Category Archives: Manufactured calories

Keep Your Enemies Closer

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Yesterday morning I looked down and saw a tiny ant crawling along the inside of my left elbow. I felt an urge to flick it away, but not to squash it. Keep your friends close and your enemies closer, I thought.

Researchers have discovered that the communities of microbes living in the guts of normal-weight individuals differ significantly from those in the guts of obese individuals. Researchers are also finding evidence to suggest that some common autoimmune diseases (like asthma) may result from decreased early exposure to bacteria, viruses, and other microorganisms that, in previous centuries, would have primed our young and immature immune systems, and protected us—later on—from these sometimes devastating autoimmune diseases. 

The extensive use of broad-spectrum antibiotics in beings of all kinds, including both humans and livestock, is being linked to a myriad of consequences, including severe secondary infections like C. dificile colitis, against which we might ordinarily be protected by the community of healthy bacteria harbored in a normally functioning gut.

You might say that the bugs are our friends. Maybe not that, but they are certainly our neighbors.

When my children were young and felt ravaged by the latest cold virus, I explained that it was helping them to grow their “antibody library,” which would be protect them as they grew. We strengthen the bugs and they strengthen us. We occupy the same space. We are not at war. We inhabit their world, and they inhabit ours.

Why does an obese individual’s gut harbor a different community of bugs? I am going to guess that one aspect may have something to do with what those bugs are fed. Perhaps if we feed them real food, the ones that work with us will thrive. And maybe if we feed them ultraprocessed, food-like items, the ones that work against us thrive, and the good neighbors cannot survive. Other bugs have moved in to take their place.

Have you ever made a project with papier mache? The recipe for papier mache, consisting of just flour, water, and salt, results in a glue that dries rock hard. You can count on that. Why does paper mache last so long? Simply put, it doesn’t disintegrate because bacteria don’t eat it. I am not sure what white flour does to the neighborly bacteria in our guts, but I will never be convinced that it nourishes them. Being fed bread and water puts me in mind of prisoners in solitary confinement.

The bugs in our gut are related to our health in every way we can imagine, and a great many more than that, I suspect. That’s why I recommend that you keep your microbiological friends close and your enemies closer. They may not be enemies at all.

 

The Maxwell House Haggadah Project

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In honor of Passover, which begins this coming Friday evening, I decided to write today about the Maxwell House Haggadah Project, a project of Nora Feinstein, a graduate of Barnard and the Jewish Theological Seminary. The haggadah is a short book that retells the story of the exodus from Egypt of the Hebrew people, and from which almost every Jewish family reads aloud at the annual Seder meals during which we celebrate the first (and sometimes second) night of Passover.

The Maxwell House Haggadah remains the longest running commercial promotion in American history. Its story begins in 1923, when Rabbi Betzalel Rosen declared that coffee was made not from a bean, but rather a berry, which made it acceptable (kosher) for drinking during Passover. Since beans are considered a forbidden food to Eastern European Jews during Passover, this changed everything!

The Maxwell House Coffee company, owned by a small Tennessee company that was hoping to make Maxwell House a national brand, had an idea. To break into the northeast U.S. market, they hired Joseph Jacobs, who was working at the time as an advertising coordinator for a number of Yiddish newspapers in the NY area.

The new field of niche ethnic marketing was still in its infancy: In 1933, Jacobs crafted ads that ran in the Jewish Daily Forward, a periodical so popular that it is still in circulation today. In fact, an article of mine about trans fats in kosher food processing ran in the Forward a few years ago.

Joseph Jacobs had the idea of providing a free haggadah with the purchase of a can of Maxwell House coffee, and the idea caught on like wildfire! In a short time, the new haggadahs could be found in almost every American Jewish home. In fact, according to Feinstein, to this day, eighty years later, Maxwell House continues to be the most popular brand of coffee among American Jews. That’s a rather successful marketing strategy, especially considering that Folger’s, and not Maxwell House, is the most popular brand in America overall.

Why do I tell this story here? Because whereas coffee appears to have beneficial effects on our mood, our concentration, and even our blood sugars, most products of the American food industry cannot make that claim. Yet niche ethnic marketing became such an extraordinarily successful strategy that it was used to entice and teach entire communities of consumers (e.g., Latinos, African-Americans, non-Jewish Eastern Europeans, Greeks, Italians, and just about any other group you can think of) to purchase and use items that they had never heard of before. These strategies included the underlying, subliminal message that the more new stuff you bought, ate, and fed to your family, the more American you became. And that was an absolutely irresistible message for a nation of immigrants.

That’s why it’s time to take matters into your own hands. Read ingredient lists; avoid stripped carbs like white flour and sugar as best you can; discard all trans fat-containing items (vegetable shortening, anything partially hydrogenated); load your plate with produce; and (re)learn to cook for yourself if you’ve forgotten or never knew how. Your health is on your plate.

You can learn more about the Maxwell House Haggadah Project here.

Happy holidays, gut yuntif, to all!