Source: http://www.foodpolitics.com/2016/02/five-more-industry-sponsored-marketing-studies-the-score-11011/

Here are some recent additions to my ever-growing collection of industry-funded food and nutrition studies or commentaries with results favorable to the sponsor’s interests.  These bring the total since last March to 110 with favorable results versus 11 with those that must have disappointed the sponsor.

Reduced dietary intake of simple sugars alters perceived sweet taste intensity but not perceived pleasantness. Paul M Wise, Laura Nattress, Linda J Flammer, and Gary K Beauchamp. Am J Clin Nutr 2016; 103:50-60.  doi:10.3945/ajcn.115.112300

Conclusions: This experiment provides empirical evidence that changes in consumption of simple sugars influence perceived sweet taste intensity. More work is needed to determine whether sugar intake ultimately shifts preferences for sweet foods and beverages.
Supported by PepsiCo Inc. and Monell Chemical Senses Center institutional funds.
Comment: This study shows that if you eat less sugar, even low-sugar foods taste sweet.  Soft drink companies are under pressure to reduce sugar.  If these results are correct, soda companies ought to be able to get away with reducing their sugar content—at least if customers get used to consuming less sugar and accept drinks that are not so intensely sweet. 

Consuming yellow pea fiber reduces voluntary energy intake and body fat in overweight/obese adults in a 12-week randomized controlled trial.  Jennifer E. Lambertemail, Jill A. Parnellemail, Jasmine M. Tunnicliffe, Jay…

Source: http://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2016/02/03/465340962/food-surgeon-dissects-candy-and-fruit-with-weirdly-hypnotic-flair?utm_medium=RSS&utm_campaign=thesalt

Reese’s Peanut-Butter-Ectomy with Oreo Cream Transplant

The Food Surgeon /
YouTube

Two blue-gloved hands grip a scalpel and slowly, methodically, peel the label off a mandarin orange, and pierce the fruit’s skin — separating pith from flesh with cool deliberation. One week later, the hand and the scalpel are back to carefully extricate the center of a Reese’s peanut butter cup and replace it with the cream filling from an Oreo cookie.

To some, this is compelling entertainment. To others, it might be disturbing. But since posting his first video of the mandarin surgery on Jan. 26, the Food Surgeon’s YouTube channel has gained at least 10,450 subscribers and hundreds of admiring comments from viewers.

Dissecting a Cutie (Californian Mandarin Orange)

The Food Surgeon /
YouTube

We wondered: Who is this person behind the gloves? And why had he decided to fuse human surgery and cooking videos into a bizarre new genre?

Turns out the Food Surgeon is neither surgeon nor chef. He’s a Seattle engineer in his late 20s. His first name is Jeff, but he was unwilling to share his last name with NPR because, he says, he’s a very private person who doesn’t use social media and doesn’t wan…

Source: http://tonygentilcore.com/2016/02/strive-for-progress-not-perfection/

My dream as a kid was to be He-Man play professional baseball. Growing up in Middle-of-Nowhere, NY1 made this dream a bit more of challenge because 1) I often had to resort to doing things alone and 2) I didn’t have a ton of access to watching baseball.

My parent’s house was outside of town lines, which meant we didn’t have access to cable television. I had five channels to choose from (<– borderline child abuse nowadays), and the only way I could watch a MLB game was to wait for the “Game of the Week” broadcast every Saturday afternoon on one of the major network channels.

Although, sometimes, if I used enough tin foil on my small black and white television in my bedroom, and angled my antenna juuuuust right, I could snake a regional broadcast out of Elmira, NY of the Yankee games.

I’d stand there in the middle of my bedroom with my bat and emulate the swings of Don Mattingly, Jesse Barfield, or Steve Sax pitch by pitch.

Anyways, I’d record the weekly broadcast on Saturdays on our VHS player and play back the game over and over and over again throughout the week.

The real treat was the annual All-Star Game. I’d record that game too, and play it back ALL year…oftentimes watching an inning or two and then heading outside to my backya…

Source: http://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2016/02/02/464852535/forked-rates-restaurants-on-how-they-treat-their-workers?utm_medium=RSS&utm_campaign=thesalt

Protesters gather at a McDonald’s to ask for higher wages on April 15, 2015 in Miami Gardens, Fla. Food labor advocate Saru Jayaraman writes in a new book that the company has taken the “low road” and lobbied extensively for lower wages and working conditions standards at the federal and state levels.

Joe Raedle/Getty Images

Saru Jayaraman may be restaurant obsessed, but don’t call her a foodie. She’s the founding director of the Restaurant Opportunities Centers United, a national organization that advocates for better wages and working conditions for restaurant workers. She’s also published several studies in legal and policy journals as director of the Food Labor Research Center at the University of California-Berkeley.

Additional Information:

Forked

A New Standard for American Dining

by Saru Jayaraman

Hardcover, 224 pages |

purchase …

Source: http://www.niashanks.com/dirty-secret-motivation/

photo: some rights reserved by coolio-claire

Allow me to end the suspense. Motivation? It can be utterly worthless. Unlike love, it is not all you need. That’s the dirty little secret.

I’m ready to take on the world!

Nothing is going to stop me! (Cue aggressive fist-pumping.)

This time is different. I’m really going to lose weight and improve my health.

How many times have you read an article or heard a motivational speech that left you amped up and ready to accomplish your goals? You just knew you were going to be an unstoppable, relentless woman.

You became a tsunami of destructible force and nothing or no one was going to stand in your way or slow you down. Your anthem became Ludacris’ early 2000 hit song “Move, bitch! Get out the way, get out the way, bitch, get out the way!” (Or something like that … I was in high school when that was popular, so give me a break.)

And then all of that intense, life-changing, get-out-the-way motivation just seemed to disappear. Like a balloon with a small hole you gradually became deflated.

What the heck happened? Why did that overwhelming motivation vanish? It was like a magic trick you saw in grade school. One second it’s here and then POOF! it’s gone. Only, it really is gone, and you would…

Source: http://www.sonima.com/yoga/yoga-for-tight-hips/

It’s said that our relationships are stored in our hips. What exactly does that mean? If we have tight hips are we bad lovers? Do our tight hips tell us something about our ability to communicate and let people in? Perhaps. Or perhaps we run too much, or our parents have tight hips.

While we can’t scientifically pin down a correlation between tightness in the hips and our success in relationships, we do know that when we are in stressful situations (“fight or flight” occurrences), we engage our emotional muscles, and we tighten our hips. On a psycho-spiritual level, the hips are the seat of our sexuality and our individuality, both of which are deeply enmeshed in our connectivity to others.

In thinking about relationships with others, we must also think about the relationship we have with ourselves, which is of course not solely relegated to our ego self coming to terms with our unmasked self.

The tighter our hips, the tighter the lower back; with tension amassing in these regions, the psoas is prone to shortening, making it harder to walk, sit, stand, and practice.

The following yoga poses will massage, open, and lubricate the hips for maximum comfort, and ultimate transformation.

Downward Dog Split

<img class="alignnone size-full wp-image-11661" src="http://cdn.sonima.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/D…

Source: http://www.foodpolitics.com/2016/02/where-are-we-on-gmo-politics-an-update/

State GMO labeling bills: While Congress dithers, states are getting busy.  The Sunlight Foundation’s SCOUT database on state GMO legislative initiatives is searchable.  Examples:

Alaska 
Florida
Massachusetts
Missouri
New Jersey
New York
Rhode Island

Detente between producers of GMO and labeling advocates: USDA Secretary Tom Vilsack held a meeting to attempt to forge some kind of accord between producers of GMO foods and advocates for GMO labels.  By all reports, it didn’t work.  Earlier, Vilsack tried to negotiate detente between GMO producers and producers of organic foods.  That didn’t work either.

GMO Salmon: The FDA says it will not allow imports of GMO salmon.  Since GMO salmon are produced in Canada and Panama, this action in effect bans GMO salmon from the US food supply.  The FDA is working on labeling guidelines and probably wants them out before allowing imports.

Monsanto’s conversation:  Monsanto’s interactive website invites you to be part of the conversation.  Aything you like.  Someone from Monsanto will respond.  This site is clearly keeping Monsanto’s PR staff on its toes. Here is just one example:

Michelle M: If you can sue a small farmer for GMO’s accidentally getting in their crop, can I sue you if they are found in my organic child’s body?

Monsanto: Hi, Michelle. The truth is, we don’t sue farmers when our seeds en…

Source: http://www.sonima.com/videos/reiki/

Watch video on YouTube.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YDtBVozulzQ

Erica Nunnally, founder of the Bijan Institute, a retreat center for parents of sick children, is a distinguished yoga teacher with a knack for physical and emotional intelligence that is evident in her thoughtful teaching. In this interview with Sonima’s founder, Sonia Jones, Nunnally describes how she first started practicing Reiki, and how this healing modality has been a powerful force in her life.

Related: How Does Rolfing Work to Relieve Pain?

The post How Reiki Helped Me Heal Physically and Emotionally appeared first on Sonima.

…

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/tinybuddha/~3/yvOhJ6A72qk/

“They say time heals all wounds, but that presumes the source of the grief is finite.” ~Cassandra Clare

I lost my father to a heart attack when I was sixteen. I went to school on the morning of April 14, 2008 having a dad and went home that night not having one. I soon found myself dealing with an unfamiliar cocktail of emotions, pain so overwhelming that I wouldn’t wish it on anyone.

Every time I thought I was pulling myself together, I’d notice his belt buckle sitting on the dresser, or a pair of his socks on the floor, and suddenly the haphazard stitches I’d been sewing myself up with would tear open with heart-wrenching sobs.

I lost the ability to make simple decisions like what takeout restaurant to order from or what to watch on TV. Nothing made sense that week.

Dad had been my best friend, though not in the sense that he tried to act my age or allowed me to get away with things. On the contrary, my father was quite strict, always pushing me to be a better person.

He was my best friend in that I could go to him with any worry and receive honest, unbiased advice. He forced me to see the good in myself instead of dwelling on the negative. I could cry in front of him knowing that he didn’t feel awkward or want to avoid me like dad char…

Source: http://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2016/02/02/465329683/cuppa-thugs-these-brutal-smugglers-ran-an-18th-century-tea-cartel?utm_medium=RSS&utm_campaign=thesalt

In 1747, members of the notorious Hawkhurst Gang carried out a brazen midnight raid on the King’s Custom House in Poole, England: They broke in and stole back their impounded tea. What followed over the next weeks would shock even hardened criminals.

E. Keble Chatterton – King’s Cutters and Smugglers 1700-1855/Wikimedia Commons

Last month’s dramatic arrest of El Chapo, the world’s most powerful drug trafficker, brought to mind one of the most gruesome stories in the history of smuggling — one that involved not cocaine, but a substance equally light and easy to transport: tea.

In 18th century England, tea smuggling was a thriving enterprise. Steep taxes on tea made it unaffordable to the ordinary …