Archive for the ‘Healthy Eating’ Category

Mark Bittman video on the American Diet

Sunday, February 8th, 2009

Check out this great video by Mark Bittman, food columnist and author of How to Cook Everything (Completely Revised 10th Anniversary Edition): 2,000 Simple Recipes for Great Food. Bittman talks about the unsustainability of our current eating habits and how they have lead to global warming and health problems. A few of nuggets from the video:

  • The optimal amount of red meat in the American diet is 1/2 pound per week. On average, we consume seven times that amount.
  • The world consumes over 1 billion Cokes per day. That’s a lot of empty calories.
  • Packaging and processing of “healthy” foods have made them more like junk food. For example, yogurts have become ice cream and granola bars have become candy bars – just read the labels.

I encourage you to watch for yourself.

By the way, Bittman released his latest book, Food Matters: A Guide to Conscious Eating with More Than 75 Recipesin January, 2009. He explores the link between global warming and other environmental challenges, obesity and lifestyle diseases, and the over consumption of meat, simple carbohydrates, and junk food. Food Matters analyzes how the American diet is taking a toll on both human and planetary health, and it offers a viable solution to this dual problem in the form of a diet––and recipes––based on eating more rationally.