Watch what you eat, folks!

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20327171.200-the-calorie-delusion-why-food-labels-are-wrong.html?full=true

A wonderful, wonderful article by those folk at New Scientist who seem to be bucking the trend these days: this highlights the inherent errors in food labeling and points out the need to judge the content of food based on how much processing it has undergone, or the method of cooking.

It’s a particularly enlightening piece, especially when you read about the reptile metabolism experiments: raw steak provided fewer available calories and as such increased metabolic rate… the net calorie intake is therefore lower than that of processed, cooked steak.

The flip-side of course is this: don’t go eating raw meat, it will make you sick.

Mind you, I wouldn’t do that anyway, seeing as I’m a vegetarian. On that note, I seem to remember in the dim and distant past several people criticizing the late Linda McCartney's range of vegetarian food for being overly processed and remarkably fattening.

The moral of the story is this: fresh fruit and vegetables, organic meat, cereals, pulses and nuts are probably a whole lot better for you than the alternatives, and they are even healthier if you are careful about how you cook them. I would suggest that steaming or stir-frying would be better than deep fried.

Duh…

Of course, without cooking and processing food hugely then our brains might not have evolved to the state that they are now. Ya can’t win.