Bacon for longevity

[Taka]

105 Year-Old Bacon Loving Granny Gets Surprise of a Lifetime

Bacon. It's what started it all.

"I love bacon, I could eat it for every meal--and I do!", says bacon-
loving granny, Pearl Cantrell.

Just a month ago, 105 year-old Pearl Cantrell let us all in on her
little secret to a long, happy life.

"I want other people to eat bacon, I tell them too. My kids all eat
it", Cantrell tells KRBC.

And lucky for her, the right people were listening.

Just like us, Oscar Mayer took a special interest in the feisty bacon-
loving granny.

"We've seen a lot of stories on the road, but nothing quite like this
one, so we're excited to be here. We know she's an inspiration. Pearl
is an inspiration for the community, and her friends and family. So we
had to make a special stop here for her today", says Abraham Luna,
"hotdogger" for Oscar Mayer.

Hitting the streets of her hometown of Richland Springs, Pearl is
riding shot-bun in the Wienermobile, waiving to several generations of
people that she's seen grow over the years.

"When they found out the Wienermobile was coming for Pearl, they said
'everyone knows Pearl, she is an amazing woman'", says Luna.

After the ride, it was more like Christmas, as she was gifted, what
else? Bacon!

And Pearl's family says she deserves every bite of it.

"She had a hard life raising all of us, so she deserves all of this,
everything that we can give her at this time. And I think this today,
will keep her going, she will talk about this for months", says Anno
Richards, Pearl's daughter.

After the ride and the gifts, it was time to get down to business.

With her stomach and heart full, Pearl says this day marks a special
memory on her lengthy timeline.

"I will never, ever forget this, for the rest of my life", says
Cantrell.

The 105 year-old serves as a reminder to us all, the importance of
family, a positive attitude, and of course, bacon.

Oscar Mayer says they plan to ship Pearl additional bacon in the
future as well.

SOURCE: http://bigcountryhomepage.com/fulltext?nxd_id=592342

[Taka]

Let Them Eat Fat

Listening to the doctors on cable TV, you might think that it's better
to cook up a batch of meth than to cook with butter. But eating basic,
earthy, fatty foods isn't just a supreme experience of the senses—it
can actually be good for you.

The hysterical crusade against fat has become a veritable witch hunt.
With New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg's ban on supersize sodas
(now temporarily thwarted) and the first lady's campaign to push
leaves and twigs (i.e., salad) on reluctant school children—all in the
name of stamping out obesity—it is fat-shaming time in America. Yes,
there are countertrends, like the pro-fat TV shows of Paula Deen and
Guy Fieri. But in the culture at large, eating that kind of fat has
become a class-based badge of shame: redneck food (which I say as
someone who likes rednecks and redneck food). It isn't food for
someone who drives a Prius to Pilates class.

But there's another world of fatty foods, a world beyond bacon and
barbecue—not the froufrou fatty foods of foodies either, but basic,
earthy, luxuriant fatty foods like roast goose, split-shank beef
marrow and clotted cream. In the escalating culture war over fat,
which has clothed itself in sanctity as an obesity-prevention crusade,
most of these foods have somehow been left out. This makes it too easy
to conflate eating fatty food with eating industrial, oil-fried junk
food or even with being or becoming a fat person.

Preventing obesity is a laudable goal, but it has become the rationale
for indiscriminate fat hunters. It can shade into a kind of bullying
of the overweight, a badgering of anyone who likes butter or heavy
cream. To the antifat crusaders, I say: Attack fatty junk food all you
want. I'm with you. But you can deny me my roasted marrow bones when
you pry them from my cold, dead hands.

I'm not suggesting that we embrace these life-changing food
experiences just on grounds of pure pleasure (though there's much to
be said for pure pleasure). As it turns out, the science on the matter
is changing as well. We are discovering that fatty delights can
actually be good for you: They allow Spaniards, Italians and Greeks to
live longer, and they make us satisfied with eating less. I'm speaking
up not for obesity-generating fat, then, but for the kind of fatty
food that leads to swooning sensual satiety.

Roast goose, for instance, is a supremely succulent, mind-alteringly
flavorful fatty food. In most of America, roast goose would be viewed
as the raven of cardiac mortality, hoarsely honking "never more." And
listening to the doctors on cable TV, you might think that it's better
to cook up a batch of meth than to cook with butter.

Eating fatty foods has become the culinary version of "Breaking Bad":
a dangerous walk on the wild side for the otherwise timid consumers of
tasteless butter substitutes and Lean Cuisine. Soon the fear-of-food
crowd will leave us with nothing but watery prison gruel (whole grain,
of course) and the nine daily servings of kale, collards, spinach and
other pesticide-laced and e-coli-menaced greens and fruits on the
agribusiness-promoted "food pyramid."

Enlarge Image

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Eating basic, earthy fatty foods can actually be good for you.
.Still worse is the ninth circle of food hell to which the fat-phobic
ninnies have consigned us: egg-white omelets. Is life worth prolonging
for a few (alleged) extra months if said life has been spent enduring
the repellent slabs of gluey, pasty albumen that so many self-
congratulatory "health conscious" types consider to be a sign of their
sanity? They want to purge themselves of dietary sin. I just want to
purge.

Fear of fat has become a national sickness, an all-American eating
disorder: Call it fatnorexia. Where is Uncle Toby from Shakespeare's
"Twelfth Night" lamenting that, under the oncoming reign of Puritan
strictures, "there shall be no cakes and ale"?

Something deeper than concern for nutrition and cholesterol is going
on here. You don't have to be a Freudian (I'm not) to see in the
antifat crusade a cowering fear of sexuality. The evil of oral
pleasure as Satan's tool of seduction, dating back to Eve, is deeply
embedded in American culture. Recall Cotton Mather's denunciation of
the hell-bound wickedness of the pleasures of the flesh and his call
for self-mortification (anticipating today's egg-white omelets).

We live in a culture where food has become a symbol of imminent
mortality, where Zagat reviews of high-end steakhouses tediously joke
about the need to have "your cardiologist approve in writing,"
variations of which are repeated practically every time a piece of
meat is mentioned anywhere ("a heart attack on a plate," "adding
insult to arteries" and other super-clever jests).

In fact, some new developments have undermined antifat absolutism.
Consider the recent New England Journal of Medicine report on a study
of the olive-oil-heavy "Mediterranean diet," a study that included
this fairly sensational revelation (as summarized by the Atlantic
Online): "After five years of watching trends in heart disease and
strokes among people at high risk, the researchers could not in good
conscience continue to recommend a 'low-fat diet' to anyone."

Hear that, you fat-shamers? You're killing your credulous low-fat
followers. Condemning high-risk people to a life that is not only
dangerous but terminally boring—a terrifyingly tedious life of austere
cuisine. Doctors had to intervene to save lives from your low-fat junk
science!

Paradoxically, the most conclusive argument for eating sumptuously
delicious fatty foods can be found in Michael Moss's well-intentioned
but scarifying new book, "Salt, Sugar, Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked
Us," where he uses the telling phrase "sensory-specific satiety
point." As Mr. Moss defines it, this is "the tendency for big,
distinct flavors to overwhelm the brain, which responds by depressing
your desire to have more."

Whoa! This is big. The author, however, misses the far-reaching
implications. He focuses on bashing the use of the "sensory-specific
satiety" concept by the evil processed-food industry, which goes to
great lengths to get you to overeat fatty fried junk by purposely
avoiding the "sensory-specific satiety" point that stops the craving.

In other words, sensory satiety is our friend. Voilà! The foods that
best hit that sweet spot and "overwhelm the brain" with pleasure are
high-quality fatty foods. They discourage us from overeating. A modest
serving of short ribs or Peking duck will be both deeply pleasurable
and self-limiting. As the brain swoons into insensate delight, you
won't have to gorge a still-craving cortex with mediocre sensations.
"Sensory-specific satiety" makes a slam-dunk case (it's science!) for
eating reasonable servings of superbly satisfying fatty foods.

So, as part of my unceasing desire to serve humanity, I will offer you
a few of my fattiest things—signature experiences of "sensory-specific
satiety" that I've had with fat.

For me, the transformative Ur-experience of the beauty and power of
fat was my late Aunt Hortense's cheesecake. Don't laugh. This was
heavy duty. When I first had this as a child at a maternal family
gathering, I felt transported into a realm of pleasure I had never
imagined. It rearranged my brain circuits forever. She made it by
supersaturating heavy, heavy cream, with heavy sour cream, creating a
creamy near-thermonuclear critical mass of density and intensity.

Next: roast goose. It's astonishing to me that so many people I know
have never had the roast-goose experience. No wonder they're in a bad
mood all the time. I'd always preferred duck to chicken and turkey
(and still do by a miracle mile). But roast goose! The crispy, golden-
hued skin, the dark meat seething with juicy, fatty, flavorsome
goodness. (Don't overcook!)

Forget foie gras. (Something evil about it.) Substitute a big old
goose for the dry, overcooked slabs of fibrous white meat that you get
from your Thanksgiving "Butterball" turkey, with its injection of
"basting material," which the Butterball people hasten to assure the
fat-phobic public has nothing, but nothing, to do with butter. Too
bad!

As long as we're on the subject of fowl, let us not forget Peking
duck, although be sure you go to a place that doesn't serve
yesterday's holdovers, as some do. Go to a place where you order it in
advance. It's all about the skin, each gleaming, crisp scallop of
which bears a slender, super-tender cargo of meat and fat (which
shouldn't need the hyped-up hoisin sauce it's often served with).

From the fancy to the humble: lard. An ex-girlfriend from the Midwest
introduced me to cookies baked with lard instead of those plastic
shortenings. Though I still prefer heavy lacings of butter in my
pastries, lard-infused cookies have some kind of smoky peasant
savoriness. And lard is great for frying hash browns, although I
prefer rendered duck or goose fat. (Ever had hash browns in cream? The
old Gage & Tollner place in Brooklyn used to serve this specialty.
That was living.)

And then there are steaks. I'm down with Jeffrey Steingarten, Vogue's
food writer, who says that the carapace of super-fatty beef that
curves around the top of most rib-eye cuts is the best there is
(though a case can be made for the tender smaller side of a
Porterhouse or T-bone). Still, for true beefy fattiness, slow-simmered
short ribs may capture the meaty soul of beef better than most steak
cuts: molten spoon-tender beef with melting fat and savory juices.

On second thought, speaking of the soul of beef, roasted marrow is its
meaty essence. It looks like pure fat, but it isn't, really, just
mainly, and when served in the split shank bone (as at places like the
Knickerbocker or Prune in New York City), one portion will keep you in
a state of sensory-specific satiety for a week.

Nut butters: One of the great scandals in American food is that when
you try to talk about nut butters—some of the supreme fatty food
experiences available—all that most people can say is, "Is it like
peanut butter?"

This is ignorant blasphemy! Almond butter, cashew butter, pecan
butter, pistachio butter, macadamia butter (!)—here is a multiflavored
fat heaven that even fat-deprived vegetarians can enjoy. They are so
good that you reach sensory-specific satiety after about two
tablespoons. They leave peanut butter, even the unhomogenized, non-Jif-
like pastes, in the dust. If you haven't had these nut butters, you
truly you have not lived a full life.

I could go on about burgers, but that terrain is so well-trodden that
it's pointless. When you get a chance, though, you must try lamb
burgers—just plain with raw onions and spicy North African harissa
sauce. You'll never go back to mere hamburgers again.

Finally, clotted cream. I've provided a good start for your fatty-food
future, but clotted cream owns the scones, so to speak. I first had it
in pastoral Devonshire itself, and I've never had it so good. It's
cream that's thickening—on the verge of turning into sweet butter or
souring into sour cream—but it has instead decided to clump together
its richest essences into buttery solids in the thick, silky, creamy
liquid. You can get it by mail order, but a recent trip to various
expat Brit outlets in New York yielded what was to me more like a
somewhat velvety cream cheese spread than the soupier, clottier Double
Devonshire clotted cream of memory.

These are just a few of my favorite fattiest things. So much fat, so
little time.

You watch: Once my style of luxe fatty eating catches on and people
start to see that moderate portions of extreme pleasure don't make
them obese, fat will become the new health food. My dream diet book:
"Eat Fat, Stay Slim." I'll have my cakes and ale with a helping of
roast goose, if you please.

SOURCE: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323393304578358681822758600.html

[Taka]

On May 15, 8:28 am, Posting into the Vacuum of Space
<trigonometry1...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Perhaps this is the other way round. Not bacon for longevity but rather
> longevity for bacon.

Good point which would imply that genetics has far stronger influence
than nutrition.

Now would someone give me the songbird mitochondria, please?
(human bird hybrids - the Angels - could become the most long-lived
species on the planet in the future, or should we rather go for the
naked mole rats?)

Taka

[On or Close to Topic]

I proposed that in 90's in this very same group as I recall (or was it later?).
It feels like two lifetimes ago.

well I did think it, if I didn't write it............Trig