Food for Thought, part II: Knowledge

When I started college there were three career paths I was interested in pursuing: business (my first business class put an end to that, it was soooo boring), English (understatement: I love to read), and nutrition. I had great hopes for nutrition; I loved to read magazine and news articles about food and nutrition and found it very interesting but confusing. I took Nutrition 101 my first semester of college. It was a night class taught by a very pregnant professor from Kenya who I had great difficulty understanding. This class killed my hopes of nutrition as a major. What I found confusing about nutrition was amplified in this class.

In 1996, when I started college, was the heyday of micro-nutritionism (i.e. all they taught and talked about was vitamins, minerals and other nutrients with heavy focus on the "super" nutrient of the moment without context to the actual foods in which they are found. That is what I found so confusing and which still confuses most people about good nutrition.) The whole food movement had started but it had not yet reached the news articles in popular magazines and college classrooms at that time. If I had attended a school where nutrition was taught from the whole foods perspective, I would have become a nutritionist instead I ended up majoring in elementary and special education for reasons I still don't understand myself.

In the years following that ill-fated nutrition class, I tried to learn more about nutrition and healthy eating but as mentioned above, it was confusing. Much of the information was confusing and contradictory. I ate as healthy as I could based upon my knowledge, resources and time available to devote to it. A few months after my wedding I met a woman at church who introduced me to Eating Well magazine. In this magazine I finally found what I had been looking for in terms of whole food nutrition information and delicious healthy recipes. After sampling several recipes from its website (all recipes from the magazine are available free on the website) I subscribed to the magazine and have for the last three years. Over 75% of the meals I cook come from recipes in this magazine. With one or two exceptions I have liked every recipe I have tried and the exceptions had more to do with personal taste than anything wrong with the recipe.

Eating Well also opened up a whole new realm of literature on food and nutrition for me. It was in that magazine that I first heard about The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meal
by Michael Pollan. I read this book about a year and half ago. Four months ago I read another book by Pollan In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto.
Pollan is an investigative journalist, not a nutritionist or someone else professionally involved with food or nutrition, and because of that I found his books to be articulate and understandable to the average reader unlike many books I had read by nutrition professionals. Since reading Pollan's books I now feel that I can read a food label with some degree of competence (before I read them because I felt I ought to even though I did not understand them). I avoid, as much as possible, buying processed foods and if I do buy any I buy ones with a short ingredient list, with ingredients that I can actually pronounce and recognize, and hopefully without high fructose corn syrup.

A week after I finishing In Defense of Food I read The End of Overeating by David Kessler, M.D, a former FDA commissioner. Reading these two books close together will prompt almost anyone to never buy processed or fast food again, and instill a strong desire to plant a garden or start a small hobby farm. While The End of Overeating is not as accessible to average reader as Pollan's book, in some respects the way it is written does drive home some important facts more forcefully than Pollan's books. The first part of the book is devoted to research on what food combinations in terms of fat, sugar, salt cause people to overeat and which can be addictive. The second part of the book then details how the food industry takes these studies and applies them to make their food more "palatable," in other words, they design processed food to be overeaten so the consumer will buy more. Even commercial diet foods use this research to make their foods more palatable.

Next I read The Unhealthy Truth: How Our Food is Making us Sick and What We Can Do About It
by Robyn O'Brien. This also was an eye opening look at food especially into food preservatives, food colors, genetically engineered food, and growth hormones used in dairy cows. O'Brien is, like me, a housewife whose daughter violent allergic reaction to eggs prompted her to do in depth research into allergies and then into the food industry. Most of the book is about the research and studies she uncovered, especially in from European sources. In Europe most studies are funded by the government not the food industry like the US. In Europe, as well, many food additives and colors, so prevalent in US foods, are outlawed. Genetically engineered food in Europe also must be labeled as such whereas in the US in it voluntary. I would recommend this book to anyone with children or just wants to be more informed with one caveat: I found her frequent references to herself as "Mama Bear" rather tiresome.

Yes, the way I ate changed after my marriage but added to knowledge I gained from these books has prompted me even more. One thing that has changed the most is how I look at processed foods: now I call them food-like substances that have a little natural food in them but they are mostly chemicals. With a few exceptions I make most of what we eat from scratch. We eat meat 2-3 times a week, and vegetarian the other nights. If I was a working mom pressed for time, I probably would not have changed to making everything from scratch. But as a stay at home mom, I have the time and, really, after I got used to it, it does not add that much time on to my day as long as I plan ahead. There was also the added benefit that our food expenditures have gone down.

 

Part III: Kids, coming soon

*Currently reading What to Eat
by Marion Nestle. I would call it a supermarket survival guide.