Certainly, we’ve written plenty about the benefits of pulses, beans, and legumes; three of the words that represent a very healthy group of foods central to the Mediterranean-style of eating. This exceptional group of foods, including beans, lentils, and peanuts is finally getting some excellent press; and for that I’m grateful. It always makes me […]

On Wednesday, February 15, 2017, the Food and Marketing Institute and the Grocery Manufacturers Associations (GMA), the two largest trade groups for the grocery industry, announced that they’ve adopted standardized, voluntary regulations to clear up what product date labels mean. The target date for the change is by July 2018. As far as I’m concerned […]

Last week I wrote a bit about the complexities of food budgeting as related to marketing and organic produce. In addition to checking deeper into the price and ingredient list there are other things that you can do. I find that buying good quality whole foods and having them on hand, not only helps to […]

All public health professionals have worries; that does not exclude public health dietitians/nutritionists. One of my big concerns is the amount of confusion and complexity that blanket nutrition. It is not just a consequence of the fact that nutrition is just in its adolescence – relatively speaking; and new science is constantly being discovered. But […]

On December 20, 2016, an article was published at www.annals.org that concluded that the: “Guidelines on dietary sugar do not meet criteria for trustworthy recommendations and are based on low-quality evidence. Public health officials (when promulgating these recommendations) and their public audience (when considering dietary behavior) should be aware of these limitations.” Let me just […]

This is the time of year when many families are juggling gift buying and ordinary demands – like the food budget. Because of this challenge, I decided to write about a not so holiday-like issue – the food budget. I guess that I should proclaim my bias from the get-go. I’m writing about how the […]

My questions and in all honesty, my wrath often start when I pick up a container in the market. This time it was an intriguing new product, tzatziki by Cedar, a company that focuses on making traditional Mediterranean recipes. The product was Cedar’s Tzatziki; it says right on the main label, “made with Greek yogurt, […]

It seems as though we are going to have to recognize and combat the “tobacco industry playbook” for each and every Big Food Industry. Sugar, processed foods, dairy, beef and other red meat, processed meat all seem to be using THE playbook. It worked like magic for tobacco; many extra decades of disability and early […]

Beans (aka legumes and pulses) likely don’t cause confusion in anyone except me. My confusion is in the fact that people seem to know that beans are inexpensive; for example – “not amounting to a hill of beans.” Where my confusion comes in, is that I read so much about the pinched budgets of families […]

Life is so complex today. Years ago I had dismissed ramen as a low-cost junk-food, high-calorie, palatable because of cheap additives, but except for calories, nutritionally impoverished. Now I am awakened to the bizarre finding that these shelf-stable bricks of twisted noodles are near the top of the food chain in two significant populations. One […]