Friday, January 08, 2010

My Perfect Storm



In the last weeks of December I saw Food, Inc, the movie was discussed on various boards and was excited to watch it.  The documentary was about the industrialization of our food industry,  the driving forces behind it, genetic engineering and so much more.  Actually, I think they could have and should have made a mini series out of this topic due to the depth of information per topic not touched upon with the time they had available.  I also read "The Food Issue - An Open Letter to the Next Farmer in Chief" written by Michael Pollan for the New York times in 2008.  Mr. Pollan discusses much of the same topics from Food, Inc. with more focus on the production of our nations food and the impact it has had on us and the environment.  These are about the quality of the food that we eat and how our nation is now consuming poor quality foods in our food markets and restaurants in larger quantities for less money, you get what you pay for folks. 

At the same time I am reading "The end of overeating" written by David Kessler, former commissioner to the FDA and currently professor of pediatrics at the University of California, San Francisco.  In this book the habits of eating, the emotions behind them and how the food industry utilizes this information to manipulate the population to desire their products is discussed.  In the midst of all of the above information a good friend posted this TED.com talk with Robert Lustig, MD Prefessor of Pediatrics, Division of Endocrinology also from the University of California, San Francisco titled "Sugar: The Bittle Truth."    The first half of this lecture discusses how low fat diets came to be and the shift to eating higher percentages of carbohydrates, particularly fructose.  The second part of the lecture is the biochemistry of how our body processes sugars like fructose, glucose and ethanol; an extremely interesting topic for me.  



These four topics have been absorbing a lot of my time in the last few weeks.  I have multiple blogs in the process as I try to organize my thoughts while processing all this information at once.   I hope to get them posted as soon as I can so I can share these things with all of you..  I want to add that I am extremely thankful to my wonderful friends that have provided me with this information..  Thank you, Thank You, Thank You..

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