Eating "food" again

[lperry]

Pollan presents a history of how and why we began eating "nutrients" instead of "food."

Humans deciding what to eat without expert help — something they have been doing with notable success since coming down out of the trees — is seriously unprofitable if you’re a food company, distinctly risky if you’re a nutritionist and just plain boring if you’re a newspaper editor or journalist. (Or, for that matter, an eater. Who wants to hear, yet again, “Eat more fruits and vegetables”?) And so, like a large gray fog, a great Conspiracy of Confusion has gathered around the simplest questions of nutrition — much to the advantage of everybody involved. Except perhaps the ostensible beneficiary of all this nutritional expertise and advice: us, and our health and happiness as eaters.

He then distills all the evidence into a few basic concepts, and a single take home message....

Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.

Link

Interesting, I think.

-L

[docsconz]

I would suggest that this article should be required reading for anyone interested in taking part in any of the debates/discussions on health and food currently taking place.

No one likes to admit that his or her best efforts at understanding and solving a problem have actually made the problem worse, but that’s exactly what has happened in the case of nutritionism. Scientists operating with the best of intentions, using the best tools at their disposal, have taught us to look at food in a way that has diminished our pleasure in eating it while doing little or nothing to improve our health.

[Gifted Gourmet]

With you on your sentiments here, doc ...required reading

[lperry]

I would suggest that this article should be required reading for anyone interested in taking part in any of the debates/discussions on health and food currently taking place.

OK, I checked out the thread you are referencing, and yikes ! Far be it from me to suggest that anything should ever be required. It might, however, prove helpful.

Moving right along, back in grad school I took a class entitled the Anthropology of Food. One of the topics we discussed was how the American diet has become focused on various compounds and vitamins rather than on "food." I found this discussion particularly salient because I had once been accused by a boyfriend of eating "ingredients" instead of "food." Food to him was something opened with scissors or a can opener and subsequently microwaved.

In that vein, and, perhaps, because I'm nosy, I often sneak peeks at the carts of various shoppers in Whole Foods type markets. The very name of the store indicates that there is a rejection of processed foods, yet a great deal of what I see in carts (there are, of course, exceptions), is boxed, packaged, processed food, albeit "organic" and "whole grain." I leave stores, in contrast, with a bag full of "ingredients." Based upon much of what I read on these boards, most eGulleteers are in that category.

So therein lies the interesting issue for me. There seems to be a backlash against processed foods, particularly among people of the middle and upper classes. Yet there also seems to be a need, perceived or otherwise, for "convenience" above and beyond, for example, freshness or home cooked meals, things that I hold in high esteem. The few people that I have asked about the organic and whole grain packaged items deny that they are eating processed foods. They consider them "whole foods," just as the sign outside reads.

So is the problem a lack of time to cook? A lack of prioritization of quality food? Is my microcosm representative of yours? It's all very curious.

[K8memphis]

I love food in all it's over processed glory. Cookies for breakfast because it's faster of course, unless one has time to stop at the bakery for a proper danish before their train comes. A liquid lunch to make up for breakfast delicacies and chips & sour cream for a comfort food supper.

On days when breakfast was skipped, I would cook for lunch. Fried shrimp and fries of course. Hey sometimes I even peeled and cut the potatoes myself--hey, the value of fresh produce was not lost on me! I'd use iceberg lettuce on my minced ham sandwich on white, soft fluffy white. Remember Silvercup bread?? mmm.

Cheez Its! I promise there's some kind of tractor beam that draws me to those bright red boxes of crispy cheesey goodness. What could be a sweeter life.

So nowadays, here on the other side of 50 I am forced to eat ingredients. They really do taste good <sigh> but...oh for the good old days

People have been setting off the fire alarm in the hall over this & that food forever. They should work so hard for world peace.

I got to page 8 of the required reading and got distracted.

What's the deal gonna kill us with radiated produce I wonder. Is that covered in pages 8-12??

Edited January 28, 2007 by K8memphis (log)

[lperry]

Cheez Its! I promise there's some kind of tractor beam that draws me to those bright red boxes of crispy cheesey goodness. What could be a sweeter life.

I agree with you on this one. I'm pretty sure "natural flavor" in the ingredients list means "crack."

So nowadays, here on the other side of 50 I am forced to eat ingredients.

If this change was due to health issues, then you are illustrating one of Pollan's main points exceptionally well.

People have been setting off the fire alarm in the hall over this & that food forever. They should work so hard for world peace.

I'm sorry you didn't get a chance to read to the end of the article. If you have more time, you can read that he is not maligning a single food, but is concerned about our general food lifestyle and its resulting health, social, and economic effects. He even argues that studies about single foods and nutrients are part of the overall problem. I thought this article was a pretty balanced look at the different issues with food science, politics, and the way we eat.

Edited for spellage.

Edited January 28, 2007 by lperry (log)

[maggiethecat]

I think that one of his points was worth a half hour of reading: we should eat food our great-great grandmothers would recognize. True, my gggms wouldn't know a kiwi or a tuna steak, but I'm sure they'd recognize that they were fruit and fish.

(They would also have had a box of Cheez Its in the pantry for good great-great grandchildren.)

[K8memphis]

Cheez Its! I promise there's some kind of tractor beam that draws me to those bright red boxes of crispy cheesey goodness. What could be a sweeter life.

I agree with you on this one.  I'm pretty sure "natural flavor" in the ingredients list means "crack."

←

So nowadays, here on the other side of 50 I am forced to eat ingredients.

If this change was due to health issues, then you are illustrating one of Pollan's main points exceptionally well.

Health yes. Who would give up Cheez Its of their own free will?

People have been setting off the fire alarm in the hall over this & that food forever. They should work so hard for world peace.

I'm sorry you didn't get a chance to read to the end of the article. If you have more time, you can read that he is not maligning a single food, but is concerned about our general food lifestyle and its resulting health, social, and economic effects. He even argues that studies about single foods and nutrients are part of the overall problem. I thought this article was a pretty balanced look at the different issues with food science, politics, and the way we eat.

Edited for spellage.

←

No no no. I dug everything he said, I got it. He's so right on. It's an attention span thing on my part--too much sugar pre-50's creamed some of the brain cells. I was more referencing the current trans fat brouhaha and did not say it clearly. No I'm on his side and I'm glad he said it all. I'll read the rest. Skim anyway, wonder which nutrient aids brain regeneration haha just kidding...

edited 'cause my quotes were crazy

Edited January 29, 2007 by K8memphis (log)

[Anna N]

I found it a very interesting article but I still think it misses one major point (which Pollan touches on briefly here and there) and that is

Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.

AND MOVE A LOT!

The traditional diets did not exist in a vacuum, they were (and are) tied to hard, physical labour.

Every time I toss a load of clothes into the laundry I recall "wash day" when I grew up which was perhaps the hardest day in the life of the women of my family. They had to haul water for the boiler, coal to get it lit, then they had to lift soaking wet all-cotton sheets and towels and wring them out either by hand or in a hand-cranked machine. Then they had to lift the still very heavy sheets and pin them on a line. Then they had to remove them and fold them when dry and iron them the next day. The number of calories used on "wash day" must have been phenomenal. Now, my synthetic laundry is quickly tossed into one machine, transferred almost dry to another machine and voila - the laundry is done. Calories used - hardly any. And that is just one example of how much we moved then and how little we move now. It isn't just the food or the food industry or the nutrionists - it's how much our lifestyle had altered that is largely responsible for our obesity epidemic. And I confess to being among those who are obese! So I am not lecturing - just observing.

[Carrot Top]

Is my microcosm representative of yours?  It's all very curious.

←

Cheez Its! I promise there's some kind of tractor beam that draws me to those bright red boxes of crispy cheesey goodness. What could be a sweeter life.

I agree with you on this one. I'm pretty sure "natural flavor" in the ingredients list means "crack."

←

I think that one of his points was worth a half hour of reading: we should eat food our great-great grandmothers would recognize.

←

I'm thinking about all this and looking at this thread. . . .

Here we have a microcosm, yes, that likely is different than the Whole Paycheck's crowd comprises . . .here we have something "naturally flavored" that some might say has an essence of "crack" to the flavor. . .and here we have a food that our great-great grandmothers would recognize.

As you say, curious. All of it.

[lperry]

I found it a very interesting article but I still think it misses one major point (which Pollan touches on briefly here and there)  and that is

Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.

AND MOVE A LOT!

The traditional diets did not exist in a vacuum, they were (and are) tied to hard, physical labour.

I thought about this as well, and I think that he is picking his battle. He gets enough flak for being "the food police." Exercise too? That's crazy talk.

-L (who, for the record, ran 20 miles this week.)

[moosnsqrl]

I would suggest that this article should be required reading for anyone interested in taking part in any of the debates/discussions on health and food currently taking place.

OK, I checked out the thread you are referencing, and yikes ! Far be it from me to suggest that anything should ever be required. It might, however, prove helpful.

Moving right along, back in grad school I took a class entitled the Anthropology of Food. One of the topics we discussed was how the American diet has become focused on various compounds and vitamins rather than on "food." I found this discussion particularly salient because I had once been accused by a boyfriend of eating "ingredients" instead of "food." Food to him was something opened with scissors or a can opener and subsequently microwaved.

In that vein, and, perhaps, because I'm nosy, I often sneak peeks at the carts of various shoppers in Whole Foods type markets. The very name of the store indicates that there is a rejection of processed foods, yet a great deal of what I see in carts (there are, of course, exceptions), is boxed, packaged, processed food, albeit "organic" and "whole grain." I leave stores, in contrast, with a bag full of "ingredients." Based upon much of what I read on these boards, most eGulleteers are in that category.

So therein lies the interesting issue for me. There seems to be a backlash against processed foods, particularly among people of the middle and upper classes. Yet there also seems to be a need, perceived or otherwise, for "convenience" above and beyond, for example, freshness or home cooked meals, things that I hold in high esteem. The few people that I have asked about the organic and whole grain packaged items deny that they are eating processed foods. They consider them "whole foods," just as the sign outside reads.

So is the problem a lack of time to cook? A lack of prioritization of quality food? Is my microcosm representative of yours? It's all very curious.

←

[moosnsqrl]

In that vein, and, perhaps, because I'm nosy, I often sneak peeks at the carts of various shoppers in Whole Foods type markets.  The very name of the store indicates that there is a rejection of processed foods, yet a great deal of what I see in carts (there are, of course, exceptions), is boxed, packaged, processed food, albeit "organic" and "whole grain." 

When I worked for a chain (name sounds like Mild Goats) our single biggest sellers were chips and salsa (in jars). Seriously. Health food? I think not. True they could buy blue corn chips with sea salt and sans preservatives, but please! If I drive an extra couple of miles and pay a little more for junk food, is it better for me? Or the earth?

[markk]

I would suggest that this article should be required reading for anyone interested in taking part in any of the debates/discussions on health and food currently taking place.

Doc, I would tell you (sadly, and ironically) that most people taking part in discussions of health, and who like to cook, probably already know what Pollan is saying; I would hope that his article would be required reading for all those people in the supermarket who are filling their carts with 12-packs of Coke, Stouffer's dinner entrees, and SnackWells !! I think what he says about people who take vitamins applies here as well:

"People who take supplements are healthier than the population at large, but their health probably has nothing whatsoever to do with the supplements they take — which recent studies have suggested are worthless. Supplement-takers are better-educated, more-affluent people who, almost by definition, take a greater-than-normal interest in personal health — confounding factors that probably account for their superior health."

I certainly like his advice that we not eat anything our great grandmothers wouldn't recognize as food, and that we avoid items with more than five ingredients or unpronouncable names. It astounds me to see people checking out with not one thing in their overflowing carts that isn't processed-food, and/or loaded with corn sweetners.

But I think his article would fall on deaf ears, and be incomprehensible to them. (I actually read the whole thing.)

Personally, I like the idea of natural foodstuffs that you buy in their "whole" state (vegetables, fruits, grains, fish, etc.) and transform into dinner yourself; it's how I've been living for many years, though I certainly do cheat and enjoy an occasional fast food item (in my own case, I don't allow it to substitute for "food" as so many people do, so it's just a needless source of extra calories for me). If his article helps enough people to think that this is a good way to eat, and things start to change away from the agribusiness mentality that has robbed our basic foods of nutrition over the years (as he points out as well), and forced real "food" to take a minor role in our supermarkets, it will be a good thing. Economically it doesn't seem realistic or likely, but things have a way of coming around, so there's always hope though.

[markk]

In that vein, and, perhaps, because I'm nosy, I often sneak peeks at the carts of various shoppers in Whole Foods type markets.  The very name of the store indicates that there is a rejection of processed foods, yet a great deal of what I see in carts (there are, of course, exceptions), is boxed, packaged, processed food, albeit "organic" and "whole grain."  I leave stores, in contrast, with a bag full of "ingredients."  Based upon much of what I read on these boards, most eGulleteers are in that category. 

So therein lies the interesting issue for me.  There seems to be a backlash against processed foods, particularly among people of the middle and upper classes.  Yet there also seems to be a need, perceived or otherwise, for "convenience" above and beyond, for example, freshness or home cooked meals, things that I hold in high esteem. 

Well, you have to make a distinction between "processed" and "convenience" foods.

A lot of things in the WF-type markets aren't a lot different than what some of us would make at home from real ingredients if we had the time. I buy stocks (chicken, vegetable, beef) (made from organic ingredients, no less) that are what I would make, but that somebody else has made for me to my own specifications and standards (speaking 'nutritionally', that is) and that save me time without any sacrifice in nutritional quality (I hope). And there are some things I buy there that I simply wouldn't be able to make at home, for example, the corn chips I buy for snacking which are made from blue corn, minimally processed (I hope) vegetable oil, and sea salt. Anyway, those are things that I consider 'convenient', not necessarily 'processed'.

To me, processed food refers to the process of taking from the food any ingredients of nutritional value, which of course they do to improve the product's shelf life, and in which process they add unnatural ingredients for the same purpose (and for a while, they were subjecting so many poor things to hydrogenation as well). I haven't actually looked completely into what WF-like stores are selling in the way of 'processed' foods (I must do that next time), but the ones I buy are simply labor-saving as far as I can tell (hope).

[docsconz]

What I found interesting about the article was that there are no easy answers or magic bullets. The science of nutrition is quite complex and as he well shows in its infancy. The article reinforces for me what I learned from my parents growing up - anything in moderation (I would add - even processed foods as they are subject to the same scientific nutritionist vagaries as anything else). The problem is figuring out what moderation means.

[Carrot Top]

I find this site: An Anthropologic Perspective on Food and Eating to be interesting reading.

The myth of nutrition is shown up by rapid changes in food fashions. Availability is of course important. As waves of different foods hit Europe, eating habits changed. At first these "foreign" foods, particularly spices, like foreign fashions were a privilege of the rich, but they soon percolated down. Giinter Grass wrote a novel (The Flounder) in which each section is based on a food that changed eating habits in Eastern Europe; turnips, pepper, and potatoes loom large.

But once foods become plentiful and varied, fashion takes over, and the lure of novelty - the trendy - is often disguised as concern for nutrition. Thus vegetarian diets and nouvelle cuisine, high fiber diets and cuisine minceur, all masquerade as "healthy." In fact, they all are nutritionally suspicious, but are used like any other fashion: to show how with-it we are. Just as clothes indicate our trendiness, so does food. When grande cuisine French cooking was in, it too was extolled as "healthy." Now sushi is a fad, raw fish is praised as a "high-protein, low-fat" source, ignoring the high rates of stomach cancer in Japan.

[Fat Guy]

I've made it through the whole piece. While well written, it contains little insight. Indeed, it appears to embrace most of the notions it criticizes -- just at a higher altitude. While critiquing modern nutrition studies, the piece ultimately supports the same dietary advice being peddled by various nutritionists who recommend a Mediterranean diet, or any other traditional diet.

The omission of physical activity from consideration is more than just a choice of battles. It's a cop out. In addition, the assumption that the way people used to eat is superior to the way they eat now is not self evident. Viewed from today's perspective, a hundred years ago people were short, weak and died young. Advances in medicine can't solely be responsible for those differences, because advances in treatment tend only to intervene at the disease or illness stage. Those advances wouldn't make us taller and stronger. It seems that something about 20th Century nutrition wasn't so bad after all.

I'm just as suspicious of Pollan's self-consciously moderate advice as I am of any other advice. For all I know, if I feed my kid a diet mostly of leaves he'll grow up to be a weakling straight out of the 19th Century. So, forgive me if I stick to the diet rich in animal protein, white flour and corn that has coincided with historically unprecedented improvements in quality and quantity of life.

[markk]

For all I know, if I feed my kid a diet mostly of leaves he'll grow up to be a weakling straight out of the 19th Century. So, forgive me if I stick to the diet rich in animal protein, white flour and corn that has coincided with historically unprecedented improvements in quality and quantity of life.

←

Yes, a lot of what he said was obvious to a lot of us who think a lot about food. And since his stated premise for the article was a tirade against "nutritionalism", and not a compendium on healthy living, I think he was okay (technically, but not morally) in avoiding the issue of exercise.

But, the question as I saw it was, instead of a diet of mostly leaves, are you going to feed your kid Coca Cola and Pop Tarts and call it a meal?

[docsconz]

I've made it through the whole piece. While well written, it contains little insight. Indeed, it appears to embrace most of the notions it criticizes -- just at a higher altitude. While critiquing modern nutrition studies, the piece ultimately supports the same dietary advice being peddled by various nutritionists who recommend a Mediterranean diet, or any other traditional diet.

The omission of physical activity from consideration is more than just a choice of battles. It's a cop out. In addition, the assumption that the way people used to eat is superior to the way they eat now is not self evident. Viewed from today's perspective, a hundred years ago people were short, weak and died young. Advances in medicine can't solely be responsible for those differences, because advances in treatment tend only to intervene at the disease or illness stage. Those advances wouldn't make us taller and stronger. It seems that something about 20th Century nutrition wasn't so bad after all.

I'm just as suspicious of Pollan's self-consciously moderate advice as I am of any other advice. For all I know, if I feed my kid a diet mostly of leaves he'll grow up to be a weakling straight out of the 19th Century. So, forgive me if I stick to the diet rich in animal protein, white flour and corn that has coincided with historically unprecedented improvements in quality and quantity of life.

←

Fewer people are existing on a subsistence level with malnutrition. That may be one reason why people are bigger, stronger and living longer. However, the incidence, no the explosion of physiologic disease seen at the last quarter of the past century continuing today is no figment of the imagination. Data that eating less, though nutritionally sound advances longevity is at the very least highly suggestive. My problem though is that I enjoy eating too much to give it up and to truly eat less. I prefer quality over quantity in years. Of course the risk is that I expose myself to the possibility of too many years of low quality with chronic physiologic disease - a real conundrum.

[Fat Guy]

I think he was okay (technically, but not morally) in avoiding the issue of exercise.

←

The problem with avoiding the issue of physical activity (and one might ask, along the same lines as Pollan asks with respect to food, when physical activity became "exercise") is that whatever supposed success traditional diets had surely didn't occur in a vacuum. Whatever it is that peasants ate in Europe was part of a matrix that included the fact that those peasants were out working the fields. It's nonsensical to recommend their diet without recommending the other essential components of their lifestyle.

[ruthcooks]

When the study began, the average participant weighed in at 170 pounds and claimed to be eating 1,800 calories a day. It would take an unusual metabolism to maintain that weight on so little food. And it would take an even freakier metabolism to drop only one or two pounds after getting down to a diet of 1,400 to 1,500 calories a day — as the women on the “low-fat” regimen claimed to have done.

This article reads like a lot of same old, same old to me.

EXCEPT for the quote above. I have read that it takes only 2 calories a day to support a pound of fat. That means that only 200 calories extra can maintain 100 pounds of fat. Most dieters of my acquaintance would gain weight on 1800 calories a day. Take it from one who does not lose weight on the old-fashioned low calorie method until I go below 1000 calories. Pollan thinks these women are cheating: no, Mr. Pollan, they are just women with a woman's metabolism. Too bad you can't walk in our shoes.

I occasionally read an article (and perhaps a comment right here on eG) that it takes a tremendous amount of calories to support extra pounds. T'aint so.

[Fat Guy]

However, the incidence, no the explosion of physiologic disease seen at the last quarter of the past century continuing today is no figment of the imagination.

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There are a lot of factors that can explain increases in disease. A big one is that when people live longer they get more diseases. Another is the "epidemic of diagnosis," which identifies diseases earlier and at lower thresholds than ever before. And I'm not ready to pin the puniness of 19th Century man entirely on malnutrition -- unless you want to define malnutrition as the diet Pollan recommends. Middle class people were also smaller and weaker well into the 20th Century. As long as we're making lists of required reading, let's add Gina Kolata's July 2006 New York Times piece, "So Big and Healthy Grandpa Wouldn’t Even Know You."

The Keller family illustrates what may prove to be one of the most striking shifts in human existence — a change from small, relatively weak and sickly people to humans who are so big and robust that their ancestors seem almost unrecognizable.

Common chronic diseases — respiratory problems, valvular heart disease, arteriosclerosis, and joint and back problems — have been declining by about 0.7 percent a year since the turn of the 20th century. And when they do occur, they emerge at older ages and are less severe.

Edited January 29, 2007 by Fat Guy (log)

[markk]

I think he was okay (technically, but not morally) in avoiding the issue of exercise.

←

The problem with avoiding the issue of physical activity (and one might ask, along the same lines as Pollan asks with respect to food, when physical activity became "exercise") is that whatever supposed success traditional diets had surely didn't occur in a vacuum. Whatever it is that peasants ate in Europe was part of a matrix that included the fact that those peasants were out working the fields. It's nonsensical to recommend their diet without recommending the other essential components of their lifestyle.

←

You are correct, indeed; physical activity is an essential component to good health. (And I think that as industrial modernization, and then high-technology removed the necessity of any real physical activity from our lives, people who felt its lack then turned to treadmills and stairmaster "exercise" to add that component back into their lifestyles.)

But more than I felt that the article was at fault for not stressing the need for exercise, I applaud the fact that from beginning to end, it was a condemnation of "processed food", especially as it pertains to nutrition, meaning that processed food is as bad for what it doesn't contain as what it does. Believe me, I like Chicken McNuggets (although not so much now that they've reformulated them), but I'm horrified to think that in the place of a real dinner, a lot of parents are feeding their kids a Value Meal of nuggets and a glass of Coke. I just don't believe that the nuggets supply any of the nutrition that growing kids (or people, for that matter) need. And I do believe that the corn sweetner in a daily glass of Coke (not that I think for a minute that a kid today who's being fed fast food is even limited in how much soda he drinks) is going to kill him.

Would we be better off living on today's processed junk food and corn-sweetened everything, and getting the amount of physical exercise our great grandparents did, or would we be better off eliminating processed foods from our diet, living on naturally grown and raised "whole" ingredients that we cooked ourselves, and having a sedentary lifestyle? Well, I don't know, and I don't know that it's come down to that. Separate from whether we have any physical activity in our lives, I think the processing-out of nutriton from our foods in favor of shelf-life is a serious problem for a lot of the population.

Personally, I'd go for the whole, unprocessed food scenario if I had to choose, but that's just my gut feeling, because as a cook and a glutton, I'm thoroughly grossed out by processed food.

(And for what it's worth, I'm a carnivore, and it's an addiction that I have to deal with. I just comfort myself by thinking that (a) steak is a "whole" food, and (b) that at least I'm getting positive nutritional values from all the whole grains, and fresh fruits and vegetables - including tons of leaves, just because I love them - that I eat as well. And I spend a lot of time on the treadmill, because the only other physical activity I get in my day is pushing the mouse around a pad.)

[Fat Guy]

I just don't believe that the nuggets supply any of the nutrition that growing kids (or people, for that matter) need.  And I do believe that the corn sweetner in a daily glass of Coke (not that I think for a minute that a kid today who's being fed fast food is even limited in how much soda he drinks) is going to kill him.

←

Yet there are millions of strong, healthy young adults who grew up eating just that. I know plenty of families -- I mean, middle class people I went to law school with -- whose kids eat almost exclusively processed foods, starting with things like Pop Tarts in the morning, moving on to awful public school lunches, to various convenience foods for dinner, with chips, cookies and other snacks in between. They rarely eat a piece of fruit or a salad. And they're in great shape. Is it the best way to eat? Maybe not. But no matter how much you, Pollan and anybody else believes there's no nutrition in McDonald's food and that soda is going to kill our children, it's not a supportable claim.