Stretching Leftovers

Hope you've all enjoyed the weekend. Though I did find some time to see friends, go out to dinner, and to a play this weekend, I spent a lot of time doing homework and cleaning. I also have a few upcoming writing gigs I'm prepping for.

It's tempting when I get busy to just eat on autopilot. While it's great—and important—to have healthy go-to's, the same old stuff can get boring. So this week, I experiment by seeing how many ways I could use the whole wheat couscous I made on Tuesday afternoon.

The first night involved a tomato-zucchini-eggplant-chickpea stew. Then the next day for lunch I threw a bunch of leftover veggies in a pot to simmer down and cooked some lentils and added the couscous at the end. Amazing. It also worked really well in a salad as well as in a soup that Chris made.

Something I was reading this afternoon you might find interesting is this post on Marion Nestle's blog, Food Politics, about the proposed New York penny-and-ounce soda tax. Check out the guide she links to. It's very informative. I'm personally in favor of it, though I don't know how well it will go over with people who regularly buy sugary drinks. For example, some believe it may drive more people to drink alcohol, which also has a lot of "empty" calories.

Thoughts?

Pouring on the Fat: Going Viral

Oh wow. This is disgusting and fascinating and I absolutely had to share:

Check out the video on YouTube. When I can figure out how to embed it here, I will!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-F4t8zL6F0c

Soda Tax Could Raise Money and Shrink Waistlines

I wasn't sure at first what to think about the soda tax—in some way, it seemed like a way to inconvenience people out of buying sugary drinks. And by that, I mean sneaky instead of addressing the fundamental issues behind Americans' overconsumption of soda.

I think I'm in favor of it, though. Food companies have just kept giving people bigger and bigger portions, selling empty calories as a "good value." In the short term, perhaps it is better to simply discourage people from buying soda by putting a high tax on it—a penny per ounce, to be specific.

An article that ran on September 16th on Bloomberg.com discussed some of the benefits of the soda tax. According to an article in the New England Journal of Medicine, this could raise $14.9 billion dollars in the first year and cutting a person's daily calorie intake by at least 10%. Not too shabby. Thinking about it, my dad once cut soda out of his diet without making any other changes and lost, like, four pounds right away.

What I'm curious about it what will be done with those $14.9 billion. I'd love to see it go into, say, a campaign to educate consumers about how to eat a healthy diet.

On a semi-related front, I decided yesterday while sipping a can of diet pepsi at 9 a.m. waiting for a lecture to begin, that I need to reign it back in. This summer, I got back into drinking diet I'm drinking, it creeps me out. And I could totally save the money I spend each week on pre-class caffeine fixes to buy, like, one really good drink at some point later in the week. Now that the weather is getting cooler, my usual green tea is a lot more appealing!

Big Food Vs. Big Insurance

On September 10th, the New York Times ran an Op-Ed by Michael Pollan titled "Big Food Vs. Big Insurance." In the piece, Pollan reflects on the health care debate and suggests that the fact that the U.S. spends twice as much on health care per person as most European countries is because that, on average, we're fatter, according to a recent study.

So many chronic diseases are linked to diet, yet people seem slow to use the power they have to eat better and help prevent the development of these illnesses, such as Type II diabetes (which the U.S. is spending $16 billion to treat).

"That’s why our success in bringing health care costs under control ultimately depends on whether Washington can summon the political will to take on and reform a second, even more powerful industry: the food industry," he says, calling the way American's eat the "elephant in the room" during the healthcare debate.

"To put it more bluntly," says Pollan, "the government is putting itself in the uncomfortable position of subsidizing both the costs of treating Type 2 diabetes and the consumption of high-fructose corn syrup."

He praises the soda tax and the new "are you pouring on the fat?" anti-sugary beverage ad campaign as well as innovations in the approach to tackling childhood obesity.

Personally, I agree with a lot of what he says, but reforming the food industry is going to take a lot of time and energy. I'd love to see a bunch of people get on board for this and make it priority, but the U.S. really isn't so big on preventative medicine. You'd almost think they want you to get as sick as possible so you'll just have to spend more to "fix the problem." That's just my cynical viewpoint on it, though perhaps that "wait until a problem develops and then treat just the acute symptoms thing" is more subconscious, something deeply ingrained in our society and not a conscious attempt at making more money.

The main thing I feel after reading this is that I hope a lot more people wake up to the idea that if you work to maintain a healthy lifestyle during the course of your life, you're more likely to avoid preventable, expensive illnesses. The question is how are you going to wake them up?