I think he mentioned candlefish on a show. Alas he still has a grape juice sponsorship I think.

Y'know after reading this about Alton, I realized I'd never had sardines.

O_O

Now I split a tin with my husband almost every night. I love my fishies! =)

When Alton still was actively blogging, he was talking about how HFCS was bad for us, and in so many of our foods unnecessarily.

I have a hunch he is in a natural foods/lower carb direction from that post and his comments recently about 'no sugar' ( but, he still 'drinks grape juice' O_O. I know I know, he's sponsored by Welch's.. =D )

No he actually said he was done with sweets. Now I need to find it. It was somewhere on the foodnetwork site in a forum.
ok here is the link about one of the comments-
http://www.foodnetworkfans.com/foru...weightloss.html

But if one was really fat-phobic you could rinse the sardines off thoroughly before eating, and I think I have seen sardines packed in water too - just that I would not buy those.

Sardines for lunch for me today! Yum.

Cool. I just didn't know if there was some significance to the "canned in oil" comment.

Or buy sardines packed in water.

A while back, someone mentioned that sardines packed in water retain more of their own fats. When they're packed in oil, the fat leaches out into the oil, which is not usually EVOO, so the quality of oil is quite a bit lower. If you drain off the packing oil, the quantity is low too.

I can't wait to see the "new Alton" -- I absolutely love that man.

I am a scientist and I LOVE the way he gets into the "science of food" (showing molecular structures of lipids, for example) -- if he truly is LCing, he would be a wonderful advocate for this WOE -- in part because he is focused on food science. Also is part because he's so darn cute.

FreyaAZ

He certainly hasn't always been a nutrition buff (OK, at least if he is he hasn't preached what he practices.) - it's hard to tell if it was an old show - I think it probably was, but one of the ones on this week about Southern biscuits a) refused to vilify lard (good) and b) still recommended Crisco over lard for biscuit-making (bad!).

The way he is with food science, though, will make him a really interesting nutrition buff if he is veering in that direction.

As an aside, you know there's some thread on this forum that talks about why obesity is so high and why a lot of it in the U.S. started to first appear in the South. One thing I thought was a little interesting from Alton's show was that years back the South had a lot of soft wheat, which has a lower protein content than hard wheat, so their flour had less gluten (it was more like cake flour and less like stretchy goo-making bread flour). But over time as shipping arose, etc., more gluteny flour (like all purpose flour, to a degree) wound up in the South.

I hardly think it would explain obesity in the South overall but if you had a lot of gluten sensitive people (which you might due to immigration patterns), and people at a lot of bread and breaded things, then a little change in the amount of a substance they're sensitive to might add to the obesity issue. (Then multiply that sort of thing by 1000 given all the other food changes in the U.S. over time.)

The thing that got AB and others interested in Food Science was this guy: Harold McGee. And his favulous book: On food and cooking. Something you might enjoy if you're truly a food science geek.

Just as an aside, I'm pretty sure the biscuit episode is quite old--he was still in the smaller white kitchen staging area.

Kind of academic, though--he will often make nutritional statements about various dishes, but veers away from really villifying anything in particular. It seems like most tv-chef personalities do this, which makes sense--you don't want to alienate the people in your audience who may have one strong food view or another, when the product you are selling is 'food enthusiasm', not 'weight loss'.

That's why I'm pretty shocked at his "I do not intend to eat sugar ever again" stance. I can't think of another celeb chef (who did not start out as a proponent of a specific dietary slant) who has made that kind of unequivocal statement on any particular food. Happy, but shocked. I do hope he follows through.

I can see it being a potential minefield for him, though. I was reading some of the comments on a forum, and you can see people are already going into the "I don't think giving up ANY food entirely is really healthy or realistic" rationale, which I think is just the first shot across the bow. He could end up with a real backlash.

Having lived in the south for a few years, I think that the regional habits of:

1. Taking ANY food, breading it, and frying it in bacon; and
2. Dissolving as much sugar as possible in HOT iced tea (so it absorbs even MORE sugar) and drinking gallons of it (I do NOT get sweet tea! Sorry Southerners, but that stuff is like drinking tea-flavored syrup and it's GROSS!); and
3. Eating huge meals late at night after the heat of day cools.

All of these contribute mightily to regional obesity.

I'm not saying that we in the Southwest don't have our own bad-food issues (refried beans cooked in lard), but the Southeast has us beat in the high-carb area. LOL.

FreyaAZ

Did I miss something? What's wrong with bacon, lard or large late-night meals?

about the sardines-the ones packed in oil taste a little strong to me. LOVE the ones in mustard or hot sauce

Bah. I'm watching his Jimmy Fallon appearance and he's making a smoothie...some berries, but also grapes, and grape juice as the liquid.

I'm rationalizing this one away because 1) I assume he may still be financially beholden to Welch's; 2) he made the grape juice smoothie look completely impractical (he flash-freezes the fruit with some kind of gas--really) and unappetizing; 3) I know he is smart enough to know that "sweets" and "bottled grape juice" share the same dietary problem.

Edit: watched his Early Show appearance--it's about eggs. He makes scrambled eggs and an over-easy egg fried in butter. So that's two low-carb appearances, and one Welch's grape smoothie.

Yes, I am spending too much time thinking about this.