Monday, March 4, 2013

Sandwich Monday: Chicken And Waffles

Even the sandwich is smiling. Enlarge image i

Even the sandwich is smiling.

Even the sandwich is smiling.

Even the sandwich is smiling.

Chicken and waffles is a great dish nobody would deny that, except for chickens. But it's not always the easiest thing to eat. You've got bones to deal with, plus sticky syrup, and worst of all, finite stomach capacity. Chicago restaurant Bel 50 has a solution: a boneless fried-chicken sandwich, on waffle bread.* Also in there: apple slaw and honey mustard glaze.

Ian: It looks like my breakfast ate my lunch.

Miles: The waffle does an excellent job absorbing the tears of gratitude I'm shedding over the fact that this sandwich exists.

Eva contemplates replacing all the bread in her life with waffles. Enlarge image i

Eva contemplates replacing all the bread in her life with waffles.

Eva contemplates replacing all the bread in her life with waffles.

Eva contemplates replacing all the bread in her life with waffles.

Eva: Bread is feeling pretty inadequate right now.

Ian: Yup. Somewhere, someone is putting maple syrup on two slices of white bread and wondering why life is so hard.

A look within Enlarge image i

A look within

A look within

A look within

Robert: This is a perfect solution to my problem of not getting my fingers greasy enough during lunch.

Ian: As far as breakfast fried-chicken recipes go, this really beats Kellogg's short lived "Special K-FC" cereal.

Miles: I hope other European countries follow suit. I for one am looking forward to fried chicken on a bed of haggis.

Robert tries it. Enlarge image i

Robert tries it.

Robert tries it.

Robert tries it.

Miles: I'm running through the whole range of emotion here, from "Belgi-Um?" to "Belgi-YUM!"

Ian: Uh-huh.

Miles: I mean, it's good, but the texture of the sauce is a little phlegm-ish.

[The verdict: really quite delicious. Not only is this a well-constructed sandwich, but the laws of physics dictate that it also gets the normally huge chicken and waffles serving down to an almost reasonable size.]

*As The Salt has reported previously, some consider boneless chicken and waffles to be a deal breaker.

Sandwich Monday is a satirical feature from the humorists at Wait! Wait! Don't Tell Me.


Crispy Chicken and Scallion Waffle Sandwich Recipe : Jeff Mauro ... These are a little time-consuming, but they are well worth every minute you put into preparing them. We had leftover chicken tenders that I froze and heated in the ... Chicken And Waffles With Gravy Recipes - Free Diet Plans at ... chicken and waffles with gravy, chicken and waffles with gravy recipes, chicken and waffles with gravy ideas Chicken Sandwich and some Waffle Fries!!! - YouTube Really? Only a moron would think treating someone that way qualified as "humor". Imagine a white man treating the man in the video that way -- how ... Mantastic Fried Chicken 'n' Waffle Sandwich Recipe from Betty Crocker Heres a new take on chicken n wafflesmade better with beer, bacon, and bourbon. Its the ultimate manly man meal. A Sandwich a Day: Buttermilk Fried Chicken on a Waffle at Bel 50 ... [Photograph: Nick Kindelsperger] Here's the deal with Bel 50: all the sandwiches come on waffles instead of bread. Sure, it's a gimmick, but it's also one that is so ... i want a chicken sandwich and some waffle fries for free! Facebook i want a chicken sandwich and some waffle fries for free! 1,812 likes 0 talking about this. Soul Groove *The Chicken Fried Soul: A succulent, boneless chicken breast is wrapped in bacon, then buttermilk battered, Southern fried, and nestled between two maple waffles. A ... Hotlanta Style Chicken and Waffle Sandwiches with Spicy Maple ... This sauce is brilliant!!! After trying this sandwich the first time, I became so crazed for more that I took shortcuts, like using a high quality pre-made waffle in ...

Selling Kids On Veggies When Rules Like 'Clean Your Plate' Fail

Experts say that positive encouragements work better than dinnertime rules like "no second helpings" to get kids to eat some foods.

If you're a parent, you've probably heard remarks like this during dinner: "I don't like milk! My toast is burnt! I hate vegetables! I took a bite already! What's for dessert?" It can be daunting trying to ensure a healthy diet for our children. So it's no wonder parents often resort to dinner time rules.

In our new poll, with the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the Harvard School of Public Health, 25 percent of families tell their children to eat everything on their plate, and 45 percent report setting restrictions on the types of foods eaten. Increasingly common are rules like "clean your plate," as well as newer strictures such as "no second helpings of potatoes," "no dessert until you eat your vegetables" and "sodas and chips only on special occasions."

This is all well-meant advice. But does it work? Kelly Brownell, who directs the Rudd Center for Food Policy & Obesity at Yale University, says "No."

"By demanding that children eat things like vegetables before they have a dessert, it makes it seem like there's something wrong with eating vegetables, and that you have to swallow medicine before you get to the good part," Brownell says.

Not only that, rules like this can backfire, according to Kristi King, a registered dietitian at Texas Children's Hospital and a spokesperson with the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics. "Some of the studies have shown us that when they were put in a situation where somebody is saying 'finish this,' or 'finish that,' the kids actually had more negative responses and actually consumed less of the food than the kids who didn't have that reinforcement of 'You need to finish.'"

The better option, King says, is creative negotiation. Take, for example, what she calls "Try It Tuesdays." On a "Try it Tuesday," parents, along with their children, pick out a new food to sample. It helps to involve the kids in preparing the dish as well, she says. This investment in the new food increases the likelihood the child will try it and even enjoy it.

If they still say no, King suggests "no thank you bites" something her friends made up for their 3-year-old daughter. It goes like this: The child just has to take a bite, and if they don't like it, they can say "no thank you," and that's that. But typically in this family, the "no thank you" turns into a "thank you," as the 3-year-old watches her parents eating and enjoying the food.

"You see her little hand reach across to the fork, and it kind of goes over into the vegetable," King says. "The next thing you know, you turn around and she's eaten the entire vegetable."

And, it turns out as with most other behaviors your kids are watching you, King says. "I had a parent who came into clinic not too long ago, and I said, 'OK, what's our goal for being here today?' And he looked at me and said, 'Make him eat vegetables!' And, my question back was, 'Well, do you eat vegetables?' And his answer was, 'No, I don't like them.'"

Dad mentioned he loved grilling, so King suggested he try that with vegetables. By their next visit, he'd become an avid veggie griller.

"Zucchini and squash and carrots and eggplants and onions and tomatoes you name it, he was grilling it," says King. "[It's] a dietitian's dream getting an entire family involved in eating more healthy foods."

As for dessert, Yale University's Brownell says there's nothing wrong with an occasional treat. "That doesn't mean that the only options are things high in sugar or fat or salt. There can be wonderful combinations of things like sorbet, sherbet, fruits things like that can make outstanding desserts and be really good for people."

Some parents worry that having only healthy foods at home will lead kids to overdo it with junk food when they head off to college. But Brownell says there's no evidence to support this worry. And, in fact, the reverse is probably true.

Even if the young adults indulge in unhealthy foods at first, they're far more likely to return to the healthy foods they grew up with. "Having only good foods around the house makes all the sense in the world, and research supports this," he says.

So, Brownell says, fill your kitchen with healthy food, don't buy junk food and watch what you eat. Your kids will follow your lead.

This story is part of the series On the Run: How Families Struggle to Eat Well and Exercise. The series is based on a poll from NPR, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the Harvard School of Public Health. If you want to dive deeper, here's a summary of the poll findings, plus the topline data and charts.


Sunday, March 3, 2013

Family Keeps Jewish Soulfood Alive At New York 'Appetizing' Store

Russ and Daughters, which opened on the Lower East Side in 1914, specializes in smoked fish. Enlarge image i

Russ and Daughters, which opened on the Lower East Side in 1914, specializes in smoked fish.

Russ and Daughters, which opened on the Lower East Side in 1914, specializes in smoked fish.

Russ and Daughters, which opened on the Lower East Side in 1914, specializes in smoked fish.

It's been more than 100 years since Joel Russ started peddling herring from a barrel on the streets of New York.

Enlarge image i

"The House the Herring Built" has served New York City for more than a century.

"The House the Herring Built" has served New York City for more than a century.

Today, the restaurant Russ and Daughters is a destination for fans of smoked salmon, whitefish and caviar, among other delicacies. Longtime owner Mark Russ Federman has written a memoir about the family business called Russ and Daughters: Reflections and Recipes from the House the Herring Built.

"An appetizing store has the mingling odors of salt, smoke, pickle and sweet," says Federman, who ran Russ and Daughters from 1978 until he retired three years ago. "So, all of that coming together makes for a unique sensory experience."

A century ago, the Lower East Side was packed with "appetizing" shops, where merchants would compete to satisfy the noshing needs of the neighborhood's Jewish clientele: pickled herring, smoked whitefish, sable and salmon, bagels and bialys, along with dried fruit, chocolate and candy.

Selling fish is in Federman's blood. His grandfather Joel Russ immigrated to New York from what's now southeastern Poland and opened the store in 1914. Russ didn't have any sons but he did have three daughters. And Federman says he put them to work behind the counter.

"Down here, there were 20, 30 appetizing stores. And a lot of them had a sign over the door that said, 'Saperstein and Son,' 'Cohen and Son,' whatever, and sons. Sons. Nobody had, 'and daughters,' " Federman says. "So, he put a sign that said Russ and Daughters. That made him unique."

Federman says Hattie, Ida and Anne helped the business in other ways, too.

Mark Russ Federman's mother, Anne, serves customers at Russ and Daughters in 1939. Enlarge image i

Mark Russ Federman's mother, Anne, serves customers at Russ and Daughters in 1939.

Mark Russ Federman's mother, Anne, serves customers at Russ and Daughters in 1939.

Mark Russ Federman's mother, Anne, serves customers at Russ and Daughters in 1939.

"These pretty young girls would be fishing herrings out of barrels, and slicing lox, and charming and disarming the toughest of New York's customers," he says. "And these were tough customers."

Unlike his aunts and mother, Mark Russ Federman did have a choice about working in the family business. Federman went to law school. He got a job at an uptown law firm and hated it.

In 1978, Federman came back to run the family business. And he was shocked at how hard the job was.

"We're dealing with a finicky product," Federman says. "We're talking about fish, most of it wild. Every fish is different. Every customer is different. Every employee is different. And the idea is to be able to line up fish and customer and counterman perfectly hundreds of times a day."

Today, the men and women behind the counter aren't all Russes. Some of them aren't even heaven forbid Jewish. Herman Vargas has been working here for 32 years, ever since he arrived in New York from the Dominican Republic.

"There is something called bashert in Yiddish, which is like destiny. Now I can say [it is] so," Vargas says of his chosen profession. "But when I first came in no, no way."

Russ and Daughters survived long enough to be rediscovered by foodies and food writers. Now, Mark Federman has handed the business over to a fourth generation of Russes his nephew, Josh Russ Tupper, and his daughter, Niki Russ Federman. They've tried to bring the store into the 21st century gently, with innovations like ordering over the Internet. Though not all of their customers are interested.

"People will come back at me almost as if I've offended them," says Niki Federman. "One person even said, 'Don't take my joy away from me. I have to come. I have to talk to Jose. He's my favorite counter guy. I've been seeing him for 30 years.'"

All the Russes acknowledge that the success of the store is about more than the quality of its fish. That helps, says Federman.

Mark Russ Federman (center) stands with the next generation of Russ and Daughters owners: his daughter Nikki and his nephew Josh Russ Tupper. Enlarge image i

Mark Russ Federman (center) stands with the next generation of Russ and Daughters owners: his daughter Nikki and his nephew Josh Russ Tupper.

Mark Russ Federman (center) stands with the next generation of Russ and Daughters owners: his daughter Nikki and his nephew Josh Russ Tupper.

Mark Russ Federman (center) stands with the next generation of Russ and Daughters owners: his daughter Nikki and his nephew Josh Russ Tupper.

But even after writing a book about the store, Federman says he's not quite sure why Russ and Daughters is still in business when so many appetizing stores aren't.

"This store has a soul a neshama, as we say in Hebrew," says Federman. "Some of the Russes get that. And that's what keeps us doing this kind of thing."

Even in retirement, Mark Russ Federman hasn't lost his enthusiasm for the store's products. His lunch order? Smoked salmon and sable on a bialy with cream cheese and tomato. "To me, it's heaven," he says. "If somebody asks me and they have, actually what's your dying meal, this is it."


Friday, March 1, 2013

Documentary 'A Place At The Table' Is A Call To Action On Hunger

The poster for the documentary A Place At The Table. Enlarge image i

The poster for the documentary A Place At The Table.

The poster for the documentary A Place At The Table.

The poster for the documentary A Place At The Table.

One nation underfed. Really?

Many of us don't think of the U.S. as the land of the underfed.

In this era of the expanding waistlines, we hear far more concern about obesity than we do about hunger. But the two are more closely connected that many of us realize.

A new documentary, A Place at the Table, peels back the curtain on the problem of food insecurity, weaving the stories of low-income Americans who struggle to put healthy food on the table, despite the fact that they have jobs.

As we've reported, the U.S. Department of Agriculture estimates that about about 50 million Americans fall into this category of "food insecure" meaning they don't always have the resources to buy the food they need. This includes nearly 17 million children in the U.S.

I attended a screening of the film - along with a panel discussion with the producers and folks from Participant Media (the people behind Food Inc.). Judging from the reaction of the audience, the film works. At a gut level, the story of Barbie, a single mom from Philly who grew up in poverty, is wrenching.

As Barbie tries to break the cycle, she finds at times that she makes too much money to qualify for federal food assistance. And her paycheck runs out long before the end of the month.

As we watch her open cans of cheap pasta and peer into her near-empty fridge, our hearts leap.

The film includes the voices of hunger and nutrition experts, as well as advocates who criticize federal farm subsidies of crops such as wheat and corn. These crops supply the bulk of our nation's processed foods, which tend to be calorie dense, and nutrient poor.

Food policy expert Marion Nestle points out there are no subsidies for fruits and vegetables one reason, perhaps, that they're so much more expensive. Raj Patel, author of Stuffed and Starved, weighs in, too.

But as producer Lori Silverbush (married to chef Tom Colicchio, who appears in the film) pointed out during the after-screening discussion, subsidies are just one part of a complex story.

The bottom line, according to hunger advocate Billy Shore of Share Our Strength: "Childhood hunger in this nation is a solvable problem." Shore says we have enough food and good nutrition programs.

"What we need is to make sure the kids who need the food are able to access the programs," Shore says.

Participant Media, which helped embolden the food movement with Food, Inc., is hoping that the film serves another call to action.

They've launched a website that will serve as a hub for for all sorts of hunger-related advocacy. And groups including Bread for the World, Feeding America, FRAC and Share Our Strength are all represented.

And back to that idea that hunger and obesity live in close quarters. I think Michael O'Sullivan of the Washington Post summed it up best in a review of the documentary:

"The problem, as Table shows, isn't that the next meal never comes. It's that when it arrives, too often it is filled with empty calories," O'Sullivan writes.


How Did Our Brains Evolve To Equate Food With Love?

At some point in human evolution, our brains became wired to remember food events and the people associated with them. Enlarge image i

At some point in human evolution, our brains became wired to remember food events and the people associated with them.

At some point in human evolution, our brains became wired to remember food events and the people associated with them.

At some point in human evolution, our brains became wired to remember food events and the people associated with them.

If food is love, Americans must love their kids a lot. About one-third of children and adolescents in the U.S. are overweight or obese.

And our emotional response to food may be one of the reasons so many kids eat so much, according to a poll by NPR, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the Harvard School of Public Health. The poll found that in more than a quarter of families, food is considered an important way to show affection.

That result is no surprise to Carol Cassie, who lives in Great Falls, Mont. For many years she ran a restaurant there called Mama Cassie's, where the front of each menu proclaimed, "Food is love."

"I wanted my customers to know as soon as they came into the restaurant that I was caring for them," says Cassie, who is also the author of Mama Cassie's "Food is Love!" Cookbook.

Customers at the restaurant really did feel like family, says Erin Duffy Osswald, who used to work at the restaurant and edited the cookbook.

"People would get engaged at Mama Cassie's," Osswald says. "They would satisfy their pregnancy cravings on turtle cake from Mama Cassie's. They would bring their babies into Mama Cassie's later, and Carol would walk around the restaurant with them."

Cassie says she loved running the restaurant. But looking back, she says, there's something that concerns her. Some of her customers, including whole families, didn't seem to know when to stop.

"They'll have big plates of whatever, like a big pork sandwich that was just oozing with cheese and pulled pork and the meat sauce," Cassie says. And then, "they would have a piece of cheesecake afterward."

Just plain gluttony? Or did customers at Mama Cassie's think more food meant more love?

Love is probably at least part of the answer, scientists say, because of the way humans have evolved.

You can see some aspects of human food behavior in our animal ancestors, including marmoset and tamarin monkeys. These monkeys are like people in that fathers and siblings help raise the offspring, and all the adults make a big deal of providing food to youngsters in the family, says Adrian Jaeggi, a biological anthropologist at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

The older monkeys give a special call when they find a special treat, like insects that are "big and juicy and very nutritious," Jaeggi says. Then they adopt the "food offering posture" to present the young monkeys with the treat.

Chimpanzees, an animal ancestor that's even closer to humans, take the food-is-love concept to the next level. Chimps share food with individuals outside their own families.

The sharing often involves a precious food: meat. And a chimp who makes a kill doesn't share the meat with everyone, Jaeggi says, only the chimps in his group who are long-term allies. Sharing food appears to be a way of strengthening the alliance and ensuring future cooperation, he says, not unlike a business lunch.

Bonobos share a piece of fruit at the Lola ya Bonobo sanctuary in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Enlarge image i

Bonobos share a piece of fruit at the Lola ya Bonobo sanctuary in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Bonobos share a piece of fruit at the Lola ya Bonobo sanctuary in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Bonobos share a piece of fruit at the Lola ya Bonobo sanctuary in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Bonobos are another of our close relatives in the ape world. But unlike chimpanzees, bonobos live in groups run by females, and emphasize cooperation over competition. And like people, Bonobos use food to make new friends, not just to keep old ones.

Researchers showed this in a series of experiments done at the Lola Ya Bonobo sanctuary in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

The experiments involved a plate of food. "What we call it is the giant salad bowl, so we have apples, bananas, peanuts, papaya and cucumber all mixed together," says Jingzhi Tan, an evolutionary anthropologist at Duke University.

Researchers give the salad bowl to a bonobo in a locked enclosure. The bonobo has two neighbors in adjacent enclosures who don't have food. One of the neighbors is a bonobo they know, and one is a stranger.

Only the bonobo with the salad bowl can unlock the doors that would let a neighbor in. "So basically we create a situation that they can eat or they can share," Tan says.

And most of the time, the bonobo with the salad bowl did share but not with the bonobo they already knew. "The majority of the time, they chose to share with the stranger," Tan says.

What was most surprising, though, is that often the stranger who had just gotten access to the food would let the third bonobo in, and all three bonobos would eat together, Tan says.

And that brings us back to humans. It's not clear how long our human ancestors have been sharing food. But it appears that the social importance of food took a big leap forward about 1 million or 2 million years ago, says John Allen of the Brain and Creativity Institute at the University of Southern California. He's the author of The Omnivorous Mind, a book about how our relationship with food has evolved.

That's when humans began hunting really big animals, like mammoths, Allen says. The animals were so big that they couldn't be eaten by a small number of people. "That in effect provides a little arena for sharing and social exchange," Allen says.

In other words, the feast is born. Then when agriculture came along, we added harvest feasts, which eventually led to Thanksgiving.

And somewhere along the way, our brains became wired to remember these food events and the people associated with them, Allen says. It's probably no accident, he adds, that the digestive system produces hormones like insulin, leptin and ghrelin that act on the hippocampus, a part of the brain that plays a key role in memory.

Allen says the gut-brain connection probably exists because our ancestors were more likely to survive if they remembered clearly where they got their last good meal. And he says this same link between gut and brain is probably why he responds the way he does to a dish his mother used to make him called ketchup fried rice.

"Every time I make it I think of my mother," he says. Allen says he makes ketchup fried rice for his own children in hopes that they will always associate the dish with their father.

And if his kids really like that ketchup fried rice, another system in the brain will kick in to help create a lasting memory. It's the brain's dopamine system, which rewards us with feelings of pleasure.

The dopamine system becomes active in people when they look at someone they love or a favorite food, Allen says. So in our brains, at least, food really is connected to love and a sense of well-being.

And until recently that was probably a purely good thing, Allen says.

"There's never really been any incentive ever to limit calories," he says. "You know when you had a feast, when the food was there you ate it."

A lot of us still think that way. In the poll NPR did with the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the Harvard School of Public Health, about half of families said they treat celebrations as a time to take a break from concerns about overeating.

And in a world where it's possible to feast every day, that can be a problem. But it doesn't have to be, says Cassie, the cookbook author in Great Falls.

"You make that one day of celebration, or a weekend if you're going away for a weekend," she says. "But then you go back on Monday and you say, 'OK, now we have to get back to real life.' "

This story is part of the series On the Run: How Families Struggle to Eat Well and Exercise. The series is based on a poll from NPR, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the Harvard School of Public Health. If you want to dive deeper, here's a summary of the poll findings, plus the topline data and charts.


The Function of the Human Brain - A Relationship Between Evolution ... A study of the human brain covering its evolution and development to obtain factual basis for human behavior. Health News & Articles Healthy Living - ABC News Get the latest health news from Dr. Richard Besser. Here you'll find stories about new medical research, the latest health care trends and health issues that affect ... How to Rewire Your Brain to End Food Cravings Dr. Mark Hyman Im a food addict. We all are. Our brains are biologically driven to seek and devour high-calorie, fatty foods. The difference is that I have learned how to control ... Human Evolution A study of the evolution of the human is necessary for the understanding of his cultural needs. Did humans really evolve from apes? - Yahoo! UK & Ireland Answers Best Answer: Sigh. Here we go again. >>>>did humans really evolve from apes? Yep, we evolved from apes and we are still apes. Humans are one of the 5 ... BRAINS PLUS BRAWN Edge.org Edge.org Print Mail Print HTML Complete your registration at Nidokidos Get Full Registration of Nidokidos Only 5 Easy Steps: 1: Start posting your files, photos, and articles. Join our forum today . Click here to register. Buddha's Brain: The Practical Neuroscience of Happiness, Love, and ... Books up to 50% Off Browse our Bookshelf Favorites store each month for big savings on popular fiction, nonfiction, children's books, and more.

Sugar's Role In Rise Of Diabetes Gets Clearer

A performer drinks a soda in Ahmedabad, India in 2010. A study found that rising diabetes prevalence in countries like India is strongly tied to sugar consumption.

A performer drinks a soda in Ahmedabad, India in 2010. A study found that rising diabetes prevalence in countries like India is strongly tied to sugar consumption.

Robert Lustig wants to convince the world that sugar is making us very sick. And lately he's turned to an unconventional field econometrics to do it.

Lustig rounded up statisticians and epidemiologists to look at the relationship between food and diabetes risk. The paper, published this week in the journal PLoS One, found that the more sugar on the market in 175 countries, the higher the country's diabetes rate.

"I'm not suggesting sugar is the only cause of diabetes," Lustig, a pediatric endocrinologist at the University of California, San Franciso, tells The Salt. "But in this analysis it was the only thing that predicted it. And it was worldwide and over a decade."

The researchers found that for every additional 150 calories of sugar (the amount that's in a 12-ounce can of soda) available per person per day, the prevalence of diabetes in the population rose 1 percent. They compared that against an additional 150 calories of from any type of food, which caused only a 0.1 percent increase in the population's diabetes rate over the past decade.

The findings controlled for obesity, physical activity, and a number of economic and social variables.

New York Times columnist Mark Bittman called the new study "the closest thing to causation and a smoking gun that we will see" for the relationship between sugar and diabetes.

But not everyone agrees this paper is the "smoking gun" for sugar.

Frank Hu, an expert on diabetes epidemiology at Harvard, tells The Salt that while the study's findings track with other research linking sugar intake to the diabetes epidemic, Lustig's study by itself is "weak evidence of a causal link."

Why? Because, he says, epidemiologists don't consider ecological studies like this one, which take a statistical snapshot, as reliable as prospective cohort studies, which follow a group of people over time.

Hu notes that he was also surprised to see that other foods did not predict diabetes risk nearly as strongly as sugar in Lustig's study. "I don't know why this happened, because we know other foods are associated with diabetes risk like highly refined grain products, white rice, bread, and other starchy foods. Those foods are not very different from sugar. But maybe sugar is a better indicator of certain dietary habits of population."

Lustig himself is the first one to admit that proving that any one thing causes a disease, especially a chronic disease, is tricky business. And Lustig's co-author Sanjay Basu admitted on an epidemiology blog this week that "we can't 'prove causality' through any amount of statistics."

But Lustig insists that nailing down sugar's role in the rise of obesity and diabetes is useful, because it will give people a starting point.

"The point is, if [diabetes is caused by] many things, you can handle each one, one at a time," says Lustig.

Where to start, then? Well, Lustig says, we could start by regulating it better, with stricter guidelines for sugar consumption, and taxes on it.

Sounds like he'll soon be pushing for legislation especially since the doctor is pursuing a law degree.

He's certainly no lightweight when it comes to getting out the message. His YouTube video "Sugar: The Bitter Truth" has attracted millions of viewers since it went viral in 2010.


Seeking A Grain Of Truth In "Whole Grain" Labels

Whole wheat, stone-ground, multi-grain. Have food labels got you confused? Joanne Slavin, a nutrition professor at the University of Minnesota, and David Ludwig, a pediatrician and obesity doctor at Boston Children's Hospital, discuss the meaning of "whole grain," and whether intact grains like wheat berries pack more nutritional punch than their ground-up counterparts, such as whole wheat flour.