Polenta, Easy and Delicious Food

Polenta is so easy to make, and is delicious.  YUM!!!  It’s made of corn, you cut it into slices and cook it/fry it in a pan with oil.  Takes a few seconds/minutes. Serve polenta with salmon, with pasta and veggies for dinner, with eggs and bacon and spinach for a nice breakfast, etc.  Refreshing, satisfying, and delicious!

Picture (and interesting post on making Mexican food with all Trader Joes products) from Orange County Mexican Restaurants blog.

Misleading Packaging: Juice “Beverages” and “Drinks” Not 100% Juice

Beware: that bottle of “juice” you are buying may actually not be 100% juice, but rather a 30% juice “juice beverage” or “juice drink.” Okay, dear Tropicana and other juice makers, this is so misleading and unnecessary. When I see a bottle of what says “juice” in big letters than in small letters under that “beverage” I don’t expect that it’ll be only 30% juice…I expect it to be 100% juice. What’s the other 70%? Do you get that many people who think,” why would I want 100% juice, I want just 30% juice?

Please stop this misleading and unnecessary practice. Please label every product that’s not 100% juice as “punch” and not “juice beverage.” If it’s not 100% juice, it shouldn’t have the word juice in the title….just punch, like “grape punch.” What on earth is a 30% grapefruit “juice beverage.” You stop this misleading labeling immediately as it is an affront to the American people who deserve clear labeling in their search for nutritious food products.  Dear FDA, please start cracking down on this nonsense!  Please require the percentage of juice to be put in large font on the front, such as “Juice Beverage, 30% juice!”

Los Angeles Versus Fast Food; US Global Competitiveness at Stake; Class Action!!!

If America ever begins to lose its competitiveness, in great measure it’s probably because we put fast food restaurants in poor neighborhoods instead of supermarkets, one in four Americans is obese, we’re going to be paying crazy healthcare costs for obese, unhealthy Americans, heart disease is still the #1 killer in America, workplace productivity suffers due to health problems and cardiac arrests, etc. It’s about time we put huge sin taxes on unhealthy fast food like McDonalds, put restrictions on the number of fast food restaurants in certain areas versus supermarkets, etc.  Subsidies should given to restaurants that serve healthier fast food that tastes good–(even vegetarian fast food can taste good, like the amazing Veggie Bite in Chicago, with its fake Philly Cheese steaks that taste exactly like meat), etc. (Even crazier, Veggie Bite is *gasp* vegan–the CHEESE even tastes like real cheese!) I don’t know how they do it, but McDonalds should buy their recipes so it can make healthier, less greasy, less fat food, since Veggie Bite tastes so darn good!

A huge congratulations to some politicians in LA who want to ban and/or highly tax unhealthy fast food restaurants, for getting profiled in the Wall Street Journal–it’s time for the people of the US to take a stand. We’re ALL paying for healthcare costs and lost productivity due to unnecessarily unhealthy “food”–does it have to be so greasy, so high in sodium, so filled with transfats, and hydrogenated corn syrup and other processed ingredients? NO! It’s a health hazard, an undue drag on the economy, and should be taxed like cigarettes–it probably causes as many health problems and deaths.  Fast food-related health problems raise the cost of our health insurance, etc.

Heart disease is the #1 killer in America still–and it starts in childhood. Would you like a Happy Meal with that? Oh, isn’t that like Joe Camel??? Multi-state class action lawsuit versus unhealthy fast food chains!

We can make our country so much more competitive if we didn’t have to pay so much money for cardiac arrests, obesity, etc–we need better nutrition, eating habits, and preventative medicine–our health insurance costs would go down, people would be more productive, we’d have more money to put into infrastructure and education, etc.

Wall Street Journal: Exiling the Happy Meal Los Angeles Lawmakers Want to Escalate The War on Obesity (And Fast Food)

Nanotubes and Asbestos; Nutrition and the Nintendo Wii

C’mon people…yeah, we can have nanotubes and neat technology, and the lung cancer won’t matter because we’ll have bionic lungs…but air probably tastes sweeter through natural human lungs. That’s the problem with all of this new fangled technology…we wouldn’t have half the health problems if we just ate balanced, organic meals made with fewer pesticides, people wouldn’t be so obese and we’d have less diabetes if people packed a healthy lunch to work, even just eating healthier microwaved food with vegetables for lunch–it’s amazing how many people eat fast food like McDonalds every day for at work. Less diabetes, less heart attacks, etc.

I’m not even talking about anything hardcore like being a vegan, which leads some people and babies to malnourishment, or even vegetarianism, I just mean something simple like not eating McDoanlds and other fast food for lunch everyday, it’s not rocket science, get some tupperware, some healthier microwave food, use that work microwave, make some hand-made sandwiches with natural chemical-free deli meats, etc.

We’re getting people to quit smoking…I imagine with healthier food markets like Whole Foods and Trader Joes, along with the “green” movement, cognizance of high health costs especially as baby boomers get older–eventually there will be a social movement that will make less healthy foods and eating habits much more socially unappealing just like smoking. Maybe there will be some cool cooking and nutrition game for the Wii since Nintendo is riding this new healthy living wave. Of course the concept of food deserts will have to be strongly tackled for a new health wave to take off–what percentage of people in the US live in neighborhoods where there are no supermarkets, just liquor stores and fast food restaurants?  How are people going to consistently make healthy dinners and pack healthy lunches when there are no markets convenient to travel to in their neighborhoods?

Financial Times:

Warning of nanotube ‘asbestos’ risk

Carbon nanotubes, hailed as a “wonder material for the 21st century”, could be as dangerous as asbestos fibres if the nanotechnology industry does not handle them properly, researchers warned on Tuesday.

A UK-US study showed that the needle-like carbon molecules – one-50,000th the width of a human hair – caused disease symptoms in mice just like those induced by asbestos fibres.

Nanotubes, discovered in the early 1990s, are coming into industrial use as very light, ultra-strong materials with a wide range of applications, from high-tech tennis rackets and other sporting goods to electronics and pharmaceuticals.

Oh and wait until the Morgellons people get wind of this nanotube/asbestos link…I haven’t yet heard any theories that Morgellons disease is caused by stray nanotube fibers but I’m sure there’s a theory for everything. Plus all the chemically sensitive people, etc…I for one am not quite looking forward to all the potential hazards presented by nanotechnology. We have enough pollution, radioactive waste sites, pesticide, etc. floating around already. Sort of like the ring of space trash around the Earth…let’s hope we don’t ever get to a point where you’ll be able to look through a microscope and see the “local atmosphere” around you polluted with all sorts of nanojunk, that’s quite a situation to avoid.