What is Food? Part 2 — Fatty American Foods
Lessons Learned From Life Series, #1
If you haven’t seen part 1, I suggest having a look there first, since this part won’t make much sense otherwise.
Here we continue with the claim list from the article quoted in part 1:
cheap,
convenient,fatty
American foods
and large meal portions
… packing on pounds
Fatty
Fatty? What kind of fat? Fat makes you fat?
This topic is far too broad, and too far afield for me to attempt to cover it. I have a book suggestion instead: The Big Fat Surprise by Nina Teicholz. I’ve read quite a few books on this subject, and this is the one I tend to remember, and to recommend.
In 1959 or 1960, when I was in 4th or 5th grade, my mother switched from whatever cooking oil she was using previously to safflower oil. Much more recently, circa 2010, I learned why. The idea came from Ancel Keys, who made a career of demonizing saturated fat (“fatty” in the list above) and promoting toxic polyunsaturated industrial seed oils like safflower oil in its place. But in my estimation, now, these oils are “not food”.
I have the audiobook version of the above book, that doesn’t lend itself to copying and pasting excerpts here, but if you are not familiar with this matter, you can get a taste of what has been going on here, in Nina Teicholz’ Substack blog:
Here is an excerpt of the “fat part” of the above post:
On the “low-fat” diet: From 2000 on, the guidelines have ditched any "low-fat" wording, explaining that low-fat “diets are generally associated with dyslipidemia (hypertriglyceridemia and low HDL-C concentrations),” which are indicators of increased risk for heart disease. Also: the low-fat diet “could engender an overconsumption of calories in form of carbohydrates, resulting in the adverse metabolic consequences of high-carb diets.” For these reasons, a DGAC Vice Chair said in 2015: “...there is no conventional message to recommend low-fat diets.”
Yet the 2020 guidelines limits total fat to between 20-35% of calories, which is, as we write, “a range of dietary fat intake that has historically been understood in the scientific literature as a low-fat diet.”
On saturated fats: We found “insufficient rigorous evidence” to support limits on these fats as protection against heart disease. The 2020 DGAC review ignored more than 20 review papers by independent teams of scientists from around the world which concluded that strong evidence is lacking for continued caps on these fats.
For more information, read the book!
American Foods
Ouch. That hurts. I eat American food, but I usually avoid industrially farmed and processed and ultraprocessed foods. The problem is not with American food. It’s with what has come to be known as the “Standard American Diet”, or SAD diet. Personally, I prefer “Western Diet”. Here’s the way one blog post phrases it: The Western Diet: A Slow Weapon of Mass Destruction. I picked that one for its catchy title, not because I specifically endorse it. But it does contain some pertinent information. Again, read the book! There are certainly other books you can read as well. Here are a couple I have read that leap to mind:
The Dorito Effect: The Surprising New Truth About Food and Flavor by Mark Schatzker, the book that convinced me to stop eating chicken. It might make you not want to eat at all. Highly recommended.
Death by Food Pyramid: How Shoddy Science, Sketchy Politics and Shady Special Interests Have Ruined Our Health by Denise Minger. The title is a little dated, since the USDA Food Pyramid has now become MyPlate, but it is also catchy, and the information is good. Caution: following the advice at the above link to the the USDA guidelines at MyPlate could lead to serious health consequences. I provide the link only for entertainment purposes.
There are many more books, but their titles aren’t leaping at the moment. It’s been long day thanks to an 8:30 AM choir rehearsal — not a warmup; the only rehearsal for the anthem was canceled due, apparently, to weather paranoia, and we rehearsed it together for the one and only time an hour and a half before the service started. Never before in my choir career, and I hope never again! But I really do digress. But it feels good to rant a little. The anthem went well.
Large Meal Portions
This one is easy. Read The Dorito Effect. Much of what people are eating is designed to make them want to eat more. Of course the portions are large. The technology works. Do you know the difference between “artificial flavor” and “natural flavor”? None, really, as far as I know. They’re the same chemical compounds, but the latter kind is derived from plants, and it sounds tastier. They are palatants, a term normally applied to animal feed additives that encourage eating more. This works with people, too.
There is so much more to it. Read.
There is another book that I read some 10 years ago, the name of which I had completely forgotten. It was an eye-opener for me at the time. I finally managed to locate it using a keyword search: The End of Overeating by David Kessler. I don’t even know if I would recommend it now, but as I recall the author dug deeply into how the food industry operates. He used the words “the three points of the compass” to refer to sugar, fat, and salt. Those are well-known principle ingredients of unhealthy processed food, but that phrase, “the three points of the compass” is something I never encounter. It is a formula for enticing people, byincluding the right amounts of each, to eat and eat and eat.
Packing on Pounds
I wrote a little about metabolic disease in part 1. This is another huge topic. It doesn’t arise from large portion sizes, insufficient exercise, or fatty foods. It arises, I would say, from eating “food” that is not really food — “food” that reprograms your appetite and ultimately wrecks your metabolism. But what do I know? Well, I know what happens when I eat well: my weight is back where it was in my teens, maybe 46 years ago. I also know what has happened when what I ate looked like SAD/Western diet: I packed on the pounds.
I also know that it can and does work differently for different people, but it is pretty clear that there is a major problem with what a lot of people are eating, a problem that often results in distended bellies among other things. That particlar feature is a sign of accumulation of visceral fat. This page at webmd.com seems to show signs of understanding what it is. Unfortunately, it doesn’t look to me like the advice about what to do about it is very good, for the reasons I gave above at the start of this section.
Metabolic disease is something I continue to research, not so that I can blog about it but so that I can continue on with my life a while longer. I have tried many things to rein in metabolic issues. I work remotely with an MD that understands more about it than I do (most of them don’t seem to — they want to sell me drugs), rather than just blindly trying this and that.
Over the years I have developed what I thought was a good personalized healthy diet, based upon what I have been able to learn from many sources. Now, however, I am discovering that I may have neglected to pay enough attention to common anti-nutrients in what is often thought to be healthy plant foods and that if so, I am not alone. This is breaking news for me, even though I have been aware of the anti-nutrient issue itself for at least a decade. I forgot about it.
I can’t say much more until I do some additional elimination testing. It may take months; I don’t know. I can see that I automatically steered away from certain foods because I didn’t feel as well after consuming them for a while, and some of those were high in anti-nutrients. (Again, read Dorito Effect. This is how it is supposed to work.) With other foods, I continued eating them, while wondering why my health seemed to be declining. There are undoubtedly other factors, but this one could prove to be major.
Forgetting about it is not as dumb as it might sound. If I eliminated everything I suspected of causing problems, I would starve to death. I had to draw a line somewhere. And then I forgot. Now I think I see a problem and that I need to possibly reconsider some things.
I am not an especially good researcher. I depend upon information being given to me. Books, articles, conversations. I ask questions, and I receive answers, sometimes in surprising ways. I ended part 1 with the following, and I am going to repeat it here. There are so many things to know, that I have no way of knowing. This is what I do. It works.
Matthew 7:7 “Ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you. 8 “For everyone who asks receives, and the one who seeks finds, and to the one who knocks it will be opened.