2/4/25: Meat Clown; #Sponsored-FREE CPEU; What's"BLOOM"?; #Resistance Resources; Spotlight: Substack Shout Out & more

Because EVERYBODY EATS

🆓This newsletter is FREE because there is #Sponsored content. Please consider SUBSCRIBING to support this work. FYI, annual subscribers will also get 1 (one) FREE ticket to the Build Up Meet Up at FNCE!

🤡A lunch meat you won’t soon forget, “Meat Clown” aka “Billy Roll”.

“Billy Roll is manufactured by the Feldhues Group in Ireland, where he’s considered “a sandwich filler beloved of a generation of Irish children.” Per Feldhues’ website, “Billy, the smiling sausage” was born in 1986 after a technological breakthrough allowed the company to produce “a clown face in the meat slice,” which was the “world’s first character meat product for children.”

Now I bet you want some! 😉

💪🏼#RESIST

From CREDIBLE HULK

Pro-science skeptical activist, musician & polymath promoting science education & smashing pseudoscience & denialism.
Bsky: https://shorturl.at/Y0Qrg
Website: CredibleHulk.org
Instagram: https://goo.gl/ZskoKX

“How to find a semblance of sanity with everything that is happening right now.”

Alt National Park Service is leading the resistance. That account started at the beginning of the first Trump administration, and they're committed to continue informing the public. Give them a follow, especially if you live in the US. You can also find them on BlueSky. @altnps.bsky.social

The CDC and FDA have a join alt account on FB: ALT cdc & fda 2025

Some amazing people managed to save the data that has been scrubbed from the CDC last week. Here’s where you can find it. https://archive.org/details/20250128-cdc-datasets?

On BlueSky, the following alt pages can be found:

Center for Disease Control(CDC): @altcdc.bsky.social

Department of Health and Human Services(DHHS): @alt-hhs.bsky.social

Environmental Protection Agency(EPA): @altusepa.org

National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA): @roguenasa.bsky.social

Food and Drug Administration(FDA): @altfda.bsky.social

👩🏾‍💻#Sponsored - Pork webinar - FREE CPEU

#sponsored Upcoming webinar with dietitian Jess Swift Harrell, otherwise known as “Chef Jess”, is all about heart health and best practices for counseling patients and clients. 1.0 FREE CPEU. Click HERE to register.

🤔Has Your Meat BLOOMED?

Why some ground beef is red and other is brown/grey--and it's still fine to eat...Hint: it has mostly to do with OXYGEN and a chemical reaction that is known as “bloom”.

Look at the veins on the inside of your arm...can you see the color of the blood? Does it look red or blue/grey? You’ll notice it looks blue/grey, but if you were to cut yourself and the blood was exposed to oxygen, it would be bright red.

The color of meat depends on myoglobin: Part 1 - Agriculture

"The more myoglobin content meat contains the darker red it will appear in color...The age of an animal will also impact the myoglobin content of the muscles with older animals having more myoglobin and darker meat...Myoglobin has three natural colors depending on its exposure to oxygen and the chemical state of the iron. If no oxygen is present, the meat appears purple red, like in vacuum packaged meat or freshly cut meat. Meat is bright red when exposed to air and is typical of meat in retail display (that may be unwrapped or wrapped but not vacuum packed). Bright red color indicates oxymyoglobin is present. Meat appears tan or brown when only very small amounts of oxygen are present such as when two bright red pieces of meat are stacked on each other excluding the oxygen. Meat can also appear brown when the meats color life is exhausted late in display when the iron in the pigment becomes oxidized. Metmyoglobin is the state when the iron has oxidized and is tan or brown in color."

Many people don’t understand this and will think that meat is “bad” because it is not red, when in fact in all likelihood it hasn’t “bloomed” yet! A short exposure to oxygen will cause the myoglobin to “bloom” and it should turn (more) red. Now, if there’s a bad or off smell or the packaging indicates it is out of date - that’s a different story!

📝Blog: ConscienHealth - Ted Kyle

Forget Cake – Let Them Eat Whole Foods - ConscienHealth

“Cutting fat out of our diets didn’t do the trick. Shouting from the mountaintops that sugar is poison did nothing to turn the tide on obesity and diabetes. But maybe this time will be different. Maybe telling people to stop eating affordable, convenient foods that make up 73% of the food supply will bring a radical transformation to population health. Like magic….

The current fixation on ultra-processed foods as the cause – rather than a symptom – seems likely to lead us to another dead end that “seemed like a good idea at the time.” People are consuming cheap and convenient foods not because they have been duped by the food industry. It is because too many of us suffer from economic disparities that leave us few alternatives….In short, simply “recommending that people eat fewer UPFs” is a smug and facile answer for a problem that goes much deeper than people eating too many chips.”

💡Spotlight - Newsletter: The Grocery Edit

Brittany Raftis, MScFN, RD - Canadian RD with her kiddos

Brittany is doing some great work on Substack. Be sure and check out her work!

Barbells Protein Bar, Vector Cereal, Mary's Crackers: Product Review Roundup

Q#1: How did you get interested in doing a newsletter?

“I’ve worked as a dietitian for 10 years, and during this time, I’ve noticed that while many people understand the basic principles of healthy eating, they struggle with how this translates to food products at the grocery store. I started my newsletter to empower readers to make educated choices by better understanding nutrition facts, ingredients, and how products fit within a healthy dietary pattern, using a realistic and evidence-based approach. The newsletter is an extension of my blog to provide exclusive content for readers through a more engaging platform – including product reviews, ingredient deep dives, label reading tips, and easy recipes.”

Q#2: Which newsletter topic has been the most popular so far?

“My ingredient deep dives on the topics of canola oil and natural flavours have been the most popular so far.”

Q#3: How much time does it take you to write your newsletter?

This varies depending on the content, but my newsletters typically take 8 to 16+ hours to write and edit.

Newsletter: The Grocery Edit (on Substack)

Instagram: @realgoodeats.ca

Blog: www.realgoodeats.ca