Today is part two of four of my discussion of Michael Pollan's "In Defense of Food". This discussion will start up from where I left off last week, starting at section six of part one ("The Age of Nutritionism") through to the conclusion of part one .
Pollan continues his discussion of the upcoming of Nutritionism as well as obesity in chapter six of part one. He talks about how our mindsets towards certain nutrients and the diets we've created from them have actually had more of a negative impact on our health than if we had just consumed food . Oddly enough, when Americans began to start low-fat diets and binging on carbohydrates in order to stay away from the evil fats, they actually gained even more weight and added to the epidemic of obesity and diabetes! However, people didn't actually stay away from the fatty foods like meat. Instead, they simply obscured the amount of these fatty foods by throwing on more and more carbohydrates. Therefore, the percentage of carbohydrates consumed was higher than that of fat, but people were now eating more food than ever before. How could this have happened? !?
Pollan blames the ideology of Nutritionism. Instead of telling us to "eat less meat and fewer dairy products", the dietary guidelines for us was to "eat more low-fat foods". So instead of cutting back on our food consumption, we simply added more in because our foods, like cookies and beer, were now low-fat. Through these ideologies, it is easy to see how Nutritionism looks nice for consumers who want to eat more foods that are so called healthy, producers who can sell more of their products, nutrition scientists who can keep coming up with new discoveries about these invisible nutrients, and journalists who can write about all of Nutritionsim's discoveries and ideologies. "Plus," Pollan writes, "every course correction in nutritionists advice gives reason to write new diet books and articles, manufacture a new line of products, and eat a whole bunch of even more healthy new food products. Nutritionism might be the best thing to ever happen to the food industry."
We eaters, though, do not get as much out of Nutritionism as does the producers. Americans have taken on a mindset of "nutritional philosophy" that requires them to eat not on the principle of pleasure, but instead on the principle of so called health. Harvey Levenstein makes the suggestion that the abundance of food in America today has allowed Americans to become indifferent to food, choosing to "eat and run rather than to dine and savor". The idea of savoring food is now thought of as a thing of foreign foppery. But whatever pleasure had to be given up, it would be made up for by better health as promised by Nutritionism. However, as Nutritionism would go, more papers were published bringing up new hypotheses about how good or bad different nutrients were and how the correlated with different diseases. One such hypothesis was the Carbohydrate Hypothesis that said eating more carbohydrates led to more weight gain.
So how valid is the science of Nutritionism? Pollan claims that Nutritionism is, in fact, bad science with many terrible flaws. Pollan tells us that "most nutritional science involves studying one nutrient at a time, a seemingly unavoidable approach that even nutritionists who do it will tell you it is deeply flawed." Nutritionism takes "the nutrient out of the context of the food, the food out of the context of the diet, and the diet out of the context of the lifestyle."
It is important to remember that foods as a whole can act very different than the nutrients they contain. It has long been believed that fruits and vegetables offer some kind of protection from cancer. Nutrition scientists will tell you it is the beta-carotene, the vitamin E, or some other nutrient that accounts for this health benefit. However, as soon as you remove these nutrients from the food source and create antioxidant supplements with them, they don't seem to work like the fruit or vegetable in its health protection at all! You could break down a food source that we eat, like Thyme, which has over 35 antioxidant nutrients in it, and know without knowing what nutrients that it contains that "it is probably not harmful (since people have been eating it forever), it might actually do some good (since people have been eating it forever), and even if it does noting at all… we still like the way it tastes." With food sources like these, that have been consumed for centuries, we don't need to worry about what is in them. We don't have to think about the complexity of the food in order to reap its benefits. Plus, foods metabolize different based on the order of food eaten, once again jabbing Nutritionism in the side.
In order to understand health and weight gain, all we need to understand is the zero-sum relationship: "If you eat a lot of one thing, you're probably not eating a lot of something else". Nutritionists have spent a lot of time and resources on researching what the "bad" cause of food could be that has caused diseases like heart disease. Rather, they may have needed to look not at how the presence of something caused it, but how the absence of something else, like plants or fish, may have factored into the presence of the disease. As Pollan puts it, "Nutrition science has usually put more of its energies into the idea that the problems it studies are the result of too much of a bad thing instead of too little of a good thing."
Along with studying individual nutrients, many of the case studies or experiments used to study them are also flawed. For instance, experiments cannot account for a placebo effect, since low-fat foods seldom taste like the real food. Confounders are another issue. For instance, people who take supplements may be healthier than those who don’t. BUT they may also be better educated, more affluent people, who take a greater interest than usual in their personal health. Finally, in studies where we look at individuals who have gotten ill and study their diets, it is vital to note that sick people often change their diets when they get sick! And even if we ask them to recall what their diets were previously, people usually eat a third to a fifth more than they actually claim.
Pollan finishes the first section of his book with revealing some staggering facts given to us by Paul Rozin, a University of Pennsylvania psychologist. Rozin found that "half of us believe high-calorie foods eaten in small amounts contain more calories than low-calorie foods eaten in much larger amounts. And that a third of us believe that a diet absolutely free of fat - a nutrient, lest you forget, essential to our survival - would be better for us than a diet containing even just "a pinch" of it." In one experiment, Rozin found that when the words "chocolate cake" appeared on a screen, the word most associated with it by Americans was "guilt". This may seem unsurprising and unexceptional, except when you compare it with the French's response of "celebration". Finally, Rozin explains that "fat seems to have assumed, even at low levels, the role of toxin" in our dietary imaginations. Today we are seeing more and more people who are unhealthily obsessed with healthy eating, breed from the age of Nutritionism.
Pollan reminds us that while Nutritionism has its roots in a scientific approach it is not actually a science, rather it is an ideology. An ideology breed mostly from the food industry, journalism, and the government into our minds and diets. Pollan concludes by saying that "all of this might be tolerable if eating by the light of Nutritionism made us, if not happier, then at least healthier. That it has failed to do. Thirty years of nutritional advice have left us fatter, sicker, and more poorly nourished. Which is why we find ourselves in the predicament we do: in need of a whole new way to think about eating."
Next week I will divulge into part two of Pollan's book titled "The Western Diet and the Diseases of Civilization" where Pollan reveals the dangers of our current diets and why it is so vital that we rethink the ways in which we consume food.
Today's Workout: Today I did a combo workout of a short run and another yoga class.
Start out today by running one mile on a treadmill (I set my miliage to ten minute miles)
After you complete the mile, do a three minute cool down.
Then enjoy another hour long yoga session. Start out with lots of stretching and eventually move into harder poses in order to stretch your muscle capabilities. Then the last fifteen minutes should be another good stretching cool down. For the last five minutes, relax on your back lying down with a towel over your face. Concentrate on your breathing and relaxing your body into the ground. Today's yoga class was all about finding the balance on the mat and in your life. So push yourself into poses that test your balancing abilities.
Today's Food Tip: I want to share one of my favorite healthy, yet delicious recipes with you today: Homemade Sweet Potato Fries. To make this dish you will only need the following ingredients: 1 sweet potato/yam per person, olive oil, salt, pepper, and cinnamon is optional.
Start by preheating your oven to 400 degrees. While the temperature is heating up, peel your potatoes and slice them into steak-fry sized pieces (sometimes I will cut my potato in half before I slice it into fry pieces). Put all of the fries into a large bowl and pour a couple tablespoons of olive oil over them. Mix the fries around with a large plastic spatula. Then sprinkle salt and pepper over them while continuing to mix everything together. Spread all of the fries out into a single layer on a baking sheet. If you wish, you can also sprinkle cinnamon over the top of the fries before you bake. Bake the fries for 20 minutes. Then remove from the oven, let cool slightly, and dive in! Enjoy this delicious snack or side dish!
Today's Relaxation Activity: After today's hard workout, spend your evening taking a really good, hot shower. Allow yourself to enjoy the warm temperatures and definitely sit down in the shower and relax for a few minutes.
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