January Nutrition News and Odds and Ends

Scanning the funny papers ...

1. Tons of school lunch news these days, starting with La Vida Lacovore. If you have a school-aged child, in public or private school, or if you pay taxes that support a school, or if you eat food, you owe it to yourself to at least scan the headlines at La Vida Locavore.

A teacher in Illinois has been buying her school's lunch every day and posting her experience on her blog, "Fed Up: The School Lunch Project." Even a simple PB&J turns into an agro-business nightmare.

And here's a look at the anti-school lunch reform movement, the nutritional equivalent of the Know Nothing Party, I guess.



2. Vitamin D: Miracle Drug or Hype?

Interesting piece on the potential benefits of Vitamin D.

However ...

This one article sums up just about everything that we need to keep in mind when reading about the latest research on just about anything.

“Correlation does not necessarily mean a cause-and-effect relationship,” said Dr. JoAnn E. Manson, a Harvard professor who is chief of preventive medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston.

... [S]ince most of the data on vitamin D comes from observational research, it may be that high doses of the nutrient don’t really make people healthier, but that healthy people simply do the sorts of things that happen to raise vitamin D."

3. A simple breakdown of the differences between whey protein and soy protein here, at VeloNews.

4. Everyone has been talking about watching too much TV lately. A study in Australia found that watching TV is correlated not only with diseases associated with a lack of exercise, such as heart disease, obesity, and high blood pressure, but also an increase in death by all causes. In a nutshell, it comes down to our general lack of not just exercise but activity. You can work out all that you like, but that's only 30 minutes to an hour or so out of the 24 hour day. If you spend the rest of the day sitting in front of a computer or shuffling papers, and then add even more sitting down to your leisure activities, then the smidgen that you dedicate to working out pales in comparison. And as David Munger of ResearchBlogging.org says, "Out of the hundreds of thousands of years Homo sapiens has existed, we’ve been intensely physically active for all but a few of them."

5. A look at the mental health of Virginia Woolf and its impact on her work, from the folks at Seed.

6. Interesting side-trip here at Bang Goes the Theory, a BBC show that mixes Myth Busters with NOVA. How much energy does the average family use, in terms of cyclists pushing generators?