Food Matters and Sleep Apnea

I am taking a few days away from the office and I have with me a copy of Mark Bittman's new book - Food Matters A guide to Conscious Eating - which is part ecological/dietary manifesto and part recipe book.

My inspiration for reading the book is the fact that Mr. Bittman was formerly a sleep apnea sufferer, along with having high cholesterol and being pre-diabetic.

I don't know the details of Mark's OSA, but according to him, losing the extra weight he was carrying around eliminated the apnea symptoms. Quoting him - "[M]y apnea was gone; in fact, for the first time in probably 30 years, I was sleeping through the night and not even snoring."

I think we all know, or we should be aware that the food production industry in this country is not an improvement over what existed before. Bittman's argument is, that if anything, Big Food as he calls it is fouling the air, the water and our bodies by its over reliance on meat, corn and soy.

Food Matters reinforces the argument made by Michael Pollan in his recent book In Defense of Food that Americans need to reassess our eating habits especially if we want to improve our health. Mr. Pollan's maxim - "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants" makes a lot of sense especially if you understand that a by-product of that way of living you can reduce your risk of heart disease, diabetes, do your joints a favor by reducing the amount of weight they need to carry and perhaps eliminate weight-induced sleep apnea.

I don't know about you, but I know that losing weight would very likely help me with a number of health issues I am currently dealing with, so I will give some of the recipes a try and see what happens.

Happy eating and more importantly happy sleeping
ED