DailyDirt: Eat This, Don't Eat That...

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

Fad diets and diet recommendations seem to change every few years. Whole eggs were bad for you, but now they should be considered as part of a balanced diet. What makes a diet balanced? More carbs? Less Fat? Maybe you should just walk every day to your nearest Subway and only eat sandwiches. Or maybe you can just track your calories and eat whatever you want. Or not.

• The American Heart Association and the US govt have been recommending low cholesterol, low saturated-fat diets for over 50 years. However, mounting evidence is removing foods high in cholesterol from the "bad" food lists -- and maybe someday foods with saturated fat won't be perceived as unhealthy either. [url]
• Saturated fat doesn't cause heart disease. The unintended consequences of vilifying fat in our diet has shifted people to consume more carbohydrates -- which actually do have proven negative health effects. [url]
• Dietary guidelines from Brazil are a bit non-specific, but they also sound pretty reasonable. Brazil's dietary advice includes this point: "Be wary of food advertising and marketing." [url]

If you'd like to read more awesome and interesting stuff, check out this unrelated (but not entirely random!) Techdirt post via StumbleUpon.

Filed Under: calories, cholesterol, diet, food, health, jared fogle, recommendations, saturated fat

DailyDirt: Seriously, You Are What You Eat...

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

There's still a lot people don't know about biology, and the way biological molecules can be transmitted. Eating food is an unavoidable way of consuming a whole range of biological compounds, and scientists are learning more and more about how foods can affect health. Here are just a few links on some interesting food science topics.

• Bits of RNA from rice have been found to survive digestion and possibly alter gene expression in mammals. MicroRNA pieces that could only have come from plants were found circulating in human blood, and mice experiments suggest that microRNAs could affect cholesterol levels and act as pharmaceuticals. [url]
• Food packaging labels could have a lot of unintended consequences, so it's not surprising that the food industry wants to try to control what they're required to print on their labels. For example, Nutrition Keys only took up 1.5 percent of the surface area of the packaging, potentially making the nutritional info less noticeable. [url]
• The FDA is supposed to start implementing food safety rules soon, but the complexity of creating effective policies (along with a reduced budget to do so) could delay the development of new food safety procedures. Writing the rules might be the easy part, too, compared to the task of actually enforcing them... [url]
• Analyzing the different types of oxygen, nitrogen, hydrogen, and sulfur in animal muscle tissue can determine the dietary history of farm animals -- which could be useful in verifying whether or not a cow was actually grass-fed its entire life (or just for its last meal). Hmmm. CSI techniques to prove how the farmer killed his cow? [url]
• To discover more food-related links, check out what's floating around in StumbleUpon. [url]  

By the way, StumbleUpon can also recommend some good Techdirt articles, too.

Filed Under: cholesterol, food, food safety, labeling, microrna, rna
Companies: fda