Vitamins Hide the Low Quality of Our Food
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
It made brief mention of a few chemicals the author claimed "processing" disrupted, but didn't really expand on that.
If the food has all the chemicals we need, what does it matter if it's "low quality" by the author's standard? If the food doesn't have all the chemicals we need and this isn't obvious, that's a failure of our nutrient tracking scheme.
Our 'nutrient tracking scheme' does not claim to be 100% complete, any more than any other science. I feel it's legitimate to discuss differences between 'naturally' healthy food, and food that is notably deficient being 'fortified' with our best guess as to what's missing.
I'm not following... How does that not apply to "natural" foods as well? Without resorting to an appeal to nature.
I don't think this article is particularly well written or argued, but at the same time, I don't see any appeals to animism or mysticism in it. The author is simply suggesting, albeit not as clearly as he could have, that we have focused in isolation on only a subset of the nutrients we actually need. Obviously, the responsible "next step" to that sort of argument would be to form hypotheses and undertake further study. But that's not really the function of the article, as far as I'm aware.
Consider the broccoli example mentioned in the article:
"A 2011 study on broccoli, for example, found that giving subjects fresh broccoli florets led them to absorb and metabolize seven times more of the anticancer compounds known as glucosinolates, present in broccoli and other cruciferous vegetables, than when glucosinolates were given in straight capsule form. The researchers hypothesized that this might be because the whole broccoli contained other compounds that helped people’s bodies put the anticancer chemicals to use."
Now, the "appeal to nature" argument here would be that there is something fundamentally irreducible or non-replicable in broccoli that we just can't reproduce in a lab, because nature. That's not what the article says. Instead, it says that researchers hypothesized that there may be more components to broccoli than we've yet figured out. That's science. Science is always probing at the edges of what we haven't yet figured out, or revising what we think we have figured out.
The author does his point no favors by harping about synthetic vitamins. I'll grant you that. But he's not advancing any magical thinking.
> the "appeal to nature" argument here would be that there is something fundamentally irreducible or non-replicable in broccoli that we just can't reproduce in a lab, because nature
This is a huge strawman.
The more dangerous "fallacy" is the idea that all food is equivalent until rigorously experimented and proven otherwise. This is the mentality that the food industry hangs its hat on to continue producing the worst possible products that still somehow meet FDA and public approval. It's dangerous because these foods are engineered primarily to appeal to convenience and taste sensibilities which give people an emotional connection to these substandard foods so that they will be more willing accept any evidence that said foods are acceptable.
The idea that eating whole foods which have traditionally been cultivated or gathered by humans is generally preferable to a manufactured alternative is not a bad or fallacious principle. It isn't "because nature", it's because we've been eating those things a long time with a good deal of success, and conversely, in the last 70-80 years of explosion of heavily processed convenience foods we've seen an explosion in diet related health problems. Waiting for conclusive scientific proof of the mechanisms of all these problems instead of using Occam's razor and some common sense is a phenomenally stupid thing to do.
OK, so even if we accept based on no evidence that it isn't, why should we prefer so-called 'natural' foods. And please tell me how GMOs such as corn (maize) and apples are natural, BTW.
> This is the mentality that the food industry hangs its hat on to continue producing the worst possible products that still somehow meet FDA and public approval.
Appeal to 'corporations are evil' is also a rather dangerous fallacy.
> The idea that eating whole foods which have traditionally been cultivated or gathered by humans is generally preferable to a manufactured alternative is not a bad or fallacious principle.
Without evidence it is. This bald assertion does your side no favors.
> It isn't "because nature", it's because we've been eating those things a long time with a good deal of success
Not really. Look at how common deficiency disorders were, back before such horrible modern artificial nonsense such as refrigeration and food preservation.
Besides, what my ancestors ate is not the same as what your ancestors ate, most likely, so which is better? Which diet should we follow? And my ancestors didn't all come from the same place, so which of my ancestors' diets should I follow?
You are arguing a stereotype rather than my actual statements.
Its both! Without a model we don't know what an experiment is testing, indeed a pure experiment is unconvincing for example Ohm's eponymous law were ridiculed as a "web of naked fallacies", and only accepted after a model was proposed.
Or consider my theory that Canadian Geese take summer with them when they migrate south. My experiment shows that after they leave it gets really cold, but nobody believes my model!
>>in broccoli that are unhealthy
Quite possibly, what is your hypothesis?
(I guess I should mention, as far as I understand we now know that some of the natural ones increase cancer risk quite a bit, yes.)
Good point. You hit the nail on the head.
This is quite ridiculous. We've mapped the nutrients required by our cells down to a molecular level. We've even got a thorough understanding of the interaction between the food we eat and how the microbial ecosystem in our digestive system breaks down our food as we digest it.
We have less understanding of the "natural" foods we eat. We've only mapped only a few genomes of the stable foods, let alone a complex break down of the exotic foods in the grocery store isle. The cocktail of organic molecules in the average fruit or vegetable is overwhelming, and many of them have been proved to be highly carcinogenic. Apples for example contain arsenic, amongst other poisonous chemicals. You get diarrhoea after eating too many fruits because of this. You also have pesticides, fertilisers, preservatives, and packaging contamination in 'natural' food.
I'm not against eating healthy, but the "we don't know if it causes cancer" banter is quite arrogant.
The concept of Soylent is great as it can be tailored for human requirements.
This belief, in a nutshell, is the problem with nutrition. We have done no such thing, but we've convinced ourselves that we have. I have no doubt that we aren't even capable of understanding half the shit that goes on to turn food into energy.
At one point, society killed people who dared claim that the Earth revolved around the sun. We should never think, even for a second, that we have all the answers, and we should be immediately suspicious of any claim that we do.
Why? What physical property of the universe precludes us from understanding metabolism?
Here's a typical journal article about Vit C stability while stored. Sealed, its actually pretty stable... assuming your seal is really good.
http://www.iosrjournals.org/iosr-jac/papers/vol2-issue4/D024...
There is another way to talk about "low quality" which is WRT discourse. There's a widely held belief that there is a constant fixed long term demand for certain substances that is invariant between people with the possible exception of demographics (prenatal vitamins, and advertising campaigns relying on selling higher priced mens/womens products to men/women). Then that compounds with liberal arts grad types thinking vitamin / mineral / supplement / medication are mere synonyms that can be freely safely interchanged to sound good in written prose. Finally experimental data shows that regardless of what was sealed into the package at the factory or farm or factory farm, somewhere between a little bit and practically all of the vitamin decays before you eat it (also cooking destroys / leaches out nutrients, etc)
This all leads to the engineering comedy of your food having 3 sig figs of "percent of US RDA of vitamin C for an imaginary person eating an imaginary 200 calorie diet". When in reality its closer to 1 sig fig at best and all we really know for sure is completely removing it from your diet for a couple months or eating months of the supply at one sitting will make you really sick. Oh and another thing we know for certain, is a lot of people make a lot of money by making sure the public is poorly informed and anxious about the topic, but that's also a given in all the other areas of the consumer economy.
"If the food has all the chemicals we need"
Well, this is complicated.
You won't die if you take all the needed vitamins and have the needed intake of macronutrients (proteins and fats, carbs are not "needed")
However, it's not healthy for the following reasons:
- Fibers. Not exactly needed, but healthy.
- Electrolytes. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water-electrolyte_imbalance (You can die from this)
- Other substances that have an effect even though they're not necessarily a nutrient, like the Broccoli one.
- Foreign substances coming from processed foods and that are not present in natural foods (or just synthetic ones, conservatives, colouring, etc)
"The problem with this approach to nutrition is not that there’s anything inherently wrong with synthetic vitamins — it’s the shortsighted nutritional philosophy that our obsession with vitamins encourages. Sure, our easy access to synthetic vitamins means that we’re no longer likely to die from acute vitamin deficiency diseases. But extra vitamins do not protect us from the long-term “diseases of civilization” that are currently ravaging our country, including obesity, heart disease and Type 2 diabetes — many of which are strongly associated with diet."
There is no appeal to nature anywhere in this article, but a general concern that hubris with regards to our knowledge of nutrition is dangerous, especially given that we have obvious serious health problems going on that our approach has caused.
She then asked me if I took a daily multivitamin. I told her I did and she told me to stop taking it. That was 12 years ago and I have not had elevated liver enzymes since. According to my doctor, people that get enough vitamins and minerals through their diet can actually overdose on the sledgehammer of vitamins in a typical Centrum-style multivitamin. This can then cause liver damage which shows up in an ALT/AST blood test.
I think it's prudent to only take vitamins for which you know you are deficient either because of dietary restrictions or through actual testing. For example, my vitamin d level gets low in the winter time so I take vitamin d3 for that.
How come most countries don't do it, then? At least in Germany I have never seen added stuff in milk or flour.
http://www.dovesfarm.co.uk/flour-and-ingredients/organic-flo...
Organic Plain White Flour 1kg
Ingredients:
wheat flour* (contains GLUTEN), statutory ingredients (calcium carbonate, iron, thiamine & niacin).
http://www.ffinetwork.org/regional_activity/europe.php
Here is the law for England & Wales; Northern Ireland, and Scotland.
http://www.food.gov.uk/sites/default/files/multimedia/pdfs/b...
UK supermarkets on the other hand sell filtered milk (at a premium price). Filtered milk stays and tastes fresh for over a week.
In Austria, all supermarkets used to sell pasteurized fresh milk (last about a week). In the last few years, they started moving to ESL milk (lasts 3 weeks). UHT milk (lasts 6 months) is also available, but people usually don't buy that.
Really fresh unpasteurized milk is available only in some stores or directly from farmers (it's still somewhat common for people on the countryside to buy milk directly from farmers).
I do know that to get pasteurized milk that tasted like I understand pasteurized milk to taste I had to look fairly hard in the supermarkets, and it was clearly a niche product. Unfortunately I don't speak German and my GF is currently in Germany, or I'd give you the key words of exactly what I had to look for.
I've had unpasteurized raw milk in Ireland when I've stayed with people with farms. But I prefer homogenized full-fat milk; with normal raw milk fresh from the cow, the cream rises to the top. I prefer it in the milk, giving it body.
PS: check out the table in Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultra-high-temperature_processi... - it indicates 66% of milk consumed in Germany is UHT, vs 20% in Austria. Possibly there is regional variation too.
UHT milk is sold here of course but mostly used as a "backup", to take a few home if you end without milk. Also micro-filtered milk is gaining in popularity for years at this point, but if I should judge the percentage of buyers from the amount of bottles I see in supermarkets, still far from fresh milk.
An important part of this is: fresh milk duration is 4 days max mostly for a matter of ancient regulation. With new productive chain milk gets a lot less contaminated with bacteria so usually lasts a lot more. Many people say that filtered milk is mostly about regulations than a huge difference in duration per se. What is true is that in filtered milk actually the fat is split from the rest of the milk and pasteurized at higher temperatures, and then re-added, so indeed the duration should be better, but not a lot better than fresh milk produced with a very good standards.
Finally, in certain parts of Sicily it is possible to purchase "raw" milk, not pasteurized at all, in automatic machines on the street (in the province of Ragusa, for example). They have a special permission because of an enhanced procedure that allows the milk to be not contained in the process.
Micro-filtered milk lasts for a spooky long time. I've had it in tea and coffee a few days past its best before date, and it's still not soured - three weeks past purchase, IIRC.
(Disclaimer: not German, but Dutch. Our "normal" bread is weak and soft and spongy compared to German bread, even the whole wheat variety, which I eat almost exclusively because it's still more nutritious)
The practice of putting iodine into food had been banned in West Germany since after World War II.
http://www.thyroid-info.com/articles/germanyiodine.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iodine_deficiency#Deficiency
That is, if you suddenly stop doing it, you have a problem. In Germany, presumably, they are already finding other ways to get those vitamins.
The information seems to be spotty though.
> we refuse to change our eating habits in the ways that would actually protect us, which would require refocusing our diets on minimally processed foods that are naturally nutrient-rich
It doesn't seem to be the one I live in, where all the trends of the last decade or longer have been towards various "natural" food diets. Even Walmart sells organic food. "All natural" is an extremely common marketing slogan and has been for decades. I know many "health conscious" people, and none of them are obsessed with vitamins.
The facts about vitamins vs minimally processed foods may be true, but the article seems to seriously mischaracterize American food culture.
I have worked with Italian colleagues, they are even more puristic. Is this really a cultural thing or are vegetables just so expensive in the US? Are you not taking the time to cook? (about 30 min hands-on a day for preparing warm meals is considered normal here.)
I do think vegetables are overpriced in general grocery stores. The large asian grocery stores are pretty fairly priced.
that shit's very very expensive here.
I do all my own cooking, exclusively roasting and steaming, and don't even use carbohydrate rich foods like rice or pasta as a staple. I have steamed or roasted vegetables every day with almost every meal.
One thing I've noticed is that my fellow Americans tend to make a lot more work of vegetables than they need to. They're much too elaborate with washing, and are way too fussy with ingredients and extraneous prep. Just boil, roast, or steam vegetables. Add some salt and butter or olive oil, and you can call it done. So long as the vegetables are fresh and not overcooked, they will taste amazing! (Also, get as fancy as you want, but the best and most complex flavors come from fresh foods.)
Yes.
>Don't you have a vegetable department in the stores?
There are a large number of Americans, especially the poor, for whom the only nearby "grocery stores" are bodegas, convenience stores, minimarts, etc, from which the supply of fresh foods tends to be limited at best. Add to that how spaced out everything in the US is and how poor Americans may not have a car or the free time to drive a considerable distance to a proper grocery store and back and stocking up on anything but the shelf-stable basics can be pretty hard. Take a look at "food desert" maps for more information.
>Here it would also be quite expensive to buy prepackage stuff as one gets peppers, cucumbers, zucchini etc for under 40 cents a piece, a bag of washed fresh spinach is about 1 euro, potatos costs less than 50 cents/kilo
Where I live, in a fairly low cost of living city, prices from a local grocery store start out at $1 apiece for bell peppers for cucumbers, $0.80/pound for potatoes, and $2/pound for apples or broccoli. Increase from there for most other big cities, or for people living in food deserts who have to spend their time getting to a real grocery store if they want anything approaching reasonable prices for fresh stuff.
By contrast, even convenience stores and minimarts will often have processed foods available at a cost low enough to approach those of "real" grocery stores, since canned foods and frozen dinners don't go bad if they're left on the shelves for too long.
One thing to understand is that the typical American diet tends to be regional and varies considerably across those regions. For example, where I currently live (Pacific Northwest) people eat relatively little processed food, in part because they have unbelievable access to fresh ingredients. On the other hand, when I lived in the central US, it was a blend of heavily processed food and fairly limited central/eastern European cuisine. This reflects what is available locally as well as the ethnic history of a region.
In my experience, some parts of the US have a much more diverse and widely available fresh vegetable selection than Europe. This is particularly true in the western US, which is where many vegetables come from. If you are lucky enough to live on the west coast of the US, you can buy a very wide range of fresh vegetables for almost no money all year long. What is available locally is seasonal but augmented by vast greenhouse operations and vegetables shipped in from other latitudes, which is simple in North America. In fact, the lack of vegetable diversity at any point in time compared to what I am accustomed to is one of my complaints about eating in Europe, especially in winter.
Street markets are cool, but they happen to cost me over 30 minutes to shop (lots of impressions), and are not any of my regular bike routes. They do indeed have cheap veggies but you need to walk around and check to get the good deals, which I am usually too tired to do at the times I ride past them. So I often choose to use a supermarket anyway, where I know what I can get, where it is, and get out within 10 minutes or so.
Great, I'd like to start today. What do I eat? Where do I get it? I already try to do this, but with all this conflicting information out there how am I supposed to know what to do exactly.
Too many articles bemoan the state of nutrition, in the United States in particular, but provide no actionable guidance to the reader.
prepare in variety of ways. hot or cold. add spices for taste. sometimes meat for protein and iron. walnuts for omega 3 fatty acids which brain needs but body can't produce. eat healthy snacks like washed pre-peeled carrots, etc.
I'd argue this is well-solved, well-known and already well and often communicated.
for example, there are books on this topic. many. anyone can read today.
There's got to be some place we got this in the ancestral environment that wasn't animal milk. Our nearest animal sibling primates don't drink animal milk, and presumably have the same requirement for them that we do. So, where do they get them? Consumption of bone marrow, perhaps?
Calcium rich foods include leafy greans, beans and fish and other seafood.
Lots of cultures around didn't have/don't have significant milk/dairy intake, those of us who can eat lactose into adulthood are mutants.
http://www.nature.com/news/archaeology-the-milk-revolution-1...
Calcium from several vegetables.
One of the explanations I've seen for why Europeans are white is to enhance this effect, because Europe gets comparatively less sunlight than other regions in which civilization initially spread, but was warm enough due to the gulf stream to support agriculture, which produces a diet lower in vitamin D. So between the comparatively lower sunlight and agriculture, Europeans needed to evolve to be able to generate more vitamin D from sunlight, which losing pigmentation helps with.
Vitamins A and D are present in the oils and livers of cold-water fishes and mammals. Vitamin C is obtained through sources such as caribou liver, kelp, whale skin, and seal brain; because these foods are typically eaten raw or frozen, the vitamin C they contain, which would be destroyed by cooking, is instead preserved.
But that doesn't fit into a modern Western diet.
Hopefully, the general trend is to move closer, though.
The general trend has always been to move toward the more profitable. Scientific research has never been a part of the decision making process.
1. Eat high alkaline foods that are organic, non gmo and make sure your diet is 80% alkaline, 20% acidic foods.
2. Fast regularly to clean out toxins
3. Make sure you drink water that isn't completely fluoridated.
4. Get daily exercise for a minimum of 1 hour per day
5. Limit processed and animal based foods
6. Don't consume any dairy products
"If man made it, don't eat it." (Jack LaLanne)
"You can ignore reality, but you can't ignore the consequences of reality." (Ayn Rand)
Sources: the pH Miracle by Robert & Shelly Young, Jack LaLanne, Paul Bragg, Ayn Rand (for kicks)
It's amazing how much pseudoscience you managed to cram into this short list. Fasting to eliminate "toxins" and avoiding fluoridated water are based on pseudoscience or conspiracy theories as well.
Have you read any work by Paul Bragg before?
Do you know the dangers of fluoride and where it comes from?
You're probably the same person who thinks New World Order, the CFR, Builderberg Group, Central Bankers, Aliens and the rest of it is all made up tin hat nonsense.
Keep watching tv and let me know how your body is 20 years from now dude.
So too will eating a good balance of meat, vegetables, legumes, and fruit (except iodine).
By "food" he means "food your great-grandmother would recognise as such". A good rule of thumb is to focus on foods that don't have an ingredients label. Anything that is green is also a good bet – leafy plants are incredibly complex chemical cocktails and the human body evolved in tandem with it.
So, no sushi, no fresh fruits except the few which were available around here circa 1900s, no African food, no Asian food, etc.
> A good rule of thumb is to focus on foods that don't have an ingredients label.
Yes. By all means, eat food which could contain who knows what.
> leafy plants are incredibly complex chemical cocktails and the human body evolved in tandem with it.
This only applies to foods found in the Rift Valley in Africa.
Instead of doing a lot of fussing over our cooking, most of the time, for everyday meals, we should be sticking things into the oven with olive oil, salt, and pepper, then letting the magic of roasting magically create wonderful flavors for us. (Garlic? If you feel like changing it up, go for it! I've solved the "garlic peeling problem" so it's a good way to change things up. It's a mistake to be too consistent with flavoring, so garlic every time isn't necessary, needed, or wise, IMO.) Also keep in mind, that unless you are one of them, you aren't cooking to impress your "foodie" friends. You have a different set of priorities. So a helpful thing to do, in your own mind (NOT out loud) tell all your "foodie" friends to "smeg-off!" Go ahead and do things "wrong." So long as you're okay with it. It's your relationship with food, not theirs!
Steak, cauliflower, fish, asparagus...so many wonderful things to have as everyday meals, and if you approach the task with efficiency in mind, the overall wait is usually 30 to 45 minutes, but active preparation/labor time is very slight. Do very minimal prep, stick something in the oven, go and play a game or write some code, then take really yummy complexly flavored food out of the oven.
Truth be told, some of us who aren't very focused on food thoughtlessly imitate people we shouldn't imitate when we cook. One example: How often do you get out a cutting board and use a full sized chef's knife? I haven't used a full sized chef's knife in over a year and get out a cutting board most often when I just need a place to set ingredients. Let's face it, we aren't chefs! We aren't pulling amazing feats of multitasking rapid culinary excellence. We don't need such a highly specialized and versatile tool to rapidly accomplish a dozen different operations and exercise well honed skills as we zip around in a restaurant kitchen. Basically, it's the inversion of the "teaching" segment in Ratatouille: You are your mother! Cut your broccoli in the air over your bowl or pot. Use a really sharp knife. (Look up the Victorinox Fibrox knife http://amzn.com/B0000CFDD5 then look at this video by America's Test Kitchen. That $24 knife has the same grain size and performs as well as the top-rated $300 knife in the video, and it's cheap enough for you to simply donate and buy a new one every year.)
I now cook all my own food, I roast and steam everything, and the effect is that I eat better than I ever have while doing just a fraction of the work I used to do. "Change your relationship to food" with Soylent? Nah. (Tried it.) An oven, judicious use of aluminum foil, a baking pan, a pot with a steamer insert, and olive oil. Use your brain and observe what you do and adjust it to your priorities. (I call it "hyper-lazy cuisine for programmers.")
That often makes a wonderful sauce for vegetables, for no more effort than just pouring it into a bowl or over the vegetables.
This just sounds like the naturalistic fallacy.
> The problem with this approach to nutrition is not that there’s anything inherently wrong with synthetic vitamins — it’s the shortsighted nutritional philosophy that our obsession with vitamins encourages. ...
> Indeed, natural foods contain potentially protective substances such as phytochemicals and polyunsaturated fat that also are affected by processing, but that are not usually replaced. If these turn out to be as important as many researchers suspect, then our exclusive focus on vitamins could mean we’re protecting ourselves against the wrong dangers. ...
> .. extra vitamins do not protect us from the long-term “diseases of civilization” that are currently ravaging our country, including obesity, heart disease and Type 2 diabetes — many of which are strongly associated with diet.
This is not a naturalistic fallacy. As my example, which I think is more direct than phytochemicals, consider that alcoholism can lead to B1 deficiency. In the 1970s people proposed vitamin fortified alcohols, which would prevent the institutionalization of 1,200 alcoholics yearly (in the 1970s) due to Wernicke-Korsakoff syndrome. (See http://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=2706&dat=19780812&id=J... for a newspaper article from the time. The PubMed reference is http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/96343 .)
This wasn't done because, as I recall, the labeling of "vitamin fortified" would likely influence some people to consume more alcohol, on the idea that it was healthier because it contains vitamins. Unfortunately I can find no reference to this decision, and I'm not sure my memory is correct, since http://www.newsweek.com/are-vitamin-enhanced-alcohols-heathi... says "Stampede Light Plus beer, fortified with B vitamins, is soon planning a relaunch. The beer first got its start with Jessica Simpson, who touted it in ads urging beer guzzlers to "Be Smart, Drink Smart.""
Beer is low quality nutrition. Adding vitamins to beer does not make it high quality nutrition.
This just sounds like the naturalistic fallacy.