Video: Spices of Life - Welcome to Food Day

Video: Spices of Life - Welcome to Food Day

 We hope you enjoyed our week long series devoted to covering food related issues in celebration of National Food Day! Remember, to celebrate healthy food & healthy living this Monday, October 24 and hopefully continue all year long!

For our weekly Friday video series post, we present this Introduction to Food Day video:

Probably many of you are familiar with the Center for Science in the Public Interest or CSPI : Founded in the early 70's, CSPI has become the leading consumer activist agency in the U.S regarding nutrition, health, food safety, alcohol safety and sound science. Or perhaps you know its Its award-winning newsletter, Nutrition Action Healthletter, with some 900,000 subscribers in the United States and Canada, the largest-circulation health newsletter in North America.

Michael Jacobson, it's founder has come up with a brilliant idea:- day styled after Earth day called "FOOD DAY" on October 24th this coming fall. It's hoped it will be a day when thousands of events in schools, college campuses, houses of worship, and even in private homes will be aimed at" fixing America's food system". According to the organizers, a Food Day event could be as small as a parent organizing a vegetable identification contest at a kindergarten class—or as massive as a rally in a city park, with entertainment and healthy food.

I like to think it will be a day when all kinds of people working in parallel universes from farmers, chefs, teachers, and politicians will come together with a common goal: t to bring awareness to improving the food and diet in the U.S.

Spices of Life asked Michael Jacobson, CSPI's founder to give you an introduction, so please give him a listen.

Enjoy!!

Confessions of a Foodie: We Are Not What We Eat

Confessions of a Foodie:
We Are Not What We Eat

By: Gwen McKinney

When Team McKinney decided we’d dive into National Food Day by raising our voices in the blogosphere, I immediately proclaimed, “I’m in!”

As an evangelical member of the Weight Watchers (WW) Lifetime circle, I have forged a relationship with food that is a lifeline to good health, a relatively streamlined body and joy. Food, like weight management, is a journey. It requires a commitment first and foremost to self. You must honestly zero in on why you eat, how you eat and what you eat. The journey need not be punctuated with denial “diets” and punitive food plans that ebb and flow as the scales tilt north. You can eat well, eat often and eat deliciously even as you drop pounds.

The multisensory passion of good eating gives me something to look forward to from one meal to the next. The Wednesday Food Section of the Washington Post is among my “must reads.” New recipes are cherished treasures. I collect them like jewels. And as a frequent flyer on Epicurious.com, there are always more ways to prepare my favorite foods than I have time to create or eat. The extravaganza of planning, shopping and preparing for a dinner party is almost as fun as the guests. Food is my friend, my salvation and an adventure with each gastronomic foray!

But back to Weight Watchers. It works with unparallel success. This is not an ad for WW. National Poster Child Jennifer Hudson is doing that just fine without me. In fact, she recently opened a weight loss center in Chicago that is primarily targeted to African American women. That makes the point about our community’s need to reassess its relationship with food.

Since Weight Watchers rolled out its phenomenally successful ad campaign featuring the sleek, sexy and seventy-pounds-lighter Hudson, new legions of wannabe smaller Black women have been stepping up to WW scales. My weekly WW meetings have been transformed from sparsely attended motivational lectures into standing room only Amen sessions. Sadly, if the stats prove true, the vast majority of those new recruits will fall off the wagon, trading sustainability for the old and easy way out. Weight management is not just about the scales. The centerpiece is behavioral change. And that is a bitch.

Role model or marketing scheme?

Hudson’s phenomenal reach to African American women surfaces a swelling epidemic. African American women of all ages and economic groups suffer the highest rate of obesity compared to any other demographic. Four out of five of us are considered overweight or obese. With that distinction comes all the evil ills: heart disease, diabetes, cancer and premature death.

Overweight women raise overweight children. The challenge of childhood obesity has become a national state of emergency. Our client, The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, embracing the issue as a health equity initiative, has targeted 2015 to reverse the epidemic.

The notion of being “big boned” or voluptuously healthy in line with our African roots have long served as a rationalization for the status quo. Culture, genetics and glandular conditions are not the culprits. Admittedly, as a forthright foodie who shed four dress sizes over a 14-month period, I will always struggle with weight management. Food and caloric intake are almost incidental to the challenge. At the core of a slender body is affirmation of me. I am not what I eat. I am what I am determined to be.

I end here with the verb to be. We are our own best solution if we affirm we can BE. Counsel for good health care? More appropriately, it is a clarion call for Self-Care. Drawing from a campaign that McKinney & Associates launched for the California Department of Public Health, I ask every African American woman to embrace food as a key to life. But command your body as your temple to BE Well.

BEcause we’re worth it.

Food Day: All Myths are not Created Equal

All Myths are not Created Equal

By Llenda Jackson-Leslie

Lately, there’s been a contrarian movement afoot arguing that the government shouldn’t be encouraging people to eat better and live healthier lives… seems that some believe government support for better nutrition leads straight to socialism. Others argue that those suffering from poor nutrition have only themselves to blame. Five Myths about Healthy Eating by Katherine Mangu-Ward printed in Sunday’s Washington Post falls in the last category, the author insists that food deserts aren’t all that barren. She claims that 93 % of the people living in a food desert have access to a car. Read the article here . I can’t refute her claims about access to a car, so I guess the many seniors I  regularly saw walking, catching the bus or a cab, and traveling by wheelchair to the Brookland Giant must have misplaced their keys.

Now I have lived in a couple of food deserts, most recently in northeast Washington, D.C.  While there was not one sit down restaurant within miles—actually within the whole ward, you couldn’t leave the house without stumbling over a Popeye’s Chicken franchise. They were as ubiquitous as Starbucks in other neighborhoods. Is Mangu-Ward seriously suggesting that if every corner had a fruit stand instead of a Popeye’s Chicken that people in that neighborhood would still be eating fast food at the same rate.

She goes on to add that people are hard-wired to like fat, sugar and salt so that the processed food companies who advertise so heavily can’t be blamed for our predilection for unhealthy food.

Now I’m the last person to suggest that we’re all robots simply doing what television advertising tells us to do—but to suggest that people are impervious to the powerful influences of our 24/7 television internet culture seems more far-fetched than the notion of food deserts. While people are ultimately responsible for the choices we make. Sometimes the choices we’re presented with aren’t so great. And people who are raising children, caring for aging parents and working overtime may find driving 2-5 miles to a grocery store to cook from scratch too be overwhelming. Taking a daily walk or run in an unsafe neighborhood just may not be a good health choice. The point in trying to eliminate food deserts and increase opportunities for exercise isn’t that people will always make better choices, but to make better choices easier to make. It took several generations for us to become an obese nation and it may take several more to reverse the trend.

As for debunking food myths, here are some that Mangu-Ward could tackle. Why not take on the myths about drinking eight glasses of milk, ingesting massive doses of vitamins, drinking something from a can that will magically turn us slim or into a super-athlete or the idea that bottled water is better for us than tap water.

Some online resources for getting fit are here and resources for healthy eating are here.

“Companies propose curbing junk food ads for kids?”

“Companies propose curbing junk food ads for kids?”

The nation’s largest food companies say they will cut back on advertising unhealthy foods to children. The move by General Mills, Kellogg and other industry giants comes as the federal government released stricter standards for marketing junk food to children.

An online search did not produce a copy of the coalition’s new marketing standards. That’s not good. Without access to the standards, there’s no way to measure change and hold the food marketers accountable.

Childhood obesity in America has more than tripled in the past 30 years. Junk food consumption is linked to the alarming increase. Let’s do more than hope that the companies are on the up and up. Let’s demand to see their new marketing standards.

Health reform is education reform

Health reform is education reform

Only one in 10 high school kids meeting the minimum goals for physical activity

America's teens are drinking too many sugary drinks and not getting enough exercise, according to new data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Only one in 10 high school boys and girls are meeting the minimum goals for physical activity outlined by in the CDC's recently released "Healthy People 2020" report. The findings appear in the June 17 issue of Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/mm6023a1.htm?s_cid=mm6023a1_w.

There’s a critical need to improve the quality of school meals and to create more opportunities for students to be physically active.

Sack Lunches Get the 'Sack' in Chicago School

Sack Lunches Get the 'Sack' in Chicago School

First Lady Obama's "Let's Move" campaign has inspired communities, families and schools to lead healthier lifestyles by exercising and choosing better foods. However, Little Village Academy on Chicago's West Side went a step further by banning sack lunches. Parents were packing their kids' lunches with chips, cookies and sodas. Under the new policy, students can either eat the $2.25-per day cafeteria meal or go hungry.

Is this extreme? Though the $45 monthly school meals contain colorful fruits, vegetables and healthy entrees, parents are angry. In light of today's economic environment, this may break family budgets already strained. Generally, it costs more to eat healthier but buying groceries you can stretch out as opposed to purchasing daily meals is not cost-effective. Sack lunches by themselves are not the problem. Educating families on what items go into the sack lunch is an approach for harvesting more seeds of success and personal responsibility.

Highlighted Clip for Monday, April 18, 2011:

"Chicago school bans packed lunches"

By: Jenn Savedge

A small school in Chicago is making big news on the lunch line these days. Little Village Academy on Chicago's West Side no longer allows students to bring food from home to eat for lunch. So it's either eat the cafeteria food or go hungry. As you might expect, the policy has parents all around the nation in an uproar.