Jonell Galloway
The 7 foods experts won’t eat is an enlightening article by Liz Vaccariello, Editor-in-Chief of Prevention magazine in the U.S.
It’s an article that will educate even those of us who consider they are in the know about what’s good to eat and what’s bad (for instance, me!). The opinions are from scientists and doctors in the field, so we have to take them seriously.
For example: “The resin linings of tin cans contain bisphenol-A, a synthetic estrogen that has been linked to ailments ranging from reproductive problems to heart disease, diabetes, and obesity.” We’ve somehow left behind what our mothers taught us. I remember my mother always saying you should never store acidic foods in metal. How did we manage to forget that in less than a generation?
Or that cattle are genetically wired to eat grass, not grains, so corn-fed beef has fewer nutrients. Common sense really. If we keep in in line with nature, there’s less likelihood that we’ll harm our health, and more likelihood that we’ll be eating in a healthy manner.
A good read, and an important one.
GenevaLunch, 19 December 2009.
Filed under: Healthy
Tags: Foodie news and events, healthy, Healthy, healthy eating, Lake Geneva, Prevention, Switzerland
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December 20th, 2009 at 13:57
There are some good points here, but I think it’s important to note that this is a mainly American article and the food business in the US is different in many ways from European agriculture. Swiss beef can’t be cut with a butter knife and it isn’t as tasty as the delicious corn-fattened steaks I grew up with in Iowa, but it’s certainly better for us, not to mention quite a lot better for the animals. Switzerland is pretty strict about beef: http://www.srp-psbb.ch/fr/files/broschueren/rindfleisch.pdf.
Even Swiss bio products allow a small amount of corn in feed for cows (www.bioaktuell.ch/fileadmin/documents/ba/bioregelwerk…/neu_f.pdf), however, after much discussion among scientists and food experts. For me, the bigger problem is the economics of corn-fed beef versus the large amount of land needed for grass fed animals – neither of these are great solutions for the world at large, so I prefer to reduce my beef consumption.
The opinions in Vaccariello’s article are from scientists and doctors: but there isn’t consensus on several of these, among specialists, so I prefer to think these are good reminders and deserve some reflection, but I’m a bit skeptical on some of these points.
And messing around with nature, while often creating problems, has been done for a long, long time – not all the results are negative. Early grains, for example, lost their seeds very easily, allowing the plant’s seeds to blow away and reproduce. Humans appear to have decided at some point this was inconvenient and we began to separate out the grains that did not easily shed. These crops, over which we have more control, are the ones we grow thousands of years later. Nature didn’t do it.
The one food I expected to find and didn’t is brains: I’ve been told by several neurologists (but I guess they are not considered food experts) and brain researchers that they will never eat animal brains. Seems sound to me.