23 October 2014

Organic doesn't make your food tastier

It is a myth to say that substituting an organic ingredient with an organic one will make your cooking tastier. In fact, sometime it is the opposite.
We choose organic because we want environmentally friendly farming practices. And possibly healthier food (due to reduced amount of pesticides). But don't rely on organic to start a healthier diet. It is better to reduce amount of sugar intake than replacing it with organic cane sugar. It is better to eat more non-organic vegetables than eating very little amount of organic vegetable at all. 
Organic is a luxury, and it is not necessary to achieve healthy diet. 


08 April 2014

Sugar, the new public enemy

Fat has long been the public enemy blamed for all kind of disease and obesity. But now sugar has become the new mascot. My favourite lie of "health" food industry is to label sugar as evaporated cane juice. Genius right?

If you evaporate this:
 you will get this:


It is that simple.

04 April 2014

High Tech Gadgets for Your Food and Health

By know we all know that processed foods are bad for us. If there is one thing that they have advantage over a freshly prepared food is that they have nutritional information printed in the box.
But that is about to change. Over the past 12 months, there have been many progress in technology which make me feels that we are living in the Star Trek 24th century timeline.

First of all, we have SITU Smart Food Nutrition Scale. This wireless scale help you to measure the nutrition (such as carbohydrate, fat and protein) when you are preparing your meal. Gone are the day where you need to count the calories manually with paper and pen.



How about when you are eating out? How do you know what is in the food served? On this aspect there are two upcoming products that will help. First is TellSpec, a portable handheld spectrometer who could identify allergens, chemicals, nutrients, calories and ingredients in foods or beverages. The second is a wearable device that measure calorie intake automatically, which is slightly less sophisticated since it only give you the measurement 30-60 after you meal (i.e. after your body have broken down your food into glucose). An example of these are Healbe GoBe, BodyMedia and AIRO. Unlike TellSpec, if you are allergic to some ingredient, these wearables will not be able to warn you in advance. However these class of devices track your daily activity like calorie burned, heart rate and your sleep status (think about it like a FitBit).



We have truly enter a new era where we can be back in charge of our diet. If you know any other food-related innovation, do leave me a comment.

==UPDATE==
Upon further investigation, it seems that the wearable technology which claimed to measure calorie intake could be bogus. At least the one for Healbe GoBe and Airo.