Category Archives: Diet And Food

Wake up! The American diet has lost its soul

Hello beautiful souls. If youre unaware, we face the largest preventable catastrophe in the history of mankind. Disease, obesity, aggressive, violent behavior, intolerance, hate, injustice and pointless murders are widely accepted as the norm.

Just as were not born to hate each other, were not born to hate eating from Gods apothecary. We are taught. Subsequently, society suffers malnutrition; deprived of vitamins and minerals that feed your trillions of hungry cells. Precious vitamins and minerals are lost during processing.

Because you are affected by this lack of nourishment, it may have rendered you apathetic, less empathetic, less compassionate, and disconnected from certain realities. When the mind is starved from essential vitamins and healthy fats, its negatively affected. Scientific and quit simple actually.

Alas, the majority of you are contentedly sleepwalking; forgetting youre a magnificent miracle of creation, and yet you are killing yourself softly with those fries. And its not your fault! You just trusted man, who can only access 10 percent of his brain, instead of God.

So there it is: youve relinquished your health and happiness to a machine. I remember grandma cooking, singing hymns and focusing like a meditation on her food preparation. We could taste the love. Alas, several generations are lost to convenience, microwave cooking and blind, obedient acceptance, and it shows. No longer does anyone question, authority as the bumper sticker suggests.

As you consume dead food, you become unbalanced, less than whole, malnourished, and disconnected from Mother Earth and all thats good. Meh, you say you dont care? For the sake of the species, you must. Like the boiling frog, dont assume this unholy madness is normal.

We are far too deferential to the interests of big food, too invested in a corporate-serving narrative of personal responsibility with no parallel requirement of social responsibility, and too culturally wedded to a food model of quantity over quality.

Our affection for fast food has taken its toll. The feds recommend eating at least five to seven 1/2 cups of fruits and vegetables daily. America eats only three servings a day and 42 percent eat less. Two of the top five sources of dead calories in the American diet are cakes, cookies, chips, pies and pastries and soda-all with zero nutritional value.

The message is getting through, but slowly: the way were eating is killing us. Something has to change.

Hello beautiful souls. If youre unaware, we face the largest preventable catastrophe in the history of mankind. Disease, obesity, aggressive, violent behavior, intolerance, hate, injustice and pointless murders are widely accepted as the norm.

Just as were not born to hate each other, were not born to hate eating from Gods apothecary. We are taught. Subsequently, society suffers malnutrition; deprived of vitamins and minerals that feed your trillions of hungry cells. Precious vitamins and minerals are lost during processing.

Because you are affected by this lack of nourishment, it may have rendered you apathetic, less empathetic, less compassionate, and disconnected from certain realities. When the mind is starved from essential vitamins and healthy fats, its negatively affected. Scientific and quit simple actually.

Alas, the majority of you are contentedly sleepwalking; forgetting youre a magnificent miracle of creation, and yet you are killing yourself softly with those fries. And its not your fault! You just trusted man, who can only access 10 percent of his brain, instead of God.

So there it is: youve relinquished your health and happiness to a machine. I remember grandma cooking, singing hymns and focusing like a meditation on her food preparation. We could taste the love. Alas, several generations are lost to convenience, microwave cooking and blind, obedient acceptance, and it shows. No longer does anyone question, authority as the bumper sticker suggests.

As you consume dead food, you become unbalanced, less than whole, malnourished, and disconnected from Mother Earth and all thats good. Meh, you say you dont care? For the sake of the species, you must. Like the boiling frog, dont assume this unholy madness is normal.

We are far too deferential to the interests of big food, too invested in a corporate-serving narrative of personal responsibility with no parallel requirement of social responsibility, and too culturally wedded to a food model of quantity over quality.

Our affection for fast food has taken its toll. The feds recommend eating at least five to seven 1/2 cups of fruits and vegetables daily. America eats only three servings a day and 42 percent eat less. Two of the top five sources of dead calories in the American diet are cakes, cookies, chips, pies and pastries and soda-all with zero nutritional value.

The message is getting through, but slowly: the way were eating is killing us. Something has to change.

Excerpt from:
[ April 13, 2017 ] Wake up! The American diet has lost its soul Articles - Southside Times

Cancer Therapy Advisor

The Role of Diet in Breast Cancer Incidence and Survival Cancer Therapy Advisor The role of diet on breast cancer incidence and survival is an active area of research with more questions than answers, though some trends are emerging. It is very important to understand the role of diet in breast cancer incidence and mortality ... and more »

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The Role of Diet in Breast Cancer Incidence and Survival - Cancer Therapy Advisor

As concern regarding climate change continues to rise, expensive, resource intensive strategies like decarbonizing the energy grid, and even drastic measures like geo engineering, are becoming more seriously considered.

However, a new study led by UC Santa Barbara analyzed the potential effects of an inexpensive alternativehealthier diets. They found that their healthier model diets could reduce greenhouse gas emissions from both the food and healthcare systems in the United States.

The researchers found that the adoption of one of three healthier diets reduced the relative risk of coronary heart disease, colorectal cancer and type 2 diabetes by 20 to 45 percent, U.S. healthcare costs by $77 to 93 billion per year and direct greenhouse gas emissions by 222 to 826 kilograms of carbon dioxide equivalents per capita per year.

It is a relatively new area of study, as noted by David Cleveland, the studys director and research professor in UCSBs Environmental Studies Program and Geography Department. The other researchers were Quentin Gee, also in Environmental Studies, Elinor Hallstrm of Lund University, Sweden, and Peter Scarborough of Oxford University, UK.

Theres been a lot of research on the relationship of our diet to health and to the climate. We have a pandemic of noncommunicable diseases due to our crappy food system, and our food system emits at least 25 to 30 percent of human caused greenhouse gas emissionsso those two have been done, Cleveland said. People have even looked at the effect of diet, climate and health at the same time, but what people havent looked at is whats the effect of diet on climate via the healthcare system, so thats the main component that was unique to our study.

SIERRA DEAK/DAILY NEXUS

The average food intake by Americas population has become less healthy in recent decades and, in combination with an increasingly sedentary lifestyle, has resulted in an epidemic of chronic, noncommunicable diseases.

About half of all U.S. adults have one or more chronic diseases, and about two-thirds are overweight or obese. Noncommunicable diseases are important contributors to increasing U.S. healthcare costs, which were almost $3 trillion per year in 2014, 18 percent of the total U.S. gross domestic product.

Its pretty much widely agreed that most of our food systems greenhouse gas emissions are due to the ruminant animal foods, Cleveland said.

In the standard American diet, around 92 grams of red and processed meat and 335 grams of fruits and vegetables are consumed per person per day. Researchers created three dietary scenarios in which there was a reduction of meat and an increase of fruits and vegetables.

The first scenario had the most red and processed meat, with 52 grams per person per day, while in the third diet none of that meat was consumed. Additionally, the amount of fruits and vegetables was doubled to 672 grams per person per day in all of the diets.

We created these healthier diets based on dietary recommendations and the foods for which there is very strong evidence for their effect on health, and so if we change these foods to create the three diets, how much will this actually affect health? What will happen to the relative risk of the three diseases we identified, colorectal cancer, type 2 diabetes and coronary heart disease? Cleveland said. We were able to look at the relative reduction of relative risk, and we assumed that theres a proportional decrease in the healthcare expenses of those diseases.

They then used a database at Carnegie Mellon University that has the greenhouse gas emissions associated with dollars spent on different parts of the economy.

We can look at, for example, diabetes, which has so much money spent on it every year on pharmaceuticals, so much hospital care and so on, and you can look at the database. For every dollar theres so much greenhouse gas emissions, Cleveland said.

Using that database, they were able to quantify the effect of a healthier diet on climate change not only through the food system, but also through the health care system.

Were fortunate because its easy to create diets composed of foods that are both good for the climate and good for health. Wouldnt it be terrible if the foods that were really good for our health were also terrible for the environment and visa versa? But fortunately, thats not the case, Cleveland said.

Cleveland believes of the results of their research could help motivate change at both a personal level and a social level.

I think the nice thing about this is the link it creates, in terms of peoples change in diets and in terms of policy; it unites the personal, immediate desire to be healthy with the growing desire of people to contribute to solving the big social and environmental problems we have, Cleveland said. And we can advocate for these changes in our own lives, here at UCSB, and in the world.

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A Better Diet May Save Money and the Environment - Daily Nexus

Hard at work at the Strawberry Shortcake beauty salon.

My 4-year-old daughter often nabs my wife's iPhone and disappears for hours into the YouTube Kids app. We intermittently check on what she's watching, but it's hard to keep track of every video.

Since lots of parents deal with this issue, Amazon decided to roll out a new way to check on your kid's digital diet. It's a service for its FreeTime kids' apps, called Parent Dashboard.

The dashboard, which is free to use starting Wednesday and can be accessed from any web browser at parents.amazon.com, provides daily activity reports on each of your accounts on FreeTime, an app that provides a gated, age-appropriate experience for kids on Amazon Fire tablets. The new website also offers handy flash cards on many kids' books and games, to give parents quickly digestible information on the items their kids are looking at in the app.

"I would love to see parents engaging more with their kids, using this information to further customize their child's experience in [FreeTime] to make the product better for kids," said Kurt Beidler, Amazon's kids and family director.

Parent Dashboard fits well in the online retailer's strategy of catering to parents and families, in hopes of getting mom, dad and the kids all hooked on the company's many websites and services. The new service could also entice more people to join FreeTime Unlimited, the paid version of FreeTime that offers curated sets of books, apps and games for specific age groups, starting at $3 a month.

Screenshots of the dashboard (left) and a "discussion card" (right).

The daily reports in the dashboard show colorful pie charts for time spent in four categories in FreeTime: books, video, apps and games. Click on any pie chart and the site will show the amount of time your kid spent per day in that category, as well as a breakdown of every video watched or book read or game played. Within these lists, parents can click through to flash cards, which Amazon calls "discussion cards," that offer a quick synopsis of the show viewed or app used, as well as general questions parents can ask their kids.

For instance, for the Strawberry Shortcake Berry Beauty Salon app, the discussion card tells me my daughter can help "style hair, clothing and make sure nails are sparkling," and I can ask open-ended questions like "What part of this game do you like the most?" or "How did you use your imagination to play this game?"

At best, these reports and flash cards could help parents get more involved in their kids' digital worlds and encourage their kids to do more reading and less gaming. At worst, the daily reports could just offer guilty reminders of how much time their kids spend watching videos (OK, maybe that's just my kids).

CNET en Espaol: Get all your tech news and reviews in Spanish.

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Amazon's Parent Dashboard helps track kids' digital diets - CNET

Motivation can come from the most unlikely places. For one mom, the push to lose weight came from a particularly surprising source: a cruel comment from an unknowing child at an indoor swimming pool.

"I was called a hippopotamus," Peggy Pullen, 48, told TODAY, recalling the moment in November 2014 she realized she needed to change. "In front of everybody, in front of my kids. The hardest part was the look on my children's faces. It wasn't just me who was humiliated it was them, too."

At the time, Pullen, a mom of four kids in Lehi, Utah, weighed over 200 pounds. That afternoon, she went home and cried, too embarrassed to even face her own family."I was just bawling," Pullen said. "I didn't want to eat. I didn't want to come out of the room or anything. I was in a really bad place. I needed to do something about it. I knew I had to make a choice that my children could learn from."

She had tried to shed the weight before through fad diets and pills Atkins, Weight Watchers, cabbage soup and more. But nothing really worked.

"Basically, any diet that has come out to the market, I've done," Pullen said.

"I knew that diets didn't work, so I wasn't going to go through that anymore," she added. "I needed to be challenged."

For Pullen, the answer was joining a 12-week program throughBodyBuilding.comthat helped her figure out what to eat and how to work out. She found support through other people in the program, who were also trying to lose weight and had shared their stories online.

The first step was the hardest: posting her "before" picture.

"It was a tough moment when my husband took my picture," she said. "I like to wear a lot of black and hide, and not show my husband my whole body. We as women like to hide sometimes, and I had my whole gut out and everything."

"I posted my picture and the second I did, I had a nervous breakdown," she added. "It was worse than the pool. (But) some young kid said he liked my picture, and then all these people started to show their support. I think they knew it was tough, what I had done."

Of course, what happened next wasn't much easier. Pullen had to curb her cravings for sweets and carbs. She also loves to cook and had to learn to alter her recipes to be healthier. As a newbie at the gym, she felt unwelcome and even bullied.

"When you are fat very fat and you want to go and lift weights with the cool guys, they own the machines," she said. "You're not welcome and those cool guys are very close friends with the people who work there. They laugh at you, and they don't like an old, fat lady in their space, so they bully you."

But Pullen, who is 5 feet 3 inches tall, stuck to her routine and within 10 months was down to 120 pounds. For her, clean eating and lifting weights are what worked. She now weighs 110 pounds, and has kept the weight off for about a year and a half.

"One of the biggest things I (noticed) before I got fit was that I was always so tired," she said. "Junk food makes you tired. Today, I eat clean and whenever I get hungry, I eat protein first."

That's not to say she doesn't allow for the occasional cheat meal or deprive her kids of things like birthday cake. Pullen knows the best diets allow for moderation. While she's figured out what works best for her, she still keeps in touch with the online community that helped get her there.

"You have to have a support group it's the most important part of your transformation," Pullen said.

Because even when you think you can't do it, other people do, and eventually, the feeling is contagious.

"It's something that clicks inside of you," she said. "You start to believe in yourself."

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How a cruel comment prompted this mom to lose 90 pounds - KVOA Tucson News

New Yorkers cant cook. Its a pervasive stereotype, turning up everywhere from Sex and the City (Carrie Bradshaw used her oven for shoe storage) to Friends (Joey essentially subsisted on pizza delivery and the contents of Monicas fridge).

A more accurate statement would probably be that New Yorkers are too lazy to cook. Thanks to Seamless, Postmates, Caviar and other delivery services, you can have just about any meal you want delivered to your home in half the time it takes to get in the line at Trader Joes. Of course, youre also paying a pretty penny for the convenience, when you consider the delivery fees, tax and tip.

Whether youre looking to save a little cash or just gain some real adult skills, cooking is the way to go. Were not suggesting giving up dollar slices or your local Thai spot for goodjust test the waters by cooking one or two meals per week. Heres how to get started with the help of a few NYC cooking classes.

Master the basics

First and foremost, you have to be safe in the kitchen. Knives (especially dull knives) cause more accidents than any other kitchen tool, so learning to handle them properly is an absolute must. Take an introductory class on Knife Skills at the National Gourmet Institute to learn the difference between slicing, dicing, mincing and other cuts, and how to do them all safely.

Start planning your meals

OK, its not exactly a sexy theme, but the Meal Planning 101 class at the Brooklyn Kitchen will save your behind (and your budget) more times than you can count. Find out how to cook once and eat several times (hi, leftovers!) to make the most of your time and money. Its a godsend for the stressed-out Gothamite.

Move on to simple (but useful!) techniques

Now that you know enough not to hurt yourself in the kitchen, youre ready to actually start cooking. Prioritize classes that cover staple dishesfoods youll want to cook over and over for simple dinners at home. Youll find out all about choosing, seasoning and preparing different cuts of beef, chicken and pork in Meat 101 at the Brooklyn Kitchen, and get the lowdown on seafood in How to Cook Fish at Home Cooking New York. Since you should probably get some greens into your steady diet of pizza and bagels, consider a class on How to Cook Vegetables (Properly), too. Or, knock several skills out in one go with a comprehensive class at the Institute of Culinary Education, like All About Technique: Roast, Saute and Steam.

Experiment with baking

No, were not talking about the boxed cake mix you threw together for your roommates birthday. Baking from scratch requires patience, attention to detail and a little bit of science. In Le Pain Quotidiens Bread Baking Basics class, youll practice making two simple doughs that can be turned into sweet rolls, baguettes, flatbreads and more. If youre more of a pastry person, youll want to opt for The Baking Basics class at Home Cooking New York. The fact that you get to taste the super flaky pie crust and silky pastry cream you whip up is just an added bonus.

Branch out to your favoritecuisines

So far, so good, right? Roasting a chicken or blanching some green beans seems like something you could totally handle. But making a restaurant-quality dinner? Now thats another story. If you really want to break up with your delivery guy, youve got to learn to cook some of your favorite types of food. If youre addicted to that fabulously fast Dominos service, try a class on Homemade Pizza at the Brooklyn Kitchen; if youre more of a pad-thai-and-chill kind of person, go for Tasty Thai at Taste Buds Kitchen. Believe it or not, making your own spicy tuna rolls is surprisingly easy, toojust try a Sushi Making class at CocuSocial to find out.

An added bonus? You can finally tell your mom that, truthfully, you are eating home-cooked meals.

Annalise Mantz is the Digital Commerce and Community Editor at Time Out New York. She thinks bagels should be their own food group and never met a dog she didnt like. Follow her on Twitter at @asmantz.

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How to quit your dependence on Seamless with NYC cooking classes - Time Out New York (blog)

HAMDEN >> Big changes may be coming to Whitney Avenue.

The state Department of Transportation will hold a Road Diet public information session this month on a proposal to reconfigure Route 10, also known as Whitney Avenue, from four lanes to three lanes in Mount Carmel.

A road diet is a technique for designing roadway corridors with a reduced number or effective width of vehicular travel lanes to accommodate more types of users safely. This treatment cannot be used for all locations, but when applied appropriately is an effective tool for accommodating all users, according to a Complete Streets report executive summary posted on the state website.

Theres a state proposal to adjust Route 10 with the intended goal of improving safety and travel by creating a focused middle turning lane for going into businesses and onto side roads, Mayor Curt Balzano Leng said.

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The change is proposed for the section of Whitney Avenue from School Street, which is located one block from Memorial Town Hall and the Whitney/Dixwell Avenue intersection, down to Mount Carmel Avenue at Quinnipiac College.

It was determined that the section of Route 10 between School Street and the Route 40 Interchange has the potential to be converted from a four-lane roadway to a three-lane roadway consisting of two through lanes, one in each direction, and a center two-way left turn lane, according to a statement released this week by Lengs office. The reduction of lanes allows the roadway cross section to be reallocated for the dedicated center left-turn lane.

The proposal comes as the Department of Transportation plans to pave that section of the road this summer.

Patrick Zapatka, a transportation planner at the state Department of Transportation, said Road Diets work best when there are certain conditions present on the road.

There are a few things to consider when we do a road diet, Zapatka said. If we are going to go through with something like that, we would check out what is the average daily traffic, so we would get traffic volumes on Route 10. The amount of cars that are on that roadway could be used as a determining factor whether it would make a good candidate for a road diet to happen there.

In addition to traffic volume, other things are examined, including the frequency of accidents on the road, he said.

Another thing we look at is crash data are there a lot of crashes there, property damage, are there fatalities or serious injuries, Zapatka said. The city may propose it, and if it fits those type of criteria, I think it would be a fantastic candidate for a road diet.

There are many possibilities when considering the implementation of road diets, Zapatka said. Road diets are really good because it gives us the opportunity to implement bicycle lanes, wider shoulders and the possibility of pedestrian amenities such as sidewalks or crosswalks, he said.

Police Chief Thomas Wydra said he believes the change would make the road safer, and with the planned paving, now is the time to investigate it.

Its certainly an idea worth exploring, and this is the moment to consider it when the road is being resurfaced and the options are available to us in terms of the line painting that will be applied, Wydra said. Thats the moment when you consider any other option that can be taken advantage of that reduces accidents and makes the road safer.

Its a big change, but it is something residents should look into before forming an opinion, Wydra said. The DOT has provided us with an optional plan that is different from what we have been used to in that section for a long time, and I think its something that we should seriously consider, he said. It would likely cause delays at certain times, but what I think it would do for sure is make the roadway safer. I think safety prevails over convenience.

The meeting will be held at 6 p.m. April 19 in the council chambers at Memorial Town Hall.

The police chief and I discussed this and we organized a public input and discussion session to learn more about the idea, Leng said.

Mount Carmel resident Erika Nealon drives the section of the road every day. She said shes skeptical of the plans.

At rush hour theres so much traffic, and I think this will make it worse, she said. She hasnt noticed any problems with cars turning left, she said, especially because there are left turn lanes at most of the traffic lights on the road.

I dont understand why they want to do this, she said. Leave it the way it is.

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'Big changes' may come to Whitney Avenue in Hamden - New Haven Register

Earth911.com

Chrystal Johnson April 12, 2017 Earth911.com Initial thoughts are that their waste appears to be safe to use as soil for growing crops. The control group was fed bran, which is the typical diet of a mealworm. At the end of the study, the worms that ate Styrofoam were found to be as healthy as the ...

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Chrystal Johnson April 12, 2017 - Earth911.com

NEW PROVIDENCE, NJ - The borough received a Safe Routes to School (SRTS) grant of $462,000 for Various Sidewalk Improvements in New Providence.

New Providence began participating the SRTSabout 10 years ago. To learn more about the program check out this story.

This was one of $4.079 million dollars in SRTS 2016 grants awarded by the New Jersey Department of Transportation (NJDOT) in partnership with the North Jersey Transportation Planning Authority (NJTPA) to municipalities in eight counties. Plainfield, which received a $304,000 grant was the only other municipality in Union County to receive a grant.

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Safety is a key component of New Jerseys transportation network, including pedestrian and bicycling accommodations, NJDOT Commissioner Richard T. Hammer said. These grants will help our local communities improve sidewalks and crosswalks so children may safely walk or bike to school.

The SRTS program is a federally funded reimbursement program that was established in 2005 to increase pedestrian safety awareness among motorists and schoolchildren. It is being administered by the NJDOT in partnership with the NJTPA, Delaware Valley Regional Planning Commission (DVRPC) and the South Jersey Transportation Planning Organization (SJTPO). DVRPC and SJTPO grants totaling $2.1 million were announced in February.

Other projects to receive grants in the NJTPA region include, by county:

Bergen County Ridgewood Safe Routes to School in Ridgewood Village for $400,000 Bike and Pedestrian Safety Infrastructure Upgrades in Rutherford for $368,000

Hunterdon County Safe Routes to School Harrison Street and Second Street in Frenchtown for $472,000

Middlesex County Infrastructure and Intersection Improvements and ADA Compliance in Highland Park for $216,000

Morris County Shunpike Road Sidewalk Falmouth Road to Pine Street in Chatham for $374,000 Pedestrian/Bike Safety Improvements in Netcong for $243,000

Ocean County Clayton Avenue Sidewalk Construction in Bay Head for $190,000

Somerset County Veterans Memorial Drive East in Somerville for $670,000

Warren County Safe Routes to School Improvements in Lopatcong for $380,000

The Safe Routes to School program was created to encourage children, including those with disabilities, to walk and bike to school. These grants will provide local governments within the DVRPC region the ability to make pedestrian safety improvements near K-8 schools.

The goal is to make bicycling and walking to school a safer and more appealing transportation alternative, thereby encouraging a healthy and active lifestyle from an early age; and to implement projects that will improve safety, and reduce traffic, fuel consumption and air pollution in the vicinity of schools.

Infrastructure improvement projects to be funded through the program include the construction of sidewalks, bikeway lanes, and multi-use paths; and the installation of new crosswalks, school-zone markings, and speed-limit signs.

Each individual municipality is responsible for implementing their respective SRTS projects.

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New Providence Awarded $462000 Safe Routes to School Grant - TAPinto.net

Professional athletes dont get to the top by accident. It takes superhuman levels of time, dedication, and focusand that includes paying attention to what they put in their bellies. In this series, GQ takes a look at what men whose bodies pay their bills eat on a daily basis to perform at their best. Today we're looking at the daily diet of Tom Ford model Conrad Bromfield.

Four years ago Conrad Bromfield started his modeling career with a Tom Ford campaign. Since then, the 25-year-old male model has been working pretty much nonstop, which is tougher than it sounds. While constant travel isn't exactly conducive to a healthy routine, in Bromfield's line of work you have to be ready to jump on a plane at a moment's notice, and your abs have to be ready, too.

Somehow that's not a problem for hima Brooklyn native whose energy reserves overflow to a ridiculous degree. (Seriously, don't ever give him coffee.) He has the buoyant enthusiasm you'd expect from a man who makes his living off of his superior physique and bone structure. Skepticism aside, though, Conrad Bromfield comes across as the real thing: a working model who takes the subway, prefers his mother's cooking to anything else, and makes all of New York City his gym. We could all learn a thing or two.

GQ: Do all male models eat the same thing? Do you abide by the steamed vegetables and grilled chicken diet?

Conrad Bromfield: No, I'm not the clich or the typical model. My thing is I eat once a day. I eat something small in the morning like an apple or a banana just to give me energy to run around to castings and do a bunch of things. When I'm finished in the evening, I eat a big meal. After that I don't eat anything.

How many castings do you go to in a day?

When I first started it was a lot, but nowadays it's one or two a day. I always take the subway or walk. And I never take the escalator. I always run up the stairs. Take the hardest way... because that's sometimes my only exercise for the day. When you're too busy you just gotta make everything around you your gym.

Do you cook for yourself at home?

I live with my mother. She's always around trying to cook something for me. We're a Caribbean family, so she makes the curried chicken and the oxtail and sometimes I have to tell her Ma, you can't put all that on the plate. But it works.

What is your favorite thing that she makes?

It would have to be Aki and salt fish. Which is a Jamaican dish. Aki is... as a country we don't know if it's a fruit or if it's a vegetable. But it grows on a tree, and it's amazing when steamed and put with salt fish.

Do you indulge in a cheat day?

Yesterday was my cheat day. I woke up pretty late. I flew in from L.A. at five in the morning. Then I went to a couple of castings, didn't get to eat anything. From there I got back home. I slept until about 6 P.M., then I got up and I ate rice, aki, and salt fish (thank you, Mama), and coconut cake all at once. Coconut cake is the greatest. It's pound cake covered with a glazed coconut frosting.

Do you eat the backstage food at fashion shows?

Yeah that's the best stuff. Because during fashion week a lot of the models have been running around so we need that re-up in a sense. In the morning, definitely, you'll always find male models eating. Trust me we eat. If there's 50 looks you're going to find 49 male models eating backstage.

What do you stay away from?

Pork. I realize when I eat pork or red meat I gain a lot more weight. So with pork I know it's harder to digest for me. The pizza's amazing in Italy, so I have to indulge. But greasy foods can sometimes fatten my head. And coffee... If you ever see me drinking coffee, run. Other than that I eat anything.

What's the one thing you can't resist?

Shake 'n Bake chicken. If you want to know my kryptonite, I'm gonna give it to you. It's Shake n Bake chicken. That's something... I'm sitting in front of my television, Looney Tunes are on, Bugs (my hero), mom comes out with the plate. Shake n' Bake chicken and corn on the cob actually. Yeeeeees.

Say you're prepping for an underwear or bathing suit shoot?

I still keep the same diet definitely. If anything, it's the workout that I'll ramp up. Do more reps on certain things. Running six miles on the treadmill, then sit ups. The best thing for me is calisthenics, which is using your body's weight. Instead of looking for a gym when I'm traveling. I use the floor, I use my backpack or my luggage, for weights... or I just have my stretch bands. I can use them for my biceps or my back. They're the best. Because when you use weights your body relies on outside sources, so you can easily lose that tone. But using your own body's weight it's coming form the inside. So it stays longer, it works better. And to get nice obliques and that V-line, when you're standing up just do a little twist. A side plank, kinda.

"If you want to know my kryptonite, I'm gonna give it to you. It's Shake n Bake chicken."

Do your non-model friends ask for advice on staying lean and fit?

YES, everyone does. I tell them sip some [apple cider] vinegar. That is the elixir. It cleans you, it kills bacteria, if you have break outs it fixes those.

So your friends say, I wanna lose weight, I wanna get abs, and you tell them drink vinegar and twist a little bit?

Uh-huh. Vinegar with grapefruit in the morning if you want to lose weight.

Models go to a lot of parties, do you drink when you're out?

I try not to. But if I'm around it, I'll probably have a champagne. But that's a thing I learned early to stay away from: alcohol, smoking, and drugs. If you wanna have the fountain of youth look, vinegar is not the only thing you need.

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Link:
The Real-Life Diet of Conrad Bromfield, the Male Model Who Eats One Meal a Day - GQ Magazine