This past summer, some 50 years after concerns were first raised about a possible link between trans fats and heart attacks, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) ruled that partially hydrogenated oils, the primary dietary source of trans fats in processed food items, are no longer “generally recognized as safe” in human food. Processed food manufacturers will have three years to reformulate their products or request an exemption. This action is expected to prevent thousands of fatal heart attacks a year. Multiply that by 50 years. Continue reading
Category Archives: Processed Edibles
The Message
Today I’d like to speak about something that has been on my mind all week, and that something is “the message.”
As we all know, over the past 100 years the processed food industry has developed ever more sophisticated strategies for influencing the public to purchase an ever-growing proportion of processed edibles to replace real food. And the industry has been so successful in this endeavor, if you want to call it that, that ⅔ of Americans are now overweight, and 50 percent are expected to carry a diagnosis of diabetes by age 65. Continue reading
Are You Kidding Me?
Is it me or is it April first? Processed food-like items seem like they’re getting stranger and stranger. I have to assume that the recipe down below seemed like a more-or-less reasonable recipe to somebody at some point, but the attempts of the processed-edibles industry to keep people eating nonsense seem to be getting desperate. Continue reading
On #Commodity and #Terroir
Today we’re going to talk about commodities. What is a commodity? When goods and services are traded on the grand scale for other goods and services, they become “commodities.” One characteristic of a commodity is that its price is determined not by quality, but by demand. The greater the demand, the greater the market. That’s what determines whether an item is a commodity. Continue reading
Keep Your Enemies Closer
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.
Let’s Start at the Very Beginning
When people want to talk with me about the blog, these are the kinds of questions they usually ask: “I went to your website and saw a lot of interesting posts, but where should I start? What is the first thing I need to understand?”
First, there is a huge difference between real food and manufactured calories. Second, manufactured calories are a major factor in the epidemic of obesity and diabetes, as well as the rising rates of many other diseases, such as breast cancer, colon cancer, and prostate cancer.
Let’s take a field trip, out the back door, and into a field of growing wheat. Pick a single grain, and take a good look, and what do you see? Each grain contains a bran fiber coat; an endosperm (primarily starch); and a germ, which is rich in nourishing oils. Approximately 200 years ago, humans figured out how to strip away the coat and germ, so that only the pellet of white starch remained. Manufacturers call this “white flour.”
If you could look at a bit of white starch under a microscope, you would see a long chain of sugar molecules. We break the links between those sugar molecules so efficiently that eating white flour causes your blood sugar to rise as quickly — if not more so — as when you eat a spoonful of sugar. White flour and sugar both cause blood sugars to spike.
Manufacturers chose to call white flour and sugar refined carbohydrates. But to refine is to remove coarse impurities. The term refined was selected specifically to suggest that whole-grain flour was coarse, or unrefined. In nature, carbohydrates are almost always found in a fiber matrix. Consider dates and beets, both of which are used by industry as raw materials for the manufacture of sugar. In their original state, they are so rich in fiber and phytonutrients that they are classified as superfoods. With only rare exceptions (e.g., honey, maple syrup), refined carbohydrates are not found in nature.
After you eat, your gut breaks down food into sugar, which then gets absorbed into your bloodstream. White flour and sugar are broken down easily; they are rapidly absorbed, and they spike your blood sugars. Foods like produce (fruits and vegetables), nuts, whole grains, beans, eggs, and meats are absorbed slowly enough that blood sugars remain more or less stable.
Once food enters your bloodstream, your pancreas releases insulin to catch the incoming sugar and escort it to the cells of your body. The more quickly you absorb sugar, the more insulin you need. The more slowly you absorb the sugar, the less insulin you need. It works like a valet service. Imagine you were invited to a huge party. At exactly 7 p.m., one thousand cars show up at the party center. They’re going to need a lot of valet staff to park those cars.
But consider an alternate scenario. Imagine you receive an invitation to an open house for 3-9 p.m. At the end of the day, the party center will still park 1000 cars. But they won’t need nearly as many valet staff.
The sugar is the cars, and the insulin is the valet staff. If your sugar shows up all at once, you will need a lot of insulin. But if the sugar gets absorbed bit by bit, you won’t need nearly as much insulin. Insulin is a fat-storage hormone. The more you use, the more you need. This is called insulin resistance. The higher your insulin levels, the more fat you store in your belly. Insulin has many other deleterious effects on the body, and they begin decades earlier than we once thought.
Which nutrients are absorbed slowly? Fiber, protein, and fat. Foods like bulgur wheat, brown rice, buckwheat, quinoa, millet — all whole grains. Dates, beets, avocados, peanuts and tree nuts, seeds, eggs, beans, fruits, vegetables. All of these are absorbed slowly. Which items are absorbed quickly? Stripped carbs, like cake, sugar, breakfast cereals, doughnuts, bagels, cookies.
Please feel free to post questions.
The Cost of Your Burger and Fries
I had intended to write about crackers this week, but crackers will wait while I share the news that Food, Inc., an Academy-award nominee for Best Documentary, will be available on line, for free, now through April 29th only, at Food, Inc. Billed by Variety as a “civilized horror movie for the socially conscious, the nutritionally curious and the hungry,” I urge you to find 94 minutes this week to watch it.
This news about Food, Inc. comes at a good time for “Your Health is on Your Plate,” because it was just last week that a reader named Julia commented on the higher cost of meat from pastured and grass-fed chickens relative to lower-priced, mass-produced meats. She expressed the concerns of many when she said that it’s a difficult choice to make when you are purchasing and cooking for a large family. But is it really true that mass-produced meat is cheaper? It is not. Food, Inc. explains why.
The money that we remove from our wallets turns out to be just one small part of the total cost of mass-produced, manufactured food products. The actual costs, a great deal higher, are transferred to three other sectors: health, the environment, and society as a whole. As a physician with a background in environmental studies, I stand at the crossroads where the three arenas intersect, and I state with authority that the costs are unacceptable and unsustainable. Health effects are reflected in the absolutely unbelievable rates of obesity and diabetes, and the skyrocketing medical costs of caring for those with these diseases. Environmental effects are made visible in the rivers of animal waste spewing from feedlots. And the parallel between the inhumane treatment of animals that become our food and the workers (without whom these artificially suppressed prices are not possible) who process that food is not coincidental.
In Food, Inc., I heard a family choose dollar-menu sandwiches, fries, and shakes over fresh produce, all while spending $70/month on the father’s diabetes medication. I saw photographs of feed lots filled with thousands of animals knee deep in their own excrement. I learned that the number of slaughter houses in the United States has dropped from several thousand to just 13 over the past several decades, effectively concentrating and destabilizing the meat processing industry. I was introduced to a woman who has campaigned, so far unsuccessfully, for safer cattle feeding and butchering practices ever since her 2-year-old son contracted hemorrhagic colitis that was caused by the E. coli 0157:H7 bacteria in the burger he ate 10 days before he died. Feeding animals a grain-based diet, which they did not evolve to eat, increases the risk of illness to both the animals and the people who consume them.
Eating well doesn’t have to be expensive. Eating meat every day is expensive, but eating different things, such as lentils, chickpeas, salads, whole grains (especially when purchased in bulk), and greens, is not. A few years ago, one of my patients, a janitor in a local high school, dropped 50 pounds and half of his medications over the course of a year or so. “How did you do it?,” I asked. “Beans and greens,” he said with a grin as he pounded on his chest and then opened both arms wide. “It’s the secret to my success.”
Jamie Oliver, the cook who transformed England’s school lunch program, has now decided to tackle Huntington, WV, with the highest rates of obesity in the nation. His goal is to teach families to prepare meals in their own homes by using real ingredients in place of pre-processed, manufactured products. I’ve been watching episodes of “Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution” as he wins over school cafeteria workers, a local disc jockey, and the many obese residents of a town filled with optimistic families. Jamie Oliver understands that teaching people to enjoy and cherish their food is key to teaching them to prepare it. And learning to prepare one’s own meals with fresh ingredients is the crucial first step to preventing obesity and diabetes.
Simple-food guru Alice Waters says that good food is a good investment. “You either pay up front, or you pay out back…in your health and your way of life and the health of the planet…” Jamie Oliver says that Alice Waters’s books “…bring her recipes to everyone. There’s nothing elitist about that.” For more on affordability, check out Dawn Viola’s post at Wicked Good Dinner, voted one of the 10 best food blogs of 2009.
In the current environment, a burger has become a better buy than a bunch of broccoli. Chips are cheaper than carrots. Easy down-payment, lifetime to pay. It reminds me of subprime, variable-rate mortgages. The actual price is untenable, unthinkable, and, actually, unaffordable.
According to Michael Pollan, this is precisely why change is required at the policy level. The “Farm Bill,” ignored for decades by most of us who assumed that it was irrelevant to those who don’t farm, is actually the heart of the American food system, and we will become more familiar with its content as we begin to make the standard American diet our own business.
Here’s more good news: We remain complicit only as long as we continue to purchase cheaply manufactured calories. The fact is, our purchasing power is substantial. We vote each and every time we open our wallets. So let’s get out there and vote.
Beverages to Spike Your Blood Sugar
Many people wrote to me about my recent post on soda and juice, so I thought it would be worth talking about the various kinds of drinks that are marketed to us right here in Ohio, the middle of America. Remember my vignette about the diabetic character on TV? Suddenly the character begins to act a little strangely, but she’s not too confused to murmur to her friend, “Help me check my blood sugar. I think it’s too low.” Sure enough. Now everyone on the set starts to run. What are they getting? Something with loads of sugar, something she will absorb very quickly. Like orange juice. Or a fruit drink, or maybe a coke.
So…sweet beverages like juices and sodas (many with 12 teaspoons of sugar per can) are good choices if you want to spike your blood sugar. None for me, thanks.
I decided to visit the “beverage center” at our local Walmart to see what’s in stock. I especially wanted to look at the names of some of these beverages. My hypothesis, borne out of experiences with margarine and breakfast cereals, is that the more manufactured the product type, the more creative the brand names.
Here’s what I found in the beverage aisles: Excluding carbonated drinks entirely, there was Sunny D, Powerade, Gatorade (11 flavors), Juicy Juice, Country Time, Tahitian Treat, Hawaiian Punch (many flavors), “Propel vitamin enhanced water beverage mix” (raspberry lemonade naturally and artificially flavored, and berry naturally flavored), and “Dasani Natural Lemon Flavored Water Beverage.” V8 Splash (not the well known V8 tomato juice) was available in mango peach, fruit medley, berry blend, and tropical blend, which also has a “diet” version.
Caffeinated or coffee-flavored beverages included Red Bull energy drink (original and sugar free), Monster (regular, mega and lo-carb), Starbucks Frappucino coffee drink in 3 flavors (coffee, mocha, vanilla), and Starbucks doubleshot espresso & cream premium coffee drink (regular and light).
Country Time Lemonade Drink Mix gets consumed in quantity around these parts, so I thought I’d check it out online. According to the official website, Country Time’s name is “reminiscent of a time when it was easier to get good old-fashioned lemonade.” The powdered mix was first marketed in 1975 by a TV character named “Grandpa.” Cans and bottles hit the market in 1982. Then came Pink Lemonade (1995), Iced Tea with Lemon (2003), Strawberry Lemonade (2004), and Country Time Light Lemonade (2005). The Strawberry Lemonade is “the perfect blend of two favorite flavors: sweet, sun-ripened strawberries and the classic taste of lemonade.” Or, you could buy strawberries and lemons, and mix them with sugar and water.
In addition to V8 and V8Splash, V8 makes a fruit juice product called “V8 Vfusion.” No matter which V8 Vfusion you buy, the first ingredient is sweet potato juice. The flavors at Walmart included acai-mixed berry, strawberry-banana, pomegranate-blueberry, goji-raspberry,and passionfruit-tangerine. The acai was listed 6th, the strawberry 7th, and the banana 8th in the list of ingredients. You’re not really eating tangerines, passionfruit or berries; you’re just eating the names. You’re not even eating sweet potatoes. And you’re paying a price that is much higher than the one marked on the bottle.
Among the powdered mixes, Crystal Light took the cake. The juxtaposition of the words “natural,” “flavor,” and “artificial” was curious. I didn’t even know about Crystal Light live active (with 3g of fiber), Crystal Light energy, Crystal Light focus, or Crystal Light sunrise prior to my Walmart excursion. Wouldn’t it be better just to get some sleep and exercise?
I also found Crystal Light natural lemonade flavor, natural pink lemonade flavor, peach artificial flavor, raspberry lemonade flavor, white grape artificial flavor, crystal light red tea, crystal light white tea and, believe it or not, “crystal light green tea natural honeylemon flavor with other natural flavor.” You can’t get a whole lot more creative than that. The word “natural,” which appears twice, describes not the product itself, but its flavor. It surely took a lot of work to figure out how to make those eleven words sound so natural.
So what else is there to drink? If you don’t care for a glass of cool water, right from the tap, or a glass of milk, or unsweetened iced tea, then try this recipe: Dissolve ¼ c. sugar with ¼ c. water in a saucepan over low heat. Set aside. Mix 2 cups of water and 1 + 1/2 c. lemon juice (fresh squeezed if you’d like) together in a large pitcher filled halfway with ice while you allow the syrup to cool. Stir the syrup into the contents of the pitcher. Add lemon slices, strawberry slices or mint leaves, slightly bruised, to garnish. Serves 4-6. To your good health!