Rich and Strange Aeons

Bloomington has SF/English weather right now, light overcast, occasional spritz of rain, grey over green, a combination I've always loved. And maybe the winter really got to me, but right now it seems *really* green around here, as in I'll look down a street and see the trees in leaf and be surprised at how the view is blocked. Many of the blocks here are criss-crossed with alleys, vs. blocks in Chicago that just had a long block going down them, or ones in San Francisco with no alleys and trash pickup is out front. (Out front here too, despite the alleys.) Today I was diverting myself down alleys, and discovering the central spaces, standing on gravel under clouds and trees, the cars somewhat distant and muffled by houses and leaves, birds chirping in the trees above me. Chicago wouldn't have that feeling, I think, partly from there being fewer trees in that location, and largely because of the feeling of being in a crossroads, and looking out in four directions, vs. being trapped in the middle of a long alley. I think *that's* related to Jane Jacobs's observations about short vs. long city blocks, and how much more pedestrian (and business) friendly the former were. Also related to my brief couple of weeks working at Knowledge Adventure, in some office block around LA, in the middle of an inhumanly long block, of course sans any green or softening features. My friends Glenn&Sarah lived in blocks half a mile long, but at least all those 3/4 acre lots softened the view, plus G&S were close to one end.

But that all isn't what I meant to be writing about. I recently read In Defense of Food, by Michael Pollan, an author you may remember from such books as The Botany of Desire and The Omnivore's Dilemma, as well as LJ posts such as this review and a brief thread on nutritionism. That last links through to his essay which in fact was the original seed of this book, and the basic message hasn't changed: Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants. Approach food and diet as a whole, not in terms of what nutrients are present, especially if they've been added; science may eventually figure out all the details of how food and eating work, but it hasn't yet, and you're better off with a traditional diet that's been not-killing people for centuries or millennia than with the killer Western diet patched up with incomplete nutritional science.

The book expands that frame, starting with the evolution of 'foods' to 'nutrients'. This covers the growth of supermarket foods with allegedly healthy additives (oat bran! low-carb! Omega-3!) in, of course, processed and marked up foods with labels that can carry health claims (thus his advice about avoiding food that makes health claims), the stages of nutritional science (food consists of fats, protein, and carbohydrates! It is solved! Oops, vitamins too. And anti-oxidants. And some fats are better than others. Fiber's good. Oh wait, there are types of good fat, you need the right ratio...) the story of the short-lived Senate recommendation for dealing with rising rates of heart disease ("reduce consumption of meat", based on comparison with both other countries and the US under wartime rationing, quickly lobbied into "Choose meats, poultry and fish that will reduce saturated-fat intake." conflating three rather different species, and focusing on one nutrient in them), and the possible disaster of the lipid hypothesis (that fats increased heart disease and cancer rates, for which the evidence isn't that good, apart from trans fats, which people ate lots more of (as margarine, and in processed foods) because they'd been told to avoid butter and lard (though I don't know if the food industry thought it was being healthy or if hydrogenated vegetable oils were cheaper than butter and lard) and of course Americans got even fatter on their low-fat diets).

He also talks about the social aspects: America's latent Puritanism, suspicious of sensual pleasure such as enjoying your food; fear of the odd foods of immigrants; John Kellogg's (yes, the co-inventor of corn flakes and advocate of hourly yogurt enemas, 10-pounds-of-grapes diets, and chewing your food 100 times before swalloing) belief that animal protein led to masturbation. And Pollan looks at what science does say, and its problems: yes, fats have more calories per gram than carbohydrates, but there's theory that refined carbohydrates interfere with insulin mechanisms and contribute to weight gain. (In admirable consistency, Pollan criticizes Gary Taubes for jumping on the "carbohydrate hypothesis" as the answer to the lipid hypothesis, an act Pollan sees as the same sort of premature reductionism. He doesn't mention it here, but it would more in keeping with his whole-diet stance to note that when we want to fatten up hogs and cattle, we feed them grains.) Heart disease mortality has dropped, but allegedly more from improved treatment, not from equally reduced rates of heart disease. He talks about why scientists are understandably inclined to analyze the effects of one nutrient at a time, but notes how often a promising chemical in the test tube seems to have little effect as a supplement, and lists the 35 (if I counted right) anti-oxidants identified in thyme. And he notes the difficulty in doing controlled experiments on single substances: cut the saturated fat, and you've cut the calories, or replaced them with something else, so you're comparing the effects of fat qua fat vs. difference in calories or the effects of other foods. The gold-standard in nutrition science has been large-scale intervention studies... which look at minor differences in the Western diet, focused on nutrients (such as eating less fat, which could mean eating more plants or eating leaner meats or...) with low rates of compliance and terribly picky and biasing questionnaires.

Quick question: imagine you're stuck on a desert island for a year, and can eat only one food, plus water: which will best support your health, out of bananas, corn, alfalfa sprouts, spinach, hot dogs, chocolate milk, and peaches?

Well, all that has covered a third of the book! Part II talks about the Western diet and the evidence against it, starting with diabetic aborigines who went back to the bush for seven weeks, and showed dramatic weight loss and improvements in their health. We've known for a century that overweight, diabetes, hypertension and other problems swarm a population newly come to the Western diet; we hadn't known the effects could be so quickly reversed. "Western diseases" aren't more common just because of age, as they're more common among old people than they were in 1900.

...and it's time for a break. But I'll throw in this article about claims that fetal exposure to common chemicals may predispose to obesity later.