105 Reader Comments

1. SB
   

   But what about wine and beer??

   [Reply]
2. Chris R
   

   I’ve just recently swapped out grains for “grains.” Namely, buckwheat and quinoa. Both classified as grains but really aren’t so they’re gluten free. Both complete proteins. And both nutritional powerhouses. Especially buckwheat which is related to rhubarb of all things.

   [Reply]
3. Jay
   

   Eating is not rocket science, but we still screw it up.
   Good post, will again cross post on my blog, if you don’t mind.
   Thanks Scott.

   [Reply]
4. DaveC - DaveGetsFit
   

   Good one, Scott. It has become my mantra of sorts. Now that my weight loss is very noticeable, I get asked all the time what I do. The first words out of my mouth are always “eat real food.”

   [Reply]
5. Anna
   

   You touched on my “10 second elevator speech” – Spend time preparing/cooking real food that will spoil, before it spoils.

   I think most folks have completely lost sense of what real food is. When I describe conventional supermarket milk, particularly skimmed or non-fat milk as a highly processed, adulterated food product, they look at me like I have two heads. In their mind, all milk is pretty much as it comes from the cow, plus some chilling and pasteurization. They have no idea that whole milk isn’t even whole anymore, it is standardized to a certain percent butterfat (3.5% I think), with excess butterfat skimmed off. The milk I buy can have as much as 8% butterfat at some times of the year.

   Last weekend I went to to a moms’ wine tasting while our husbands and sons were camping. At least three of the moms were telling stories about how thrilled they were that their kids had learned to love turkey bacon. I refrained from commenting at all (not like me, but I had already “weirded them out” when I said I had a freezer full of bison meat and I make my own lard). No offense to the turkey, but it takes a heck of a lot more processing & chemicals to make turkey bacon than pork bacon.

   [Reply]
6. Jessi
   

   I have a couple of degrees in nutrition and am somewhat obsessed with reading nutrition research, yet the more I learn about nutrition the more convinced I am that nutrition is very simple and this article summarizes it perfectly. Thanks for the great website with useful information, insightful opinions and a forum for discussion. Just know that some nutritional scientists subscribe to these ideas on food!

   [Reply]
7. Jennifer Thornberry
   

   “Eat real food”

   Simple brilliance.

   This reminds me of a comment I overheard at my gym one day: “If it doesn’t spoil within a few days, you probably shouldn’t be eating it.”

   [Reply]
8. Marc
   

   Scott,

   GREAT post!

   I do use some “vegenaise” from time to time, but only because Anna ioesn’t live close enough to drop by with homemade mayo.

   Real foods…..how simple…..how complicated for most of my friends.
   Meals in a bag do not translate to “home cooked meals”

   Marc

   [Reply]
9. Liz
   

   The nice thing about Michael Pollan’s saying is that he includes “mostly plants.” I think that is key, because it reminds us to eat a lot of fruits and veggies.

   That being said, I think this is a good starting point, but not enough. That’s why I’m trying to learn more on the internet. My husband and I are both normal weight, we both exercise, and I always prepare all our meals from scratch. But he has been having some health problems and his cholesterol was high. I am due for a physical but the last time I checked my blood pressure at Walgreens one of the two was high. I’m 30, he is a few years older than me–too young to be having health problems like that.

   Just out of curiosity I started to look at nutritiondata.com to see the breakdown of my diet, and saw that I was routinely low in a few vitamins, like vitamin E. That led me to more research, and to efforts to include more of a variety of foods and to diversify the fruits and veggies more. Even in your post here you point out that spaghetti does not classify as a “real” food in your opinion. I had never heard that before a couple of weeks ago. I will not be going whole hog on the paleo plan any time soon–we want to have children and I am leery of making drastic changes at this time. There is enough to keep track of in terms of what you “should” and “shouldn’t” eat during pregnancy.

   For me, though, it has been interesting to learn about the concept of glycemic load. One of the things that surprised me when we found out that my husband’s cholesterol was high was that his triglycerides were high. The doctor said usually people with that problem eat a lot of sweets (he does not have a sweet tooth), drink a lot of soda or sweet drinks (we are almost exclusively water drinkers), or drink a lot of alcohol (he barely drinks alcohol!). If he has to cut carbs and cut fat, that doesn’t leave a lot left–like I said, he is fairly athletic and normal weight.

   Basically I have tried to increase our quantity and variety of fruits and veggies, add more seeds and nuts (vitamin E!), and switch virtually all refined grains to whole grains. I’m preparing fish more often, too. I am hoping that these moderate changes will reap some benefits. But I think there is more to be said than that we have to eat real foods. A few more guidelines are necessary.

   [Reply]
10. Katie
    

    Amen! We can get into arguments over what constitutes the “best” diet, but you have to start from real food. About my only difference is with things like spaghetti, or bread. My theory is that if I can make it myself from real ingredients, it qualifies as food, not food-like product. So, for example, I could get my own grain, grind the flour, and make the spaghetti myself, or make bread. It is, though, highly impractical.

    And I’ll just add that, as a vegetarian, it cracks me up when people ask if I eat soy burgers and the like. I do eat things like tofu and tempeh, but it’s because I like them, not because I need them to replace burgers and the like. It’s as though they think that you must replace one processed thing–hot dogs and the like–with something else processed–tofu dogs–instead of going for something like a plate of broccoli and cauliflower.

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11. sarena
    

    My friend Jay sums it up pretty much the same. His words are to refrain from anything with a bar code:) I like it and believe it to be true!

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12. Maria
    

    Great post! But how about all things pickled/smoked/cured a no-no? Assuming that only natural ingredients/processes are involved, I think this might be an exception to the rule of eating things that will spoil in a few days. Well too much salt is probably not the best thing, but I would think it’s better than truly processed garbage. I’ve been thinking about making some beef jerky in the oven–seems quite easy, anyone every attempt this?

    [Reply]
13. Steve Liberati
    

    I think we can all agree that there really is no single way for humans to eat because there is really no single way for humans to live. The bodies of various populations have adapted and thrived on various diets that were available to them. The Eskimos in Canada that lives on a diet of strictly meat and no fruits and veggies in a good example. The exception being of course Americans following the so called “Western Diet” in highly industrialized countries that eat a diet of highly processed foods that I don’t think our bodies will ever adapt to. But despite all the differences in diets among the tens of thousands of cultures throughout the world and throughout time, there is one commonality that has stood the test of time (among those considered “healthy”) and have enabled us to thrive as a specie. That is “eating real food” as you neatly put it, or simply eating food that comes from outside, not in a building.

    Great post as usual Scott. Thanks!

    [Reply]
14. Scott Kustes
    

    Well this post seems to have resonated!

    SB, I’d consider them as “vices,” though I do consume them. Moderate intake as you see fit.

    Chris R, Robb Wolf has pointed out before that even though they’re not technically grains, because they serve much the same purpose, they can also cause a reaction people with gluten sensitivity. Course, if you don’t have any form of gluten sensitivity, it’s probably ok.

    Jay, I’ll never complain about a link.

    Anna, after your mention of turkey bacon, I made the mistake of going to Google to see how it’s made. Luckily, a quick search turned up nothing on the list of ingredients, but it appears that the white “fat’ is made from white meat and the dark “lean” is made from dark meat. I can only imagine what goes into it to make it taste like pork. I don’t imagine the ingredient list is quite as concise as “pork, salt, spices, sugar”.

    Jennifer, I like that line. It’s funny that the simpler we keep things, the more they tend to work. Occam’s Razor or something.

    Marc, darn that Anna and not sending us all homemade mayo. That sounds downright tasty.

    Liz, what additional guidelines do you think are important for getting people eating right? It looks like you’ve started on the right path.

    Katie, that’s why I say that vegetarianism can be done healthfully, so long as one avoids the Frankenfoods. It’s just like all of the low-fat and low-carb garbage in the stores. The lack of something (fat, carbohydrates, animal products) doesn’t make something nutritious by default.

    Maria, our ancestors routinely used salting, drying, and fermenting as a means of preserving foods. I’d consider them to be a food that fits into such a diet. As I mentioned, there are a few gray areas, but as long as the foods are preserved with salt or fermented, it seems to be a natural process to me.

    Steve, let’s hope that we don’t ever adapt to such a diet. That would be a disgraceful day for the human race.

    Cheers all
    Scott

    [Reply]
15. Anna
    

    Maria,

    There isn’t a timeline on the food spoilage guideline. Some foods are considered “rotten” by other culture’s standards, but that doesn’t mean they are inedible.

    Traditional food preservation techniques (drying, fermenting, culturing, etc.) are a way to take processes that occur spontaneously in nature and controlling the process to optimize certain characteristics in a predictable fashion (some foods are enhance nutritionally, such as yogurt). For example, raw milk left out of the fridge separates into curds and whey in a day or two. Drain it and you have a simple cheese. I’ve done that many times, on purpose and inadvertently. Do that in a tightly controlled, repetitive process with aging along with certain cave molds and you have Roquefort. Raw milk doesn’t putrefy into something inedible and unsafe to consume like pasteurized milk will.

    Traditional aged sausages are salted and fermented, too. “Rotten” fruit yields wine and other alcoholic beverages.

    The issue is more about foods that “don’t” rot under normal circumstances, like Twinkies, “protein” bars, refined foods, etc. That is stuff that is shelf stable for a very long time due to new food chemistry ingredients and techniques, making them artificially shelf stable. Usually the nutritious part is removed (like the oily grain “germ” in a grain kernal) because that is the part that spoils easiest. If you made a “Pop Tart” from scratch in your kitchen, it would not remain edible as long as a commercially made Pop Tart.

    [Reply]
16. Liz
    

    Hi Scott,

    I think a good first additional guideline is the “mostly plants” that Michael Pollan uses. But I wonder if someone like you, who blogs on this topic, would be able to come up with 10 rules for the novice.

    Here is what I am trying–
    1. No processed foods, or the less processed the better
    2. Mostly plants–guideline–5 cups a day of fruit and veggies (that’s what the USDA says at least)
    3. Seafood a couple of times per week
    4. Avoid grains–no (or almost no) white flour, refined grains, smaller servings of whole grains
    5. Lean meats (red meat less often than other types)
    6. Check to make sure you are getting the vitamins and minerals you need on a regular basis with an engine like nutritiondata.com
    7. Regular time outdoors during the day a couple of times per week
    8. Aim for variety in what you prepare–sometimes you can tell by the different colors in the fruits and veggies
    9. When in doubt, avoid sugar and salt
    10. No corn and soybean oil

    Something like that. I can just say that as someone who loves Michael Pollan, his message of eat food, mostly plants, resonated with me. Then I found out that doing that, and getting exercise, my husband and I are bordering on unhealthy in our cholesterol and blood pressure. So while I think that is a good starting point, a lot of people who just look to that one rule will end up disappointed.

    I definitely cannot be the one making rules at this point–I don’t know them. These are just some things I am trying. But I appreciate your blog and those of others who write about their nutritional choices.

    Cheers,
    Liz

    [Reply]
17. Anna
    

    Liz,

    I’m going to take a contrarian view on Michael Pollan’s message about plant foods. I like Michael Pollan’s writing a lot, too. But I gotta say, his eat mostly plant-based foods doesn’t resonate with me at all. He’s too nutritionally-correct in many ways, but I give him some lee-way because he is at least getting people to think about their food and perhaps getting them to cut back on processed, industrial foods. But nothing I have read of his indicates that he has more than a minimal understanding of human nutrition.

    He sure does have an engaging writing style, though. And he knows how to simplify it because people have lost their collective sense of food knowledge.

    The more I look into it, the more I am less certain that humans necessarily need a *lot* of vegetables (then again, the more I look into it, the more I think the conventional nutrition advice is bull). Some vegetables, perhaps. But I doubt we “need” a lot of vegetables or even nearly as many as the nutrition experts suggest. During the various Ice Ages, vegetable foods would not have been abundant. That we tolerate a lot of vegetables, sure. I like veggies, too, and eat them for variety and enjoyment. Fruit, as much as I “like” it, is even less necessary, though. Veggies have the same or more nutrients, but with less sugars. Fruits today are cultivated sugar bombs, nothing like the fruits our ancient ancestors would have encountered (those were more like crabapples).

    I’m skeptical of the conventional advice on meat, too. The current advice to limit red meat and limit animal fat ignores most of human history. Game is naturally lean in the muscle tissue (unlike grain-fattened meat, which is marbled), but humans traditionally ate a lot more than the skeletal muscle. Organs and other nutritionally dense parts were prized, as was the fat, which tends to deposit in and around the organs, not in the meat. Not enough fat in the diet leads to “rabbit starvation”, which is horrible.

    You might look further into the cholesterol issue (www.thincs.org) if it worries you. Try to find info that contrasts with the conventional view (which is designed to sell statin drugs). You wouldn’t know it from the big pharma ads for statins and the hook, line, & sinker way the medical establishment has swallowed the unproven cholesterol theory, but there isn’t much evidence to support the notion that high cholesterol levels are “unhealthy”. That might be hard to believe, given the attention high cholesterol has been given for the past 50 years. But plenty of people with “healthy” cholesterol drop dead form heart attacks, too. Low cholesterol levels could be argued as “unhealthy”, I suppose, because low cholesterol has its own negative associations (cancer, dementia, depression, suicide, etc.) so I guess if I had to worry about a choleserol level, it would be that it was too low. And skewed cholesterol levels can indicate that underlying health issues are present (hypothyroidism, for example) but overall, high cholesterol is a poor predictor of health status.

    [Reply]
18. DaveC - DaveGetsFit
    

    Liz,

    I’m not Scott but I thought I’d bounce what I’ve come to beleive against your set of rules.

    1. Agree totally
    2. I go with a lot of vegatables and some fruit. I have more that five cups of greens alone in my daily lunch salad.
    3. Good call. I have wild sockeye salmon for dinner every weekend, and I usually use tuna or sardines in my salad at least once a week.
    4. I stop after the first two words–avoid grains–period. That doesn’t necessarily mean totally abstain, but it’s pretty rare that I eat them.
    5. Big disagreement here. I don’t fear fat. I love read meat. Gimme a big, juicy New York Strip anytime (and spare the side order of Zocor). The steak I eat most often, however, is fairly lean. It’s grass fed London Broil (top round).
    6. Good idea!
    7. Absolutely! I play golf every week and walk the course. I also try to get out for early evening walks a few times a week.
    8. Amen. Although the breakfast I eat at work (if I’m not on an Intermittant Fast day) is always the same, I try to vary things for all other meals.
    9. I’ve never been one to add salt but I don’t go out of my way to avoid it. That’s a subject of some controversy–just like fat consumption. I do try to avoid sugar.
    10. I’m good there–I use a lot of olive oil.

    That was fun!

    [Reply]
19. Jenjen
    

    We could say that say, a steak, or an apple, has not been made by “man” but in reality, those two items have been highly bred to produce a certain taste for people, and in most cases wouldn’t survive the wild for long. A steak is usually cut from aged beef, which has usually been sitting around for awhile vacuum sealed in plastic. Cows are not much like their ruminant ancestors. They are larger, slower, and their hormones are quite different, as they have been bred to grow fast, get fat, and have tender meat.

    Apple trees are highly hybridized and totally dependent on people for their production (my aunt is a grower, and I’ve seen how much work they put into it). They aren’t planted from seeds anymore for one — they are always grafted, with separate root stock that has different properties from the trunk. They contain a lot more sugar than even 20 years ago, and the farmers use chemicals to kill off a large number of apple blossoms so that the surviving blossoms make bigger fruit. They use tons of fertilizers and pesticides so that the apples are pristine and the trees don’t have to compete with other plants.

    Maybe we would be healthier eating weeds and rabbits?

    [Reply]
20. Anna
    

    JenJen,

    Excellent points for those who are looking to go the extra mile in their food choices (most are not ready for that yet, though). Choosing heirloom varieties instead of the commercial common varieties is a good start. Traditionally dry aged meat instead of wet-aged is good, too, though slower to age and more expensive.

    I’m eating pastured bison (American buffalo) now (I bought a half bison in a co-op buy), which is bred naturally, and not too far removed from the stock that remained after American bison were nearly killed off in the 19th century to nearly the point of extinction by land-hungry Americans. A half bison processed and wrapped will fill a standard side-by-side freezer, so they are about half again smaller than a beeve.

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21. JCD
    

    What do you think of avocado oil?

    [Reply]
22. Alida Cornelius
    

    Hi!
    I keep finding you on the net when I am researching healthy diets.

    You really get around and that is great because people need to know.

    Check out my new lens on Peanut Allergies on my Squidoo site. It’s one of my lens.

    http://www.squidoo.com/artbyalida

    I am on a mission to have all food and product recalls to be listed in all newspapers.

    We are not being protected by our government in food safety and products and no one hears about it.

    I LOVE your site.

    Alida Cornelius
    http://www.artbyalida.com

    Keep up the good work!!!!!!

    (I still have not figured out how to do the RSS feed from your site to mine.)

    [Reply]
23. Scott Kustes
    

    Liz,
    It sounds like you already have a good start on other rules. Anna covered most everything I would’ve touched on and more. She’s right that humans don’t necessarily “need” vegetables. But since most of us aren’t eating the whole carcass, turning the bones into broth, eating the organs, etc, we’re not getting all of the vitamins present in the animal. Since muscle meats are much lower in vitamins and minerals than organs, most of us moderns need to shore up our vitamin intake with vegetables.

    Jenjen,
    It’s true that pretty much all of our modern food is “processed” in some way, but I’d give a pass to genetic engineering through selective breeding. It’s the same thing nature does, only in a way guided for human benefit. Anna brings up a good point though…eat meat that is raised naturally. That is, grass-fed cows instead of corn-and-god-knows-what-fed cows. Chickens fed on pasture where they can eat bugs. Heirloom varieties are good as well if you can find them, though typically quite expensive. I usually buy an heirloom turkey or two per year and just found a farmer at the Market selling heirloom chickens soon. However, I think there’s a point of overcomplicating things and I think we’re venturing perilously close when arguing that without humans cows wouldn’t exist.

    JCD, check out my response to Greg Davis on this post.

    Alida, good stuff!

    Cheers
    Scott

    [Reply]
24. Anna
    

    Alida,

    I suppose recall notices are important for people who eat mostly conventional foods and pay no attention to seasonality or locality.

    But I’m finding less need to even think about recall issues, because at least at home, most of food we eat arrives through a path that I already know, and it’s a short field-to-fork path. In many cases I can pick up the phone and talk to the farmer. If his produce was the focus of an illness investigation, then he could easily contact all his customers very quickly. His produce is consumed quickly, too, not artificially kept fresh for a longer shelf life, like prepared RTE produce.

    For instance, I learned about the latest illness outbreak related to tomatoes on a raw dairy blog I read. Not a worry for me, as I don’t buy tomatoes this time of year, because they aren’t ripe locally.

    I didn’t worry during the illness outbreak with spinach, because I no long buy bagged greens. I didn’t worry during the may pet food contamination problems, because my two cats eat homemade food, not commercial pet food.

    I do think about illness when I dine out, as that is probably my biggest area of vulnerability, both from a food-borne illness standpoint as well as human-transmission (actually, I am aware of it, but I try not to think too hard about it!). But I dine out less often now, and am more choosy about the restaurant, if the choice is mine.

    [Reply]
25. cath
    

    Raw milk may be “real” food but if you can get it, you need to cook it, or process it into cheese, or at very least do your own pasteurisation – which is nothing but heating for a while to kill bacteria. Unless you’re fond of tuberculosis. Those traditional peoples living on diets of real food also had real childhood mortality rates that you don’t want to think about.

    [Reply]
26. Mark’s Daily Apple » Blog Archive » 10 Ways to Forage in the Modern World
    [...] in restaurants, at parties or just at home) is to only eat those items that exist in nature. A recent post by Scott Kustes at the Modern Forager sums it up to a tee: Eat real foods, preferably in their [...]
27. Roland
    

    “What do you think? Is eating real food enough to achieve top health or is there more to it than that?”

    Yes, mostly.

    I think for most people, a change to “real food” will be enough to be very healthy. That doesn’t address fat loss, however.

    Many people are fat, and while this switch will go a long way toward them leaning out, it may not get them to a level of leanness that they’d like. For those who’s “fullness indicator” or “hunger meter” is broken or out of whack, further changes (measuring, counting, or some other method of self-monitoring) may be needed to get them to where they’d like to be.

    Hopefully, once they reach the point of being lean, they’ll have learned enough about themselves to maintain themselves with real foods.

    Great blog post, btw.

    Roland

    [Reply]
28. DaveC - DaveGetsFit
    

    Roland,

    I think you make a great point about fat loss. I’ve lost a bunch and I find I can maintain that loss and still eat quite well. But getting rid of that last few pounds is proving tough. I still have to work on portion control (mainly of evening meals) and limit my “healthy indulgences” if I want that excess stuff hanging around my middle to disappear!

    [Reply]
29. hak - The Outdoor Journey
    

    Fantastic post and great words to live by! I particularly like the line of thought: If it has a label on it, don’t eat it.

    [Reply]
30. EATING YOUR WAY TO A BETTER YOU! (Some rules to live by) « Work. Get Fit. Learn & Grow
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31. Kelsey
    

    Lean meat is not in it’s natural state. It has had the fat removed from it. To eat meat in it’s natural state, DON’T remove the fat! So many people don’t understand this concept. In traditional cultures the fat was the most prized portion of the animal, they would have never cut it off and thrown it away.

    [Reply]
32. Collective Fitness Wisdom | Zen to Fitness
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33. lisa w
    

    how about lets just go by three rules.. Real food-

    1.must be plucked out of the ground.
    2.killed
    3.plucked off a tree.

    [Reply]
34. Fitness Wisdom - 3 things for Fat Burning, Muscle Building, Abs, Supplements | Zen to Fitness
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    Keeping it Real: Food…

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    [...] Dietary Vitamin D Sources So if you are either scared of the sun or live much above the sub-tropical zones, it’s going to be hard to get enough vitamin D from the sun. Luckily, there are some rich sources of the vitamin that fit perfectly into a lifestyle of eating real foods. [...]
40. Matt
    

    Good suggestions.

    I cook a significant amount of middle eastern and Mediterranean food. Most of it is pretty healthy for you and uses nearly all raw ingredients – as long as you stay away from the cheese based casseroles. Home made hummos is great with sun-dried tomatoes, roasted red pepper, chili peppers, and artichokes. Cucumber yogurt dressing is the bomb and it’s probiotic – make’s digesting meats alot easier on your tract :-p

    Along those lines, I often opt for lamb at the butcher over beef. I have a craving for a steak about once a month – but most of my red meat comes from lamb. It’s alot cheaper here in the US and typically has a lower risk of being contaminated with growth hormone or antibiotics.

    I also cook just about everything with garlic and ginger. Moreover If I actually cook veggies; like snap peas, I throw some cashews or almond slices in there. Seeds and nuts make it really easy to go meat-free a couple days a week without being a full blown vegetarian.

    As far as beer and wine go – moderate alcohol intake is the key – but I’d do everything you can to opt for unpasteurized beer. Typically the most economical way is to make it yourself for those without the time – I like Wolaver’s alot. Great “organic” beer. What that word means – I don’t know.

    Along with eating real foods – the less you cook it, the better. Heat destroys alot of potent enzymes and nutrients in veggies. Raw broccoli salad with a home-made vinaigrette, alot of nuts, and some fruit is a great lunch and it keeps for about 2 weeks.

    [Reply]
41. Bethany
    

    I have been recommending that people read “Real Food” by Nina Planck who recommends Michael Pollan’s books and he recommends hers. She gives a lot more information on what Real Food is and especially cholesterol facts. She presents scientific research but in a very easy and understandable way. One BIG thing you forgot to mention is just that real food tastes a lot better and is way more satisfying! My kids drank down a half gallon of raw milk the first time I brought it home because it tastes better than pasteurized/homogenized milk! My husband grew up on raw milk at their dairy farm (prior to RGB hormones being added) and is extremely healthy. His whole family has high cholesterol because they haven’t been eating real food like we have… mostly processed, carb-laden stuff, even though they have an abundance of fresh fruit and vegetables around them. I know it’s hereditary but my husband out of all the men in his family is not on cholesterol medication and is still a size 32 waist like when I met him 18 years ago!! I love my farmers market and I preach buy fresh/buy local and especially eat real, organic food!! Cutting out the worry over everything else keeps you from feeling deprived and over-eating.

    [Reply]
42. Dave
    

    Plenty of healthy societies existed primarily on grains, as well, yet you put them down. Curious…

    What about minimally processed soy (a process well over a thousand years old) and other foods? Some foods actually do better after simple non-chemical processes, and soy is one of them. Unless you don’t think it’s healthy.

    Sorry, I just have a lot of problems with this article. I’ll grant you that the FDA food pyramid and most diet plans are just utter over-complicated non-sense. And I won’t argue the whole foods points in your first couple of paragraphs. But after that, not so much.

    [Reply]
43. Class of Nuke 'em High
    

    Boy this comment thread has once again become hot. To answer the previous poster about soy and grain.

    Soy when fermented is a healthy addition to the diet. Having a bowl of soy nuts covered by soy milk with some tofu sausage ad nauseum is overkill and is not very healthy in the longterm.

    Grain cultures based around corn have been the most successful healthwise. On the other hand, cultures based on wheat have been the least succesful and have done poorly healthwise.

    Wheat and corn is in everything we eat today and that is a very bad thing.

    [Reply]
44. Umbratikus
    

    So when does a food cease to be a real food? Steak, is real, as you said. Vegetables are real. So what if you make beef stew? Is beef stew, made from real food a real food? Then what about canned beef stew? Dinty Moore beef stew, for example, is complosed almost entirely of real food (with the exception of “modified food starch,” and “caramel coloring”). And what about potato chips? Plain potato chips are made up of three ingredients: potatos, vegetable oil, and salt. When does something cease to be a “real” food?

    [Reply]
45. Scott Kustes
    

    Dave, soy is an okay food, if properly fermented. But most people aren’t eating miso, natto, and tempeh. They are eating tofurky, soy milk, and other such Frankenfoods that don’t properly neutralize the antinutrients in the soy bean (which has some of the highest levels in the food world). The Chinese knew this and while they’ve been cultivating soy for some 5 millenia, they didn’t use it for food until they learned to ferment it, a few thousand years ago (it was used as a cover crop). Further, soy isn’t a staple food of Asians, being eaten in quantities averaging a few teaspoons per day.

    The grains issue is mainly with wheat and again mainly in modern processing techniques. Mexicans thrived on corn, but they soaked their corn in lime solution, a process called nixtamalization, to reduce toxins and improve nutritional status. The Japanese do well on rice. The gluten in wheat appears to be particularly problematic. Quick-rise breads and extruded cereals neither neutralize the problematic side of grains nor maintain what nutrition is available in them. And it boils down to this…a diet without grains invariably improves one’s health and fruits and vegetables contain more nutrients on a calorie-for-calorie basis.

    Cheers
    Scott

    [Reply]
46. Scott Kustes
    

    Dave, also check out the second article in this series. I get more into fermentation of foods.

    [Reply]
47. Scott Kustes
    

    Umbratikus, I think you’re reading too much into it. The key is to try to eat as much unprocessed food as possible. Turning meat and vegetables into soup is no different than cooking your meat on a grill and steaming vegetables. Now let’s turn to the Dinty Moore Beef Stew with the following ingredient list: “Beef Gravy , Water , Beef Broth , Beef , Tomatoes , Water , Tomato Paste , Corn Flour , Salt , Modified Food Starch , Caramel Coloring , Sugar , Flavoring , Beef , Potatoes , Carrots”

    On the surface, it’s hard to argue with a good bit of that, but what’s “flavoring”? Why is there a need to add sugar? Each of us has to make our own decisions about what unknown ingredients to allow in our diet, but reducing modified food starch and caramel coloring is probably not going to hurt. And why is beef included twice? What’s the beef gravy made of? See how packaged foods make certain things quite opaque? But there are worse things you could be eating.

    As for potato chips…since vegetable oils are an unnatural addition to the human diet (see my guest post at Fitness Black Book for further explanation), I’d call potatoes cooked in vegetable oils “unreal”.

    Bottom line is that making your own beef stew will always, always, always be better than buying it canned. If you want potato chips, frying them in coconut oil will always be better than buying them from Lay’s. Don’t overcomplicate the matter.

    Cheers
    Scott

    [Reply]
48. Anna
    

    I’ll piggy-back onto Scott’s response to Dave’s comment “Plenty of healthy societies existed primarily on grains, as well, yet you put them down.”.

    If you start to look at the research (rather than accepting popular vegetarian myths or mass media diet advice), you’ll that is isn’t necessarily true. For example, the ancient Egyptians ate a lot of stone-ground wheat at every level of society, yet there is evidence of obesity and diabetes. A grain-based diet that is deficient in adequate high-quality protein, fatty acids, fat soluble vitamins (the FSV found in animal foods are nearly always readily bio-available (like pre-formed Vit A and K2, and those in plant foods often need conversion after ingestion (like beta-carotenes and K1) and are hindered by fiber and plant toxinx/anti-nutrients.

    Anthropological evidence indicates that in most cases, ancient stone-age humans were rather tall, with excellent musculature. With the adoption of agriculture and grain, stature went down dramatically in a very short period of time, along with other health indicators (dental decay increased). Height, while also being influences by genetics, is also a strong nutrition status indicator (as well as prenatal and early childhoood nutrition status). Adequate protein at critical stages in early life is essential to fulfill one’s genetic height potential.

    More contemporary humans have only regained the lost height in the last few hundred years. Average height increases for those of European descent began in North American colonies, as wild game and access to plentiful meat on the frontier and with the increase of economic prosperity meant increased animal protein. At the time of British and European colonization of the Western Hemisphere, the average European man was the heigh of today’s average 13 year old girl! Americans led the rise in average heights beginning in the 19th century, towering above the Europeans, but that trend changed around WWII. Today’s Scandinavians are among the tallest, with the Dutch being tallest in the world. Even the younger generations in Asia and other places where average heights are lower than Europeans are much taller on average than in previous generations.

    Weston A. Price documents some examples of societies that consumed a lot of grains (particularly the isolated Swiss populations prior to WWII), but as Scott and others mentioned, those grains were prepared far differently than today’s industrially prepared grains. Agriculture and industrial food is mostly compressing time and standardization because increased time reduces profit and non-standardized processing is harder to do with automation. The grains were also part of a diet that was rich in other nutrient-rich foods, such as fish, butter, organs, bone broths, etc. meat might not have been on the daily menu, but the whole animal was used – the fat, the bones, the organs, the connective tissue, as well as the skeletal muscle tissue. Nearly every fundamental aspect of eating has changed since food became industrialized.

    [Reply]
49. Anna
    

    Umbratikus,

    Have you eaten Dinty Moore stew lately? It has changed over the years, not for the better, either. Or have you compared it directly to homemade stew? They are a world apart, even if the label wouldn’t suggest it.

    The “beef” in the DM stew is more like a beef version of chicken McNuggets, some sort of meat paste glued back together (my guess is it is the cheapest meat, i.e., mechanically-harvested meat, which is scraped off the bones of 1000s of carcasses and the added starch binds the meat fibers into a chunk shape); the “chunks” aren’t not even as good as a decent meatball.

    My ten year old was served DM stew somewhere not long ago and even he told me later the meat “wasn’t right” and he preferred my stews (be still my heart!).

    [Reply]
50. Dale
    

    To tell people that raw milk is better than pasteurized/homogenized milk is crazy. Raw milk contains bacteria that can harm people. Pasteurized/homogenized milk is the only way to be sure that the milk you drink is safe to drink. If you are drinking raw milk, at least bring the raw milk to a boil before drinking. Thank you.

    [Reply]
51. Anna
    

    Dale,

    If you are talking about raw milk that is produced for the pasteurized milk market, then you are right – there’s probably a good chance there’s pathogenic bacteria in the milk. Little care is taken to produce pathogen-free milk that is co-mingled in the tankers and in the bulk tanks at the processing plant because a) the farmers are paid the same for milk regardless of the “cleanliness” and their efforts and b) it is assumed the milk will be “cleaned up” later, during the cooking, standardizing, and fortification that becomes conventional milk.

    By the way, pasteurized milk will not support the growth of a calf; it won’t grow properly and eventually will die. Something to think about. There are reports of people with damaged esophaguses that have lived quite well for decades on not much more than many quarts of fresh raw milk each day.

    Back to the bacteria, in fact, if you check the CDC data, you’ll see far many times more illness and even death from pasteurized dairy food-borne illness outbreaks in the last 50 years than from raw milk, not to mention contaminated ground beef and many types of fruits and vegetables. Raw milk is way down on the list and not just because fewer people consume it.

    One can’t just drink any raw milk, though, one must only consume raw milk that is properly produced. You can say the same thing about any food today, whether it be bagged spinach, fresh jalapenos, scallions, strawberries, etc. That pathogenic e-coli 0157:H7 that is sickening and killing people every so often is the result of acid-tolerant mutations in unhealthy and stressed feedlot cows and cattle (that eat acid-producing grains), not herds on pasture living naturally. Now that destructive e. coli pathogen is “out of the bag” so to speak, and it finds its way into the fresh fruit and produce, too.

    But well-produced real milk (meant to be consumed fresh and unprocessed) from healthy animals living naturally in stress-free smaller herds, consuming pasture and alfalfa rations (instead of the unnatural grain and industrial waste that makes up most CAFO dairy rations), not to mention scrupulously clean modern stainless teat-to-tank protocols, will be milk that is pathogen-free and far healthier and easier to tolerate than conventional pasteurized milk. Yes, raw milk does have bacteria, but it is naturally healthy and beneficial lacto-bacillus bacteria that is very helpful, not harmful. Raw milk probiotic bacteria will crowd out pathogenic bacteria through competition; pasteurized milk is not sterile, actually, but with the beneficials inactivated or weakened, any surviving pathogens might multiply without competition. The dairy industry works very hard to make sure that news of conventional pasteurized milk illness outbreaks remains unknown. Reports about illness outbreaks linked to raw milk, even when small, limited or fairly mild, or unproven, are reported far and wide, in disproportionate scale.

    And keep in mind that humans have consumed raw milk (from a variety of mammals, not just bovine) for at least 9,000 years and they continue to consume raw milk in many parts of the world, including here in the US through family cows, herd shares, farm sale, and retail sales (regulations and laws governing raw dairy vary by state). Pasteurized milk has only been around about 100 years (Pasteur developed the process for wine and was said to be saddened by its use on fresh milk). Pasteurization only became conventional in the last few generations (many of our grandparents can remember drinking only raw dairy during their childhood) as agriculture and food processing became more industrial.

    Breast milk is raw milk, too, and the transfer of skin bacteria from mother to child play an important role in inoculating the child’s gut with beneficial bacteria that will act as part of their immune system and promote good digestion an nutrient assimilation. Raw milk does have beneficial *probiotic* bacteria, which is healthful to consume, plus the delicate enzymes are still intact, allowing for full absorption of the minerals, fats, and nutrients. Pasteurized milk no longer has intact enzyme proteins, so many people do not tolerate conventional dairy products, resulting in lactose-intolerance, inability to absorb the calcium and other minerals, etc.

    It’s ironic that increasingly people pay big bucks for *probiotic* supplements and yogurt products to aid digestive problems, when real fresh milk already naturally comes with beneficial probiotics and nutrients, and without the processing, additives, and added sweeteners.

    Just for the record, my family has been consuming raw milk from a small family-owned pasture-based (grass-fed) dairy in CA for the past several years (my 10 yo son consumes the most). We’ve had the healthiest two years ever in our family. My son is a strong, active boy with no cavities and a very dense bone structure (he’s quite slim but deceptively heavy when picked up). So not only why isn’t our grass-fed raw milk making us sick, but why are we not getting colds, flu, cavities, GI illness, and other common maladies?

    [Reply]
52. Jim
    

    Lard yes? Olive oil iffy? I’m outta here.

    [Reply]
53. Ash
    

    Not only was the content great, but you are hilarious. You should consider being a comedian. Very entertaining article.

    [Reply]
54. dw
    

    I am guessing I know the answer, but is the comment on multi vitamens, or protein powders?

    [Reply]
55. Scott Kustes
    

    Dale, Anna nailed that one far better than I could’ve.

    Anna, you are awesome and quite an asset to the site. Thanks!

    Jim, lard has been consumed as long as pigs have. Some people argue against olive oil because of its polyunsaturated fat content or the fact that it still takes a lot of olives to produce a bottle of oil, though not as extreme as vegetable oils.

    DW, I take a whole foods-based multivitamin as an insurance policy, though I rely on meat and vegetables for the bulk of my nutrition. I don’t think protein powders are a good source of whole food nutrition and don’t use them.

    Cheers
    Scott

    [Reply]
56. Herbal Remedies Girl
    

    Great Post! I agree, Real Food is the best food. Our bodies don’t need all of the preservatives, chemicals and additives!

    [Reply]
57. Rob Y
    

    In regards to milk, how is pasteurization any different from cooking meat? And all homogenization dose is force the milk through a small hole at high pressure. Kind of like paint through a sprayer.

    [Reply]
58. Anna
    

    Rob Y,

    Good question! You got me thinking.

    Yes, there is a difference in some ways, but not in others. Milk is a little different in that it is fluid and the proteins are suspended in liquid rather than in solid form, so one can’t tell if they’ve stiffened up from damage, like we can with poorly cooked meat.

    Just like with milk, the wrong treatment *can* ruin meat. I, and many others, like the tender meat cuts seared on the outside but still quite rare on the inside for the best flavor, tenderness, and nutrition/digestibility. Overcooking ruins a good steak, drying it out, and potentially rendering it inedible. Basically, the proteins are completely denatured in an overcooked steak. Many people who grew up on well-done, overcooked dry meat and hated it, never learn that properly cooked rare or medium-rare steak is a pleasure to eat and digests easily.

    On the flip side, “tough” cuts from well-worked muscles do very well with long, slow cooking, to break apart the collagen fibers so that the meat falls apart. Cook a tough cut over heat too high and too fast and you’ll have an awful hunk of tough, chewy meat.

    A modern way around the long slow cooking of tough cuts in both homes and food factories is to pressure cook (though I don’t use a pressure cooker, probably for obvious reasons). Industrial-sized pressure cookers quickly cook those “heat & serve” packaged pot roasts one sees in the stores, because it’s faster – and fast makes the food cheaper for the consumer and more profitable for the processor. But aside from the lab chemicals and additives in the “heat & serve” pot roast and its plastic wrapper that cloaks the meat for weeks or longer, is the meat still as good as a roast cooked the traditional way? I doubt it, in fact I’m pretty sure of it.

    Then again, some people think all meat should be consumed raw, too, as in steak tartar, etc. I’d consider that option if I trusted the source; I don’t trust conventional meat sources.

    Milk needs the right care, too, or it’s not fit to consume. But how many even know traditional foods anymore, like raw milk, so how can they compare? How would one know the difference between real milk and factory milk in a side-by-side taste test? The milk boards and dairy councils have done a good job of lumping all milk together, with few differences. Traditional foods like milk are more variable, that’s a certainty, and factory foods are designed to not be variable, unless it is intentional. Factory food is nothing if not very consistent for consumers.

    When I was first out on my own, I wondered why most of the cheddar in the US was dyed orange (I grew up in Upstate NY, a dairy state, where the cheddar was most often white unless it was a national brand). Then I met a cheesebroker at a party. The dye is added to cheese through most of the country to mask the variable colors, which change throughout the year or from source to source, from pale white to creamy or deep yellow, depending on the season and the rations: grass, sileage (bales of fermented alfalfa), or grain & other controlled rations. But cheddar is not ever naturally prison-jumpsuit orange, I can assure you of that. Not sure if consumers demanded standardized color for cheddar, but it is provided anyway for our “benefit”. Hmmmph, I prefer cheddar natural and undyed.

    Traditionally, humans have long “processed” foods to make them more transportable (dried jerky), more nutritious, easier to digest, and to preserve the foods for later consumption. That sort of processing often results in very flavorful foods, too (aged cheese, miso, sauerkraut, beer, for example). Small scale processing generally takes natural processed in nature and controls them for our purposes, such as bacterial culturing, yeast-proofing, drying, etc. Milk won’t stay fresh and sweet very long unless it kept chilled, because the natural bacteria culture/ferment faster in warmer temps, so some variation on controlled fermentation was a natural way to transform, enhance, and store milk. The results are fresh and aged cheeses, yogurts, sweet and cultured creams, and sweet and cultured butter, as well as soured (clabbered) milk and buttermilk, etc.

    When one starts using fresh, raw milk it is easy to see how humans observed, then took some control of the natural processes in dairy – leave milk out and it sours ad thickens naturally from its normal bacteria or the wild bacteria in the air. This milk is still safe to consume, but the bacteria have consumed the lactose while lactic acid increases. Leave the warm milk out longer, and it will separate into curds and whey, a sort of primitive cheese. Again, it’s still safe to consume (pasteurized milk at this point would be pretty putrid and smell foul instead of cheesy, and no one would be tempted to taste it).

    Home cheesemaking is quite fun and easy. The less processed the milk is, the better the cheese results. Ultra-pasteurized or UHT milk for instance, isn’t very good for making cheese and ultra-pasteurized cream doesn’t whip nearly as well as raw or the lower temperature pasteurized. Ultra-pasteurized is packed like lower temp pasteurized milk and is sold in the cooler case in the US because that’s where consumers expect “fresh” milk to be, but until opened, it is actually shelf-stable and will keep without chilling (it Europe is usually sold in aseptic boxes on room temp-shelves, but Americans have a preference for cold milk, I guess). Pasteurized and high heat-treated milk won’t nourish a calf’s growth because of the damage and loss of critical factors (why we consume milk from another species is a different argument not addressed here). The very high rapid heat of UHT processing damages the milk protein structure too much (some suspect the damaged proteins isn’t used well by the human body any more, either). It tastes terrible, too, very “cooked” because of the Maillard browning (gee, that is very much like meat, actually), compared to fresh milk.

    Most people don’t think of conventional milk as a highly processed food, but it is highly processed, in very different ways than when handled on a small scale such as at home, a farm, or in a cottage/artisan operation. Even home pasteurization on a stove is different from plant processing, just as there is a difference in what happens to egg protein when quickly heated (the proteins stiffen up) compared to the gentle, slow heat when making a custard or creme brulee (stirred constantly over a double boiler to gently heat slowly, resulting in a smooth, creamy texture).

    Conventional milk is picked up in huge tankers (hope they’re clean after that last load of liquid eggs!), sloshed to dairy processing plants (places that look sort of like oil refineries but we’ll try not to hold that against them).

    As an aside, it’s hard to get tours of dairy plants, unlike breweries and distilleries, Kelloggs, Jelly Belly, or Ben & Jerry’s. Wonder what they don’t want us to see? I can’t even get any stores to provide the names of dairies that make their private label milk. I wanted to know if the herds were on pasture or confined indoors and fed grain (or orange industry waste, old bakery goods, and expired candy bars! I kid you not!, but I didn’t get the chance to ask about these common dairy rations) Industrial scale cow milk herds are fed garbage, treated like machines, and they make watery, but copious amounts of milk. Nope, no grocery corporation I have asked will tell me the who supplies their bulk milk or how the herds are managed and fed, which isn’t very transparent and doesn’t inspire my trust in their milk products.

    On the other hand, tours are encourage at the small farm/creamery that our milk comes from (the owner himself guided us around from the cows in the field, to the mobile milking trailer to goes to the cows in the field, to the building where butter was being made, to the bottling facility. The fluid milk is basically chilled, poured through a filter, and bottled, nothing else, unless it is being separated for cream & butter. If the creamline is especially high that season, that’s great for the consumer, none is removed.

    Industrial processing controls or imitates nature, too, but above all, it seeks to make food products which maximize profit, so often that means speeding up the production process, slowing down natural biodegradation, eliminating some steps, adding other steps, scaling up production, removing components that reduce efficiency (profit), adding ingredients (that increase profit), etc. In other words, the process is manipulated in ways far removed from those that simply occur in nature or are gently coaxed with simple techniques.

    Standard milk processing begins with centrifuging to separate it into liquids, fat, protein, and other milk solids. Then it is reconstituted back into a standardized product of certain percentages of fat, protein, milk solids, etc. (yup, taken apart, then put back together in a slightly different formula, like taking apart a Lego kit and making something that only resembles the original). Milk naturally has varying amounts of butterfat depending on the breed, the health, and the diet of the animal (fast growing high altitude grasses make the best butterfat, rich and deep yellow from carotenes and Vit A – think Heidi and beautiful cows, sheep, and goats in the Alps in Europe).

    Butterfat, which carries the important fat soluble vitamins A, D, E, & K, is siphoned off for more profitable uses, like butter, cream, and ice cream. So whole milk isn’t really “whole”, it’s regulated to be exactly 3.5%, 2%, 1% or practically no butterfat (the fresh milk I buy is as much as 8% butterfat at times). That makes skimmed milk very profitable, as you can imagine. Skimmed milk is very watery, with little body, and looks more like “blue water” – very unappetizing, so spray-dried milk solids are added back to it to thicken and whiten it, making it appear more palatable.

    Another thing to note is making sun-dried milk processing goes back a long way, to at least the Mongolians of the Kublai Kahn era (armies need portable food), but it’s a far different process than than high pressure spray-drying milk solids with heat, which oxidizes the cholesterol, which is the one form of cholesterol one should avoid. And the synthetic vitamin D2 added to fortify milk is not the same as the natural Vitamin D3 made by animals. Plus without the milk fat, the Vit D may not even be absorbed or utilized if it can’t be converted to Vitamin D3.

    By the way, my fresh milk dairy does centrifuge milk for cream and butter-churning, and but it doesn’t reconstitute or adulterate the skimmed milk. They sell skimmed milk, but in far less quantity than the whole milk (real milk aficionados want the whole enchilada, not a pale, watery imitation). In the past, skimmed milk was made into cheese or fed to the chickens or hogs, which were great way to put it to good use.

    Back to comparing cooking meat to pasteurizing milk – there’s a phenomenon occurs when cooking meat and during high heat pasteurization – the Maillard effect (browning), which generally enhances the taste of meat, but ruins the taste of milk. You might not see it in white milk or taste it as strongly in regular pasteurized milk , but the cooked taste is detectible to some and most noticeable in the higher temp products, like Ultra-Pasteurized and UHT. UHT (Ultra High Temperature) processed milk suffers the most from it.

    In standard pasteurization the reconstituted milk is run over very hot plates at 161 degrees to quickly kill bacteria, both beneficial and potentially pathogenic (there *are* poop and pathogens in the factory bulk milk because there’s no incentive to keep it out with pasteurization). The rapid heat flash also denatures the delicate protein enzymes that make milk more digestible, enhances nutrient bioavailibility, and boost the immune system such as lactase, phosphatase, the immunoglobulins, etc. The delicate protein structures are changed and many people cannot digest or utilize damaged milk proteins well, or the damaged protein shapes trick immune systems into allergic reactions instead of strengthening immune defenses. Ultra-pasteurized and UHT utilize yet higher temps ( and more damage to the milk structure. Europeans, especially Spaniards, consume a lot of UHT milk because not needing chilling until opened, it saves on energy and refrigerator space. I don’t know how they can drink the stuff, though. Even before I ever tried raw milk, I couldn’t stand the taste and “feel” of UHT milk. My son wouldn’t touch ever finish a glass when he was younger, either. Now he drinks lots of raw milk.

    In the US there isn’t much interest or money for conducting research on raw dairy foods or the health benefits. Studies in Europe show that children fed raw dairy have less asthma and allergies. A number of raw dairy consumers in the US choose raw dairy specifically to treat asthma and allergies and reduce medication necessity. Lactose intolerant people can often consume raw milk, because the lactase enzyme in the milk breaks down the lactose.

    Homogenization is another assault imposed on milk; under intense pressure the milk is forced through miniscule screens, which breaks up the naturally large fat globules, which normally float on top, into very tiny globules that remain dispersed in the milk. There are theories that these tiny fat globules “leak” and pass through the GI tract before they are supposed to, causing health problems and disease, but there isn’t a lot of research on this.

    It’s hard to imagine that, homogenization is totally benign. The fat globules aren’t just fat. They’re surrounded by a membrane consisting of phospholipids and proteins; these emulsifiers keep the individual globules from joining together into noticeable grains of butterfat and also protect the globules from the fat-digesting activity of enzymes found in the fluid portion of the milk.

    Furthermore, homogenization serves no purpose whatsoever for the consumer (it isn’t hard to give a milk jug a quick shake before pouring – as long as the cap is on securely – my 4th grader’s been managing it a few years), but hiding the cream content does give an advantage to the dairy processor (back when milk was sold in glass bottles by small local farms and dairies, consumers could see which milk had the most cream and if it was very plentiful with a creamy color, or pale and skimpy). Cream was considered important then.

    That’s probably more than anyone wants to know about milk. I won’t argue that anyone *must* consume dairy foods, but if one is going to, then it’s worth knowing what that’s been done to that factory milk in between the farm and the store. Factory milk pales in comparison to fresh, real milk in every way, except in cost; factory milk does have a huge price advantage. But I choose to pay more for the real deal that I can trust.

    [Reply]
59. DaveC - DaveGetsFit
    

    Anna,

    It’s been a long time since I’ve had milk to drink but your posts describing “the real thing” sure has me wishing I could try some. Don’t know about finding any around here but I’m gonna make some inquiries.

    And when is your book coming out?

    Dave

    [Reply]
60. Jessica, M.Sc. Nutrition
    

    dw,
    In keeping with the spirit of this article, multivitamins and powdered anything is obviously out.
    From a more general ‘is it good for me’ point of view, its not that simple
    First let me explain that even as a grad student in nutrition, I think the majority of what I have learned about healthy eating can be summed up is those famous seven word (eat food. not too much. mostly plants). that diet is ideal and can be really simple once it becomes routine.
    What if your diet isn’t ideal, should you be taking a supplement? Let me start with giving the example of beta-carotene (precursor to vitamin A). A while back, a lot of big population surveys were showing that people who ate a lot of beta carotene had a lower risk of dying from lung cancer. great! They started a couple big studies (look for the CARET study and the ATBC study) giving beta-carotene to people with lung cancer. They had to stop the studies early, because the patients who took beta-carotene were dying earlier! It turns out that there’s a lot of beta-carotene in vegetables, so when you eat a lot of beta-carotene, it’s really just representative of how many vegetables you are eating. The beta-carotene itself actually promotes the growth of cancer cells. It was the vegetables that were protecting people from lung cancer.
    This is not to say that all vitamins will give you cancer (and we still all need beta-carotene, just try to get it from a carrot). But a lot of things in a multi-vitamin could be good for you, or bad for you, depending on your personal health status. Vegetables, on the other hand, are always good for you. Scientists have trouble speaking in absolutes, so let me re-pharse. Vegetables are virtually always, 99.9999999999999999999% of the time good for 99.999999999999% of the population. There, I feel better now.
    Ok, so should you take a multi-vitamin? I do. I think you should too. If you’re following a very healthy diet, the one described in this post, then you could consider skipping it. If your diet is less than ideal, however, then a multi-vitamin is likely to do more good than bad. With a multi-vitamin you can’t megadose with any one vitamin (never megadose) in a way that could cause toxicity. There’s also some things that it’s virtually impossible to get from normal healthy living. If you anywhere that requires wearing a jacket in winter, take 400 IU vitamin D. Beyond that it gets more complicated. Another reason to just eat healthy and not worry about it.
    Sorry, I know i diverged from the spirit of this post. Micheal Pollan is right on the money.

    [Reply]
61. Janine
    

    Great post… As a Dietitian, I, too, am trying to get people to get back to the basics. It’s harder than you’d think!!

    [Reply]
62. Carole
    

    Wow, what a great post – and so many insightful comments.

    I’ve been a meat and fruit and vegetable eater pretty much since I could make my own food. I don’t drink milk.

    I’ve never been hospitalized, except for childbirth. I take no meds. And I’m over 50.

    My sister on the other hand, is a big milk drinker and has had health problems all of her life.

    I was happy to see that you actually recommend meat. But I don’t think you should be so quick to discount fruits. Fruits are great for your skin and your immune system. Yes, they have more sugar, but natural sugar is not today’s problem.

    Eat a few servings of fresh fruit for a few days and see if your skin doesn’t look better

    [Reply]
63. Fun Work | Crossfit Watertown, Oakville, CT
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64. Scott Kustes
    

    One more thing about homogenization (I think the only point that Anna didn’t add!)…it decreases the size of the fat globules, greatly increasing their surface area-to-weight ratio. This means more of the fat is exposed to oxygen and light. More exposure to oxygen and/or light means more of a tendency to oxidize and turn rancid.

    Jessica, great comment…thanks!

    Carole, my caution against fruits is more against lumping them together as “fruits and vegetables”. I don’t think the two are really interchangeable. Vegetables are far more nutritious. On the other hand, a couple pieces of fruit a day isn’t going to do any damage to anyone but the most insulin resistant. More of a warning that you can’t just go whole hog on a fruit buffet on a regular basis. I eat plenty of fruits seasonally, which means some nice apples and such this time of year.

    Cheers
    Scott

    [Reply]
65. 10 Mistakes That Could Be Killing Your Blog, and More | Open Source Blogging
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66. alis
    

    Great article, backed up by valuable information from Anna.

    I just want to add one little thing about olive oil. My parents own a small olive garden, they produce/process them almost organically. My father likes to make delicious home-made olive paste, and you wouldn’t belive how beautifully the olive oil seperates from the olives after just a little bit of mashing. I’d say olive oil is totally legit

    [Reply]
67. Anna
    

    alis, we just bought two small olive trees for our garden. I can’t wait to make olive paste!

    [Reply]
68. Maintaining Your Immunity During The Holidays | Modern Forager
    [...] not get the job done. I know which way I’m leaning. It seems to me that continuing my diet of Real Food, getting my usual 8-9 hours of sleep, and throwing in a bit of exercise should keep me humming [...]
69. Lisa
    

    How does not eating grains improve one’s health, when Ellie Krieger, who has a master’s degree in nutrition says grains are great for health?

    [Reply]
70. Anna
    

    “How does not eating grains improve one’s health, when Ellie Krieger, who has a master’s degree in nutrition says grains are great for health?”

    I know, it’s hard to wrap one’s head around the contrasting diet advice, but we are very overdue for a paradigm shift. One has to look both very far backwards in human dietary history, before humans began practicing agriculture, as well as very deeply into the connections between a number of chronic illnesses that plague populations that are grain heavy, such as ours.

    This is a huge topic which needs far more explanation than can be provided in a comment. But essentially, grains are a very recent addition to the human diet, only added in the last approximately 10,000 years or less. So the human body is not well adapted to some of the proteins and phytochemicals found in grains, nor the heavy load of starch (glucose) that a high intake of grains provides.

    Wheat in particular, and the wheat relatives like rye, barley, kamut, etc., seem to be particularly problematic for those with certain genes, genes which are quite common in those of European ancestry (there is a lot of research currently in Scandanavia and Italy). The protein in wheat, gluten, damages the gut in sensitive individuals, instigates an immune response from the adaptative and/or the innate immune system, and is implicated in a high number of chronic diseases of inflammation and auto-immunity, as well as nutrient malabsorption, which causes disease due to missing nutrients. Where wheat goes, these diseases follow, if one follows the trail of wheat around the world in history.

    Many of these diseases are “silent” for a long time, even decades, so it has only been fairly recently that “the dots are being connected” to wheat and gluten. Many, many people find their health improves when they remove wheat from their diet. Until recently, testing for gluten damage was not conclusive until the damage was so great that severe symptoms presented and gut antibodies left the gut and went into the blood, as well as biopsies showing damaged small intestine villi confirmed the problem. There is a new fecal testing protocol which identifies the antibodies much earlier, before the villi are damages or the antibodies show up in the blood, as well as genetic testing for gene carriers (www.enterolab.com). I expect this testing protocol will gain acceptance in the near future, but it is still too soon for widespread acceptance.

    Another part of the problem with modern grain use is that industrial processing of grains eliminates certain crucial steps that “old-fashioned” grain users always took to make the grains more digestible and less damaging. Grains used to either be soaked, sprouted, or fermented (sourdough) to neutralize potent anti-nutrients (phytates or phytic acid) that prevent premature sprouting in the seed (the sprouting enzymes are kick-started with moisture). These phytates must be neutralized or else they bind to the minerals, preventing absorption. Commercial breads are made with cheaper fast-rise processes and unsoaked grains now, instead of traditional long rise methods, too. So the steps our ancestors took to make grains less problematic are now completely sidestepped.

    Then there is the issue of the starch in grains, which is far more quickly converted to glucose than commonly acknowledged (easily tested with a glucose meter). Impaired glucose tolerance is very commonplace (because our genes weren’t designed to have this much access to glucose all the time) and concentrated starches severely stress the body’s ability to maintain tight glucose control. Tight control is about 1 tsp of glucose in the entire blood stream, or 4 gms of glucose. Years of daily dumping 200-400+ grams (50-100 teaspoons) of sugars and starches into a body and the ensuing insulin production to dispose of that glucose wreaks havoc, damages glucose control regulation even further, contributes to many chronic diseases, and weight gain, not to mention messes with moods and in more extreme cases or sensitive individuals, destroys mental stability.

    Sure, one can find lots and lots of mainstream advice to consume whole grains, because the last 50 years or so of nutrition science has been very unscientific, very biased by dogma, and advice was put forth to the public before it was well-tested. But dig a little deeper (the information is there if one looks for it) and keep an open mind about grains, and one finds that the emperor may in fact be quite naked. But it *will* require digging a little, because the “grains are good message” is quite entrenched, sells a lot of product, not to mention is entrenched in the culture. So there is a lot of bias resistance to the idea that consuming grains (especially wheat) come with a steep price.

    [Reply]
71. Scott Kustes
    

    Lisa, nothing more I can add to what Anna wrote (and that’s why I love having her here!). Don’t assume that because someone has degrees and a position of authority they are fully aware of the full picture. Try going grain-free (especially wheat) for a month, then see how you feel when you add them back in. That’s the only way to really know what’s going on with your body.

    Cheers
    Scott

    [Reply]
72. Happy New Year « Agon Athletics
    [...] A few good articles from other sites explaining some diet basics. One Rule to Remember [...]
73. FoodRenegade
    

    I agree that most Americans overeat grains, and that the grains the average American eats are harmful.

    That said, I really think there’s something to the movement to only eat grains in traditionally prepared ways — sprouted, soaked, or fermented.

    It’s like quoting studies about pasteurized milk and applying the findings to raw milk. You can’t do it. They’re two different substances altogether. So it goes with grains. Traditionally prepared grains are vastly different than their industrialized, refined counterparts.

    It’s really not that hard to prepare these grains according to traditional methods; I do it all the time. Plus, for those unwilling to do the work themselves, sprouted-grain products are becoming more commercially available as well.

    [Reply]
74. Mild Colonial Boy, Esq.
    

    Spaghetti – I don’t recall seeing a spaghetti tree on my last hike

    Then you haven’t seen this then : http://au.youtube.com/watch?v=SyUvNnmFtgI

    [Reply]
75. Katrina
    

    Another good reason to forgo the Western mentality for and about food.

    “Oreo cookies – Hold while I read the ingredients…” That is defiantly one of the longest ingredient lists I’ve ever seen. D:

    [Reply]
76. Janet W
    

    Scott,
    AMEN! Excellent post and the comments are great too. I love finding Anna’s comments throughout real food web sites. While I already know what she’s saying, it’s nice to read it again, by someone so dedicated to it.

    What I like about Weston Price’s book is that he had no ax to grind when he traveled around looking at what native people were eating. While Atkins, The Zone, Ornish, etc weren’t around at the time, there was information about low carb eating and John Harvey Kellogg was espousing his diet recommendations. He reported what each group he encountered ate and how it affected their health. Anyone interested in real food needs to read this book. I also highly recommend Nina Planck’s Real Food and Michael Pollan’s Omnivore’s Dilemma. I’m not sure what happened to Pollan between OD and In Defense of Food (I didn’t read this one, the “Eat food. Mostly plants. Not too much” turned me off). OD is in large part about eating meat (the omnivore’s dillema). He talks about 4 meals — fast food, factory “organic”, real organic, and getting the food yourself. He talks to Joel Salatin of Polyface Farms, he buys a factory farm cow and follows it to the end, he hunts boar and forages for wild vegetables. It was an excellent book and I, as I said, was surprised at what seemed a change of heart with his next book (Defense).

    I would also like to suggest Vilhjalmar Stefansson, an anthropologist who spent a number of years in the arctic, living with the Inuit, eating their food. One season, he ate nothing but cooked fish, raw fish and drank water. He and a colleague conducted a study overseen by Bellevue Hospital where they ate nothing but meat and fat for one year. He talks about this and his time with the Inuit in Not By Bread Alone (reprinted, I think, as Fat of the Land).

    One last thing about grains — yes, they are a part of traditional diets, prepared the right way. But we have so polluted our bodies with factory foods that we may not be able to tolerate even these good grains and products. About 1 month ago I gave up grains entirely (I was eating a wonderful organic whole wheat/whole rye sourdough bread and nothing else). I feel much better than I have in years — more energy, sleeping better, my skin is clearing up. I think if there is a second rule of good nutrition, it would be, after you eat real food, you must decide which of these foods your body will accept (I don’t go near soy *in any form*, grains, high starch vegetables, legumes including peanuts, higher lactose dairy (milk and yogurt), coconut).

    If you want to see how important real food is to your body, besides reading Weston Price, read Cure Tooth Decay by Nagel. An eye opener.

    [Reply]
77. skustes
    

    Food Renegade, traditionally prepared grains are definitely a different animal than most of the products in the grocery. Probably still not as good as fruits and vegetables, but significantly better than quick-rise breads and pasta.

    Mild Colonial, nice! Love that video!

    Janet W, yeah, I love having Anna around too. She’s passionate and knowledgeable. I have read “Omnivore’s Dilemma,” along with “In Defense Of Food”. OD was far superior. Also, “Holy Cows and Hog Heaven” and “Everything I Want To Do Is Illegal” by Joel Salatin are excellent reads.

    I need to read Weston Price’s book, along with some of the others you mentioned. Once I get through the other two books I have in progress (fiction…needed a break from sciencey stuff).

    Cheers
    Scott

    [Reply]
78. Anna
    

    Janet and Scott – Thanks! You made my day!

    [Reply]
79. ChrisR
    

    That’s weird to critisize a book you haven’t read (ie. In Defense of Food) which is a very good book as well as he rights about weston price and others in the book in a positive and rational light. I don’t think anyone can find fault with his suggestion to eat mostly vegetables (and especially those who haven’t read the book and don’t know what they are talking about.)

    [Reply]
80. Anna
    

    “I don’t think anyone can find fault with his suggestion to eat mostly vegetables (and especially those who haven’t read the book and don’t know what they are talking about.”

    I’ve read the book (though I had to force myself to finish it because I was so disappointed with Pollan’s advice and conclusions in this book). As much as I like Michael Pollan’s writing, I think the same way Scott does on this book. And I do think Pollan, like mainstream nutrition authorities, has over emphasized the advice to eat vegetables.

    [Reply]
81. Karin
    

    Anna:
    With regards to height…
    I am a normal, healthy, 5′1″ woman who got plenty of good food to eat during childhood. I was simply born to short parents.I don’t know that it’s fair to say that if the average height of (United States) Americans is now less than some European countries it’s because we are not eating right. I think a lot of that is that the U.S. is a more diverse (genetically) bunch of people. We have a lot of immigrants from Asia and Latin America here. And, like me, some of those people simply lack the genetic potential to be tall. If someone was malnourished it was their great-great-great-great….grandparents. The whole tendency of some folks to equate tall with healthy is just not realistic.

    [Reply]
82. Rolfe
    

    So what on earth did our forefathers have for breakfast? Pork chops? I can see lunches and dinners, but breakfasts is something nobody includes in their writings.

    [Reply]
83. skustes
    

    Rolfe, on days I eat breakfast, which isn’t all the time since I do some Intermittent Fasting, I eat eggs or leftovers. There’s a big market for “breakfast foods,” but eggs, meat, vegetables, and fruit are all great for breakfast. Today, I had 4 eggs cooked in butter with green onions and green garlic, grapes, olives, and Brazil nuts.

    Here are a couple links on Intermittent Fasting:
    Intermittent Fasting 101
    My Intermittent Fasting Success Story

    Cheers
    Scott

    [Reply]
84. Hiram
    

    Just discovered this post. Makes a lot of sense. I just purchased Pollan’s book “In Defense of Food.” You just can’t put it any better than he does: Eat food. Mostly plants. Not too much.

    Words to live by!

    Hiram

    [Reply]
85. JD
    

    light breakfast… a granola bar consisting of 9g fiber and traces of DHA and EPA, 20oz of water with supplements
    a dannon yogurt shot.

    [Reply]
86. Anna
    

    JD, I hope you are kidding…

    [Reply]
87. ChrisR
    

    For breakfast I eat a whole skinned rabbit (because if I don’t the fur gets up my nose and I sneeze), two cups of whole wheat coffee, and a snickers bar.

    [Reply]
88. Eating Right: How to Get Started « Specialization is for Insects
    [...] thumb and some interesting information on how to identify healthy foods then you should check out this article from the Life [...]
89. Eating Right: How to Get Started « Chris Salvato
    [...] thumb and some interesting information on how to identify healthy foods then you should check out this article from the Life [...]
90. CrossFit Saskatoon » Blog Archive » CFS WOD 230609
    [...] of it. The basic rule of thumb that I use to guide my eating is, as I wrote about in my Nutrition 101 post, “Eat Real Food”. That means unprocessed fresh foods…meats, vegetables, fruits, nuts, [...]
91. Dextery
    

    Chris R.

    The following site outlines the light sensitivity problems ingesting buckwheat sprouts.

    http://www.townsendletter.com/Dec2004/buckwheat1204.htm

    [Reply]
92. Amir
    

    Scott,

    Your advice and Pollan’s advice is very simple, of course people are going to like making it that simple, but as Einstein says “Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.”

    I’m not saying you are wrong, I’m just not sure. Anna, is there anything that should be done to fresh raw milk? Or just straight from the source? What is your opinion and what is Scott’s opinion on rolled oats? What is your guys’ opinion on sprouted wheat bread?

    I’m not a nutrition expert, but I don’t see the logic/evidence that we should eat the foods we’ve been eating the longest, I mean the average age of people during those times thousands of years ago seemed to be about 30 years old…why do you apply that to humans living on average to 66 years now? And really it’s just people who were hungry who started eating whatever they could without the research of knowing whether it was bad for you or not.

    While I think meat is definitely better than processed food, there is a lot of research that shows the ill effects of real foods like red meat and butter? What do you guys think about that research? You can find it on Wikipedia. Would you agree that a good example to take notes from are the Japanese? They are the healthiest and longest living, they mostly eat fish (not other meat), vegetables, fruits, and rice.

    It seems you can find studies that prove whatever you want to prove (like your sites article on how much protein that cites a study done with only 6 males!!), it’s a lot harder to objectively look at all the research, and then issue objective advice.

    Again, I’m not saying you’re definitely wrong, there are just (what seem like) big holes in your conclusions that would be great if you could explain. I would also say that I think evolution is probably ahead of our own mind’s thinking in what is good for us and not good for us and how it is processing it. And just another interesting fact, the oldest person to ever live said she ate 2 pounds of chocolate a week!

    I mean it can all get so confusing, now grass fed cows?, not that much whole grains?, don’t over emphasize fruit and vegetables?! And then there’s people like the poster Liz who seemed to follow most of your advice but her and her husband are suffering from high blood pressure and ldl cholesterol. Also, your current recommendations on what to eat are not that different from those of the well researched possibily biased World Health Organization guidelines (http://whqlibdoc.who.int/trs/WHO_TRS_916.pdf)
    Anyway, I appreciate being able to respond and hope to get further answers/responses to the questions I asked.

    [Reply]
93. skustes
    

    Amir, it’s not oversimplified. It’s 100% true. If you eat unprocessed foods, there is no worry of fat, carb, protein, saturated fat, etc. Unprocessed foods are self-regulating. Processed foods trick your taste buds with sugar and salt. Natural foods don’t.

    No, nothing needs to be done to raw milk. Rolled oats…not horrible, but much better options that are non-grain. Sprouted wheat bread….better than unsprouted, but better options that are non-grain.

    Talk of average age is bunk. Average age is an average, as it says. An average includes outliers…like babies that die during childbirth (infant mortality at the turn of the 20th century was nearly 25% and deaths before age 5 were high as well…what would that have been during Paleolithic times?). People in Paleolithic times were sometimes killed by dinner since it had claws. We aren’t. The increase in life expectancy has come from improved sanitation and medical procedures.

    The research on meat and butter never looks at healthy omnivores that eat meat and butter, but avoid processed foods. The research is wrong. Numerous groups eat plenty of meat and butter without ill health. The difference is in the US with our “nutrition knowledge,” the supposedly healthy people avoid red meat and butter, tainting the pool by default. They’re less likely to smoke, more likely to exercise, and less likely to drink excessively.

    You’re overthinking things, resisting the statement: Eat Real Food. Stop the paralysis by analysis and just eat unprocessed foods. Grass-fed meats, fruits, vegetables. Stop worrying.

    Cheers
    Scott

    [Reply]
94. Amir
    

    Actually, the average age of 30 statistic does account for infant mortality. I don’t disagree that advances in sanitation and medical procedures play a role, but I don’t see the evidence that the same diet could be recommended for people living the higher average age now. I’ve done some more reading, I don’t think I know the complete truth and don’t have a complete answer yet, but on the Wikipedia entry for paleolithic diets, I tend to agree with Milton’s research that led her to conclude that “there is little evidence to suggest that human nutritional requirements or human digestive physiology were significantly affected by such diets at any point in human evolution.”

    What groups eat butter and meat without ill health?

    I do agree with you about the unprocessed foods. I agree with you about meat and non-grain being good for weight loss, however, I don’t agree with that for long-term health though.

    Again, the Japanese, the healthiest, and longest living, mostly eat fish, vegetables, fruits, rice, rice, and more rice. There are many studies showing the US, Europe, and South America being the biggest consumers of meat and having the highest incidences of related diseases and cancers.
    You pointed out a very valid criticism of many studies, that they don’t look at the other eating habits besides meat and that confounds the conclusions you can draw from them.

    However,there are studies. Just one article, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/8218780.stm. And there is mountains of research from the World Health Organization in the document I posted before (http://whqlibdoc.who.int/trs/WHO_TRS_916.pdf) that support the general recommendation to limit protein from meat to 15% of your eating and the recommendations for whole grains. I went through some of the research studies cited by WHO, and in my opinion their recommendation on meat and to limit refined sugar is pretty unbiased considering the financial interests against coming to those conclusions.

    I am excited to try raw milk. You are right that I should not worry so much about this, especially because I don’t work in this industry, and my research on nutrition has been taking a lot of my spare time. I pretty much conclude by remaining not converted to everything you specifically suggest, but most of my guidelines for diet are similar to what you generally suggest. I don’t have spare time to keep researching all these different topics or to go back and forth with you on the items of food we differ on. Maybe sometime I will try all your recommendations for 30 days, as you suggested to someone before, and see what effect it has. I will agree that butter is better than margarine but I’m not giving myself a license to eat meat and butter regulary. I feel happy to stay away from refined grains/free sugar and most processed food, and stick with a bulk of my food intake from fruit, vegetables, fish, oatmeal, sprouted bread, etc. Thanks for your response and being able to voice my opinion in the comments of this article.

    [Reply]

    

    Mike OD Reply:
    

    @Amir – on meat, fat and diseases here are just a couple good quotes from Weston A Price (a site worth looking around)

    Myth: Heart disease in America is caused by consumption of cholesterol and saturated fat from animal products.

    Truth: During the period of rapid increase in heart disease (1920-1960), American consumption of animal fats declined but consumption of hydrogenated and industrially processed vegetable fats increased dramatically. (USDA-HNI)

    It is true that beef consumption in the United States has gone up during the last eighty years, the period of huge increases in heart disease. Today we consume 79 pounds of beef per person per year versus 54 in 1909, a 46% increase-but poultry consumption has increased a whopping 280%, from 18 pounds per person per year to 70. Consumption of vegetable oils, including those that have been hydrogenated, has increased 437%, from 11 pounds per person per year to 59; while consumption of butter, lard and tallow has plummeted from 30 pounds per person per year to just under 10. Whole milk consumption has declined by almost 50%, while lowfat milk consumption has doubled. Consumption of eggs, fresh fruits (excluding citrus), fresh vegetables, fresh potatoes and whole grain products has declined; but consumption of sugar and other sweeteners has almost doubled. Why, then, do today’s politically correct dietary gurus continue to blame beef consumption for our ills?

    Two American studies conducted in the 1990’s have found a higher risk of colon cancer among those who eat red meat. However, no study done in Europe has ever shown an association between meat consumption and cancer. This suggests that European sausage and luncheon meat, included in the rubric of “meat consumption,” are prepared by traditional methods that require few additives, while the similar products in the United States contain many carcinogenic preservatives and flavorings. Unfortunately, the American Cancer Society’s 1996 recommendation that Americans cut down on their consumption of meat-particularly fatty meat-in order to avoid cancer makes no distinction between fresh meats and those that have been embalmed with modern chemicals.

    The relative good health of the Japanese, who have the longest life span of any nation in the world, is generally attributed to a lowfat diet. Although the Japanese eat few dairy fats, the notion that their diet is low in fat is a myth; rather, it contains moderate amounts of animal fats from eggs, pork, chicken, beef, seafood and organ meats. With their fondness for shellfish and fish broth, eaten on a daily basis, the Japanese probably consume more cholesterol than most Americans. What they do not consume is a lot of vegetable oil, white flour or processed food (although they do eat white rice.) The life span of the Japanese has increased since World War II with an increase in animal fat and protein in the diet. Those who point to Japanese statistics to promote the lowfat diet fail to mention that the Swiss live almost as long on one of the fattiest diets in the world. Tied for third in the longevity stakes are Austria and Greece-both with high-fat diets.

    [Reply]
95. Anna
    

    Amir,

    I appreciate your thoughtful comment. It is clear you are exploring and searching for meaningful information you can put into practice. That is exactly what I am doing too. However, it is too easy to be swayed by powerful influences that have crept into the “research” and public health guidelines, as well the expansion toward a global “machine cuisine”.

    One must efficiently sift the “wheat from the chaff” . I experience a huge paradigm shift about 12 years ago when I was newly pregnant after 3 years of trying to conceive, which led to more and more paradigm shifts for me. I’m not a Wayne Dyer fan, but I love his quote, “the more you change the way you look at things, the more the things you look at change”. I also have a research scientist husband who challenges me with his occasional skepticism and his dedication to good science. That said, he has no issue at all with about 99% of the changes I’ve made to the family diet, in fact, he loves that I’m not on his case about his butter and cheddar consumption (he’s English and never was convinced of the evils of saturated fat).

    Look into average life expectancy averages for other periods if that is a big issue for you. I don’t have time right now to track down the figures and sources I found when I looked into this, but they aren’t hard to find. Suffice it to say that average life expectancy, with brief and limited exceptions, was generally quite low not just in paleolithic people, but every where in the world at all times until after 1900 (though obviously there was some variation in those low numbers). Agriculture didn’t really raise ALE statistics much at all and in fact, with the widespread warfare, infectious disease, and unsanitary conditions that developed with agriculture and urbanization, ALE even dipped or remained quite low (even lower than Paleolithic ALE) at many fairly recent points in neolithic history. Early and mid Industrial Age statistics on Ave. Life Expectancy are especially dismal, in some places hovering around 20-25 yoa. The gains in the last 100 years or so are not due to diet, but rather reduced violence (though we have some horrific wars in that time period), safer workplaces, sanitation and some public health measures (simple things like doctors washing their hands), and antibiotics, for the most part. If anything, the historical references show that in North America, increased availability of meat added to height and improved health of the offspring of the 17th and 18th century European immigrants.

    The potential for a long life (potential lifespan) is a different thing entirely than average life expectancy (which goes up and down primarily due to infant and childhood mortality stats). Hunter gathers didn’t die off at age 30 or 40 from old age related causes. If they survived into adulthood successfully and then survived death from violence, accidents, and avoided becoming prey, they had the same potential to live as long as we do and there is ample evidence that through *all* the ages that despite high early mortality rates, many people did live well into their 70s, 80s, and 90+s. The strong do survive.

    I know personal anecdote is not evidence, but I think my situation is typical of what has happened in in the past 50-60 years as a result of the meddling in dietary advice based on soft science. I simply can’t follow the recommended whole grain, low fat diet any more. It was ruining my health. I’ve tried, believe me, I’ve tried. I grew up eating produce from my dad’s organic backyard garden for at least half of the year. My mother baked homemade bread and was more mindful of our family’s nutrition than most of my friend’s mothers (sodas, chips, candy, and packaged snacks were only for special occasions), though I think she made a serious judgement error in choosing skimmed milk and margarine for the family.

    For reasons that still aren’t clear to me, my metabolism is damaged; my glucose regulation is impaired and I’m hypothyroid. The hyperglycemia was first caught a dozen years ago when I was pregnant, and I was diagnosed with gestational diabetes. About five years later I realized I still had impaired glucose regulation and a low fat, high carb diet, whether it started the damage or not, was doing further damage with roller coaster BG levels throughout the day. I have reason to think that my blood glucose regulation had probably been stressed ( reactive hypoglycemia) for some years before it shifted to hyperglycemia and was caught, perhaps beginning well before I was 30 yo. I was very slender, even underweight and couldn’t gain weight no matter what I ate, until I was 29 yo., and I loved starchy grain and potato foods as well as started drinking soda (I gained 5 pounds a year after I bought a bread machine in 1999). Even after my metabolism suddenly shifted and I gained weight, I’ve never been more than 20 pounds overweight, and that weight dropped off easily and without hunger when I drastically cut soy, concentrated sugars and starches, and especially grain starch from my diet. Turns out I also have gluten intolerance, too (I make antibodies to gluten, as well as carry two HLA genes which predispose to gluten sensitivity). My son has one of my HLA genes, plus one HLA that predisposes to celiac from his father’s side of the family (which does have at least one cousin diagnosed with celiac). Our symptoms were very mild and hard to associate with wheat, but now that we are gluten-free, our tolerance has declined and we have some symptoms with gluten exposure. We don’t find a GF diet very difficult because we focus on grain-free real food that is prepared traditionally and relatively unprocessed. The only time it’s tricky is when we are away from home and only have access to processed foods.

    While genetics may play a significant role in my health, it’s very interesting to me that there was no diagnosed diabetes at all in my family history until the past 12 years, when I was discovered to be prediabetic and the same year my maternal uncle and his son were diagnosed with T2 diabetes. I had some seeming unrelated minor health issues in my 20s that were probably warning symptoms, but I nor my doctors failed to connect the dots, because “I was healthy overall”, yet I had trouble conceiving, I developed a skin cancer in my late 20s, etc. More recently, my mother was diagnosed with T2 diabetes. There could be epigenetic issues at play during our fetal development (my uncle and mother were born at the end of the depression and I was born at a time when expectant mothers were urged to not gain very much weight, not more than 12-15 pounds). The big “family health worry” was heart disease, because my grandfather died prematurely in 1959 at age 50 of MI. So believe me, from that point on, my mother’s family paid attention to and followed the official dietary recommendations. So something or a combination of things either damaged our metabolisms or expressed some variation of genes which hadn’t been expressed before. From what I can gather, it’s likely a toxic combination of growing up in the “chemical soup” environment that is a major feature of the latter half of the 20th century in America; decades of consuming artificial products like margarine, vegetable oils/shortening (containing damaging trans fats and rancid/unstable omega-6 PUFAs) that are stripped of fat soluble vitamins A, E & K2 and other important nutrients found in and with natural fats; increasing consumption of obvious and hidden sugars (sucrose, corn syrup, HFCS, and various dextrins); changes in the wheat varieties as well as increases in processing practices in grain food production. Lifestyle and career factors are no doubt players, too. My mother recently retired from a 25 year career as a night shift nurse when she underwent and is severely Vit D deficient due to her career and her northern climate.

    Once I realized how the dietary advice I had grown up with (I was born in the early 60s) and had such faith in was so flawed (the “emperor had no clothes”), I reversed my carb/natural fat ratios and I saw huge improvements in the stability of my BG, my energy, my moods, my skin, my weight, in fact, my overall health and well-being. The only medication I take is natural dessicated thyroid hormone and on the rare occasions I am sick, I bounce back quickly. There’s more to it than simply reversing the carb/fat ratio, of course, as we now mostly consume local, seasonal organic produce (from a CSA farm subscription program), and grass-fed, naturally and humanely raised meats dairy, & eggs, direct from the farms, without added hormones and antibiotics, instead of CAFO products. I buy few processed food ingredients or pre-prepared convenience foods (or I make sure they are produced in a traditional, small scale manner with no unnecessary additives or fillers). I prepare most of my family’s food and we are all in much better health than we were 6-8 years ago when I was too often seduced by cooking convenience and false economy.

    By the way, since the 70s when the Japanese went from a poor post-war nation to a wealthy one, beef and meat consumption has risen markedly, shabu-shabu (very fatty beef) being just one example. There are too many false stereotypes in the Western dietary literature about Asian food and how it connects to their health, especially in the vegetarian propaganda. The Okinawins also eat significant amounts of pork and lard which is usually denied or left out of many discussions about Okinawin diet and longevity. Childhood obesity and T2 diabetes in the young is on the rise in Japan, too, they are just behind our head start. I suspect the youngest Japanese citizens will not have the longevity and good health of their grandparents, as they have adopted many “machine cuisine” foods.

    I encourage you to keep searching and questioning. We all have not enough time to into the research, but I think it is important to not blindly accept anything anymore (too much depends on it) without first reviewing from all angles, and in true scientific form, be prepared to change your mind and reverse your course if the best data suggests a new conclusion. Knowledge is not an anchor, it is the ship that takes you to new horizons. Rigid dogma is the anchor that keeps us from exploring.

    [Reply]

    

    Mike OD Reply:
    

    @ Anna – Fantastic comment! Thank you for sharing your experiences for others to benefit from!

    [Reply]
96. skustes
    

    Anna, you’re awesome! Thanks for the comment. Good seeing you around again.

    Mike, nice work there. Don’t think I have anything to add.

    Cheers
    Scott

    [Reply]
97. Anna
    

    Thanks, Mike OD!

    I’d also like to add a comment to your quote, ” today we consume 79 pounds of beef per person per year versus 54 in 1909, a 46% increase”.

    Meat consumption data in 1909 is misleading. In 1906 Upton Sinclair’s book, The Jungle, was published, exposing scandalous conditions in the Chicago-based American meat-packing industry. The shocked public recoiled from meat consumption (and may have even turned to local sources of meat that might not have been counted in the national livestock stats. It was several years before meat consumption regained lost ground. This context is important.

    Eventually, the industry cleaned up its act significantly (albeit coerced by loss of sales, new legislation, and new industry regulations) in terms of sanitation, occupational safety and training, and responsibility to the public. Meat processing became a safer and more respectable occupation by the mid-century with improved training, better wages, and improved standards of Quality Control. Sadly, most of that ground is now lost. The rise of CAFOs and centralized, vertically integrated mega-corporate control of the meat industry from farm to table since mid-century, however, has reversed the trend to Jungle-like scenarios.

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Jungle

    There are many good contemporary exposes of the modern livestock industries, however the majority of them either ignore sustainable and humane small scale models of livestock production/processing or they can only respond with a call for vegan/vegetarianism (which rather misses the point and is misguided on a number of angles). The Jungle, with its lack of vegetarian/vegan/extreme animal rights agenda clouding the issue, is well-worth reading today, in fact I dare say it should be required reading in junior high, high school and college a number of disciplines, not just in literature classes.

    The contemporary CAFO livestock production/processing model shares many parallels to conditions described so realistically in the The Jungle of 1906. Swift, Smith, Hormel, Tyson, Dean, etc., are not interested in my health and well being; they just want to count me in their market share. Executives from those industry mega-giants don’t lose sleep over how their corporations degrade the environment, exploit unskilled (often undocumented immigrant and “guest worker”) labor, and sell unsafe products masquerading as food; their main responsibility is to their stockholders an the bottom line. When I seek information about those foods from the industrial model, I find lack of transparency and doublespeak from these companies and we see flagrant deflection/avoidance of consequences when the spotlight shines their way each time a new food supply scandal is exposed.

    For those who feel the vegetarian/vegan model is a rational counterpoint or answer to the horrors of CAFOs, I highly suggest the provocative and thorough book, The Vegetarian Myth, by Lierre Kieth, a former long-time vegan/vegetarian. There is no such thing as “guiltless” meals, something always loses, even if it isn’t immediately apparent. I was driving past many recently harvested GMO corn fields in central Ohio in October. I lost count of the times I saw vultures feasting on a dead deer or fox caught in the combine harvester as it roared and mowed through the tall stalks (and that’s not even accounting for loss of wildlife habitat to agriculture. We also passed one former agriculture zone in Ohio that has been restored to native prairie grasses – it was a contrast to the fields with its symphony of bird songs.

    I also highly suggest Joel Salatin’s books and articles, on the flip side of the modern livestock production paradigm. Today’s Christian Science Monitor has an article on Salatin’s side of the livestock production/processing side of the paradigm.

    http://features.csmonitor.com/environment/2009/11/24/joel-salatin-advocates-a-better-way-to-raise-food/

    On another note, I’d like to add one more thing to Mike ODs comments about the studies on meat consumption. These studies are nearly always epidemiological and often poorly designed (plus all the researchers know the subject questionnaires are notoriously inaccurate), and are not intervention studies, they don’t prove anything except correlation (which also can correlate to income, education, religion, culture, and other lifestyle variables). Any scientist worth his/her salt knows correlation is not causation. I’ve yet to see a study that effectively separates meat consumption from sugar, starch, modern vegetable oil consumption, for instance. I’ve known very few people who eat meat without also eating grains and other starches, without vegetable oils, and without concentrated sugars for even limited periods, let alone for decades or a lifetime. If 95% of meat eaters eat their hormone and antibiotic-laden high omega 6 grain-fed CAFO meat ) mechanically harvested and co-mingled with animals raised in up to 4 countries) with considerable amounts of industrially produced grain products, alongside deep fried in hydrogenated vegetable oil tacos shells, chips, pastry containers or potatoes, all washed down with free-refill HFCS sweetened sodas (or even for contrast, a home cooked meal of supermarket meat, mashed potatos/rice side dish with margarine, canned vegetables, iceberg lettuce and anemic out of season tomato with bottled salad dressing made with soy bean oil, washed down with a big glass of whole milk), how can we, without bias, single out the meat as the problem, especially when the meat is the closest thing to the foods on which we evolved? How can you study a population that has no sizable population for control (not eating the other things)? Seventh Day Adventists? They don’t smoke (a biggie), they don’t drink alcohol (therefore they don’t abuse it), they lead extremely moderate lifestyles probably, and they have a strong religious culture for support. How can we be sure they have healthier members simply because they don’t eat meat? Perhaps they’d be even healthier if they didn’t eat wheat and vegetable oil…

    I love that these post discussions “stay alive” when new readers discover the blog.

    [Reply]
98. Anna
    

    Hey Scott,

    I’m trying to wean myself from blogs a bit to catch up on life, but sometimes it’s just too tempting!

    I’ve heard about several new farm-to-table restaurants in SD lately. Let me know when you’re in town again.

    [Reply]
99. Amir
    

    Thank you all for your responses. I still feel the same way as my last post but about seven day Adventists, they seem to be a good group to study because they don’t smoke/drink usually, there was a study done that shows vegetarians Adventists were healthier than non-vegetarians Adventists, but it can’t be attributed just to the absense of meat (let alone trying grass-fed fresh meat) because vegetarians consumed more tomatoes, legumes, nuts, and fruit, but less coffee, doughnuts, and eggs than did nonvegetarians. http://www.ajcn.org/cgi/content/full/70/3/532S

    [Reply]
100. skustes
     

     Amir,
     How about the meat-eating Mormons that are as healthy or healthier than the 7th Day Adventists? http://www.opposingviews.com/arguments/myth-meat-causes-osteoporosis-kidney-disease-heart-disease-cancer

     Despite being meat eaters, a study of Utah Mormons showed they had a 22% lower rate for cancer in general and a 34% lower mortality for colon cancer than the US average. A study of Puerto Ricans, who eat large amounts of fatty pork, nevertheless revealed very low rates of colon and breast cancer. Similar results can be adduced to demonstrate that meat and animal fat consumption do not correlate with cancer. Obviously, other factors are at work.

     It is usually claimed that vegetarians have lower cancer rates than meat-eaters, but a 1994 study of vegetarian California Seventh Day Adventists showed that, while they did have lower rates for some cancers (e.g., breast and lung), they had higher rates for several others (Hodgkin’s disease, malignant melanoma, brain, skin, uterine, prostate, endometrial, cervical and ovarian), some quite significantly. In that study the authors actually admitted that:

     Meat consumption, however, was not associated with a higher [cancer] risk.

     And that,

     No significant association between breast cancer and a high consumption of animal fats or animal products in general was noted.

     There’s plenty more info out there about these two groups too. To add to what Anna mentioned above about the failure of nutrition studies to adequately separate meat from sugar, processed grains, etc (which the average meat eater eats tons of), don’t forget that most nutrition studies fail to distinguish between meat raised in a CAFO and real grass-fed meats not loaded up with hormones. The difference is huge.

     It doesn’t surprise me that vegetarians are healthier than meat eaters when the meat eaters that are being used are typical Americans. Have you seen any of the very few studies published comparing a Paleo-style diet against other diets? And that’s still even a “politically correct diet” with low saturated fat and “lean meats” and also not using properly-raised meats. I want to see them compare to a group of people eating nothing but whole real foods, including grass-fed meats.

     Cheers
     Scott

     [Reply]
101. skustes
     

     Anna, I understand that! I try to stick to the important stuff on here and not get sucked into the black hole time wasting that the Internet can be. Some days I’m more successful than others! Haha!

     I’ll definitely let you know when I’m in town again. Hopefully in the spring sometime.

     Cheers
     Scott

     [Reply]
102. Going the extra mile « No More Junk Food
     [...] me (and seem to have figured this out long before we did), check out this site I stumbled upon http://www.fitnessspotlight.com/2008/6/4/nutrition-101-the-one-rule-to-remember/ Ya, being snowed in produces quite a bit of free [...]
103. Why Do We Get Fat |
     [...] Nutrition 101: The Basics That Will Keep You Healthy : Fitness Spotlight [...]
104. Dana
     

     “It’s true that pretty much all of our modern food is ‘processed’ in some way, but I’d give a pass to genetic engineering through selective breeding.”

     Selective breeding is not genetic engineering. Genetic engineering is gene-splicing or similar things that take place in a test tube or petri dish. It’s very precise and never happens in nature. (And they use fun things like viruses or bacterial genes in the process. Cool, huh?) And the genes inserted are just about never the same species as the organism they’re being inserted into. For instance, a starfish gene might be used in a tomato, or a hazelnut gene in a soybean.

     I’m totally against GMO foods. There is no redeeming value to them whatsoever. Every single problem they purport to solve can be solved through other, less technological means. Even “golden rice” is a joke–it is made with the stated purpose of “preventing blindness” in children who grow up surrounded by food-bearing plants that already produce a lot of beta carotene. In any case, children do not convert beta carotene as efficiently as adults, so are better off with vitamin A pills to prevent blindness (as their families generally cannot afford large quantities of foods like liver). They are cheaper, work better, and do not tie farmers to Monsanto or some other Big Ag conglomerate in a state of economic serfdom for the rest of their working lives.

     I’m all for selective breeding if we’re going to continue domesticating plants and animals (and I have a feeling we will for quite a while yet). That’s fine. That works only with the organism’s own species-specific gene pool and harnesses natural processes. GMO is not like that. But the industry sure likes people to think it is.

     [Reply]
105. samantha
     

     Anna and Scott thank you for being so informative!!

     Someone mentioned this earlier and so I had to comment: For the record, I KNOW that cattle can exist without human supervision, I’ve seen it. As for the way cattle are treated, it sickens me and it should sicken everyone. There… now i feel better.

     Anna, you are very knowledgeable and well-spoken about many things regarding food and food processes. Did you attain this knowledge through consistent research or are you a professional within your field? I believe in what you all have said on this site to my core. If you are a nutritionist or somewhere along that level then what turned you away from popular belief?

     I am also one of many who have fallen victim to the “whole grains are good for you” march. I find all of this information about grains very interesting. I would have never guessed that they were so bad for our bodies (traditional use) but the information provided on this site makes a lot of sense. In some ways I feel that processed grains have addictive properties. I quit eating grains for awhile and once I kept to my regimen it was easy to ignore what my friends and family were eating. As soon as I gave in to that ONE urge for a cracker or slice of bread it was like I was hooked again.

     [Reply]

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