Author: Mark Linton

Want a drug that could lower your risk of diabetes, Parkinson’s disease, and colon cancer? That could lift your mood and treat headaches? That could lower your risk of cavities?

If it sounds too good to be true, think again.

Coffee, the much maligned but undoubtedly beloved beverage, just made headlines for possibly cutting the risk of the latest disease epidemic, type 2 diabetes. And the real news seems to be that the more you drink, the better. [WebMD]

The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) now requires food manufacturers to list trans fat (i.e., trans fatty acids) on Nutrition Facts and some Supplement Facts panels. Scientific evidence shows that consumption of saturated fat, trans fat, and dietary cholesterol raises low-density lipoprotein (LDL or “bad”) cholesterol levels that increase the risk of coronary heart disease (CHD). According to the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute of the National Institutes of Health, over 12.5 million Americans suffer from CHD, and more than 500,000 die each year. This makes CHD one of the leading causes of death in the United States today.

FDA has required that saturated fat and dietary cholesterol be listed on the food label since 1993. By adding trans fat on the Nutrition Facts panel (required by January 1, 2006), consumers now know for the first time how much of all three — saturated fat, trans fat, and cholesterol — are in the foods they choose. Identifying saturated fat, trans fat, and cholesterol on the food label gives consumers information to make heart-healthy food choices that help them reduce their risk of CHD. This revised label, which includes information on trans fat as well as saturated fat and cholesterol, will be of particular interest to people concerned about high blood cholesterol and heart disease. However, all Americans should be aware of the risk posed by consuming too much saturated fat, trans fat, and cholesterol. [FDA]

When it comes to real red meat, game leads the pack on chic menus coast to coast — with choices including Alaskan caribou or elk tenderloin (Saddle Peak Lodge of Calabasas, Calif.), lion scaloppine (Serbian Crown in Great Falls, Va.) and kosher venison at Levana in Manhattan. Of course, there’s another little catch: Paradoxically, the game served in restaurants isn’t actually wild. It is illegal for hunters to sell what they bag, so most of this meat is farmed, though on a small scale.

I need to come up with a name for my journal. Does anyone have any suggestions?

Breakfast this morning was a bowl of steel-cut oats with brown sugar, soy milk, and pecan halves. I weighed in at 158 pounds. The cereal is Organic Steel-Cut Oats from King Arthur Flour. If you have any feeling at all for oatmeal, give this a try. They require a little more effort, but I think they have much more flavor and a more interesting texture. The brown sugar, soy milk, and pecan halves are not really necessary. I just like to dress it up a little. It is good all by itself. Walnuts are good in there, too, or a little heavy cream in place of the soy milk, if you like that sort of thing.

I had an orange for lunch today. Since it was so nasty outside today I decided to forego my walk in favor of some calesthenics: 10 toe-touchers, 10 lunges, 10 sit-ups, 10 push-ups, 10 squats.

I broke down and had a bag of Middleswarth Kitchen Fresh Bar-B-Q Flavored Potato Chips.

Dinner was Hodgson Mill’s Whole Wheat Fettuccine (it was on sale) with Gretchen’s Pork Sausage Tomato Sauce, a slice of her stone-baked Italian bread, and two glasses of Bolla Valpolicella (and a hand full of dry roasted unsalted peanuts for dessert).

Dean Cliver, a professor of food safety at the University of California, Davis, found that microwaving sponges — cellulose ones, not the natural kind — wipes out harmful bacteria. “We did soak sponges in some pretty bad things,” he said, “and one minute in the nuke and that pretty much did it.”

Dishcloths also become saturated with bacteria, although since they dry more quickly than sponges, bacteria are less likely to breed. They can be microwaved, too, or simply laundered regularly.

Professor Cliver’s other notable discovery involved cutting boards. “Somewhere along the line, wood got a bad name,” Professor Cliver said. Part of the blame, he said, must go to the rubber industry, which assailed wood cutting boards in order to promote hard rubber and plastic. In recent years, it has become conventional wisdom that plastic cutting boards are safer and easier to clean than wood cutting boards. Even the Food and Drug Administration says that plastic is less likely to harbor bacteria and easier to clean.

But in a study Professor Cliver conducted, he found that cellulose in wood absorbs bacteria but will not release it. “We’ve never been able to get the bacteria down in the wood back up on the knife to contaminate food later,” he said.

Plastic absorbs bacteria in a different way. “When a knife cuts into the plastic surface, little cracks radiate out from the cut,” Professor Cliver said. The bacteria, he said, “seem to get down in those knife cuts and they hang out. They go dormant. Drying will kill, say, 90 percent of them, but the rest could hang around for weeks.”

In one test he did, raw chicken juices were spread on samples of used wood and plastic cutting boards. Both boards were washed in hot soapy water and dried, then knives were used to simulate cutting vegetables for a salad. No bacteria appeared on the knives cut on wood, but there were plenty on the knives used on a plastic board.

Professor Cliver found that running plastic boards through the dishwasher only spread the bacteria around. The bacteria in the cracks remained. He said that the water in dishwashers must get hotter than 140 degrees or all sorts of bacteria can survive.

Wood cutting boards may be microwaved for five minutes, but Professor Cliver warned that some wood cutting boards contain metal pieces within. He added, “Some people who tried their boards in the microwave had some spectacular fireworks.” [NYTimes]

“The basic reality is that the risks that scare people and the risks that kill people are very different,” said Dr. Peter M. Sandman, a risk communication consultant in Princeton, N.J. “Risks that you control,” Dr. Sandman said, “are much less a source of outrage than risks that are out of your control. In the case of mad cow, it feels like it’s beyond my control. I can’t tell if my meat has prions in it or not. I can’t see it, I can’t smell it. Whereas dirt in my own kitchen is very much in my own control. I can clean my sponges. I can clean the floor.”

Dread is another factor, Dr. Sandman said. People can deal with sick stomachs, but they absolutely dread the idea of rotting brains. [NYTimes]

No kitchen is sterile, but certain steps can help cut back on bacteria.

• Microwave sponges and dishcloths on high for at least one minute.
• Regularly launder dish towels.
• Make sure tap water (and thus, the dishwasher) can exceed 140 degrees.
• Prepare raw meats and vegetables on separate work surfaces.
• Wash your hands before cooking, and as often as you can while cooking — especially if you pet the dog.
• Wash the meat thermometer after each use.
• Wash refrigerator door handles, cabinet knobs and work surfaces.
• Fill the sink with hot soapy water and drop in utensils after using them. Change the water often.
• Fully disassemble your blender before putting it in the dishwasher.
• Use a pipe brush and hot soapy water to clean under processor blades, even if you put them in the dishwasher.
• Wash the sink’s drain plug and scrub the sink before washing produce in it. [NYTimes]

As recommended by Bruce Cole over at Saute Wednesday, I went and read the LA Times article I have quoted here:

It seems like a ghastly conspiracy. Yet factory farming isn’t someone else’s fault. It’s not only of our making, but it also made us. More than any other factor, cheap food accounts for American prosperity. We spend less of our annual incomes on food than any other nation. Our first case of mad cow disease isn’t the result of some evil plot. It’s the price of our way of life and it may be telling us that it’s time to change.

Read beyond the headlines and one finds that the practice that wrought the disease, recycling ruminant slaughter waste back into cattle feed, was the work of social idealists. Meat and bone meal, which in 1988 was revealed as the source of the disease, was put in the dairy feed in ever greater proportions after World War II to boost the protein content. Feeding cows protein, it was believed, would increase output and enrich milk. The dairy technologists behind it were not out to kill people, just to nourish them.

What’s more, it worked…

It worked so well, we ourselves grew bigger. We outgrew our kitchen counters, doorways and beds. How could our grandparents have been so short? [LATimes]

The author goes on to examine one of the unexpected consequences — mad cow disease — of these good intentions. She ends with this sagacity:

Great food has always been a matter of quality, not quantity. Organic meat is far more expensive than conventional — often twice and three times the cost of conventional. That gap will surely narrow as more farmers convert to organic, but organic will always cost more. It has to by definition. It costs more to produce. That does not necessarily mean we must double what we pay.

Imagine how much longer we would live, and live to eat well, if instead of gorging on 16-ounce factory-farmed steaks we ate 8-ounce organic ones?

Cheap food made us wealthy. Now is the time to be wise. In the past, conventional producers dismissed organics as a niche market and credited themselves with feeding a hungry nation. That argument has become obsolete. The environment, public health and safe food are no longer niche concerns. If we heed the lesson of our first case of mad cow disease, it may just prove our salvation. [LATimes]

Over the past week, concerns about the arrival of the Seattle java giant filtered their way through the media. The usual French suspects talked about Simone and Jean-Paul and their smart set spinning in their graves at the sight of the latest American cultural invasion. And just how do we know Starbucks won’t feed us American Frankenfood?

Yet the English-speaking denizens were even more exercised. “Is this the final fall of French civilization?” asked Theodore Dalrymple, a recent exile to France, only half in jest in The Times (of London)…

No self-respecting Hemingway wannabe would be caught dead near Starbucks. Tales of a misspent Parisian youth can’t be built around a 7,000-strong food chain from back home. The mythology of Paris — above all, it’s not America — is why we come…

The steady decline of French cafe culture predates Starbucks by about five decades. The number of cafes — which, for the record, serve more wine than coffee — topped out at about a half-million before World War II, before television and bigger apartments gave the French something else to do. Today the dirty secret is that the coffee often resembles “sock juice” — the old French slur against the American variety — and establishments are uniformly drab. At the Starbucks opening, co-founder Howard Schultz told me the old cafe just isn’t “as relevant” to French life as before. [WSJ]