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.

The lie that is BMI

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=106268439&sc=fb&cc=fp

Having worked for a few years in obesity / cardiovascular biology and also struggling with my own weight and health, I came to the conclusion many years ago that the Body Mass Index was a big ball of dung. For the life of me I couldn't get to a BMI of less than 27 - it became an obsession - even though I was dieting, exercising and doing everything right. But the article I've linked to points out very succinctly that the BMI does not take into account tissue content. Bone and muscle all contribute and therefore should be adjusted for.

Why, in that case, have doctors failed to dismiss the BMI in favour of something like impedance or DEXA to measure body content combined with serum cholesterol and blood pressure? Maybe this is what they're doing, but every clinic I walk into STILL has that damn BMI chart. Burn them! Burn them all!

A quick trawl of the stories I find VERRRYY INNNTERRRESSSSTING

They’ve found more creatures that perished in Noah’s Flood in Queensland, apparently. That’ll be dinosaurs, then. We have Banjo, a carnivore, Matilda and Clancy, two herbivores, all named after Waltzing Matilda but not nearly as wonderfully named as Muttaburrasaurus.

On a slightly related note, as I was looking at the various diseases that are afflicting the nation (Ronnie Biggs has MRSA, everyone!) there was an article about an extremely ancient alternative therapy: ground up dragon bones used in Chinese medicine. Those guys!

Seriously, we’re all going to die. How many cases of Swine Flu in August? Take care, Ronnie Biggs, you’re not a healthy man. You’d have thought with all this hot weather flu wouldn’t be an issue, but now it seems even the buses are turning into incubators.

One final thing, and I honestly thought this was a joke story, but it seems the Scots are keen to recycle the oil from the deep fat fryers. First thought, very good, very ecologically sound, I thought it was a biodiesel alternative, but no. I was wrong, and so is this. I mean… as a tanning agent? Wrong on so many levels.