I have been a researcher for more than a decade, and a personal nutritional consultant for just as long. But I have never felt compelled to start a blog. That is, until yesterday, when two things happened:

1) I watched the documentary Before the Flood and realized I needed to be doing more to keep this planet livable for my girls and all the children of the world; and

2) I looked at the ingredients list of a Kellogg's Nutri-Grain bar for the first time.

The two don't seem to be related at first glance. But in fact, they are. The documentary is a call to action.

As an undergrad at Cal I took Dr. Edwards' intro to social studies class in which I was deeply offended as a young idealist when he stated with such surety that the world was not going to rise up and do anything about the environmental situation until there was a crisis. I went to his office hours and waited in line to tell him I had more faith in humans to act when we could see so clearly that we should. And he literally laughed and said "there there little girl" or something to that effect and repeated very clearly that there would be no major action until disaster was imminent.

And years later I realize it turns out that he was absolutely right.

We have known for decades that our consumption of fossil fuels, burning of rainforests, pollution, wastefulness and general disregard for our planet's health has been setting in motion processes that would eventually be irreversible. Only in the last several years has the evidence become more and more difficult to ignore with melting glaciers, droughts, disappearing coral reefs, and flooding.

We are finally here, where Edwards and others knew we would be: facing imminent environmental disaster.

And at this point, if we haven't yet or if we've forgotten to think about it lately because life has gotten so busy, we have to ask ourselves: am I part of the problem, or am I part of the solution?

Being a nutritionist, I think about things from the lens of food and nourishment. Even if I can't drop everything and go live in a yurt in order to minimize my carbon foot print right now, is there something that I CAN do to make a positive and meaningful change?

There are a number of things, from teaching my girls about what's going on and inspiring them to pursue science or engineering or something where they might be able to contribute directly to coming up with the solutions we will need to fix the damage that has already been done; to driving less or getting a hybrid.

But the two things that the documentary brought up that really struck me were beef and palm oil. I won't belabor the reasons why these two foods/ingredients are bad for the environment since the documentary and many others have explained it so well already.

But hopefully I can offer some additional insight. Back to my reading the ingredients label on the Kellogg's Nutri-grain bar. Let me just say that this "food product" is an abomination and the epitome of everything that is wrong with our food system.

From the high total amount of sugar, partly from high fructose corn syrup, and partly from a number of other sugar sources, to the red #4, to the artificial flavoring, there is nothing about this "food product" that is "food" in the classic sense of something that we eat that is nourishing and worth eating. This bar is the result of countless hours of testing of mixing different chemicals together to come up with something that is dirt cheap, shelf stable, and yet supposedly fulfills the criteria for healthy eating that are laid out in the dietary guidelines. And yet, when you put all these things together what you get is something that is edible and yet is not really food.

The scientists and nutritionists who reviewed pages and pages of published research to come up with the recommendations set out by the dietary guidelines certainly never envisioned that bar when they wrote those guidelines. Yet somehow that bar is the frankenstein result of them. It is "low in fat." "low in saturated fat," and "includes whole grains" just like it's supposed to. Although this particular product doesn't contain palm oil, many others like it do.

Palm oil is the solution for the tricky problem that the dietary guidelines recommended we eat less saturated fat. That meant butter, lard, and other fat sources that were typically used in baked goods before were now no longer on the table. Whole fat dairy has long been vilified as a culprit for our cardiovascular disease problem, it turns out wrongfully so (we'll have to tackle that one in a separate post).

So the food industry switched to hydrogenated vegetable oils. Oops. It turns out trans fat is even worse for you than saturated fat!

So now we are stuck between a rock and a hard place, what on earth do we use when we need a solid fat for stability and other properties that baked goods need but we can't use butter or hydrogenated vegetable oil. Well, how about a natural plant based source of saturated fat?

Sounds good right? You can even eat it if you're vegan. Plant source, must be better right? Well not really, there is no evidence that dairy fat is any worse than saturated fat from palm oil. But more importantly, because we want to be able to buy a "breakfast bar" for 40 cents we have artificially created this need for cheap sources of shelf-stable fat and thus inspired places like Indonesia to burn down all their rainforests so they can plant palm plantations.

What we choose to eat matters. Every $ we spend on food products that contain things like palm oil is a $ that contributes to the burning of rainforests.

And this is even more obvious in the case of beef. There is no larger influence on the burning of the Amazon rainforest than the clearing of land for cattle grazing to feed our ever growing appetite for cheap burgers and steaks. Everyone is now on the "corn-fed beef is bad"bandwagon so even fast food joints are selling "grass-fed beef," so is the problem solved? Is that grass-fed beef better for you? Is it less harmful to the environment?

SO. I have started this blog to offer my opinion and knowledge on all things nutritional. Ask me questions and I will do my best to find time between playing with my girls and writing grants to keep my research program going, and trying to squeeze in that 15-minute run to keep me sane, to answer your burning nutrition, food, and health related questions.

I do this in the hope that I can help sort through the morass of information and misinformation out there about nutrition because frankly, the question of what we should eat and what we shouldn't eat can be really complicated once you actually try to make it work in the real world.

...and because I want to help make it easier for people to make choices that are healthy for them AND for the environment, because what we choose to buy and eat DOES MATTER.