It seems that every month we hear about the miracle food we should be eating or the staple food we should avoid for various health reasons. The news reports a new study one month that we should be drinking two cups of coffee per day to decrease the risk of liver disease or Parkinson’s, but then we hear a few weeks later that a different study says coffee is terrible for your health and you should stop drinking immediately because drinking too much can increase your risk of heart disease. Besides the multitude of food labels in the grocery store, we’re being left to decipher between what risks we want to take with our health just to enjoy a food we love.
Spoiler alert: There are no miracle berries and there are no foods that are going to cause you to drop dead (well, except poisonous berries, so avoid those next time you’re out hiking).
What we don’t always hear is the level of risk that is tied to each of these studies. And much of the time, what we hear about is being leveraged for marketing purposes.
October’s AgBookClub pick, Unsavory Truth: How Food Companies Skew the Science of What We Eat explores more into this topic. Marion Nestle has written several other books in the food and agriculture space, so we should be in for an interesting read.
Here’s what you need to do this month:
Get the book. Buy it, borrow it, download and listen to it, read it over your neighbor’s shoulder — we don’t care. But don’t steal the book.
Read the book.
- Week 1: Chapters 1 – 3 [pages 1 – 44] (Twitter chat on 10/2)
- Week 2: Chapters 4 – 6 [pages 45 – 90] (Twitter chat on 10/9)
- Week 3: Chapters 7 – 9 [pages 91 – 140] (Twitter chat on 10/16)
- Week 4: Chapters 10 – 12 [pages 141 – 188] (Twitter chat on 10/23)
- Week 5: Chapters 13 – 15 [pages 189 – 232] (Twitter chat on 10/30)
Join the chat (#AgBookClub) on Wednesdays at 8:00pm Central on Twitter. Learn how to participate in a Twitter chat here. While we hope you can participate in our discussion every week, we know that everyone has busy schedules. We always include general questions following the topic(s) of the book that can be answered by anyone, so please don’t hesitate to jump in the Twitter chat if you didn’t have a chance to read the section we’re discussing. We welcome any and all to join the discussion!
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