Thursday, January 17, 2008
Food
Food is a big part of everyone’s lives. We’ve chosen to make it an even bigger part of ours by producing much of our food ourselves, for a variety of reasons. It tastes better, we believe it is healthier, and it requires a certain amount of physical labor that is both satisfying and productive.
It is fascinating to me to trace the history of food production, as it changed from largely local unprocessed foods to the industrialized global shipping network we see today. As the industrial era was just beginning, farm products were typically varied, plentiful, and were brought into towns daily out of necessity, as the preservation methods that we take for granted today did not exist. Except for famine, natural or man-made, people’s diets were varied and malnutrition was relatively rare.
Modern food preservation techniques began with the discovery of primitive canning in the early 1800s. It was noticed that if food was put into a sealed jar and heated for a time, it didn’t spoil. They did not understand why this worked, as this predated Pasteur’s work by many decades. Of course, the first widespread use of canned goods was in various military campaigns of the 1800s, where the advantage of non-perishable portable food is obvious.
As time progressed, manufacturing technology improved, and mass-production of canned food became possible. Prices came down, and this food became available to the masses starting in the late 1800s. However, people started noticing something odd. Now, with ever more plentiful varieties of food, strange diseases started cropping up in the population that had only rarely been seen before. What was going on?
Scientists began to tackle this issue, through the best tools they had available to them at the time. They knew about fat, protein, and carbohydrates, and their importance in the sustenance of life, and they didn’t quite understand why all of these things in a can was fundamentally different from all of these things fresh. They began experiments to figure out the difference. Inducing these new diseases in animals was easy, so they proceeded to feed the sick animals a variety of foods to determine the best way to alleviate the symptoms of the disease.
It was found that eating liver helped cure night blindness, citrus fruit helped cure scurvy, whole rice helped cure beriberi, etc. Clearly something was present in these foods that was destroyed in the industrial canning process. It was only with further scientific advancement that the compounds we know today as vitamins A, C, D, K, and the B complex were identified and isolated. It was discovered that the heating process involved in canning food destroyed these vitamins, which are compounds outside of the fat, protein, and carbohydrate building blocks that are still essential to life. Still later, industrial processes were perfected to manufacture these vitamins in huge quantities, for supplementation into the diet of the masses in pill form or as additions to the food itself, such as in fortified bread and cereals.
Thus, all is well in the diet of the masses in the industrial era. But it is really?
It seems to me that as industrial process have evolved even further, and manufactured foods become even more removed from their “real” food roots, we have not stopped to analyze what has happened to our diets. Instead, we look to the USDA to tell us how much of each of the building blocks we should eat, assuming that this is sufficient. If we don’t get enough of these things, we can easily make up the difference with protein power or multivitamins. I think I’ve heard this before.
I’ve recently had the opportunity to do some rather intense research in the medical literature. One thing that completely astounded me was the shallowness of understanding, the seeming disregard for the multidimensionality of the system they are dealing with, and the flippant dismissal of anything that is not understood. For example, T3 is the bioactive thyroid hormone and T4 is the “storage” form of T3 that circulates in our blood. How these hormones interact with other hormones is understood at a basic level. There are also other thyroid hormones which are produced by the thyroid, T1 and T2, but these are considered “unimportant”. As far as I can tell, “unimportant” translates into “we don’t know what they do.” Wait, what?
It is my belief that the nutritional guidelines that we have today are sufficient to sustain life, but not to sustain health. I think we do not understand the complex systems we are dealing with anywhere near as well as we think we do. As more people have a greater portion of their diet composed of corn syrup, texturized vegetable protein, and wheat bran, I think there are health problems creeping into the population that are completely unrecognizable to doctors that are trained in the “a complete diet consists of these 20 simple building blocks” paradigm.
Some may accuse me of being a whole foods fetishist, and that’s all right. To some extent I am. I’m willing to work hard to eat some of the best tasting food on earth. I look at the nutritional benefits as a rather substantial bonus rather than a true motivating factor. Regardless, I suspect there is more truth to what I say than either the industrial food establishment or the medical establishment would be comfortable admitting.
Think about your food, read your labels, and remember that we thought we knew everything once before already.
Comments
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My only disagreement would be in this area:
As far as I can tell, “unimportant†translates into “we don’t know what they do.â€
You cannot assume they are unimportant and you cannot assume they ARE important. Neither extreme works.
What we can do is assume, until more information becomes available, that they are not as important as those things that have demonstrated that they are important. They are clearly not low hanging fruit or the causation would be understood already.
It could very well be that they are not important… but we will never know if something is 100% unimportant because we cannot prove a negative.
It might end up they are important to some (but not others), important in combination with other factors, or truly not important or indicators of anything of significance. Not knowing with 100% certainly, however, doesn’t mean we should assume they are important. We should assume they are not (as science currently suggests).
Where my too-paranoid antenna goes up is when folks suggest that not knowing everything about something means something in itself. It may very well be that T1 and T2 mean absolutely nothing and ARE unimportant… until proven as important/meaningful, we have to go with “not important/significant… until information suggests otherwise.”
Mrs. du Toit | 1/17/2008 01:24 PM CDT -
I agree with your assessment, in general. Perhaps I should elaborate on this specific situation.
The impression that I’ve gotten in my admittedly shallow foray into the realm of endocrinology is that it is a very YOUNG science, in the grand scheme of things. Meaning, it looks to me like low hanging fruit is still being plucked. Basic processes have been mapped out, some feedback loops are understood at a basic level, but all of these things form an n-dimensional system of interactions, and only the absolutely most obvious ones are understood.
I don’t need everything to be understood to be satisfied. But when it is well established that the system is far more complex than we really understand, and when treatments based on existing knowledge fail in many cases, I’m not so quick to accept that these things that are poorly understood should be written off as unimportant so quickly.
American Farmer | 1/17/2008 03:24 PM CDT -
I’m not so sure it is as young a science as you might think. I remember running stacks when I was a mere teenager on the endocrinology subject (as one of the periodicals we produced was a bibliography of all the endocrinology studies [of the Hypothalamus, if I’m remembering correctly] published each month--before online Medline, of course).
It is not necessarily far more complex than we understand. That’s my point. It could be that we understand it quite well, despite outliers.
You know the rules about outliers.
I am just too familiar with folks thinking that this or that, based on our ignorance of the complexity, generally turns out to be not so mysterious and not so complex. I’ve been through dozens of these types of things in my lifetime and they generally don’t pan out to be the Big Complex Secret that people hoped for.
It COULD end up being complex, but we don’t yet know that, nor should we assume that. Lack of knowledge is just that. We can’t speculate on what more knowledge will provide: that it is simpler than we think OR more complex than we think. Within 100 years we could just as easily determine we were 100% correct as we were 100% wrong.
It’s like the sugar and children’s behavior thing. Despite all scientific evidence to the contrary, people still want to think that sugar has an affect on a child’s behavior. Because people keep preaching it, science keeps testing it, and there is no correlation. Parents will swear up and down that THEIR child reacts to sugar… but as with all observed anecdotes, they only notice when their hypothesis is correct. They don’t notice when their children are behaving badly when they haven’t had sugar, or behaving normally and properly when they’ve had sugar… it is a selective, biased, anecdotal sampling.
Mrs. du Toit | 1/17/2008 04:29 PM CDT -
I will agree with you to the extent that nutrition is much more complex than the “nutriceuticals” advocates believe. They will say “take vitamin Z and antioxident X to cure condition Y”, citing a study that shows people who eat diets rich in these things have a lower incidence of disease Y. However, when studies are done with people taking vitamin Z and and antioxident X in supplement form, universally there are no benefits. Sometimes the people taking the supplements are worse off.
Papapete | 1/19/2008 10:06 PM CDT -
I have to admit to a (superstitious?) belief in the sugar thing with kids’ behavior.
Here’s a tangential anecdata point that keeps me believing in it: I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard mothers say they went to the doctor with their child and with an idea of what’s wrong. The doctor pooh-poohed their idea which later turned out to be right. We don’t visit the doctor much, and we’ve had it happen.
I think an unfortunate number of scientists have their own biases that lie outside the scientific method (global warming, anyone?). I suspect the sugar/behavior thing may be one of them.
Unfortunately for this discussion, my suspicions are of a visceral nature, and therefore, not easy to discuss.
And, I have to say that I agree almost entirely with AF’s take on the canned / packaged / enervated & refurbished foods. I have no research to back it up, but it sure seems to me that a great deal of the time when man “improves” on nature, he gets more effects than he expects.
Now, I’m not saying we shouldn’t have antibiotics, eye glasses, indoor plumbing, or hygeine for teenage boys, but I think with any good, you can overdo it until it becomes bad. I think industrial food processing & packaging has gone that way.
Weetabix | 1/22/2008 09:01 AM CDT -
The problem with the sugar analysis, from a parental/anecdotal perspective, is that very often the kid has eaten something sweet (let’s say a Hershey Bar) and nothing else. The child’s reaction, or complaints of not feeling good, are not because of the chocolate/sugar, but because they have no protein in their system. They’re running on empty.
Obviously, if they’re filling up on empty calories/sugar-only snacks, they’re not getting the stuff they need to keep their engines running… and that’s where these things go awry. Lack of something else (protein, etc.) is what is causing the reaction/behavior, not the sugary snack food itself. Sugary foods WITH everything else they need causes them no reaction at all.
And that has been proven to be the case in study after study.
Children (and parents) have to learn that “treats” come after they’ve gotten their requirement of protein foods.
Mrs. du Toit | 1/22/2008 09:46 AM CDT -
Ahh! I hadn’t thought of it as a lack of something else.
I know Mrs. Bix and Weetachick #2 have problems if they don’t have some protein in them.
I’ll watch with a new eye.
I do understand that treats come after, but I don’t always have the immediate control over the sequence that I might like.
Weetabix | 1/22/2008 10:19 AM CDT
