Before I did my brief stint as Huffington Post’s executive editor of Healthy Living last summer, I’d blogged a little bit for them. But I never got around to posting the stuff I really wanted to … because, well, it didn’t exist yet.
Now, I’m doing a cool new “Revolutionary Acts” column series for Experience Life magazine, and it has a sweet second life over at HuffPo. I’m really happy with how it’s rolling both places.
Basically, I’m just riffing on my “101 Revolutionary Ways to Be Healthy” (you’ve got the free mobile app, right?) — taking each of the “ways” in turn, sharing my current thoughts on them, and offering some easy, real-life ways to leverage them for healthy-change mojo.
Speaking of revolutionary change, my current HuffPo post (“Revolutionary Act # 2: Buck Trends”) is particularly timely, because just this week, Time magazine came out with their “Butter Is Back” cover, presenting recent research and scientific analysis that suggests saturated fats (and fats in general) are not the disease-and-obesity-causing culprits they’ve made out to be.
Of course, we’ve been tracking that research and reporting it in Experience Life for a decade now, so it’s no big news flash to us, but it’s been encouraging to see that info hitting the mainstream at last.
It means those of us who’ve been bucking the fats-avoidance trend (and eating our veggies) for a long while can now do a happy little “I told you so” dance, hopeful that soon, our way of eating may seem at least a little more “normal.”
True, there are still not that many of us out on the happy-fats dance floor (all week, I’ve been trading emails and tweets with folks who still insist that low-fat diets, saturated-fats avoidance and calorie counting are the way to go), but more people are coming out to boogie all the time, and that’s fun.
A little less fun is today’s New York Times “Quote of the Day,” which comes from Marion Nestle, an expert who has offered us plenty of sensible nutrition counsel over the years, but who in this case still seems to be clinging to a soggy old-think perspective.
She says: “There really isn’t much better dietary advice than eating your veggies, exercising and limiting calories. People just seem to like making eating difficult for themselves.”
Needless to say, I disagree. And I think a lot of what’s been making healthy eating way more difficult than it has to be is the confused and confusing “official” and “expert” advice we’ve been getting for decades now — a great deal of which steered us away from healthy, satisfying whole foods and toward lower-fat processed alternatives.
But those are the trends we are now successfully bucking. With pleasure. And not a moment too soon.
