by Melissa Diane Smith

(Opinion) We desperately need a food revolution and there are indications that one may have already started.

First lady Michelle Obama is spreading the word around the country about making better food choices in her anti-obesity campaign and she just planted her second organic White House vegetable garden.

Last week ABC News reported that a coalition of Chicago high school students went to a meeting of the Chicago Board of Education to speak out against their school lunch menu. The students are fighting against the nutrient-poor, frozen and highly processed foods they are being served in the school cafeteria. Some students were quoted as saying, “Nutrients are missing. Calories are high. Sugar is high,” and, “Parents rely on schools to give their children nutritious meals, not tan-colored slop.” In addition, they said they rarely see any vegetables being served.

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by Melissa Diane Smith

It’s time to take action to end the epidemic of childhood obesity and it’s easier than you may think, first lady Michelle Obama said this week as she launched her “Let’s Move” campaign. Preventing and reversing weight problems in children in this country is vital for the health of kids who may for the first time lead shorter lives than their parents. But it’s also critical for the health of our country, which has a staggering $147 billion a year in weight-related medical bills.

Mrs. Obama knows firsthand that weight issues with kids can easily be reversed with changes in diet. Several years ago, Mrs. Obama was busy juggling a career and being a mother, and ended up cutting corners with food by ordering takeout and eating out more often. Doing that led to unintended weight gain in her girls and their pediatrician told Mrs. Obama that she needed to think more about nutrition. The Obamas got the message and made changes, particularly by eating more fresh fruits and vegetables, and the extra pounds quickly fell away.

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by Melissa Diane Smith

People who drink two or more sweetened soft drinks a week have an 87 percent higher risk of pancreatic cancer, a particularly deadly form of cancer, according to a 14-year study of 60,000 people just published in the journal Cancer Epidemiology, Biomarkers & Prevention.

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What’s coming in the new year? Plenty of changes, most of which were put into motion in 2008. A new U.S. president is the most obvious change, but there will also be changes in foods and drinks on supermarket store shelves, finance-driven modifications in eating and lifestyle habits, and research and news about health topics that used to be so underground that they were only covered on blogs on the Internet such as this one!

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Many people like to read nutrition information that motivates them to eat better, but they also like to learn information through watching movies. As one client said to me, “Being able to both read information and watch it works really well together, helping to reinforce why we all need to ‘go against the grain’ with our diet for improved health.”

In my previous post, I wrote about “King Corn”, a documentary that explains how cheap corn ends up in most commercial American foods and plays a major role in our widespread and widening health problems. But two other documentary movies to watch are “SuperSize Me” and “McLibel”.

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If you rent just one movie to watch at home this year, make sure it’s “King Corn”. Better yet, buy yourself a copy, so you can watch it every so often and remind yourself of the messes that have been created in our farming practices, our system of raising animals for meat, our own health and the health of the environment — all because of growing outrageous amounts of corn.

“King Corn” documents the experience of two idealistic college graduates who decide to grow an acre of corn in Iowa. Viewers follow them through the whole process — government subsidies, genetically engineered seed, and pesticides that kill everything but the genetically engineered corn. Viewers then learn how the surplus of corn seeps into our foods in many ways, and what all that corn does to us, to animals, to the environment, and to small farmers who can’t compete with big industrialized food corporations.

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Drinking more than one soft drink a day is associated with a higher risk of developing individual cardiovascular disease risk factors, as well as developing the cluster of risk factors known as metabolic syndrome, according to a 2007 study published in Circulation.

The research, part of the ongoing Framingham Heart Study that evaluates common factors that contribute to cardiovascular disease, followed middle-aged men and women during a four-year period.

At the start of the study, researchers established that participants who drank one or more soft drinks a day had a 48 percent higher chance of having metabolic syndrome than those who drank less. Over the four-year follow-up, the results were similar, showing that people who drank one or more soft drinks a day had a 44 percent higher risk of developing metabolic syndrome for the first time.

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