My annotated version of NY Times Mag. nutrition article

[Guest guest]

[From Judy Pokras, editor/publisher of _www.RawFoodsNewsMagazine.com_

(http://www.RawFoodsNewsMagazine.com) : Because this is a very long article, I

highlighted in yellow the parts I found the most relevant, and I added a few

notes of my own, in boldface brackets. Feel free to write me about my comments

and any that you have.]

 

New York Times Magazine

 

January 28, 2007

Unhappy Meals

By MICHAEL POLLAN

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. I hate to give away the game right

here at the beginning of a long essay, and I confess that I'm tempted

to complicate matters in the interest of keeping things going for a

few thousand more words. I'll try to resist but will go ahead and add

a couple more details to flesh out the advice. Like: 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. " Once, food was all you could eat, but today there are

lots of other edible foodlike substances in the supermarket. These

novel products of food science often come in packages festooned with

health claims, which brings me to a related rule of thumb: 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.

Uh-oh. Things are suddenly sounding a little more complicated, aren't

they? Sorry. But that's how it goes as soon as you try to get to the

bottom of the whole vexing question of food and health. Before long,

a dense cloud bank of confusion moves in. Sooner or later, everything

solid you thought you knew about the links between diet and health

gets blown away in the gust of the latest study.

Last winter came the news that a low-fat diet, long believed to

protect against breast cancer, may do no such thing — this from the

monumental, federally financed Women's Health Initiative, which has

also found no link between a low-fat diet and rates of coronary

disease. The year before we learned that dietary fiber might not, as

we had been confidently told, help prevent colon cancer. Just last

fall two prestigious studies on omega-3 fats published at the same

time presented us with strikingly different conclusions. While the

Institute of Medicine stated that " it is uncertain how much these

omega-3s contribute to improving health " (and they might do the

opposite if you get them from mercury-contaminated fish), a Harvard

study declared that simply by eating a couple of servings of fish

each week (or by downing enough fish oil), you could cut your risk of

dying from a heart attack by more than a third — a stunningly hopeful

piece of news. It's no wonder that omega-3 fatty acids are poised to

become the oat bran of 2007, as food scientists micro-encapsulate

fish oil and algae oil and blast them into such formerly all-

terrestrial foods as bread and tortillas, milk and yogurt and cheese,

all of which will soon, you can be sure, sprout fishy new health

claims. (Remember the rule?)

By now you're probably registering the cognitive dissonance of the

supermarket shopper or science-section reader, as well as some

nostalgia for the simplicity and solidity of the first few sentences

of this essay. Which I'm still prepared to defend against the

shifting winds of nutritional science and food-industry marketing.

But before I do that, it might be useful to figure out how we arrived

at our present state of nutritional confusion and anxiety.

The story of how the most basic questions about what to eat ever got

so complicated reveals a great deal about the institutional

imperatives of the food industry, nutritional science and — ahem —

journalism, three parties that stand to gain much from widespread

confusion surrounding what is, after all, the most elemental question

an omnivore confronts. Humans deciding what to eat without expert

help — something they have been doing with notable success since

coming down out of the trees — is seriously unprofitable if you're a

food company, distinctly risky if you're a nutritionist and just

plain boring if you're a newspaper editor or journalist. (Or, for

that matter, an eater. Who wants to hear, yet again, " Eat more fruits

and vegetables " ?) And so, like a large gray fog, a great Conspiracy

of Confusion has gathered around the simplest questions of nutrition —

much to the advantage of everybody involved. Except perhaps the

ostensible beneficiary of all this nutritional expertise and advice:

us, and our health and happiness as eaters.

FROM FOODS TO NUTRIENTS

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. More important than mere foods,

the presence or absence of these invisible substances was now

generally believed to confer health benefits on their eaters. Foods

by comparison were coarse, old-fashioned and decidedly unscientific

things — who could say what was in them, really? But nutrients —

those chemical compounds and minerals in foods that nutritionists

have deemed important to health — gleamed with the promise of

scientific certainty; eat more of the right ones, fewer of the wrong,

and you would live longer and avoid chronic diseases.

Nutrients themselves had been around, as a concept, since the early

19th century, when the English doctor and chemist William Prout

identified what came to be called the " macronutrients " : protein, fat

and carbohydrates. It was thought that that was pretty much all there

was going on in food, until doctors noticed that an adequate supply

of the big three did not necessarily keep people nourished. At the

end of the 19th century, British doctors were puzzled by the fact

that Chinese laborers in the Malay states were dying of a disease

called beriberi, which didn't seem to afflict Tamils or native

Malays. The mystery was solved when someone pointed out that the

Chinese ate " polished, " or white, rice, while the others ate rice

that hadn't been mechanically milled. A few years later, Casimir

Funk, a Polish chemist, discovered the " essential nutrient " in rice

husks that protected against beriberi and called it a " vitamine, " the

first micronutrient. Vitamins brought a kind of glamour to the

science of nutrition, and though certain sectors of the population

began to eat by its expert lights, it really wasn't until late in the

20th century that nutrients managed to push food aside in the popular

imagination of what it means to eat.

No single event marked the shift from eating food to eating

nutrients, though in retrospect a little-noticed political dust-up in

Washington in 1977 seems to have helped propel American food culture

down this dimly lighted path. Responding to an alarming increase in

chronic diseases linked to diet — including heart disease, cancer and

diabetes — a Senate Select Committee on Nutrition, headed by George

McGovern, held hearings on the problem and prepared what by all

rights should have been an uncontroversial document called " Dietary

Goals for the United States. " The committee learned that while rates

of coronary heart disease had soared in America since World War II,

other cultures that consumed traditional diets based largely on

plants had strikingly low rates of chronic disease. Epidemiologists

also had observed that in America during the war years, when meat and

dairy products were strictly rationed, the rate of heart disease

temporarily plummeted.

Naïvely putting two and two together, the committee drafted a

straightforward set of dietary guidelines calling on Americans to cut

down on red meat and dairy products. Within weeks a firestorm,

emanating from the red-meat and dairy industries, engulfed the

committee, and Senator McGovern (who had a great many cattle ranchers

among his South Dakota constituents) was forced to beat a retreat.

The committee's recommendations were hastily rewritten. Plain talk

about food — the committee had advised Americans to actually " reduce

consumption of meat " — was replaced by artful compromise: " Choose

meats, poultry and fish that will reduce saturated-fat intake. "

A subtle change in emphasis, you might say, but a world of difference

just the same. First, the stark message to " eat less " of a particular

food has been deep-sixed; don't look for it ever again in any

official U.S. dietary pronouncement. Second, notice how distinctions

between entities as different as fish and beef and chicken have

collapsed; those three venerable foods, each representing an entirely

different taxonomic class, are now lumped together as delivery

systems for a single nutrient. Notice too how the new language

exonerates the foods themselves; now the culprit is an obscure,

invisible, tasteless — and politically unconnected — substance that

may or may not lurk in them called " saturated fat. "

The linguistic capitulation did nothing to rescue McGovern from his

blunder; the very next election, in 1980, the beef lobby helped

rusticate the three-term senator, sending an unmistakable warning to

anyone who would challenge the American diet, and in particular the

big chunk of animal protein sitting in the middle of its plate.

Henceforth, government dietary guidelines would shun plain talk about

whole foods, each of which has its trade association on Capitol Hill,

and would instead arrive clothed in scientific euphemism and speaking

of nutrients, entities that few Americans really understood but that

lack powerful lobbies in Washington. This was precisely the tack

taken by the National Academy of Sciences when it issued its landmark

report on diet and cancer in 1982. Organized nutrient by nutrient in

a way guaranteed to offend no food group, it codified the official

new dietary language. Industry and media followed suit, and terms

like polyunsaturated, cholesterol, monounsaturated, carbohydrate,

fiber, polyphenols, amino acids and carotenes soon colonized much of

the cultural space previously occupied by the tangible substance

formerly known as food. The Age of Nutritionism had arrived.

THE RISE OF NUTRITIONISM

The first thing to understand about nutritionism — I first

encountered the term in the work of an Australian sociologist of

science named Gyorgy Scrinis — is that it is not quite the same as

nutrition. As the " ism " suggests, it is not a scientific subject but

an ideology. Ideologies are ways of organizing large swaths of life

and experience under a set of shared but unexamined assumptions. This

quality makes an ideology particularly hard to see, at least while

it's exerting its hold on your culture. A reigning ideology is a

little like the weather, all pervasive and virtually inescapable.

Still, we can try.

In the case of nutritionism, the widely shared but unexamined

assumption is that the key to understanding food is indeed the

nutrient. From this basic premise flow several others. Since

nutrients, as compared with foods, are invisible and therefore

slightly mysterious, it falls to the scientists (and to the

journalists through whom the scientists speak) to explain the hidden

reality of foods to us. To enter a world in which you dine on unseen

nutrients, you need lots of expert help.

But expert help to do what, exactly? This brings us to another

unexamined assumption: that the whole point of eating is to maintain

and promote bodily health. Hippocrates's famous injunction to " let

food be thy medicine " is ritually invoked to support this notion.

I'll leave the premise alone for now, except to point out that it is

not shared by all cultures and that the experience of these other

cultures suggests that, paradoxically, viewing food as being about

things other than bodily health — like pleasure, say, or socializing —

makes people no less healthy; indeed, there's some reason to believe

that it may make them more healthy. This is what we usually have in

mind when we speak of the " French paradox " — the fact that a

population that eats all sorts of unhealthful nutrients is in many

ways healthier than we Americans are. So there is at least a question

as to whether nutritionism is actually any good for you.

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. In the years following McGovern's capitulation

and the 1982 National Academy report, the food industry set about re-

engineering thousands of popular food products to contain more of the

nutrients that science and government had deemed the good ones and

less of the bad, and by the late '80s a golden era of food science

was upon us. The Year of Eating Oat Bran — also known as 1988 —

served as a kind of coming-out party for the food scientists, who

succeeded in getting the material into nearly every processed food

sold in America. Oat bran's moment on the dietary stage didn't last

long, but the pattern had been established, and every few years since

then a new oat bran has taken its turn under the marketing lights.

(Here comes omega-3!)

By comparison, the typical real food has more trouble competing under

the rules of nutritionism, if only because something like a banana or

an avocado can't easily change its nutritional stripes (though rest

assured the genetic engineers are hard at work on the problem). So

far, at least, you can't put oat bran in a banana. So depending on

the reigning nutritional orthodoxy, the avocado might be either a

high-fat food to be avoided (Old Think) or a food high in

monounsaturated fat to be embraced (New Think). 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.

Of course it's also a lot easier to slap a health claim on a box of

sugary cereal than on a potato or carrot, with the perverse result

that the most healthful foods in the supermarket sit there quietly in

the produce section, silent as stroke victims, while a few aisles

over, the Cocoa Puffs and Lucky Charms are screaming about their

newfound whole-grain goodness.

EAT RIGHT, GET FATTER

So nutritionism is good for business. But is it good for us? You

might think that a national fixation on nutrients would lead to

measurable improvements in the public health. But for that to happen,

the underlying nutritional science, as well as the policy

recommendations (and the journalism) based on that science, would

have to be sound. This has seldom been the case.

Consider what happened immediately after the 1977 " Dietary Goals " —

McGovern's masterpiece of politico-nutritionist compromise. In the

wake of the panel's recommendation that we cut down on saturated fat,

a recommendation seconded by the 1982 National Academy report on

cancer, Americans did indeed change their diets, endeavoring for a

quarter-century to do what they had been told. Well, kind of. The

industrial food supply was promptly reformulated to reflect the

official advice, giving us low-fat pork, low-fat Snackwell's and all

the low-fat pasta and high-fructose (yet low-fat!) corn syrup we

could consume. Which turned out to be quite a lot. Oddly, America got

really fat on its new low-fat diet — indeed, many date the current

obesity and diabetes epidemic to the late 1970s, when Americans began

binging on carbohydrates, ostensibly as a way to avoid the evils of

fat.

This story has been told before, notably in these pages ( " What if

It's All Been a Big Fat Lie? " by Gary Taubes, July 7, 2002), but it's

a little more complicated than the official version suggests. In that

version, which inspired the most recent Atkins craze, we were told

that America got fat when, responding to bad scientific advice, it

shifted its diet from fats to carbs, suggesting that a re-evaluation

of the two nutrients is in order: fat doesn't make you fat; carbs do.

(Why this should have come as news is a mystery: as long as people

have been raising animals for food, they have fattened them on

carbs.)

But there are a couple of problems with this revisionist picture.

First, while it is true that Americans post-1977 did begin binging on

carbs, and that fat as a percentage of total calories in the American

diet declined, we never did in fact cut down on our consumption of

fat. Meat consumption actually climbed. We just heaped a bunch more

carbs onto our plates, obscuring perhaps, but not replacing, the

expanding chunk of animal protein squatting in the center.

How did that happen? I would submit that the ideology of nutritionism

deserves as much of the blame as the carbohydrates themselves do —

that and human nature. By framing dietary advice in terms of good and

bad nutrients, and by burying the recommendation that we should eat

less of any particular food, it was easy for the take-home message of

the 1977 and 1982 dietary guidelines to be simplified as follows: Eat

more low-fat foods. And that is what we did. We're always happy to

receive a dispensation to eat more of something (with the possible

exception of oat bran), and one of the things nutritionism reliably

gives us is some such dispensation: low-fat cookies then, low-carb

beer now. It's hard to imagine the low-fat craze taking off as it did

if McGovern's original food-based recommendations had stood: eat

fewer meat and dairy products. For how do you get from that stark

counsel to the idea that another case of Snackwell's is just what the

doctor ordered?

BAD SCIENCE

But if nutritionism leads to a kind of false consciousness in the

mind of the eater, the ideology can just as easily mislead the

scientist. 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.

What's going on here? We don't know.

 

[Judy: Ah, couldn't it be because the vitamins that scientists extract from

whole foods are no longer raw, because of the process used to extract and

package them?]

 

It could be the vagaries of human digestion. Maybe the fiber (or some other

component) in a

carrot protects the antioxidant molecules from destruction by stomach

acids early in the digestive process. Or it could be that we isolated

the wrong antioxidant. Beta is just one of a whole slew of carotenes

found in common vegetables; maybe we focused on the wrong one. Or

maybe beta carotene works as an antioxidant only in concert with some

other plant chemical or process; under other circumstances, it may

behave as a pro-oxidant.

Indeed, to look at the chemical composition of any common food plant

is to realize just how much complexity lurks within it. Here's a list

of just the antioxidants that have been identified in garden-variety

thyme:

4-Terpineol, alanine, anethole, apigenin, ascorbic acid, beta

carotene, caffeic acid, camphene, carvacrol, chlorogenic acid,

chrysoeriol, eriodictyol, eugenol, ferulic acid, gallic acid, gamma-

terpinene isochlorogenic acid, isoeugenol, isothymonin, kaempferol,

labiatic acid, lauric acid, linalyl acetate, luteolin, methionine,

myrcene, myristic acid, naringenin, oleanolic acid, p-coumoric acid,

p-hydroxy-benzoic acid, palmitic acid, rosmarinic acid, selenium,

tannin, thymol, tryptophan, ursolic acid, vanillic acid.

This is what you're ingesting when you eat food flavored with thyme.

Some of these chemicals are broken down by your digestion, but others

are going on to do undetermined things to your body: turning some

gene's expression on or off, perhaps, or heading off a free radical

before it disturbs a strand of DNA deep in some cell. It would be

great to know how this all works, but in the meantime we can enjoy

thyme in the knowledge that it probably doesn't do any harm (since

people have been eating it forever) and that it may actually do some

good (since people have been eating it forever) and that even if it

does nothing, we like the way it tastes.

It's also important to remind ourselves that what reductive science

can manage to perceive well enough to isolate and study is subject to

change, and that we have a tendency to assume that what we can see is

all there is to see. When William Prout isolated the big three

macronutrients, scientists figured they now understood food and what

the body needs from it; when the vitamins were isolated a few decades

later, scientists thought, O.K., now we really understand food and

what the body needs to be healthy; today it's the polyphenols and

carotenoids that seem all-important. But who knows what the hell else

is going on deep in the soul of a carrot?

The good news is that, to the carrot eater, it doesn't matter. That's

the great thing about eating food as compared with nutrients: you

don't need to fathom a carrot's complexity to reap its benefits.

The case of the antioxidants points up the dangers in taking a

nutrient out of the context of food; as Nestle suggests, scientists

make a second, related error when they study the food out of the

context of the diet. We don't eat just one thing, and when we are

eating any one thing, we're not eating another. We also eat foods in

combinations and in orders that can affect how they're absorbed.

Drink coffee with your steak, and your body won't be able to fully

absorb the iron in the meat. The trace of limestone in the corn

tortilla unlocks essential amino acids in the corn that would

otherwise remain unavailable. Some of those compounds in that sprig

of thyme may well affect my digestion of the dish I add it to,

helping to break down one compound or possibly stimulate production

of an enzyme to detoxify another. We have barely begun to understand

the relationships among foods in a cuisine.

But we do understand some of the simplest relationships, like the

zero-sum relationship: that if you eat a lot of meat you're probably

not eating a lot of vegetables. This simple fact may explain why

populations that eat diets high in meat have higher rates of coronary

heart disease and cancer than those that don't. Yet nutritionism

encourages us to look elsewhere for the explanation: deep within the

meat itself, to the culpable nutrient, which scientists have long

assumed to be the saturated fat. So they are baffled when large-

population studies, like the Women's Health Initiative, fail to find

that reducing fat intake significantly reduces the incidence of heart

disease or cancer.

Of course thanks to the low-fat fad (inspired by the very same

reductionist fat hypothesis), it is entirely possible to reduce your

intake of saturated fat without significantly reducing your

consumption of animal protein: just drink the low-fat milk and order

the skinless chicken breast or the turkey bacon. So maybe the culprit

nutrient in meat and dairy is the animal protein itself, as some

researchers now hypothesize. (The Cornell nutritionist T. Colin

Campbell argues as much in his recent book, " The China Study. " ) Or,

as the Harvard epidemiologist Walter C. Willett suggests, it could be

the steroid hormones typically present in the milk and meat; these

hormones (which occur naturally in meat and milk but are often

augmented in industrial production) are known to promote certain

cancers.

But people worried about their health needn't wait for scientists to

settle this question before deciding that it might be wise to eat

more plants and less meat. This is of course precisely what the

McGovern committee was trying to tell us.

Nestle also cautions against taking the diet out of the context of

the lifestyle. The Mediterranean diet is widely believed to be one of

the most healthful ways to eat, yet much of what we know about it is

based on studies of people living on the island of Crete in the

1950s, who in many respects lived lives very different from our own.

Yes, they ate lots of olive oil and little meat. But they also did

more physical labor. They fasted regularly. They ate a lot of wild

greens — weeds. And, perhaps most important, they consumed far fewer

total calories than we do. Similarly, much of what we know about the

health benefits of a vegetarian diet is based on studies of Seventh

Day Adventists, who muddy the nutritional picture by drinking

absolutely no alcohol and never smoking. These extraneous but

unavoidable factors are called, aptly, " confounders. " One last

example: People who take supplements are healthier than the

population at large, but their health probably has nothing whatsoever

to do with the supplements they take — which recent studies have

suggested are worthless. Supplement-takers are better-educated, more-

affluent people who, almost by definition, take a greater-than-normal

interest in personal health — confounding factors that probably

account for their superior health.

But if confounding factors of lifestyle bedevil comparative studies

of different populations, the supposedly more rigorous " prospective "

studies of large American populations suffer from their own arguably

even more disabling flaws. In these studies — of which the Women's

Health Initiative is the best known — a large population is divided

into two groups. The intervention group changes its diet in some

prescribed manner, while the control group does not. The two groups

are then tracked over many years to learn whether the intervention

affects relative rates of chronic disease.

When it comes to studying nutrition, this sort of extensive, long-

term clinical trial is supposed to be the gold standard. It certainly

sounds sound. In the case of the Women's Health Initiative, sponsored

by the National Institutes of Health, the eating habits and health

outcomes of nearly 49,000 women (ages 50 to 79 at the beginning of

the study) were tracked for eight years. One group of the women were

told to reduce their consumption of fat to 20 percent of total

calories. The results were announced early last year, producing front-

page headlines of which the one in this newspaper was typical: " Low-

Fat Diet Does Not Cut Health Risks, Study Finds. " And the cloud of

nutritional confusion over the country darkened.

But even a cursory analysis of the study's methods makes you wonder

why anyone would take such a finding seriously, let alone order a

Quarter Pounder With Cheese to celebrate it, as many newspaper

readers no doubt promptly went out and did. Even the beginner student

of nutritionism will immediately spot several flaws: the focus was

on " fat, " rather than on any particular food, like meat or dairy. So

women could comply simply by switching to lower-fat animal products.

Also, no distinctions were made between types of fat: women getting

their allowable portion of fat from olive oil or fish were lumped

together with woman getting their fat from low-fat cheese or chicken

breasts or margarine. Why? Because when the study was designed 16

years ago, the whole notion of " good fats " was not yet on the

scientific scope. Scientists study what scientists can see.

But perhaps the biggest flaw in this study, and other studies like

it, is that we have no idea what these women were really eating

because, like most people when asked about their diet, they lied

about it. How do we know this? Deduction. Consider: When the study

began, the average participant weighed in at 170 pounds and claimed

to be eating 1,800 calories a day. It would take an unusual

metabolism to maintain that weight on so little food. And it would

take an even freakier metabolism to drop only one or two pounds after

getting down to a diet of 1,400 to 1,500 calories a day — as the

women on the " low-fat " regimen claimed to have done. Sorry, ladies,

but I just don't buy it.

In fact, nobody buys it. Even the scientists who conduct this sort of

research conduct it in the knowledge that people lie about their food

intake all the time. They even have scientific figures for the

magnitude of the lie. Dietary trials like the Women's Health

Initiative rely on " food-frequency questionnaires, " and studies

suggest that people on average eat between a fifth and a third more

than they claim to on the questionnaires. How do the researchers know

that? By comparing what people report on questionnaires with

interviews about their dietary intake over the previous 24 hours,

thought to be somewhat more reliable. In fact, the magnitude of the

lie could be much greater, judging by the huge disparity between the

total number of food calories produced every day for each American

(3,900 calories) and the average number of those calories Americans

own up to chomping: 2,000. (Waste accounts for some of the disparity,

but nowhere near all of it.) All we really know about how much people

actually eat is that the real number lies somewhere between those two

figures.

To try to fill out the food-frequency questionnaire used by the

Women's Health Initiative, as I recently did, is to realize just how

shaky the data on which such trials rely really are. The survey,

which took about 45 minutes to complete, started off with some

relatively easy questions: " Did you eat chicken or turkey during the

last three months? " Having answered yes, I was then asked, " When you

ate chicken or turkey, how often did you eat the skin? " But the

survey soon became harder, as when it asked me to think back over the

past three months to recall whether when I ate okra, squash or yams,

they were fried, and if so, were they fried in stick margarine, tub

margarine, butter, " shortening " (in which category they inexplicably

lump together hydrogenated vegetable oil and lard), olive or canola

oil or nonstick spray? I honestly didn't remember, and in the case of

any okra eaten in a restaurant, even a hypnotist could not get out of

me what sort of fat it was fried in. In the meat section, the portion

sizes specified haven't been seen in America since the Hoover

administration. If a four-ounce portion of steak is

considered " medium, " was I really going to admit that the steak I

enjoyed on an unrecallable number of occasions during the past three

months was probably the equivalent of two or three (or, in the case

of a steakhouse steak, no less than four) of these portions? I think

not. In fact, most of the " medium serving sizes " to which I was asked

to compare my own consumption made me feel piggish enough to want to

shave a few ounces here, a few there. (I mean, I wasn't under oath or

anything, was I?)

This is the sort of data on which the largest questions of diet and

health are being decided in America today.

THE ELEPHANT IN THE ROOM

In the end, the biggest, most ambitious and widely reported studies

of diet and health leave more or less undisturbed the main features

of the Western diet: lots of meat and processed foods, lots of added

fat and sugar, lots of everything — except fruits, vegetables and

whole grains. In keeping with the nutritionism paradigm and the

limits of reductionist science, the researchers fiddle with single

nutrients as best they can, but the populations they recruit and

study are typical American eaters doing what typical American eaters

do: trying to eat a little less of this nutrient, a little more of

that, depending on the latest thinking. (One problem with the control

groups in these studies is that they too are exposed to nutritional

fads in the culture, so over time their eating habits come to more

closely resemble the habits of the intervention group.) It should not

surprise us that the findings of such research would be so equivocal

and confusing.

But what about the elephant in the room — the Western diet? It might

be useful, in the midst of our deepening confusion about nutrition,

to review what we do know about diet and health. What we know is that

people who eat the way we do in America today suffer much higher

rates of cancer, heart disease, diabetes and obesity than people

eating more traditional diets. (Four of the 10 leading killers in

America are linked to diet.) Further, we know that simply by moving

to America, people from nations with low rates of these " diseases of

affluence " will quickly acquire them. Nutritionism by and large takes

the Western diet as a given, seeking to moderate its most deleterious

effects by isolating the bad nutrients in it — things like fat,

sugar, salt — and encouraging the public and the food industry to

limit them. But after several decades of nutrient-based health

advice, rates of cancer and heart disease in the U.S. have declined

only slightly (mortality from heart disease is down since the '50s,

but this is mainly because of improved treatment), and rates of

obesity and diabetes have soared.

No one likes to admit that his or her best efforts at understanding

and solving a problem have actually made the problem worse, but

that's exactly what has happened in the case of nutritionism.

Scientists operating with the best of intentions, using the best

tools at their disposal, have taught us to look at food in a way that

has diminished our pleasure in eating it while doing little or

nothing to improve our health. Perhaps what we need now is a broader,

less reductive view of what food is, one that is at once more

ecological and cultural. What would happen, for example, if we were

to start thinking about food as less of a thing and more of a

relationship?

In nature, that is of course precisely what eating has always been:

relationships among species in what we call food chains, or webs,

that reach all the way down to the soil. Species co-evolve with the

other species they eat, and very often a relationship of

interdependence develops: I'll feed you if you spread around my

genes. A gradual process of mutual adaptation transforms something

like an apple or a squash into a nutritious and tasty food for a

hungry animal. Over time and through trial and error, the plant

becomes tastier (and often more conspicuous) in order to gratify the

animal's needs and desires, while the animal gradually acquires

whatever digestive tools (enzymes, etc.) are needed to make optimal

use of the plant. Similarly, cow's milk did not start out as a

nutritious food for humans; in fact, it made them sick until humans

who lived around cows evolved the ability to digest lactose as

adults. This development proved much to the advantage of both the

milk drinkers and the cows.

" Health " is, among other things, the byproduct of being involved in

these sorts of relationships in a food chain — involved in a great

many of them, in the case of an omnivorous creature like us. Further,

when the health of one link of the food chain is disturbed, it can

affect all the creatures in it. When the soil is sick or in some way

deficient, so will be the grasses that grow in that soil and the

cattle that eat the grasses and the people who drink the milk. Or, as

the English agronomist Sir Albert Howard put it in 1945 in " The Soil

and Health " (a founding text of organic agriculture), we would do

well to regard " the whole problem of health in soil, plant, animal

and man as one great subject. " Our personal health is inextricably

bound up with the health of the entire food web.

In many cases, long familiarity between foods and their eaters leads

to elaborate systems of communications up and down the food chain, so

that a creature's senses come to recognize foods as suitable by taste

and smell and color, and our bodies learn what to do with these foods

after they pass the test of the senses, producing in anticipation the

chemicals necessary to break them down. Health depends on knowing how

to read these biological signals: this smells spoiled; this looks

ripe; that's one good-looking cow. This is easier to do when a

creature has long experience of a food, and much harder when a food

has been designed expressly to deceive its senses — with artificial

flavors, say, or synthetic sweeteners.

Note that these ecological relationships are between eaters and whole

foods, not nutrients. Even though the foods in question eventually

get broken down in our bodies into simple nutrients, as corn is

reduced to simple sugars, the qualities of the whole food are not

unimportant — they govern such things as the speed at which the

sugars will be released and absorbed, which we're coming to see as

critical to insulin metabolism. Put another way, our bodies have a

longstanding and sustainable relationship to corn that we do not have

to high-fructose corn syrup. Such a relationship with corn syrup

might develop someday (as people evolve superhuman insulin systems to

cope with regular floods of fructose and glucose), but for now the

relationship leads to ill health because our bodies don't know how to

handle these biological novelties. In much the same way, human bodies

that can cope with chewing coca leaves — a longstanding relationship

between native people and the coca plant in South America — cannot

cope with cocaine or crack, even though the same " active ingredients "

are present in all three.

 

[Judy: He's making it sound like coca leaves are a healthy drug! A new raw

food?]

 

Reductionism as a way of understanding food

or drugs may be harmless, even necessary, but reductionism in

practice can lead to problems.

Looking at eating through this ecological lens opens a whole new

perspective on exactly what the Western diet is: a radical and rapid

change not just in our foodstuffs over the course of the 20th century

but also in our food relationships, all the way from the soil to the

meal. The ideology of nutritionism is itself part of that change. To

get a firmer grip on the nature of those changes is to begin to know

how we might make our relationships to food healthier. These changes

have been numerous and far-reaching, but consider as a start these

four large-scale ones:

From Whole Foods to Refined. The case of corn points up one of the

key features of the modern diet: a shift toward increasingly refined

foods, especially carbohydrates. Call it applied reductionism. Humans

have been refining grains since at least the Industrial Revolution,

favoring white flour (and white rice) even at the price of lost

nutrients. Refining grains extends their shelf life (precisely

because it renders them less nutritious to pests) and makes them

easier to digest, by removing the fiber that ordinarily slows the

release of their sugars. Much industrial food production involves an

extension and intensification of this practice, as food processors

find ways to deliver glucose — the brain's preferred fuel — ever more

swiftly and efficiently. Sometimes this is precisely the point, as

when corn is refined into corn syrup; other times it is an

unfortunate byproduct of food processing, as when freezing food

destroys the fiber that would slow sugar absorption.

So fast food is fast in this other sense too: it is to a considerable

extent predigested, in effect, and therefore more readily absorbed by

the body. But while the widespread acceleration of the Western diet

offers us the instant gratification of sugar, in many people (and

especially those newly exposed to it) the " speediness " of this food

overwhelms the insulin response and leads to Type II diabetes. As one

nutrition expert put it to me, we're in the middle of " a national

experiment in mainlining glucose. "

 

[Judy: " Note that " mainlining " is a term used for shooting up heroin. He's

saying Americans are all addicted to sugar and sugar-products.]

 

To encounter such a diet for the

first time, as when people accustomed to a more traditional diet come

to America, or when fast food comes to their countries, delivers a

shock to the system. Public-health experts call it " the nutrition

transition, " and it can be deadly.

From Complexity to Simplicity. If there is one word that covers

nearly all the changes industrialization has made to the food chain,

it would be simplification. Chemical fertilizers simplify the

chemistry of the soil, which in turn appears to simplify the

chemistry of the food grown in that soil. Since the widespread

adoption of synthetic nitrogen fertilizers in the 1950s, the

nutritional quality of produce in America has, according to U.S.D.A.

figures, declined significantly. Some researchers blame the quality

of the soil for the decline; others cite the tendency of modern plant

breeding to select for industrial qualities like yield rather than

nutritional quality. Whichever it is, the trend toward simplification

of our food continues on up the chain. Processing foods depletes them

of many nutrients, a few of which are then added back in

through " fortification " : folic acid in refined flour, vitamins and

minerals in breakfast cereal. But food scientists can add back only

the nutrients food scientists recognize as important. What are they

overlooking?

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.

 

 

[Judy: And it's a sin that consumers are given so few choices when they go

to buy produce.

There are hundreds of varieties of apples, for example, and we're given only

a few to choose from. This extends to all produce. We don't even see many

catergories, like white sapotes, as one example.]

 

From Leaves to Seeds. It's no coincidence that most of the plants we

have come to rely on are grains; these crops are exceptionally

efficient at transforming sunlight into macronutrients — carbs, fats

and proteins. These macronutrients in turn can be profitably

transformed into animal protein (by feeding them to animals) and

processed foods of every description. Also, the fact that grains are

durable seeds that can be stored for long periods means they can

function as commodities as well as food, making these plants

particularly well suited to the needs of industrial capitalism.

The needs of the human eater are another matter. An oversupply of

macronutrients, as we now have, itself represents a serious threat to

our health, as evidenced by soaring rates of obesity and diabetes.

But the undersupply of micronutrients may constitute a threat just as

serious. Put in the simplest terms, we're eating a lot more seeds and

a lot fewer leaves, a tectonic dietary shift the full implications of

which we are just beginning to glimpse. If I may borrow the

nutritionist's reductionist vocabulary for a moment, there are a host

of critical micronutrients that are harder to get from a diet of

refined seeds than from a diet of leaves. There are the antioxidants

and all the other newly discovered phytochemicals (remember that

sprig of thyme?); there is the fiber, and then there are the healthy

omega-3 fats found in leafy green plants, which may turn out to be

most important benefit of all.

Most people associate omega-3 fatty acids with fish, but fish get

them from green plants (specifically algae), which is where they all

originate. Plant leaves produce these essential fatty acids

( " essential " because our bodies can't produce them on their own) as

part of photosynthesis. Seeds contain more of another essential fatty

acid: omega-6. Without delving too deeply into the biochemistry, the

two fats perform very different functions, in the plant as well as

the plant eater. Omega-3s appear to play an important role in

neurological development and processing, the permeability of cell

walls, the metabolism of glucose and the calming of inflammation.

Omega-6s are involved in fat storage (which is what they do for the

plant), the rigidity of cell walls, clotting and the inflammation

response. (Think of omega-3s as fleet and flexible, omega-6s as

sturdy and slow.) Since the two lipids compete with each other for

the attention of important enzymes, the ratio between omega-3s and

omega-6s may matter more than the absolute quantity of either fat.

Thus too much omega-6 may be just as much a problem as too little

omega-3.

And that might well be a problem for people eating a Western diet. As

we've shifted from leaves to seeds, the ratio of omega-6s to omega-3s

in our bodies has shifted, too. At the same time, modern food-

production practices have further diminished the omega-3s in our

diet. Omega-3s, being less stable than omega-6s, spoil more readily,

so we have selected for plants that produce fewer of them; further,

when we partly hydrogenate oils to render them more stable, omega-3s

are eliminated. Industrial meat, raised on seeds rather than leaves,

has fewer omega-3s and more omega-6s than preindustrial meat used to

have. And official dietary advice since the 1970s has promoted the

consumption of polyunsaturated vegetable oils, most of which are high

in omega-6s (corn and soy, especially). Thus, without realizing what

we were doing, we significantly altered the ratio of these two

essential fats in our diets and bodies, with the result that the

ratio of omega-6 to omega-3 in the typical American today stands at

more than 10 to 1; before the widespread introduction of seed oils at

the turn of the last century, it was closer to 1 to 1.

The role of these lipids is not completely understood, but many

researchers say that these historically low levels of omega-3 (or,

conversely, high levels of omega-6) bear responsibility for many of

the chronic diseases associated with the Western diet, especially

heart disease and diabetes. (Some researchers implicate omega-3

deficiency in rising rates of depression and learning disabilities as

well.) To remedy this deficiency, nutritionism classically argues for

taking omega-3 supplements or fortifying food products, but because

of the complex, competitive relationship between omega-3 and omega-6,

adding more omega-3s to the diet may not do much good unless you also

reduce your intake of omega-6.

From Food Culture to Food Science. The last important change wrought

by the Western diet is not, strictly speaking, ecological. But the

industrialization of our food that we call the Western diet is

systematically destroying traditional food cultures. Before the

modern food era — and before nutritionism — people relied for

guidance about what to eat on their national or ethnic or regional

cultures. We think of culture as a set of beliefs and practices to

help mediate our relationship to other people, but of course culture

(at least before the rise of science) has also played a critical role

in helping mediate people's relationship to nature. Eating being a

big part of that relationship, cultures have had a great deal to say

about what and how and why and when and how much we should eat. Of

course when it comes to food, culture is really just a fancy word for

Mom, the figure who typically passes on the food ways of the group —

food ways that, although they were never " designed " to optimize

health (we have many reasons to eat the way we do), would not have

endured if they did not keep eaters alive and well.

The sheer novelty and glamour of the Western diet, with its 17,000

new food products introduced every year, and the marketing muscle

used to sell these products, has overwhelmed the force of tradition

and left us where we now find ourselves: relying on science and

journalism and marketing to help us decide questions about what to

eat. Nutritionism, which arose to help us better deal with the

problems of the Western diet, has largely been co-opted by it, used

by the industry to sell more food and to undermine the authority of

traditional ways of eating. You would not have read this far into

this article if your food culture were intact and healthy; you would

simply eat the way your parents and grandparents and great-

grandparents taught you to eat. The question is, Are we better off

with these new authorities than we were with the traditional

authorities they supplanted? The answer by now should be clear.

It might be argued that, at this point in history, we should simply

accept that fast food is our food culture. Over time, people will get

used to eating this way and our health will improve. But for natural

selection to help populations adapt to the Western diet, we'd have to

be prepared to let those whom it sickens die. That's not what we're

doing. Rather, we're turning to the health-care industry to help

us " adapt. " Medicine is learning how to keep alive the people whom

the Western diet is making sick. It's gotten good at extending the

lives of people with heart disease, and now it's working on obesity

and diabetes. Capitalism is itself marvelously adaptive, able to turn

the problems it creates into lucrative business opportunities: diet

pills, heart-bypass operations, insulin pumps, bariatric surgery. But

while fast food may be good business for the health-care industry,

surely the cost to society — estimated at more than $200 billion a

year in diet-related health-care costs — is unsustainable.

BEYOND NUTRITIONISM

To medicalize the diet problem is of course perfectly consistent with

nutritionism. So what might a more ecological or cultural approach to

the problem recommend? How might we plot our escape from nutritionism

and, in turn, from the deleterious effects of the modern diet? In

theory nothing could be simpler — stop thinking and eating that way —

but this is somewhat harder to do in practice, given the food

environment we now inhabit and the loss of sharp cultural tools to

guide us through it. Still, I do think escape is possible, to which

end I can now revisit — and elaborate on, but just a little — the

simple principles of healthy eating I proposed at the beginning of

this essay, several thousand words ago. So try these few (flagrantly

unscientific) rules of thumb, collected in the course of my

nutritional odyssey, and see if they don't at least point us in the

right direction.

1. Eat food. Though in our current state of confusion, this is much

easier said than done. So try this: Don't eat anything your great-

great-grandmother wouldn't recognize as food. (Sorry, but at this

point Moms are as confused as the rest of us, which is why we have to

go back a couple of generations, to a time before the advent of

modern food products.) There are a great many foodlike items in the

supermarket your ancestors wouldn't recognize as food (Go-Gurt?

Breakfast-cereal bars? Nondairy creamer?); stay away from these.

2. Avoid even those food products that come bearing health claims.

They're apt to be heavily processed, and the claims are often dubious

at best. Don't forget that margarine, one of the first industrial

foods to claim that it was more healthful than the traditional food

it replaced, turned out to give people heart attacks. When Kellogg's

can boast about its Healthy Heart Strawberry Vanilla cereal bars,

health claims have become hopelessly compromised. (The American Heart

Association charges food makers for their endorsement.) Don't take

the silence of the yams as a sign that they have nothing valuable to

say about health.

3. Especially avoid food products containing ingredients that are a)

unfamiliar, b) unpronounceable c) more than five in number — or that

contain high-fructose corn syrup.None of these characteristics are

necessarily harmful in and of themselves, but all of them are

reliable markers for foods that have been highly processed.

4. Get out of the supermarket whenever possible. You won't find any

high-fructose corn syrup at the farmer's market; you also won't find

food harvested long ago and far away. What you will find are fresh

whole foods picked at the peak of nutritional quality. Precisely the

kind of food your great-great-grandmother would have recognized as

food.

5. Pay more, eat less. The American food system has for a century

devoted its energies and policies to increasing quantity and reducing

price, not to improving quality. There's no escaping the fact that

better food — measured by taste or nutritional quality (which often

correspond) — costs more, because it has been grown or raised less

intensively and with more care. Not everyone can afford to eat well

in America, which is shameful, but most of us can: Americans spend,

on average, less than 10 percent of their income on food, down from

24 percent in 1947, and less than the citizens of any other nation.

And those of us who can afford to eat well should. Paying more for

food well grown in good soils — whether certified organic or not —

will contribute not only to your health (by reducing exposure to

pesticides) but also to the health of others who might not themselves

be able to afford that sort of food: the people who grow it and the

people who live downstream, and downwind, of the farms where it is

grown.

" Eat less " is the most unwelcome advice of all, but in fact the

scientific case for eating a lot less than we currently do is

compelling. " Calorie restriction " has repeatedly been shown to slow

aging in animals, and many researchers (including Walter Willett, the

Harvard epidemiologist) believe it offers the single strongest link

between diet and cancer prevention. Food abundance is a problem, but

culture has helped here, too, by promoting the idea of moderation.

Once one of the longest-lived people on earth, the Okinawans

practiced a principle they called " Hara Hachi Bu " : eat until you are

80 percent full. To make the " eat less " message a bit more palatable,

consider that quality may have a bearing on quantity: I don't know

about you, but the better the quality of the food I eat, the less of

it I need to feel satisfied. All tomatoes are not created equal.

 

 

[Judy: The reason this writer feels satisfied when he eats according to his

suggestions is because when we eat foods that are nutritionally dense, we

don't need to eat as much food.]

 

 

6. Eat mostly plants, especially leaves. Scientists may disagree on

what's so good about plants — the antioxidants? Fiber? Omega-3s? —

but they do agree that they're probably really good for you and

certainly can't hurt. Also, by eating a plant-based diet, you'll be

consuming far fewer calories, since plant foods (except seeds) are

typically less " energy dense " than the other things you might eat.

Vegetarians are healthier than carnivores, but near vegetarians

( " flexitarians " ) are as healthy as vegetarians. Thomas Jefferson was

on to something when he advised treating meat more as a flavoring

than a food.

7. Eat more like the French. Or the Japanese. Or the Italians. Or the

Greeks. Confounding factors aside, people who eat according to the

rules of a traditional food culture are generally healthier than we

are. Any traditional diet will do: if it weren't a healthy diet, the

people who follow it wouldn't still be around.

 

[Judy: Not true: Eastern European Jewish food is not healthy, even though

it might be tasty.

But Jews are still, thank god, around.]

 

 

True, food cultures

are embedded in societies and economies and ecologies, and some of

them travel better than others: Inuit not so well as Italian. In

borrowing from a food culture, pay attention to how a culture eats,

as well as to what it eats. In the case of the French paradox, it may

not be the dietary nutrients that keep the French healthy (lots of

saturated fat and alcohol?!) so much as the dietary habits: small

portions, no seconds or snacking, communal meals — and the serious

pleasure taken in eating. (Worrying about diet can't possibly be good

for you.) Let culture be your guide, not science.

8. Cook. And if you can, plant a garden. To take part in the

intricate and endlessly interesting processes of providing for our

sustenance is the surest way to escape the culture of fast food and

the values implicit in it: that food should be cheap and easy; that

food is fuel and not communion. The culture of the kitchen, as

embodied in those enduring traditions we call cuisines, contains more

wisdom about diet and health than you are apt to find in any

nutrition journal or journalism. Plus, the food you grow yourself

contributes to your health long before you sit down to eat it. So you

might want to think about putting down this article now and picking

up a spatula or hoe.

9. Eat like an omnivore. Try to add new species, not just new foods,

to your diet. The greater the diversity of species you eat, the more

likely you are to cover all your nutritional bases. That of course is

an argument from nutritionism, but there is a better one, one that

takes a broader view of " health. " Biodiversity in the diet means less

monoculture in the fields. What does that have to do with your

health? Everything. The vast monocultures that now feed us require

tremendous amounts of chemical fertilizers and pesticides to keep

from collapsing. Diversifying those fields will mean fewer chemicals,

healthier soils, healthier plants and animals and, in turn, healthier

people. It's all connected, which is another way of saying that your

health isn't bordered by your body and that what's good for the soil

is probably good for you, too.

Michael Pollan, a contributing writer, is the Knight professor of

journalism at the University of California, Berkeley. His most recent

book, " The Omnivore's Dilemma, " was chosen by the editors of The New

York Times Book Review as one of the 10 best books of 2006.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[Guest guest]

It would be great if everyone would read the whole article. But some people

don't have the time.

That's what my friends are telling me!

 

It doesn't come up highlighted. Sorry. I think we should all read all of

the article. I mean it is CRUCIAL work for America, period.

 

Blissed be, Annie

 

 

Anne Kaspar, C.A.P.H

Health and Wellness Consultant

 

www.bodybybliss.com

bodybybliss

 

 

[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]

 

 

 

 

Links

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[Guest guest]

It doesn't come up highlighted. Sorry. I think we should all read all of

the article. I mean it is CRUCIAL work for America, period.

 

Blissed be, Annie

 

 

Anne Kaspar, C.A.P.H

Health and Wellness Consultant

 

www.bodybybliss.com

bodybybliss

 

 

 

[Guest guest]

Anne Kaspar wrote:

> It doesn't come up highlighted. Sorry. I think we should all read all of

> the article. I mean it is CRUCIAL work for America, period.

 

When there are long articles and I'm a busy mom with 4 children at home,

I quickly scan it for highlights. It made a lot of good points about

FOOD vs NUTRIENTS. The final recommendations to cook your food and to

think like an omnivore and to try different (animal) species were the

only parts that made me go " huh? " . But all in all it was a pretty good

article.

 

 

--

Personal Blog: http://ec.lecti.ca