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A new study appears to have concluded that the universal staple of Latin America, beans and rice, are a mixed bag, health-wise. The beans, they concluded, are excellent for human health. The rice? Not so much. Harvard researchers, studying a population in Costa Rica, found that by reducing the rice and increasing the beans, the likelihood of diabetes can by reduced by 35 percent. The problem with rice, they found, is that it's "pure starch" and therefore "easily converted into sugar by the body," the lead scientist told Reuters. Here's what's really going on. The beans and rice widely consumed in Latin America usually involve whole beans and white rice. Beans are a largely natural food, while white rice is industrially processed. Here's what industrial food is . A better solution to reducing white rice and increasing beans is to eliminate white rice and replace it with whole-grain brown rice. In addition, both the beans and the rice should be fermen...

In our last post , we defined industrial food in detail, and told you how it has created the health crisis. Industrial food is obviously unsustainable. Following current trends, the United States will be bankrupt by healthcare costs, and will be unable to find enough young people fit enough to join the military in just a few decades. So what comes next? The solution to industrial food is not, and cannot be, to turn back the clock to a pastoral, agrarian past. Technology and science got us into this mess, and technology and science will get us out. The old industrial food system would have us buying most of our food at the supermarket, a majority of which would be packaged, canned or pre-prepared foods. We would go to restaurants, which would involve incredibly processed industrial ingredients made compulsively appealing to our basest cravings with massive amounts of low-quality fat, sugar and salt. The foundational enabler of this system is a pact of ignorance -- We won't demand to...

How did our food get so bad? Ironically, the catastrophic decline in food quality began more than 200 years ago with breathtaking improvement. The Industrial Revolution, which would transform the lives of billions, was really a series of smaller, mutually reinforcing revolutions: The industrial energy revolution, the industrial transportation revolution, the industrial chemicals revolution, and so on. One of these was the industrial food revolution. From around 1800 to about 1950, all of the major food problems that had plagued mankind for centuries were largely solved by industrialization, at least for people in the minority of countries that industrialized during this period. Famine, food-borne illness, lack of food variety, basic nutritional deficiencies among the poor and other problems were largely eliminated for millions. Agriculture machinery, chemicals, railroads and trucks, factory assembly lines, refrigeration, pasteurization, sterilization and other industrial-revolution inn...

Tart cherries have a unique combination of powerful antioxidants that may help reduce inflammation http://bit.ly/hJOYvv Strange but true: the brain is shaped by bacteria in the digestive tract http://bit.ly/hj1FWY Type 2 diabetes may be an autoimmune disease http://lat.ms/hbmfMW YMCA survey: 74% of US kids don't get minimum exercise; 74% of parents choose TV for family time. Coincidence? http://bit.ly/fRJ4J7 How to reduce BPA exposure from food http://bit.ly/hpRlln Losing weight improves your memory! http://usat.ly/eJ37bI Nationwide study finds US beef and poultry is widely contaminated http://bit.ly/fM8moH Nearly three-quarters of samples tested of top-selling imported olive oil failed extra virgin standards. http://lat.ms/fJe4gO Why tea is better than coffee, green tea better than black, and white better than green. http://lifehac.kr/idOkLQ The science is clear: Sugar can also make us fat and unhealthy http://bit.ly/hMAvDs How the military is being hammered by obesity and yo yo...

The makers of an upcoming documentary called Wine From Here have posted a trailer for the movie. The documentary is about the burgeoning natural wine movement in California, which is a post-industrial process for making wine without the long list of chemicals, additives and processes used by industrial wine makers. Most natural wine makers use grapes from vineyards that are unsprayed and sometimes even unirrigated. They add no sugar or yeast, make no changes for acidity and they add either very little or no sulphite (the stuff universally overused in industrial wine that can wreck the flavor). Natural wine is a global movement, but the documentary focuses on 14 winemakers in California. We're really glad this documentary has been made, because anyone who drinks wine needs to understand how conventional wine is made (it won't be pretty), and also why natural wine is so much better. Our own favorite natural wine maker, A Donkey and Goat , is featured in the documentary.

The standard villain in any discussion of the global health crisis is the so-call " Western diet ." The meaty, sugary, refined-grain and processed-food heavy diet is blamed for the unprecedented growth of obesity, cardiovascular disease, diabetes and all the rest. "Western" is convenient shorthand. Unfortunately, it's also intellectually dishonest, lazy and inaccurate. The "West" refers generally to Europe and its former colonies. It's a legitimate cultural designation based on historical reality. Europe was a creation of the Roman Empire, which itself was largely modeled on classical Greece. The "West" is Ancient Greece and its cultural descendants. The traditions that began in Greece, which served as the foundation for our views about Democracy, science, architecture, philosophy and more also included a culture of food. And while key aspects of the Greek cultural tradition (Plato, Socrates, etc.) was lost, then rediscovered during the R...