Tag: Food

The book Spoon-Fed by British physician and writer Tim Spector discusses the diets of people in developed countries. Spoon-Fed puts a great deal of information into a short book. It discusses a number of “myths” about food and nutrition. A myth is a story that many people have learned to believe, but not a scientifically proved factual story. The myths are the foundation of public health rules, dietary recommendations and beliefs about food. The myths are the foundation of public health rules, dietary recommendations and beliefs about food. Spoon-Fed treats eating and digestion as complex biological processes that cannot be explained by instinct, culture, culinary tradition, common sense or known science. It fails to reconcile some inconsistencies.

There is a chapter pointing out that there is no component in the education of medical doctors addressing nutrition, implying that medical doctors, unless they work on the problems, are not experts on nutrition, food and diets. There is a chapter which reviews some of the arguments of The Diet Myth, points out that digestion, and weight gain are individual, and cautions against believing that there are rules that apply to all people and all foods. In The Diet Myth, Dr. Spector explained why weight loss through calorie restriction and exercise is difficult by the data of weight loss in twin studies, and to the science of calories, based on the 1944-1945 Minnesota Starvation Experiment. Like The Diet Myth, Spoon-Fed suggests that food science has not absorbed the presence of an active microbiome in the human digestive tract.

Some chapters talk about how food is collected, processed, and sold.

The chapter on the myths of fish addresses the marketing of fish raised in fish farms, the standards for farmed fish, the marketing of wild fish harvested recklessly, and outright fraud in the way fish is misdescribed in some restaurants.

There are chapters on the myths of avoiding animal fat, reducing calory consumption or exercising to reduce weight, avoiding gluten, avoiding nuts, sports drinks, fruit flavoured drinks, and the quality, safety and convenience of bottled water. Some involve the factors affecting purchasing and processing food, including sports drinks, flavoured water, bottled water, candy, snacks and fast food.

Spoon-fed notes that the food industry, dominated by financial interests, and focussed on reducing foods into packaged commodities, fabricated with processed ingredients, and processed to taste good, package well, and sell. The food industry has convinced people try to make up for “missing” ingredients by taking supplements and seeking following diet fads, to combat obesity by restricting calories and by exercise. This has made the food industry financially successful in selling flavoured junk. Dr. Spector suggests that individuals might eat more vegetables, recommend diversity of diet, endorses Michael Pollan’s advice in his books In Defence of Food (2008) and The Omnivore’s Dilemma (2006), and suggests avoiding consuming highly processed foods. He also endorses the public health advocacy of Marion Nestle and others on measures against sugary, artificially sweetened and carbonated beverages and disposable containers.

Other chapters discuss the rise and fall of beliefs about fat, calories, weight loss theories, supplements and diets. These are generally informative. Some chapters invite readers to consider changing what they eat, and are more controversial.

Spoon-Fed favours eating fermented foods because they contain nutrients produced by microorganisms and may contain beneficial and viable microorgamisms (unless the microorganisms have been killed off in the processing). Spoon-Fed favours food with some microflora or microfauna, although Dr. Spector is largely dismissive of the probiotic yogurt and the marketing claims made by the manufacturers of other highly processed food products. He is in favour of consuming fermented foods, including saurkraut and kimchi on the basis that fermentation can introduce health probiotic microorganisms. His views on probiotics may be more controversial than he implies. Fermented food with microorganisms is prepared in salted water (brine) as opposed to pickled in acidic vinegar. It is therefore salty.

Dr. Spector states that public health measures involving salt have not prevented the wide use of salt in food processing. The food industries have increased the consumption of salt, while concealing the amount of salt in processed food. He refers to studies suggesting that studies have failed to demonstrate adverse effects of high sodium levels in food on health. He explains that industrialized countries favour treating people with high blood pressure with medication to reducing salt use. He disagrees with the low sodium approach of the DASH (Dietary Approaches to Stop Hypertension) diet, without a discussion of the issue.

Spoon-Fed refers to the modern NOVA food classification system suggested by Carlos Monteiro, with his team at the Center for Epidemiological Research in Nutrition and Health at the University,of São Paulo, Brazil in the journal Public Health Nutrition in the 2009 paper, “Nutrition and health. The issue is not food, nor nutrients, so much as processing”, and agrees with some reservations.

Spoon-Fed carefully precise in supporting restrictions on alcohol consumption, while defending moderate alcohol consumption.

While it is dismissive of diet fads, it tends to be speculative about the benefits of some foods. It dismisses some public health information based on poor sampling and other statistical errors, and appears to encourage disrespect for all public health recommendations.

The title of Tim Spector’s 2015 book The Diet Myth refers to one “myth”. The book begans with an Introduction that discusses the author’s midlife health crisis when his blood pressure rose suddenly, and present an overview of his research into the modern diet. The Introduction identifies the problems of deciding “what is good or bad for us in our diets” and several misconceptions about food that impair discussion of food and diet, and sensible decisions by consumers. In his later book Spoon-Fed, he discusses many other misconceptions or myths about food science, appetite, differences between individual metabolism, diet and health.

The Diet Myth‘s first chapter introduces discusses some of the gut microbiota (part of the human microbiome) that process food consumed by humans by breaking it down, releasing nutrients that the human gut absorbs and metabolizes. In reviewing Dr. Spector’s, 2020 book Spoon-Fed, the English writer Bee Wilson said it contains an overview of many medical and scientific studies of genetics, microbiology, biochemistry and food:

The book’s main argument is that to find the best way of eating we need to ignore much of what we are told. … Spoon-Fed is a worthy successor to Spector’s earlier bestselling book, The Diet Myth, which focused on the powerful role that the microbes in our guts play in determining our health. This new book is broader, but he manages to distil a huge amount of research into a clear and practical summary that leaves you with knowledge that will actually help you decide what to add to your next grocery shop.

Bee Wilson, the Guardian, August 5, 2020, review of Spoon-Fed

The Diet Myth suggests that

• food science and popular writing has not absorbed the fact of the presence of an active microbiome in the human digestive tract,
• the importance of a healthy and diverse gut microbiome,
• the overuse of antibiotics and other medical errors that have harmed humans by affecting their microbiome,
• medical and cultural practices that have contributed to the increasing incidence of food allergies. The book suggests that food science and popular writing has been inattentive to genetic variations of humans as affecting metabolism and interactions with food and microorganism.

The remaining 18 chapters discuss the topics addressed by the “Food Facts” labels used to disclose information about food: calories, fats, nutrients, and warnings, with reference to genetics and the microbiome.

The science of calories is based on the 1944-1945 Minnesota Starvation Experiment. Calorie-based thinking suggests that diets aimed at reducing weight or “curing” obesity should reduce the intake of calories. This has evolved into a proliferation of diet advice: avoiding all fats (or bad fats), avoiding carbohydrates. eating “paleo”, eating protein, eating “Mediterannean”, not eating cheese or nuts. The food industry dominated by corporate interests, is focussed on reducing foods into packaged commodities, processed to taste good, package well and sell. The food industry reduces food to “ingredients”. People try to make up for “missing” ingredients by taking supplements.

The book discussed the scientific “discovery” of “vitamins” with a brief reference to the illness known as beri-beri, caused by thiamine (vitaman B1) deficiency. One of the principal causes where the food supply is primarily “white” (milled or polished) rice is processing the rice:

Beriberi was known for millennia in Asia, but was not described by a European until the 17th century when Brontius in the Dutch East Indies reported the progressive sensorimotor polyneuropathy. The prevalence of beriberi increased greatly in Asia with a change in the milling process for rice in the late 19th century. In the 1880s, Takaki demonstrated the benefits of dietary modification in sailors, and later instituted dietary reforms in the Japanese Navy, which largely eradicated beriberi from the Japanese Navy by 1887. In 1889 Eijkman in Java serendipitously identified dietary factors as a major contributor to “chicken polyneuritis,” which he took to be an animal model for beriberi; the polyneuritis could be cured or prevented by feeding the chickens either unpolished rice or rice polishings. By 1901, Grijns, while continuing studies of beriberi in Java, suggested a dietary deficiency explanation for beriberi after systematically eliminating deficiencies of known dietary components and excluding a toxic effect.

….

By the 1950s synthetic forms of the vitamin were produced cheaply, allowing both therapeutic administration and prevention with food enrichment.

Abstract of Douglas J. Lanska “Historical aspects of the major neurological vitamin deficency disorders …” in Volume 95 of Handbook Clinical Neurology, Elsevier (2009), ScienceDirect portal.

The use of polished rice was culturally and economically embedded – it was easier to cook and digest, and conserved the fuel needed to cook rice. This problem was not an exclusively pre-modern or Asian problem American and European scientists criticized the use of bleached white wheat flour to bake bread and other cereal products. The public policy response was to require that white flour be “enriched” with nutrients. The book also mentions studies demonstrating that agricultural products harvested in modern times contain less nutrients than the products harvested several decades earlier. The book does not refer to studies about the causes and consequences of this fact. One consequence is that vitamin products are marketed as necessary to supplement foods available to consumers in markets – and that supplements have become a huge industry

The idea of enrichming some processed food is embedded in public health policy, and supplements are embedded in culture. The book touches the issues with criticism of the scientific and industrial idea of “reducing” food to a mixture of ingredients, and with criticism of fad diets. Food science in the 19th century and the 20th century failed to addressed dangerous unknowns, and failed to warn against risky agricultural and food processing practices. Science is now not exploring the known unknowns, and public policy remains uninformed. This area can be developed further – although it was beyond the scope of Dr. Spector’s book.

The Diet Myth

• suggests that food science, as discussed in the popular media, has been static,
• suggests that individuals might eat more vegetables,
• recommends diversity of diet and expressly and implcitly endorsies Michael Pollan’s advice to “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants” and much of what Michael Pollan wrote in his books In Defence of Food (2008) and The Omnivore’s Dilemma (2006), and
• suggests avoiding consuming processed foods,

The Diet Myth does not refer to the NOVA food classification system suggested by Carlos Monteiro, with his team at the Center for Epidemiological Research in Nutrition and Health at the University of São Paulo, Brazil in the 2009 paper “Nutrition and health. The issue is not food, nor nutrients, so much as processing” in the journal Public Health Nutrition. The NOVA system classifies many foods as ultra-processed.

The Way We Eat Now, a 2019 book by British writer Bee Wilson discusses paradoxes of food in the modern world: the success of farmers in growing enough food to feed the world, the inequalities of access to food, and the prevalence of unhealthy eating. Ms. Wilson does not identify herself as a chef, biologist, ecomomist or food scientist. She approaches food as a consumer, cook, parent and journalist.

The book suggests that individuals might spend more time cooking and eat more vegetables, apparently endorsing Michael Pollan’s advice to “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants” and much of what Michael Pollan wrote in his books In Defence of Food (2008) and The Omnivore’s Dilemma (2006). The book makes a stronger argument about the problems of modern food.

The prevalance of unhealthy food was discussed in this excerpt or digest from the book:

What we eat now is a greater cause of disease and death in the world than either tobacco or alcohol. In 2015 around 7 million people died from tobacco smoke, and 2.75 million from causes related to alcohol, but 12m deaths could be attributed to “dietary risks” such as diets low in vegetables, nuts and seafood or diets high in processed meats and sugary drinks. This is paradoxical and sad, because good food – good in every sense, from flavour to nutrition – used to be the test by which we judged the quality of life. A good life without good food should be a logical impossibility.

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Almost every country in the world has experienced radical changes to its patterns of eating over the past five, 10 and 50 years. For a long time, nutritionists have held up the “Mediterranean diet” as a healthy model for people in all countries to follow. But recent reports from the World Health Organisation suggest that even in Spain, Italy and Crete, most children no longer eat anything like a “Mediterranean diet” rich in olive oil and fish and tomatoes. These Mediterranean children, who are, as of 2017, among the most overweight in Europe, now drink sugary colas and eat packaged snack foods and have lost the taste for fish and olive oil. In every continent, there has been a common set of changes from savoury foods to sweet ones, from meals to snacks, dinners cooked at home to meals eaten out, or takeaways.

….

For most people across the world, life is getting better but diets are getting worse. This is the bittersweet dilemma of eating in our times. Unhealthy food, eaten in a hurry, seems to be the price we pay for living in liberated modern societies.

Bee Wilson, March 16, 2019, Good Enough to Eat, the Guardian

The author appears to agree that Green Revolution succeeded in breeding growing plants that put calories in mouths, but observes that agriculture failed to add to the quality of diet of most humans. She appears to agree with the United Nations’ Committee on World Food Security that food security means that “all people, at all times, have physical, social, and economic access to sufficient, safe, and nutritious food that meets their food preferences and dietary needs for an active and healthy life”, and that the Green Revolution did not provide humans with food security. She does not attempt to explain how the Green Revolution changed the way that food is purchased by food processing companies and sold in markets of the world or discuss the issue in terms of agricultural economics.

The Way We Eat Now refers to the NOVA food classification system suggested by Carlos Monteiro, with his team at the Center for Epidemiological Research in Nutrition and Health at the University of São Paulo, Brazil in the 2009 paper “Nutrition and health. The issue is not food, nor nutrients, so much as processing” in the journal Public Health Nutrition. The NOVA system classifies many foods as ultra-processed.

In a 2015 article, Ms. Wilson discussed her thoughts on the way food is discussed:

It’s easy to be negative about this: much easier to criticise the overweight two thirds of the country than observe the smaller proportion who are in, well, proportion. “What they should be telling us,” she insists, “is that one third of the population, assuming they are not anorexic, bulimic or compulsive exercisers, have positive eating habits which means that eating well is a pleasurable thing.” We’ve become moralistic about food and size, waging war with words. “It’s not ‘naughty’ or ‘virtuous’. It’s food,” Bee fumes. “Painting chocolate as naughty and salad as virtuous just enforces the dualism in which salad is unpleasant and sweet things, frankly, sound like way more fun.”

Changing the lingo is just one part of the battle; changing attitudes is the objective. A good starting point, Bee suggests, is to remind ourselves that as omnivores, eating has long been a complex thing. “We don’t have an instinct that tells us what to eat,” she says. “We have to educate ourselves. It’s not a moral thing. It’s a skill we learn.” When people say it’s easy to lose weight—move more and eat less—it is not just insensitive, but patronising. “It’s not about intelligence. It’s about education.”

In Scandinavia they’ve tried diet interventions at various ages: using cooking workshops and meal planning, they’ve introduced both young and old to new tastes. Projects carried out in Finland proved that children’s tastebuds can be broadened considerably, and in Sweden even 70-year-olds were taught to like vegetables eventually. “It’s not hopeless at any age.” On the other hand, she reminds me “there are plenty of highly intelligent people who haven’t worked out how to stop when they’re full.”

Clare Finney, June 29, 2015, “It’s not ‘naughty’. It’s not ‘virtuous’. It’s food.” in the Market Life section of online magazine of the Southwark Borough Market, archived at the Wayback Machine

Ms. Wilson critiicizes sweetened soft drinks – ultra-processed compounds of water, dissolved sweetener, and flavourings. The majority are sweetened with sugar. The brain registers that the liquid quenches thirst, but does not register that the person has consumed enough sugars to provide energy for hours of activity. In the absence of activity, the body converts the glucose to fat. She also says:

The occasional bowl of instant ramen noodles or frosted cereal is no cause for panic. But when ultra-processed foods start to form the bulk of what whole populations eat on any given day, we are in new and disturbing territory for human nutrition. More than half of the calorie intake in the US – 57.9% – now consists of ultra-processed food, and the UK is not far behind, with a diet that is around 50.4% ultra-processed. The fastest growing ingredient in global diets is not sugar, as I’d always presumed, but refined vegetable oils such as soybean oil, which are a common ingredient in many fast and processed foods, and which have added more calories to what we eat over the past 50 years than any other food group, by a wide margin.

Bee Wilson, March 16, 2019, Good Enough to Eat, the Guardian

Ms. Wilson criticizes fad diets including food promoted by the inventors and supporters of “clean eating”, meal replacement fluids and powders (e.g. Soylent, Huel,). She thinks many energy bars and gels are largely candy snacks (ultra-processed), dressed up as special foods with benefits for some people (e.g. athletes competing in endurance sports). Her view of protein bars is similiar. She discusses the growth of prepared food – whether prepared in haute cuisine restraurants or fast food shops. The food is appealing and plentiful but not nutritious.

She also refers to psychological issues influencing how humans make decisions about buying and consuming food.

Cooking has been socially deprecated. Cooking skills and home economics are not part of the education of children. Nutritious foods are hard to identify, inconvenient, or not available in grocery stores. At the same time ultra processed food is cheap, convenient, strongly flavoured and available anywhere in the world. The book supports the campaigns to regulate the marketing and sale of soft drinks (e.g. the campaigns discussed in the writing of Marion Nestle). In part, this reinforces comments of Michael Moss, the author of Salt Sugar, Fat (2013) about modern food, poor public health policy and advice on diet, the biases and failures of so-called food science in America, calories and obesity.

Another of Ms. Wilson’s criticisms of the food supply and processing industries is that they buy and sell ony a few varietals of several fruits and vegetables, usually based on durability, size and availability in bulk rather than nutrition or taste. The Cavendish banana is ubiquitous, often used to sweeten ultra-processed grain “breakfast”cereals. It is not a nutritious fruit. Some vegetables – e.g. most winter squashes (or all squashes) – are water in a plant fibre shell, and are not palatable. She discusses the efforts of Dan Barber to breed a better tasting squash, which have been covered in articles including Tom Philpott’s Squash Is a Mediocre Vegetable. It Doesn’t Have to Be That Way in Mother Jones in 2018.

In part, Ms. Wilson describes the the world food markets as a giant mess that cannot be solved without political action affecting farmers, processers and consumers:

A smart and effective food policy would seek to create an environment in which a love of healthy food was easier to adopt, and it would also reduce the barriers to people actually buying and eating that food. None of this looks easy at present, but nor is such change impossible. If the transformations we are living through now teach us anything, it is that humans are capable of altering almost everything about our eating in a single generation.

Bee Wilson, March 16, 2019, Good Enough to Eat, the Guardian

The goal of creating an environment of a love of healthy food is vague, and involves changing the role and power of food companies in the markets of the world and altering the present climate of respecting the perceived preference of consumers for fast food which can be harvested, processed and brought to market with the least expense to producers and processers.

Much of this book discusses ideas first discussed in Ms. Wilson’s column in the Daily Telegraph, interviews with other writers, and articles in publications such as the Guardian. Her material at the Guardian is indexed under her profile.

In Defence of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto has received favourable reviews in the LA Times and the Sunday Times (of London), and is a bestseller at this point in time. Michael Pollan is an experienced journalist and writer. He reviews a fair amount of history and science in a short book. He tries to talk about food from a common sense perspective. He is cautious about food science, which is often bad science. He is skeptical about anything the food industry, nutritionists and journalists say about food. All too often, claims about food are made to sell new kinds of processed foods, or to sell books, diet plans, supplements and fads.

His advice for eating well, to avoid malnutrition and obesity is: “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.” His idea of food is something pretty close to the original plant or animal – fresh, dried, frozen – cooked at home, not processed at a factory. Don’t buy or eat processed and packaged things that claim to produce health benefits or weight loss. If you want to avoid obesity, eat less.

Pollan advocates a natural diet, organic produce and Slow Food. He describes the Western diet as a disaster, and cites the studies of people who return to a traditional diet from a Western diet. He says that there are many traditional diets incorporating indigenous resources and cultural traditions – and all of them are healthier than the Western diet, which manages to produce malnutrition and obesity at the same time. Many of the themes of In Defence of Foods were developed in his previous book, The Omnivore’s Dilemma. In Defence of Food summarizes those themes and adds a discussion of the research into traditional diets – many of which are high in fats – and why people who stick to those diets don’t have the same problems with obsesity, diabetes and heart disease as people who eat a high-carb Western diet.

His main criticisms of the Western diet are that it is based on a handful of plants and animals raised under industrial conditions, heavily processed, mixed with chemicals that are not food, and served in gargantuan portions. He suggests that refined white flour, processed in mills with steel rollers is probably the first true fast food. It was the first food processed to the point that vitamins have been added back in to avoid contributing to vitamin deficiency diseases.
Throughout the book, he flirts with the French paradox. The French diet, like the Italian diet features wheat flour, carbs, meat, fat, sugar and alcohol, but it doesn’t seem to produce as much heart disease or other health problems. The French eat small portions at long meals, and to some degree they invest in diverse fresh ingredients.

The problem with food in America is that it is cheap, and served in large portions. North Americans don’t know when they are full or when to stop. The food processing industry has succeeded in securing a supply of cheap ingredients – partly because of government agricultural subsidies, and it sells lots, cheap, with the full force of modern marketing. Medicine, science and journalism don’t provide eaters with valid information, because science is too fond of trying to refine the idea of food into the idea of essential ingredients. The problem is that the science never gets it right. Science has not identified all the key nutrients and the idea of adding vitamins back in to make food healthy is, in his view, ridiculous. It isn’t completely ridiculous, but he makes a very good point about the marketing of processed food on the basis of health claims. Food should be nutritious – nutrition shouldn’t have to be a marketing point.

The history of food science has been blotted by disasters. Margerine was marketed as a healthy alternative to butter – it has been easier and cheaper to make, but the hydrogenation of vegetable oils has produced a toxic chemical. There is a long history of processed baby foods that prove to be nutritionally deficient. Nothing has come close to mother’s milk.

Pollan doesn’t think that buying fresh food is the answer, because the food industry has already colonized the production of fresh produce. Intensive production and specialized fertilizers grow large vegetables full of water and fertilizer. I was a little surprized – I thought that the people who said that fresh produce was lacking in nutrients were trying to sell vitamin supplements, but it turns out that there is something to that claim. He doesn’t push vitamin supplements though – he suggests finding organic vegetables grown in healthy soil, and he encourages home gardening.

In large part, he encourages investing more money in good real food, more effort in cooking it, and more time enjoying it, eaten slowly, in the company of family and friends, and savored. My main criticism of the book is that his recommendations are aimed at affluent Westerners who can afford to purchase organic produce. He ignores the green revolution – the genetic programs that produced healthy high yield grains and other scientific advances, in favour of a rather Arcadian view of life. He does, in the end, align himself with the organic food snobs, as Rob Lyons’s review in Spiked agrees. But Pollan makes a lot of sense.