Countdown to Halloween

Kidding, kidding. Sort of.

You see, Sunday marks the last candy-based holiday until October. While I have no desire to rush through spring and summer, this early Easter has caught me a bit off-guard. I think we’ve only eaten one bag of Cadbury Mini Eggs (two? Maybe two.)

Perhaps the arrival of the Easter Calorie Calculator in my email this morning was intended to make me feel better. 1 Creme Egg, 5 Peeps, and 25 jelly beans will power a nearly five-mile walk. I’m ok with that.

Food for thought: Totally gross

I could try to come up with a more eloquent title for this post, but this story really is totally gross. Veg(etari)an friends, you might as well stop right here, unless you’re willing to subject yourself to a story that includes “aerosolization of brain tissue.”

This story from the New York Times about a strange disease plaguing some people who worked in pork processing plants reads like a story from Eric Schlosser, though it’s not. The description of the way the brains were removed from the pigs’ skulls made me gag. I’m impressed that the company moved fairly quickly to halt the procedure that seemed correlated with the strange illness the workers developed, but it seems like yet another reason to avoid factory-farmed meat. Even though there’s no evidence that actually eating the pork has caused any problems, the toll on these workers is problem enough.

Food for thought: Pollan’s In Defense of Food

If you consume any media at all, I’m sure you heard Michael Pollan discussing his new book In Defense of Food last month. His catchy “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.” mantra was picked up not only by the New York Times, where he originally published the article that spawned the book, but also Slate, NPR (more than once) and pretty much everyone else.

I was excited to get my hands on the book, and read it in less than 24 hours. First in line for a library copy, four weeks later it’s overdue (bad librarian!) and I’m still trying to figure out what it was about the book that left me flat. I can’t imagine arguing with his “eat food…” premise, but I’m not so sure about the way Pollan gets there.

Pollan spends much of In Defense of Food decrying “nutritionism,” a term he found in the 2002 article “Sorry Marge (.pdf)” that criticizes of the “use of and reliance on nutritional categories, and this whole framework of analysis, to guide us in our everyday quest to eat well.” Instead of science, Pollan writes, he relies “mainly on the authority of tradition and common sense” to tell us “how to eat.” This philosophy he contrasts to “letting scientists decide the menu,” “a mistake,” he tells us, because “they simply do not know enough.” It seems that here he either misunderstands or misrepresents scientific research. Science is in the business of describing our best understanding of the world up to this point. It changes, and rightly so. Each individual study adds a tiny building block of knowledge to all the others that came before it, and no single finding alone means as much as the synthesis of the findings together. The food industry, on the other hand, and is more than willing to cherry-pick the science that will help it sell food, and government agencies seem happy to turn a blind eye to the behavior. This is a relationship Pollan does not fail to discuss, yet he seems to ultimately hold science to blame. The distortion of science is not a good reason to reject science itself.

An assignment I always like to see coming through the library is one where students are asked to find an article in a popular source like Time or Newsweek that reports on a recent scientific study. Then, they have to find a copy of the actual scholarly article, the primary source, and compare the conclusions drawn in the two articles. Typically they find that the scientists are fairly circumspect, qualifying their conclusions and noting the limitations of their studies, while the reporting on the studies tends to simplify (and therefore distort, in many cases) the findings. These students are learning to read critically, and they’re learning how we synthesize data into knowledge, skills that are in short supply. The trouble with nutritionism is not bad science, it’s an inappropriate use of science, egged on by marketing, supported by government agencies like the USDA, and made possible by low scientific literacy.

The end of In Defense of Food covers Pollan’s recommendations for how to eat. These are suggestions like “don’t get your fuel from the same place your car does” or “cook, and if you can, plant a garden.” These are the kinds of suggestions that can’t possibly hurt anyone who chooses to follow them, whether they do it because they don’t trust science or because they make sense given what we know about diet and the human body up to this point. Trouble is, the food industry is just as happy to use Pollan’s advice to promote their products as they are to use science. The Salt Institute picked right up on the “don’t trust all that science-y stuff, just eat what you like” message when “Unhappy Meals” was published last January. Caveat lector.

Do vegetables bust your grocery budget?

Back in June I wondered where our grocery budget actually went, what proportion of it went for meat compared to produce compared to dairy, etc.. I kept track in July and discovered that it was, in fact, produce that ate up the largest chunk of our budget, averaging just under 35% of our total grocery expenditures for the month.

I used to be the “salad girl” at work–I ate a salad for lunch almost every day, topped with some kind of fat and protein (chicken, nuts, cheese, olives, etc.) for some staying power. I grew up eating salad with dinner pretty much every night. It sounds weird to say it, but I have actually intentionally cut back on my salad consumption in an effort to eat more seasonally, locally, and affordably.

Even with this change in diet we are still very lucky to eat a wide variety of fruits and vegetables; in July we purchased and ate 27 different kinds of produce ranging from the most expensive item, a 20 lb. Oregon-grown watermelon that cost $6, to several items that were under $1 like sprouts, green onions, and even tomatoes (ah, summer!) The variety and relative affordability of produce is not something I take for granted. It’s one of the many reasons I love living in the Pacific Northwest.

All this thinking about produce was triggered by a MedlinePlus article about Americans’ ability to afford a healthy diet that caught my eye this morning. I didn’t even realize there were new dietary guidelines that suggest nine servings (about 4.5 cups) of fruits and vegetables a day. For some folks, according to the article, following this guideline could mean spending up to an unrealistic 70% of their food budget on produce. When dietary guidelines are this out of reach for some people it makes it a little hard to take them seriously.

Nevertheless, in addition to paying more attention to my calcium intake, I’m going to pay closer attention to my servings of fruits and vegetables as well. I’ll keep an eye out for any great deals on (hopefully organic) produce and I’ll keep you posted.

Vitamin Doh!

In addition to the organic suggestion I mentioned Friday, my (very patient) health care provider also recommended that I take calcium citrate and vitamin D supplements.

Now, I am a reasonably well-educated and analytical person. I should be able to pick out a decent vitamin at the grocery story all by my grown-up self, right? A busy Saturday afternoon might not be the best time to stand and read labels, but still, how hard can it be to find one that has the two things I am looking for?

Right.  Hard.

I finally choose the “Naturally Preferred Advanced Women’s Multi Food Rich Dietary Supplement with Standardized Herbal Extracts.” They’re not perfect–in particular I’m not happy that they only have 20% of the RDA of calcium–but, hey, they’re preferred, advanced, and food rich. I buy them (and if you think food is expensive just be glad you don’t have to buy it all in pill form–these suckers are not cheap.) I take them home and put them on my “nightstand” (which is really a tv tray, but we don’t have to talk about that now, do we?) I am very proud of myself for remembering to take one before I go to bed, even washing it down with a large glass of water.

This morning I wake up and study the label again. I realize that the “serving size” is 3 tablets.

Health, check.

So I’m obviously rather fond of food.

A lot of what I like (and, consequently, cook) is “healthy”–whole grains, vegetables of all sorts, fruit, cheese, butter, chocolate….

Well, chocolate has been getting good press–can cheese and butter be far behind?

There is so much information out there about diet and nutrition; even as an information professional who finds and synthesizes information all day long, I find it totally overwhelming. I checked out Marion Nestle’s book What to Eat, but barely put a dent in it before the due date arrived. We do eat a really varied diet (too varied, Jeff sometimes complains: “can’t you make that stuff you made last month?” me: “again?”) but I’m never quite sure if it would be considered a healthy diet.

Some of the branches on my family tree have trouble with high cholesterol that can’t be controlled by diet and exercise alone. I have always crossed my fingers that I lucked out in the gene lottery, but until yesterday that’s all I did because I’d never had my cholesterol tested (because I hadn’t had blood drawn in almost 20 years. Because I do. not. like. needles.)

Turns out my cholesterol level is just fine (as is everything else, thanks for asking) which is a relief. I did talk about diet a bit with my (very patient) health care provider and I’ll share one of her recommendations here: she suggested buying organic produce when possible and washing any conventionally grown produce with dish soap to remove pesticide residue. It will be an interesting challenge to add more organics to our $75/week menus.

I know there are no guarantees in life, especially when it comes to health (I love it when Willard Scott reads centenarians‘ secrets to long life that include cigars and bacon) but there are some things that it can’t hurt to try.