Last month, I shared two great videos which busted the Cholesterol Myth. After writing the post, I got a flood of emails. The typical comment? “If saturated fat and cholesterol don’t cause heart disease, what does?”

I’ve answered that question here at Food Renegade often enough, so I didn’t feel immediately compelled to write a separate post answering that good (but beaten to death) question. But today (thanks to blogger Ed Bruske @ The Slow Cook) I discovered a video presentation that answers the question quite nicely.

It’s a talk given by Dr. Robert H. Lustig, MD, a UCSF Professor of Pediatrics in the Division of Endocrinology called “Sugar: The Bitter Truth.” The reasons I love this talk? First: the man’s a doctor at a prestigious university teaching and doing research in the field of endocrinology. If anyone is qualified to speak authoritatively on this subject, it would be him. So, if your friends or your family don’t want to hear it from you, other bloggers, science journalists like Gary Taubes, or those in the alternative medicine community, perhaps they’ll actually listen to him. Second: He tackles not just heart disease, but diabetes, obesity, and high-blood pressure. In other words, he shows the connection between dietary intake of sugar (specifically acute fructose) and the root causes of these diseases of industrialization.

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Have you ever tried to explain to a friend or relative why the lipid hypothesis is just plain wrong? Why dietary intake of saturated fat and cholesterol have nothing whatsoever to do with increasing incidence of heart disease (and may perhaps be protective against it)? Why a low-fat diet is actually unhealthy? Have you ever felt like the words got stuck in your mouth, or like you couldn’t find the right way to explain it all? Or maybe you felt like you could explain it, but you didn’t have scientific studies at hand to reference when they said “show me the science?”

Chris Kresser, The Healthy Skeptic, recently released two beautifully done videos (really just one video, broken into two parts) that may be the answer to your prayers. Just email your friends or relatives these videos, and let Chris do the talking for you.

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Container gardening, particularly growing vegetables in containers, is new to me. Oh, I knew it could be done. I’d just never done it. A couple of weeks ago I moved from a house into an apartment. With the move went any hope I’d had of creating a garden that could keep my family in vegetables all summer long.

So now I’m researching container gardening. That’s when I found this video from our friends at Cooking Up A Story featuring a creative, easy, and inspiring idea: growing salad bowls. It’s container gardening at it’s best.

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Earlier this week, I wrote about the exciting new online course in the basics of how to prepare traditional foods. Your response has been overwhelming. Nearly two hundred of you have already signed up for the course!

For those of you still wondering if the 14 weeks of interactive learning is worth the shockingly low price, Wardeh’s released a new sneak peek at one of her videos from the class. (And no, that’s not just sales copy. The classes are less than $10 each — far less than you would pay at your local community college.) Check out the video below:

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Michael Pollan interviewed by Jon Stewart. How can that be anything but perfectly entertaining?

Pollan is promoting his newest book. Yes, you loved him for The Omnivore’s Dilemma. And you probably enjoyed In Defense of Food. His newest book is more like a pamphlet. It’s called Food Rules, and is on sale at Amazon for a mere $5.50. The new book contains 64 food rules which Pollan collected from people around the world. The few I’ve read are simple, funny, and fairly well on-target. I can’t wait to get my hands on the rest to see whether they’re all as good.

The segment began with Jon Stewart asking a straightforward question: Name one over-arching rule that summarizes the book.

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