The F Word

Poor Dana.*

(*I change the names of my friends to protect the innocent...)

I saw Dana in passing the other day, and she was very proud to tell me that she has lost a few pounds lately (great!) doing Weight Watchers (oh...) and was eating things like fat free cheese (GASP!) at which point my look of horror shut her down. In her defense, she had not yet read my second post (The Whole Truth About Googala, and if you haven't either, you'd better catch up, because the information train is rollin', people!). She was understandably frustrated and confused as to why I was admonishing her for something that she was actually paying money for people to tell her, and is considered common sense among many people who are trying to be "healthier."

Back to Marketing 101. If the advice is free, then it is less likely to have an agenda behind it. I do this purely out of the love in my heart for you. Now some of you may argue that there is no such thing as free advice, so if you wish to count the awesome feelings I get when I take the fat free cheese out of people's refrigerator, then consider it fair compensation for goods and services rendered.

So, Dana, this one is for you.

In my last post, I alluded to "nutritional theories" (to be exact, they are hypotheses at best) that have caused the extreme prevalence of Googala in many "diet foods," and the absolute best place to start is with the F word: Fat. Or rather the F-ing F word: Fat Free. The hypothesis is that eating dietary fat causes a person to be fat, and that if you remove the fat from food, people will get less fat. Unfortunately, Dana, and the rest of you, this hypothesis is what we in the Industry like to refer to as bull s***! Now, this post has taken longer than I would have liked to write, because I wanted to make sure I did a fair amount of research to back up my claims. It all started in the 1940s with Ancel Keys and the Lipid Hypothesis…

Uh oh. This is about to get very boring. OK look, I want to inform you, but this is supposed to be light and entertaining as well, so I am going to cliff note it for you, and for those of you who are sticklers for things like facts, I will give you homework…OK?

· Circa 1940: Lipid Hypothesis says eating fat and cholesterol causes heart disease.

· 1940s-present: Plethora of fake foods, rancid oils and margarines replace butter, raw whole milk, cheese, lard, etc. (Homework: go compare the labels of regular Hellman’s Mayonnaise and Fat Free Mayonnaise. Then for bonus points take a look at Mayonnaise made with “healthy” olive oil. Scary.)

· 1994: A girl in my college dorm told me she couldn’t eat avocados because they are “too fattening.”

· Present Day: Obesity rates in adults and especially children have skyrocketed. Diabetes Type II (a largely preventable disease) rates have skyrocketed in adults and children. And the CDC reports Life Expectancy on the decline (Google it. It’s all there)

· Conclusion: The Hypothesis is probably wrong!

If you wish to do your own fact finding, start with this foundation, which is doing very good work with whole food education: http://www.westonaprice.org/cardiovascular-disease/myths-a-truths-about-cholesterol. Then read anything by Michael Pollan (The Omnivores Dilemma, In Defense of Food) or watch his movie, Food, Inc. Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution is a great show and he has cookbooks and a website to support his foundation. I am about to start reading Barbara Kingsolver’s Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, so I will be reviewing that for you, but I hear from many whole food enthusiasts that it is a must read. There are endless sources of whole food enthusiasts, as there are also endless sources of food religion zealots and Fat War proponents. Those of us who do not have the time nor the intellect to sift through this much conflicting data must step back from the rhetoric and try to use our common sense.

Some of you may be suspicious of the refuting of the Lipid Hypothesis due to in large part the number of medical people who tout it. As one who has participated in medical research in my past life, I will tell you that “evidence based medicine” is a lot less evidence based than you might think. Personal bias, cuts in funding, drop-out rates, poor data entry, understaffing, the size of the patient groups being studied, and most importantly who is funding it and what is their agenda can all affect the results. People hear a report on the news (“A new study showed that…”) or hear about it from a secondary source on the Internet or in a book and the idea is accepted as Gospel, without any knowledge of the source of the study or how good it was. Most of us are not qualified to judge scientific research, so as a basic guideline, if you hear of a study done in a major publication, such as the NEJM, Pediatrics, JAMA, then it is probably good science. If you are poking around on the Internet and come across someone’s blog (uh, except for mine…) then be cautious.

Doctors are so busy with disease, they have very little time to do good fact finding about Nutrition, and really, who is out there funding that research? The only people with the money to do that are the large AgraBusinesses who are creating all of the googala. Also, I know it’s hard to believe, but doctors have a hard time admitting they were wrong: it is hard to get into medical school but do you know how hard it is to get out? Very. Even bad doctors get saved to save face…(In case you are thinking I am a bitter ex-Nurse, many of these thoughts on the Medical Profession are the opinions of two of the best doctors I have ever known. I will be interviewing them in future posts…) Though many, esteemed heart surgeons are coming forth and admitting that the Fat Wars have failed us miserably, as of this date (2/21/12) the American Heart Association has still not made an official statement, and are still pushing their “Heart Smart” label on a lot of googala. I’m sure it has nothing to do with their being too busy cutting people open to deal with this issue properly. Baby’s got to eat, you know…In case you think I just hate doctors, I am not saying that doctors are bad: there are great ones and terrible ones just like every other profession in the world. I am saying that for many of them, Nutrition has not been a priority in their education (some schools have as little as 2 hours of Nutrition education) and so they simply do not know enough about it. They should therefore, refrain from addressing it. If your doctor tells you that eating Special K and Dannon Light are healthy for you…run.

But aside from the doctors, I have a very hard time trusting the results of actual Nutrition studies, even if they were done perfectly, when the people in them are eating fake foods! How can we claim to have a truthful understanding of the body’s natural response to a phenomenon, when they are consuming meat with hormones and antibiotics, produce with pesticides, pasteurized milk, trans fats, high fructose corn syrup and food dyes, etc… The sad truth is, we probably can’t. But what we do know is that things are getting oh-so-very-worse at an alarming rate, and we need to do something very different. And at this point, very different is re-training our brains to see that a paragraph of chemicals is not and I repeat NOT better for your body than good old fashioned butter, whole milk and cheese. Since I started eating whole foods I have lost weight, in case you are worried about jumping in.

BUT, keep in mind that you cannot eat these things every day, and sit at your desk all day, and expect to look like a runway model. Our ancestors moved around a lot! And we can’t fake the food just to avoid moving our tushies. We need to stick to whole foods, eat mostly plants and nuts and protein and less dairy and grains, and have the appropriate level of exercise in our lives to burn off the calories and keep us at a healthy weight.

And that is advice you can take to the bank…for free.
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Latest recipe: I made the white bean hummus, and it was delicious, but I did not use Joel Fuhrman's recipe, because he likes to stick Dijon Mustard in everything for flavor. I used the Moosewood Cookbook's recipe with soaked white beans instead of garbanzo. It was delicious, and the kids inhaled it.

Currently Reading: Sigh. It's still Harry Potter with the kids. I promise to start something about Nutrition before my next post...

The Whole Truth About Googala

My daughter, excited to try the new fennel soup recipe, and said fennel trying to soften up. It's so pretty, but hard to beat into submission...

In order for us to take this journey together, there are a few things we need to clear up first. You may have noticed, in my inaugural post (Why blog, why now?), that I referred to a string of "food religions" that I have been exploring and comparing. What you may or may not have noticed is what was missing from that list, such as Low Fat, Low Cal, Portion Control, South Beach, Atkins, Jenny Craig, Weight Watchers, ________(insert latest diet craze here). This is because for me, and hopefully for you as well, these are not options of consideration. The nutritional theories that support these diets are much of the reason why googala is so present in supposedly healthy diets, and keeping well-meaning people fat, sick, and miserable. (By the way, this is a tell-it-like-it-is blog. Not for the overly sensitive...just FYI...) And so, dear readers, we must go back to the beginning. Back to the conversation that I had with my friend, when the word googala was invented.

My friend Erica is an extremely intelligent Pediatric Nurse Practitioner. She and I worked together in my past Life at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia on a Gastrointestinal and Endocrine unit. You would think that this makes us experts in food and nutrition, but sadly, it does not. Stay tuned for more on that one...But, I digress. Erica was experiencing skin breakouts, and I, being her Skin Care Consultant, was asking her what she had been eating lately. (Why, you ask? Oh readers, we have so much to learn together! Enjoy the journey.) She told me that she has been eating "reasonably well-balanced meals with enought fruits and vegetables, and treats in moderation." "But how much processed food are you eating?" I asked her. To which she responded why does it matter? If she is eating enough of the good stuff, why isn't she allowed to have a store bought cookie for dessert? And this is what I told her:

"This is not a meritocracy. Your body is a machine that was designed to run on whole foods. It doesn't recognize non-food, and it doesn't know what to do with it. When you eat an apple, your body says: "oh, an apple! I know how to digest that and what it's for." If you eat almonds, it says "I know what to do with that!" Your body recognizes the water, fiber, vitamins, minerals, fats, proteins, etc. in whole foods, and handles them accordingly. Now say you eat a processed cookie with chemical dyes and sugars: your body says, "this is...googala...I don't know what to do with googala..." But it is very smart and resourceful, and it has a system for dealing with foreign matter or trash. So, the googala goes through and the liver and kidneys and the gut and skin do what they can to handle it. And on it goes: "Fiber, Vitamin, A, proteins...woah! Googala. Um, ok let's put that aside..." So it doesn't matter how much you feel you deserve to eat googala by offsetting it with other foods, the fact is, your body was not designed to thrive by digesting it. Our body is brilliant: it will handle the processing of googala every-once-in-a-while, without seriously taxing our machinery. However, are most of us using true moderation? (hint: it's not once a day, or even once a week!) No. Most people live on googala, with whole foods as the exception. And now they are living with an extraordinary gammit of illnesses that they are convinced is just "coincidence" or even "normal" for people of their age/race/gender/bone structure/fill-in-the-blank. It's like putting motor oil in your gas tank and saying, "What? My tank is full! Why isn't it running properly? Something must be wrong with my motor..."

OK, it's a goofy metaphor. But it worked: I enlightened Erica, and googala became a household name. I began to identify forbidden foods as googala for my children, and I made sure to take the time to eplain to them why foods they were previousy allowed in moderation were now forbidden and/or replaced. We will be talking more about this process in future posts, but I will leave you with a memory of one of the best conversations my kids and I had on this subject.

My son struggles a lot more than his sister with resisting the temptation of processed sugar, and one time he asked me, in utter frustration, "Mom, why do they make googala taste sooooo good?" Now, I have been discussing the concept of Marketing with my children, because I wanted to raise them with a lot of awareness about their status as a consumer, and how most of what we see and hear is designed to influence our emotions and part us with our money. If you haven't started this kind of education with your children, please do. It saves you a lot of "But why? I want it!!!!" conversations in the future...So when he asked me that question, I went straight to the Marketing answer: "Because if you knew how sick it makes you, you would never buy it. They have to make it taste really good in the hopes that you will ignore what your body needs." Was he angry that I was telling him he couldn't eat the crappy candy he got from school? No! With that explanation, he kissed me on the cheek, and said "I'm so glad you're my Mom."

It takes a lot of work, people, but aren't they worth it? Aren't you?

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Latest new recipe: My own invention! Cauliflower, fennel potato soup. I love the look of fennel, but am struggling to make it tender enough to enjoy eating it. I sauteed it until soft, but very, very browned. I used it in place of leeks in a cauliflower, leek, potato soup recipe we love. It's a pureed soup, but I left the potatos cubed like a chowder. The flavor was very interesting...We liked it the first night, but it doesn't make for good leftovers. The kids ate some no thank you bites, and my husband said the flavor was good, the color was off-putting.

Currently reading: OK, I admit it. It's Harry Potter The Goblet of Fire. I love to read aloud to the kids in lieu of watching TV, and I have waited for years to get them HP ready. It has shoved Eat To Live to the backburner. But I will be trying the White Northern Bean Hummus recipe soon, and I even bought dried beans to soak so I can avoid the canned version, which has high levels of BPA. A new step for me...