Eat. Drink. Better.

Hmmm…eggs. Incredible. Edible.

Many college students like eggs because they provide a cheap, fast and (If prepared correctly) tasty meal. I like eggs for all of those reasons too. Since I have been in school,  I have found them to be reliable for curing both morning and evening hunger.

I also like eggs because they pack a nutritional punch. According to the American Egg Board, one large egg provides six grams of protein; the quality of egg protein is so high that scientists frequently use eggs as the standard for measuring the protein quality of other foods. Eggs are also much lower in fat than many people think (one large egg has 4.5 grams of fat and 75 calories). In addition, eggs have recently begun to shed their rep as heart-clotters because scientists have yet to show that dietary cholesterol (the kind in eggs) significantly boosts blood cholesterol levels in everyone.

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I knew little about Foreign Animal Disease (FAD) when I walked into a Wisconsin Department of Agriculture (DATCP) talk on the subject Nov. 3 at the Microbial Sciences Center on the UW-Madison campus.  Here is a description of foot-and-mouth disease, an example of FAD, from www.cattletoday:

Foot-and-Mouth Disease is a severe, highly communicable disease of cattle, pigs, sheep, goats and deer.  It is caused by one of the smallest disease producing viruses known.   Humans do not catch the virus.  The disease is characterized by blister-like lesions on the tongue, nose and lips, in the mouth, on the teats and between the toes which then burst, leaving painful ulcers.   The blisters cause a heavy flow of sticky, foamy saliva that hangs from the mouth.  Infected animals sway from one foot to the other due to the tenderness of the feet.  Although older cattle usually do not die from the infection, they suffer a severe illness which leaves them in a weakened state.  They have high fevers, stop eating, give less milk and become lame. 

The virus is extremely contagious and spreads rapidly unless it is contained. This usually requires quarantining infected farms, followed by slaughtering and burning all susceptible animals. Anyone having contact with animals in infected countries should not go near susceptible animals for at least five days.  Because the virus is spread so easily, countries with the disease are banned from exporting animals and their products, creating further economic hardship.  Foot-and-Mouth Disease was last seen in the United States in 1929. The U.S. Government places an extremely high priority on keeping the disease out of the country. 

The FAD Threat

The first speaker i heard reviewed the horror stories of millions of hogs killed in Europe between 1997 and 2001 from either foot and moth disease or classic swine fever, including a 2001 outbreak in the United Kingdom that killed 10 million animals at a total cost of $13 billion.

The numbers are staggering but foreign animal disease hasn’t caused nearly as much carnage in the U.S. or the state of Wisconsin — yet.  The major concern is that foreign animal disease can enter the country and disrupt the Wisconsin farm economy without warning. Two main causes are live animals that can come from elsewhere and spread the disease, or people coming or returning from abroad and smuggling diseased meat products into this country.

Preparing a Plan

The USDA, DATCP and local governments continue to develop a response plan acceptable to all sectors of Wisconsin agriculture that will effectively deal with an incident or outbreak. The big challenge is to get the word out about foreign animal disease so that a plan can be put in place that will work quickly and efficiently. That’s because the onset of foreign animal disease requires precautions so that the incident or outbreak is addressed qicklu without disrupting the transportation, distribution, and production of agricultural products, particularly raw milk that drives Wisconsin’s dairy industry.  According to DATCP, Wisconsin produces 25.1 billion pounds of milk each year from 1.25 million cows from nearly 13,000 dairy farms.  An outbreak severely disrupts the process.  A response plan reduces the disruption significantly.

A response would include setting up what amounts to safety zones around the affected farm and those closest to the occurrence and moving milk within specified zones to identified milk processing plants to get the product moving as quickly as possible. This is critical for raw milk, which can spoil after 48 hours. Though destroying affected herds has been done elsewhere, officials say it’s not a practical solution in Wisconsin. 

The Job Ahead

The main task for agricultural officials and milk marketers is to educate all players involved about foreign animal disease and develop an efficient response system.

the Wisconsin Agro-Security Resource Network (WARN) has a Web site intended to mobilize the entire food industry — dairy, beef, pork, egg, and poultry — to build relationships prior to an occurrence. Officials want to build on existing research and response plans from other areas to complete a plan that has total support.

“We are better prepared but we still have a long way to go,” USDA’s Ty Vannieuwenhoven told the audience.  That’s where citizen journalism plays a role. We can get the word out through GO Media and other outlets and participate in the public education needed to prepare for FAD, which is not a fad, but a potentially serious economic, logistic, and public health problem.

(Map courtesy Epoch Times Web images).

“Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants,” says Michael Pollan. While I’m pretty good at eating real, non-processed food and basing my diet on plants, I struggle with the “not too much” part.

I love food. I probably love it a little too much. Although I’m very active, I carry around 10-20 extra pounds from being such a big eater.

Part of the problem is that, as a grad student, I don’t get nearly enough sleep. Sleep deprivation can make you fatter by increasing levels of appetite regulating hormones and eroding your ability to make good decisions. I also spend an inordinate amount of time in front of my computer doing work that I don’t really want to do, so I snack to stay awake and make my work more enjoyable.

So what’s a food-loving, sleep-deprived gal supposed to do? I have enough experience training animals that I know I can’t simply tell myself to stop certain behaviors. (Ever try yelling at your dog to get it to stop barking? Usually doesn’t work, does it? Distracting your dog with a game works much better.) Instead of telling yourself that tomorrow is the day that you will stop overeating, you need to replace a bad habit with a good one to be successful.

Here are some strategies for replacing habits that lead to overeating with healthier habits:

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Today is National Sandwich Day, supposedly because November 3rd marks the birthday of John Montagu, 4th Earl of Sandwich. Legend has it that Montagu ordered his servant to bring him meat tucked between two pieces of bread so Montagu could eat one-handed while gambling.

While I’ve yet to be convinced that National Sandwich Day wasn’t created to sell more sliced bread, the holiday is still a good excuse to make a sandwich for dinner tonight - or any night for that matter. Sandwiches can be much more than your basic peanut butter and jelly. When done right, a sandwich can be a simple, healthy, and elegant meal.

Here are my top sandwich choices from the Eat.Drink.Better archive:

• Meatless Monday: 8 Meat-Free Sandwich Ideas

• Meatless Monday: Berry Compote, Tofu Pesto Sandwiches, and Pasta With Chickpeas

• A Beefy (yet Beefless) Burger with Black Beans

For more ideas, visit:

• Smitten Kitchen’s Sandwich Archive

• Sandwiches, from Vietnam to South Carolina

• Scanwiches

To test your sandwich knowledge, take this quiz.

(Image courtesy of andso at flickr under a Creative Commons license)

Since I’ve been in college, my morning routine has remained pretty consistent: wake up, brush my teeth, make some coffee, get dressed, make my bed, collect my school things, fill up my thermos with brew, and go. The whole she-bang takes about an hour. The last step, in which I am walking out the door, is usually when I have an oh yeah moment, and remember that I should eat something. That’s when I grab some Pop-Tarts and run to class.

Even though I eat them for breakfast regularly, I think that Pop-Tarts are a lousy meal. The pastry is bone dry, the filling is overly sweet, and the frosting resembles old, flaking nail polish. I also find Pop-Tarts to be extremely unsatisfying—even when I eat more than one, I feel like I am lightly snacking at best. To make matters worse, I am unsatisfying myself with a lot of empty calories: two tarts (one package) offers 400 calories, 10 grams of fat, and little nutritional value.

Like a lot of the foods in my diet, I’ve been eating Pop-Tarts because they are cheap and convenient. But because breakfast is such a vital part of my day, I’ve decided to start improving the quality of the meal, even if that means investing a little more of my time and money.

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My dog taught me to make better seafood choices.

Weird, I know.

You see, my dog has a lot of, er… issues. By the time I adopted her, she had lived on the streets of East St. Louis for three months, bounced through eight different foster homes, and had one failed adoption - all before her first birthday.

Dealing with her emotional baggage has become a big part of my life. Since she doesn’t find pets, praise, or ordinary dog treats very motivating, I’ve had to get more creative in my training. One food she finds really motivating are canned sardines.

Before I got this dog, I had never eaten a sardine. Once my pantry was stocked with at least a dozen tins of sardines - an option I knew was more sustainable and lower in mercury than the neighboring cans of tuna - it was inevitable that I would get curious.

I’ve since become a convert, and it looks I’m not the only one focusing on the sardine as a greener seafood option.

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Going to a body and nutrition expert with my husband is one of the best things we’ve done for ourselves. What was the key take away? Warning! Turn Alkaline!

Turn Alkaline? Are we magicians? Well according to biochemists we are! You can change your body chemistry with what you eat!

Chemicals have seeped into foods, air, and water, which in turn lower our system’s ability to control the chemistry of our body fluids, increasing illness and chronic disease.

The sad fact is that most food consumption in the wealthiest nations has shifted from nutritious raw foods to low nutritional value processed foods and we need to shift it back. Now that our total biological terrain is at risk, we urgently need to do some clean up by shifting our body chemistry back to the raw, organic foods it was designed to function on as we’ve evolved.

Below I’ve listed out a quick list of the good foods (alkaline) to treat your body to often…

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(Image courtesy of www.sporeflections.wordpress.com)

Can you imagine anything worse than being somewhere in public and realizing your breath is loaded with a smell so pungent that it’s offending everyone in a one mile radius from you?

It may be fair to say that garlic tops the list there.

Yikes. I’ve nightmares about this and think having a constant supply of a combination of mouthwash and chewing gum in my bag would be a great idea, but the fact remains that licking some grrr-lick can work nothing short of wonders for you, despite its grrrr factor.

Plus with a reputation for preventing everything from the common cold to aging, garlic is as much known for its versatility as for its effectiveness.

Hey, it can even be effective as a repellent - and not just for mosquitoes.

The word garlic comes from  garleac, meaning “spear leek” in Old English. It is reported to be native to Central Asia, and dates back over 6000 years.

But it was the Egyptians historically that took garlic to the next level. They worshipped it and placed clay garlic bulb models  in the tomb of none else than Tutankhamen. Can you believe, they even used it as currency? Who would’ve thought that money could stink so bad?

Egyptian folklore holds that garlic repelled vampires and ghosts, protected against the “Evil Eye”, and warded off nymphs said to terrorize pregnant women and engaged maidens. Garlic was also considered an aphrodisiac in Egypt. Nature decided to enshrine this super-substance in stink.

Researchers have known that the distinct aroma, flavor and healing properties of garlic come from an organic compound in garlic called allicin, which is also a powerful antioxidant or something that stop the damaging effects of radicals that can accelerate certain diseases.

Like a lot of other herbal medicines though, garlic was not subjected to a vigorous scientific study until earlier this year.

In a Science News report,Queen’s University Chemistry professor Derek Pratt, who led a study on how garlic does it said “We didn’t understand how garlic could contain such an efficient antioxidant, since it didn’t have a substantial amount of the types of compounds usually responsible for high antioxidant activity in plants, such as the flavanoids found in green tea or grapes.”

The  team experimented with synthetically-produced allicin, they found that an acid produced when allicin decomposes rapidly reacts with radicals, more than the allicin itself, explaining its effects better.

According to Dr. Pratt, who is Canada Research Chair in Free Radical Chemistry, no one has ever seen compounds, natural or synthetic, react this quickly as antioxidants.

“The reaction between the sulfenic acid and radicals is as fast as it can get, limited only by the time it takes for the two molecules to come into contact,” he told Science News.

That’s all for the science part. From the personal angle, I wonder why Nature wraps extremely good things in extremely bad packages. Maybe the rock band, The Verve, got it right when they sang that life is a bittersweet symphony. And sometimes it’s easier to appreciate the sweet, when you’ve had a taste of the bitter.

I really, really don’t like Ramen noodles.  To me, Ramen smells like paste.  It looks like tapeworms.  It tastes like seasoned gummy cardboard, and it leaves behind an aftertaste that’s ten times worse than what I experience while it’s actually in my mouth.  I’ve tried to dress it up with different meats, vegetables and sauces, but that never seems to improve things.  Also, I can never get full on just one package, so I always end up eating three, and then wind up feeling cramped and bloated, laying on my couch cursing Nissin, Maruchan, and any other corporation responsible for mass producing the inedible noodle bricks that I somehow  just made edible.

If the world was kind, then Ramen would offer me some health benefits to compensate for its disgustingness.  However, the product offers little nutritional value.  To make matters worse, one package of chicken-flavored Ramen (about two servings) is loaded with sodium—71% of the recommended daily amount.

Ramen is terrible. TERRIBLE.  I see it as a crime against the human body and the culinary arts.  However, these crimes never seem to matter to me, and I eat Ramen time and time again, because it’s quick and easy.  It’s also dirt cheap; to my knowledge, it’s the only meal in existence that I can literally buy on a dime.

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By Steven D. Schmitt

A Letter to the Editor in the September 17, 2009 Wisconsin State Journal could not have been timed better. A Madison resident who had farmed for a career questioned why UW-Madison was spending its financial resources to bring author Michael Pollan to the Kohl Center (Sept. 24, 7 p.m.) to speak on his book, In Defense of Food, especially because he has been so critical of the current agricultural production system.

I am reading Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma, an account of his personal journey through the modern food chain that criticizes U.S. farm policies and large-scale industrialized farming for turning cheap surplus corn into a variety of consumer products that pose risks to public health and the environment.  The man did a tremendous amount of research and interviews - and even bought his own cow. Read the rest of this entry »