Eat Out Eat Well

Food for Fun and Thought

What’s A Food Desert – And What Happens There?

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It’s not stretch of hot white sand.  It’s also not where you can come upon an oasis, shimmering in the heat, and find platters laden with fresh fruit like in old-time movies.

Here’s what it is:   the CDC defines a food desert as an area “that lack(s) access to affordable fruits, vegetables, whole grains, low-fat milk, and other foods that make up the full range of a healthy diet.”

 

How Does A Food Desert Affect Health?

It would seem pretty obvious that if there isn’t a readily available supply of good food for people to buy and eat then they won’t eat healthy food.

But here’s the problem:  many food deserts may not have a lot of affordable healthy food choices available, but they may have readily available and inexpensive fast food choices.

The CDC indicates that some researchers think a link exists between having easy access to affordable healthy foods and the consumption of those foods. But other studies show that even when healthier food options are available in food deserts, many people continue to make unhealthy choices based on their own personal preferences — or put more simply — because they want to.

 

Food Choices May Be Unrelated To The Availability Of Healthy Food

A study of 5,115 people,  just published in The Archives of Internal Medicine, looked at fast food and fruit and vegetable consumption compared to the availability of fast food restaurants and groceries.  The researchers found that in “food deserts,” where fast food is readily available and there are few or no supermarkets, the local population is drawn to the fast food. But even where there are supermarkets and groceries the food choices the locals make don’t seem to be based on healthy eating.

The results showed that in low-income areas, particularly among men living within one to two miles of a fast food restaurant, there’s a strong association between the availability of fast food and how much of it they consumed. But, they also found that there was no strong association between living near a supermarket and eating more fruits or vegetables.

 

Are Supermarkets Important?

The lead researcher says that it isn’t enough to expect that building supermarkets will make people shop for healthy foods in them.  She thinks that healthy foods need to be promoted and affordable and that people also need to be taught that there are better and healthier food choices available in fast food restaurants, too.  If someone chooses to go to a fast food restaurant they should have the option to find and choose food items that are “relatively more healthy as opposed to less healthy.”

However, just because there might not be a strong association between food choices and supermarkets doesn’t mean that markets aren’t important.  It might be that the market may not be stocked with an abundance of healthy food choices or that the healthier options are expensive and crowded out by an overwhelming array of unhealthier options.

 

What Is Important?

It’s not enough to just teach people what’s healthy and how to make healthy choices. The food environment is crucial and needs to support making healthy food choices easy, attractive, affordable (competitive with the “cheap” calories of fast food), and the cool choices to make.   Just like the oasis in the sandy dessert, there needs to be a welcoming oasis of healthy food choices in the “food deserts.”

 

Frosted Flakes: Do They Really Put A Tiger In Your Tank?

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I was having breakfast with a five year old who insisted on taking an individual box of Frosted Flakes from a display. Of course she would, the little box is designed to appeal to a child.

I’m not a cold cereal lover, but I have been known to grab a handful or two of those sugar coated flakes when they are sitting in front of me (without milk – it destroys the crunch).

Because I haven’t had a box of Frosted Flakes in front of me for a long time and I like to think of myself as an informed adult, I picked up the cute little royal blue box with Tony the Tiger on the front to read the nutrition and ingredients labels.

What a shocker.  I knew that Kellogg’s Sugar Frosted Flakes of Corn was not nutritionally stellar – but what a shock to read the front of the box hype and then to look at the labels.

Sugar Frosted Flakes

The cereal, first introduced in 1952 as Sugar Frosted Flakes, is described as sweet and crunchy and “packed with 10 essential vitamins and good-for-you grains that give you the great-tasting energy you need.”  The tagline reads: “It’s what fuels you up so you can play, prep and be your very best.”

Take a peek at the nutrition label.  Notice the amount of protein and fiber (or, essentially, lack of).  How much sugar is there? Look at the ingredients label.What are the first five ingredients?

My youngest son once ate an astonishing double digit number of little boxes of Frosted Flakes, without milk, at summer sleep-away camp – a story first told to me by his brothers and validated by the counselors.  Can you imagine what his behavior must have been like that day on a massive sugar overload from breakfast cereal? No wonder the camp changed its breakfast policy – and its breakfast foods!

Is it time to change your breakfast?

How Obesity Threatens Our Future

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Since 2006, Trust for America’s Health and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation have released an annual report on obesity.  This year’s report, F as in Fat: How Obesity Threatens America’s Future 2011 (available as a PDF download), unveils some downright alarming statistics.

Some Major Findings:

Adult Obesity Rates and Trends (2008-2010)

  •  Adult obesity rates rose in 16 states over the past year. No state had a decrease.
  •  Obesity rates exceed 25% in more than two-thirds of states (38 states).
  •  Mississippi had the highest rate of obesity at 34.4%; Colorado the lowest at 19.8% — the only state with a rate below 20%.
  •  Obesity and obesity-related diseases (like diabetes and hypertension) remain the highest in the South. Nine of the 10 states with the highest rates of diabetes and physical inactivity are in the South as well the 10 states with the highest rates of hypertension. Northeastern and Western states have the lowest rates of obesity.
  •  In the past year adult diabetes rates increased in 11 states and Washington, D.C.; more than 10% of adults in eight states now have type 2 diabetes.
  •  Obesity increased for men in nine states and for women in ten states, and decreased for women in one state (Nevada).
  •  People who didn’t graduate from high school have the highest rates of obesity (32.8%). High school graduates who didn’t go to college or technical school have the second highest obesity rate (30.4%).  People who went to college/technical school had an obesity rate of 29.6%; graduates from college/technical school had the lowest obesity rate, 21.5%.
  •  Households with an income less than $15,000 have a 33.8% obesity rate; households with an income above $50,000 have a 24.6% obesity rate.

Changes in Adult Obesity, Overweight, Diabetes, and Hypertension Over Time

  • Twenty years ago no state had an obesity rate above 15%.
  •  Twenty years ago the state with the highest combined obesity and overweight rate was 49%; now the lowest rate is 54.8%; 44 states are above 60%.
  •  Twenty years ago, 37 states had hypertension rates over 20%; now every state is over 20%; nine are over 30%.
  •  Over the past 15 years seven states have doubled their obesity rates; 10 states nearly doubled theirs with increases of at least 90%; 22 more states saw their  obesity rates increase by at least 80%.
  •  Since 1995 obesity rates have grown the fastest in Oklahoma, Alabama, and Tennessee and the slowest in Washington, D.C., Colorado, and Connecticut.
  •  Ten years ago there weren’t any states with an obesity rate above 24%; now 43 states have higher obesity rates than the state that was the highest in 2000.

Top Recommendations

“The report includes recommendations for policies to help leverage change quickly and efficiently, by providing individuals and families with the resources and opportunities to make healthier choices in their daily lives. For instance, the report calls for the strategic implementation of the ACA, the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act, and other federal and state policy changes to help prevent and control obesity in America.”

Please take notice.  To see more recommendations and to read the full report click here.

Soda Fountains And Egg Creams: Try This At Home

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What’s An Egg Cream?

It isn’t made with eggs or cream.  It has a complex taste – sort of like what’s left over in the bottom of your glass after you eat the ice cream out of an ice cream soda.  You can’t find bottled egg creams – although companies have tried – because the ingredients separate, the fizz disappears, and the taste just isn’t the same.

A recent article in the New York Times really got me thinking about egg creams.  I’ve made hundreds of them.  My parents owned an old-fashioned soda fountain in Flushing, Queens (NY) – the kind with a long counter with revolving stools. We sold thousands of egg creams, malteds, cherry cokes (vanilla cokes, too) and for those upset stomachs, old fashioned alka seltzers that you poured from glass to glass to really get a fizz going.

Our soda fountain was half of a large drug store and the pharmacist would sometimes have a small medicine bottle filled up with coke syrup give to someone suffering from some form of GI upset.  (Whether or not it actually helped is debatable – psychologically, perhaps it did!).

Historically, fizzy water (essential to an egg cream), was considered medicinal. The first commercial carbonators were found in pharmacies and pharmacists added mineral salts to water to mimic those found in naturally carbonated water. To make the fizzy stuff more tasty and profitable they started flavoring it with sweet syrups (and some not so benign stuff like cocaine and alcohol).

What Happened To Soda Fountain Drinks?

There is some speculation that the bottle cap was the death knell for soda fountain drinks.  When fizzy soda in a bottle could be conveniently bought at the gas station, soda mixed at the fountain lost some of its appeal, although, in my experience, people would come for conversation and camaraderie along with the soda.

Lately there’s been a resurgence of soda fountain drinks – many made with home made syrups and organic milk and served by both top notch restaurants and new soda fountains which also aim to be neighborhood gathering spots.

How to Make An Egg Cream

An egg cream is sweet and fizzy and initially were made almost exclusively in New York City.  Most people think chocolate — a lot of New Yorkers insist on Fox’s U-Bet Chocolate Syrup — but they can be made with vanilla or strawberry syrup, too.

Most of the “new” makers of egg creams – as well as “old-timers” — agree that cold seltzer made from a carbonator with taps  — not the push button soda gun you see behind bars or two-liter bottles of club soda — gives the popping and lively bubbles that make the best drinks. Our fountain had big gas tanks to provide the seltzer water – which inevitably needed changing (by my father) during a very busy lunch hour!

We always used a coke glass and that’s what I remember an egg cream being served in when I ordered it in other places, too.  An egg cream needs to be drunk quickly – gulping is okay – because it’ll lose its fizzy head if it sits too long.

Ingredients for a home made egg cream:

  • Cold whole milk (low fat or skim won’t foam well)
  • Cold seltzer:  a soda siphon with a cartridge that carbonates water is great – otherwise, use very cold seltzer
  • Chocolate (or vanilla or strawberry) syrup

Preparation:

Some recipes suggest adding the milk first, but this is how we made it (in an 8oz. coke glass):

  • Put about an inch of syrup into a soda glass (you can adjust for sweetness with more or less syrup)
  • Layer on about an inch of cold milk
  • Fill to the top with cold seltzer
  • Stir with a long spoon until it gets a fizzy head

Drink up!