NYtimes.com

I (heart) the New York Times.com

here's a fascinating article on Happiness
It illuminates "the distinction between feeling good, which according to positive psychologists only creates a hunger for more pleasure — they call this syndrome the hedonic treadmill — and doing good, which can lead to lasting happiness."

Also another article on The Insula,
a small part of the brain and its link between rational and emotional behavior, and its role in addiction. Really fascinating.

I'm also reading Unhappy Meals a 12 page article on Western science, nutritionism and how to maintain a balanced diet. I almost feel healthier already. I highly recommend:
"Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants."

~ In the first few pages the author links the American food system to politics and semantics altering the ways American's view food vs. it's inherent nutritional value. He makes some really interesting connections between nutritionism and actual whole food products:
"The fate of each whole food rises and falls with every change in the nutritional weather, while the processed foods are simply reformulated."

~ Scientists are in part to blame for our societies over simplified obsession with nutrients:
“The problem with nutrient-by-nutrient nutrition science is that it takes the nutrient out of the context of food, the food out of the context of diet and the diet out of the context of lifestyle.... If you’re a nutritional scientist, you do the only thing you can do, given the tools at your disposal: break the thing down into its component parts and study those one by one, even if that means ignoring complex interactions and contexts, as well as the fact that the whole may be more than, or just different from, the sum of its parts."
"Scientists study what scientists can see." and not necessarily the entirety of the situation.

~We need to look at the bigger picture. We need to examine food beyond its components and healthy eating as it relates to the entire food chain:
"we would do well to regard 'the whole problem of health in soil, plant, animal and man as one great subject.' Our personal health is inextricably bound up with the health of the entire food web."

~ As the new western diet causes an alarming increased risk of heart disease, cancer and obesity, our health care system thrives:
"Medicine is learning how to keep alive the people whom the Western diet is making sick. Capitalism is itself marvelously adaptive, able to turn the problems it creates into lucrative business opportunities: diet pills, heart-bypass operations, insulin pumps, bariatric surgery.... fast food may be good business for the health-care industry"

~He leaves us with tips on how to maintain a healthier more natural diet. Among his list of advice: "Don’t eat anything your great-great-grandmother wouldn’t recognize as food."