In Defense Of Food

In Defense Of Food describes the decline of natural eating in exchange for diets driven by science and nutritional data, how this decline has ruined our health, and what we can do to return to food as a simple, cultural, natural aspect of life.

How did you describe your dietary habits the last time you thought about changing something? Did you say: “I’ll try to eat less bread and more salad?” Or rather something like: “I’m cutting out carbs.”

Today, we spend most of our time talking about nutrients, rather than foods, but why is this?

It all started in the 1950s, when scientists came up with something called the lipid hypothesis – the idea that eating lots of fat and cholesterol (mostly from meat and dairy) is bad for you and causes heart disease.

However, that lipid hypothesis stood on just two, very shaky studies, but over the years has been cited and re-cited thousands of times, until it became an almost universally accepted “law” – in spite of just as many studies showing opposing evidence.

The reason the lipid hypothesis became a center of attention is that in 1977, a special committee selected by the senate published a report called “The Dietary Goals for the United States”. Originally, the report was going to tell people to “eat less meat and dairy.”

However, since head of the committee, George McGovern, happened to own a bunch of cattle farms, (which would not have sold a lot of meat after the release of the report), the wording was changed to “decrease consumption of animal fat, and choose meats, poultry and fish which will reduce saturated fat intake.”

This sounds a lot more cryptic and it doesn’t encourage you to eat less meat – no, just less “saturated fat” – whatever that means.

And that’s how one greedy guy got you to think about eating low-carb instead of quitting donuts.

The pretense for all this science-talk about food was of course that it’d make us healthier, but did that really happen? Not really. 3 out of 4 Americans are either overweight or downright obese and if we continue to eat the way we do we’ll end up in a place where 1 in 3 children will get diabetes. Yes, deaths from heart disease have been cut in half over the past 50 years, but admissions to hospitals from heart attacks haven’t – it’s better medical treatment that carries this achievement, not better nutrition. So not only did we start talking about food in very un-foody ways, this “evolution” has also failed horribly at bringing about the improvements in health it was created for in the first place. Cooking up your diet in…