The Extraordinary Science of Junk Food

This article is adapted from “Salt Sugar Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us,” which will be published by Random House this month.

http://nyti.ms/11TOoSR

kenji wrote:This article is adapted from “Salt Sugar Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us,” which will be published by Random House this month.

http://nyti.ms/11TOoSR

Well, he certainly lays out in no uncertain terms what I think we have always instinctively known, but I wonder if this excerpt and book will gain the necessary traction to create wholesale change. People have bought into the concept of convenience for so long now that will be a hard mindset to change.

I am not a food terrorist by any stretch of the imagination -- but I do know what happened to me. For myriad reasons, I quit cooking for several years except for special occasions, but I still made sure there was food in our home -- which pretty much meant a lot of prepackaged things that could be fixed in 10 minutes or less. (Trader Joe's frozen-food aisle, I'm looking at you.)

Maybe about a year ago, I rediscovered my love of cooking. Since then, I have lost a lot of weight. So much weight, that when I see people I have known for years for the first time in a while, they actually haven't recognized me. This is both amusing and embarrassing.

So many people asked me about my "secret" to weight loss, I finally had to think through what happened. This is what I came up with -- without consciously doing it, I had replaced processed, packaged stuff with ingredients.

Somewhere in the article, the loss of home-ec education is bemoaned, and while I agree that not knowing the basics of cooking limits your options, I doubt we'll see a return to the time when that is a required component of school curricula. I also doubt government regulation is the answer. In the end, it comes down to taking the time to pay attention to what our individual systems need to be healthy, and eating accordingly.

OK, I'm done pontificating.

Thanks for the link.

Our Inalienable Right to Snarf Junk Food

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142 ... =junk+food

Did anybody else cheer the food scientists and marketer researchers in the article? I found myseelf applauding everything that I expect we're supposed to find horrifying and evil.

Independent George wrote:Did anybody else cheer the food scientists and marketer researchers in the article? I found myseelf applauding everything that I expect we're supposed to find horrifying and evil.

Well, no, but I guess in retrospect their cleverness could be applause-worthy; what did you find worth cheering about?