Five Food Facts You Can’t Live WithoutThe Daily Green says…
1. Eat at Home and Cook for YourselfWhy cook for yourself? It’s cheaper than eating out. It’s fun. It’s a chance to spend time with loved ones (or catch up on your favorite TV — whatever works). You choose the ingredients. You control how nutritious it is. You drive less. You waste less food.
Why not cook for yourself? Time.
A little planning goes a long way. Stretch Sunday’s meal into Monday and Tuesday’s leftovers, try a slow cooker, develop new quick pasta recipes, learn to love root vegetables with a forgiving shelf life, and soups and stews that keep on giving.
Cooking for yourself is a habit like anything else. It’s a habit that can help you lose weight, stay healthy, save money — and do your part to save the planet. Oh — and don’t forget to eat your leftovers.
2. Eat Real FoodsWhy eat real foods? If your grandmother wouldn’t have immediately recognized it as “food†there’s a good chance it’s less food and more manufactured good. Who wants to eat a manufactured good? There’s a reason a Twinkie has a shelf life to rival a Nerf basketball.
Real foods are the basis for a commonsense diet. The only processing food needs is the cooking you do at home. Chances are, the less processing a food has been subjected to, the less energy and fewer resources have been expended manufacturing, packaging and transporting it to your grocery store. And real foods haven’t had all the nutrition processed out of them.
So read labels, and look for those foods with the shortest, most direct list of ingredients. Better, choose foods without labels because the items in the produce aisle are as real as it gets. A good place to start is The Daily Green’s Real Food Diet.
3. Eat In SeasonWhy eat in season? There’s a reason Locavore was the 2007 Oxford Word of the Year. Eating fruits and vegetables at the time of harvest means you’re eating them when they’re fresh, have traveled less and have been stored less. That means a tastier food that has typically required fewer resources to reach you. For instance, a blueberry in April (from Florida) to September (from Michigan) will arrive fresher — and cheaper — than its counterpart flown in from South America during the winter.
Summer, when so much food is being harvested, is easier than other seasons. Here’s some help with the rest of the calendar:
4. Choose Fish CarefullyWhy choose fish carefully? First, fish can be
highly contaminated with toxic chemicals like mercury and PCBs, so you want to
avoid eating tainted species, particularly if you are pregnant, may get pregnant, are nursing, or planning to serve the meal to a child. (Government warnings have shifted and sometimes one agency’s recommendations have contradicted those of another agency, or of respected advocacy groups.)
Second, the world’s stocks of commercial fish are, in many cases, being fished at unsustainable rates that are leading to collapsing populations. That said, fish are a healthy meat, so many people want to make fish a part of their diets.
A great source of information about fish comes from the
Environmental Defense Fund’s Seafood Selector, which identifies which fish are both caught sustainably and are low in contaminants — and which are not. It has a searchable database of fish, and also provides a handy wallet-sized card to take to the fish market.
According to Consumer’s Union, no fish label is highly meaningful, but each of the following will tell you something:
FishWise is very useful for choosing sustainably caught fish and “somewhat meaningful†for determining contaminant levels.
Safe Harbor is “somewhat meaningful†for choosing fish that are less contaminated (below median level) with mercury, but is not useful for comparing mercury levels between species. In other words, hypothetically, you may choose a Safe Harbor-labeled tuna that is less contaminated than other tuna, but it could be still more contaminated than an unlabeled swordfish.
Seafood Safe is “somewhat meaningful†for choosing fish that are lower in two common contaminants, PCBs and mercury. The label relies on data from the tests of random samples of fish.
5. Check for RecallsWhy? Green eating is about preserving the land, but it’s also about improving your health. Organic and natural foods are not immune from recalls, as the
recent peanut and pistachio recalls showed.
More often, recalls are indicators of larger problems in the food system. They demonstrate how industrialized and centralized food processing can introduce pathogens — E. coli bacteria, salmonella, etc. — into the food supply, and then circulate them widely throughout the U.S. or world in countless processed foods.
http://www.yolohealthrevolution.com/201 ... 0You%20Can%u2019t%20Live%20Without
It's all about "how much you made when you were right" & "how little you lost when you were wrong"
