Yesterday I wrote about food that used to be considered bad for you but which recently have been revised by science to actually being considered good for you. Unfortunately there are also foods that fall in the opposite category - food that used to be considered healthy that just doesn't make the grade anymore. According to LiveScience here's a list of good foods gone bad:
Most Americans have never eaten real pizza and confuse it for the junk food advertised on television. In Italy there are laws defining pizza, which set allowances on the type of flour, tomato, mozzarella, olive oil, basil and oregano. The real Italian pizza is inherently nutritious and filling. Some local shops in New York City and other large cities have kept close to the original idea of simple, fresh ingredients. Unfortunately the large commercial pizza chains have replaced fresh ingredients with preservative-laden, cheap and fatty ingredients that could be mass-produced, frozen and shipped across the country. Commercial pizza is now a high-calorie, high-fat, high-sodium, low-nutrient food.
True cereals such as wheat, barley, rice and oats are and always have always been the most important food of the human race. The combination they provide of protein, healthy fat and vitamins is unbeatable. Sadly, the word "cereal" has been hijacked, by food producers who make what amounts to candy out of true cereal with the addition of sugar, corn syrup, salt, food dyes and preservatives. Try oats with raisins, or barley with 100-percent fruit spread. These are both healthier and cheaper.
The most common form of bread in America is the mass-produced white, soft doughy bread in plastic bags. Yet it is considered a major component of obesity and diabetes. True bread is flour and water with a pinch of salt and yeast. Packaged white bread contains flour plus sugar, corn syrup and often a dozen other ingredients. The processing creates a food product that is quickly converted to glucose. This causes the pancreas to work overtime and can ultimately destroy the organ. Even some mass-produced whole wheat breads are unhealthy because they still contain the unholy trinity of sugar, salt and softening additives.
When my Dad was in the service and stationed in Idaho, my mother learned to love these potatoes and I grew up eating them. Yet at the risk of pissing off Idaho, the Russet varieties of potatoes, with their brown skin and white flesh, are only marginally healthy. Cheap and hardy and with a few nutrients, they serve some purpose as a filler. But their starch is quickly converted by the body into blood sugar and raises the risk of diabetes and obesity. Even worse we tend to boil and mash them and cover them in butter, or we cut them into strips, deep-fry them and cover them with salt. Not good.
Most fish sticks are made from a very healthy fish called Pollack. However, it's when they turn them into sticks that things turn bad. The stick part consists of the remaining 20 ingredients listed on the box, which aren't so healthy. Doctors have been advising people to eat more fish for years, because they are high in healthy fats and low in unhealthy fats compared to beef and pork. Yet when you buy processed fish products or when you order deep-fried fish from a fast-food joint, the bad outweighs the good.
Why am I posting this picture of Justin Timberlake?
If you have to ask - nevermind.
Some Naderites had a table set up in the Campus Center today, the first time I've seen that campaign represented.
The article about me in the UMass Collegian came out today.
Ryan Fung, the photographer, sent me some color shots from the article, which appeared as black and white in print and not at all on the web version.
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