Food "science"

[altivo]

Here is a really excellent essay on the golden calf that is nutritionism. (Link provided by herefox.) Yes, it's long. If you're the type who can't maintain an attention span for more than a few sentences, I still urge you to get through the first page.

Click here to read, from the New York Times Magazine.

This is a strong and reasoned indictment of the American "scientific" approach to eating that reduces food to nutrients and thus denies that there is any difference between highly processed foods and whole foods. The problem, as the author so aptly points out, is that science can only make recommendations for nutrients that it knows and understands (or thinks it understands.) Thus each new wave of urgent recommendations (the latest being the omega-3 fatty acids) is bound to be rebuked by the next "discovery." In the meantime, the mega-giants of the food industry just change their labels and stuff more artificial ingredients into their products.

The ultimate advice, to recognize nothing as "food" that your grandmother wouldn't have recognized, is probably sound. As herefox summed it up: eat less overall, and eat a lot more plants (though it really seems to be the leaves and stems, and the flesh of the fruits, that are the important parts.) Eating seeds and roots doesn't count.

This advice is bound to be rejected by most Americans, I'm afraid. It requires a different approach to eating, a different approach to food shopping, and a great reduction in the consumption of takeout and fast foods prepared by chain restaurants. To be more healthy, America must learn again how to cook, how to grow a garden, how to buy fresh produce. In my opinion, this can only be good, but to most people I'm afraid it is now anathema.

Comments

[doco.livejournal.com]

An even better question is, why does this guy need a whole 12 pages to tell us that processed foods are bad? ;P

[altivo.livejournal.com]

Because he's giving supporting facts and reasons, as well as tracing the history of the nutritionist approach to eating in America specifically. Like any good journalist, he gave you the conclusions up front so even if you quit before the end, you got the main message. The whole history is an interesting one and we don't usually see it laid out that way, from the "fats, proteins, and carbohydrates are all you need to know" to the current craze for what should be micronutrients, like the omega-3 acids, or bioflavenoids, or, as he amusingly points out, "oat bran." Each new discovery is touted as if it were the only thing you need in your diet in order to insure perfect health.

[cabcat.livejournal.com]

*sits there eating a head of iceburg lettuce* 'scrunch scrunch scrunch'

I don't eat enough vegetables but on my current diet I've knocked out heavily processed foods, and haven't gone on my junk food binges so far :) Reducing my food intake to around 6000kJ a day, cut out my snacking habit and eating slower. I think I'm losing weight but I can't be sure since I don't have any scales. I must go out and buy some. I've also taken up some cardio ^.^ which so far I try to do 30mins each day. I might take up my weights again.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

Sounds good. I dunno if folks down your way have the terrible eating habits Americans have developed, though. This nation is a disaster that's starting to happen.

[cabcat.livejournal.com]

Oh its getting there, but just the size of the servings is huge in a lot of places in America O.O

[farhoug.livejournal.com]

Yeah, that Omega-3 stuff is already slowly crumbling. In recent studies they've noticed that having regular sources of that have little or no effect on the brain functionality, for one... but of course we always have the good old placebo effect. =)

Everything in moderation, I think that's plain and simple enough rule to follow. And to remember not to breath too deeply, because oxygen is harmful to living organisms.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

*snicker* And too much water can be deadly.

You probably didn't see this idiocy because of living in a more sensible place, but back in the mid-90s we had a succession of media "exposés" on the horrible secrets about food. First it was that Chinese food contains a lot of sodium, and everyone was going around all horrified about that (as if you couldn't tell just by tasting it, but maybe they don't know what salt tastes like) and then it was that Mexican foods are high in fat (well, yeah, a lot of what they were talking about is fried in oil and then loaded with melted cheese, though really not very authentic Mexican cuisine.)

It comes down to the fact that Americans are idiots when it comes to food and nutrition. Most don't know a carbohydrate from a carborundum stone. Yet they are driven like lemmings from one craze to the next, always supposed to be the "final" answer to all your dietary problems, endorsed by some celebrity or other. This stuff used to be something you learned in school, but somehow it isn't happening any more.

[farhoug.livejournal.com]

In the past the truth used to be in the newspapers, after than in TV, and these days, in scientific publications. Dunno, it's like an alternative "faith" for the masses, something to believe in wholeheartedly.
I think they taught that nutrition stuff back when I was in school, but I don't remember much of that anyways, I didn't have much use for it back then. But something more useful for everyone would been to learn to criticize the different data sources, to recognize its reliability... and to adapt to new data when it becomes available. Basic research 101? They should probably teach that in kindergarten already. Though I guess it would lead to, "Don't trust everything your parents and teachers say to you." =)

[altivo.livejournal.com]

That seems to be very hard to teach, actually. For a while it was my job to try to teach college students how to tell reliable sources of information from the untrustworthy. I discovered that they really didn't want to know. I believe that overexposure to television has resulted in many of them selecting the most lurid and dramatic bits of information and highlighting them every time, regardless of their accuracy.

[dakhun.livejournal.com]

"Don’t eat anything your great-great-grandmother wouldn’t recognize as food."

I'm not sure what food preparation advice I'm supposed to garner from a time before refrigeration or even electricity was available to most people?

I consider maintaining a healthy weight to be far more important than what I eat to maintain it. The diets that tend to make people fat only do that because people eat too much of them. It is really hard to binge to unhealthy excess by eating too many leaves, yuck! But I'm sure it could be done.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

It has nothing to do with refrigeration and everything to do with processing. The author is saying that foods that are essentially "synthesized" from broken down and refined constituents of various things, like high fructose corn syrup and lecithin, are of dubious value as nutrition. Our grandmothers would have approved of corn, meat, potatoes, and milk. But if you showed them a dish with Pringles and Lucky Charms and cheese curls in it they undoubtedly would have wondered what on earth that stuff was.

You can't create the equivalent of a dinner made from whole foods (which may well include meat, that isn't the point here) by just making a list of vitamins, minerals, and so many grams of protein, fiber, etc. And the reason is that there are many constituents that we don't recognize or know about yet, or can't synthesize and add even if we did know them.

[dakhun.livejournal.com]

But if you showed them a dish with Pringles and Lucky Charms and cheese curls in it they undoubtedly would have wondered what on earth that stuff was.

They would have eaten it non-stop if it were available though. :-)

I don't think my grandmother ever saw a real pineapple in her life, except maybe on TV. Does that mean I shouldn't eat pineapples? My great-great-grandparents probably lived off of seeds, roots, and meat so salted that even the most salt-happy person today wouldn't put that much salt on it - all winter, every winter. Does that mean I should eat like that? I'd risk getting scurvy just as often as they probably did, and have a life expectancy of 50 or less just like they did. Their cooking methods usually consisted of boiling and simmering things for hours, which today would be considered an enormous waste of electricity, not to mention that all the taste and some of the nutrients are removed this way. They also didn't know much about spices beyond maybe black pepper - so should I eat all my food plain like they did?

I know what his point is and I don't really care, because I reject it as just as irrelevant as any study that tries to promote eating a lot of one thing to make you healthy while ignoring such basic things as balancing caloric intake with expenditure and maintaining an intake of all of the vitamins and minerals that the body requires. Appealing to mystical unseen somethings in the food isn't all that convincing to me either. I know that snack food isn't real food and I'm not even talking about that; but I know what foods I like, and I reject any claims I can't live just as well from them as anything else.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

Well, obviously your mind is made up, so I won't argue with you. You really are carrying the grandmother test much too far and taking it too literally, though.

[dakhun.livejournal.com]

Well I have a good reason to think my diet works for me.

And I'm not taking it too literally. I don't think the author has any idea how badly people ate 100 years ago... or 150 years ago, rather. That would be about when my great-great-grandparents were born. The comment about refrigeration is apt, because they had nothing "leafy" to eat during the entire winter, and no mass transit so they couldn't just import food from Mexico and buy it at the supermarket. If they could survive for months at a time without leafy vegetables and without the benefit of vitamin supplements, then I can surely do the same or much better with the benefit of supplements.

[darklingfox.livejournal.com]

I'm sure the author has no idea what kind of diet you are on, much less targeting you in particular with his article. =)

The grandma comment isn't supposed to be taken literally at all. It is just a simple illustration/measuring stick. A loose guideline that warns against eating overly processed foods and urges a habit of eating that is closer to the source such as natural, whole foods. Taking an illustration completely literal and rigid would make anything seem rediculous. No one grandma has seen every natural food available to mankind. Not every grandma was able to eat healthy or chose to do so. And both of those things couldn't be farther from the point the author was trying to make.

Saying what the author doesn't know about old eating habits is supposition. I like to assume, based on his writing, that he isn't dumb. =)

Refrigeration and mass transit does help with variety. It isn't relevant at all the the illustration, though. People in that era did have vegetables to eat in the winter. They would jar, can, pickle, make jams, etc.. The refrigerator was not the first method of preserving food. Ice houses were also creatively employed sometimes. They were also more likely to eat foods that were in season and to know something about the pesticides used on their produce as it wasn't trucked in from Mexico and more than likely a local product.

It's good that you're happy with your diet, but it doesn't invalidate what the author was trying to say.

[dakhun.livejournal.com]

Taking an illustration completely literal and rigid would make anything seem rediculous.

Sure, but I think you missed his justification for 'eating like your grandma', or my objection to it based on my specific ancestors/cultures would make more sense:

"if it weren’t a healthy diet, the people who follow it wouldn’t still be around."

The idea is that everyone must have eaten a healthy diet all the time back then simply because they lived long enough to have kids. There were in fact several nutritional defficiencies in what people ate long ago, and I tried to illustrate some of these. You're being very clever and I must say... very humourous too in pointing out the error in taking a specific statement too literally, however if you can get past that, you'll finally see the point I was making. They had nutritional problems back then, and we have nutritional problems now. They are just different problems. I'm sure those that want to will survive long enough to have kids today as well, and that doesn't prove anything about the quality of their food.

Good point on the canning, however canning was actually invented in the same century as refrigerators. If you go back another 50 years, then they didn't even have that. Also, canning is no good for leafy vegetables like lettuce. It is the leafy vegetables that are being pushed by the author in his essay. There are in fact several vegetables that I like, but since none of them are leafy, that's apparently not good enough. Thus to a vegan, my diet is just as bad as if I ate no vegetables at all, which is pure fiction.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

Actually canning was invented in the Napoleonic era, but didn't become reliable until near the end of the 19th century. Modern canning, with pressure cookers and self sealing lids is indeed a 20th century invention, as you point out.

Some leafy vegetables can be preserved fairly well by canning. Spinach and chard are the examples that come to mind, and I have actually canned and eaten both myself. Both freeze well too, and that's easier now that we have convenient freezers and (usually) reliable electricity.

A vegan might criticize you for eating meat, eggs, or dairy products. I know of no specific requirement for leafy vegetables in the definition of vegan, however. In fact, a good many vegans I have known definitely needed to eat more leafy vegetables themselves. ;p

[altivo.livejournal.com]

But the rule of thumb was "What your grandmother (not great-great-grandmother) would have recognized as being food" not necessarily what she actually ate, perforce or by luck. My maternal grandmother lived from 1897 to 1977. She certainly knew what a pineapple was, and would have recognized that an avocado or even a breadfruit was probably food even if not familiar to her; but I know for a fact that she questioned vitamin pills, and food ingredients like lecithin or guar gum. She baked her own bread, or bought it from a bakery (not Wonderbread or equivalent.) She bought meat from a butcher shop or a meat counter where she could see the butcher at work, and refused to get it prepackaged or in ready to heat frozen packets. As it happens, she usually ate well because she gardened and froze or canned her own produce. She also preferred to buy produce from local farmstands or farmers markets in season. I think that is what this author means. The reason for choosing grandmother and not mother is that we're well into a second generation of people who have been raised on microwave meals and fast food and have no real idea of where food comes from or how it affects them.

What you choose to eat is your business and I'm not really trying to change that if you've thought it through at all. My reason for posting is that I think an awful lot of people today don't give it any thought at all.

[dakhun.livejournal.com]

I like the article for pointing out quite rightly, the problems of nutritionism. It does a good job there. And it is good to read something periodically that makes you re-examine what you eat - people eat every day of their lives (or they want to, if they can't) yet few give it a second thought.

But I just don't like leafy vegetables. :-) They could just never be a staple of my diet, and as I already hinted at, they could not have been a year-round staple for most cultures from which western civilization originated from... So there must be an alternative, and that alternative should be considered.

[avon-deer.livejournal.com]

I think America just needs to work fewer hours, and then maybe people will have time to prepare real food. Rather than getting in at 8pm, falling face down on the sofa, and hardly having the energy to put that TV dinner in the microwave.

That's the real problem if you ask me. I know this because Britain is the going same way.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

It's not just that. Most people still work 40 hours a week (we had a trend toward a shorter work week but it has been reversed.) Some spend way too much time driving to and from work, but that's not the issue.

Even if given the time, Americans simply don't know how to eat, or what to eat, or how to prepare it any more. They have been brainwashed into thinking that the only things that matter are that it adds up to so many calories and contains no more than X grams of fat, sodium or whatever this month's bad thing is, and lots of omega-3 or whatever the current trendy good thing is.

Or, worse yet, they don't think about it at all, and like undisciplined children, just eat junk and fast food.

In America, cooking and food shopping are out of vogue, considered obsolete and boring by most, especially by those under age 40 or so of both genders.

[darklingfox.livejournal.com]

"eat less overall, and eat a lot more plants"

Good advice. I try to keep in mind how humans have evolved in relation to their food sources when I'm planning for eating habits. After all, if we had to run out, hunt, and kill prey for meat any time we wanted to eat it.. I'm pretty sure that the meat-to-veggie ratio would look a lot different than what most people consume... Evolution/adaptation doesn't always keep pace with technological advancement.

I like the great grandma rule.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

I like the grandma rule too. It makes more sense to me than the oversimplified one I occasionally hear, "If it has more than five ingredients it's no good." It matters what those ingredients are. A good marinara sauce for pasta may have a dozen or more ingredients, but none of them are "soy lecithin," or "high fructose corn syrup," or "BHT added to preserve freshness." (The last really means "to increase shelf life beyond any normal expectation so we don't have to worry about warehousing, shipping times, or rotating our stock.")

Grandma had no problem with "tomatoes, oregano, olive oil, diced onions, crushed garlic, sweet basil, diced sweet peppers, salt, parsley, and grated parmesan cheese" though. That's ten ingredients, but all are individually recognizable as normal foods and in theory, we know where they all came from. Likewise, the pasta can contain "eggs, semolina flour, durum flour, water, and salt" all of which she would have recognized.

[nicodemusrat.livejournal.com]

I think it's good advice. People should just generally be more aware of what they're eating. I've followed similar advice for a while: "Don't eat anything if you don't know how it's made and you aren't comfortable with that."

Rules out Twinkies on both counts.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

Yep, you've got the idea. But I knew you'd be one of the enlightened. :) I'm probably preaching to the choir by mentioning this to my friends list at all.

[keeganfox.livejournal.com]

You're making me hungry!

My issue is that I always seem to be cooking for one, so I make one thing and it lasts for a week. The other thing is time. My boss has this expectation that I work as long as he does, but he fails to realise, there's not a damn thing I like about my job, and I have a house to run as well. Things like cooking and cleaning and laundry and whatnot that he doesn't have to worry about. So I get home after all that mess and the last thing I want to do is pour another bowl of bachelor chow ("Now, makes it's own gravy!") so it's usually whatever's convenient and quick. I try to eat well, but it's hard to be motivated for all that.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

I agree, motivation is probably a necessity. I have generally done well on my own, but I enjoy cooking and much prefer a varied diet. I've never understood the apparent ability of some, mostly males, to subsist on "meat and potatoes only" or worse yet "fast take-out food only". ;p

Filling pita bread up with tomato, onion, cheese, and lettuce and running it through the oven to melt the cheese and crisp the outside is fast and easy and beats bachelor chow or fast food any day as far as I'm concerned. Making a multi-ingredient pizza myself using fresh ingredients takes me about 45 minutes, the last 15 of which are baking time. Two of us get two dinners out of that. On my own it makes three dinners and a couple of lunches too...

[herefox.livejournal.com]

You could do what I do as well (though I tend to do it for lunches to bring to work rather than for dinner) On weekends sometimes I'll make a vat of chili/stew or something and toss 90% of it in the freezer. If I do this every other week or so then I have enough variety in the freezer so that I'm not eating the same thing every day but I don't have to cook as often.

Though I like to cook so generally I do at least 2-3 times a week on weekdays. My downfall is pizza, I'm afraid since a pizza will last me around 3 days of eating one meal a day...all of them not terribly healthy dinner days :-)

[altivo.livejournal.com]

Let's assuage your conscience a bit. Pizza properly made is actually quite a healthy food. The issues are portion size and "properly made."

Commercial restaurant pizza is often loaded with excess fat beyond what you need to make it tasty and delectable. Convenience food frozen pizza is just yucky in my opinion, but it also fails the ingredient list test. What ARE all those weird things they put into it anyway?

I make pizza at least a couple of times a month. One large pizza serves two of us twice as a rule. One serving will have two ounces of mozzarella, which can be a reduced fat version and still quite good, about a teaspoon or so of grated parmesan, tomato sauce and spices, diced onion, diced sweet pepper, sliced mushrooms, an anchovy or two (a bit salty, I know) and two or three thin slices of pepperoni. The crust is made from scratch: bread flour, part whole wheat part unbleached, salt, yeast, olive oil, and sugar. It all passes the grandmother test, and might be a bit high in fats but we make up for that on other days of the week. Usually the pizza is accompanied by a leafy green salad and glass of red wine. ;D

[herefox.livejournal.com]

*nod* When I say pizza is my downfall I mean pizza I've ordered because either I'm being lazy, have forgotten to eat on a weekend that I sugar crash hard or I really need comfort food. Honestly it's not that bad though, I don't exactly have much of a weight issue...probably should watch the salt though.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

We don't order out for pizza any more because I can make it faster than they deliver. ;D

Bread machine, dough setting, quick cycle, no preheat, and use instant acting yeast. The dough is ready in 36 minutes. Meanwhile prepare the toppings and salad and heat the oven. Five minutes to assemble it, max, and bake for 15 minutes at 475°. While baking, enjoy the salad.

[herefox.livejournal.com]

I'm rather amazed that what I thought was sort of a throw away "Hmmmm...interesting" post has caused so much debate. And rather surprised by the amount of "Oh, yuck, I'm not going to eat THAT" as well.

I think one thing people are forgetting is that there's a huge amount of variety when it comes to vegetables. So you don't like A, B, or C. Well have you tried D, E and F? Or have you tried any of them prepared a different way or raw? I know a lot of my vegetable YUCK issues were solved when I realized that they didn't always have to be boiled and mushy.

Though there are still common vegetables I loathe. Tomatoes raw are inedible, though cooked they range from tasty to bearable. I don't really care for avocado but I'll eat a bit of it if I must. But I just find other things to eat. (I'm in a rut vegetable wise I'm afraid, I need to fing more interesting ways to prepare things.)

[altivo.livejournal.com]

The "Yuck, I won't eat that" response always comes up when this subject is mentioned. :D

It's amazing how many people not only refuse all vegetables except perhaps the potato, but even reject fruits as well.

Tomato dislikes are often the result of getting them insufficiently ripe, which is a serious problem in the US and no doubt elsewhere. They are picked green and turned red by exposure to ethylene gas, which doesn't develop the flavor or texture they really should have. I love vine ripened tomatoes, but loathe the supermarket crunchy ones. As Garrison Keillor says, those were strip mined down in Texas.

Avocado chunks are definitely an acquired taste. I like them in salad but prefer to drizzle lemon or lime juice over them before adding them. I much prefer to make avocadoes into guacamole, though.