confined indoors for their entire lives, never seeing a day of sunshine.[6]

Here’s more on that distinction:

“Free range” eggs, according to the United States Department of Agriculture, must come from chickens which are offered access to the outside. Many commercial production companies provide this access in the form of a small door which is opened a few times a day; used to being confined indoors, the chickens make no move to explore the outdoors. Pastured eggs, however, come from chickens which are raised on pasture, with mobile coops to roost in at night.[8]

Pastured eggs are more nutritious.

One commercial egg has about 34 IU of vitamin D, according to the USDA[1] The numbers for pastured eggs can be 3-6 times that amount or more[1][2][3][4][7] These results are based on data from 14 farms that produce pastured eggs and then comparing that data to USDA data on standard eggs.[4] This makes sense. See Do animals absorb vitamin D from sunlight?

Of course the benefits of pastured eggs don’t stop at Vitamin D

pastured eggs containing 2/3 more vitamin A, 3 times more vitamin E, 7 times more beta carotene, 2 times more beneficial omega-3 fatty acids, 1/3 less cholesterol and 1/4 less saturated fat.[1]

Pastured eggs had 50% more folic acid and 70% more vitamin B12 than eggs from factory farm hens. (1974 – The British Journal of Nutrition)[5]

Eggs from pastured eggs are often have a different hue. They can be almost orange, reflecting higher vitamin content and other factors:

The color may vary based on the season and how many bugs or green grasses the hen eats.[6]

Beyond that pastured eggs often have larger yolks in proportion to the tolk size of the eggs, and the thick part of the egg white is often more voluminous proportionally, and thicker, while the thin part of the egg white thinner and less voluminous proportionally[6].

[1] http://www.organicconsumers.org/…
[2] http://www.motherearthnews.com/R…
[3] http://www.fullsirclefarms.com/v…
[4] http://wholehealthsource.blogspo…
[5] http://healingthewholechild.com/…
[6] http://www.foodrenegade.com/heal…
[7] http://www.inpasturesgreen.com/a…
[8] http://www.wisegeek.com/what-are…

Daniel Layon, MS Candidate at Georgetown University explains why fruit is more than just a sweet snack:

Don’t make the mistake of looking at nutrition through a simple “macro-nutrient” perspective. Fruits and vegetables are not just “calories” or “grams of sugar”. They are nutritional packages that combine multiple difference micro- / macro- / phyto- nutrients.

Let me begin by demonstrating how fruits are good for you. In a classic study that examining the effects of the “Dietary Approaches to Stop Hypertension (DASH)”, Appel et al (1997) demonstrated, among other things, that a diet high in fruits and vegetables was a beneficial for lowering blood pressure. Closely examine the table below. Notice the highlighted area, which illustrates the relative number of servings of fruit per day in three different diets, a control diet, a high fruits and vegetables diet, and a combination diet.

The diet with higher fruits and vegetables did quite well in reducing blood pressure; though it is worth noting that the combined diet was superior to the fruits and vegetables diet.

A study by Joshipura et al (1999) demonstrated that an increased consumption of fruits and vegetables was associated with decreased incidence of ischemic stroke, as can be seen below.

An analysis of intake of specific food categories (fruits, vegetables, yogurt, etc) and their influence on weight loss was performed by the Harvard School of Public Health which found that increased consumption of fruits was associated with decreased total body weight:

NEJM 336: 2392 (2011).

Very quickly, I will address the sugar idea. Is pure sugar in large amounts bad for you? Yes. However, the sugar in fruit is not the same as the sugar that goes in your tea or soda. By this, I am not referring to the specific type of sugar , I am referring to the fact that the sugar in fruit comes with a hefty dose of fiber. Fiber attenuates the effect of sugar on insulin levels, which is why most fruits have a relatively lowglycemic index. In general, it’s better to eat things with a low glycemic load due to the effect on insulin and blood sugar of foods with high glycemic indices / loads:

(image courtesy of Dr. Sherman, GUMC).

So, in sum, I have yet to see a single study that convincingly demonstrates that fruit is not good for you. There may be an “upper limit” to its benefits, but it seems unlikely that fruit, even if consumed in large quantities, can cause harm.

Peakfoods is a visual database of foods that are in season now where you live. 

The site automatically detects location. Access from an iPhone and it acts just like a mobile app. Mouse over or tap the food to explore nutrition info, populated by USDA data, and recipes, which you can archive.  Recipes can be filtered for low sodium, no gluten, diabetes, low carb and no nuts.

Peakfoods is yet another side project success story.  It is created by Pete Petrash and Rick Sharp as a part of HiDef Inc’s CauseLabs Program, a platform for employees to try out new ideas with the potential for positive impact.

HiDef’s CauseLabs allows HiDef staff to champion social technology innovations from the inside out. Following a rigorous process, ideas receive votes, teams form, and the best products launch for social impact. The result? We keep our skills sharpened while producing valuable solutions for social needs.

We see such creative outcroppings frequently these days in the form of Google’s 20% time (responsible for gmail) and 3M’s 15% time.   Perhaps peakfoods will be the side project that inspires you to take action on your ideas.  Either way, this useful Farm to Table resource is an exciting find.  Let us know what you think and share your favorite local food hacks in the comments.

Bradley Voytek, an NIH-funded post-doctoral neuroscience fellow at University of California, San Francisco studying human cognition (namely working memory and attention), explains how play is more than just fun.  It has a profound neurological impact, from thickening the neocortex to enhancing an animal’s ability to learn and problem solve.

Why does the brain crave entertainment?

Answer by Bradley Voytek:

In short, yes, “entertainment” is beneficial to our neural health. And yes, for various definitions of “entertainment” we should absolutely “give in”!

There is a reason that young mammals play and frolic.

It’s practice.

Lion cubs and wolf pups at play are learning motor skills. They’re learning how to hunt to survive.

Classic research from the 1950s by my friend and Berkeley teaching mentor [1] Marian Diamond proved that mammals raised in “enriched environments” (with toys, running wheels, etc.) had less neural death (or more neuronal growth) in their brains. They learned better, were healthier, etc.

I’ll just let Dr. Diamond tell the her own story (via the Society for Neuroscience History of Neuroscience Autobiographies [2]):

It turns out that the Hebbs allowed their children’s pet rats to run freely around the house, and this gave Hebb an inspiration. After a few weeks of free roaming, Hebb took the rats to his lab to run mazes and compared the results with maze-running by rats living in laboratory cages. Interestingly, the free-ranging rodents ran a better maze than the locked-up rats. Hebb speculated that rats confined to small unstimulating cages would develop brains worse at solving problems than animals growing up in a stimulating environment like a large house with hallways, staircases and human playmates.

From Hebb’s observation the Berkeley team got the idea of deliberately raising baby rats in two kinds of cages: a large “enrichment cage,” filled with toys and housing a colony of twelve rats; and a small “impoverished cage,” housing a solitary rat with no toys. Indeed, the rats growing up in a deliberately enriched environment ran better mazes than the “impoverished rats” raised in unstimulating confinement. And like the bright and dull rats that Krech and his colleagues had already tested, the deliberately enriched rats had more of that particular brain chemical, acetylcholinesterse, than the impoverished rats. This time, however, it was apparently nurture at work, not nature…

The research process involved removing the brain of a laboratory rat, chemically fixing, or preserving, the brain tissue andmaking thin slices of it (20 micra thick), viewing the slices undera microscope, then very carefully measuring the thickness of the cerebral cortex from the rats raised in both kinds of cages, enriched and impoverished. I did see variations: The enriched rats had a thicker cerebral cortex than the impoverished rats, but the difference was not the sort you could observe casually. You had to compare the brain tissue under the microscope, and the cerebral cortex of the enriched rats was only 6 percent thicker than the cortex of the impoverished rats. Nevertheless, it was highly statistically significant; nine cases out of nine showed a 6 percent difference. This was the first time anyone had ever seen a structural change in an animal’s brain based on different kinds of early life experiences. Could it really be true?

I took another year and repeated the experiment with nine more animals. Then I started to get excited. It was about 1963 by then, and my life was really hectic. I now had four children, Catherine, Rick, Jeff, and Ann and was only at the university half time, doing demanding, pioneering work in the lab. In some ways, that period is hard to recall. But I do remember very clearly the day I took the results over to show David Krech. I ran across campus with the papers in my hand and laid them out on his desk. He stared at them, then at me, and immediately said, “This is unique. This will change scientific thought about the brain.” It was a great thrill—truly an emotional high—to sit with him and share that moment.

In 1964, we published the results in a paper by Diamond, Krech, and Rosenzweig called “Effect of Enriched Environments on the Histology of the Cerebral Cortex.” And a year after that I found myself standing in front of a session on the brain at the annual meeting of the American Association of Anatomists.

We were at a hotel conference room in Washington, D.C., and I was truly scared. There were hundreds of people in the room—very few of them women—and this was the first scientific paper I had presented at a big conference. I explained the projects as calmly as I could, people applauded politely, and then—I’ll always remember this—a man stood up in the back of the room and said in a loud voice, “Young lady, that brain cannot change!”

It was an uphill battle for women scientists then—even more than now—and people at scientific conferences are often terribly critical. But I felt good about the work, and I simply replied, “I’m sorry, sir, but we have the initial experiment and the replication experiment that shows it can.” That confidence is the beauty of doing anatomy. Ed Bennett used to say to me,“Marian, your data will be good from here to eternity, because it’s based on anatomical structure.” Eternity is a long time, of course. But so far—and it’s been thirty-four years—Bennett has been right. And the man in the back row? My entire research career and some of the many scientific findings that stemmed from it will continue to show how wrong he was in the pages ahead….

We know that this applies to humans to some extent, too. For example, even briefly practicing a new skill, such as juggling [3], can increase your motor cortex grey matter volume. Practice and play is most certainly good for the brain.

I don’t have the time to hunt around right now, but I’d be shocked if there wasn’t a whole wealth of academic research looking to the evolution of playing behaviors and their role in species fitness and survival.

My guess is the running theory would be something like this:

• Play is simulation. It’s Practice.
• Low-cost practice can prepare you for high-cost survival situations (such as fighting or hunting).
• Animals that have practiced are more likely to survive the high-cost scenarios for which they’ve practiced.
• This type of practice and play is therefore beneficial for survival (which increases the chances of procreation).
• To encourage this type of behavior, mammals are “rewarded” for playing.
• These neurochemical “rewards” in response to play are what we refer to as “entertainment”.

Note that so far I’ve only focused on physical play. But humans, being the social primates that we are, also find social practice entertaining as well. It’s good for us to practice socializing and learning social structures in low-cost scenarios, so we watch TV, read books, go to performances, chat online, play multiplayer videogames, and so on.

We interpret the observations of social interactions or the simulation of social behaviors as “entertaining”. But what we really might be doing is practicing how to interact with one another in a low-cost setting.

You don’t want to piss off king monkey or your future possible offspring supporter when you only get one chance in real life.

[1] http://www.wired.com/wiredscienc…
[2] http://www.sfn.org/index.aspx?pa…
[3] http://www.nature.com/nature/jou…

“Have you ever wondered why every person is unique? Could it be because our brains are wired differently? Our goal is to test this hypothesis by developing and applying technologies for finding connectomes, maps of connections between neurons.”

Neuroscientists at MIT, Harvard and several other Universities have come together to launch Wired Differently.  The project is described as a “‘citizen science’ community to test the hypothesis that the uniqueness of a person, from memories to mental disorders, lies in his or her connectome.”   This wonderful crowd-sourced project will empower anyone with an internet connection to help the world’s top neuroscientists organize hundreds of terabytes of data. You will even be able to play from an iPhone.

Your body recognizes pain with nerve cells called nociceptors.  When nociceptors are triggered to fire (i.e. send a nerve impulse, known as an action potential), they cause a cascade of chemical reactions that result in the experience of pain.

One class of chemicals, called prostaglandins, plays a key role in the progression of this chemical reaction.  Drugs like ibuprofen and aspirin block prostaglandin, therefore preventing the remaining reaction cycle and as a consequence, pain.

Check out the full lesson here for a Quick Quiz, Thoughtful Questions and Dig Deeper resources.

Your body is a complex set of chemical reactions.  If it does not have the proper building blocks (i.e. nutrients), it cannot perform the necessary functions that keep you alive.  Perpetually consuming a high ratio of processed and low-nutrient-value foods changes the chemical equilibrium and results in your body building the wrong compounds and not building necessary molecules.  This process is more commonly known as disease.

Dr. Wahls studied the biochemistry of MS at Dr. Mark Hyman’s Institute for Functional Medicine.  In short, MS causes mitochondria to stop working properly.  It also impacts the ability for neurons to make and maintain myelin, a crucial insulative layer around the neurons known as “white matter” in your brain.  Studying the chemical implications of these malfuncting reactions led Dr. Wahls to design a diet that quintessentially forced her body back into equilibrium.

She began incorporating 9 cups daily of vegetables and fruits into her diet, broken down into: 3 cups of leafy greens (Kale has the highest nutrient density per calorie of any vegetable); 3 cups of sulfur rich foods such as onion, cauliflower and mushrooms; and 3 cups of antioxidant-rich pigmented foods, such as blueberries, carrots and peaches, preferably in a variety of colors.  She also worked in grass-fed meat and fish like Salmon, which is plentiful in Omega fatty acids.  Finally, and not for the squeamish, organ meat is loaded with vitamins and minerals.  A small factoid to support the evolutionary advantage of organ meat: guess what predators eat first when they have made a kill?  That’s right, organs.  Don’t knock it until you try it.

That’s it.  You probably noticed that some major food groups are missing.  Dr. Wahl’s Paleo diet remix excludes bread,  dairy and refined sugars.  Dairy and wheat are among the most common food allergens and can lead to many adverse effects if consumed in excess.  Livestrong offers a good elucidation.

Now that you’ve read our thoughts, watch Dr. Wahls’s talk.  While it may not motivate you to change your diet to 9 cups of veggies with a kidney on the side, it will definitely make you think twice about what you eat and how it can fundamentally change the life you live.

We frequently hear that knowing one’s  farmer and having a connection to that farm helps to know one’s  food. Ultimately, growing our own food is considered optimal by many. Not all of us have the space, time, knowledge , or frankly, ability to succeed at that endeavor. Thankfully, we have many farmers in our community who can help those of us who want it fresh, but are gardening challenged. I am extremely happy to provide you the recently released ASAN (Alabama Sustainable Agriculture Network) FOOD &FARM GUIDE for the Huntsville area. This guide highlights most of the farms and growers of Alabama  and restaurants that use local produce. It provides information on Farmers Markets and a listing of informative  links.  As stated in the ASAN guide:

“We believe that Alabama families deserve really good, freshly farmed local food, whether purchased directly from farms or eaten at a restaurant.To that end, we offer this series of Food and Farm Guides, which highlights the farms and growers of Alabama, as well as the restaurants serving local produce. In addition to the great taste and the satisfaction of knowing where your food comes from, locally grown food offers health benefits over the highly processed and conveniently fast foods that have been shown to contribute to the near epidemic of obesity we are seeing, especially in Alabama’s precious children. When you purchase standard supermarket or fast food fare, you send your money out of the community and out of the state. When you choose to buy locally grown meats and produce, you support local employment and local businesses of all kinds, while enhancing the governmental tax base. Not all food from sources listed in this guide are strictly or certifiably “organic,” but all meet strict standards of quality and safety; and for families wanting the added assurance of quality, the guide does indicate which farms and restaurants offer USDA certified organic or Certified Naturally Grown™ food. Healthy Farms, Healthy Foods, Healthy Communities!”

Peruse this site to find farmers, markets, restaurants, etc. that meet your needs and suit your requirements.  Good friends and and providers of some of the food for my family are  Charles and Laura Ritch of Goose Pond Farm. Charles has suggested to me that getting local and fresh food does not necessarily guarantee that it will meet my criteria.  He has told  me to “really ” talk with my farmers and ask the specific questions regarding how the fruits and vegetables are grown, how the soil is prepared, how the animals are fed, sheltered and cared for. He has encouraged me to visit the farms for a behind the scenes view. AND he has suggested that people should visit  the farms on days other than tour days to get a REAL view of how the farm is run. Granted, the farmers can’t always stop and chitchat with us (running a farm can be a grueling task!) ; however, we can at least see if life on the farm appears to be as we have been told it is.

I would like to thank Karen Wynne for the ASAN link. She serves with me  on the North Alabama Food Policy Council, another excellent source for food security and availablity information.

Eating is more than merely a way to  provide  energy for the body; it is an experience that nurtures our bodies, minds, and spirits.  Eating locally grown foods provides more than healthy fare for our bodies;  it helps to support healthy farms and create healthy communities.  Locally grown and healthily prepared foods are truly a form of SUPERFOODS. I look forward to sharing  food experiences, research, and information with you.  I invite you to share  some of your favorite food memories, healthy recipes, and shopping or  cooking tips.  Ask questions; we will look to the experts for answers. When we combine our knowledge and ideas, the synergy magnifies the positive results and the experience.   I look forward to learning with you.

Have a great week!

Rebecca