The food that we must eat

Here about the food that we must eat.

The government gives us the food pyramid as their representation of a good diet. They also come up with the "thrifty food plan" (the "healthy" diet that a person on food stamps should be able to afford), the WIC food packages given to pregnant and breastfeeding mothers and kids under 5 who are below 185% of the poverty line, and the school lunch program. I think there's little disagreement that the quality of food in school lunches is, on average, crap.

But the government isn't the only entity that tells us how to eat well. There are all of the various food companies and food industry organizations who each claim to produce healthy food. There are diet books galore that tell you to eat right for your blood type, drink tons of fresh squeezed juices, fast, limit how many carbs you eat, eat only raw food, go vegetarian, go vegan, and on and on. And there are people who follow each of these ideas. A certain percent of people are looking for a miracle food to save them, and marketers capitalize on that by selling pomegranate, acai, goji, mangosteen, hemp, etc, etc EVERYTHING.

I think that eating well comes down to a few pieces of advice I've heard from trusted sources. For babies, breastfeed! That one's easy. For the rest of us, we should go for a diet of a variety of whole foods, mostly plants. That means that if you can't identify a plant, animal, or fungi that a food came from, don't eat it. Salt and water are exceptions. It is really hard to go wrong when you are eating a variety of whole grains, nuts, beans, seeds, fruits, and vegetables. Animal products should be from animals raised on pasture. Organic food is preferable but not necessary. It's better to eat conventional fruits and vegetables than no fruits and veg at all.

My friend Hank Herrera coined the phrase "MESS:"

Food
Food is an edible plant or animal that grows, walks or swims on the earth and its waters with no genetic engineering, no hormone-driven growth, and no synthetic chemical substances to mimic natural qualities. Over millennia human metabolism and cultures have adapted to the foods growing in every ecological niche.

Anything else is a MESS (Manufactured Edible Substitute Substance)
Any edible substance other than real food is a MESS. A MESS has genetic engineering, hormone and antibiotic residue from concentrated production, and synthetic additives. Emerging research demonstrates that human metabolism cannot handle MESSes. MESSes subvert food cultures and food sovereignty. MESSes and the processes used in their manufacture and packaging contribute to the alarming toxic load that every human being now carries.

There you go. Our health care costs are going to be a mess until we stop eating MESSes. Yet right now, we - and the government - are guilty of what Michael Pollan calls "nutritionism." That means we focus on specific nutrients and ignore what the actual food is. Diet Coke has no calories and water has no calories. If you are only comparing foods by calories, then you'd assume they are equally healthy. Obviously, they aren't.

One reason we do this is because it's non-offensive to food companies. No media outlet (TV, magazines, etc) wants to lose the lucrative ad dollars of the food companies. And for the most part, whole foods aren't advertised. I've seen an occasional billboard for avocados, oranges, and milk, but most of the ad dollars come from MESSes. If you're a news show, instead of calling out specific foods, you can call out fat, calories, carbs, and salt as the evils that are wrecking our health and avoid offending your advertisers.

An example how this plays out in DC can be found in a hearing held by the Senate Ag Committee earlier this year about child nutrition. A representative of Mars candy company spoke, patting his company on the back for coming up with a special line of candy that was made to be sold in schools to kids. It had: Less than 35% of calories from fat; Less than 10% of calories from saturated fat; and Less than 35% sugar by weight. That ignores the fact that you are still selling kids candy in school as part of their lunches. Here's what Tom Harkin said:

So if I have a bar - more than 1/3 can be sugar? I have a problem with that. When I heard that, that means that if I buy something, 1/3 of that could be sugar! Ms. Neely's heard me say many times, a 20 oz [soda] has equivalent of 15 teaspoons of sugar. I just have a problem. If 1/3 of something a child can purchase at school can be sugar - is that really a good nutritional standard? I have trouble with that. I understand the 35% fat, I understand the 10% saturated fat... I think we need to work on this.

Yet he's not questioning the idea of setting nutritional standards that the junk food companies can duck under, often without making their products healthier in any significant way. And we are teaching kids that candy's not just an occasional treat, it's something you can eat with your lunch every day.

Here's the thing. Our bodies evolved over millions of years, eating ONLY whole foods. Our bodies are VERY good at regulating how much we eat and what we eat. There is a reason we feel hungry and we feel full. There is a reason we enjoy sweets and fat. Listening to the signals our bodies send us is a good thing, a necessary thing. Yet we as a society tend to believe it's a bad thing and instead we must restrict the amount we eat and fight our bodies' natural needs. People feel guilty, even. They think they are failures.

One friend of mine insists over and over that the problem with food and obesity is education. Trust me, a fat person is WELL aware that eating makes you fat and being fat is unhealthy. They aren't stupid. They might not know that MESSes are the problem, but I'd bet you that most thin people don't know that either.

When you try to go on some sort of restrictive diet and you fight your body's needs, your body is going to (usually, at some point) win. It's going to give you signals that, at some point, compel you to meet its needs. In other words, it'll make you eat. If you eat when you're moderately hungry, you're rational enough to make a good food choice. You aren't so hungry that you don't mind taking the time to cook, or head out to a place that serves healthy food.

If you are STARVING, you shove whatever you can get into your mouth ASAP. I do this too. If I'm planning ahead, and I'm a little hungry, I'll stick some carrots in the oven for an hour, or for a quicker meal I'll steam some green beans. If I am starving, the first thing I see goes into my mouth, and if that's ice cream, then ice cream is dinner. (That's why I don't often buy pints of ice cream to keep around... instead I try to keep fruit around for when I'm starving.)

Here's where the whole foods, mostly plants, comes in. They were set up to work with your body's natural system of telling you when to eat and when to stop eating. The MESSes are incompatible with your body's signals. Your body is trying to play by the old rules it evolved to play by, and you're giving it new rules that it can't adapt to. You don't need a scientist to tell you how to eat. If you eat a variety of real foods, your body can tell you what you need.

As far as animal products go, when you get pasture-raised animal products, they are going to cost more. If you still want to eat them, the way to handle the increased cost is to eat less of them (compared to how much you would eat factory farmed products). I spoke to a nutritionist yesterday who told me she thinks meat is an important part of a healthy diet, but she thinks it's only necessary to eat about 3 oz of it every 3-4 days. That's nearly like being a vegetarian.

The truth is, I don't know how much meat is the right amount. I haven't seen any evidence that one needs meat to live and be healthy. If you get your vitamin B12 from somewhere, you can be a healthy vegan too. But if you want to eat meat, I haven't seen a good guideline from a credible source (other than the nutritionist I just spoke to) that gives an idea of how much to eat.

The US government says 4-6 oz per day (or less). My hunch is that's too much, especially when taken together with the USDA's recommendation for dairy consumption. Long story short is that we eat too much meat. By a lot. Historically, we eat much more than we did several decades ago, pre-obesity epidemic.

In 1960, the average American ate 28 lbs of chicken, 60 lbs of pork, and 65 lbs of beef. In 2006, the average person ate 87 lbs of chicken. Chicken consumption surpassed pork consumption around 1985 (per capita pork consumption slightly declined over time). Meanwhile, beef consumption rose from 1960 until the late 1970's, peaking around 95 lbs per person... Beef consumption fell since then until about 1990 and stayed more or less stable since then, around 65 lbs per person in 2006 - same as it was in 1960. Chicken consumption surpassed beef consumption in the first half of the 1990's.

If we just went back to the levels we ate in 1960 by reducing consumption of beef, pork, and chicken, we'd be better off than we are now. Especially if we reduced consumption of beef and pork (according to a study that found higher mortality linked to red meat consumption, including pork).