"Unhappy Meals"

Whoa!!

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/28/ma...56f&ei=5087%0A


EXCERPTS

Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.

That, more or less, is the short answer to the supposedly incredibly
complicated and confusing question of what we humans should eat in
order to be maximally healthy.

....

A little meat won't kill you, though it's better approached as a side
dish than as a main. And you're much better off eating whole fresh
foods than processed food products. That's what I mean by the
recommendation to eat "food."

....

If you're concerned about your health, you should probably avoid food
products that make health claims. Why? Because a health claim on a
food product is a good indication that it's not really food, and food
is what you want to eat.

....

It was in the 1980s that food began disappearing from the American
supermarket, gradually to be replaced by "nutrients," which are not
the same thing. Where once the familiar names of recognizable
comestibles - things like eggs or breakfast cereal or cookies -
claimed pride of place on the brightly colored packages crowding the
aisles, now new terms like "fiber" and "cholesterol" and "saturated
fat" rose to large-type prominence.

"Prisoner at War" wrote in message
ups.com...
Whoa!!

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/28/ma...56f&ei=5087%0A


EXCERPTS

Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.

That, more or less, is the short answer to the supposedly incredibly
complicated and confusing question of what we humans should eat in
order to be maximally healthy.

...

A little meat won't kill you, though it's better approached as a side
dish than as a main. And you're much better off eating whole fresh
foods than processed food products. That's what I mean by the
recommendation to eat "food."

...

If you're concerned about your health, you should probably avoid food
products that make health claims. Why? Because a health claim on a
food product is a good indication that it's not really food, and food
is what you want to eat.

...

It was in the 1980s that food began disappearing from the American
supermarket, gradually to be replaced by "nutrients," which are not
the same thing. Where once the familiar names of recognizable
comestibles - things like eggs or breakfast cereal or cookies -
claimed pride of place on the brightly colored packages crowding the
aisles, now new terms like "fiber" and "cholesterol" and "saturated
fat" rose to large-type prominence.

I just finished reading that article. A must-read for everyone, IMHO.
From this past Sunday's magazine section.

-S-
http://www.kbnj.com

On Jan 31, 1:42 pm, "Steve Freides" wrote:
"Prisoner at War" wrote in oglegroups.com...



Whoa!!

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/28/ma...sm.t.html?em&e...



SNIP




I just finished reading that article. A must-read for everyone, IMHO.
From this past Sunday's magazine section.

-S-http://www.kbnj.com


Definitely a great article. I hope folks read it all the way
through. Like this, just on page 4 of a 12-page affair (I'd already
quoted something astounding on page 3 about the Food Industry, but
****ING GOOGLE seems to have lost it -- again):

"Most nutritional science involves studying one nutrient at a time, an
approach that even nutritionists who do it will tell you is deeply
flawed. 'The problem with nutrient-by-nutrient nutrition science,'
points out Marion Nestle, the New York University nutritionist, 'is
that it takes the nutrient out of the context of food, the food out of
the context of diet and the diet out of the context of lifestyle.'

"If nutritional scientists know this, why do they do it anyway?
Because a nutrient bias is built into the way science is done:
scientists need individual variables they can isolate. Yet even the
simplest food is a hopelessly complex thing to study, a virtual
wilderness of chemical compounds, many of which exist in complex and
dynamic relation to one another, and all of which together are in the
process of changing from one state to another. So if you're a
nutritional scientist, you do the only thing you can do, given the
tools at your disposal: break the thing down into its component parts
and study those one by one, even if that means ignoring complex
interactions and contexts, as well as the fact that the whole may be
more than, or just different from, the sum of its parts. This is what
we mean by reductionist science.

"Scientific reductionism is an undeniably powerful tool, but it can
mislead us too, especially when applied to something as complex as, on
the one side, a food, and on the other, a human eater. It encourages
us to take a mechanistic view of that transaction: put in this
nutrient; get out that physiological result. Yet people differ in
important ways. Some populations can metabolize sugars better than
others; depending on your evolutionary heritage, you may or may not be
able to digest the lactose in milk. The specific ecology of your
intestines helps determine how efficiently you digest what you eat, so
that the same input of 100 calories may yield more or less energy
depending on the proportion of Firmicutes and Bacteroidetes living in
your gut. There is nothing very machinelike about the human eater, and
so to think of food as simply fuel is wrong.

"Also, people don't eat nutrients, they eat foods, and foods can
behave very differently than the nutrients they contain. Researchers
have long believed, based on epidemiological comparisons of different
populations, that a diet high in fruits and vegetables confers some
protection against cancer. So naturally they ask, What nutrients in
those plant foods are responsible for that effect? One hypothesis is
that the antioxidants in fresh produce - compounds like beta carotene,
lycopene, vitamin E, etc. - are the X factor. It makes good sense:
these molecules (which plants produce to protect themselves from the
highly reactive oxygen atoms produced in photosynthesis) vanquish the
free radicals in our bodies, which can damage DNA and initiate
cancers. At least that's how it seems to work in the test tube. Yet as
soon as you remove these useful molecules from the context of the
whole foods they're found in, as we've done in creating antioxidant
supplements, they don't work at all. Indeed, in the case of beta
carotene ingested as a supplement, scientists have discovered that it
actually increases the risk of certain cancers. Big oops."

On Jan 31, 10:15 am, "Prisoner at War"
wrote:
Whoa!!

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/28/ma...sm.t.html?em&e...

EXCERPTS

That article goes on for 12 pages. I guess you didn't notice, because
all your excerpts are from the first one, and you are citing what are
some of the least interesting passages. It gets better in the
subsequent pages:

For instance here is a good one:

`` Another potentially serious weakness of nutritionist ideology is
that it has trouble discerning qualitative distinctions between foods.
So fish, beef and chicken through the nutritionists' lens become mere
delivery systems for varying quantities of fats and proteins and
whatever other nutrients are on their scope. Similarly, any
qualitative distinctions between processed foods and whole foods
disappear when your focus is on quantifying the nutrients they contain
(or, more precisely, the known nutrients).

This is a great boon for manufacturers of processed food, and it helps
explain why they have been so happy to get with the nutritionism
program. ''

And another:

``The fate of each whole food rises and falls with every change in the
nutritional weather, while the processed foods are simply
reformulated. That's why when the Atkins mania hit the food industry,
bread and pasta were given a quick redesign (dialing back the carbs;
boosting the protein), while the poor unreconstructed potatoes and
carrots were left out in the cold.''

On Jan 31, 6:07 pm, "Kaz Kylheku" wrote:
On Jan 31, 10:15 am, "Prisoner at War"
wrote:

Whoa!!

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/28/ma...sm.t.html?em&e...
EXCERPTS

That article goes on for 12 pages. I guess you didn't notice, because
all your excerpts are from the first one, and you are citing what are
some of the least interesting passages. It gets better in the
subsequent pages:

For instance here is a good one:

`` Another potentially serious weakness of nutritionist ideology is
that it has trouble discerning qualitative distinctions between foods.
So fish, beef and chicken through the nutritionists' lens become mere
delivery systems for varying quantities of fats and proteins and
whatever other nutrients are on their scope. Similarly, any
qualitative distinctions between processed foods and whole foods
disappear when your focus is on quantifying the nutrients they contain
(or, more precisely, the known nutrients).

This is a great boon for manufacturers of processed food, and it helps
explain why they have been so happy to get with the nutritionism
program. ''

And another:

``The fate of each whole food rises and falls with every change in the
nutritional weather, while the processed foods are simply
reformulated. That's why when the Atkins mania hit the food industry,
bread and pasta were given a quick redesign (dialing back the carbs;
boosting the protein), while the poor unreconstructed potatoes and
carrots were left out in the cold.''

Good one indeed!

"Prisoner at War" wrote in message
ups.com...
Whoa!!

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/28/ma...56f&ei=5087%0A


EXCERPTS

Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.

That, more or less, is the short answer to the supposedly incredibly
complicated and confusing question of what we humans should eat in
order to be maximally healthy.

...

A little meat won't kill you, though it's better approached as a side
dish than as a main. And you're much better off eating whole fresh
foods than processed food products. That's what I mean by the
recommendation to eat "food."

...

If you're concerned about your health, you should probably avoid food
products that make health claims. Why? Because a health claim on a
food product is a good indication that it's not really food, and food
is what you want to eat.

...

It was in the 1980s that food began disappearing from the American
supermarket, gradually to be replaced by "nutrients," which are not
the same thing. Where once the familiar names of recognizable
comestibles - things like eggs or breakfast cereal or cookies -
claimed pride of place on the brightly colored packages crowding the
aisles, now new terms like "fiber" and "cholesterol" and "saturated
fat" rose to large-type prominence.

I think you have omitted a vital detail about 'plant food' - if it is not
organic you are negating the nutritional benefits with the pesicides content
of these foods. Many greens i..e spinach, celery etc are rich with nutrients
and pesticides

It was a very interesting essay, and has changed my outlook on
things. I'm also inspired to change my diet, even though I'm no
"typical American eater" either.

It really answers my question, which I'd asked for the longest time to
no real answer, why all these protein shakes and vitamin pills, if
they really are "food," can be taken *as* food, in lieu of other
food. The article really answered that for me when it noted that
isolating nutrients from their naturally-occuring whole food contexts
has not been successful, particularly in the case of anti-oxidants.

As for a "biologically diverse" diet, well, the South Chinese are
known for their no-holds-barred culinary habits. The joke, told by
North Chinese, is that they eat anything with four legs except tables
and chairs. I'd be very curious as to a study of their health...but
such a study would probably be impossible to conduct, given the
difficulties in controlling for environmental and lifestyle factors
there....



On Jan 31, 3:05 pm, "Butcher" wrote:
A very long read, but very well-done. The author approaches the
Western diet and the history of how it evolved (or devolved?) in a
very compelling, common sense way. I truly can't disagree with what
he's saying. Although I don't see my eating habits as typically-
American, I'm still inspired to change my diet even more to reflect
what he's advocating - kind of a get-back-to-nature-don't-believe-the-
nutritional-marketing-bull**** approach.

One of the most interesting lines:

"Simplification has occurred at the level of species diversity, too.
The astounding variety of foods on offer in the modern supermarket
obscures the fact that the actual number of species in the modern diet
is shrinking. For reasons of economics, the food industry prefers to
tease its myriad processed offerings from a tiny group of plant
species, corn and soybeans chief among them. Today, a mere four crops
account for two-thirds of the calories humans eat. When you consider
that humankind has historically consumed some 80,000 edible species,
and that 3,000 of these have been in widespread use, this represents a
radical simplification of the food web. Why should this matter?
Because humans are omnivores, requiring somewhere between 50 and 100
different chemical compounds and elements to be healthy. It's hard to
believe that we can get everything we need from a diet consisting
largely of processed corn, soybeans, wheat and rice."

Now that's a nice example/fact that drives the point home.

In article , "Steve Freides"
wrote:



I just finished reading that article. A must-read for everyone, IMHO.
From this past Sunday's magazine section.

Steve, did you really need an article that long to tell you eating whole
un processed food is generally what you should eat? Really?



-S-
http://www.kbnj.com

On Jan 31, 1:24 pm, "Prisoner at War"
"Also, people don't eat nutrients, they eat foods, and foods can
behave very differently than the nutrients they contain.

I'd rather eat nutrients than food at this point in my life. If your
body could get all the nutrients it needs to sustain healthy life
that's all you need. If they could shrink all the nutrients into a
little pill or even inject it into the bloodstream somehow it would
save a lot of wear and tear on the internal organs which have to work
very hard each time you eat a meal.

On Feb 1, 7:59 am, "Prisoner at War"
As for a "biologically diverse" diet, well, the South Chinese are known for their no-holds-barred culinary habits. The joke, told by North Chinese, is that they eat anything with four legs except tables and chairs. I'd be very curious as to a study of their health...but such a study would probably be impossible to conduct, given the difficulties in controlling for environmental and lifestyle factors there....

I don't see why you couldn't just pluck someone out of south China and
do some blood tests, and overall performance assessment of their
internal organs and so forth.

My parents are both from south China. I can say that a stroll down the
street reveals a striking difference between southern and northern
chinese. We have visited Shanghai, Beijing, Changsha, etc. and people
in these areas, tend to be thinner. Tell the truth, we didn't see one
fat person (in the north) the whole trip.

A stroll down the streets of Taishan (southern China) will reveal many
overweight looking chinese (not obese, just truly overweight). The
people in Taishan are more laid back than in the north, you can see
many young people talking loudly and laughing, whereas in Sichuan and
Beijing everyone is more controlled (businesslike). The culture and
the excellent food may be a factor in the increased weight.

One thing is definite no matter where you go in China. Everyone is
constantly on the move exercising regardless of age. I would guess a
man in southern China would probably have health not too much
different than a man in the US. Only the chinese man would probably
have a better muscle tone due to the constant exercise (lengthens
life) but also have poorer eating or other habits (smoking, drinking,
drugs?) which could bring a shorter lifespan. They have some bad
habits over there in Taishan and Kaiping as my grandfather found out.


One of the most interesting lines:
For reasons of economics, the food industry prefers to
tease its myriad processed offerings from a tiny group of plant species, corn and soybeans chief among them. Today, a mere four crops account for two-thirds of the calories humans eat.

The same is occuring in the fashion industry. Clothing for men has
basically broken down to T-shirts, polo shirts, and knits, pants and
shorts. There really isn't much else in between. Macy's, Nordstrom,
GAP, and other clothing stores are only going to satisfy the bottom
line and they know people will buy polo's and knits, so that's what
they sell. Many creative innovative fashion ideas go by the wayside
because they don't want to or can't afford to take chances.