TracyFood

Quick updates! 26 March 2008 9:13 am

Posted by Tracy in : Morning Glory, books, breakfast, health, news, nutrition, pictures, politics , trackback

First, I finally added this week’s Morning Glory specials to Monday’s post. More on that in a bit.

Second, Google Analytics says almost none of you read my open letter to Keith Knight, but that’s okay, because the man himself did, and even wrote me a nice comment which completely made my day, so yay!

Finally, a little rant about yesterday’s annoying food, nutrition, and health news. Researchers at the University of Minnesota found a correlation between not eating breakfast and weight gain in teenagers and instead of saying something like, “Well, gee, maybe some kids don’t eat breakfast because they’re starving themselves because they’re scared of getting fat,” or even “Maybe kids who don’t eat breakfast have other bad food habits regardless of whether they’re fat or not” all the conclusions seem to be about the dreaded weight gain. <big hot sarcasm>Because, y’know, teenagers aren’t growing or anything, so there’s no reason to expect their body mass might increase and after all as we know all weight gain is automatically and unilaterally bad.</big hot sarcasm> To be fair, I’m even more annoyed at the way the study results were reported in the New York Times than the actual study itself, which at least had the good grace to note that eating breakfast was correlated with other factors like white race (their phrasing, not mine) and socioeconomic status — don’t tell, but those both also often tend to correlate with thinness! Gah. Really I’m most annoyed at Good Calories, Bad Calories by Gary Taubes, which I got on hold from the library yesterday, and which despite its claims of challenging the conventional wisdom of dieting and nutrition so far seems to be uncritically reporting on their history without any mention of the fact that weight gain does not unilaterally correlate with the end of life as we know it. It makes me want to reread Gina Kolata’s fabulous Rethinking Thin and maybe even make another stab at The Obesity Myth by Paul Campos. But for now, I gotta go to work. Just to bring things full circle back to the specials menu, we’re already out of the wheatfree vegan mac ‘n cheeze unless there’s more pasta hidden away that I don’t know about. Game on!