Category Archives: Uncategorized

This is a really cool visualization of the “healthiness” of food people eat over a 24 hour time period. This visualization is based on data collected from over 7 million people over five months who track what they eat using an iPhone all called Eatery. Users upload a photo of their food and it is rated by others. While the people doing the rating aren’t nutrition experts, the results are still useful. This is a concept called crowd sourcing. It turns out that feedback from multiple non-experts can approximate what you would learn from one expert. In a sense, the crowd becomes the expert. Consider the jelly bean example: one of the most accurate ways to guess the number of jellybeans in a jar is to average the guesses of everyone in the room.

Back to the visualization…Notice that people tend to eat less healthy food at night. While much of this has to do with choices we make when we are up late, it may also reflect food availability. This has implications for people who work at night. Think about the types of restaurants and stores that are open all night compared to during the day. The link between night shift work, poor diet, and health consequences was explored in an editorial in the journal PLoS Medicine.

Also take a look at the other elegant infographics on the  Massive Health website. They are a compelling way of presenting data about what we eat.

This is wrong on so many levels!

The K-E Diet: Brides-to-Be Using Feeding Tubes to Rapidly Shed Pounds

It looks like Nike, having conquered the world of sports, has moved on to the world of incidental physical activity.

I expect that Gatorade will be developing a sports drink specific for stair climbing in the near future.

My latest column in the Aiken Standard is about “pink slime,” the additive, formally known as lean finely-textured beef, which is found in much of the ground beef we eat and buy. Since this product is approved for use in meat and is (apparently) safe, many of us have eaten it over the years without knowing it.

But, thanks to a recent ABC News segment from early March, pretty much everyone knows about pink slime. Although that segment is credited with starting the recent controversy over pink slime, it has been in the media over the years, including Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution almost a year ago. If you would like to learn more about pink slime, read this update and expert commentary on the most recent pink slime developments.

Then think about this: What other foods that we commonly eat also have equally disturbing additives in them that we just don’t know about?

Bon appetit!