I’ve been doing a lot of summer reading and below I briefly review three books I recently read and enjoyed very much.
My Fat Dad is the touching memoir of nutrition consultant and New York Times writer Dawn Lerman. If you’ve seen any of her “fat dad” blog posts, you will know that she was raised by a father who was seriously overweight and food-obsessed and spent most of his life cycling through every imaginable fad diet until a stage-3 lung cancer diagnosis forced him to finally turn his eating around. His food issues traced back to his mother, Beauty, who was a fabulous Jewish-style cook. Since Dawn’s mother was a creative, [Read more…]
The supplement industry is big business, and just about everyone I know takes one or more supplements daily—including me and every member of my family. There is often an assumption that supplements are a simple form of insurance that can help halt or reverse poor lifestyle choices. They are also seen as a remedy for a bad diet. Finally, they are perceived as harmless substances that, worst case scenario, you just pee away.
When my daughter was three, she had a severe respiratory infection that required overnight hospitalization. Our local hospital is medically cutting-edge, and I was confident she’d receive the best care. What shocked me was the food they served her. Similarly, my father-in-law, who passed away in 2011, spent the final four months of his life in and out of the hospital. Again, the daily fare was not only tasteless and vile from a culinary standpoint, but a nutritional mess. Medical science is advancing at an unprecedented speed. What is going on with the nutrition science that guides hospital food services? Is anybody home?
This is not exactly news. The Internet is littered with stories about such hospital meals as roast beef for cardiac patients, and wings and hotdogs for kids. Many, many hospitals have one or more fast food restaurants in their lobbies, or just take it upon themselves to offer such dishes to patients as chicken-fried steak. A British fellow photographed a series of meals and challenged people to identify the food—”hospital food bingo.” Over half of the respondents could not! Kids are loaded up with white bread, Jell-O, cookies, syrupy and slimy fruit, funky processed meats, and gray, lifeless vegetables that even a vegan would rather starve than eat. A study published in Academic Pediatrics found that in Californian hospitals only 7% of entrees classify as being “healthy.” The saturated fat and sodium levels in much hospital food could alone keep you as an inpatient. And try finding a healthy snack in the lobby shops. Chips, candy, soda—you might as well be at the gas station.
Really boring book title, really fascinating book–especially for those, like me, who are savers. Are you a saver? Are there people in your life with simple misconceptions that make them unhappy and that you’d love to disabuse them of? For instance, my kids’ view that I’m a “health freak,” and that they’d be much better off stuffing themselves with the “regular” food served by “normal” moms? Or a coworker’s view that if she just tried the latest diet, she’d soon be thin and all her problems solved? Or a divorced friend’s idea that avoiding all social interaction is a good plan?