Today is the third installation of the discussion on Michael Pollan's "In Defense of Food". Today I will be talking about the second part of his book, titled "The Western Diet and the Diseases of Civilization".
Pollan starts out this section by taking us back to our past, to the aborigines who have lived in the west (or the US) for as long as we have known, and revealing what westernization has done to their lives. In 1982, a group of ten middle-aged, overweight and diabetic Aborigines agreed to see what the effects would be on them if they were to temporarily reverse the effects of westernization, to see if some of their health problems might also be reversed. With the influence of the western civilization, these Aborigines had acquired a diet consisting of large amounts of refined carbohydrates and a sedentary lifestyle. These two things in combination had "disordered the intricate system by which the insulin hormone regulates the metabolism of carbohydrates and fats in the body", leading to type 2 diabetes. After leaving behind their learned western lifestyle and returning to their hunter-gatherer lifestyle instead, "all of the metabolic abnormalities of type 2 diabetes were either greatly improved or completely normalized". This small study brings up the danger of the western diet, and serves as a warning to all Americans today.
So what is the western diet? The western diet consists of "processed foods and meat, lots of added fat and sugar, lots of everything except fruits, vegetables, and whole grains". In the United States, many individuals have acquired this western diet in their everyday eating. However, as the study with the Aborigines shows us, there are great consequences that come with this way of eating. How do we know that these consequences come from our diets? We know that people today who have adopted the western diet suffer from many diseases; including higher rates of cancer, cardiovascular disease, diabetes, and obesity. In fact people who eat the way we do in the West today suffer from these more than people eating any other traditional diet. We also know that when other people come into the West and adopt the eating style, the disease soon come for them too. Many of these diseases, in fact, "followed closely on the heels of the arrival of Western foods, particularly refined flour and sugar and other kinds of "store food"".
While there is a lot of evidence showing that these diseases are a product of our diet, there have also been some counter arguments. On objection to the Western diet theory was genetics, that some people were more susceptible to diseases based on their genetics. However, Pollan reminds us that by "simply moving to places like America, immigrants from nations with low rates of chronic disease seemed to quickly acquire them". The other main objection was demographics, that illnesses show more as we age and we're simply living long enough now to obtain them, thus chronic disease is the price of long life. This theory, however, is also flawed because it bases its information off of life expectancy. Our life expectancies have greatly increased because many of the infants and children that would have died from disease are now living longer with today's medicines. When adjusted for age, rates of chronic diseases are far greater today than they were in 1900. However, the chances that a 60 or 70 year old adult suffers from cancer or type 2 diabetes are far greater today than they were a century ago.
One man who was very influential in the theory of the Western diet leading to chronic diseases today was Weston Price, a dentist in the early 1900s. Price believed that the rapid increase in dental issues were due to the modern diet. He closed down his dental practice in the 1930 to completely devote himself to the study of this theory. Thanks to his data, Price helped us draw a connection not only between diet and health, but also between the way a person produces food and that foods nutritional value. Price learned that isolated populations eating a wide variety of traditional diets had little or no chronic disease, that modern Americans were consuming significantly less nutrients from their foods (a result of taking nutrients out in order to make the products stable and more resilient to pests, thus enhancing their shelf life), and that "the common denominator of good health was to eat a traditional diet consisting of fresh foods from animals and plants grown on soils that were themselves rich in nutrients". Unfortunately Nutritionism and the Western diet won out. It wasn't until the 1960s, with the rise of organic agriculture, that questions were again posed about the industrial food chain.
Pollan suggests that instead of thinking of food as nutrition, that we should "create a broader, more ecological - and more cultural - view of food". Among species, there has developed a strong interdependent relationship between the species and the species that they eat. We rely on the health of animals and plants, and the products they produce, to keep us healthy. Therefore, when one part of the food chain is disturbed, it can affect all the other creatures in the chain - including us! Some species (most plants) have developed a sign to let us know when to eat them, which they have coupled with the time when they are ready to send their seeds to germinate. This is what we refer to as ripeness! Lucky for us, when a plant is at it's ripest, it also contains its highest concentration of nutrients in the fruit! In order for our food to be at its optimum health level, we have to consider its environment: consisting of its geography, its weather, its predators and prey, the nature of the food available to it, and its relationship to the species that eats it. Pollan believes that "to get a better grip on the nature of these changes is to begin to understand how we might alter our relationship to food - for the better, for our health. Thus he finishes out this section by offering five fundamental transformations to our foods and ways of eating to consider.
- From Whole Foods to Refined
Pollan uses the example of corn to show that the modern diet has caused a shift toward increasingly refined foods, and especially carbohydrates. Refining grains allows the foods to have an extended shelf life and it makes them easier to digest by removing the fiber. Fibers ordinarily slow down the digestion and release of sugars in carbohydrates. Thus, refining foods has essentially been finding a way to speed up the energy process of foods. Back in the day, grinding stones could only get wheat to be so white. While it could remove the wheat kernel (largest part of fiber in wheat), it couldn't remove the germ or the embryo (which contain oils rich in nutrients). But with the invention of advent rollers and steam engines, the germ and endosperm could now be removed as well, creating white flour for white bread. Thus, the first main staple of the Western diet, white bread, was born and marketed on image rather than on nutritional value. However, this wonder bread was also nutritionally deficient. So scientists began to supplement different vitamins into the bread, still not curing all the problems caused by refining grains. Even with all of these added nutrients, the fortified white bread eaters were still not getting the same amount of nutrients and health benefits as the whole-grain eaters. Thus leads us to our first fundamental transformation of food and eating: a whole food might be more than the sum of its nutritional parts. Unfortunately, this truth may never take effect in the food industry. Big money has always been in processing foods, not selling them whole. As long as it is technically "safe" to eat refined foods, the industry will continue to sell them to us, to our brains that craves sugar. It is important to remember that in the natural world, sugars like fructose are a rare occurrence, usually found in whole foods like seasonal fruit and packaged in with fiber and valuable micronutrients. In eating processed foods, the increase in sugars and carbohydrates in our diets has been the biggest change in the American diet since the early 1900s. We are consuming a far greater amount of calories, and yet are not feeling full. This results from refining foods to take out their fiber contents. Fiber slows our digestion, helping us to feel full and stop eating. Pollan encourages us to take a step back from the processed, refined foods and to evaluate our evolutionarily new relationship with sugars like glucose and fructose.
- From Complexity to Simplicity
After the identification of the big three nutrients needed for plants to grow: nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium, along with the invention of a method for making nitrogen fertilizer, agricultural soils began receiving large doses of these three nutrients but hardly any others. While plants can live on this sort of diet, devoid of the complex underground ecosystem of the soil, it also makes them more vulnerable to pests and disease. It also appears to diminish their nutritional quality. Not only are our nutrients being limited, but so are our choices. While there seems to be an astounding variety of foods in our grocery stores, the actual numbers of species (plant and animal) that are in the modern diet are shrinking! While many years ago, a single farm would raise more than a dozen different plants and animal species, now it only raises two: corn and soy beans (and cattle for animals). This simplification of the agricultural landscape has lead directly to the simplification of the diet, mostly dominated now by corn and soybeans. Why these two? Corn and soybeans are the best transformers of sunlight and chemical fertilizers into carbohydrate energy (corn) and fat and protein (soy). When you consider that, in an American persons diet today, about 554 calories a day come from corn, 257 calories from soy, 768 calories from wheat, and 91 calories from rice, there is really little room for much else in the diet. While these four products dominate our daily diets, it is hard to believe that we can get all of our needed nutrients from just them. We have gone from eating a complexity of products, to simplifying our diets and putting ourselves on the straight track to future problems.
- From Quality to Quantity
Pollan writes that "while industrial agriculture has made tremendous strides in coaxing macronutrients - calories - from the land, it is becoming increasingly clear that these gains in food quantity have come at a cost to its quality." Crops that are grown today in industrial fertilized soil and sold in grocery stores are far inferior nutritionally to the same varieties grown in organic soils, mostly because crops grown in industrial fertilizer grow more quickly and don't have the time to acquire the nutrients. Organic crops, on the other hand, grow deeper roots which help to gain more nutrients because they can access more soil minerals and they live in symbiosis with fungi that supply the plants with minerals in exchange for sugar. Organic crops have also been found to have more phyto-chemicals which have important antioxidant, anti-inflammatory, and other beneficial effects in humans. While growing with these industrial fertilizers has allowed our crop sizes to increase significantly and create more calories, these calories also supply less nutrition. However, these products can be sold at a cheaper price, reaching the cheap food policy of the U.S. government. While farmers can now grow 600 more calories per person per day, people are also eating a lot more and not getting the proper nutrition; breeding the human being who manages to be both overfed and undernourished, which is thought to be linked with the rise of cancer. Interestingly, most of the missing nutrients found to link with a decreased risk of cancer are supplied by fruits and vegetables (which most Americans eat only about 8% of their total daily calories of fruits and veggies today).
- From Leaves to Seeds
Pollan states that, simply put, "we are eating a lot more seeds and a lot fewer leaves (as do the animals we depend on)." This is a grave fact, because many of the nutrients we need cannot be found in the refined seeds, but are in leaves. Take for example Omega-3 Fatty Acids. While most people associate these with fish, fish originally get them from green plants: algae. Green plants produce these omega-3 fatty acids as a part of photosynthesis. Omega-6's, on the other hand, are found in the seeds. Omega-3s are found in the tissues of the brain and eyes, and are found to help visual acuity, permeability of cell membranes, the metabolism of glucose, the calming of inflammation, and the reduction of heart attack. Omega-6s are involved in fat storage, the rigidity of cell walls, clotting, and the inflammation response. Because these two fatty acids compete with each other for space and attention, having too much omega-6 may be just as mush of a problem as too little of omega-3. Since our diets, and the diets of animals, have shifted from eating leaves to eating seeds, there has been a marked decline in the amount of omega-3s found in modern meat, dairy products, eggs, and our diets. Plant breeders have also been selecting for plants that do not create as many omega-3s as well because those crops do not spoil as quickly (extending shelf life). Additionally, when oils are partially hydrogenated, it is the omega-3s that are being eliminated. Pollan concludes this fundamental transformation by stating that "of all the changes to our food system that go under the heading "The Western Diet", the shift from a food chain with green plants at its base to one based on seed may be the most far reaching of all."
- From Food Culture to Food Science
Finally, Pollan describes this last change to our food thinking brought on by the Western diet. Before the modern food era, people simply relied on guidance on what to eat from their national or ethnic or regional cultures. Pollan writes that "the sheer novelty and glamour of the Western diet, with its seventeen thousand new food products every year and the marketing power - thirty two billion dollars a year - used to sell us those products, has overwhelmed the force of tradition and left us where we now find ourselves: relying on science and journalism and government and marketing to help us decide what to eat." While it is possible that we will one day adapt to this Western diet, we have to be prepared to let those whom it sickens die, and to accept that it is going to take a very long time to happen since most diseases occur after the child bearing years, causing genes predisposing people to these conditions to get passed on rather than weeded out. "Much more so than the human body, capitalism is marvelously adaptive, able to turn the problems it creates into new business opportunities: diet pills, heart bypass operations, insulin pumps, bariatric surgery," writes Pollan. "But though fast food may be good business for the health care industry, the cost to society - an estimated $250 billion a year in diet-related health care costs and rising rapidly - cannot be sustained indefinitely." A global pandemic is being created by this way of eating. Interestingly, an estimated 80% of cases of type 2 diabetes could be prevented by a change of diet and exercise, but instead the money can be made on the creating of a diabetes industry. "Apparently," says Pollan, "it is easier, or at least more profitable, to change a disease of civilization into a lifestyle than it is to change the way that civilization eats."
That is all for today's talk on Pollan's book "In Defense of Food". Next Wednesday I will be writing the last installment of my discussion on his book, covering the third section of the book titled "Getting Over Nutritionism". Hope you all were able to take away quite a bit of information and food for thought today! Have a good night. :)
Today's Workout: Today I finally felt well enough to do a small workout. Since I'm still in no shape to be running and Yoga was cancelled for a work meeting, I decided to do a low intensity, high incline walk.
First, I set my speed to about a 14 minute mile and set my incline to 7.0. I stayed at this speed and height for 20 minutes.
Then, the next five minutes, I increased my speed up to about a 13 minute mile, keeping my same 7.0 incline height.
For the next five minutes, I increased my incline up to 8.0 and kept my speed the same.
Finally, I completed a five minute cool down.
Today's Food Tip: Sometimes it can be really difficult to get enough fruits and veggies in your daily diet. For my family, it is usually not because of a lack of fruits and veggies being available, rather it is from laziness to cut them up and serve them. One thing I try to do to avoid this dilemma is to cut the veggies and fruits up as soon as I bring them back from the store! Cut them into bite sizes and put them into separate containers. Then, the next time you go to pack a lunch or grab a snack, open up a few containers and pick out a variety of fruits and vegetables! It also makes cooking with them much easier.
Today's Relaxation Activity: Today I want to encourage you to sit down with your favorite magazine.
Find one that inspires you or just makes you happy, whether it is about the latest in health or today's fashions! I also like to bring my magazines with me to the gym to browse through while I am walking on the treadmill or when I grab a bite to eat in the café.
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