Eat Your Greens and Stay Healthy
Eat Your Greens, or Your Gut Gets It While Congress lets Big Food crush school lunch reform, new research shows just how bad the status quo is. By Tom Philpott | Wed Nov. 16, 2011 4:00 AM GMT While Big Food rams its Tater Tots and frozen pizza school lunch agenda through Congress [1], we're learning more about the effects of diets high in starchy foods and low in green vegetables. And it's not pretty. I pointed yesterday to a vast recent Harvard study [2]finding that heavy consumption of potatoes—even in nonfried forms—leads to unhealthy weight gain. Now, from UK scientists, comes a study (press release here [3]; abstract here [4]) suggesting that green vegetables may have even more dietary importance than we previously thought. (Hat tip Atlantic Life [5].) The researchers subjected mice to a diet stripped of vegetables and found that after just three weeks, the mice lost 70 to 80 percent of a kind of white blood cell called intraepithelial lymphocytes, which, the press ...