The London Free Press votes for Steam Whistle

I don't follow beer. I used to like my beer but as the price for a brewski went up and up my consumption went down and down. Today beer is a treat. No brewery will stay in business because of me.

That said, I used to buy Labatt whenever I did buy beer. It was brewed locally and it made me feel that I was supporting local workers. I still have a Blue, if it is available on tap, when I am out at a pub as I was Sunday.

But the Labatt brewery is now owned by AmBev, the fourth-largest brewing operation in the world. Buying Labatt does not come with the same feel-good-buying-Canadian aura it once did. Still, I was surprised to read this recommendation in a recipe in The London Free Press, the Labatt hometown paper: "1 bottle (355ml) Pilsner beer ( Steam Whistle's a good choice)"

Mixing a Pilsner into a recipe is a great leveler. No need to waste one's favourite beer when it is about to be altered with addition of "BBQ seasoning". I was surprised to see the hometown paper wasn't supporting the hometown beer.

And then I realized that The London Free Press is owned by Sun Media and Sun Media is a Toronto-based outfit. The article, written by the Sun's Rita DeMontis, was simply supporting an award-winning, local Toronto brewery.

It's nice to see a paper supporting local business when possible. Nice work Toronto Sun.

Città Slow

In the next day or two the food topic will be a wrap - for now.

A new topic worth some attention has appeared on my radar: Città Slow.

I'm a fellow who is put off by buzzwords. I stiffen when someone talks about placemaking or walkable cities. But Città Slow has grabbed my attention. Maybe it's the Italian.

Cheers,
Rockinon

The New York Times - Serving Size Snafu

The New York Times took a look at serving sizes. For me the most interesting examples were the blueberry muffin and the Healthy Choice soup. The soup carries the seal of the Heart Association.

A half muffin is the usual serving size according to the label. The soup comes in what clearly appears to be a single serving sized bowl ready to be micro-waved. In reality it contains two servings of soup. This is a bowl of soup meant to be shared with a friend. Get out two spoons.

Business Playlist - Video Library - The New York Times

After viewing the NYT video, Rockinon has a four-part series looking at food. If you only have time for one, I suggest reading Part IV.


We're killing ourselves with an unhealthy lifestyle. Part I
We're killing ourselves with an unhealthy lifestyle. Part II
We're killing ourselves with an unhealthy lifestyle. Part III
We're killing ourselves with an unhealthy lifestyle. Part IV

This topic, the dishonest marketing of our food, is hot right now. The Huffington Post carried a link this weekend to a story looking at dishonest food claims.

Cheers,
Rockinon

We're killing ourselves with an unhealthy lifestye_Part IV

Putting the brakes on the obesity epidemic should be easy. If you consume more calories than you burn, and do this everyday, you will gain weight. It's that simple. On the other hand, if you cut back on calories, and add a little exercise to the mix, you'll lose weight. Again, it's that simple.

Processed foods are notoriously calorie dense and often nutritionally thin. Why are so many people turning to processed foods when the results are as obvious as the thickening waist lines expanding around the world? Paul Berton, the editor-in-chief of The London Free Press has an answer, "We'd rather buy our food prepared (and salty) than make it ourselves."

He's right but I also think a little mean spirited and preachy. (If there is one tone that I can recognize it's preachy.) I think Berton needs a little history lesson.

When I was young most families were supported by only one working parent, usually the father. My father never made a lot of money. My mother told me my father never earned much more than $5000 in any year. Yet, my mother was never forced to work outside the home.

Speaking of home, our home didn't cost a lot; I don't think it was more than $7000 in 1960 when my parents bought the pleasant, two-story, five-bedroom home, built in the 1920s. Our home didn't cost even two times my father's annual wage. (Well, maybe it did on a bad year.)

Today the average wage in Canada is about $42,305 and the average home costs about $332,00 according to The Canadian Real Estate Association. It should come as no surprise that more than three-quarters of mothers with school-aged children are employed, most full-time, or are actively looking for work.

Today parents struggle to juggle multiple responsibilities. Fifty percent of working mothers, and 36 percent of working fathers report having difficulty managing their work and family responsibilities. Stress is on the rise.

Many parents simply do not feel they have the time to cook. Processed foods are time savers and many of them are healthy — at least that's what it says on the label.

And if the processed food product doesn't have the word healthy in the name, often it carries the Heart and Stroke Foundation’s Health Check program logo. Many believe the Health Check logo means 'healthy,' 'good for you' and 'approved by the Heart and Stroke Foundation.'

Wrong, wrong and wrong.

According to The Uniter, Winnipeg's Weekly Urban Journal:

"Although high amounts of sodium are associated with increased health risks leading to strokes and high blood pressure, the Health Check can be found on food products with extremely high levels of sodium. Canned soups with 650mg of sodium per serving still bear the Health Check symbol . . . Dinner entrées are allowed to bear the Health Check symbol with 960mg of sodium per serving."

1500mg of sodium (salt) is all an adult needs in a whole day!

The Health Check program is updating their nutrition criteria as of November 2010. Soups will soon have to contain less than 480mg of sodium; and dinner entrees, less than 720mg.

It's tough out there. Putting good food on the table is even hard for those of us who shun processed foods and have the time to play in the kitchen cooking healthy meals.

Check out the peaches at the top of this post. They are from Chile, imported by Del Monte, and tossed out by my wife. They were hard; They never ripened — not even when left for days to ripen in a bag — they were stringy, dry and tasteless. The food value was nil as they were inedible. 

O.K. I know I shouldn't buy peaches out of season but I did. Forgive me. It won't happen again. Trust me.

Oh well, when it comes to the Chileans it all comes out even. We sent them Coke. And the stuff, unlike the peaches, tastes good. Now they, like the rest of world, are hooked on sugar water.

When I was in the little Saharan town of dusty Douz in Tunisia, I discovered Tunisians quench their thirst with Coke. When I bought a carpet from a desert shop I was offered the choice of traditional mint tea with an almond cookie or I could sip a Coke while we haggled. (I went with the mint tea.)

What do Canadians look for when buying healthy foods. The Heart Check icon is not perfect. How about the Kraft Sensible Solutions flag? It's not perfect either. According to Kraft the Sensible Solutions products cannot have more than 10 percent of their calories from saturated fat plus trans fat . . . Trans fat? I think not.

Trans fat is related to elevated risks of heart disease and type 2 diabetes but even if you read labels you may still be eating trans fat. You see, Health Canada says if a food contains less than 0.2 grams of trans fat per serving it can claim to be "trans fat free."

But stated serving sizes are often rather small. In some cases a consumer can eat three "trans fat free" cookies a day and in a week consume approximately 4 grams of trans fat. And that is just from three cookies over a week. How much trans fat sneaks in the back door and into our diets in year of eating "trans fat free?"

Berton tells us that we eat too much fat. I don't know. Maybe we do. But according to Harvard School of Public Health the low-fat approach hasn't helped Americans control weight or become healthier.

In the 1960s, fats and oils supplied about 45 percent of the calories in the U.S. diet. At that time 13 percent of Americans were obese and under 1 percent had type 2 diabetes. Today Americans take in far less fat, they get only about 33 percent of calories from fats and oils. Yet, 35 percent of Americans are now obese

and 8 percent have diabetes, most with type 2 diabetes.

Why hasn't Paul Berton's suggestion paid off? I admit, I thought he was right. Let's have Harvard's answer:

"Detailed research — much of it done at Harvard — shows that the total amount of fat in the diet isn't really linked with weight or disease. What really matters is the type of fat in the diet. Bad fats, meaning trans and saturated fats, increase the risk for certain diseases. Good fats, meaning monounsaturated and polyunsaturated fats, do just the opposite. They are good for the heart and most other parts of the body.

What about cholesterol in food? For most people, the mix of fats in the diet influences cholesterol in the bloodstream far more than cholesterol in food does."

According to Harvard, "Eliminating trans fats from the U.S. food supply could prevent between 6 and 19 percent of heart attacks and related deaths . . . "

Here we really get the last laugh on Chile, they'll be sorry for those peaches; we may be cutting our trans fat use but inexpensive partially hydrogenated oil has become a staple in homes in the developing world. There is a growing epidemic of cardiovascular disease in developing nations around the world.

Slowly, I'm beginning to think there my be something to be said for the eat-organic-movement. And I no longer think vegetarians are giving up an important source of protein. We will be taking another look at food in the coming weeks and maybe giving out some recipes that my wife uses and which help us avoid the worst of the processed food traps.

Cheers,
It's the weekend,
I'm off,
Rockinon!

Killing ourselves with an unhealthy lifestyle_Part Three

According to Paul Berton, the editor-in-chief of The London Free Press, "We're killing ourselves with an unhealthy lifestyle."

Paul sees the problem as stuff like snow blowers, food processors, prepared foods and professional sports (we watch 'em, we don't play 'em.) Sounds good except that the obesity epidemic is often growing faster in developing countries. There are not a lot of snow blowers and food processors in those countries. But they do have prepared foods and each year they have more and more of them.

Maybe we should be putting more attention on prepared foods. If we consume more calories than burn, we gain weight. It is that simple. Today's prepared foods make it far easier to consume more calories than are needed. Packed with fats and sugars, many prepared foods propel your calorie consumption into the stratosphere long before you feel full.

Now, this is where it gets interesting. Paul Berton asks: "What can be done? . . . We need to do something about this ourselves. And we need to do it soon. We can't afford --- physically, economically or socially --- to ignore it any longer," he says.

And what does Paul suggest? One of the answers he apparently likes is: ". . . make cities more walkable . . . " (This is actually weirder than it sounds on first reading. If we make our cities more walkable, we put the stores, etc., closer to the homes. Walking to the store becomes attractive because it doesn't entail much of a walk. I live in the suburb of Byron in London Ontario and I have no problem walking. Remarkably, my legs work just as well here as they did when I lived downtown.)

Let me suggest another approach: I believe many Canadians, if given clear, healthy choices, will choose health. But the marketplace, when it come to food, is anything but clear. Often food labels are downright misleading.

For instance, Campbell's Healthy Request Chicken Noodle Soup contains 480mg of sodium which they list as 20% of your daily allowance. But Health Canada says 1500mg is about right for an adult. My math says a cup of this soup contains 32 percent of your daily salt allowance. This is not healthy.

I could go on and on about this. I could list lots of food products with healthy sounding names but containing massive amounts of fat. Or others with healthy sounding names but packed with a variety of sugars.

I try and stay away from those prepared foods. Do you know what helps me accomplish this? Let me surprise you: food processors, bread machines and massive stand mixers. For me, these are all part of the answer and not, as Paul argues, part of the problem. It is the year 2010 and we live busy lives. It is not 1910 anymore.

But, thanks to my bread machine, I still have the time to bake my own bread. I control the fat --- French bread has none --- and I control the sugar, too. The flour for this loaf came from the Arva Flour Mills and the flavour of my bread, forgive me, but it came from heaven.

My next and last installment will look at the excellent recommendations of the Heart and Stroke Foundation and how these dovetail nicely with solutions being suggested right around the world.

Cheers,
I'm going for a walk,
Rockinon

Great New York Times link

If you are interested in math but always found it daunting, follow the new series starting today in the New York Times. It sounds like a great introduction to math. Check it out. If it delivers on its promise, it will be well worth your time. It might even be a good read for young students in grade seven or eight. Click the link.

From Fish to Infinity --- NYT

I've always had a certain love for numbers. I can still vividly recall getting scolded in grade one for not memorizing all my multiplication tables. I was asked, "What is five times ten?" I thought for a moment and said, "50." I took a bit too long to answer and so was asked another question from the five times table. This time I took even longer as I answered the question, "What is five times nine?" "45."

The teacher quizzed me, a little boy in grade one, and discovered that I knew how to multiply by ten, just add a zero to the number. I also understood division by two. And I could subtract ones.

To multiply an even number by five I was dividing by two and adding a zero. To multiply an odd number by five I was subtracting one, dividing by two, and finally adding a five as one added a zero when working with ten. Why I thought this was a better approach than simply memorizing the five times multiplication table I'm not sure.

Maybe I thought I had enough math tools. I didn't need anymore. I was just showing an early conservationist bent.
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Tomorrow, I am running Part Three: Killing ourselves with an unhealthy lifestyle.

Killing ourselves with an unhealthy lifestyle_Part Two

Paul Berton, editor-in-chief of The London Free Press, wrote in the pointofview (sic) column: "Many of us smoke too much, eat too much, eat too many of the wrong things, and not nearly enough of us get adequate exercise, whether we're teenagers or aging baby boomers."

He's right, of course. There are folk to be found doing all the above. But in some areas things are looking up. Take smoking. The number of young people smoking regularly or occasionally has dropped over the past decade. (At least by figures going up to 2008.)

As people typically start smoking in their teens, this drop indicates future smoking rates will be lower than today's. At 19.8 percent, you may be interested to know, the smoking rate in Ontario is below the national average.

As good as things look on the smoking front, they look quite the opposite when it comes to the battle of the bulge. And the problem is not confined to Canada. Obesity is a global epidemic affecting about a billion people worldwide. According to the World Health Organization: "Contrary to conventional wisdom, the obesity epidemic is not restricted to industrialized societies . . ."

"Increased consumption of more energy-dense, nutrient-poor foods with high levels of sugar and saturated fats, combined with reduced physical activity . . . ," these are fueling the global obesity epidemic. (More on this in the next post.)

In Canada 37% of adults are overweight and 24% are obese. Do the math --- 61% of adult Canadians are fat. The situation with children and teens is even more alarming. Among teen boys age 15 to 19, the proportion classified as overweight or obese rose from 14% to 31% between 1981 and 2009. Among teen girls, it increased from 14% to 25%.

I think it is rather simplistic to just damn the lazy Canadians who would "rather buy food prepared (and salty) than make it . . . " In many ways Canadians are trying to eat well. The question is: Why are they so often failing?

Take tea: Per capita consumption of tea has increased to 79.4 litres. Wow! This increase may be partially explained by the widely reported antioxidant properties of some teas. This looks like evidence that Canadians are trying; They do care.

According to Statistics Canada we have more fruit in our diets, more yogurts but less milk, we've increased our chicken while cutting back on our red meat. Oils and fats are on a downward trend, but vegetable consumption is also down and refined sugar use is up.

And where do all these food trends lead? Well, the total daily intake of calories per person has fallen to 2,382 calories, a decline of 131 calories since peaking in 2001. It does appear that if we give Canadian healthy choices, they will take them.

But making healthy choices is not always easy. Tomorrow we'll take a look at how food producers make it difficult to make healthy food choices.

And we'll be taking a look at the key priorities of the Heart and Stroke Foundation. I must tell you that as much as I disliked The London Free Press editorial, the news report on the Heart and Stroke Report Card was excellent, even going so far as to touch on the foundation's recommendations.
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Are you a fatty? Try the BMI (body mass index) calculator.

BMI For Adults Widget

   
   

I like the following site as it discusses the strengths and weaknesses of the BMI calculations. Nothing is black and white in my world; This is the BMI site for those who live in Rockinon's world.

BMI calculator background information.Lastly, be aware that some people believe BMI can potentially missclassify people as fat, even though their percentage of body fat is not excessive.