NUTRITION cover story in Times Magazine (Jan. 24, 07)

i did research work someone who did her phd on the nutrition rhetoric and the quantification of food, and this article touches on a lot of her points. really fascinating how relatively new this way of understanding food (and our digestive system!) is yet how it came to be so embraced by people, north american culture especially (lots of government help there, obv.)

digestive systems, man, total inner space odyssey land.

Ha, Jel, part of what this article drives home is that we're practically already there -- most of the processed foods we eat are just, like, corn or soy product, shaped and flavored like proper foods, and fortified with whatever nutrients science has figured out you probably need.

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Yeah, Robyn, the general post-war Science = Forward ideology is weird on this one. I can see how it'd be intuitively appealing to think you really knew what was in each food, and were being very clever about arranging them, or getting them in Pure Supplement Form! -- plus a lot of the time we like to think about nutrients as basically medicines, so we go from "you need more iodine so you don't get goiter" to like "I won't have a heart attack if I eat things with omega-3s" -- but no matter how much we go around that stuff, I suspect 99% of Americans know perfectly well, way deep down, that the healthiest things they could be eating are whole plain-ass vegetables. (It's kind of amazing to think about the attention people will put into label-reading and diet-fiddling when we all know perfectly well there's an easier way.)

I also notice the call here for, umm, biodiversity of eating, which suggests that Ned's 90%-chard diet is close but no cigar.

Though ha ha, my great-grandmother wouldn't have recognised as food anything that wasn't prepared by her cook and brought in by a servant!

The year before we learned that dietary fiber might not, as we had been confidently told, help prevent colon cancer.

They keep cutting further back on commas after introductory clauses like that one, which in a case like "Last Sunday he said..." is fine, but in a case like this is really annoying, and turns it into an incomplete sentence. The year before we learned all that about fiber ... what? What happened the year before we learned that stuff about fiber?)

well, one of the things i see a correlation btwn is the 'modern science' division of both the human body into its parts and food into its component parts - the typical analytical deconstruction as a way to understanding something that actually functions as a whole. so if you come from that view and also try to incorporate holistic medicine/science/thought, the whole thing becomes mindboggling - as we're seeing now, i think, with debates btwn dif kinds of medicine and health care, 'natural' vs 'man-made', etc.

so while in many ways the division has helped us see/discover things, it's also been a limiting factor - we sort of have to forget some of it in order to, in this case, 'eat right' - not simply balance all the component parts but see things primarily as wholes. and then we get into spiritual terrain, right, but geez, that's OK. i do love science anyway.

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The possibility he of course leaves open here is that nutritive science isn't a bad or misleading way of looking at food -- it's just that the state of it is completely surface-scratching and primitive, and thus it can't even begin to compete with the empirical wisdom of "what humans have traditionally eaten." (Which makes sense: we know a lot about the human body, too, but it's not like we can construct one, any more than we can construct a great diet from what we know about nutrients.)

other things that point to that being otm: bacteria and other micro-organisms, 'parasites', etc in the gut that work to keep us healthy, hydrated, nutritionized - they're just discovering some of them now and that's just the beginning, they think!

Often, these identifications have a resemblance to reality as I see it. For example, we agree that such egregiously manipulated foods as hydrogenated oils belong in the 'bad' category and that vegetables belong in the 'healthy' category. We part company on such foods as butter, wheat flour or sugar. I think of these as good ingredients found in good food and she tends to see them as treacherous foes - except when she succumbs to them. After which she swears off again, like a drunkard going on the wagon. For me, that attitude is what seems unhealthy.

I am just glad that her medicine vs. poison thinking doesn't lead to worse excesses than it does. I do feel much more comfortable when I do the shopping and cooking for us, though. Her attachement to food has too little affection and too much eccentricity for my tastes.

i linked to it on that cheap eats for college kids thread

i really liked the article, and am planning on reading the omnivore's dilemma as soon as i pay down my library fees. one of the better takeaway lessons is that food isn't medicine, or health/nutrient delivery, or poison. it's food. we should enjoy eating it because it tastes good, not because we need XXX mg of this or that each day. additionally, fast food may taste good, but slow food tastes better.

And the worst part is that non-processed food, especially in urban areas, is way more expensive than processed food (Wild Oats/TJs vs. Super A/Stop n Shop) (with the exception, at least in LA, of farmer's markets), so the growing unhealthiness of Americans is as much a class issue as anything else.

http://www.hipchicksmacrobiotics.com/

What do you eat?

Most people practicing macrobiotics mix and match from the following foods: whole grains, beans and bean products (like tofu), organic vegetables (local and in season), soups, sea vegetables (a/k/a seaweed!), desserts (sweetened with rice syrup, barley malt, fruit and sometimes maple syrup), a little fish, a little fruit, pickles (to aid digestion), condiments (to provide minerals), nuts, seeds and non aromatic teas. However, every person has different needs depending on their age, gender, lifestyle and ambitions. Plus, the real spirit of macrobiotics is about freedom; one eats healthy food most of the time so that one can eat more extreme foods some of the time. So people in good health can go out and "play", having a glass of wine, or a piece of chocolate cake, or . . . whatever, when they feel it's appropriate to the occasion. They then return to their regular macro foods in order to maintain their health and eventually "play" again.

why do you think everyone's decided that ethanol is suddenly a great fuel?? it's actually pretty terrible, AND requires tons of commercial agriculture to produce....

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there are things that aren't good for you, though, and seeking to limit consumption doesn't make you a control freak.

Soy oil biodiesel is probably a better economic and environmental bet than soy ethanol. Cheatgrass is being pushed on eastern Washington wheat farmers for its potential in ethanol production, and rapeseed for potential biodiesel production.

Actually, from what I understand, the clearing of rainforests is done primarily to permit grazing - not to grow crops. Brazil already gets its ethanol (which has allowed it to become independent of foreign oil imports) from sugar cane, which is a much more efficient source of ethanol than corn.

But this is a thread about nutrition.

i understand, and i agree on one hand. it's fucked. on the other hand, i think it's very difficult to avoid good/bad binaries with food because there are many things that are "bad" - either objectively ("mcdonald's french fries will make you fat.") or personally ("anchovies give me diarrhea.").

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Re: soy, we should probably be noting here that massive soy production (whether it's eating up rainforest or not) is surely more in the service of filling out processed foods than anyone actually purchasing and eating soy itself.

Re: good/bad, I don't think there's a problem with labeling specific food preparations like "McDonalds' fries" bad. But that's, like, a dish, and as such a very different proposition from putting good/bad labels on whole, natural foods (like eggs) or things that are fundamentally and invariably ingredients (like flour). I mean, most anything that's been a base-level "ingredient"-type staple of the human diet for hundreds of years is surely a reasonable part of your diet -- I guess if calling it "bad" is what it takes to keep your intake of it to a reasonable level, then fine, but it seems wrongheaded to just banish it entirely.

I don't know if they've become more scientific - in the sense of the scientific approach to eating that the Times magazine article questions. I think they've always been about a quasi-spiritual, holistic approach to food that can't be reduced to terms of chemistry or biology as understood by current scientific thinking.

more on the good/bad - i don't think there's actually an 'objective' part to it, that's my issue with such labelling - it really is all subjective, even the science. poor, villified mcdonald's fries, y'know? i never eat them but who am i to call them 'bad'? I guess what i'm really talking more about is a way of viewing the world here, that i am trying to figure out, and not really meant for this thread.
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IT IS DELICIOUS

U HAVE RUINED PORK U HEAR ME RUINED IT

I agree that the medieval medical view of the four humors was woefully inadequate, and it's easy to laugh at it now, but I think that the idea of linking diet to emotional or mental states was at least tenuously connected to something real, which has been lost sight of in most scientific nutritional discourse. Macrobiotic concepts may be laughable as pseudo-science, much like the Renaissance humors, but I believe that it's too soon to know whether or not they do correspond to factors that have a real effect on health. In fact the summary of what to eat from that Times magazine article bears more than a passing resemblance to the summary from the macrobiotics FAQ, so it's perhaps not unreasonable to think that maybe those factors are place-holders for something real, the full scientific basis of which has yet to be discovered.