Many years ago, before we knew as much about nutrition and all the components of diet (i.e. what’s ‘good’ and ‘bad’ for us), most people were healthier than we are today. Lower rates of cancer, heart disease, diabetes. So what’s wrong?
Michael Pollan, author of The Omnivore’s Dilemma and other books, believes science is part of the problem. In a recent New York Times essay titled “Unhappy Meals,” he describes how nutritionists have depended too much on the accepted scientific technique of reductionism: reducing what we eat into component parts and studying them one by one, rather than the relationships between all the components in a particular food – or the relationships between foods and the people who eat them.
The result is that we get a continuous – and often contradictory – stream of recommendations about various components in our diet, like saturated fat, cholesterol, antioxidants, vitamins, omega-3 oils, and so on. Food makers have complied with a vast array of products that are fortified with vitamins, or are lowfat or low-carb, or contain sugar substitutes. But what they add in or take out may actually be disturbing a complex relationship between the different components of a particular food.
And in the meantime, the diet of Americans has kept making us less healthy, because it contains too much of just about everything except fruits, vegetables and whole grains. Mr. Pollan recommends that if we want to eat right, we need to get back to basics. Here are a few of his suggestions:
- Eat food, and stay away from items that have been heavily processed or refined. Mr. Pollan recommends this simple guideline: eat foods your great-grandmother would have recognized.
- Avoid foods with health claims. This means they’ve been heavily processed, and their health claims are likely to be overturned with the next study.
- Avoid products with ingredients that are unfamiliar or unpronounceable.
- Be willing to pay more for better food, and eat less of it.
- Eat mostly plants, especially leaves. (You don’t have to give up meat entirely; vegetarians tend to be healthier than meat-eaters, but near-vegetarians are just as healthy as vegetarians.)
- Cook your own food as much as possible.
- Eat a diverse diet. The more variety in what you eat, the more likely you are to be obtaining all the nutrients you need.
Sometimes the simplest advice is the most difficult to follow. But when it comes to what we eat, most of us would probably be better off if we stopped trying to keep up with the latest nutritional studies and instead followed the simple advice above.
Dr.Mike
