Articles

Integrative Nutrition: Feed Your Hunger for Health and Happiness

By Joshua Rosenthal

The Food Our Ancestors Ate

Throughout history people have eaten food essentially as nature produced it. People ate whole and unprocessed vegetables, fruit, grains and beans and chicken, fish and other animal foods. Small amounts of sugar and honey or some wine and beer in the diet were balanced by regular physical labor, from sunrise to sunset, for every member of the family. They had no cars, planes, trains or bicycles for transportation. Life was active.

Our ancestors would not recognize the food in today's supermarket. In the last 100 years or so, large-scale food processing has become the norm. Breads and other baked goods that were once made of whole-grain flour are now made from processed, white, bleached flour that is far less nutritious. American consumers have developed a taste for processed foods like pastries, cookies, crackers, chips and other foods that are far removed from their origins. I think most people would agree that Doritos don't grow on trees.

Many people don't realize that processing food strips it of many nutrients. Think of the difference between white bread and wheat bread. Both come from wheat. But wheat bread uses the entire grain, while white bread is made by removing the bran and the germ (parts of the grain) during the milling process. Manufacturers remove these parts to create lighter, fluffier bread and to extend its shelf life. The germ, specifically, contains natural oils that could make bread go rancid. Wonder Bread can sit on the shelf for about 21 days before it loses its moisture and gets hard, while bakeries typically sell their fresh-baked bread within 24 hours.

In addition to leaving out or removing essential nutrients, processing foods generally involves adding sweeteners, colors, flavors and preservatives. Manufacturers now add sugar to everything from ketchup to toothpaste. Supermarket shelves are filled with highly chemicalized foods, including soft drinks, packaged snacks, frozen dinners, boxed desserts and condiments. Nearly all of these items contain artificial ingredients, rather than fresh, natural ingredients.

Sometimes manufacturers try to reintroduce nutrients to foods by a process called enrichment. But a laboratory can't possibly reintroduce all the vitamins, minerals, carotenoids, phytochemicals and fiber that the original plant source contains. A single tomato contains more than 10,000 phytochemicals. (Scientists believe phytochemicals may protect cells from the damaging effects of toxic substances that can result in cancer and heart disease). When you see the word "enriched" on bread labels, such as "enriched white flour" or "enriched wheat flour," it means they took out the good stuff in the processing and tried to put some of it back at the end. A similar process occurs with fortified cereals, which typically feature highly processed grains and sweeteners, dosed with a few vitamins. A simple way to think about enriched foods is to imagine you have $100 in your wallet. If someone stole the $100, but then decided to put back $20, would you feel enriched? I think most people would feel like they're still missing $80.

The fact that we have to inject nutrients back into our food demonstrates how strange our eating habits have become. Not that long ago, we ate what was fresh and available. Now we eat foods that are cheap, fast and convenient with little thought about whether they give our bodies the nutrients we need to get us through our day. I wonder what our ancestors would think. My guess is that, if they could see us buying food from drive-thru windows and from automated vending machines, they would think we were from another planet. If they tasted all the chemicals, preservatives and added fats and sugars, the flavor of our modern foods would be so intense they would probably spit them out.

What we buy in the grocery store may look like food, and it may taste like food, but it's not the food our great-grandmothers ate. I encourage you to eat foods in their whole, natural states as much as possible. Before you put products in your cart at the store or before you place your order at a restaurant, think about the processing the food went through to get to you. If you're at a Mexican restaurant, the corn tortillas are probably made from processed corn flour and a mix of preservatives. If you're buying Twinkies from the store, think about how they were created—using highly processed flour and sugar and stuffed with a white filling, made with cream, which comes from cow's milk and contains added sugar. Many different machines are involved in both the production and the packaging of processed foods like this one.

Many people are disconnected from real, whole foods and have lost touch with the reality that our food comes from the earth. Simple eating celebrates the richness of whole foods. Think of the juiciness of a ripe piece of fruit, the crunchiness of a whole carrot or the creaminess of mashing an avocado. I encourage you to find simple pleasures in the foods you eat.

Excerpted from Integrative Nutrition: Feed Your Hunger for Health and Happiness. Integrative Nutrition Publishing, 2007. $29.95.

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USDA Policy Contradictions: Apples and Kale vs. High Fructose Corn Syrup

By Alexa Van de Walle

These days it seems like everyone is talking about good health. For many, good nutrition and food quality are their top strategies for staying healthy and achieving wellness. Elected officials have also turned their heads toward nutrition as food policy not only makes for healthier citizens but has the potential to significantly reduce health care costs for all levels of government. Despite good intentions, many beneficial policies are often contradicted by other policies. One example is the recently revised USDA Dietary Guidelines and Food Pyramid which promotes eating plenty of fruits and vegetables and whole grains and the USDA's Farm Bill that heavily subsidizes corn and soybeans that are processed into sweeteners and oils and which the Food Pyramid recommends eating only on a limited basis and which many say are making many Americans fatter (and sicker!).

A long-running contradiction, the Farm Bill is counterintuitive and a major contributor to the nation's (and New York's) obesity and diabetes epidemics. While a majority of the spending is for farm subsidies and nutrition programs, the problem lies in that the majority of subsidies and programs do not support farmers who grow fruits and vegetables and whole grains - the healthy food groups that the Food Pyramid recommends we eat.

What is the connection between the Farm Bill and the USDA Food Pyramid?
While the USDA's Food Pyramid recommends at least five daily servings of fruits and vegetables, the Farm Bill subsidizes commodities that are grown by a few large, corporate farmers, namely corn, rice, wheat, soybeans and cotton. Most of the crops that the mega-farmers receive subsidies for are used to feed cattle, processed into food ingredients, such as high fructose corn syrup or soybean oil, or used for biofuels such as corn ethanol. What the policy does not adequately support are hundreds and even thousands of plant species including the many varieties of fruits and vegetables that smaller farms grow as well as whole grains, legumes and nuts—all the foods that the USDA recommends and encourages in the Dietary Guidelines and outlines in the USDA My Pyramid Plan (www.mypyramid.gov).

How do corn and soybeans impact our health?
Corn and soybeans, which the Farm Bill supports with billions of dollars, are ubiquitous in the American food supply. They are used to make the foods that the Dietary Guidelines specifically state we should limit in our diets, namely those with "added sugars", "saturated and trans fats", "cholesterol "and high salt content.

High fructose corn syrup is the number one sweetener in our diet and one of the main ingredient in sodas and thousands of processed foods and beverages.

Soybeans and corn are used to make oils, many of which are hydrogenated and rich in trans fats and used to fry potatoes and potato chips which are filled with empty calories and fats that are actually harmful to our health.

Over 100 million cattle in the US feed on soy and corn, which is used to fatten factory-raised livestock, with a high percentage of the processed meat ending up as saturated fat- and cholesterol-rich hamburgers in fast food restaurants.

The inherent contradiction in the quality and quantity of food available and artificially low price of these subsidized (and harmful) food products has led to an alarming increase in obesity rates across the country and an increase in the incidence of diabetes, especially among children and poorer populations. Diabetes is now at epidemic proportions in some New York City neighborhoods.

What if the 2007 Farm Bill supported the Federal Government's Dietary Guidelines?
Farm policy is an ideal avenue to address the obesity and diabetes epidemics and foster healthy lifestyles. If the 2007 Farm Bill mirrored the USDA Dietary Guidelines, monies would be allocated to nutrient-dense foods. Growers of "fruits and vegetables" and the "five vegetable subgroups recommended by the USDA including "dark green, orange, legumes, starchy and other vegetables" would receive billions of dollars. Funds would be allocated to growing and producing "whole-grains and fiber-rich foods and whole-grain products", fishing, growing nuts and producing poly- and mono- unsaturated vegetable oils, "fat-free and low-fat dairy". Limited funds would be allocated to corn and soy that is fed to cattle to produce "high-fat red meat" and processed to create "added sugars", refined grains, and "beverages with added sugars" which are all foods the USDA recommends "limiting".

Through greater subsidies for fruits and vegetables, the policies and programs have the potential to ensure that Americans can not only enjoy hundreds of varieties of locally grown and delicious fruits and vegetables, from New York's Cortland apples to shitake mushrooms grown in California, but also at a price that allows the local farm to make a profit.

Further, subsidy allocations that better reflect the Food Pyramid can address a much noted barrier to healthy eating which is that many people say that fresh fruits and vegetables, the foods the USDA recommends we eat in abundance, are "too expensive".

Imagine if there were no subsidies for corn and soybeans and the prices for these commodities increased to the point where it was cheaper for a family to buy fruits and vegetables than it is to buy high-calorie low-nutrient foods that are artificially cheap such as Coke and McDonald's hamburgers.

Why is the Farm Bill Important Now?
It's one of the largest and most important bills and it comes up for renewal once every five years (September 2007) and affects every taxpayer and citizen. Essentially a $90 billion dollar tax bill, the Farm Bill's programs range from subsidies for farmers to crop research, conservation, trade, labeling and food safety to nutrition policy in schools and food stamps. Basically anyone who eats is affected by the Farm Bill, not just the people who grow, package and distribute food. Even so, most Americans, including legislators, leave the Farm Bill to the agricultural and cattle farmers in the rural states and not the urban centers, such as New York.

Alexa Van de Walle is a volunteer for Just Food. She is a Holistic Health Counselor and chef, and received certification from the Institute for Integrative Nutrition and the Institute for Culinary Education. She has a MBA in Marketing and Finance from the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University.

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Crazy Sexy Cancer Tips


Remember the Milton Bradley game, Operations? Well, before cancer forced me to educate myself, that juvenile game was my main reference for the body's organ systems. I was still looking for the "wish-bone," when out of nowhere, my vascular system blew up! Why hadn't I been paying attention? Why had I been strutting around in stupid acting classes? I should have listened in biology class instead of passing notes to my friends and flirting with pimply schoolboys. Oh, I wish I could go back and undo.

Get in line, right? Who doesn't feel that way about something? If only we could press STOP the moment before it all changed...but it just doesn't work that way. When the red phone rang with my wake-up call, a light bulb went off.

Back then, I had no idea how to take care of myself, to eat right and nourish my body. My idea of nutrition was based on what to eat to keep (or whittle away) my figure for my job. PowerBars, coffee, fat-free this and take-out that: My meals were planned according to convenience. I didn't have time to cook! Order, pick up or nuke, that pretty much describes my old routine. I chose restaurants based on wine lists, not the nutritional value of their food. Please, how square! The worst part about my ignorance was that I assumed it was my body's job to sort it all out. I put the junk in, and it dealt with it. I had no idea how, but that wasn't my problem. My job was to keep the junk on the table. Whatever my body was doing, well, it just had to keep doing it, and if I drove my bus out of hell today, I promised I would slow it down tomorrow. I was in my twenties! Savings accounts, retirement packages, and fiber were for boring people! I wanted juicy, luscious living, and I didn't want to have to think about it. I was too cool for that.

Then, I got sick and my doctor said there was no cure. My damned body was asleep at the wheel. Or was I? Not that I thought I gave myself cancer, as some people wanted me to believe. Yet, I couldn't help but wonder: In my ignorance, had I pulled the trigger on an already existing predisposition? Was my immune system struggling as I looked the other way, partied, and numbed out? I'll never know for sure, but it was certainly food for thought.

When my wonderful doctor told me "watch and wait," I went nuts. Hell no! I'm stage IV - and there is no V! So, I chose to explore alternative/holistic medicine, not because I wanted to be a brave pioneer, but because in my mind there were no other options. To watch and wait and doing nothing felt totally disempowering. I wanted to be part of the solution, not part of the problem. So I gave it the ol' college a try and read countless books on nutrition and natural recoveries from cancer. I traveled the country taking workshops and seminars, interviewing top researchers, Western doctors, Eastern doctors, teachers, gurus, alternative practitioners, nutritionists, naturopaths, yogis, and healers. I left no stone unturned and basically became a guinea pig with certifications.

Adapted from Crazy Sexy Cancer Tips by Kris Carr. skirt! 2007. $17.95.

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The Myth of Obesity


The trouble with the science of obesity as it has been practiced for the last sixty years is that it begins with a hypothesis—that “overweight and obesity result from excess calorie consumption and/or inadequate physical activity,” as the Surgeon General’s Office recently phrased it—and then tries and fails to explain the evidence and the observations. The hypothesis nonetheless has come to be perceived as indisputable, a fact of life or perhaps the laws of physics. Fat people are fat because they eat too much or exercise too little, and nothing more ultimately needs to be said.

The more closely we look at the evidence and at obesity itself, the more problematic the science becomes. Lean people will often insist that the secret to their success is eating in moderation, but many fat people insist that they eat no more than the lean—surprising as it seems, the evidence backs this up—and yet are fat nonetheless. As the National Academy of Sciences report Diet and Health phrased it, “Most studies comparing normal and overweight people suggest that those who are overweight eat fewer calories than those of normal weight.” Researchers and public health officials nonetheless insist that obesity is caused by overeating, without attempting to explain how these two notions can be reconciled.

For the past decade, public-health authorities have tried to explain the obesity epidemic in the United States and elsewhere. In 1960, government researchers began surveying Americans about their health and nutrition status. The first of these surveys was known as the National Health and Nutrition Examination Surveys (NHANES), of which there have been four so far. According to these surveys, through the 1960s and early 1970s, 12-14 percent of Americans were obese. This figure rose by 8 percent in the 1980s and early 1990s, and another 10 percent by the turn of this century.

This doubling of the proportion of obese Americans is consistent through all segments of American society, although obesity remains more common among African Americans and Hispanics than among whites and other ethnic groups, and most common among those in the lowest income brackets and poorly educated.

Some factor of diet and/or lifestyle must be driving weight upward, because human biology and our underlying genetic code cannot change in such a short time. The standard explanation is that in the 1970s we began consuming more calories than we expended so as a society we began getting fatter.

It all sounds reasonable, but there are so many variables, so many other possibilities—including the fact that the consumption of refined carbohydrates and sugars has also been increasing dramatically.

Adapted from Good Calories, Bad Calories by Gary Taube. 2007. $27.95.

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My Mother’s Kitchen


When my mother put dinner on the table, it was a well-orchestrated affair. We had protein and fiber, vitamins and minerals—a virtual symphony of colors and tastes—all of which occurred naturally. Our food was clean. It was not altered with additives, growth hormones or pesticides, and our meals were made from scratch with natural ingredients, with intention and with love. Every evening the family sat around the table and infused our meals with laughter, mischief, conversation, and most importantly, connection. We did not eat perfect diets, nor were we a model family, but we were nourished and nurtured by wholesome foods, the energy and love that was cooked into them and by the ritual of mealtime.

Over the years, my mother’s meals have changed. Natural meats and dairy products have been replaced with organic black beans and kale, chicken and eggs with miso and Wild Alaskan Salmon, bread and butter with quinoa and extra virgin olive oil. I nourish myself with a balanced diet of locally grown, organic, unprocessed foods prepared fresh daily. Yet, when I am in my mother’s home, there is a force that pulls me to explore her refrigerator and cupboards.

If hunger and nutrition are not what drive me to scavenge through my mother’s kitchen, what is it that I’m searching for? Could it be the same thing I search for after the children are in bed and I am drawn to my own kitchen to find that elusive little something that’s going to make me feel complete?

In this country, the topic of food is charged with emotion and controversy. The whole meals of my past are now an illusion. Nothing is as it appears on the surface. Our produce departments and grocery shelves are lined with unknowns—pesticides, herbicides, growth hormones, chemical additives and process upon process, stripping our food of its inherent nutritional value. Behind each glass of milk or piece of meat is an agenda, a lobbyist, a Fortune 500 company, a distribution chain, a processing plant. . . you need to squint to see the farmer and you need binoculars to find the cow!

The further we remove ourselves from the source of our food, the less we are able to maintain physical and emotional balance. Our processed food diets are so lacking in nutrition that we require coffee to wake up, sugar to get through the day, television to calm down, alcohol to let go of our inhibitions, chocolate and ice cream to feel satisfied, pills to sleep through the night and drugs to provide us with the illusion of health. The vitamins and nutrients that were so rich in my mother’s whole meals are hard to come by, and the nourishment from that mealtime is even more rare. Have we become a society that is artificially sustained?

Perhaps what I am searching for in my mother’s kitchen is not in the food at all. Perhaps the craving that never seems satisfied is actually a desire for connection, for mealtime.

Adapted from Clean Food: A Seasonal Guide to Clean Food with Recipes for a Healthy Sustainable You by Terry Walters. 2007. $39.95.

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YOU Staying Young


6 Foods to Keep Your Mind Young

Generally, what’s harmful to your heart is also harmful to your brain. Make no mistake about it—while fried potato skins are busting your buttons, there’s also a portion that gets shuttled up through your arteries to your gray matter.

Saturated fats, for example, clog arteries that lead to your brain, putting you at risk of stroke, while omega-3 fatty acids—the good fats found in fish—are helpful for your brain because they help keep your arteries clear. They also alter your neurotransmitters and reduce depression.

These are the best foods to keep your brain and RealAge young:

Food Why Recommended
Amount		 RealAge
Difference
Nuts Nuts contain monounsaturated fats to keep your arteries clear, as well as levels of precursors of serotonin to boost mood. 1 ounce of nuts a day is just right. (More is fine, but be careful of calorie overload.) An ounce is about 12 walnuts or 24 almonds. Men: 3.3 years younger.

Women: 4.4 years younger.
Fish
especially wild salmon, whitefish, tilapia, catfish, flounder, mahi mahi		 Fish contain artery-clearing omega-3 fatty acids. Aim for 13.5 ounces of fish a week, or 3 servings, each about the size of your fist. 2.8 years younger.
Soybeans Soybeans contain heart- and artery-healthy protein, fiber, and fats. 1 cup of soybeans a day. 0.4 years younger.
Tomato juice and spaghetti sauce Tomatoes contain folate, lycopene, and other nutrients to keep arteries young. 8 ounces a day of juice or 2 tablespoons of spaghetti sauce a day. At least 1 year younger.
Olive oil, nut oils, fish oils, flaxseed, avocados All of these foods contain heart-healthy monounsaturated fats. 25% of daily calories should be healthy fats 3.4 years younger.
Real chocolate (at least 70% cocoa) Real chocolate increases dopamine release and provides flavonoids, which keep arteries young. 1 ounce a day (to replace milk chocolate) 1.2 years younger.

Adapted from YOU: Staying Young, by Michael F. Roizen, MD, and Mehmet C. Oz, MD. Free Press. 2007. $26.00.

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More from YOU Staying Young


8 Ways to Improve Nutrition and Make Your RealAge Younger

  1. Eat when you’re hungry. And eat often, so you’re never famished. But have your last meal at least three hours before bed.

  2. Change your plates. Switch to 9-inch plates for meals, not the usual 11- or 13-inch variety. Smaller plates = smaller portions.

  3. Eat these every day:
    1. Nine handfuls, total, of fruits and vegetables
    2. At least 1 ounce of nuts (a small handful)
    3. High-fiber whole-grain bread or cereal, especially in the morning
  4. Eat fish at least 3 times a week.
    Ideally salmon, mahi mahi, tilapia, catfish or flounder.

  5. Be a hot tomato. Eat at least 10 tablespoons of cooked tomato products (ketchup, marinara sauce) a week for a healthy dose of the antioxidant lycopene, which can decrease the risk of prostate and other cancers.

  6. Avoid these like a hot potato:
    1. Anything that contains trans and/or saturated fats
    2. White foods -- white bread, white rice, white pasta, creamy sauces -- white tends to go with foods that are highly processed, high fat, or both
    3. Products that list simple sugars, including high fructose corn syrup (HFCS), in the first few ingredients; they put your blood sugar on a roller coaster that makes you crave high-calorie foods
  7. Before you eat, drink. Have 1 or 2 glasses of water before every meal to help fill you

  8. Take daily:
    1. Vitamins and minerals that contain at least 800 micrograms of folate, 400 IU of vitamin D, 1,200 milligrams of calcium, and 400 milligrams of magnesium.
    2. If you don’t eat fish, an omega-3 supplement that contains 2 grams of these heart-healthy fatty acids.

Adapted from YOU: Staying Young, by Michael F. Roizen, MD, and Mehmet C. Oz, MD. Free Press. 2007. $26.00.

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Eat, Pray, Love


The Beauty of Doing Nothing

Sometimes I wonder what I’m doing here, I admit it.

While I have come to Italy in order to experience pleasure, during the first few weeks I was here, I felt a bit of panic as to how one should do that. Frankly, pure pleasure is not my cultural paradigm. I come from a long line of superconscientious people. My mother’s family were Swedish immigrant farmers, who look in their photographs like, if they’d ever even seen something pleasurable, they might have stomped on it with their hobnailed boots. (My uncle calls the whole lot of them “oxen.”) My father’s side of the family were English Puritans, those great goofy lovers of fun. If I look on my dad’s family tree all the way back to the seventeenth century, I can actually find Puritan relatives with names like Diligence and Meekness.

My own parents have a small farm, and my sister and I grew up working. We were taught to be dependable, responsible, the top of our classes at school, the most organized and efficient babysitters in town, the very miniature models of our hardworking farmer/nurse of a mother, a pair of junior Swiss Army knives, born to multitask. We had a lot of enjoyment in my family, a lot of laughter, but the walls were papered with to-do lists and I never experienced or witnessed idleness, not once in my whole entire life.

Generally speaking, though, Americans have an inability to relax into sheer pleasure. Ours is an entertainment-seeking nation, but not necessarily a pleasure-seeking one. Americans spend billions to keep themselves amused with everything from porn to theme parks to wars, but that’s not exactly the same thing as quiet enjoyment.

Americans work harder and longer and more stressful hours than anyone in the world today. Alarming statistics back this observation up, showing that many Americans feel more happy and fulfilled in their offices than they do in their own homes. Of course, we all inevitably work too hard, then we get burned out and have to spend the whole weekend in our pajamas, eating cereal straight out of the box and staring at the TV in a mild coma (which is the opposite of working, yes, but not exactly the same think as pleasure). Americans don’t really know how to do nothing. This is the cause of that great sad American stereotype—the overstressed executive who goes on a vacation, but who cannot relax.

I once asked one of my Italian friends if Italians on vacation have that same problem. He laughed so hard he almost drove his motorbike into a fountain.

“Oh, no!” he said. “We are the masters of il bel far niente.”

This is a sweet expression. Il bel far niente means “the beauty of doing nothing.”

Adapted from Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert. Penguin Books, 2006. $15.00

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More from Eat, Pray, Love


Deliberate Prayers

There’s a wonderful old Italian joke about a poor man who goes to church every day and prays before the statue of a great saint, begging, “Dear saint—please, please, please…give me the grace to win the lottery.” This lament goes on for months. Finally the exasperated statue comes to life, looks down at the begging man and says in weary disgust, “My son—please, please, please - buy a ticket.”

Prayer is a relationship; half the job is mine. If I want transformation, but can’t even be bothered to articulate what, exactly, I’m aiming for how will it ever occur? Half the benefit of prayer is in the asking itself, in the offering of a clearly posed and well-considered intention. If you don’t have this, all your pleas and desires are boneless, floppy inert; they swirl at your feet in a cold fog and never lift. So now I take the time every morning to search myself for specificity about what I am truly asking for. I kneel there in the temple with my face on that cold marble for as long as it takes me to formulate an authentic prayer. If I don’t feel sincere then I will stay there on the floor until I do. What worked yesterday doesn’t always work today. Prayers can become stale and drone into the boring and familiar if you let your attention stagnate. In making an effort to stay alert, I am assuming custodial responsibility for the maintenance of my own soul.

Destiny, I feel, is also a relationship—a play between divine grace and willful self-effort. Half of it you have control over; half of it is absolutely in your hands and your actions will show measurable consequence. Man is neither entirely a puppet of the gods, nor is he entirely the captain of his formers balancing on two speeding side-by-side houses—one foot is on the house called “fate,” the other on the horse called “free will.” And the question you have to ask every day is—which horse do I need to stop worrying about because it’s not under my control, and which do I need to steer with concentrated effort?

There is so much about my fate that I cannot control but other things do fall under my jurisdiction. There are certain lottery tickets I can buy, thereby increasing my odds of finding contentment. I can decide how I spend my time, whom I interact with, whom I share my body and life and money and energy with. I can select what I eat and read and study. I can choose how I’m going to regard unfortunate circumstances in my life—whether I will see them as curses or opportunities (and on the occasions when I can’t rise to the most optimistic viewpoint, because I’m feeling too damn sorry for myself, I can choose to keep trying to change my outlook). I can choose my works and the tone of voice in which I speak to others. And most of all, I can choose my thoughts.

Adapted from Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert. Penguin Books, 2006. $15.00

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In Defense Of Food


Escape from the Western Diet

So here we find ourselves once again, lost at sea amid the crosscurrents of conflicting science.

Or do we?

Because it turns out we don’t need to declare our allegiance to any one of these schools of thought in order to figure out how best to eat. In the end, they are only theories, scientific explanations for an empirical phenomenon that is not itself in doubt: People eating a western diet are prone to a complex of diseases that seldom strike people eating more traditional diets. Scientist can argue all they want about the biological mechanisms behind this phenomenon, but whichever it is, the solution to the problem would appear to remain very much the same: Stop eating a Western Diet.

In truth the chief value of any and all theories of nutrition, apart from satisfying our curiosity about how things work, is not to the eater so much as it is to the food industry to go on tweaking the Western diet instead of making any more radical change to its business model. For the industry it’s obviously preferable to have a scientific rationale for further processing foods–whether by lowering the fat or carbs or by boosting omega-3s or fortifying them with antioxidants and probiotics–than to entertain seriously the proposition that processed foods of any kind are a big part of the problem.

For the medical community too, scientific theories about diet nourish business as usual. New theories beget new drugs to treat diabetes, high blood pressure, and cholesterol; new treatments and procedures to ameliorate chronic diseases; and new diets organized around each new theory’s elevation of one class of nutrient and demotion of another. Much lip service is paid to the importance of prevention, but health care industry stands to profit more handsomely from new drugs and procedures to treat chronic diseases than it does from a wholesale change in the way people eat. Cynical? Perhaps. You could argue that the medical community’s willingness to treat the broad contours of the Western diet as a given is a reflection of its realism rather than its greed, “People don’t want to go there,” as Walter Willet responded to the critic who asked him why the Nurses’ Health Study didn’t study the benefits of more alternative diets. Still, medicalizing the whole problem of the Western diet instead of working to overturn it (whether at the level of the patient or politics) is exactly what you’d expect from a health care community that is sympathetic to nutritionism as a matter of temperament, philosophy, and economics. You would not expect such a medical community to be sensitive to the cultural or ecological dimensions of the food problem–and it isn’t. We’ll know this has changed when doctors kick the fast-food franchises out of the hospitals.

So what would a more ecological or cultural approach to the food problem counsel us? How might we plot our escape from nutritionism and, in turn, from the most harmful effects of the Western diet? To Denis Burkitt, the English doctor stationed in Africa during World War II who gave the Western diseases their name, the answer seemed straightforward, if daunting. “The only way we’re going to reduce disease,” he said, “is to go backwards to the diet and lifestyle of our ancestors.” This sounds uncomfortably like the approach of the diabetic Aborigines who went back to the bush to heal themselves. But I don’t think this is what Burkitt had in mind; even if it was, it is not a very attractive or practical strategy for most of us. No, the challenge we face today is figuring out how to escape the worst elements of the Western diet and lifestyle without going back to the bush.

Excerpted from In Defense of Food by Michael Pollan. Penguin Press, 2008. $21.95

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More from In Defense Of Food


Bad Science

The problem starts with the nutrient. Most nutritional science involves studying one nutrient at a time, a seemingly unavoidable approach that even nutritionists who do it will tell you is deeply flawed. “The problem with nutrient-by-nutrient nutrition science,” points out Marion Nestle, a New York University nutritionist, “is that it takes the nutrient out of the context of the food, the food out of the context of the diet, and the diet out of the context of the lifestyle.”

If nutrition scientists know this, why do they do it anyway? Because a nutrient bias is built into the way science is done. Scientists study variables they can isolate; if they can’t isolate a variable, they won’t be able to tell whether its presence or absence is meaningful. Yet even the simplest food is a hopelessly complicated thing to analyze, a virtual wilderness of chemical compounds, many of which exist in intricate and dynamic relation to one another, and all of which together are in the process of changing from one state to another. So if you’re a nutrition scientist you do the only thing you can do, given the tools at your disposal; Break the think down into its component parts and study those one by one, even if that means ignoring subtle interactions and contexts and the fact that the whole may well be more than, or maybe just different from, the sum of its parts. This is what we mean by reductionist science.

Scientific reductionism is an undeniably powerful tool, but it can mislead us too, especially when applied to something as complex, on the one side, as a food and on the other a human eater. It encourages us to take a simple mechanistic view of that transaction: Put in this nutrient, get out that physiological result. Yet people differ in important ways. We all know that lucky soul who can eat prodigious quantities of fattening food without ever gaining weight. Some populations can metabolize sugars better than others. Depending on your evolutionary heritage, you may or may not be able to digest the lactose in milk. Depending on your genetic makeup, reducing the saturated fat in your diet may or may not move your cholesterol numbers. The specific ecology of your intestines helps determine how efficiently you digest what you eat, so that the same 100 calories of food may yield more or less food energy depending on the proportion of Firmicutes and Bacteroides resident in your gut. In turn, that balance of bacterial species could owe to your genes or to something in your environment. So there is nothing very machinelike about the human eater, and to think of food as simply fuel is to completely misconstrue it. It’s worth keeping in mind too that, curiously, the human digestive tract has roughly as many neurons as the spinal column. We don’t yet know exactly what they’re up to, but their existence suggests that much more is going on in digestion than simply the breakdown of foods into chemicals.

Also, people don’t eat nutrients; they eat food, and food can behave very differently from the nutrients they contain. Based on epidemiological comparisons of different populations, researchers have long believed that a diet containing lots of fruits and vegetable confers some protection against cancer. So naturally they ask, What nutrient in those plant foods is responsible for that effect? One hypothesis is that the antioxidants in fresh produce–compounds like beta-carotene, lycopene, vitamin E, and so on–are the X factor. It makes good theoretical sense: These molecules (which plants produce to protect themselves from the highly reactive forms of oxygen they produce during photosynthesis) soak up the free radicals in our bodies, which can damage DNA and initiate cancers. At least that’s how it seems to work in a test tube. Yet as soon as you remove these crucial molecules from the context of the whole food they’re found in, as we’ve done in creating antioxidant supplements, they don’t seem to work at all. Indeed, in the case of beta-carotene ingested as a supplement, one study has suggested that in some people it may actually increase the risk of certain cancers. Big oops.

Excerpted from In Defense of Food by Michael Pollan. Penguin Press, 2008. $21.95

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Gluten-Free Girl


The Pleasure of Vegetables

“Being forced to go gluten-free is what helped me to learn to love my vegetables. After months of exhaustion and pain—and especially after being reduced to eating jars of baby food to get nutrients into my system—I felt malnourished. This is no surprise to me now. After researching my digestive disorder, I learned that people who have celiac disease and eat gluten are damaging their small intestines. That’s because the body reads gluten as a toxin, and it sends out antibodies to attach the offending food. In the process of going after gluten, the antibodies attack the villi of the small intestines. These little fingerlike structures wave and ripple in the intestines, stretching out to grab food particles as they rush by. This is how our bodies absorb nutrition. However, in their attempt to attack gluten, the body’s antibodies destroy major portions of the villi over time. This means that the body of someone who has celiac disease attacks itself and cannot absorb nutrition. Someone with active celiac sprue is malnourished, even if she is eating more than a jar of baby food at a time.

After going gluten-free, the first food I ate was a small place of sautéed spinach. That leafy green had never tasted so good. After three weeks of eating gluten-free, I experienced sudden spasms of energy so enormous that I felt as though I could fly to the mountains on the power of my body. After months of feeling near death, I found myself dancing around the living room to songs I had forgotten I owned. I walked around the neighborhood so fast that I broke a sweat for the first time in months. I felt good.

Why? Because, after a lifetime of being malnourished and anemic, my body was finally absorbing nutrition properly. I was eating well and feeling the effects of it. I owed most of that to vegetables. Finally, I was able to let go of the past—frozen, flash-fried, and flabby—and learn to love vegetables.”

Of course, it’s not just those of us who are forced to go gluten-free who could learn to love our vegetables. When I was reaching for a plastic bag in the produce section at my local market recently, I was struck by an absurdity. Printed on the bag, in big green letters, was “5 a day!” The store was cheerfully exhorting customers to eat at least five servings of fruits and vegetables a day.

Do people really need to be reminded of this? I guess we Americans do. I remember an isolated moment from the Oprah show sometime last year. I don’t remember what the topic was, because I can only remember this moment: a women in the audience admitted that she ate mostly fast food, all week long. The only vegetable she ever ate was the potatoes in the french fries. And she wondered why she suffered such bad constipation? I stared at the television set in cringing embarrassment for our entire culture. What are we doing to ourselves? Later that day, a friend of mine told me about her Thanksgiving weekend and said, “In four days of eating, there wasn’t one green.” I’m sure hers wasn’t an isolated case. How did we become like this?

Why do we need to be cajoled to eat our vegetables, when they can be so damned good?

Excerpted from Gluten-Free Girl by Shauna James Ahern. Wiley, 2007. $24.95

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More From Gluten-Free Girl


Free to Be You and Me, Gluten-Free

The older I grow, the less I feel I have to know. But I am sure of one thing now, after learning it the hard way: food allergies—as well as an autoimmune disorder triggered by gluten—are real.

I live in a country that prides itself on celebrating individuals. And yet we are deathly afraid of being different. It’s as if our popular culture is dictated by a bunch of adults who have never left the seventh grade. When Kermit sang, “It’s not easy being green,” he was telling the truth. Step outside the preordained norm that no one ever speaks aloud—but we all feel hovering around us—and you feel you ought to be ashamed.

According to recent estimates, I out of 100 people in the United States suffers from celiac disease. That’s no small number. That makes at least 2 million people. It is not just those with celiac disease who need to avoid gluten. Hundreds of thousands of people have gluten sensitivity, gluten allergies and wheat allergies. In addition, thousands of parents with autistic children are starting to put them on gluten-free and casein-free diets, which seem to alleviate some of the symptoms. The same is true for children with attention deficit disorder/attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and phenylketonuria, as well as adults with rheumatoid arthritis, schizophrenia, and diabetes. The medical field is just starting to understand how damaging gluten can be for millions of people.

According to the National Institutes of Health, only 3 percent of people with celiac disease have been diagnosed. As awareness of the disease grows, however, that number is increasing. Every week, I receive at least five e-mails from readers telling me that they were diagnosed with celiac disease since they started reading my Web site. My initial symptoms sounded so familiar that they recognized themselves. Every day, I received dozens and dozens of e-mails from people who know that they must live gluten-free, but they are at a loss as to how to eat and live.

Eating gluten-free is not the latest fad in dieting. It is not a trendy choice. It is imperative.

Of course, there are millions more people who are trying to negotiate their lives without eating dairy, soy or eggs. The parents of children with peanut allergies have to send their kids to birthday parties with epinephrine pens and a long list of what not to eat. Try living with a corn allergy—see if you can find a processed food that does not contain high-fructose corn syrup. (Did you know that Americans eat an average of sixty-three pounds of high-fructose corn syrup a year?) I have a dear friend who is so allergic to fish that he cannot be in the same room where fish has been prepared, or else his throat will swell up and he will have to be rushed to the hospital. He simply cannot go to restaurants. Imagine how isolated he feels.

We are not alone.

Think of it—most of us have some issue with food. And yet, somehow, we are seen as being on the fringes of society.

We can change this view. By living gluten-free successfully, and happily, for a couple years, there is one lesson I have learned clearly: the attitude I take toward this diet is just as important as the food.

Excerpted from Gluten-Free Girl by Shauna James Ahern. Wiley, 2007. $24.95

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Eat This, Not That


Eat This, Not That

What To Eat When…

When You’re Stressed

Modern life is a big, boiling cauldron of anxiety stew, and we get a heaping helping every day. Whether you’re talking to your boss about a promotion, talking to your spouse about the credit cards bills, or talking to your kids about a streak of bad behavior, there’s always a stress-soaked moment around the corner. So calm yourself quick with these natural nerve-settlers.

Eat This:
1 cup of low-fat yogurt or 2 tbsp of mixed nuts
Scientists in Slovakia gave people 3 grams each of two amino acids—lysine and arginine—or a placebo and asked them to deliver a speech. Blood measurements of stress hormones revealed that the amino acid—fortified guys were half as anxious during and after the speech as those who took the placebo. Yogurt is one of the best food sources of lysine: nuts pack tons of arginine.

Red Bell Peppers
Researchers at the University of Alabama fed rats 200 milligrams of vitamin C twice a day and found that it nearly stopped the secretion of stress hormones. Add half a sliced red bell pepper to a salad or sandwich; calorie for calorie, no single food gives you more vitamin C.

A Cup of Peppermint Tea
The scent of peppermint helps you focus and boosts performance, according to researchers. In another study, they found that peppermint makes drivers more alert and less anxious.

A Handful of Sesame Seeds
Stress Hormones can deplete your body’s supply of magnesium, reducing your abilities and increasing your risk of developing high blood pressure. Sesame seeds are packed with this essential mineral.

Not That!
A Can of Soda
A study from the American Journal of Public Health found that people who drink 2 ½ cans of soda daily are three time more likely to be depressed and anxious, compared with those who drink fewer.

When You’re Sad

Watch enough TV advertising and you begin to think the only answer to a bad mood is a bottle of pills. Wrong! Your next meal can have as dramatic an impact on your mood as your next prescription refill. So the next time you have a gnawing feeling that something’s amiss, try gnawing on one of these.

Eat This:
An arugula or spinach salad
Leafy greens—arugula, chard, spinach—are rich sources of B vitamins, which are part of the assembly line that manufactures feel-good hormones such as serotonin, dopamine and norepinephrine. In fact, according to a study published in the Journal of Neuroscience Nursing, a lack of B6 can cause nervousness, irritability and even depression.

Tuna Sashimi or Grilled Salmon
A study in Finland found that people who eat more fish are 31 percent less likely to suffer from depression. And skip sweet, simple carbs (like the rice with you sushi)—the inevitable sugar crash can deepen depression.

1 tbsp of Ground Flaxseed Daily
Flax is the best source of alphalinoleic acid, or ALA—a healthy fat that improves the working of the cerebral cortex, the area of the brain that processes sensory information, including that of pleasure. To meet your quota, sprinkle it on salads or mix it into a smoothie or shake.

Not That!
White Chocolate
White chocolate isn’t technically chocolate, since it contains no cocoa solids. That means it also lacks the ability to stimulate the euphoria-inducing chemicals that real chocolate does, especially serotonin. If you’re going to grab some chocolate, darker is better; more cacao means more happy chemicals and less sugar, which will eventually pull you down.

Excerpted from Eat This, Not That by David Zinczenko and Matt Goulding. Rodale Books, 2007. $19.95.

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More From Eat This, Not That


YOU’RE THE EXPERT

It’s simple. No matter how successful The Abs Diet has been, it shares with all other diets one single dilemma: A diet only works if you have control over what, how and when you’re eating. And as you well know, most of the time, you don’t have control.

Sure, you can cook you own dinner. You can brown-bag your own lunch. You can spoon yourself some yogurt in the morning and eat a healthy snack before bedtime. (And yes, there ARE healthy and delicious snacks to eat before bedtime.) But you can’t control what’s offered at the office cafeteria (unless you own the company), or what’s being served at Mom’s house for Thanksgiving (unless you’re Mom). And you can’t stand in the kitchen at Olive Garden or Mickey D’s and tell the chef to go easier on the vegetable oil, either.

Consider this:
TWO-THIRDS OF U.S. ADULTS ARE NOW OVERWEIGHT, and the obesity rate has increased 50 percent since 1960. Is it because we all just turned into junk food junkies? No: It’s because restaurants and packaged food marketers are loading our meals with empty calories, and there’s nothing we can do about it—until now, that is!

THE FOOD INDUSTRY SPENDS $30 BILLION A YEAR ON ADVERTISING—70 percent of it pitching convenience foods, candy, soda and desserts. Even the teens working behind the counter are coached to get you to upsize your meal. (And for an average 17 percent more money, you get yourself 55 percent more calories! A bargain—if you consider flab a good investment.)

But with EAT THIS, NOT THAT!, you’re the expert. You’re the expert in the frozen food aisle. You’re the expert at the deli counter. You’re even the expert at the sushi restaurant. You control your food universe because, unlike every other customer, you’ll know the smart choices to make—instantly!

Just think about what this means:

YOU’LL LOSE WEIGHT.
EAT THIS, NOT THAT is crafted to specifically target belly fat—by filling you with smart, healthy choices that rev up your resting metabolism and help you burn away flab all day, every day, even while you sleep!

YOU’LL RESHAPE YOUR BODY.
Most diet plans force you to cut, cut, cut calories until you’re practically starving. And what do you get? Sure, you lose fat, but you also lose muscle. And muscle is crucial to keeping your metabolism revving and giving you the lean, firm shape you crave. So as soon as you go off your starvation diet, your body is primed to gain weight back more easily than before. When you are the expert and make informed choice, you’ll eat in the same places at the same times, but you’ll eat smarter. And that means you’ll be able to hold on to—and even build—firm, lean muscle while shedding useless, flabby pounds.

YOU’LL GAIN GREATER HEALTH.
The number-one principle of EAT THIS, NOT THAT! Is to cut empty calories and add in nutrition—more bang for your caloric buck with every bite. And by carving away belly flab, you’ll cut your risk of heart disease, diabetes, stroke and even cancer. (A University of Alabama-Birmingham study, for example, found that the amount of belly flab you carry is the single best predictor of heart disease—more so than blood pressure, cholesterol or family history.)

YOU’LL EVEN GAIN RESPECT
Not just the respect of those who admire your body—because let’s face it, staying lean is something successful people do—but the respect of coworkers and bosses, too. Don’t believe me? Consider this: An NYU study found that people packing on an extra 40 pounds make 20 percent less than their slimmer colleagues.

Think about it: Do you really know what’s in the food you’re ordering at the sports bar, the fast food restaurant, the local diner or the all-you-can-eat buffet? Not unless you’ve worked in the kitchen yourself. Do you really know if that burger is 250 calories, or 500 calories or 1,000 calories? No.

Adapted from Eat This, Not That by David Zinczenko and Matt Goulding. Rodale Books, 2007. $19.95.

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Hungry Planet: What The World Eats


Cart a la Carte
by Charles C. Mann

Everyone who has visited a foreign country has experienced it. Walking down a street, you are unexpectedly assaulted by the sights and smells of cooking food—food unlike anything you’ve seen or tasted before—in roadside stalls. Your stomach informs you that it is hungry. You make your way to the stand and point to the grill, wok or display case to indicate that you’ll take one—no, two—of those whatever-they-ares. The proprietor smiles at your lack of knowledge and hands you a parcel. And as you’re biting down, you feel that you have entered deep into the heart of this foreign place. You are taking part, you tell yourself, in a culinary tradition dating back centuries or even millennia.

Kosheri (lentils, onion and rice) in Cairo; pão de quejo (cheese bread) on the beaches of Rio de Janeiro; the scorpions on a stick in Beijing: pirogi (boiled and fried turnovers) in St. Petersburg’s Palace Square—street food indeed can powerfully evoke a specific time and place. But it is by no means an ancient tradition. Indeed, in many places it is as contemporary as electric power and automobiles. This is not necessarily a bad thing. Indeed, street food’s very modernity is why it could play a role in the fight against globalization.

Street food belongs to the era of market capitalism, which did not become widespread until the Industrial Revolution and the beginning of global trade. Beginning in the 15th century, the private sector—merchants, traders and speculators—began to predominate. The era’s new workforce of dyers, weavers, miners, clerks, seamstresses, messengers, and the like had to be paid in cash rather than barter. Factory owners, merchants and workers all had to be away from the kitchen for long periods of time in an era in which the lack of refrigeration made bag lunches problematic. The results—an explosion in the number of hungry people traveling around with coins jingling in their pockets—opened up a new venue for small entrepreneurs: the street-food stall.

The Philippines, for example, is home to a particularly exuberant street-food scene. At lunchtime, the younger children race from their schools to the smoking, sizzling stalls and stands in nearby streets; the older children and the parents do much the same from their offices. Without street food, countless thousands of Filipinos would have no employment, and the rest of the country would lose a vital piece of urban culture.

Manila’s street-food scene is open to would-be entrepreneurs not least because cooks are almost entirely free from the costs of regulations. Unsurprisingly, sanitary standards are low. The same is true elsewhere in the world. Sanitation is not the only health problem with street food, but it is a major one. Such problems suggest that street food will fade in importance as the world becomes more affluent—the unsanitary brown stalls in Manila will be replaced by clean, brightly colored enterprises bearing the globally recognizable logos of McDonald’s, Kentucky Fried Chicken, Starbucks and Yoshinoya. Indeed, these places are powerful symbols of modernity to people who are seeking to lever themselves out of poverty. Given the international chains’ financial muscle, it often seems that this century will see the end of street food.

The international fast-food giants are spreading worldwide. But the very affluence that fosters their spread will also promote competition from street food. Starbucks, for example, is rapidly moving into Brazil. There, it is facing tough competition from the likes of Casa do Pão de Queijo, which accompanies its espresso with the light little puffs of cheese bread loved by Brazilians. A union of street food vendors that has become a chain in itself, Casa do Pão de Queijo may represent a kind of culinary “third way”—a means of providing the clean, reliable food promised by the global chains but that still retains some local character.

Which vision is correct? A world dominated by a few hyper efficient fast-food chains, most of them originating in the United States, or a world with many thousands of diverse eateries, each based in a specific culture? The answer will depend on how much, in the end, people value the ability to step into a street and be instantly reminded of specific times, places and memories.

Adapted from Hungry Planet: What The World Eats by Peter Menzel and Faith D’Aluisio. Ten Speed Press, 2007. $24.95.

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More from Hungry Planet: What The World Eats


Baked, Boiled, Roasted, and Fired
by Alfred W. Crosby

Looking at the centerpiece of this book—the photographs of families from all over the world with the foods they normally eat in a week—it is hard not to identify with them, no matter how much they differ from us in appearance. The context of the photographs—food—tells us everything we need to know. Nothing is more basic to the maintenance of all our lives than food. Nothing is more important to the continuance of our customs, crafts, religions, institutions—to our cultures and civilizations—than family. Mealtime is when we take on fuel and lay the foundations of our societies.

More than likely, the apes who were ancestors of both the chimpanzees and ourselves did not dine at preselected times and locations. They probably operated in bands much of the time, as chimps do today, and when they discovered food, ate it immediately, on the spot, and only incidentally together. The experience surely promoted some bonding, but by our standards it was scarcely communal. There was little to remind us of the gathering of family and friends around the turkey laden table on Thanksgiving.

Then, over the epochs there came a monumentally important change. We began to collect food and to carry it back to some location known to all where successful kin with food and kin who were having an unlucky day gathered to share it. The family evolved to be more than relationships dictated by DNA. The germ cell of what today we call community eased into history.

The phenomenon accelerated mightily as our ancestors learned how to increase the proportion of available organic matter that they would digest by inventing cooking. Cooking is universally among our species. Cooking is even more uniquely characteristic of our species than language. Animals do at least bark, roar, chirp, do at least signal by sound; only we bake, boil, roast and fry.

Treating food, plant or animal, with high heat changes it, simplifies it, so to speak, so our teeth and gut can deal with it more effectively. In general, it transforms organic matter that, when raw, is unpleasant to eat, difficult of impossible to digest, and unhealthy or even deadly into nourishing and palatable food. On average, chimps spend six hours a day chewing, and people (that is to say, members of the cooking species) only one.

Cooking reinforced the trend toward community. Kindling had to be collected beforehand and carried to the central location to which the food collectors would return. Planning for the future, albeit the near future, became necessary. Cooking made us smarter and, at the same time, it enormously increased the range of organic matter that we could tap for nourishment, and thereby the kinds of places and climates in which we could live. Harvard anthropologist Richard Wrangham proposes that humanity was launched when a kind of ape learned how to cook. In his view, we are not herbivores or carnivores but “cookivores”

Adapted from Hungry Planet: What The World Eats by Peter Menzel and Faith D’Aluisio. Ten Speed Press, 2007. $24.95.

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Chew on This


The Youngster Business

John Pain worked for KFC, and he was trying to get the crowd excited about Yum! Brands, Inc., the company that owns KFC, Pizza Hut, and Taco Bell. He was giving a speech about the “Top Ten Ways to market to Asian Youths of Today” at the Youth Marketing Forum 2004 conference. Hundreds of businesspeople had paid thousands of dollars to learn the secrets of how to sell things to children. Sitting in the audience were representatives from McDonald’s, Disney, Coca-Cola, Toyota, Nestle and MTV. A special workshop held the previous day had promised to help companies create “brand preference and loyalty” among children.

“It is all about establishing a relationship early,” Paul Kurnit, the president of a marketing firm called KidShop, told the conference on opening day.

The relationship between big companies and small children had changed enormously in the past thirty years. Until recently, just a handful of companies aimed their advertising at children, and they mainly sold breakfast cereal and toys. Today companies selling all kinds of products realize that kids have a lot of money to spend and a lot of influence on what their parents buy. Every year in the United States children are responsible for more than $500 billion worth of spending. Big companies want that money. And too often they are willing to manipulate kids in order to get it.

Two men played a central role in turning America’s children into the targets of major advertisers: Roy Kroc and Walt Disney. The two had a great deal in common. They were both from Illinois. They were born a year apart, Kroc in 1901, Disney in 1902. They knew each other as young men, serving in the same ambulance corps during World War I. They both left Illinois to create whole new industries in southern California. And they both had a powerful desire to control things, make them orderly, and always keep them clean.

Kroc and Disney shared a limitless faith in science and technology. They ran their companies in much the same way, making all the big decisions and letting other people handle the details. Walt Disney didn’t write or draw any of the classic animated films that carried his name. Ray Kroc didn’t come up with the recipes for any of McDonald’s sandwiches. Both men, however, knew how to hire the right people. Although Disney gained success first, Kroc wound up having a greater lasting influence. His company eventually wielded more power over the American economy—and created the mascot, Ronald McDonald, who became even more famous than Mickey Mouse.

More importantly, Walt Disney and Ray Kroc were both terrific salesmen. Instead of simply marketing one thing to children, they created imaginative worlds for selling many things: Disneyland and McDonaldland. They carefully linked products to the feeling, ideas and dreams of children. And their huge success encouraged other businesspeople to use the same tactics and pull the same tricks on kids around the globe.

Adapted from Chew On This by Eric Schlosser and Charles Wilson. Houghton Mifflin, 2006. $16.00.

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Deceptively Delicious


Tofu Nuggets

Tofu Nuggets
(with spinach or broccoli or peas)

Think your kids won’t touch tofu? When I serve these, my kids think they’re eating chicken or cheese.

Prep Time: 15 minutes
Total Time: 25 minutes
Yields: 4 servings

Ingredients:
1 cup whole-weat or white breadcrumbs
1 tablespoon flaxseed meal
1 tablespoon grated parmesan
½ teaspoon paprika
1 cup spinach or broccoli or peas puree
1 large egg, lightly beaten
1 (14 ounce) package extra-firm tofu
½ teaspoon salt
1 tablespoon olive oil

Directions:

  1. In a bowl, stir together the breadcrumbs, flaxseed meal, parmesan and paprika. Set aside.
  2. Ina shallow bowl, mix the spinach puree and egg with a fork, and set the next to the breadcrumb mixture.
  3. Slice the tofu ½-inch and cube it or cut into shapes with a cookie cutter. Sprinkle both sides with salt. Dip the tofu pieces into the puree mixture, then roll them in the breadcrumbs until the tofu is completely coated and you can’t see the puree.
  4. Coat a large skillet with cooking spray and set it over medium-high heat. When the pan is hot, add the oil.
  5. Add the tofu nuggets in a single layer (be careful not to crowd the pan!) and cook until nicely browned on one side, 3 to 4 minutes. Turn and cook until the crumb coating is crisp and golden, 2 to 3 minutes longer.

Adapted from Deceptively Delicious by Jessica Seinfeld. HarperCollins, 2007. $24.95.

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More from Deceptively Delicious


Oatmeal Raisin Cookies

Oatmeal Raisin Cookies
(with banana and zucchini)

Don’t use an electric mixer—it will make the cookies tough.

Prep Time: 20 minutes
Total Time: 35 minutes
Yields: 2 dozen

Ingredients:
Nonstick cooking spray
1 cup whole-wheat flour
1 cup old-fashioned oats
1 teaspoon baking soda
½ teaspoon sea salt
¼ teaspoon cinnamon
¾ cup firmly packed light or dark brown sugar
6 tablespoons butter
½ cup banana puree
½ cup zucchini puree
1 large egg white
½ cup raisins
1.2 cup chopped walnuts (optional)

Directions:

  1. Preheat the oven to 350. Coat two baking sheets with cooking spray, or line with cooking parchment.
  2. In a bowl or zipper-lock bag, combine the flour, oats, baking soda, sea salt, cinnamon and shake or stir to mix.
  3. In a large bowl, beat the sugar and butter with a wooden spoon until just combined; do not overmix. Add the banana and zucchini purees, and the egg whites, and stir just to blend. Add the flour mixture, raisins, and walnuts, if using, and stir to combine.
  4. Drop the dough by heaping tablespoonsful onto the baking sheets, leaving about 1 inch in between. Bake until golden brown, 12 to 15 minutes. Let the cookies cool on the baking sheets for 4 to 5 minutes, just until they are frim enough to handle, then transfer to a rack to cool completely.

Adapted from Deceptively Delicious by Jessica Seinfeld. HarperCollins, 2007. $24.95.

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Renewing America’s Food Traditions


The Food Nations of North America

What food passport do you carry? What landscape do you see in your mind when you close your eyes while eating a mouthful of food that makes you feel immediately at home?

Our sense of place and our sense of taste are intimately related. From a small barrier island off the coast of South Carolina to the pink sandstone canyons of Utah, the landscape of the United States is as varied as its cultures. The farmers’ markets, fishmongers and fruit vendors of each region across North America have their own distinctive calls, colors and flavors. Our sense of place is determined as much by the food we see and taste as we walk the streets or drive the backroads of our home ground as it is by our postal address.

As we began our project to document the unique foods of this country, we wondered how we should structure our inquiries into the traditional foods unique to American landscapes and seascapes. Should we inventory them time period by time period or consult with culture after culture across the entire continent? What would our organizing principle be?

Of course, we realized that ecological regions, agricultural production zones, and culinary conventions cut across state and national boundaries. So do our organizations’ concentrations of membership. But is there such a thing as an ecogastronomic region? Could those regions be mapped?

One morning a cartoonlike map appeared on a napkin while two of us were merely doodling before launching into our day’s work. What is that hypothetical map of ecogastronomic regions was, as Nation Book Award-winning poet William Safford once said, “a story that could be true”?

Once the first draft had seen the light of day, we went out to test whether our hypothesis regarding the existence of “food nations” was true, false, or debatable. To our amazement, we found that several individuals and organizations had already pushed past conventional political boundaries to imagine a fresh geographic framework that had food and food traditions at its base.

We quickly realized that we were not at all the first Americans who had used the convention of calling various ecoregions of North America “food nations.” For roughly a decade, organizations in the Pacific Northwest of the United States and Canada have referred to “Salmon Nation,” a binational region of the watersheds in which various species of salmon have been ecologically, culturally, and spiritually significant. In fact, the imagining of a Salmon nation had brought together previously unlikely partners who subsequently forged effective alliances to restore salmon streams, forests and foodsheds in their region. Indigenous communities or “First Nations” of this ecoregion have referred to themselves as Salmon People in meetings and in their own publications for many decades.

Across the continent to the southeast of Salmon Nation, the Southern Foodways Alliance has hosted a series of food conferences and workshops in which African-, European- and Native American historians and writers have explored their shared culinary traditions. They have published a series of books on their regional foodways titled Cornbread Nation. If only Ivory Tower scholars had embraced this label it would be one thing, but chefs like Hoopin’ John Martin Taylor, humorists like Roy Blount Jr. and bluegrass musician artists like Tim O’Brien have also pledged allegiance to Cornbread Nation.

Our book highlights some unique ecological, cultural and culinary traits of each of these nations. While we expect the boundaries and names to change through time, we see this playful naming as an imaginative tool to help us all think about the relationships among food, place, and culture. By naming each ecoregion for a traditional food that has served as an ecological and cultural keystone there for centuries, is not millennia, we hope to encourage residents of that regions to take particular pride in their iconic food and in all the other food species associated with it.

Adapted from Renewing America’s Food Traditions: Saving and Savoring the Continent’s Most Endangered Foods by Gary Paul Nabhan. Chelsea Green Publishing, 2008. $35.00.

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Embracing Menopause Naturally


The View on Menopause

For generations the menopausal passage has not been addressed correctly. Myth, fear and misconceptions painted a negative picture of menopause. As a result, many women are afraid of it. Sigmund Freud, for instance, described menopausal women as “quarrelsome, peevish, and argumentative, petty and miserly…” Psychiatrist Dr. David Rueben declared that after menopause, a women becomes “not really a man but no longer a functional women” in his best-selling book, Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex, But Were Afraid to Ask. In a time when plastic surgery supports a youth and sex-obsessed society, middle age does not even seem to exist.

When women are actually asked about their experiences with menopause, the vast majority do not have experience that live up to these negative characterizations. Drs. Sonja and John Mckinlay of the New England Research Institute interviewed 2,300 women who were approaching or passing through menopause to find out how it affected their physical and psychological health. The results showed that only 3 percent of the 2,300 women expressed regret during or after menopause about the physical changes associated with menopause. Few lamented the end of menstruation and many felt relieved about not having to worry about contraception, menstruation and pregnancy. Some of the women I interviewed for this book expressed these same feelings. Dr. Chistiane Northrup, a well know gynecologist and diligent advocate for women’s health, states in her book Women’s Wisdom, Women’s Bodies, that 80 percent of women do not experience menopause as a problem, although society does, because of our ageist and sexist culture.

Can a women’s status in her society influence the way she experiences her change of life, her menopause? Ann rite’s study revealed that there is a difference in how traditional and non-traditional Navajo women experience their menopause. The traditional women had fewer symptoms of menopause. The reason seems to be that traditional Navajo people know that the changes in nature are connected with the changing cycles of women. The !Kung women, from the traditional tribe living in Africa, do not even have a word for hot flash, suggesting that these symptoms are not experienced, or are experienced as a natural and accepted part of change.

Women are changing western-society views about menopausal women and the meaning of midlife. Acceptable and non-judgmental language about women’s issues declare menopause as a meaningful passage into old age. Women are beginning to discover what menopause really means, and reconsider covering it up through face-lifts. They are aware of the risks of Hormone Replacement Therapy, and want to experience a natural menopause. Through balanced diets with regular exercise women stop worrying that their bodies are going to disintegrate, and their bones are going to break. Women are networking with other women and sharing experiences to avoid feeling isolated and find beauty and value in life. Women experience menopause with awareness. They are taking the initiation into wisdom and honoring themselves. They tell the truth about what they are feeling, and stand up for what they believe. To bring forth such motion is imperative in women’s personal lives, as well as in the political sector. Not only will society’s view of women change; women will bring a sense of balance and healing to the planet.

Adapted from Embracing Menopause Naturally: Stories, Portraits and Recipes by Gabriele Kushi. Square One Publishers, 2006. $14.95.

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More from Renewing America’s Food Traditions


Traditional Recipes

From the acorn region:

Olice and Lemon Relish

Ingredients:

½ cup olives, pitted
2 preserved lemons (packed in salt, submerged in lemon juice)
4 shallots
2 tablespoons olive oil
¼ teaspoon olive oil
¼ teaspoon freshly ground black peppercorns
Sea salt to taste

Directions:

  1. Chop the pitted olives and preserved lemons and then peel and dice the shallots.
  2. In a glass mixing bowl, combine these ingredients.

From the Bison Region:

Bison Cattail Stew

Ingredients:

1 pound bison meat
6 cups water
1 cup chopped cattail stalk bases
½ cup chopped prairie turnips
1 cup flint cornmeal
5 cedar or juniper berries, crushed
1 teaspoon
Black or red pepper to taste

Directions:

  1. In a 2-quart saucepan, place 1-inch cubes of the bison meat and add water until it sits 2 inches above the level of the meat.
  2. Add the bay leaf and simmer, uncovered, over medium heat for 2 hours.
  3. Next, add the chopped cattails, prairie turnips, cornmeal and crushed juniper berries. Cook for at least 30 minutes more, stirring regularly, until the cornmeal is viscous.
  4. Add salt and red or black pepper to taste and serve in warm bowls.

Adapted from Renewing America’s Food Traditions: Saving and Savoring the Continent’s Most Endangered Foods by Gary Paul Nabhan. Chelsea Green Publishing, 2008. $35.00.

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More from Embracing Menopause Naturally


Cooling Recipes for Hot Flashes and Summer Months

Sweet Corn Soup
This is a delicious, sweet soup to enjoy in the summer season

Serves 4-6

Ingredients:

4 ears of corn
1 large onion
2 carrots
2 stalks of celery
Nori Sea Vegetable
1 teaspoon light sesame oil
4 teaspoon mellow rice miso, diluted with warm water
4-6 cups of spring water

Directions:

  1. Begin by dicing the onion, carrots and celery.
  2. Remove the Kernel from the corn.
  3. Saute the onions in sesame oil until translucent.
  4. Add carrots, celery and corn, then the water, and bring to a boil.
  5. Reduce heat and simmer for about 15 to 30 minutes, or until vegetables are soft.
  6. Add miso to the soup and simmer for five minutes.
  7. Garnish with nori strips that have been toasted and cut into thin strips and serve.

Variation:

Adding another vegetable or omitting one will vary the taste of the soup.
Pureeing the soup in a blender or eating it cold is another option.
You can also roast the corn before adding it to the soup.
Use fresh or frozen corn.

Orange Cream with Strawberries Dessert
This is a very soothing, cooling and satisfying dessert, and it is quick to make.

Serves 4-5

Ingredients:

1 pint of strawberries
2 cups orange juice
2 teaspoons rice syrup
4 drops vanilla
Pinch of sea salt
3 teaspoons of kudzu, dissolved in a little cold water
Pinch or cinnamon, as garnish
Mint leaves, as garnish

Directions:

  1. Clean the strawberries and cut into fourths.
  2. Bring 2 cups of orange juice with a pinch of sea salt to a boil.
  3. Add the rice syrup and vanilla and simmer for a minute.
  4. Add dissolved kudzu while stirring constantly for 3 minutes, until the kudzu thickens.
  5. At this point add the cut and cleaned strawberries, and let simmer on a low flame for 1 to minutes.
  6. Serve hot and decorate with a touch of cinnamon and leaves of fresh mint.

Variation:

Instead of orange juice, prepare this dessert with apple juice or any other unsweetened juice.
Choose different berries or tree fruits, like apples or pears. Boil the juice with a cinnamon stick and remove it before serving.
Decorate with lemon or orange zest.

Adapted from Embracing Menopause Naturally: Stories, Portraits and Recipes by Gabriele Kushi. Square One Publishers, 2006. $14.95.

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Secrets of Self-Healing


Doctors don't have all the answers. I learned this more than twenty years ago as a young resident in a hospital affiliated with Shanghai Medical University. I was assigned to the outpatient clinic for gastrointestinal disorders, and one day when I was making my treatment rounds at the clinic I was a patient who was suffering from a care of stomach acid reflux that was keeping hi up all night. He had been medicated with all kinds of acid blockers for two months, without relief. As our conversation carried on, the woman who sat next to him in the waiting room barked out, "Drink potato juice in the morning to get rid of it. It sure got rid of mine." I thought to myself, I am the doctor. What does she know about stomach problems? The next week, when I saw the patient again, he said he had used the potato juice remedy and his acid reflux was 90 percent better. I was humbled.

I knew about many useful natural remedies that had been handed down over the generations, and I learned about others from my patients. I began researching the healing properties of potatoes and other foods. I learned that the potato is no only rich in magnesium and other minerals, but it is also an alkalizing food, meaning it neutralizes acid in the stomach. More recently the potato was discovered to contain compounds called kukoamines that can help lower blood pressure. This knowledge led me to ask, What if everyone learned how to take care of their health problems without fancy drugs and a minimum of invasive treatments? Wouldn't that produce a healthier and happier population?

Just as planet Earth restores a fire-scarred forest with new saplings, each and every being comes with its own intrinsic healing capability. Humans, since time immemorial, have activated this power of self-healing through natural means. They have chanted, danced, prayed, touched and used plants to restore themselves and others to health. Virtually every culture in the world has developed natural healing traditions that were in popular use until about a hundred years ago. But in the past century this knowledge has nearly disappeared from our collective memory.

Excerpted from Secrets of Self-Healing by Dr. Maoshing Ni. Penguin Group. 2008. $24.95.