You Are What You Eat- Part 3

The book I read where this information comes from is called In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto by Michael Polan. It was a great and informative read. Polan argues that the Western diet has made us more unhealthy despite the fact that Americans are obsessed more about the nutrients they take in than ever before. The problem with focusing on nutrients, Polan argues, is that nutrients have a food context, food comes from a cuisine, and a cuisine comes from cultures that have existed for a long periods of time living in the same place and eating the same things. So people have adapted to their diets for thousands of years. But more importantly, these cuisines usually consist of whole foods with little processing.

Processing makes foods last longer and makes them cheaper, but also strips them of their nutrients. Polan uses the example of a Twinkie, and how it never goes bad. Why doesn't it go bad? Because it has no nutritional value. We are in competition with micro-organisms for the nutrition found in food. If it will rot then that means it's good for you; micro-organisms want to eat it for the same reasons we do. Yet instead of eating foods that will spoil, we have a culture that lives off food which will last forever-- hamburger helper, macaroni and cheese, canned soup and pasta-- and much of this food amounts to a lot of empty calories and carbohydrates. In other words, we might have a crap ton of food in this country, but much of it is poor quality, and has to be fortified with vitamins because of the ways it is preserved. And while fortified food is better than non-fortified food, it's just not that same as "real food"-- that is, fresh fruits and vegetables and meat that comes from animals that had healthy diets themselves. Take whole grain.

For years we've been eating white bread made from refined flour. Refined flour-- or the plain white flour in your pantry-- is made by stripping the grain of most of it's nutritional value (the germ) leaving the starch and protein. Why strip it of the germ? Because removing the germ causes the flour to last much longer. Before this discovery, flour would rot rather quickly. When people first began living off of bread made from refined flour they began developing deficiency diseases. It wasn't until the thirties, with the discovery of vitamins, that this problem was solved. And in 1996 folic acid began to be added to flour as well, because people were deficient in folic acid. It hasn't been till recently that we've seen food companies and the media encouraging to us eat "whole grains."