Eating For Health

Summer means ice cream, popsicles, Slurpees, slushies, and iced drinks.   Many people enjoy these until they get what most people call “brain freeze”.   A Virginia Tech assistant professor has studied the brain freeze phenomenon.   Kristofer Rau is an expert in molecular biology, electrophysiology, and behavior assessment and has used his expertise to study why one gets “quick onset headaches” after eating some cold foods or drinks.    What causes you to have a “brain freeze”? Some call it a “brain freeze” others call it an “ice cream headache”.   After eating something really cold, you suddenly feel a sharp pain in your head.   Why?   The professor explains that your body wants to keep things at a certain temperature including your mouth.   Eating something really cold means your mouth temperature suddenly isn’t warm anymore so your body wants to warm your mouth back up.   More blood is sent to the roof of your mouth to warm it up,...

Hungry before going to bed?   Checking out what snacks are on hand?   Is it bad to eat before you go to bed?   Growing up I always ate my dessert late, usually just before bed time -   a hard habit to break.   The New York Times has an article, What are the Best Snacks Before Bedtime?   A reader asked them, “I know it’s not good to eat close to bedtime, but I get hungry.   What are the least harmful things I can eat – or drink – say, an hour or two before going to bed?”   Most of their bedtime snack suggestions were low fat and healthy so I adapted some of their suggestions and also added some real life snacks for real people.       Calories – if you are trying to keep off the pounds or lose a few pounds, limit the bedtime snack to 100-200 calories or 300 calories max, says Isabel Maples from the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics.   If you are trying to bulk up, then adding snacks to your day is a good way to add som...

This week the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) announced proposed changes in our food labels.    Major changes in the food labels appearing on everything from chips to soup haven’t changed much in 20 years.   So what are some of the proposed changes? Serving sizes – ever look at the serving size on ice cream.   It states one half cup is the serving size, yet who eats only one half cup?   In teaching my nutrition class, I show a video in which the dietitian notes the one half cup serving size on ice cream.   The students are always surprised it is so low.   When I told my husband, he insisted that one half cup was too low and went to the freezer to prove it.   Of course, the ice cream container verified that one half cup is the serving.   So one of the proposed food label changes is to increase the serving size on foods such as ice cream to reflect what people actually eat.   Thus, for ice cream the serving size will increase fro...