Eat Mostly Plants, Especially Leaves.

Unhappy Meals - Reprise

"Most people associate omega-3 fatty acids with fish, but fish get them from green plants (specifically algae), which is where they all originate. Plant leaves produce these essential fatty acids (“essential” because our bodies can’t produce them on their own) as part of photosynthesis. Seeds contain more of another essential fatty acid: omega-6. Without delving too deeply into the biochemistry, the two fats perform very different functions, in the plant as well as the plant eater. Omega-3s appear to play an important role in neurological development and processing, the permeability of cell walls, the metabolism of glucose and the calming of inflammation. Omega-6s are involved in fat storage (which is what they do for the plant), the rigidity of cell walls, clotting and the inflammation response. (Think of omega-3s as fleet and flexible, omega-6s as sturdy and slow.) Since the two lipids compete with each other for the attention of important enzymes, the ratio between omega-3s and omega-6s may matter more than the absolute quantity of either fat. Thus too much omega-6 may be just as much a problem as too little omega-3..."

Unhappy Meals

"Eat food. Though in our current state of confusion, this is much easier said than done. So try this: Don’t eat anything your great-great-grandmother wouldn’t recognize as food. (Sorry, but at this point Moms are as confused as the rest of us, which is why we have to go back a couple of generations, to a time before the advent of modern food products.) There are a great many foodlike items in the supermarket your ancestors wouldn’t recognize as food (Go-Gurt? Breakfast-cereal bars? Nondairy creamer?); stay away from these..."

Click here to read Michael Pollan's full article

Is Organic Agriculture Pro-Poor?

Of the world's 1.09 billion extremely poor people, about 74% or 810 million live in marginal areas and rely on small-scale agriculture for their livelihood. In most developing countries, agriculture continues to be the most important sector of the economy, accounting for the biggest proportion of employment. As such, unless effective strategies for agriculture development are successfully implemented, ending rural poverty will remain a distant goal.

During the past few decades, the Green Revolution has brought about significant changes in the world's food production systems. It is recognized that while the Green Revolution has benefited better-off farmers in irrigated areas, it has by-passed the poor in marginal areas. Low-external input sustainable agriculture (LEISA) has long been viewed as an alternative for areas where the Green Revolution technologies are not feasible. More recently, one particular alternative that has gained interest is organic agriculture, due to its commercial viability. Most farmers in marginal areas practice traditional agriculture methods using very little or no agrochemicals. By adopting organic agriculture (OA), which requires less financial inputs while placing more reliance on natural and human resources, farmers could move towards more sustainable agricultural practices. Improving the agricultural production system in marginal areas in a sustainable manner and providing market access for the poor hold the key to the mass reduction of poverty...

Sununtar Setboonsarng
Asian Development Bank Institute

Download full paper "Organic Agriculture, Poverty Reduction, and the
Millennium Development Goals"

Unit Bias
a new heuristic that helps explain the effect of portion
size on food intake

"People seem to think that a unit of some entity (with certain constraints) is the appropriate and optimal amount. We refer to this heuristic as unit bias. We illustrate unit bias by demonstrating large effects of unit segmentation, a form of portion control, on food intake. Thus, people choose, and presumably eat, much greater weights of Tootsie Rolls and pretzels when offered a large as opposed to a small unit size (and given the option of taking as many units as they choose at no monetary cost). Additionally, they consume substantially more M&M’s when the candies are offered with a large as opposed to a small spoon (again with no limits as to the number of spoonfuls to be taken). We propose that unit bias explains why small portion sizes are effective in controlling consumption; in some cases, people served small portions would simply eat additional portions if it were not for unit bias. We argue that unit bias is a general feature in human choice and discuss possible origins of this bias, including consumption norms."

Andrew B. Geier, Paul Rozin, and Gheorghe Doros
University of Pennsylvania

Full article

Courtesy of the fanatic cook