A food desert is an area that lacks or has limited access to fresh fruit, vegetables, and other healthy foods; they typically occur in urban or low-income areas. We’ve shared posts discussing multiple aspects of food deserts, such as: examining the effects of banning new fast-food restaurants, challenging long accepted theories surrounding food deserts, and evaluating how proximity to a supermarket may or may not lead to a healthier weight.
While it was once generally accepted that food deserts contribute to the rate of overweight/obesity, more recent studies have found that new grocery stores and increased access to food did not cause significant improvements to BMI and self-reported health. There was an increase in psychological health and “perceptions of food access” reported, but not the health outcomes that we would’ve once expected.
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Bubble tea has gained popularity since its first invention in 1980 when a teashop owner experimented by adding black tapioca balls (“boba” or pearls) to milk tea. The trend of adding toppings in tea drinks has now expanded to a wide variety of drinks and topping options, such as jelly, white pearls, popping boba, aloe vera, etc.
There are a few things that we all know; people eat more if their food is served on larger plates, or if they’re watching something exciting like an action movie. If you go grocery shopping when hungry, you’ll end up with more calories in your cart than if you’d gone shopping with a full stomach. Children can be encouraged to make better food choices if healthier foods are made more appealing, perhaps by giving them catchy names like “power peas” or decorating them with stickers. There’s just one problem with all these “facts” – they may not be true.
A poor night of sleep can leave most of us feeling groggy, moody, or fatigued. Aside from these obvious symptoms, other negative health effects also occur in the body. New research from Sweden finds that even one sleepless night may be enough to trigger the body to store extra fat and break down muscle. Researchers at Uppsala University demonstrated that one night of sleep loss impacts regulation of gene expression and metabolism. If one night can have measurable effects, chronic sleep loss could profoundly impair our metabolism and adversely affect body composition.
 Karen Switkowski, MS, MPH, PhD If you ask American parents what their baby’s first complementary (“solid”) foods were or should be, many first think of cereals, rice puffs and mild fruits and vegetables such as sweet potato, peas, avocado and banana. Current recommendations also encourage introduction of common allergens such as peanuts, dairy, eggs and soy along with other complementary foods at 4-6 months of age. Many parents feed these foods to their baby as purees, though “baby-led weaning”, or self-feeding of family foods, is gaining more popularity among modern parents (discussed in more detail here and here). Whether babies are fed purees, self-fed family foods, or a combination of the two, introduction to the typical American diet often leaves babies missing out on key nutrients and other whole food components beneficial to their developing bodies, as well as exposure to the rich flavor profile of a varied whole-food diet.
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