After posting my goal for this week, my friend M commented that she thinks of foods making health food claims to be items like Goji berries and Noni juice. Foods that you wouldn't ordinarily eat except that they claim to cure what might ail you. I don't have anything of this nature in my kitchen. I don't even take vitamins, although my husband assures me that I should be taking supplements. The general care of my health is an entirely different dissertation altogether, based naturally in the family culture in which I was raised.
Pollan goes deeply into food engineering in Omnivore's Dilemma. The ideas that remain with me from reading OD is when diet trends change, the industrial food complex processes and markets food in new ways to meet the specifics of that trend. Low fat, low carb, heart healthy, South beach Diet, and so on. In Food Rules, he simply states that most items that make big health claims do so on their splashy colorful packaging. Food that comes in splashy colorful packages is typically among the most processed. And oftentimes based upon bad science.
Consider the trend and marketing of margarine. I remember this especially vividly during my childhood in the 1970's. Margarine is made by adding hydrogen atoms to fat molecules to make them more saturated and thus reduce their melting temperature. Some cubes of margarine can stand on your kitchen counter without melting or even softening up to temperatures of 98F. Neither molds nor insects are attracted to margarine...because it isn't meant naturally to be a food. This frightens me. Additionally, the hydrogenation produces unhealthy trans fats which is the worst kind of fat we can ingest. So despite the lower comparative cholesterol of margarine (compared to butter), some margarines are even worse for you than butter. And ultimately margarine is created in a lab. Do we really need to eat food that is created in a lab on a daily basis? (I exclude the kitchens of Jose Andres, Wylie Dufresne and Grant Achatz in the lab category, although I certainly wouldn't eat in any of their restaurants daily.) For more information on the process and product of margarine, read Dane Roubos's The Margarine Hoax, originally published in Nexus Magazine, 1997. Read Dr. Martha Grogan's butter vs margarine comparison on the Mayo Clinic website.
So, when Pollan advises we steer clear of foods that make health claims, I will not be eating the following items in my kitchen right now: Diet Coke, Special K, Cheerios, Pam, Progresso Low Sodium Soup, etc. Naturally, as a result of this project I am not eating these items anyway. My husband has made no such comittment. He continues to happily munch his Cheerios in low fat milk every morning.
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4 comments:
I knew this girl in college who was part of a shared summerhouse trip with me and some of my friends. She was SHOCKED when we used butter to make biscuits one morning, claiming her nutritionist mom called it "yellow death". I replied that my dad was a chemical engineer and after he told me what was in margarine, I had no interest in eating THAT stuff. Better yellow death than chemical death.
Nice to be vindicated in some sense, ten years later!
Margarine would not have darkened my mother's kitchen doorstep. It is and always has been about natural ingredients. I don't use butter often in my own cooking, but I see no reason to fear it within reason. It's so funny how our perceptions of what is healthy is so dependent upon the media and marketing.
Years ago, I said to a very dear friend, 'You really ought to have more fruit in your diet.' His response, 'My idea of fruit is a Fig Newton;'
He's read all of Pollan's books and over time he has actually put real fruit into his diet....but he too also 'continues to happily munch his Cheerios in low fat milk every morning.' Calls it his comfort food. What can I say?
It,
My husband is much like your friend with his Cheerios and knowledge of a healthy diet. He still drinks a couple diet cokes a day despite fully understanding the health risks. We have tried green and black hot tea, and even bottles of iced tea all to no long lasting avail. What can one say indeed?
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