Tag: food

How closing your eyes and counting before meals may aid weight loss – Business Insider

Nutritionists have recently come to an exciting find in a new study on eating habits, recently published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

According to the study’s findings, small rituals prior to meals could assist us in eating more consciously and with more discipline.

Comprised of six rounds of assessment on 1800 participants, the study was conducted by assistant professor at Shanghai University of Finance and Economics, Allen Ding Tian.

How closing your eyes and counting before meals may aid weight loss – Business Insider

The Scientists Who Shape What and How We Eat – The Ringer

You are not what you eat. Though you may have brought home bags of groceries from the store and put them together in the form of a meal (or accidentally left them to rot in the crisper like every other bag of salad I’ve ever purchased), your choices aren’t strictly your own. Bernays was only one of the first to realize how easily people can be swayed by the right kind of advertising — a kind that speaks to our unconscious minds and pulls at our emotions. It’s no coincidence that Bernays — these days known as the “father of public relations” to communications students across the country — was the nephew of Sigmund Freud.

In 2014, there was a huge outcry when it was revealed that Facebook had secretly tinkered with over half a million users’ News Feeds to make some of them see more negative posts and others more positive. The emotions were contagious — those shown happy posts got happier and vice versa. The reaction to Facebook’s psychological manipulations was uniformly swift and angry. Yet when a group of psychologists remodels a cafeteria or grocery store to see if it changes people’s eating habits, we hardly think twice about it.

The Scientists Who Shape What and How We Eat – The Ringer

How You (Yes You, By Yourself) Can Start Mitigating Climate Change – Digg

Perhaps you’ve heard about this climate change? A buildup of greenhouse gases — largely produced by us — in our atmosphere over the past century is warming the atmosphere. This warming will result in all kinds of fun consequences such as increased precipitation, regular heat waves and drought, stronger hurricanes and sea level rise on the order of at least a foot.

It is, by no exaggeration, a problem of global proportions. Just months ago 136 nations ratified the Paris Climate Agreement — the international diplomatic equivalent of your group project members finally agreeing to meet the night before your group presentation is due. It’s also a problem that is slightly out of the control of the average person. Between 1970 and 2011, 78 percent of all greenhouse gasses emitted were the work of industrial processes and transportation.

The more cynical among us might see that stat and throw their hands up. No one person can halt the complex systems that keep the engines of our planet going. But maybe you aren’t a cynical person. Perhaps you watched Leonardo DiCaprio’s Before The Flood, and now feel like you should try and do something. Maybe you’d like to, at least, no longer contribute to the problem.

Fantastic. The good news is that just about everything you do emits some kind of greenhouse gas into the atmosphere — if you really want to understand the exact extent of which, go ahead and use a carbon calculator — so there’s plenty you can do to reduce that.

How You (Yes You, By Yourself) Can Start Mitigating Climate Change – Digg

Breaking Down The Science Of Picky Eating

Our food preferences are intensely personal, but scientists have tried to figure out why some people are so picky about the things they eat. Jane Kauer is anthropologist who has studied this topic at the University of Pennsylvania and at the Monell Chemical Sciences Center. She’s also a board member of the youth nutrition company Rebel Ventures. She sits down with Here & Now co-host Jeremy Hobson to talk about the science and culture of picky eating. A transcript of their conversation follows, edited for brevity and clarity.

NPR

Why (almost) everything you know about food is wrong

There was a time, in the distant past, when studying nutrition was a relatively simple science.

In 1747, a Scottish doctor named James Lind wanted to figure out why so many sailors got scurvy, a disease that leaves sufferers exhausted and anemic, with bloody gums and missing teeth. So Lind took 12 scurvy patients and ran the first modern clinical trial.

The sailors were divided into six groups, each given a different treatment. The men who ate oranges and lemons eventually recovered — a striking result that pointed to vitamin C deficiency as the culprit.

This sort of nutritional puzzle solving was common in the pre-industrial era. Many of troubling diseases of the day, such as scurvy, pellagra, anemia, and goiter, were due to some sort of deficiency in the diet. Doctors could develop hypotheses and run experiments until they figured out what was missing in people’s foods. Puzzle solved.

Unfortunately, studying nutrition is no longer that simple. By the 20th century, medicine had mostly fixed scurvy and goiter and other diseases of deficiency. In developed countries, these scourges are no longer an issue for most people.

Today, our greatest health problems relate to overeating. People are consuming too many calories and too much low-quality food, bringing on chronic diseases like cancer, obesity, diabetes, and heart disease.

Vox.com

Sorry, You Can’t Have Fries With That: 10 Foods That May Disappear Thanks to Climate Change

Climate change is making the world a different place. There are more floods, droughts, wildfires, heat waves and other extreme weather events. Animal species around the world are either shifting habitat locations or simply dying off. Even humans are migrating due to a warmer world.

But there is one effect that will hit many of us right in the gut: Certain foods could disappear thanks to our changing climate. Brace yourself: here are 10 foods you’ll probably be sad to see go.

Alternet

We’re throwing away tons of fruits and veggies for not being pretty enough

Some criteria are rightly based on food-safety and shelf-life considerations, but many are manifestations of misguided normative ideas about what produce should look like. Cucumbers should be straight, cauliflower florets should be tightly held, and rhubarb stalks should be ruby red. If not, retailers tell farmers, consumers won’t buy them.

Washington Post