"diet" news and stories

In China, they have an extra season.

Spring, Summer, Late Summer, Fall, and Winter make up the five seasons of the Chinese calendar; corresponding with the five Chinese elements and a number of their healing philosophies.

According to my knowledgeable friend Lora:
"Each season is connected to a set of organs in the body. Corresponding foods that are fresh in each season are meant to cleanse, detoxify, and heal those organs. When we eat the same diet year-round without paying attention to seasonal foods, we ignore our bodies' needs to support and properly heal organs, which leads to lots of health issues (obesity, heart disease, diabetes, stroke, etc.)."

So. Here's what you should eat right now:

You probably remember hearing about The Miracle Fruit (containing the mysterious protein miraculin) earlier this year. It makes bitter and sour taste sweet, and, by altering those two flavors, makes everything taste like something else.

Surprise surprise, they turned it into a pill!

Available from ThinkGeek, the Miracle Fruit Tablets come in dodgy-looking packets of ten and will apparently blow your mind so much, they recommend only taking half a tablet to start.

Originally documented in France in 1725, the Miracle Fruit has been experiencing a renaissance of interest since 2007. We attribute the public fascination to the hope that one day cauliflower will taste like ice cream and vinegar will taste like ranch dressing. As people continue to invent crazy diets to lose weight, everyone is on the lookout for a way to make diet food taste more like Snickers bars. We wonder what it does to cabbage soup!

For now, people are mostly using the tablets recreationally. Two pills per person makes one heck of a crazy dinner party!

Source

Tofu noodles, a slimy, putty-pale item that might ordinarily be relegated to the back of the ethnic food shelf in American grocery stores, are experiencing a surge in popularity. Why? The 40-calories-a-bag noodles have been endorsed by Hungry Girl, a website dedicated to the kind of food substitutions that recall the bad old days of Slim-Fast, Snackwells, and other highly altered dietetic food stuffs. Her endorsement has made the once-obscure noodles a hot ticket item in stores like Whole Foods and Gristede's.

Hungry Girl suggests eating Tofu Shirataki noodles with low-fat cheese as a sort of (very) faux fettuccine Alfredo. I dunno - anything labeled "lite" or "low-fat" reminds me too much of my mid-90s girlhood of eating neon-colored sugar-free yogurt for breakfast and tofu bologna slices for lunch.

One of my favorite early Saturday Night Live skits was featured John Belushi as an Olympic athlete. The scene opens with clips of Belushi doing a high jump and running around a track, then cuts to a shot of him at the breakfast table. Clutching a cigarette, Belushi looks into the camera with complete gravitas and tells about his secret to staying fit: "I downed a lot of donuts. Little chocolate donuts. They taste good and they've got the sugar I need to get me going in the morning."

The commercial played off the classic "Wheaties" ads, which featured Bruce Jenner. The prevailing wisdom in those days stated that top-class athletes had to eat extremely healthy foods, like whole grain cereal and skinless, boneless chicken. However, as I recently read about Michael Phelps' daily eating regimen, I was surprised to see that his diet is much closer to John Belushi's than to Richard Simmons. To begin with, the Olympian consumes approximately 12,000 calories a day, roughly six times the RDA for a man his age. Second, it is heavily skewed towards carbohydrates and fats, which most diets eschew. Given Phelps' amazing energy expenditure (in the average week, the guy swims five hours a day, six days a week!

At any rate, Phelps' average daily menu is after the jump...

As someone with an insatiable sweet tooth, I was fascinated when I found out that hormones in our body affect how we perceive and crave sweetness. They do this according to our body's nutritional needs. Since I have a pretty bad sweet tooth, does this mean my body needs more of it? Not exactly. A recent article in The Economist explains that scientists have done the first step; they've isolated hormones that affect our palate's sensitivity to sugar.

The reason why this study is so important is because it may lead doctors and nutritionists to find a solution for ways of reducing the desire for sugar-heavy foods, and thus reduce calorie-intake. Yuzo Ninomiya, a neuroscientist at Kyushu University in Japan, researched the effects of leptin, a hormone that regulates appetite and metabolism. His results show that when leptin levels are low, we are more sensitive to sugar, which means something tastes sweeter than when our leptin levels are low. The level of the hormone increases over the day. This might explain why we tend to eat lots of sugar in the morning ('cause it tastes so good!).

So, it seems, if scientists can figure out how to raise leptin levels (or at least keep them steady) throughout the day, then all of us sweet-tooth types might have a chance at eating less cake!

In a world full of sweets, it's not easy to avoid them. What are some ways you control your sugar intake?