More from Pollan

I'm back with a bit more from In Defense of Food by Michael Pollan.  In previous posts, I've written a kind of book report about this book.  I highly recommend reading it--I'm just touching on the highlights.  It really makes you change the way you look at the things you're eating.

As I mentioned at the end of my last post, Pollan goes into great detail of how the Western diet is the main cause of diseases such as heart disease, diabetes, etc that are running rampant in this country. 

He tells of an study in Australia in 1982 where a group of 10 middle-aged, overweight and diabetic Aborigines that were living in Western Australia agreed to be a part of an experiment.  They moved from their "civilized" homes to the homes of their ancestors--back to the bush.  In a nutshell, after 7 weeks, all had lost weight, had lower blood pressure, lower triglycerides and increased omega-3 fatty acids.  In short, they became much healthier in an amazingly short amount of time.

Pollan writes:

What we know is that people who eat the way we do in the West today suffer substantially higher rates of cancer, cardiovascular diseases, diabetes, and obesity than people eating any number of different traditional diets.  We also know that when people come to the West and adopt our way of eating, these diseases soon follow, and often, as in the case of the Aborigines and other native populations, in a particularly virulent form....[W]hen one Western disease arrived on the scene, so did most of the others, and often in the same order: obesity followed by type 2 diabetes followed by hypertension and stroke followed by heart disease.
 

Welcome to our world. 

So why does this happen?  Basically, it's the processing of most of our foods.  During processing, food is made to last longer so it can be shipped and sit on store shelves.  But to do this, nutrients--the things that bugs and other pests are seeking out--are removed. 

The interesting thing is that studies show that there is not one ideal diet to follow.  There are cultures that eat virtually all meats and dairy.  There are those that eat a majority of seafood and little dairy.  Some have lived on a mostly vegetarian diet while others eat very little green vegetation.   Yet all these cultures and traditions result in people much healthier than we are.  The common thread that runs through all of these diets--the consumption of fresh foods, whether animal or plants, that are high in nutritional value. 

Again, Pollan:

The human animal is adapted to, and apparently can thrive on, an extraordinary range of different diets, but the Western diet, however you define it, does not seem to be one of them.
 

Next time, thinking differently about our food.

More Defense

I'll continue with more of my "book report" on Michael Pollan's In Defense of Food. 

So one of Pollan's main points is that nutritionism rules how and what we eat these days.  We're more worried about the antioxidants and low-fat labels on foods than on what the food really is.  He makes the point that these nutrients that are added to so many foods, often don't really do their job as they do in nature.  They need the relationship with other chemicals and nutrients in the food to create the benefits that they were intended to have.

And often, these "nutritional" way of eating--low-fat, for example--sometimes lead to other problems.  Pollan writes:

Like most of us, they [researchers] assumed that a bad outcome like heart disease must have a bad cause, like saturated fat or cholesterol, so they focused their investigative energies on how these bad nutrients might cause disease rather than on how the absence of something else, like plant foods or fish, might figure in the etiology of the disease.  Nutrition science has usually put more of its energies into the idea that the problems it studies are the result of too much of a bad thing instead of too little of a good thing.
 

Of course, other factors come into play with regard to these diseases--social class for example.  Poor people don't often have the ability to exercise or eat fresh vegetables or fish.  Many only have access or the money to buy processed foods--causing a problem of obesity even in those who are most in need of food.  This, then leads to diabetes and heart disease in many cases.

This segues into Pollan's next major discussion.  Those of us who eat a Western Diet are the ones who end up with these diseases.  Next time, I'll go into a little more about that.

Defense, cont.

So I wrote yesterday about how the 1973 FDA ruling that foods can be changed without being labeled "imitation" opened the floodgates for food producers to add all sorts of "healthy" ingredients to our food. 

One of the most prevalent was the perpetuation of the fear about fat--that it causes heart disease, stroke, etc.  Recent studies, however, have shown that for the most part, this is not the case.  Michael Pollan writes:

Only one study has ever found "a significant inverse association between poly-unsaturated fat intake and CHD [coronary heart disease]."  Let me translate:  The amount of saturated fat in the diet may have little if any bearing on the risk of heart disease, and evidence that increasing polyunsaturated fats [such as margarine] in the diet will reduce risk is slim to nil.
 

In addition, there's little proof that dietary cholesterol leads to CHD risk.  Some say that reducing fat in the diet leads to weight loss, but again, there's little to support this claim as well.

If that theory were correct, when we're all trying to reduce our fat intake, why the rampant spread of heart disease in this country?  According to Pollan, you need to look back in time.

...during the decades of the 20th Century when rates of heart disease were rising in America, Americans were actually reducing their intake of animal fats (in the form or lard and tallow).  In place of those fats, they consumed substantially more vegetable oils, especially in the form of margarine, sales of which outpaced butter for the first time in 1957. 
 

Between the end of World War II and 1976, animal fat consumption in the US dropped greatly, while fats from seed oils almost doubled.  Yet, there were more people having heart attacks.  Hmm.

Heart disease dropped greatly during WWII and Pollan hypothesizes that it's because of the war's affect on the availability of meat, butter and eggs--not to mention sugar and gasoline being rationed.  Americans were eating less of everything--except fish, interestingly.  And they got more exercise because of the gas rationing.  A theory, but an interesting theory nevertheless.

Probably the thing I agree with the most in Pollan's book is the fact that industrial food production has been the downfall of our health in this country--with thanks to the government's nutrition guidelines.  Again, he writes:

The whole of the industrial food supply was reformulated to reflect the new nutritional wisdom, giving us low-fat pork, low-fat Snackwell's and all the low-fat pasta and high-fructose (yet low-fat!) corn syrup we could consume....Oddly, Americans got really fat on their new low-fat diet....

All this helped to change the way Americans ate--focusing on the components of the things they were eating rather than the experience of eating--the taste, the pleasure, the healthful whole food.  We want to eat antioxidants and beta-carotene instead of fruit and fish.   

I'll talk about that a little more next time.

 

In Defense of Food

I first heard of Michael Pollan while organizing a screening of the film Fresh a few years ago.  There were a lot of great points made by a lot of interesting people in that film, but his stood out to me and made me think about not only how important eating "real" food is, but how it impacts so many parts of our lives--the environment, the economy, health care, etc.

I recently read his 2008 book, "In Defense of Food" and it was eye-opening.  If you are at all interested in how food can affect our lives and health, then this is a must read. 

In my mind as I read the book, I was going to write a blog entry about it.  But there are so many interesting and worthwhile topics that he discussed in the book, it's hard to just choose a couple.  So, if you'll indulge me, I'll revert back to my junior-high-book-report-writing days and try to summarize what Pollan's book is all about.  It'll take more than one blog entry, but hopefully, it'll whet your appetite (pun intended) to read the book.

I admit that after reading the book, I look at everything that I eat in a different light.  His ideas are thought-provoking and make a lot of sense.  The last parts of the book are his tips and suggestions for how to eat.  Some of them are things that I already do--and maybe should do more of.  Some, admittedly, are just not practical--for me, at least.  I want a Coke or a Tastykake once in a while.  But just getting people to think about these things will help to change the food culture in this country, which is at the root of our eating problems.

Part of what Pollan tries to do in the beginning of the book is to define what "food" is.  Food is not necessarily anything we eat.  In his definition, we eat a lot more than "food".  He writes:

But I contend that most of what we're consuming today is no longer, strictly speaking, food at all, and how we're consuming it--in the car, in front of the TV, and, increasingly, alone--is not really eating, at least not in the sense that civilization has long understood the term.
 

Eating is so much more than just ingesting food.  It's about pleasure, communion, family, culture.  I recently wrote about how important eating as a family can be to the development of a family--especially the children.  (Click here for that post.)

But despite how we in this country are eating--filling ourselves with non-nutritious foods on the run--we seem to want to eat healthily.  Pollan talks extensively about how we have become "a nation of orthorexics: people with an unhealthy obsession with healthy eating."  An interesting thought, huh?

Think about it.  We are inundated by ads for weight loss, nutritional supplements, vitamins, fish oil, on and on and on.  Walk through a supermarket and look at all the items with some sort of nutritional claim--whole grain, fortified with vitamins and minerals, low-fat, low-sodium, added antioxidants, etc. 

This is "nutritionism".  The idea that eating is simply taking in nutrients--with little or no regard for anything else.  And our country's obsession with this idea has helped it to grow. 

Pollan tells about a 1938 act that required the word "imitation" on any food that was in any way changed from the traditional or common form of the food.  Milk with added vitamins and the like.  If anything was changed, it was "imitation".  But the FDA in 1973, repealed this rule while passing new food labeling laws.  Now, as long as the food was not deemed "nutritionally inferior" to the "real" version, it was not "imitation". 

With that, the regulatory door was thrown open to all manner of faked low-fat products:  Fats in things like sour cream and yogurt could now be replaced with hydrogenated oils or guar gum or carrageenan, bacon bits could be replaced with soy protein, the cream in "whipped cream" and "coffee creamer" could be replaced with corn starch....
 

Not imitation in the government's eyes, but imitation nonetheless.  And in most cases, less healthy, depsite what is told to us by the producers of these items.  It was the beginning of the confusion of food labels that is meant to draw us in with all those promises. 

Microgreens

Perhaps you've been to a restaurant that offers a salad of microgreens or you've seen them sold in a farmers' market.  But do you know what they are?  And why would you want to eat these tiny versions of familiar greens and herbs?
Well, basically, microgreens are young greens like radish, arugula, lettuce, peas, herbs, etc.  But they're even younger than some of the "baby" vegetables we see--baby spinach, for example.  These greens are usually no more than 14 days old.

While similar to sprouts (like bean sprouts), microgreens are different.  According to this NPR article,

Sprouts are seeds germinated in water just long enough (usually 48 hours) to grow roots, a stem and pale, underdeveloped leaves. Microgreens, on the other hand, need soil and sunlight and at least 7 days to grow before you can harvest them.

Microgreens have been getting more and more popular because of their sweet and tender taste as well as their look--really, they are kind of cute, aren't they?

But now some studies show that these tiny leaves give us a huge nutritional package.  From the same article:

The researchers looked at four groups of vitamins and other phytochemicals – including vitamin C, vitamin E, and beta carotene — in 25 varieties of microgreens. They found that leaves from almost all of the microgreens had four to six times more nutrients than the mature leaves of the same plant. But there was variation among them – red cabbage was highest in vitamin C, for instance, while the green daikon radish microgreens had the most vitamin E.
 

While microgreens will not overtake the popularity of their full-grown versions, it's good to know that great things can come in little packages.  As little fresh fruits and vegetables as we Americans eat, any place we can find to get these nutrients into our bodies is a great thing.

So next time you see some of these tiny greens on your plate, don't just move them aside like some common garnish.  Munch them down and get as much nutrition from your meal as you can!

Value Meals

There are lots of benefits to hiring me as a personal chef. 

There's all the time you save since I do the meal planning, shopping and cooking.  Clean-up is a breeze. 

There's the ability to eat healthy, delicious meals with the effort of popping a frozen dinner from the grocery store in the microwave (without all those ingredients that you can't pronounce).

But my favorite benefit that I can give to families is the ability to eat a good meal together.  It's the way dinner is supposed to be eaten.

A great shirt from Life is Good.

Growing up, it was rare if our family didn't eat dinner together.  I know times have changed, but my family still tries to eat together as much as we can--actually sitting down at the dinner table and sharing a meal together.  We talk about our days, listen to music and talk about food (you can teach kids a lot about food and cooking at dinnertime).  We go through Jake's folder from school to see what he did that day. 

Some people feel that they just don't have the time to prepare a family dinner so they go out to eat.  But as someone in an article I once read said:

If you think about it, if you count packing the family into the car, driving to the Applebee's, standing in line for 20 minutes, getting to your table, waiting for your food, checking out, paying the bill of 40-50 dollars, and then driving back home, have you saved any time at all?  No, definitely not.  And you've probably spent four times the money you would have at home.
 

I have no problem with going out to eat--I enjoy it.  But when families make it the norm, it just doesn't make sense.  It not only can be more expensive, but less nutritious. 

But families are constantly on the move--running kids to rehearsal, running to meetings, running home from work.  A recent study shows that 19% of American meals are eaten in the car.  I don't know if that's true or not, but if it is, that's freakin' scary.  There's just something wrong with that.

So eating meals at home saves money, is more nutritious and allows us to just settle down--even for a short time.  There are even more important reasons, however, for families to eat meals together.

Check out these statistics (from a few years ago):

• 75% of teens say that they talk to their parents about what's going on in their lives at the dinner table.  79% of parents say that's where they find out what's going on in their kids' lives.
• Of those kids who eat less than 5 family dinners a week, 60% say they wish they did more often (Not what you'd expect, huh?).
• Teens who eat 5-7 family meals per week are almost 3 times more likely to say they have an excellent relationship with their parents when compared to those who eat less than 3 family meals per week.
• Compared to teens who eat 5-7 family meals a week, those who eat less than 3 per week are nearly 2 times as likely to get mostly C's or lower in school; 2 times as likely to have used tobacco; nearly 2 times as likely to use alcohol; and 1.5 times more likely to smoke pot.

Clearly, the social aspects of eating as a family are major.  Meals have always been central to who we are and who we become. 

Sit down.  Enjoy your food and each other.  Build relationships.  When Dinner's Done can do that for a family, I feel great.  And so do they. 

MOO

MB & Jake enjoying their yummy burgers and soup.

There's a new burger place in Ottsville that we tried out for dinner on Saturday night.  It's called MOO.

It's not just your typical burger joint, however.  They use organic and locally produced ingredients in all their offerings.  The place is decorated with big portraits of some of the farmers that produce their ingredients. 

MOO started as a food truck in Wrightstown and has branched out with the restaurant that opened on January 23.  You can read more about how MOO came about in this article from Bucks County Taste.

They offer a somewhat limited, but tasty-sounding menu--burgers, hot dogs, fries, salads, grilled cheese sandwiches, chili, soups, birch beer floats, locally-made (NJ) sodas, etc.  The prices aren't the cheapest, but considering what you pay in a McDonald's or Burger King, it's well worth it.

Mary Beth ordered the Moo Burger--a cheese burger that comes with lettuce, onion, pickles and "moo-goo" (their version of special sauce).  Jake ordered just a plain burger.  I went with the Moink--the same as a Moo Burger, but with bacon.  (Get it?  Moink?)  MB also got some homemade butternut-apple soup.  Jake and I got fries, too.

I wish I could report that everything was wonderful.  Nothing was bad, but, for example, the fries were a little limp and could have (should have) been more crispy.  They made a mistake on our order--brought Jake's burger with cheese when it was supposed to be plain.  I chalked these problems up to simply being new.  I look forward to tyring it again in a month or so once they get their "restaurant-legs" under them.

As for the burgers, they were delicious.  The meat is ground on-site and you can tell.  The patties are hand-formed and have a nice crust on the outside.  They are incredibly tender and flavorful.  Mine was a little on the rare side, but I didn't mind since it was freshly ground.  So if burgers are what they're known for, then they're on the right track. 

When we got there, we were the only ones in the place.  But soon, it filled up--good to see for another local business promoting good, local food.

MOO is located at 4010 Durham Rd, Ottsville (right where 412 and 611 intersect).  Hours are 11AM-7PM, Monday-Saturday (closed Sundays at least during the winter).  You can find them on Facebook or call 215-317-3317.  Cash only (although there is an ATM on the premises).