Why everyone’s hopping on the meal replacement bandwagon? Being overly busy has become our new reality. And when it comes to making the healthy meals and snacks that are so important for our health, there never seen to be enough hours in the day. We can resort to restaurant meals and take-out, but these are expensive and not necessarily healthy. Frozen dinners and cheap fast food chains have filled the gap since the 1950s, but though they may satisfy our stomachs and provide calories, these chemical-laden meals lack nutrition and have been a disaster for our national health—major contributors to obesity and chronic disease. What we need are healthy, good-tasting convenience foods that can be used to make quick, easy meals and snacks at a reasonable price. In recent years, a flock of meal replacement (MR) products have entered the market promising to fill that need. Some target specific issues, like weight loss and fitness support. Others are designed to meet the needs of…

New kinds of burgers made from plants, with the look, taste, smell and “mouth-feel” of real meat, are showing up in mainstream restaurants and grocery stores. They reportedly pass taste tests, even among die-hard carnivores, but are they healthy? Current levels of meat consumption are unhealthy as well as environmentally unsustainable. An international commission of leading scientists assembled by the prestigious medical journal, The Lancet, concluded that, “The current global food system is unsustainable and requires an agricultural revolution …” if we hope to feed all ten billion people projected to inhabit the earth by 2050.  According to the Commission, cutting back on red meat production is an essential part of this revolution.  A major consumer of land and water, and a major producer of greenhouse gas emissions, red meat, they say, should be limited to half an ounce per person per day, and other animal proteins should be reduced in our diets as well. Ente…

According to our friends at Beyond Pesticides, food insecurity how affects 54 million people in the United States! And with the continued surge in COVID cases, the problem promises to become worse before it gets better.Our current food system, which has become increasingly dominated by fewer and fewer mammoth multinational corporations, has been criticized by leading scientists and economists for some time as being neither environmentally, nutritionally, socially nor economically sustainable. In our current pandemic crisis, this food system has proved to be cumbersome and inflexible, with farmers being forced to dump products and kill their livestock due to supply-chain disruptions and lack of access to markets at the same time that 15% of our population is in dire need of food and we continue to import food from overseas. Even before the current crisis, scholar-activist Raj Patel had pointed out that worldwide while 800 million people starved, over a billion were becoming obese on…