She couldn’t read or write and her English wasn’t all that great…but her ability to prepare a meal was culinarily brilliant and gastronomically genius.
Sunday dinners were epic, with a five course meal shared with at least 30 relatives…the adults sat the banquet sized table in their Milton Massachusetts home while us kids sat at the round children’s table in the adjacent room by the fireplace.
“Ma” as we called her, only and always prepared fresh food with ingredients purchased from a
farmers market in Providence Rhode Island, Faneuil Hall in Boston or hand picked from her half acre long garden along the Neponset River.
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| My Great-Grandmother "Ma" |
She had a room dedicated to creating and storing pasta: spaghetti, ravioli, lasagna, ziti…she made it all by hand and spent a good part of her weekdays preparing for the huge family feast.
It wasn't a philosophical choice on her part to cook with all natural, non-preservative laden fresh ingredients, it's just that she knew of no other way to create a meal. She had been taught as a young girl in her home town of Pontecorvo Italy that food HAD to be fresh from the farm.
That’s because hey didn't have super-markets or fast food restaurants back in the Italy of 1910. Salt, sugar and fat wasn't an ingredient considered key to meal preparation.
That’s not to say there wasn’t salt, sugar or fat in the food they made, it’s just that it wasn’t a major component of the food…as it is today.
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| My "Ma", "Pa" and me. My Great Grandparents |
How was that possible? This about it: as a kid I would eat mounds of lovingly prepared food every Sunday afternoon and maintained a fairly scrawny body through my teens. Midweek, my Mom or Dad would cook similar home made foods, because although Dad worked, my Mom stayed at home to raise my two sisters, bother and I. Buying fresh food was cheaper than getting us prepared frozen food...and we didn't complain.
EXCEPT: that I never liked lima beans. I would complain about that alot...and we were served some kind of bean or vegetable with every meal...but lima beans? Ugh...any food that looks like a green kidney isn't meant for consumption. The same goes for cauliflower...which looks like bleached brains...no thank you.
My point, and you know where I'm going with this... Is that we didn't understand, back then, that we were eating healthier food than we do today.
Something sinister has happened to our food...and today doctors and scientists know exactly what has gone wrong.
I've recently finished reading a very well written and scientifically factual book titled:
"The End of Overeating: Taking Control of the Insatiable American Appetite"...published in
September of 2010 by Dr. David A. Kessler.
Dr. Kessler is a former FDA commissioner known for his crusade against the tobacco industry. In his book, he provides overwhelming evidence show how our human brain chemistry has been hijacked by the foods we most love to eat, which contain stimulating combinations of fat, sugar, and salt.
Today I want to present for you some of Dr. Kesslers findings with regards to what he calls "conditioned hyper-eating" and explain how this way of consumption is a biological challenge and NOT a character flaw. Alot of us, myself included, have lost control over what we're masticating…that’s the clinical term for chewing, stay focused… we need to regain control of our diets.
We've so often been told to eat with moderation...but what if we can't do so because we have been programmed otherwise?
What if the food that is being produced, and the marketing behind it, is designed with the deliberate intent to trick our brains into eating unhealthy food in unhealthy excess?
That wouldn’t have been a good bet to go against, it turns out…because Frito Lay knew something that you probably didn’t, and that something is called “Hedonic Hyperphagia”. The act of eating in excess for pleasure without hunger.
Researchers used used magnetic resonance imaging to compare two groups of rats: the first received a feast of potato chips and the second had regular rat pellet food.
What they saw was that the reward centers of the chip eating rats were significantly more active than the pellet eating rats.
Next, they compared rat pellets, a mixture of fat and carbs and potato chips…to see if the fat and carbs mixture would be more appealing to the rats. It wasn’t, they still went for the potato chips.
When the researchers looked at the imaging results from the chip eating rat brains they found that it
wasn’t just the reward centers that were being activated…parts of the brain that control sleep, food intake, and motion also received extra blood flow activity.
The overall take away from this study…a study which has been duplicated in humans by the way…is that some of us have no control over what we’re eating because we've been literally chemically brainwashed into stuffing our mouths full of cheesy-poofs.
Now, I’m not someone who believes in conspiracy theories...and to be honest, I don't consider what food producers are doing to be a "secret plan by a shadow government to rule the planet and enable the alien invasion of Earth"...I acknowledge the overwhelming evidence that the food industry seeks to increase its profits by whatever means possible....and that what they're doing is just amazing marketing and genius chemical programming.
Also, by giving you this information, I'm not trying to convince you to eat any differently. I told you last week that I'm not qualified to preach to you about healthy dieting...but what I do feel obligated to do is to make you aware of why we sometimes cannot control our eating habits, and both the quantity and quality of the food we’re consuming.
I’m not here to tell you what you should be eating, but the science is very clear on a few points worth mentioning.
GMO foods are no riskier to human health than conventional food. A 2004 report by the Institute of Medicine and the National Research Council found that genetic engineering in food is not an inherently hazardous process and that "adverse health effects from genetic engineering have not been documented in the human population".
I'm going to read that again, because I want you to remember this: "adverse health effects from genetic engineering have not been documented in the human population."
Food produced by organic farming is also not proven to be better for you than conventionally grown food...although, since there is no standard process for organically growing food, there's no way to know for sure.
Just wash your veggies and you'll have no problem, regardless of how the food is grown.
It is true that grass fed beef is better for you than corn fed beef...but without going into a long explanation here...from a purely ethical perspective, I don't condone the consumption of tortured murdered animal flesh as a food source…but that’s just me. I'm not telling you what to consume.
Instead, what I'm talking about here is the advantage of eating non-processed foods, food that isn't fried with fat, sprinkled with salt and loaded with sugar...the unholy trinity of unhealthy food.
So, why do we crave the unholy trinity of unhealthy food? Dr. Kessler Writes that:
"Powerful biological forces are at play that make us want something enough to pursue it and then make us feel momentarily better once we obtain it. The anticipation of reward provides motivation to act. Motivational pathways in our brains have developed over the millennia to keep us alive. Activated by stimuli in the environment, they generate an emotional response, which then drives our behavior. In other words, we receive information and we act on it. If the message is "This is good," we move closer to gain the benefit; if the message is "This is dangerous," we're likely to withdraw".
That's why we crave fat, salt and sugar...because our brains have developed an emotional response to cheesy poofs.
He goes on to write that:
"Eating foods high in sugar, fat, and salt makes us eat more foods high in sugar, fat, and salt. We see this clearly in both animal and human research".
He then goes on to describe an experiment where "participants were asked to keep track of the foods they ate for seven days and to rate their preference for each meal on a scale of 1 to 7.
Most people gave higher ratings to foods with higher levels of fat and sugar.
Unsurprisingly, they also ate more of them, consuming almost 44 percent more food at meals that they rated a 7 than at those that they rated a 3 or below."
So, think this through: if you're a cheesy poof manufacturer and you want to sell alot of cheesy poofs...doesn't it make sense to take advantage of the fact that humans will gorge themselves on a fat, salt and sugar enhanced corn puffs?
Of course! You'd be crazy not to!
Since the early 1980’s, the food industry has created and marketed food that bypasses our human self-regulating systems…to the point where we cannot stop ourselves from eating large quantities of fatty, salty, and sugary foods.
Here’s the problem with almost all of the processed foods that are available to us today:
They’re convenient, easy to prepare if preparation is even necessary, they’re easily accessible, inexpensive, and uber-laden with multiple forms of sugar, salt and fat. Today’s highly processed foods are easy to get calories from without alot of chewing…most processed food melts in your mouth and proceed without delay down your gullet.
Dr. Kessler writes that “Because this kind of food disappears down our throats so quickly after the first bite, it readily overrides the body’s signals that should tell us “I’m full””.
Processed foods can, in a way, be thought of as a kind of “adult baby food” by removing all of the whole fiber and gristle that makes food harder to chew and swallow.
Try this experiment sometime: For lunch, one day…eat an apple. Bite into it, and eat it, skin and all down to the core and take note of how satisfied, from a hunger perspective it made you feel.
One other thing: take note of how many times you had to chew to consume it.
Then, on the next day, consume an equivalent volume of standard, store bought on the shelf apple sauce. Count your chews and make note of how full it made you feel. You probably don’t even have to chew apple sauce, it’s pretty much drinkable.
The food industry has really smart people working for them who know that the less chewing you do, the more likely it is that you’ll need or want to consume more of their processed food in order to achieve the same level of satisfaction that you would with unprocessed food.
It’s the difference between eating your food, and shoveling it in your mouth.
I think I'm going to leave it there. You're out running...and I'm thinking about going for a run...which is a good thing I gotta tell you....I haven't felt that way for a long time....the fact is that anything else I'm could tell you about "food that is specifically processed to override your satiability quotient" (is that a thing?), and subvert the cells in your brain which tell you that "your full already, stop eating"...THAT food, you know about it already...the only take away I'm proposing for you here is that you take a moment before you buy, shovel and chew.
Look, cheesy poofs are amazing...I get it...but can you really eat just one? Maybe...maybe not...but at least think about that...because Ill be honest with you...I'm pretty weak when it comes to cheesy poofs....ooooooh they’re soooo goood...so fluorescent orange, so cheesy salty wicked that they glow...they actually freakin glow and the crunch...oh man...how can you eat just one? Come on, be honest....there's a bag of these things in front of you (eat and chew during this diatribe) oh man....these are sooo good, I don't even mind that my fingers are permanently stained orange....I look like Ive run my fingers through the Donald's hair!!
Don't let this happen to you. Every day hundreds of Mericans decide to vote for Donald Trump...you've probably seen them...they roam the hillsides with fluorescantly orange hands and amazing fat stupid heads crushing ants with their toes and squealing out "Make America Great Again"...because after all...if the Donald is suggesting that Merica sucks...he ought to know...because, well...he's The Donald and he has to live with that!!
Paid for by the committee made of up fat stupid headed people with florecently orange hands"
Wow....not sure how I went there, but if felt right somehow. The Donald is a dope.
Anyway...the next time you go food shopping, reconsider visiting the center isles....try buying fresh foods around the out edges of the store....that's how supermarkets are organized by the way....all the salt, sugar and fat are stored with their long expiration dates on the middle shelves.
I'm not telling you what to eat, I'm just saying to think about it....there's no conspiracy here but food corporations want you to over eat everything they make....that's just good business on their part, but it takes wisdom to purchase and consume what can only be called "real food".
BASEBALL IS BACK!
So, as you've heard...I've been working in Indianapolis Indiana, a great city with basketball at it's heart. But I'm a baseball guy...I really don't know what that says about me...but it does say something.
unlike football, basketball, hockey and soccer...or REAL football, as the rest of the planet calls it...baseball, much like it's long lost cousin Cricket...is more of a cerebral statistical sport....that's not to say that there isn't athleticism involved but: Two words BIG PAPI...just sayin.
For me, ,the pastoral plane and the diamond field of baseball takes me to a warm and happy place where...no matter what ball park I'm in...and yes, I'm going to say it...even Yankee Stadium...I will thoroughly enjoy myself.
I won't be cheering for the Yankees though...I bleed Red Sox which means I have principles..
Baseball is back, and joy is once again engulfing the land I love....now, typically, this time of year you would find me seated aboard a JetBlue flight for Fort Meyers en route to savor the park named after the same airline...but alas, work calls...and I'm needed here.
That's okay. Though...baseball is back...and. On this very day...leap day, February 29th, a day that only comes around only once every four years (thank you friggin Gregorian reform)...my beloved Boston Red Sox will compete against Boston College at 1:05pm Eastern standard time at a ball park in Florida...and Spring Training...the prelude to all things great in 2016, will begin!!
What is it about baseball? It's so many things....its the team and the way they have each others backs...I envy that and have attempted, with some success, to incorporate the team spirit into my professional life...respecting the people I rely on, letting them now how much I appreciate them and verbally valuing their hard work and friendship.
That is a lesson I got that from baseball.
Give me a green field, a blue sky a warm summer day and the roar of a crowd, large or small...baseball has always been there for me through the good and bad times... like a good friend welcoming me back, I am very much at home at a ball park, anywhere.
Whether it's my Worcester Bravehearts, Boston Red Sox, Toronto Blue Jays or any number of major, minor or independent teams....baseball has and will always bring me joy.
And best of all, it's back. Thank the holy flying spaghetti monster, it's back…and if feels so good, so good, so good.
