How to eat right? Ideological wars

Vitamins or whole foods? Fatty or nonfatty foods? Sugar or sweetener? Will we ever be able to get a clear idea of how to eat right?

The history of food processing

The history of mankind is, in no small measure, the history of the growth of control over our existence. About 2 million years ago, early human ancestors began to process food by slicing meat, chopping tubers, and possibly cooking. This allowed people to have smaller teeth and jaws, making room for a larger brain and providing more room for its growing needs.

About 10,000 years ago, people began selectively breeding plants and animals according to their preferences, and the growth of food production helped them build larger and more complex societies. The Industrial Revolution brought great advances in canning and pasteurizing food, helping to feed thriving cities with food from afar. In the 20th century, we used chemistry to change the taste of food and prevent it from spoiling, while modern breeding and genetic engineering have accelerated the artificial selection that humans began thousands of years ago. The emergence of humans, civilization, and industrialization were closely tied to changes in the food industry.

Since modern manufacturing has drastically reduced the cost of food, our attention has shifted from producing enough food to eating right. During this time, nutritional science has given birth to approaches toward healthier eating. As food became more and more a creation of humans rather than nature, the analytical study of nutrition missed something about what makes food healthy. Food, that inanimate object with which we are most closely associated, challenges not only how we think about human health, but also how we use science to understand the world.

Popularization of vitamins

At the turn of the 20th century, the science of nutrition suddenly became an important part of our understanding of human health. The story of how people got rid of scurvy now seems obvious. And in the era of sailing ships, people ate canned foods for months and often fell ill with the disease until they realized that eating citrus fruits could prevent scurvy.

In 1940, only 9% of Americans knew why vitamins were important; by the mid-50s, 98% did. Public health success and the popularization of fortified bread helped to see that vitamins are an essential component of human health, and food is a mechanism for their delivery. We now know that bananas are rich in potassium, milk is rich in calcium, carrots are rich in vitamin A and, of course, citrus fruits are rich in vitamin C. The value of food can be calculated by measuring its caloric value and reflected on the label on the side of the package.

In the 2010s, this nutrient-based model approached its logical endpoint. In 2012, three college graduates working on a technology startup in San Francisco quickly ran out of funding. One of them, a programmer named Rob Rinehart, got an insight: He could just stop buying food. “We need amino acids and lipids, not milk itself,” he thought. “We need carbs, not bread.” Reinhart did a little research and compiled a list of 35 essential nutrients-a list of vitamins that Funk and Hopkins compiled about 100 years ago. He mixed the powders with water, began consuming the mixture instead of regular food, and was immensely pleased with the result. “Not having to worry about food is fantastic,” he wrote on his blog. “I save time and hundreds of dollars a month. I feel liberated from a huge amount of repetitive chore.”

Foodies who were not interested in breaking their habits or who did not want to save time cried out at the engineers’ tasteless encroachment on one of life’s great joys. The new powdered food companies have also been criticized by a group they might have expected to be on their side–nutritionists.

Essentialism and Nutritionism. How to eat right?

According to Gyorgy Sreenis, professor of food policy at the University of Melbourne, there is a good reason why nutritional science cannot solve this problem. In the 1980s, Scrienis began to question the modern trend of reducing the fat content of food. Instead, he embraced the idea of whole foods, started cooking more food from scratch, and eventually became a bread enthusiast and baked it on sourdough from combinations of whole and sprouted grains.

Sreenis argues that nutritional science is influenced by an ideology he calls “nutritionism,” a paradigm of nutrition that makes a number of erroneous assumptions. It reduces foods to amounts of nutrients, takes healthy ingredients out of the context of diet and lifestyle, assumes that biomarkers such as body mass index are accurate indicators of health, overestimates scientists’ understanding of the relationship between nutrients and health, and echoes corporate claims that the nutrients they add to heavily processed foods make them healthy.

These errors lead us to foods that are processed to optimize flavor, convenience and nutrient profile, diverting us from the whole foods that Sreenis says we should be eating. He says the history of margarine provides insight into the dangers of nutritionalism.

Margarine was first accepted as a cheaper alternative to butter and then promoted as a healthy food when saturated fats became an issue – criticized as a villain, riddled with trans fats. And recently, margarine has been processed without trans fats using new processes such as transesterification. According to current trends in dietetics, this has made margarine look better, but it is another type of ultra-processing that will probably reduce the quality of the product. Sreenis, as an essentialist, argues that nutritional research increasingly shows that modern processing itself makes food unhealthy.

Recommendations and reality

Most of us carry both ideologies: essentialism and nutritionism, which pull us in different directions, making it difficult to make decisions about how to eat. Many public health agencies make precise recommendations, based on centuries of research, about the amount of each nutrient we need to maintain our health.

They also insist that whole foods, especially fruits and vegetables, are the best way to get these nutrients. But if you accept the nutrient recommendations, why is it assumed that whole foods are a better way to get those nutrients than, say, a powdered mix, which is objectively superior in terms of cost, convenience, and greenhouse gas emissions? What’s more, powder mixes allow people to know exactly what they’re eating.

This reflexive preference for natural foods can sometimes hide scientific conclusions from us. Although research is accumulating pointing to, for example, excessive sugar consumption as a particular problem in modern nutrition, most nutrition organizations refuse to endorse artificial sweeteners as a way to reduce sugar intake.

“I’ve spent a lot of time on artificial sweeteners and I can’t find any convincing evidence that anything is wrong with including them in my diet,” says Tamar Haspel, a Washington Post columnist who has been writing about nutrition for more than 20 years. She argues that there is some evidence that low-calorie sweeteners help some people lose weight, but you won’t hear that from nutrition organizations, which constantly minimize the positives while focusing on the potential downsides.

Food and Values

Our arguments for food are so polarizing because they converge on our values. Our choice of what we put inside ourselves physically represents what we want inside ourselves spiritually.

Nutritionalism and essentialism provide insight into what makes food healthy. But an unbiased look at the evidence shows that many of the most hotly debated questions about nutrition cannot be answered with the information we have. If we excrete nutrients and eat them in a different form than they come naturally, how will they affect us? Is it possible to prepare blends that can approach or even surpass natural whole foods in their usefulness?

Outside of an experiment such as Davis’s inimitable infant study, we cannot know and control exactly what people eat over time-and even this project never came close to uncovering the diseases that kill millions of old people.

The human body is so amazing in part because it is so changeable and malleable. Different people’s bodies work differently because of a variety of genes, behaviors, and environments. The food we eat today will change the way our bodies work tomorrow, making yesterday’s recommendations obsolete. There are too many variables and too few ways to control them.

If scurvy has not been properly explained for years, we can imagine how difficult it would be to fully understand how food is related to much more complex illnesses, such as cancer, heart disease and depression.

But this disappointment has a downside. Perhaps the reason food is so difficult to optimize is because there is no optimal diet. We are extremely flexible omnivores who can lead healthy lives on a variety of diets, just like our hunter-gatherer ancestors or modern humans who fill shopping carts in global supermarkets. But we can also live on specialized diets, like the Inuit, who mostly ate a small portion of Arctic foods, or the farmers, who ate almost nothing but the grains they grew.

Aaron Carroll, an Indiana physician argues that people spend too much time worrying about eating the wrong things. “The danger of eating wrong is too small, but, the very search for truth gives you pleasure, it probably outweighs the disadvantages,” he said in 2018. And he added:“Many of our discussions about food are overly moralized and fearful. Food is not poison, it doesn’t kill us.

Food is a field for spreading ideologies such as nutritionism and essentialism to realize deep-seated desires such as connecting with nature and creating a better future. We argue so passionately about food because we’re not just looking for health – we’re looking for meaning. If food helps us find meaning in our lives, that’s the best we can hope for in this matter.

source