Over the last 2 centuries, humans have studied nutrition, but has all that science made us healthier as a species?
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Key Takeaways
It is a common assumption that the human species grows more intelligent as time progresses. We are certainly learning more about how the world works from space exploration to the smallest atoms. Our knowledge is expanding.
But is all the scientific knowledge making us healthier when it comes to food? Scientific research has done little to make us healthier as a species, but rather it has done far more to ensure the profits of massive food corporations.
1. Nutritionism
Nutritionism an ideology of viewing food for its nutritional value, rather than its taste or tradition. This would be the biggest shift in the way humans ate food since the invention of Agriculture.
Liebig would go on to concoct the first ever baby formula consisting of cow’s milk, wheat flour, malted flour and potassium bicarbonate. This invention would reveal itself as a massive failure of liebig’s understanding of nutrition.
- For babies fed, exclusively on his formula would suffer serious health effects. Regardless of this failure Scientists were determined to break down food to its smallest elements and unlock its nutritional secrets.
Nutritionism is what gets us into that type of trouble where we have the hubris to think that we’re gonna be able to figure it all out. Yes you can identify this nutrient, and that nutrient, but what about all the stuff you’re missing? What about all the other information that’s related when we consume food? This is why the book is called in defense of food.
2. Failed Experiment
Enter the 20th century and the rise of the Kellogg Empire John Harvey Kellogg Considered a diet guru at the time went on an unfounded campaign to smear animal protein in an attempt to promote is much healthier snacks and cereals.
Kellogg convinced the public that protein proliferated toxic bacteria that destroyed organs and even spread the idea that protein caused obsessive masturbation. In the mid 1900s the focus would become fat, as Americans gained weight throughout the century the logical target was fat.
Short-sighted consensus would lead us to believe that eating fat makes you fat. Science and the media would support that logic by demonizing fat and soon every aisle in the grocery store was nonfat this or low-fat that.
As you do a little more investigating you uncovered that many of the studies that demonized fat in the 1960s and 70s were funded by sugar companies. The same thing happened in the tobacco industry with physicians approved cigarettes that could miraculously heal a sore throat, clean your teeth, and lead to a longer life. Of Course these studies and claims were all funded by the tobacco industry.
Today it’s the same story, but different culprit packaged foods are now covered with health labels of no carbs and sugar free. The science is now telling us that some fats are a necessary part of a healthy diet.
Monounsaturated fats and polyunsaturated fats, which are found in foods like fish, seeds, nuts, Olive oils, and avocados, are a major source of energy, help you absorb vitamins and minerals, are needed to build cell membranes, essential for blood clotting, muscle movement and hormonal balance. For the last 40 years Marketing on food labels has convinced the public that fat makes us fat which could not be farther from the truth
Yet many of us go on trusting food labels that claim to be backed up by science. What happens when we zoom out at the last two centuries and review all the nutrition science? You’d think that with all these studies and health revelations that the population as a whole would be much healthier.
If the goal of foods was to produce the most optimal, most nutritious food, wouldn’t there be ultra healthy superhumans walking around everywhere? The fact is the exact opposite is true. After all the studies and research, the Western world is more unhealthy than ever.
- More than 100 million people in the United States have diabetes or pre diabetes.
- About 70% of the population is overweight.
- 40% is obese.
- Heart disease is the number one killer of Americans.
Nutrition science may have its intentions rooted in the right place, but ultimately it has been manipulated to serve the capitalist profit machine not our health. Nutrition fads, health claims, and diet plans have fueled the food industry into a nine trillion dollar glutton. The bottom line is the Western diet is not good for health if this wasn’t already obvious enough.
60% of your brain is fat. To reduce dietary fat consumption without taking that into account is a dangerous thing. Recent research echoes the fact that this is a failed experiment and it was driven by this nutrient by nutrient by nutrient approach rather than the holistic.
Let’s look at it and think about a common-sense wise and again — eat food, not too much, mostly plants — and we get in trouble when we start eating non-food stuff.
3. Aborigine
We have startling proof of just how unhealthy the Western diet is when it gets introduced to an isolated population like the aboriginals—who for thousands of years lived on animals, they hunted and plants they could gather.
- Once the Western diet was introduced to them, the rates of obesity, heart disease, addiction, and diabetes skyrocketed.
- When aboriginals get off the Western diet, and go back to their traditional ways of eating they lose weight, lower their blood pressure, lower cholesterol, and dramatically improve their health in all areas.
The point here is that those Western disease influenced, chronic issues are easy to reverse in modern society. We should ask ourselves. How different are we from aboriginals? You just need to eat food, not too much, mostly plants.
4. Industrialized Food
A hundred years ago we were eating very, very different food than we are today. It wasn’t until the Industrial Revolution that we learned to do a lot of things to food that we simply could not do before the Industrial Revolution.
We moved from Whole Foods to refined foods. When you can industrialized food, you go from whole food to refined food. From complexity to simplicity. Corn, soy, wheat, rice for crops account for sixty-six percent of our calorie intake. That’s insane.
We move from quality of food to quantity of food. You have to eat three apples today to meet the equivalent level of iron that was in an apple from 1941. We went from eating a ton of leaves to a ton of seeds—those four crops.
Short story here is salads are your friend. We went from a food culture influencing us what our moms tell us we should eat to food scientists telling us what we should eat —that’s not a good switch. There were huge shifts with the Industrial Revolution as applied to our food processing and development.
5. Lucky Charms
Don’t eat anything with a health claim on it that it’s good for you. The American Heart Association gave a its seal of approval to Lucky Charms and the Cocoa Puffs, and two tricks cereals. Those companies that produce them paid the American Heart Association to get a stamp saying that Lucky Charms is health food heart-healthy.
Crazy to think that these are being put forward as health foods and the reason why they are is because we’ve bought into this nutritionism. We thought that fat was bad for us, so foods that have low fat and high grains, no matter how much sugar, have a heart-healthy stamp on it.
All kinds of other products that have gotten a health stamp from the FDA—frito-lay can say that some corn chips are healthy because they supposedly replace certain calories.
Simple Rules to Follow
1. Don’t eat anything your great-grandmother wouldn’t recognize as food.
2. Avoid food products containing ingredients that are: Unfamiliar, unpronounceable, more than five, and number.
3. Avoid food products that make health claims.
4. Shop the peripheries of the supermarket— the middle aisles are where all the processed foods are.
5. Get out of the Supermarket whenever possible and go to farmers markets in.