In the 1980’s, the Western diet moved from thinking of food as a source of healthy consumption to the idea of eating “nutrients” (e.g., cholesterol, fiber, saturated fat) and the concept (and name) “nutritionism” was developed.
Nutritionism turned out to be good for the food industry, but apparently not so much for the humans who were eating based on the concepts. The so-called Western diet is filled with lots of processed foods and meat and lots of added fat and sugar – and lots of nutrients, but not necessarily with the benefits of the foods that contain the nutrients (and micro-nutrients).
An example of the ultimate nutritionist product is margarine (to replace butter). And so began a debate about whether margarine or butter was healthier. The underlying message of the margarine side of the debate was that we should understand and engage with food and our bodies in terms of their nutritional and chemical constituents and requirements.
Increasingly, by adding nutrients to junk food, the industry has also added “healthy” to the description, to the point that the author recommends not eating any food substance that has a label calling itself “healthy”.
At the same time the Western diet has increased sugar intake. Along with this increase has been an increase in obesity, cancer and heart-related diseases. Nutritionism hasn’t reduced that, but medical science has reduced the mortality rate from these diseases so it looks like people are healthier when in actual fact, they are not.
Orthorexia nervosa (defined as “an unhealthy obsession with healthy eating”) is an eating disorder suggested by some psychologists.
The industrialization of food:
- From whole foods to refined foods
- From complexity to simplicity. 4 crops account for 2/3 of calories we eat
- Soy (257 calories/day) 75% of vegetable oils come from soy (20% of daily calories)
- Corn (554 calories/day) More than ½ of sweeteners come from corn (10% of daily calories)
- Wheat (768 calories/day)
- Rice (91 calories)
- From quality to quantity – nutritional values of foods have actually gone down, so to get the same nutritional value, you have to eat more (e.g., since 1940, the iron in apples has gone down by 2/3). One of the reasons to go organic is to get away from industrialized foods.
- From leaves to seeds – provides humans with over-supply of macro-nutrients and an undersupply of micro-nutrients. So, for example, we get Omega-6 from the seeds and Omega-3 from the leaves. Omega-3 is good for neurological development and processing; Omega-6 is involved in fat storage (hmmmm). So, we are eating a lot of Omega-6 in the Western diet and a lot less Omega-3.
- From food culture to food science. We used to rely on our moms (or grandmothers) to provide a food culture. Since the advent of nutritionism, the Western diet has moved toward more processed foods that has been enhanced.
PART III – GETTING OVER NUTRITIONISM
If you don’t get to any other part of the book, you can pick up all you need to know in Part III.
“…the challenge we face today is figuring out how to escape the worst elements of the Western diet and lifestyle without going back to the bush.”
Finally, what are we going to do? “In order to eat well we need to invest more time, effort, and resources in providing for our sustenance…than most of us do today.”
Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.
Is it food? When you go to buy food, you will be inundated with “food-like substances”. One clue as to whether something is food: will it rot? If not, it is not food. These food-like substances contain various chemical additives and corn and soy derivatives. These are “foods that lie to your body”, causing you to eat by the numbers.
So, how to figure out if it’s real food:
- Don’t eat anything your great grandmother wouldn’t recognize as food p.148
- Avoid food products containing ingredients that are p.150
- A) unfamiliar,
- B) unpronounceable,
- C) more than five in number or that include
- D) high-fructose corn syrup (gets digested in the liver, by the way)
- Avoid products that make health claims p.154
- Shop the peripheries of the supermarket and stay out of the middle
- Get out of the supermarket to purchase food whenever possible
- Farmers markets are good
- Get to know the farmer
“Regulation is an imperfect substitute for accountability and trust…”
The idea of meat as a “condiment”, keeping in mind that you are what the animal eats as well as what you eat.
Regard non-traditional foods with skepticism p.176
There are no magic bullets in the traditional diet p.177
Pay more, eat less. We pay less for our food than most cultures but they eat better. As our cost of food has gone down, our health care costs have “soared”. P.187
Eat till your 80% full (not till it’s all gone).
- Eat meals – not snacks.
- Do all your eating at the table
- Consult your gut
- Eat slowly
- Cook, and plant if you can
A recent personal experience:
I bought a bottle of coconut oil and and a bottle of ghee to spray on my food. As I looked more closely, the first listed ingredient for both was “Medium Chain Triglycerides”. I contacted the company to find out what that was, since the bottle was labelled “Nutrition in Nature 100%”. What did that mean? Here is the explanation I received:
“You were asking about our medium chain triglycerides (i.e. MCTs) and how they’re made. The chemistry is quite complex, but this is my simplified understanding of the process. The base oil for our MCTs is coconut oil. The coconut oil is then fractionated, i.e. separated by oil types. The second step is to apply lipase esterification (i.e. the use of lipase catalysts to force esterification). These two steps give you a crude MCT, which is then filtered to remove the lipase catalyst. After that there is a step of deacidification and finally a step to blanch and deodorize the MCTs.”
Uh, yeah. I couldn’t find it in any of my grandmother’s cookbooks…
There is a video on Netflix entitled In Defense of Food, and here is a link to a video on www.YouTube.com of Michael Pollan explaining the concepts in the book: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W7z6-xnqazk