Until They Pass Berniecare... Maybe You Can Try A Healthier Diet

I grew up like everyone else from an American working class background-- eating pretty crappy food-- bacon and eggs for breakfast, ham and cheese for lunch, burgers, meatloaf, pot roast or some other crap for dinner. When I got to college I realized for the first time that there's another way of eating. She didn't consult me, but my girlfriend-- a great cook, was a vegetarian and before I ever made a decision to become one, I was one. After college, when everyone around me in Kabul was getting sick and crapping and puking on themselves, too weak to get up off the floor, I was fit as a fiddle (or as fit as a rubab at least). That's because everyone was eating meat-- those fly-covered carcasses we would see, unrefrigerated, hanging in the markets-- and I was still a vegetarian... and not drinking Coke or Pepsi because I was boycotting them over the massacre at Kent State. I still haven't has a sugary beverage since 1970.

Eventually, I managed to make my way back to Europe, utterly destitute, penniless. I found a macrobiotic restaurant inside the city-owned meditation center and a meal was a buck. And when I ran out of bucks, they hired me to wash dishes. Eventually I would up as the manager. But first, I was a chef. Me-- who had never heated up a pan of water. I learned how to make food, specifically how to make healthy food... how to shop for it, what to avoid, how to cut it and prepare it... everything. So decades later when I went to the hospital to be treated for cancer, my doctor said I was remarkably healthy for a man my age and would probably live through the treatment-- and I passed every physical test they give you before allowing you to get (expensive) experimental treatments. They check every organ in your body because they don't ant to spend a million bucks on you if you're gonna die anyway. So... lucky me that my girlfriend imposed vegetarianism on me.

Yesterday, Newsweek ran a piece, Eating Badly Is A Leading Cause Of Death Worldwide, New Study Shows, that explains how "a long list of benefits is associated with maintaining a nutritious, well-balanced diet, including added energy, weight control and a lower risk of diabetes."

A new study outlines the serious toll that poor nutrition can have on our well-being, and in some cases that even means death. In fact, about one in five deaths around the world in 2016 can be attributed to poor diet, making this one of the biggest killers, according to the study, The Global Burden of Disease.

“In particular, diets low in whole grains, fruit, nuts and seeds, fish oil and high in salt were the most common dietary risk factors,” the research team wrote in its report, published in The Lancet medical journal. “In addition, high blood glucose, high blood pressure, high body mass index [BMI], and high cholesterol were all in the top ten leading risk factors for death for men and women globally.”

All of these factors can be attributed to poor diet, as well as to other causes. Smoking was the only other risk factor to contribute to more deaths, reportedly killing about 7.1 million people in 2016.

“This is really large,” the study's lead author, Dr. Christopher Murray, director of the Institute of Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) at the University of Washington, told The Guardian. “It is amongst the really big problems in the world. It is a cluster that is getting worse.”

The findings also showed that while people are living longer, more years of their lives are spent being sick.

“Death is a powerful motivator, both for individuals and for countries, to address diseases that have been killing us at high rates. But we’ve been much less motivated to address issues leading to illnesses,” Murray told Reuters.

The findings also showed that less than 5 million children under the age 5 died in 2016, compared with more than 16 million in 1970.

“Yet, despite this progress, we are facing a triad of trouble holding back many nations and communities-- obesity, conflict and mental illness, including substance use disorders,” Murray said in a statement.

The IHME study is a collective effort by more than 2,500 researchers who analyzed data from more than 100 countries. Data from some countries are more comprehensive than that from other countries, and therefore the researchers used estimates to fill in missing information. Their findings were published Friday in a series of five papers.

So... unless you're one of those fabulists who think Señor Trumpanzee is going to suddenly embrace BernieCare, it's probably not going to be until 2021-- at the earliest-- that Medicare-For-All is going to pass. Before then, I suggest eating in a more healthy way-- maybe just knocking out refined sugar, probably the single best thing you can do for your health.

And then there's this-- from author Michael Chabon: "Every morning I wake up and in the seconds before I turn my phone on to see what the latest news is, I have this boundless sense of optimism and hope that this is the day that he’s going to have a massive stroke, and, you know, be carted out of the White House on a gurney and every day so far, I have been disappointed in that hope, but, you know, hope springs eternal; he’s an old guy, he doesn’t eat well, he’s overweight, he has terrible nutrition, he doesn’t exercise and it’s not that hard to imagine."

Not All Countries Freak Out About Healthy Eating Alternatives-- Take Holland

I'm thinking about going to Paris this summer. What I'd like to do is rent a house or an apartment in the city and then take a side-trip to Bordeaux, Périgueux, Limoges and the Dordogne Valley to see the caves in the region. It's the only part of France I've never visited and friends tell me it's not-to-be-missed. But Roland wants to visit Amsterdam. He loves Amsterdam-- and especially our friends there-- but I lived there for 4 years and visiting someplace you know in such a workaday way isn't really a vacation. And, after all, no place is as good as it used to be, right?

I lived in Amsterdam when I returned from Europe after a couple of years traveling around Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, Sri Lanka and Nepal. That was pretty exotic. Amsterdam wasn't. I rented an apartment, got a job, some friends and lived my life. Hum-drum in a way. The city of Amsterdam employed me in a youth center, het Kosmos, dedicated to non-sectarian meditation. I was a chef, waiter, dishwasher, cashier, manager in the center's macrobiotic restaurant. I had never so much as cooked an egg before I stumbled into the restaurant, looking for a place I could eat healthy food for a dollar or two per meal.

Amsterdam was very welcoming in those days, especially to Americans who didn't want to be living in the country bombing Vietnam, like myself. Someone even made a documentary about my life there-- a war resister in Holland. Believe it or not, Holland is such a conservative society-- but so entirely progressive at the same time. I could never understand the politics there, not for the 4 years I lived there and not since. And not now, as an actual fascist, Geert Wilder-- who has endorsed Trump-- inches closer and closer to the premiership. So on the one hand you have Wilders and on the other... a government advocating vegetarianism as a preferred option and healthy eating that is good for you and, at the same time, environmentally sustainable. Last week, National Geographic pointed out a report from the Dutch government about the relationship between a healthy diet, a healthy planet and the unsuitability of meat in that context-- meat and fish as a matter of fact.

The Netherlands Nutrition Centre says  it is recommending people eat just two servings of meat a week, setting an explicit limit on meat consumption for the first time. The recommendations come five years after a government panel weighed the ecological impact of the average Dutch person’s diet, concluding last year that eating less meat is better for human and environmental health.

The Nutrition Centre, a government-funded program responsible for making food-based dietary guidelines, took those conclusions and presented them on Tuesday in its “Wheel of Five”-- a graphic distributed to the public, along the lines of the U.S. government’s “MyPlate.”

“The new dietary guidelines are implemented in our new education model … in a way that the total environmental impact of the diet is lower than the current consumption,” explains Corné van Dooren, a sustainable food expert at the center. “We focus on eating a less animal-based and more plant-based diet by the unique advice to consume not more than 500 grams of meat a week.”

Of that 500 grams, or about one pound, only 300 grams should be red, or “high-carbon” meat, van Dooren noted, explaining that the guidelines suggest getting protein from other sources, like one 25-gram portion of unsalted nuts a day and one 135-gram portion of pulses a week. Seafood recommendations also get an update.

“The advice for fish is changed from two portions to one portion a week, due to sustainability issues,” van Dooren adds. “One portion is enough to reach the benefits for coronary heart diseases.”

Over the past decade, a handful of countries have started to more seriously consider environmental factors in their official nutrition advice, including the U.S. That’s out of the more than 60 countries that maintain and update nutrition advice, according to the FAO.

“There are just a very few countries that have taken this issue on,” says Kathleen Merrigan, former deputy secretary at the U.S. Department of Agriculture, now the executive director of sustainability at George Washington University. “It’s a moving target.”

In 2014, Merrigan helped convene a conference on food sustainability, inviting government nutrition advisers from the Netherlands and Brazil, two of the countries that have worked most intensively on the issue. (In 2012, Brazil set new recommendations that factored in “environmental integrity,” fair trade principles and the eating patterns of indigenous food cultures.)

Other countries that have included sustainability into their nutrition advice, or have seriously contemplated doing so, include Germany, Australia, Sweden, and the U.K.

Many in the U.S., too, embraced the conversation around sustainability when the 15-member Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee announced in its 2015 report that sustainable diets, lower in meat intake, are also more healthful (see New U.S. Dietary Recommendations First to Consider Environmental Impact.)

But not everyone went for it. The idea that environmental considerations should make their way into nutrition advice has been especially controversial with the livestock industry, which fought against their inclusion. The American livestock industry, for one, successfully argued that sustainability—or specific recommendations to limit meat consumption because of the environmental toll of meat production-- get knocked out of the final Dietary Guidelines. The final guidelines were issued in January (see What’s In America’s New Dietary Guidelines-- and What’s Not).

Just last week, the U.K. issued its latest nutrition advice, recommending a diet lower in red and processed meat.  The move was hailed by nutrition groups,  even as they sought more explicit reductions.

...The new advice, though, was immediately blasted by the livestock industry.

“Blanket messages to reduce red meat consumption could be very detrimental to the diets of consumers who already eat low to moderate amounts of red meat, for example women and young people,” says Emma Derbyshire, a member of the Meat Advisory Panel, in British media reports last week. “Lean red meat is rich in protein, iron, zinc, B vitamins and selenium and makes an important contribution to daily vitamin and mineral intakes.”

The industry pushback will likely get stronger as more governments turn their attentions to the issue of sustainability in the diet.

I remember a couple of years ago when Jared Polis (D-CO) wrote and introduced H.R. 4870, the Healthy School Meals Act. Polis hoped to offer the option of school kids eating some plant-based food at school meals. Polis told me he isn't a vegan or even a vegetarian. He just wants to make sure that children have a choice, noting that in the past 30 years "the prevalence of overweight in children ages 6 to 19 has tripled and 1 in 5 is struggling with obesity and related conditions like type 2 diabetes, hypertension, and heart disease, which were previously considered adult diseases."

His legislation is based on the fact that children consume too much fat, saturated fat and sodium and don’t get enough fiber, whole grains, fruits or vegetables and that research shows that children who eat school-purchased lunches are more likely to be overweight and obese, and less likely to eat enough fruits and vegetables. So what does the bill do?

Improves children’s eating patterns by encouraging the inclusion of healthful plant-based options in the National School Lunch and Breakfast Programs.

Introduces plant-based foods to schools, increases their availability and affordability, and provides incentives for schools to provide healthful entree options in the lunch line.

Removes restrictions on providing nondairy milk alternatives with school lunches, thus ensuring that all children receive vital nutrients.

I asked Jared if there were any bad guys in this story-- some crackpot Republicans or evil food processing corporations. He told me there weren't. He just hadn't been clobbered by him yet. That came after our chat. Some time ago I was the general manager of Sire Records and one of our artists, k.d. lang, recorded the TV ad below. The cattle and meat processing industries came down on us like a ton of bricks. I've read that they do the same thing to schools that start vegetarian-oriented programs, even if it's just to offer a vegetarian option once a week. Jared's bill didn't pass; he never even got out of committee.

Do Conservatives Actively Want To Make Your Family Less Healthy-- Probably Not; They Just Don't Care

Friday morning, the House passed the GOP's so called Common Sense Nutrition Disclosure Act 266-144, originally written by lobbyists for Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-WA) and Blue Dog John Barrow (GA), who has since wisely been retired by his district's voters. The bill had several corporate-friendly Democratic co-sponsors, Blue Dog Henry Cuellar (TX), New Dem chief Ron Kind (WI), Blue Dog Loretta Sanchez (CA) and 33 corporate Democrats skipped across the aisle to vote with Republicans and prepare for big PAC checks that will come for the AYE vote. Mostly it was the regular suspects, anti-working family corrupt careerists like Patrick Murphy (New Dem-FL), Collin Peterson (Blue Dog-MN), Cheri Bustos (Blue Dog-IL), Kyrsten Sinema (Blue Dog-AZ), Gwen Graham (Blue Dog-FL), Pete Aguilar (New Dem-CA), Jim Costa (Blue Dog-CA)... you know the characters.

During Thursday night's debate Hillary disingenuously tried tagging Bernie with an anti-Obama label but of course, all the whores who voted for the bill are on her leadership committee and the White House had warned them Obama would veto the toxic legislation and explained that "H.R. 2017 would undercut the objective of providing clear, consistent calorie information to consumers. If enacted, it would reduce consumers’ access to nutrition information and likely create consumer confusion by introducing a great deal of variability into how calories are declared. The legislation also would create unnecessary delays in the implementation of menu labeling."

Of course, that's exactly what the GOP and the New Dems and their corporate paymasters want. But it wasn't only the White House opposing the lobbyist-written legislation. Alliance for Justice, Center for Justice & Democracy, National Association of Consumer Advocates, National Consumers League and Public Citizen sent a letter to Joe Pitts, the corrupt and reactionary chairman of the chairman of the Energy and Commerce Committee's Subcommittee on Health, urging him to alter the bill so that it would not cause the kinds of damage they envision.

The undersigned organizations are writing to express opposition to H.R. 2017, the Common Sense Nutrition Disclosure Act of 2015. The bill would undermine the Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) menu labeling regulations, which require chain restaurants and similar food establishments to provide consumers with calorie information for standard food and beverage items on menus and menu boards. We join the many public interest and health organizations that have written in opposition to the numerous anti-consumer provisions of this bill.

In addition, we strongly oppose Section 3 of the bill, which preempts civil litigation for violations of this federal law as well as any state laws that may exist. The bill does not replace state remedies with federal remedies. It eliminates all remedies and provides total immunity to any unscrupulous business that may violate this law.

As some experts have written, "Congress historically has considered preemption of state law a rather drastic step that should be taken only where clearly necessary for a federal statutory program to work" because if used too casually, it greatly disturbs the balance of power between the federal and state systems. Clearly, there is no need for radical preemptive language contained in H.R. 2017. Litigation in this field is not creating problems for businesses. In fact, it does not even exist.

Yet immunity will have a destructive impact. For the tort system’s deterrence function to work, wrongdoers must know that certain types of conduct will not be tolerated. The prospect of tort liability is one of the best ways to ensure compliance with the law.

We strongly oppose H.R. 2017 and in particular, Section 3. This provision interferes with traditional state authority and shields chain restaurants and similar food establishments from any legal accountability for violating this important law.

Food Watch: "Herbing up" with Ellie Krieger

Ellie is interviewed by Family First's Marijo Tinlin.

by Ken

Since we were just talking about food in my 3pm PT post, from the New Fulton Fish Market, I thought this might be a good opportunity to slip in this latest mailing from Ellie Krieger, a registered dietitian who's an interesting combination of a nutritionist who's serious about both nutrition and food (I've got two of her cookbooks). Ellie has had her own Food Network show, Healthy Appetite with Ellie Krieger, which I enjoyed a lot, and she maintains an active website (not to mention the usual Facebook and Twitter stuff, which I won't mention) in addition to sending out periodic nutrition-themed food bulletins to her mailing list, which is definitely worth signing up for. (She's also scorching hot, but that's neither here nor there, right?)

In addition, as Ellie's Washington Post bio says, she's

a healthful eating columnist for The Washington Post's Local Living section, and writes a weekly Nourish recipe for The Washington Post’s Food section. She is a registered dietitian, nutritionist and author. Her most recent cookbook is Weeknight Wonders: Delicious, Healthy Dinners in 30 Minutes or Less."

Ellie's subject this time out is "Ten Ways to Herb Up," which links to a WaPo column of hers, "The health benefits of herbs," with tips on buying and storing fresh herbs as well as these herbing-up tips.

10 ways to herb up

Using fresh herbs is a great way to add both flavor and health to your food. While there are plenty of inspiring herb-centric recipes from all over the world to explore, like pesto, Tabbouleh salad, or chimmichurri sauce, you don’t need any special instructions or culinary skills to get more herbs into your life. When you move beyond thinking of herbs as a mere garnish and start to see them as the major culinary player they can be, a whole world of healthy taste opens up to you. You can simply add them to foods you are already making. Here are ten ways to get you started:

* Add chopped fresh or dried parsley or dill to your scrambled eggs.
* Tuck a few leaves of mint and/or basil into your ham or turkey sandwich.
* Pile fresh cilantro leaves onto your turkey or veggie burger.
* Toss handfuls of fresh tender herbs—parsley, basil, cilantro, mint-- into your basic green salad,  treating them more like a lettuce than a seasoning.
* Add a generous pinch of dried oregano or thyme to your vinaigrette-type salad dressing.
* Mix a handful of fresh Italian parsley or dill into your boiled or mashed potatoes.
* Rub a mix of dried rosemary and thyme onto your chicken breast before grilling
* Muddle some fresh mint or basil leaves in a glass then fill with iced tea or sparkling water and a twist of citrus.
* Spruce up jarred pasta sauce with a handful of fresh chopped basil leaves.
* Stir fresh basil, parsley or mint leaves with grilled zucchini or sautéed green beans.

Click here to learn about the health benefits of herbs and buying and storing tips.

#

What Do Politicians Eat-- Aside From Bribes From Food Conglomerates?

On his MSNBC show Friday, Chris Hayes, talked with socially conscious celebrity chef Tom Colicchio about the new food guidelines from the U.S.D.A. (above). Does anyone care what the U.S.D.A. suggests? Or, is there a way to implement their guidelines as part of social policy? As a society, for example, we eat way too much sugar. Hundreds of thousands of Americans died every year because over sugar over-consumption. Diabetes and cancer are rampant. As many as two-thirds of Americans are obese now. Social policy is based on bribes to corrupt politicians-- both parties, like Florida Republican Senator Marco Rubio and DNC Chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz-- who make sure the multibillion dollar sugar empire of their benefactors are subsidized with taxpayer funds and protected from competition from cheap foreign-grown sugar. It seems like poor social policy that we spend $180 billion annually in healthcare costs related to bad diet. But the lobbyists are working this full-time and the politicians are lined up to line their pockets and fill their campaign war chests with their bribes.

Some local governments are trying soda taxes, the idea being to make the worst carrier of sugary death, more expensive. Not easy to do. Over 5 million people have watched this sugar documentary by Dr. Robert Lustig, Sugar: The Bitter Truth. How much impact will it have in changing public policy?



Yesterday, Steve Kornacki, also on MSNBC, interviewed another celebrity chef, Rocco DiSpirito, to talk about how some of our politicians eat. They focuses on two especially obese GOP fatties-- Jeb Bush and Chris Christie-- who decided they had to lose some serious poundage in order to run for president. DiSpirito: "I think you can draw an inference from how the candidates conduct themselves in their diet to how they lead. I don't think it's unfair to say that a candidate who's thinking and actually conscious about what he consumes is more likely to be conscious about other things... How well you preserve yourself is an indication of how well you might try to preserve our nation."

Our Corporate Masters Are Poisoning Us And Making Us Sick-- For Quick Profits

Let me take a break from the election for a minute-- at least in terms of politicians. There were also food policy issues on the ballot around the country. The results were mixed.

Colorado Proposition 105: This statewide ballot initiative pushed for the labeling of genetically modified foods, requiring most GM foods to bear a label reading "produced with genetic engineering." Burrito chain Chipotle and Whole Foods came out in support of the measure, while agribusiness giants Monsanto, PepsiCo, and Kraft came out against it. (Unsurprisingly, 105's opponents raised more than $12 million-- many times what supporters brought in.) Outcome: Colorado voters resoundingly rejected Prop 105, with nearly 70 percent of voters voting no.

Oregon Measure 92: This ballot measure was nearly identical to Colorado's, requiring foods with GMO ingredients to be labeled. Like in Colorado, Big Ag mobilized big-time against Measure 92, raising more than $16 million. But 92's supporters-- including Dr. Bronner's Magic Soaps-- raised an impressive $8 million. Outcome: Oregon voters barely rejected the measure-- just over half voted no. The narrow defeat means there are no GMO labeling laws in place anywhere in the country.

San Francisco Measure E and Berkeley Measure D: These two Bay Area cities both considered levying taxes on sugary beverages. San Francisco's Measure E proposed a 2 cent per ounce tax, while Berkeley's Measure D proposed 1 cent per ounce. Both races were considered something of a last stand for the soda tax-- if it couldn't pass in these two bastions of liberalism and healthy living, it was essentially doomed everywhere else. No surprise, then, that Big Soda spent more than $7 million in San Francisco and some $2.1 million in Berkeley (population: 117,000) to defeat the measures. Outcome: Failing to gain the necessary two-thirds supermajority, the San Francisco soda tax failed. Berkeley's passed overwhelmingly, with 75 percent voting yes.

Maui County, Hawaii, GMO Moratorium Bill: Hawaii's Maui County-- which includes the islands of Maui, Lanai, and Molokai-- considered one of the strongest anti-GMO bills ever: a complete moratorium on the cultivation of genetically engineered crops until studies conclusively prove they are safe. Agriculture is big business on Maui: The island is a major producer of sugarcane, coffee, and pineapple, among other things. Monsanto is among the companies operating farms in Maui County, and this bill would've effectively shut it down. (Under the law, farmers knowingly cultivating GMOs would get hit with a $50,000 per day fine.) Opponents raised nearly $8 million against the measure, making it the most expensive campaign in state history. Outcome: Maui citizens approved the temporary ban, with 50 percent voting yes.

Here in my own super-progressive Los Angeles district, grassroots independent, Steve Stokes, ran against corporate whore Adam Schiff and because Schiff was a big booster of the Monsanto Protection Act, Stokes tried to make GMO labeling a big issue. He raised a total of $6,893 for the campaign-- against Schiff's $819,788 (plus the $2,000,000-plus war chest Schiff is sitting on for the race for Boxer's Senate seat). Predictably, Schiff won-- but Stokes did surprising well-- 69,944 for Schiff to 22,083, almost a quarter of the voters). A lot more work needs to be done, apparently even in enlightened bastions like Silverlake, Los Feliz, Glendale, Hollywood, and West Hollywood. April McCarthy reported this week that scientists have officially linked processed foods to an increase in auto-immune diseases like multiple sclerosis, alopecia, asthma and eczema. Scientists from Yale in the U.S. and the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg in Germany have found that "excess refined and processed salt may be one of the environmental factors driving the increased incidence of autoimmune diseases." And, as McCarthy reminds us, "Junk foods at fast food restaurants as well as processed foods at grocery retailers represent the largest sources of sodium intake from refined salts."

The Canadian Medical Association Journal sent out an international team of researchers to compare the salt content of 2,124 items from fast food establishments such as Burger King, Domino’s Pizza, Kentucky Fried Chicken, McDonald’s, Pizza Hut and Subway. They found that the average salt content varied between companies and between the same products sold in different countries.

U.S. fast foods are often more than twice as salt-laden as those of other countries. While government-led public health campaigns and legislation efforts have reduced refined salt levels in many countries, the U.S. government has been reluctant to press the issue. That’s left fast-food companies free to go salt crazy, says Norm Campbell, M.D., one of the study authors and a blood-pressure specialist at the University of Calgary.

Many low-fat foods rely on salt-- and lots of it-- for their flavor. One packet of KFC’s Marzetti Light Italian Dressing might only have 15 calories and 0.5 grams fat, but it also has 510 mg sodium-- about 1.5 times as much as one Original Recipe chicken drumstick. (Feel like you’re having too much of a good thing? You probably are).

Bread is the No. 1 source of refined salt consumption in the American diet, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Just one 6-inch Roasted Garlic loaf from Subway-- just the bread, no meat, no cheeses, no nothing-- has 1,260 mg sodium, about as much as 14 strips of bacon.

The team from Yale University studied the role of T helper cells in the body. These activate and ‘help’ other cells to fight dangerous pathogens such as bacteria or viruses and battle infections.

Previous research suggests that a subset of these cells-- known as Th17 cells-- also play an important role in the development of autoimmune diseases.

In the latest study, scientists discovered that exposing these cells in a lab to a table salt solution made them act more “aggressively”. They found that mice fed a diet high in refined salts saw a dramatic increase in the number of Th17 cells in their nervous systems that promoted inflammation. They were also more likely to develop a severe form of a disease associated with multiple sclerosis in humans.

The scientists then conducted a closer examination of these effects at a molecular level. Laboratory tests revealed that salt exposure increased the levels of cytokines released by Th17 cells 10 times more than usual. Cytokines are proteins used to pass messages between cells.

Study co-author Ralf Linker, from the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg, said:

“These findings are an important contribution to the understanding of multiple sclerosis and may offer new targets for a better treatment of the disease, for which at present there is no cure.”

Multiple Sclerosis develops when the immune system mistakes the myelin that surrounds the nerve fibres in the brain and spinal cord for a foreign body. It strips the myelin off the nerves fibres, which disrupts messages passed between the brain and body causing problems with speech, vision and balance.

Another of the study’s authors, Professor David Hafler from Yale University, said that nature had clearly not intended for the immune system to attack its host body, so he expected that an external factor was playing a part. He said:

“These are not diseases of bad genes alone or diseases caused by the environment, but diseases of a bad interaction between genes and the environment.

“Humans were genetically selected for conditions in sub-Saharan Africa, where there was no salt. It’s one of the reasons that having a particular gene may make African Americans much more sensitive to salt.

“Today, Western diets all have high salt content and that has led to increase in hypertension and perhaps autoimmune disease as well.”

...Refined, processed and bleached salts are the problem. Salt is critical to our health and is the most readily available nonmetallic mineral in the world. Our bodies are not designed to processed refined sodium chloride since it has no nutritional value. However, when a salt is filled with dozens of minerals such as in rose-coloured crystals of Himalayan rock salt or the grey texture of Celtic salt, our bodies benefit tremendously for their incorporation into our diet.

Eating Native Foods Is One Of The Pleasures Of Foreign Travel-- Being Careful With Your Restaurant Choices Might Keep You Alive

You maybe be aware that we also have a travel blog-- and we cover eating in strange places-- whether the bacon craze in Jersey City, the raw food craze in London, how to eat healthy in Bali and Bangkok or even the best eatery in Mali. And we always try to alert readers to problems with food safety-- contaminated bottled water here, filthy food there and... well an article by David Sedaris prompted us-- precisely 3 years ago-- to ask the question How Important Is Food In Determining Where You Travel? Hygiene? Everything is clean and even pristine in Japan, he asserts, but not in China. I'll skip the parts about the toilets-- but feel from to hit the link and read it all--and head right off to the a restaurant he ran across called Farming Family Happiness:

As far as I know there wasn't a menu. Rather, the family worked at their convenience, with whatever was handy or in season. There was a rooster parading around the backyard and then there just wasn't. After the cook had slit its throat, he used it as the base for five separate dishes, one of which was a dreary soup with two feet, like inverted salad tongs, sticking out of it. Nothing else was nearly as recognisable.

I'm used to standard butchering: here's the leg, the breast, etc. At the Farming Family Happiness, rather than being carved, the rooster was senselessly hacked, as if by a blind person, a really angry one with a thing against birds. Portions were reduced to shards, mostly bone, with maybe a scrap of meat attached. These were then combined with cabbage and some kind of hot sauce.

Another dish was made entirely of organs, which again had been hacked beyond recognition. The heart was there, the lungs, probably the comb and intestines as well. I don't know why this so disgusted me. If I was a vegetarian, OK, but if you're a meat eater, why draw these arbitrary lines? "I'll eat the thing that filters out toxins but not the thing that sits on top of the head, doing nothing?" And why agree to eat this animal and not that one?

I remember reading a few years ago about a restaurant in the Guangdong province that was picketed and shut down because it served cat. The place was called The Fangji Cat Meatball Restaurant, which isn't exactly hiding anything. Go to Fangji and you pretty much know what you're getting. My objection to cat meatballs is not that I have owned several cats, and loved them, but that I try not to eat things that eat meat. Like most westerners I tend towards herbivores, and things that like grain: cows, chickens, sheep, etc. Pigs eat meat-- a pig would happily eat a human-- but most of the pork we're privy to was raised on corn or horrible chemicals rather than other pigs and dead people.

There are distinctions among the grazing animal eaters as well. People who like lamb and beef, at least in north America, tend to draw the line at horse, which in my opinion is delicious. The best I've had was served at a restaurant in Antwerp, a former stable called, cleverly enough, The Stable. Hugh was right there with me, and though he ate the same thing I did, he practically wept when someone in China mentioned eating sea horses. "Oh, those poor things," he said. "How could you?"

I went, "Huh?"

It's like eating poultry but taking a moral stand against those chocolate chicks they sell at Easter. "A sea horse is not related to an actual horse," I said. "They're fish, and you eat fish all the time. Are you objecting to this one because of its shape?"

He said he couldn't eat sea horses because they were friendly and never did anyone any harm, this as opposed to those devious, bloodthirsty lambs whose legs we so regularly roast with rosemary and new potatoes.

The dishes we had at the Farming Family Happiness were meant to be shared, and as the pretty woman with the broad face brought them to the table, the man across from me beamed and reached for his chopsticks. "You know," he said, "this country might have its ups and downs but it is virtually impossible to get a bad meal here."

I didn't say anything.

Many Americans think they can avoid that kind of collision with alien reality by sticking to a now ubiquitous McDonald's or KFC. Bad news on that front as well. Note: I have no trouble fasting for a few days or even a week when I have to-- and I would certainly resort to that than ever consider eating in a McDonald's or any facsimile abroad. There's one on the ground floor of the apartment we always rent in Bangkok. Just walking through it-- a shortcut to the elevator-- makes me want to throw up, although it's always filled with happy middle class Thais and relieved American tourists. Is the food they serve filthy and unhealthy? I always assumed so-- and that has been borne out this week by another food scandal in good ole China, a virtual cesspool to begin with. McDonald's and the other fast food companies have been buying meat from a typical food supplier-- typical because in the unregulated universe of Ayn Rand capitalism that holds sway there-- even serving human bits and pieces is within the realm of possibility-- as long as it's profitable.

[A]n undercover local TV reporter found workers repackaging and selling expired and spoiled meat at Shanghai Husi Food Co., owned by the Illinois-based OSI Group. The Shanghai Food and Drug Administration has halted Husi’s operations.

The latest food safety scandal could be a blow to McDonald’s and Yum [KFC, Pizza Hut and Taco Bell] as both hopes to expand in the Chinese market. The pair has already vowed in 2012 to ensure the safety of food they serve after China Central Television reported the companies may have sold chicken fed with unapproved antibiotic drugs and growth hormones.

The Husi investigation shows that the culture of food safety still hasn’t taken root in China, where infants have been killed and sickened after consuming milk powder tainted by industrial chemical melamine. Shaun Rein, founder and managing director of the China Market Research Group, once told me that the problem lies in the country’s porous and outdated supply chain, where every link could go awry.

Tourists and the Chinese middle class expect foreign restaurants to be more reliable and less likely to kill them or make them sick. But we're talking about McDonald's, KFC, Pizza Hut and Taco Bell so... I wouldn't eat in one down the road from where I live let alone in China or anywhere else. They serve garbage and their food and business culture is garbage. So what else could anyone possibly you expect? Starbucks? The Husi Food Co scandal has moved across the Sea of Japan.

The scandal surrounding Husi Food, which is owned by OSI Group of Aurora, Illinois, has added to a string of safety scares in China over milk, medicines and other goods that have left the public wary of dairies, restaurants and other suppliers.

Food safety violations will be “severely punished,” the food agency said on its website.

Starbucks Corp. on Tuesday said it removed from its shelves sandwiches made with chicken that originated at Husi. Burger King Corp. said it stopped using hamburger it received from a supplier that used product from Husi. Pizza restaurant chain Papa John’s International Inc. announced it stopped using meat from Husi.

In Japan, McDonald’s Corp. said it stopped selling McNuggets at more than 1,300 outlets that used chicken supplied by Husi. It said the Shanghai company had been supplying chicken to it since 2002.

Let's hope the "severe punishment" will include extraditing American ex-bankster, billionaire Sheldon Lavin, OSI's sole owner (most of whose political donations go through the Desert Caucus).

Why Boycott Organic Food Distributor Eden Foods?

Michigan right-wing crackpot Michael Potter (left)

Do you automatically assume organic and health food companies are hippies? Liberal? Progressive? You shouldn't. Hitler was a vegetarian, remember? And Mormon anti-gay fanatics, the Lassens are still running their health grocery chain in Los Feliz and threatening to open another one in Echo Park. Then there's Eden Foods… as bad as Hobby Lobby.

Lisa Hymas, writing for Grist, spilled the beans. "Like Hobby Lobby," she wrote, "Eden Foods sued the Obama administration to try to get out of providing contraceptive coverage for its employees. Eden Foods is a Michigan-based business that bills itself as 'the oldest natural and organic food company in North America.' It is solely owned by Michael Potter, a Catholic who refers to birth control pills as 'lifestyle drugs' and likes to whine about 'unconstitutional government overreach.'"

In Eden Foods Inc. v. Kathleen Sebelius, filed in federal court in March of 2013, the company claimed its religious freedom was being violated by the Affordable Care Act’s mandate that employee health insurance cover birth control. The suit argued that “contraception or abortifacients … almost always involve immoral and unnatural practices.” In October, the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals decided against Eden Foods, ruling that a for-profit company cannot exercise religion.

But then, on June 30, the Supreme Court ruled in the Hobby Lobby case that family-owned, “closely held” companies can use religion as an excuse to flout the birth control mandate. Eden Foods is one of a few dozen “closely held” for-profit companies that have filed suit over the Affordable Care Act’s contraceptive mandate. On July 1, the Supreme Court ordered the 6th Circuit Court to reconsider its decision against Eden Foods and another plaintiff with a similar case.

On its website, Eden Foods talks up its commitment to organic and local farming, social responsibility, and even the LEED green-building standards. “One of our founding principles is sustainability,” says the company’s marketing director, Sue Becker. “It guides us today.” But it’s a sad, desiccated version of sustainability that would deny women the ability to decide how many children to have, or whether to have children at all.

In April of last year, Potter made a bizarrely inept attempt to explain the reasoning behind his company’s suit to Salon reporter Irin Carmon. From her article:

“I’ve got more interest in good quality long underwear than I have in birth control pills,” [Potter said.] …

I … asked why he said he didn’t care about birth control, since he filed a suit about it and all.

“Because I’m a man, number one and it’s really none of my business what women do,” Potter said. So, then, why bother suing? “Because I don’t care if the federal government is telling me to buy my employees Jack Daniel’s or birth control. What gives them the right to tell me that I have to do that? That’s my issue, that’s what I object to, and that’s the beginning and end of the story.” He added, “I’m not trying to get birth control out of Rite Aid or Wal-Mart, but don’t tell me I gotta pay for it.”

But the federal government tells him to do a lot of things, I said. Why sue over this if he had no particular issue with contraception, as the suit … clearly alleges he does out of religious conviction? Well, he said, he opposes “using abortion as birth control, definitely.” But the mandate doesn’t cover abortion, I reminded him, only contraception, and emergency contraception is not abortion.

“It’s a morass,” Potter said. “I’m not an expert in anything. I’m not the pope. I’m in the food business. I’m qualified to have opinions about that and not issues that are purely women’s issues. I am qualified to have an opinion about what health insurance I pay for.”

That didn’t go over so well with Eden Foods’ liberal customers, many of whom took to the company’s Facebook page to complain and call for a boycott. That prompted Potter to release a non-apology apology: “We apologize for the unintended consternation given rise to by this action.” But it didn’t prompt him to retract the suit.

Now, in the wake of the Hobby Lobby ruling, there’s a new round of complaints and boycott threats on the company’s Facebook page and in the Twittersphere.

But Potter isn’t bothering to faux-apologize this time. He told the Daily Telegram of Adrian, Mich., that he’s “grateful” for the Supreme Court’s Hobby Lobby ruling. And, just in case there’s any confusion about where he stands, he called President Obama a “dictator” who’s trying to take away citizens’ rights.

When I go shopping for paper products for my kitchen or bathroom, I print out this handy little graphic to make sure I don't accidentally enrich the fascist Koch brothers. Eden Foods is a lot easier to act on:

Angel Soft® toilet paper
Brawny® paper towels
Quilted Northern® toilet paper
Soft n' Gentle® toilet paper
Dixie® plates, bowls, napkins, & cups
Mardi Gras® napkins and towels
Sparkle® napkins
Vanity Fair® napkins
Zee® Napkins
Georgia-Pacific® paper products, lumber and building products
INVISTA® products
Lycra® products
Stainmaster® Carpet

Health Watch: The menace of toast -- and of French fries fried darker than "golden"

So you love toast, do you? But does toast love you? This toast is not only not golden, it is surely by any standard dark brown. Why not just swallow poison?

"Acrylamide [is] a chemical that causes cancer in animals. . . . The FDA suggests these steps to decrease your intake of acrylamide: . . .

"* Lightly toast your bread until it's a golden -- not dark -- brown."

-- from a "Johns Hopkins Health Alert,"
"The Risks of High-Temperature Cooking"

by Ken

What? You mean you're toasting your toast dark brown? I'll bet you're also the kind of person who fries your French fries darker than "a golden yellow color." Good grief, Sir or Madam, why don't you just swallow a healthy, or rather terminally unhealthy, dose of cyanide? Robert Benchley once wrote a piece called "The Menace of Buttered Toast"; now it turns out that the menace may be the toast itself!

So naturally I think of shmura matzo.

I've mentioned a couple of times the fascinating pre-Passover tour I took with the Wolfe Walkers in which Justin Ferate led us into the heart of Chassidic Brooklyn. From Justin's tour description it was clear that in negotiating our tour with our Lubavitcher hosts he had been trying urgently to secure a promise of one of the possible tour features: a visit to the Lubavitchers' shmura matzo factory.

You don't see Justin getting much bubblier -- and Justin is someone whose many great enthusiasms render him more than usually prone to bubbling -- than when he was able to inform us that the matzo-factory visit was confirmed.

Some other time we might wish to talk about matzo manufacture among avowedly observant Jews, in fulfillment of the requirement that, to qualify as unleavened bread as required for Passover consumption (in commemoration of the Exodus from Egypt, when the fleeing Jews were instructed, in the interest of all possible haste, to prepare bread without allowing the dough time to rise), the product has to be made completely, beginning at the moment the water hits the flour, in 18 minutes.

For now, though, let's just say that shmura matzo is made the old-fashioned way: entirely by hand, with lots of preparers on hand in the cramped space to roll out just-produced little chunks of dough into flat discs for immediate transfer to an excruciatingly hot oven. (I'm recalling something like 15 seconds at 1200 degrees. Rabbi Beryl Epstein, our tour guide from the Chassidic Discovery Center, explained that if the dough is left in the oven even a second too long, it will burst into flame. This must simply the quality-control operation.) When the person manning the oven paddle pulls a batch of completed matzos out and dumps them aside, they don't look exactly yummy.

And it's not cheap. We had the opportunity to buy the shmura product at the source, and considering that I had lived my life as long as I had without ever consuming this truly authentic product, and didn't expect to have a comparable opportunity to do so anytime soon, I fought back my native cheapness and paid the freight: $21.75 for a pound box.

Justin explained to us that basically the stuff tastes burnt, and that consequently his partner loves it because he loves foods with a charred flavor. I discovered with my first bite that Justin's description, as usual, was on the money. The stuff tastes burnt. Nevertheless, it didn't take me all that long to consume my pound's worth.

Now, however, I have to rethink the whole shmura-matzo issue, If this "Johns Hopkins Health Alert" is to be trusted -- and are we going to start mistrusting one of our leading medical centers, or anyway the commercial partner to which it lends its name? It looks like God is butting heads with the FDA.

Johns Hopkins Health Alert

The Risks of High-Temperature Cooking

You know that many fried foods pose a health risk because of their saturated fat content. Now the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) says that food fried -- and baked -- at high temperatures is cause for concern.

High-temperature frying, baking and toasting causes certain sugars and an amino acid in mainly plant-based foods like bread, potatoes, cereal, crackers, coffee and dried fruit to form acrylamide, a chemical that causes cancer in animals. Scientists suspect that acrylamide causes cancer in humans, too.

Although you can't eliminate acrylamide from your diet -- it's estimated to be in up to 40 percent of the calories Americans consume -- the FDA suggests taking these steps to decrease your intake of acrylamide:

* Lightly toast your bread until it's a golden -- not dark -- brown.

* Don't eat areas of food that are burned or dark from cooking.

* Don't overcook food like frozen French fries -- they should be a golden yellow color.

* Store potatoes in a dark, cool place, never in the refrigerator, which increases acrylamide during cooking.

The FDA has also issued a draft document advising food service operators, manufacturers and growers of strategies to reduce acrylamide amounts in foods.

Published in FDA Consumer Health Information.

Posted in Nutrition and Weight Control on April 30, 2014

Medical Disclaimer: This information is not intended to substitute for the advice of a physician. Click here for additional information: Johns Hopkins Health Alerts Disclaimer

What can I tell you? I am a person who has frequently been known to toast my toast to full brownness -- maybe not "dark brown," but incontestably darker than "golden." I have close friends who routinely specify that theiir French fries be fully cooked, by which they don't mean "golden."

#

Does Debbie Wasserman Schultz Want To Poison Your Family? Of Course Not... She Just Doesn't Care One Way Or The Other

Sugar is deadly.

I'm so lucky. While staying at a house in the country near a tiny village in Tuscany, Montespertoli, I immediately noticed that the gelateria in the square, where the whole town gathers every evening, serves dozens of flavors of ice cream, including two-- lemon and cappuccino-- that are senza zucchero, sugar free. My friends kept asking me why I'm such a fanatic. Maybe I'll send them this article from today's Business Standard, Sugar at "safe" levels may be toxic to health. I'll share it with you in a second but let me say one thing first. About 8 years ago I was diagnoses with cancer and told to get my affairs in order by my regular doctor. I went to a specialist who put me on-- among other things-- a sugar-free diet. The original doctor now claims his original diagnosis may have been an error.

Sugar, even at moderate levels, could be toxic to your health, a new study claims.

When mice ate a diet of 25 per cent extra sugar-- the mouse equivalent of a healthy human diet plus three cans of soda daily-- females died at twice the normal rate and males were a quarter less likely to hold territory and reproduce, according to a toxicity test developed at the University of Utah.

"Our results provide evidence that added sugar consumed at concentrations currently considered safe exerts dramatic adverse impacts on mammalian health," researchers said.

"This demonstrates the adverse effects of added sugars at human-relevant levels," said Wayne Potts, the study's senior author.

...Even though the mice didn't become obese and showed few metabolic symptoms, the sensitive test showed "they died more often and tended to have fewer babies," said the study's first author, James Ruff.

"We have shown that levels of sugar that people typically consume-- and that are considered safe by regulatory agencies-- impair the health of mice," said Ruff.

...The experimental diet provided 25 per cent of calories from added sugar-- half fructose and half glucose-- no matter how many calories the mice ate. Both high-fructose corn syrup and table sugar (sucrose) are half fructose and half glucose.

The diet fed to the mice with the 25 per cent sugar-added diet is equivalent to the diet of a person who drinks three cans daily of sweetened soda pop "plus a perfectly healthy, no-sugar-added diet," Potts said.

So what does this have to do with ambitious DNC Chair, Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-FL)? Glad you asked. Last Friday we touched on the Wasserman Schultz-sugar connection. It's all about how she's financed her blind ambition. Basically, the corrupt Florida New Dem who masquerades as a "liberal" to ignorant supporters, long ago made herself into the Democratic Party bag-man for the Fanjul brothers' sugar empire. She's a funnel for far right Cuban money to Democratic members of the House and for sugar cane money (which is behind anything that will keep the U.S. from normal relations with Cuba). In 2007, sixty-six House Democrats-- including 20 members of the freshman class-- recently voted against a farm bill amendment offered by Ways and Means Committee Chairman Charles Rangel (D-N.Y.) that would have made it easier for U.S. farmers to sell agricultural goods to Cuba. ...Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-Fla.) was instrumental in winning Democratic votes against the Rangel amendment. Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-Fla.) told the Miami Herald that Wasserman Schultz was “a tiger” on the Rangel vote, while Antonio Zamora of the U.S.-Cuba Legal Forum described her as a key party in building Democratic opposition.

In fact she fights like a tiger for the Fanjul's entire toxic agenda. And, in return, they are financing her consolidation of power-- and her dream to be the first Jewish Speaker of the House. This is how corrupt careerists like Wasserman Schultz build power. They take money from criminal elements like the Fanjuls and then spread it around to members of their own party, building personal loyalty-- and guaranteeing the contributors that they can deliver the votes needed to prevent reform.

Don't cooks who acknowledge their kitchen bloopers enhance their general credibility?

Ellie's latest book

by Ken

My mother had a pretty universal peeve about the cooking shows that proliferated in the later part of her life. Oh, she was grateful enough for the Food Network, especially in the earlier years when it really was about cooking, before it began its now-nearly-complete transformation into a network that's primarily for people who wouldn't cook on a bet.

In fact, she first saw Food Network when she was staying with me during a by-then-rare visit to New York. It wasn't carried at all on her Florida cable system, and at that time we still didn't get it until New Jersey Public Television signed off the air at midnight. Eventually we were both getting TVFN in real time, and especially enjoying Sarah Moulton's nightly hour of Cooking LIve, which actually was broadcast live. (Best of all was that period when that great baker and baking teacher Nick Malgieri, who had been a frequent Cooking LIve guest, filled in regularly for Sarah on Friday nights, always ending with his exhortation, "Bake something!" He always inspired you to do just that.)

I might add that even after my stepfather's death, my mother continued to cook her own meals into her mid-80s, and always insisted on sitting down to a properly set table -- not fancy, mind you, but properly set. Her friends thought this was weird; I thought it was highly civilized, and was pleased to be able to mention that Craig Claiborne was an outspoken advocate of doing exactly this, even if what you were eating was just a sandwich. I remember being startled when my mother finally announced that she had "cooked enough meals."

But I digress. I was talking about her peeve with the cooking shows. It was when the dish being prepared was finished and ready for tasting, and the tasting always resulted in rapture. I guess this just didn't square with her experience in the kitchen. Over all those years, certainly a great many of the things she cooked turned out fine. I sometimes asked her if she really expected the TV taster to declare, "Gee, that's really not very good." Apparently she did, at least sometimes.

For us home cooks, even when things turn out OK, they often didn't turn out the way they were supposed to. The invariable effortless triumphs of the TV "chefs" didn't square with my mother's kitchen experience.

Like many viewers, my mother had fond memories of Julia Child's early efforts on TV, when all manner of mishaps occured which The French Chef's crazed shooting schedule and microscopic budget didn't allow for fixing. Over time Julia's unflappability while cooking became a part of her charm, if anything enhancing her credibility among people who actually cooked.

So naturally I pounced on today's e-mail from nutritionist Ellie Krieger, familiar to many as the host of Food Network's Healthy Appetite, who on the show, on her website (elliekrieger.com) in her attractive series of books (Small Changes, Big Results; The Food You Crave: Luscious Recipes for a Healthy Life; So Easy: Luscious Healthy Recipes for Every Meal of the Week; and now Comfort Food Fix: Feel Good Favorites Made Healthy) offers much wisdom about how to cook, eat, and live healthier -- always dealing in actual food, not the assorted abominations that pass for "healthy" food options these days.* (You can sign up here for Ellie's newsletter of "free recipes & tips.")

*I'm especially touchy about this just now, having just been treated, on a Midtown Manhattan food-truck tour, to a vegan doughnut from a truck that draws massive lines for stuff that you supposedly can't tell is vegan -- assuming you're an imbecile and have never eaten actual food in your life. The fake doughnut wasn't inedible, as a lot of the swill in some of the hellholes Howie has dragged me to has been, but anyone who would voluntarily subject him/herself to a creepy-tasting clump like that, which has nothing but its shape in common with an actual doughnut, is a glutton for punishment.

The new e-newsletter from Ellie, featuring "Funny Food Bloopers," begins:

Dear friends,

TV cooking shows make everything look so seamless, but the truth is we all make mistakes in the kitchen. Don't let the fear of messing up hold you back from cooking. Making mistakes is ultimately how you learn. Besides, you could wind up wth some funny stories to tell, like these that truly happened to me.

In the blogpost to which the e-newsletter links, Ellie explains that she originally blogged about these bloopers awhile back but found herself "hysterically laughing about them recently," and so "thought they were worth revisiting."

$149 Smoothie
Ever make a $149 smoothie? I have, quite recently. Here's how: put some milk, fruit and ice into your good blender. Then, using a stainless steel spoon, add about a tablespoon of almond butter. When the phone rings and you go to answer it, leave the spoon in the blender. Cover and blend on high, forgetting to remove the spoon. You will hear an odd clanking sound; then the motor of your blender will burn out. Blender $145. Spoon $2.50. Ingredients $1.50. Feeling like an idiot: priceless.

Nature's Lip Plumper
When I was first out of college I decided to make my first chili from scratch. The recipe called for chopped fresh jalapeno peppers "to taste," but I had no idea how spicy the peppers I bought were, or frankly if they were even jalapenos. So I had the ingenious idea of cutting one open and rubbing it on my lips to find out. I found out all right! I wound up on the sofa in complete agony, my lips burning, bright red and swollen. I finally got some relief covering them with a cold, milk soaked towel but they stayed inflamed the rest of the night. Come to think of it, I just may have discovered nature's lip plumper. I don't recommend it.

How Do You Say Chicken?

I was 18 years old in Japan (back in my modeling days) and walked in alone to a den-like noodle bar filled with serious looking businessmen in suits slurping steaming bowls of noodles. I didn't speak a word of Japanese and the staff didn't speak English, so I pointed to a bowl of soup and my waiter nodded enthusiastically. I really wanted chicken in my soup but no matter how slowly, clearly and loudly I said CHICK-IN of course he still didn't understand. As a last resort, I stood up and a little shyly began flapping my elbows and clucking. Even the serious suits laughed. I got my chicken noodle soup that night and I also learned a little Japanese: baka gaijin means "silly foreigner."

Now these aren't by any stretch of the imagination the most inspired or inspiring kitchen oopses I've encountered. Still, I have to applaud the spirit.

#

Is America The Healthiest Country? Not By A Long Shot

I've changed the way I travel pretty drastically. My first big international sojourn was primarily in a VW van I bought in Germany and drove to North Africa and then through Europe and Asia as far as Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, Sri Lanka and Nepal... and back to Europe. It was a hectic time in my life, but I was a kid and my system handled the shocks pretty well. I'm not a kid any more-- but I still love to travel abroad and I still love going to off-the-beaten-track kind of places. In the last couple of years I went on extended vacations to Mali, Kerala, Nepal, Myanmar, Bali and the Yucatán (and, no, not Cancún or anywhere near it). This summer it's not going to be quite so over-the-top. We rented an ancient farmhouse in the Tuscan hills between Florence and Siena. Staying in one place as a base and exploring the surroundings from there, renting a house, getting to immerse ourselves in the life of one region, is more the way I travel these days than trying to see if I can make it over dangerous, rutted dirt roads from Mashad, Iran to Herat, Afghanistan in one grueling day.

Did I mention I'm older now? Older means, among other things, breaking down physically more than when you're 20. This morning it crossed my mind that if I have to see a doctor in the rolling hills of rural Tuscany... maybe it would be different from my doctors at UCLA or Beverly Hills. And that, of course, reminded me that no U.S. doctor was able to help me with the hives I developed after a bout of dengue fever in Mérida but the Ayurvedic doctor in Cochin at least eased the symptoms. Is medical care always bets in America? Not really-- and sometimes the environment can be pretty unhealthful as well.

Over the weekend, the New York Times Health section looked into "a growing body of mortality research on immigrants [that] has shown that the longer they live in this country, the worse their rates of heart disease, high blood pressure and diabetes. And while their American-born children may have more money, they tend to live shorter lives than the parents." Robert Hummer, a UT, Austin social demographer, says, "There’s something about life in the United States that is not conducive to good health across generations." Is it all the atrocious, toxic food America feeds poor people? Not 100% but... the poorer you are, the more likely you are to die sooner.

For Hispanics, now the nation’s largest immigrant group, the foreign-born live about three years longer than their American-born counterparts, several studies have found.

Why does life in the United States-- despite its sophisticated health care system and high per capita wages-- lead to worse health? New research is showing that the immigrant advantage wears off with the adoption of American behaviors-- smoking, drinking, high-calorie diets and sedentary lifestyles.

Here in Brownsville, a worn border city studded with fast-food restaurants, immigrants say that happens slowly, almost imperceptibly. In America, foods like ham and bread that are not supposed to be sweet are. And children lose their taste for traditional Mexican foods like cactus and beans.

For the recently arrived, the quantity and accessibility of food speaks to the boundless promise of the United States. Esther Angeles remembers being amazed at the size of hamburgers-- as big as dinner plates-- when she first came to the United States from Mexico 15 years ago.

“I thought, this is really a country of opportunity,” she said. “Look at the size of the food!” Fast-food fare not only tasted good, but was also a sign of success, a family treat that new earnings put in reach.

“The crispiness was delicious,” said Juan Muniz, 62, recalling his first visit to Church’s Chicken with his family in the late 1970s. “I was proud and excited to eat out. I’d tell them: ‘Let’s go eat. We can afford it now.’”

For others, supersize deals appealed.

“You work so hard, you want to use your money in a smart way,” said Aris Ramirez, a community health worker in Brownsville, explaining the thinking. “So when they hear ‘twice the fries for an extra 49 cents,’ people think, ‘That’s economical.’”

For Ms. Angeles, the excitement of big food eventually wore off, and the frantic pace of the modern American workplace took over. She found herself eating hamburgers more because they were convenient and she was busy in her 78-hour-a-week job as a housekeeper. What is more, she lost control over her daughter’s diet because, as a single mother, she was rarely with her at mealtimes.

Robert O. Valdez, a professor of family and community medicine and economics at the University of New Mexico, said, “All the things we tell people to do from a clinical perspective today-- a lot of fiber and less meat-- were exactly the lifestyle habits that immigrants were normally keeping.”

As early as the 1970s, researchers found that immigrants lived several years longer than American-born whites even though they tended to have less education and lower income, factors usually associated with worse health. That gap has grown since 1980. Less clear, however, was what happened to immigrants and their American-born offspring after a lifetime in the United States.

Evidence is mounting that the second generation does worse. Elizabeth Arias, a demographer at the National Center for Health Statistics, has made exploratory estimates based on data from 2007 to 2009, which show that Hispanic immigrants live 2.9 years longer than American-born Hispanics. The finding, which has not yet been published, is similar to those in earlier studies.

Still, the data does not break down by generation. Ms. Arias cautioned that subsequent generations-- for example, grandchildren and great-grandchildren-- may indeed improve as they rise in socioeconomic status, which in the United States is strongly correlated with better health.

...[H]alf of the three-year life expectancy advantage that Hispanic immigrants had over American-born Hispanics was because they smoked less. The children of immigrants adopt health behaviors typical of Americans in their socioeconomic group. For second-generation Hispanics, the group tends to be lower income, with higher rates of smoking and drinking.

Other researchers say culture contributes. Foreign-born Hispanics are less likely than American-born Hispanics to be raising children alone, and more likely to be part of large kinship networks that insulate them from harsh American economic realities that can lead to poor health.

“I’d love to have my wife at home taking care of the kids and making sure they eat right, but I can’t afford to,” said Camilo Garza, a 34-year-old plumber and maintenance worker whose grandfather immigrated from Mexico. “It costs money to live in the land of the free. It means both parents have to work.”

As a result, his family eats out almost every night, leaving his dining table abandoned. “It’s a decoration,” said Mr. Garza, who is overweight and a smoker. “It’s a place where we set groceries before sticking them in the refrigerator.”

The lifestyle takes its toll. The county in which Brownsville is situated, Cameron, has some of the highest rates of obesity and diabetes in the country. The numbers are made worse by a lack of physical activity, including walking. Immigrants said they felt so conspicuous during early attempts to walk along the shoulder of the roads that they feared people would suspect they were here illegally. Ms. Angeles recalled that strolling to a dollar store provoked so many stares that she felt like “a bean in rice.”

“In Mexico, we ate healthily and didn’t even know it,” said Ms. Angeles, who has since developed diabetes. “Here, we know the food we eat is bad for us. We feel guilty. But we eat it anyway.”

Still, immigrants have better health outcomes than the American-born. A 2006 analysis by Gopal K. Singh, a researcher at the Department of Health and Human Services, and Robert A. Hiatt, a professor of epidemiology and biostatistics at the University of California, San Francisco, found that immigrants had at least a 20 percent lower overall cancer mortality rate than their American-born counterparts.

Mortality rates from heart disease were about 16 percent lower, for kidney disease 18 percent lower, and for liver cirrhosis 24 percent lower.

“When my daughter was born, my doctor told me that if I wanted to see her 15th birthday I needed to lose the weight,” said Gerry Ortiz, 37, a first-generation Mexican-American in Brownsville. He managed to lose 75 pounds, motivated in part by his grandfather, a farmer in rural Mexico who at 93 still rides his bicycle every day. He stares down at the family from a black-and-white photograph hanging in Mr. Ortiz’s living room. Four of the family’s six siblings are obese and have diabetes.

And health habits in Mexico are starting to look a lot like those in the United States. Researchers are beginning to wonder how long better numbers for the foreign-born will last. Up to 40 percent of the diet of rural Mexicans now comes from packaged foods, according to Professor Valdez.

“We are seeing a huge shift away from traditional diets,” he said. “People are no longer growing what they are eating. They are increasingly going to the market, and that market is changing.”

Joseph B. McCormick, the regional dean of the University of Texas School of Public Health in Brownsville, said, “The U.S. culture has crept across the border.”

Perhaps more immediate is the declining state of Hispanic health in the United States. Nearly twice as many Hispanic adults as non-Hispanic white adults have diabetes that has been diagnosed, a rate that researchers now say may have a genetic component, particularly in those whose ancestry is Amerindian from Central and South America, Dr. McCormick said.

Hispanic adults are also 14 percent more likely to be obese, according to 2010 data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The rate is even higher for Hispanic children, who are 51 percent more likely to be obese than non-Hispanic white children.

“We have a time bomb that’s going to go off,” said Dr. Amelie G. Ramirez, a professor of epidemiology and biostatistics at the University of Texas Health Science Center in San Antonio. “Obesity rates are increasing. Diabetes is exploding. The cultural protection Hispanics had is being eroded.”

But at least for now, the older generation is still enjoying its advantage. In the De Angeles snack bar, a favorite meeting place for elderly Brownsvillians, one regular who is 101 still walks across the bridge to Mexico. Maria De La Cruz, a 73-year-old who immigrated to the United States in her 40s, says her secret is raw garlic, cooked cactus and exercise, all habits she acquired from her father, a tailor who died at 98.

I eat a lot of raw garlic too. I'll have to try some cactus. But not in Tuscany.