In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto
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Read between August 8 - August 15, 2012
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Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.
Bruno Sánchez-Andrade
indeed
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Most of us no longer eat what our mothers ate as children or, for that matter, what our mothers fed us as children.
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humans deciding what to eat without professional guidance—something they have been doing with notable success since coming down out of the trees—is seriously unprofitable if you’re a food company, a definite career loser if you’re a nutritionist, and just plain boring if you’re a newspaper editor or reporter. (Or, for that matter, an eater.
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Four of the top ten causes of death today are chronic diseases with well-established links to diet:
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Nutritionism is good for the food business. But is it good for us? You might think that a national fixation on nutrients would lead to measurable improvements in public health. For that to happen, however, the underlying nutritional science and the policy recommendations (not to mention the journalism) based on that science would both have to be sound. This has seldom been the case.
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nutritionism favor ever more novel kinds of highly processed foods (which are by far the most profitable kind to make), it actually enlists the medical establishment and the government in the promotion of those products.
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Bruno Sánchez-Andrade
Just visit an american supermarket to see this. It would be interesting to see the evolution of the rate of processed food over raw food.
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it’s difficult to conclude that scientific eating has contributed to our health.
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Bad things happen to people who eat bad things. But what people don’t eat may matter as much as what they do.
Bruno Sánchez-Andrade
like the logical inference that too much meat increases hearth disease. it very well be also the lack of something that foes that.
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populations. The Mediterranean diet is widely believed to be one of the most healthful traditional diets, yet much of what we know about it is based on studies of people living in the 1950s on the island of Crete—people who in many respects led lives very different from our own. Yes, they ate lots of olive oil and more fish than meat. But they also did more physical labor. As followers of the Greek Orthodox church, they fasted frequently. They ate lots of wild greens—weeds. And, perhaps most significant, they ate far fewer total calories than we do.
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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.
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Thirty years of nutritional advice have left us fatter, sicker, and more poorly nourished.
Bruno Sánchez-Andrade
and confused about what to eat, or guilty, or over worried, avoiding some types of food to over consume others.
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“all of the metabolic abnormalities of type II diabetes were either greatly improved (glucose tolerance, insulin response to glucose) or completely normalized (plasma lipids) in a group of diabetic Aborigines by a relatively short (seven week) reversion to traditional hunter-gatherer lifestyle.”
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pressed to find in the native populations they had treated or studied: little to no heart disease, diabetes, cancer, obesity, hypertension, or stroke; no appendicitis, diverticulitis, malformed dental arches, or tooth decay; no varicose veins, ulcers, or hemorrhoids.
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while it is true that our life expectancy has improved dramatically since 1900 (rising in the United States from forty-nine to seventy-seven years), most of that gain is attributed to the fact that more of us are surviving infancy and childhood; the life expectancy of a sixty-five-year-old in 1900 was only about six years less than that of a sixty-five-year-old living today.*
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isolated populations eating a wide variety of traditional diets had no need of dentists whatsoever. (Well, almost no need of dentists:
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Wherever he found an isolated primitive race that had not yet encountered the “displacing foods of modern commerce”—by which he meant refined flour, sugar, canned and chemically preserved foods, and vegetable oils—he found little or no evidence of “modern degeneration”—by which he meant chronic disease, tooth decay, and malformed dental arches.
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The Masai of Africa consumed virtually no plant foods at all, subsisting on meat, blood, and milk. Seafaring groups in the Hebrides consumed no dairy at all, subsisting on a diet consisting largely of seafood and oats made into porridges and cakes. The Eskimos he interviewed lived on raw fish, game meat, fish roe, and blubber, seldom eating anything remotely green. Along the Nile near Ethiopia, Price encountered what he judged to be the healthiest populations of all: tribes that subsisted on milk, meat, and blood from pastured cattle as well as animal food from the Nile River. Price
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“The dinner we have eaten tonight,” he told his audience in a 1928 lecture, “was a part of the sun but a few months ago.”
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same simple and devastating piece of news, one that seems hard to deny: The human animal is adapted to, and apparently can thrive on, an extraordinary range of different diets, but the Western diet, however you define it, does not seem to be one of them.
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A whole food might be more than the sum of its nutrient parts.
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The big money has always been in processing foods, not selling them whole,
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something in us that loves a refined carbohydrate, and that something is the human brain.
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refined carbohydrates contributes to obesity in two ways. First, we consume many more calories per unit of food; the fiber that’s been removed from these foods is precisely what would have made us feel full and stop eating. Also, the flash flood of glucose causes insulin levels to spike and then, once the cells have taken all that glucose out of circulation, drop precipitously, making us think we need to eat again.
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So here, then, is the first momentous change in the Western diet that may help to explain why it makes some people so sick: Supplanting tested relationships to the whole foods with which we coevolved over many thousands of years, it asks our bodies now to relate to, and deal with, a very small handful of efficiently delivered nutrients that have been torn from their food context.
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Why corn and soy? Because these two plants are among nature’s most efficient transformers of sunlight and chemical fertilizer into carbohydrate energy (in the case of corn) and fat and protein (in the case of soy)—if
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It’s hard to believe we’re getting everything we need from a diet consisting largely of processed corn, soybeans, rice, and wheat.
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USDA figures show a decline in the nutrient content of the forty-three crops it has tracked since the 1950s.
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you now have to eat three apples to get the same amount of iron as you would have gotten from a single 1940 apple, and you’d have to eat several more slices of bread to get your recommended daily allowance of zinc
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the nutritional equivalent of inflation, such that we have to eat more to get the same amount of various essential nutrients.
Bruno Sánchez-Andrade
and we need to grow more, which pushes us for yet further diminishing nutritional value if the yield.
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USDA researchers recently found that breeding to “improve” wheat varieties over the past 130 years (a period during which yields of grain per acre tripled) had reduced levels of iron by 28 percent and zinc and selenium by roughly a third. Similarly, milk from modern Holstein cows (in which breeders have managed to more than triple daily yield since 1950) has considerably less butterfat and other nutrients than that from older, less “improved” varieties like Jersey, Guernsey, and Brown Swiss.
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overfed and undernourished,
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Omega-3s, being less stable than omega-6s, spoil more readily, so the food industry, focused on store food, has been strongly disposed against omega-3s long before we even knew what they were.
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You would not have bought this book and read this far into it if your food culture was intact and healthy.
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fully a quarter of all Americans suffer from metabolic syndrome, two thirds of us are overweight or obese, and diet-related diseases are already killing the majority of us.
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This is a global pandemic in the making, but a most unusual one, because it involves no virus or bacteria, no microbe of any kind—just a way of eating.
Bruno Sánchez-Andrade
yet we prefer to make a busi ESS of it with pills, surgeries, health care... we created a demographic to serve, a new norm
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much of the nutrition science I’ve presented here qualifies as reductionist science, focusing as it does on individual nutrients (such as certain fats or carbohydrates or antioxidants) rather than on whole foods or dietary patterns.
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an empirical phenomenon that is not itself in doubt: People eating a Western diet are prone to a complex of chronic diseases that seldom strike people eating more traditional diets.
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A hallmark of the Western diet is food that is fast, cheap, and easy. Americans spend less than 10 percent of their income on food; they also spend less than a half hour a day preparing meals and little more than an hour enjoying them.*
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A wall of ignorance intervenes between consumers and producers, and that wall fosters a certain carelessness on both sides.
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While it is true that many people simply can’t afford to pay more for food, either in money or time or both, many more of us can. After all, just in the last decade or two we’ve somehow found the time in the day to spend several hours on the Internet and the money in the budget not only to pay for broadband service, but to cover a second phone bill and a new monthly bill for television, formerly free.