Unhappy Meals

original-NYTimesMag

Unhappy Meals

By MICHAEL POLLAN

Published: January 28, 2007

*Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.

That, more or less, is the short answer to the supposedly incredibly complicated and confusing question of what we humans should eat in order to be maximally healthy. I hate to give away the game right here at the beginning of a long essay, and I confess that I’m tempted to complicate matters in the interest of keeping things going for a few thousand more words. I’ll try to resist but will go ahead and add a couple more details to flesh out the advice. Like: A little meat won’t kill you, though it’s better approached as a side dish than as a main. And you’re much better off eating whole fresh foods than processed food products. That’s what I mean by the recommendation to eat “food.” Once, food was all you could eat, but today there are lots of other edible foodlike substances in the supermarket. These novel products of food science often come in packages festooned with health claims, which brings me to a related rule of thumb: if you’re concerned about your health, you should probably avoid food products that make health claims. Why? Because a health claim on a food product is a good indication that it’s not really food, and food is what you want to eat.

Uh-oh. Things are suddenly sounding a little more complicated, aren’t they? Sorry. But that’s how it goes as soon as you try to get to the bottom of the whole vexing question of food and health. Before long, a dense cloud bank of confusion moves in. Sooner or later, everything solid you thought you knew about the links between diet and health gets blown away in the gust of the latest study.

Last winter came the news that a low-fat diet, long believed to protect against breast cancer, may do no such thing — this from the monumental, federally financed Women’s Health Initiative, which has also found no link between a low-fat diet and rates of coronary disease. The year before we learned that dietary fiber might not, as we had been confidently told, help prevent colon cancer. Just last fall two prestigious studies on omega-3 fats published at the same time presented us with strikingly different conclusions. While the Institute of Medicine stated that “it is uncertain how much these omega-3s contribute to improving health” (and they might do the opposite if you get them from mercury-contaminated fish), a Harvard study declared that simply by eating a couple of servings of fish each week (or by downing enough fish oil), you could cut your risk of dying from a heart attack by more than a third — a stunningly hopeful piece of news. It’s no wonder that omega-3 fatty acids are poised to become the oat bran of 2007, as food scientists micro-encapsulate fish oil and algae oil and blast them into such formerly all-terrestrial foods as bread and tortillas, milk and yogurt and cheese, all of which will soon, you can be sure, sprout fishy new health claims. (Remember the rule?)
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complete article here

Seriously!

Related thread here
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=389&topic_id=79810&mesg_id=91315

More excerpts:

(...)

The story of how the most basic questions about what to eat ever got so complicated reveals a great deal about the institutional imperatives of the food industry, nutritional science and — ahem — journalism, three parties that stand to gain much from widespread confusion surrounding what is, after all, the most elemental question an omnivore confronts. Humans deciding what to eat without expert help — something they have been doing with notable success since coming down out of the trees — is seriously unprofitable if you’re a food company, distinctly risky if you’re a nutritionist and just plain boring if you’re a newspaper editor or journalist. (Or, for that matter, an eater. Who wants to hear, yet again, “Eat more fruits and vegetables”?) And so, like a large gray fog, a great Conspiracy of Confusion has gathered around the simplest questions of nutrition — much to the advantage of everybody involved. Except perhaps the ostensible beneficiary of all this nutritional expertise and advice: us, and our health and happiness as eaters.

FROM FOODS TO NUTRIENTS

It was in the 1980s that food began disappearing from the American supermarket, gradually to be replaced by “nutrients,” which are not the same thing. Where once the familiar names of recognizable comestibles — things like eggs or breakfast cereal or cookies — claimed pride of place on the brightly colored packages crowding the aisles, now new terms like “fiber” and “cholesterol” and “saturated fat” rose to large-type prominence. More important than mere foods, the presence or absence of these invisible substances was now generally believed to confer health benefits on their eaters. Foods by comparison were coarse, old-fashioned and decidedly unscientific things — who could say what was in them, really? But nutrients — those chemical compounds and minerals in foods that nutritionists have deemed important to health — gleamed with the promise of scientific certainty; eat more of the right ones, fewer of the wrong, and you would live longer and avoid chronic diseases.

(...)

An Omnivore's Dilemma. great read!

It's long, but I think everyone (or at least everyone who eats food) should read it. :)

Don't eat that don't eat this EAT THIS.

IF you want to be thin, attractive and envied.

If you are just another human, eat

And remember everything you eat today will be found to cause cancer tomorrow. Oh, and note this those veggies and "real food"?
They too are contaminated.So wash it with anti baterial veggie soap
http://www.tryfit.com/faq.php
Hmm, that kinda Potassium hydrate kills the organic mystique doesen't it?
http://ptcl.chem.ox.ac.uk/MSDS/PO/potassium_hydroxide.html

Organic labels mean nothing now that the label has been stripped of meaning. Really.
http://www.organicconsumers.org/articles/article_616.cfm
http://www.afn.org/~iguana/archives/1998_04/19980410.html


We are all gonna die some sooner than later.

What all this means to me is either A science don't know shit about why we get fat is it too much eating, inflammation due to pollution or bad bacteria in the gut genetics? what..NOBODY KNOWS but everyones got a pet theory.And they'd be more than happy to tell you how to live. Why do we age and lose that enviable look of a nubile 16 year old? What is death anyway? Too many cells in our body going apoptosis on us?

We are living longer than ever. Did you know an 80 year old was a remarkable thing in ancient egypt, Ramses lived to be 80 something and he was the only Pharaoh generations of Egyptian plebeians knew they thought for sure he'd live forever. He didn't. We can go see his leathery creepy old bod in the Cairo Museum.Now it's not uncommon to see 80 year olds around.

Sure we live a long time, but what about QUALITY OF LIFE?
If your quality of life sucks a long life seems more like a curse.

With 1 in 4 people with a case of mental illness in this country,Mental disorders are common in the United States and internationally. An estimated 26.2 percent of Americans ages 18 and older — about one in four adults — suffer from a diagnosable mental disorder in a given year. When applied to the 2004 U.S. Census residential population estimate for ages 18 and older, this figure translates to 57.7 million people...
http://www.nimh.nih.gov/publicat/numbers.cfm

Regarding Quality of Life..where does that kind of whopper statistics leave us? Suicide the leading cause of death in teens, those with the young healthy bodies the older of us spend big bucks at the plastic surgeon to imitate and look fresher than our sell by date..If it ain't your mom going nuts or your dad or sister or friend than most likely it is YOU facing down depression, schizophrenia or PSTD everyday. Never mind the addictions that are in evidence everywhere.


I have come to this conclusion that pursuing happiness ain't the same thing as living in happiness, no more than a packet of condensed soup cooked in the microwave is eating good food.

But also consider the planet is used up. Because the modern farmer didn't listen to the lessons of the dust bowl yet and take care of the topsoil . http://www.kevinbaker.info/c_taw.html

All our veggies are basically kept alive with OIL yes OIL. Fertilizing the unfertile land uses up more OIL than all the cars we drive.And the shit of pigs and cows is chock full of chemicals toxins bacteria and mad cow PRIONS.
http://www.earth-policy.org/Updates/2005/Update48.htm

Remember THE "organic" SPINACH with E Coli??

People don't seem to have the interest to pursue things that make them feel uncomfortable or anxious. They tell me to lighten up.
But you see I see what no one wants to admit and definitely don't want to dwell on long enough to put the big ugly picture together for themselves ..really. Yes,the planet is being poisoned by agriculture factory farms industry the military..Witness the sea creatures going crazy from chemical toxins and toxic algae. Toxins permeating the bodies of the fish where that Omega 3 oil you are popping in convenient capsule form comes from.
Millions of Birds drop from the sky and the stench of gas, scent tainted with rotting vegetable matter under the seabed drifting up as the planet cooks,into New York making people sick.

There is no escaping it,IF you really looked into what damage agriculture and civilization run by sociopath bullies a longstanding kakistoracy ever since the first empire transformed us from tribal groups, has caused us. After that consider the damage the solutions to those other problems caused and add it all up it has ruined the planet and poisoned the land the water. Here I don't mean ONLY the insane factory chicken,pig and cow farms, I mean also the factory fruit and big agri-veggies picked by a immigrant slave you never noticed before bought for around 18 bucks..
http://www.renewamerica.us/columns/kralis/060719


Even the " organic " veggies that are REALLY organic are still grown on a planet choking on toxic chemicals. That broccoli still gets a bit of run off from highways and polluted streams and toxic air that we all are breathing.. It seems civilization as we live it and planets mix together like cancer invading a host.And it seems because of the defense mechanisms in our minds called denial,and our compartmentalizing habit used to make big problems solvable looking so we can stay relatively sane as the world dies,, and the game of make believe that holds us in invisible bars we are convinced must be there and be real ,I can say the madness is terminal.

Eat what doesn't make you sick, for tomorrow it might. Survive the best you can eating whatever you can that does not sicken you.Because there are no saviors but you.And even little old you are not psychic enough to avoid certain contaminations. People eat white bread rats won't.But rats will drink anti freeze. Go figure.
http://www.environmentalhealthnews.org/


There's no government agency that cares about me or you, no hero on a white horse coming to make it all go away.. literally, That is reality.
http://www.unveilingthem.com/SecretCovenant.htm
And if comprehending all of it at the same time threatens to break your mind and crush your heart and to make you depressed, paranoid and furious remember you are not alone.. there are plenty of depressed mad mentally ill people out there who can see it coming just like you do.And be aware nobody likes a pessimist especially when they are correct.
http://www.unknownnews.org/051209a-Panther.html

Easiest question I've seen asked all day.

As far as health, I have to agree with you for the most part - if it isn't one thing, it's another. We've polluted this world to the extent that even "healthy" isn't always healthy anymore.

exercise.

I see no mention of the product at this site.....

http://www.tryfit.com/faq.php

being anti-bacterial.

Good thing too. The bad of anti-bacterial soaps and washes seems to outweigh the good by a wide margin.



From http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/fea/lifetravel/stories/DN-NH_soap_0102liv.ART.State.Edition1.3e1949b.html

(snip)
7. Eat more like the French. Or the Japanese. Or the Italians. Or the Greeks. Confounding factors aside, people who eat according to the rules of a traditional food culture are generally healthier than we are. Any traditional diet will do: if it weren’t a healthy diet, the people who follow it wouldn’t still be around. True, food cultures are embedded in societies and economies and ecologies, and some of them travel better than others: Inuit not so well as Italian. In borrowing from a food culture, pay attention to how a culture eats, as well as to what it eats. In the case of the French paradox, it may not be the dietary nutrients that keep the French healthy (lots of saturated fat and alcohol?!) so much as the dietary habits: small portions, no seconds or snacking, communal meals — and the serious pleasure taken in eating. (Worrying about diet can’t possibly be good for you.) Let culture be your guide, not science.

9. Eat like an omnivore. Try to add new species, not just new foods, to your diet. The greater the diversity of species you eat, the more likely you are to cover all your nutritional bases. That of course is an argument from nutritionism, but there is a better one, one that takes a broader view of “health.” Biodiversity in the diet means less monoculture in the fields. What does that have to do with your health? Everything. The vast monocultures that now feed us require tremendous amounts of chemical fertilizers and pesticides to keep from collapsing. Diversifying those fields will mean fewer chemicals, healthier soils, healthier plants and animals and, in turn, healthier people. It’s all connected, which is another way of saying that your health isn’t bordered by your body and that what’s good for the soil is probably good for you, too.
(snip)

His book is excellent too.

kick