FOR THE LOVE OF FOOD: Make family meals a reality, gut bacteria can prevent weight loss, and red meat wins in the context of a healthy diet

Welcome to Friday’s For The Love of Food, Summer Tomato’s weekly link roundup.

This week make family meals a reality, gut bacteria can prevent weight loss, and red meat wins in the context of a healthy diet.

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Links of the week

• How to Have Better Family Meals – Family meals are a wonderful goal, but reality can often get in the way. Some good, realistic tips on making it happen more frequently. (NY Times)
• Makeup of an individual’s gut bacteria may play role in weight loss – Preliminary research, but still a very interesting hypothesis of how gut bacteria may be influencing your ability to lose weight. What’s encouraging about this is that while it is difficult, gut bacteria can be changed with diet and other interventions. (ScienceDaily)
• Eat meat and reduce carbon emissions. How? Feed cattle on grass. – This is really important to remember. Properly raised cattle actually helps the CO2 problem, whereas industrially raised cattle is nearly as bad as the transportation industry. One more reason in a long list to choose pasture-raised meat. (Food Politics)
• Your Chicken’s Salmonella Problem Is Worse Than You Think – Speaking of industrial meat, if you eat chicken this is a must-read. Especially if you aren’t very careful about sourcing. (Mother Jones)
• Court Orders E.P.A. to Ban Chlorpyrifos, Pesticide Tied to Children’s Health Problems – Boom. Nice job team. (NY Times)
• Joël Robuchon, innovative French ‘cook of the century,’ dies at 73 – Such a legend. “For years he held the most Michelin stars in the world.” (Washington Post)
• Pizza Doesn’t Give You Acne—But What About Sugar? – Interesting read. Personally I think the science will catch up with dairy eventually as well. (The Atlantic)
• You might not have to give up (lean) red meat, after all – This write-up is pretty bad and the science is very short-term, but I’m happy to see that scientists are finally starting to compare two healthy (and comparable) diets next to each other before making sweeping conclusions about a single element (e.g. red meat). These researchers compared two groups on a Mediterranean diet, the only difference was the amount of meat they consumed. Check out what they found. (Washington Post)
• Premade Wraps and Salads Sold at Trader Joe’s, Walgreen’s, and Kroger Contaminated With Parasite – Romaine lettuce again. Gross. (Modern Farmer)
• SKILLET BAKED OATMEAL WITH SUMMER STONE FRUIT – Nom nom nom. (The Full Helping)

What inspired you this week?