The French Paradox of eating saturated fats and drinking wine without the risk of heart disease found in America may not be related to the polyphenols in red wine or some other mystical factor.  Instead, it might be related to how the French eat.  Most French take their time to eat.  They eat far smaller amounts than we Americans do, and they hold a taboo about eating seconds.  They also do not snack; whereas Americans are chained to a lifeline of endless drinks and food on their desk at work and at home near the television.

Americans stop eating when the plate is empty or when the television program is over, which are external cues.  Interestingly, the French respond that they stop eating when “I am full”, an internal cue.  Not very complex on that one.  The reason the French can eat smaller portions and be full than their American counterparts has to do with the speed of their eating.  It has been known that it takes 20 minutes for the brain to realize you are full. Unfortunately, most American meals are well over by that time interval.  If you slow down your meal, you will eat less.

Further, the French have built a culture around eating at the table.  Americans today do not prepare meals but shovel them.  The Normal Rockwall painting of the family dinner is now splintered into the kids eating a different meal from the parents at a different time at a different location while doing different other activities.  The cohesive social element of food in the American family has been torn asunder.

I hope all of you have learned as much as I have from this fantastic book, In Defense of Food. It has changed the way I think about food and nutrition, and it has facilitated a revolution in my own life, as much as my recent trip to Europe has reinforced these concepts.

1. Don’t eat anything that your great-great grandmother would not recognize.
2. Don’t eat anything on the label that you cannot pronounce or cannot recognize, especially anything with high-fructose corn syrup.
3. Avoid food that makes health claims.
4. Stay away from the center of the grocery store (where processed food reigns) and circumscribe the periphery (where fresher food flourishes but still can be invaded by refined foods today.)
5. Better yet stay away from grocery stores, and go to farmer’s markets or be involved with community-supported agriculture (CSA).
6. Eat more leafy plants.
7. Eat well-grown food from healthy soils.  Pollan argues that the word “organic” is important in that the food was not subjected to chemical fertilizers, but it is not the last word on quality.  Organic oreos are not healthy, and some farmers who are not certified organic still grow exceptional food.  In Omnivore’s Dilemma (which I shall be covering a couple of months from now), he goes into great detail of how a lot of organic food is truly not organic but a quasi “industrial organic” served up in reputable establishments like Whole Foods…frightening!.)
8. Eat wild foods when you can like wild animals (which dine on leaves) and sturdier, wild plants that may have more nutritional value.
9. Be the kind of person who takes supplements (not that you have to take supplements but just be in the mindset of those individuals who care enough that they would).  Most nutrients should come from food but if you don’t eat a lot of fish consider taking fish oil capsules (see last Friday’s blog), or if you are getting older and need more to supplement your diet, then do so if need be.
10. Eat more like the French, Italians, or traditional food cultures. This means as much of what we eat as how we eat it:  slow, social, and relaxed.
11. Have a glass of wine with dinner.

These are great rules to live by.  Tomorrow we conclude our series on this wonderful, inspiring (and perspiring) book!

Think about cutting down the dead animal portion (not necessarily getting rid of it unless you are already a vegetarian) and increasing our focus on vegetables.  I myself am a big fan of the big dead animal in front of me and don’t quite feel it constitutes a meal unless I have that carcass in front of me.  However, having finished my journeys through Europe and seeing a more egalitarian representation of food items, I am beginning to appreciate that we need to save room not for dessert but for green stuff in our bellies and perhaps make it the centerpiece of our meals.

It is not only important to cut down meat but to eat only quality meat.  Meat that is fed grain instead of plant leaves has higher Omega 6s than Omega 3s, which as we discussed last Friday is bad for you.  Cows were meant to eat grass as they are ruminators.  Instead, man has forced cows to eat grain to get fatter faster at the expense of Omega 3s.  Eating grains make a cow sick and therefore require antibiotics to keep them from getting sick.  So it is not only important to eat quality animals but it is important what food your animal eats too.  Pay more for pastured animals even chickens or other livestock.  The more grass they eat the better it is for you.  Obviously, eating organic products that are free from pesticides and other chemicals is very important too but hard to be certain if you are getting the real deal.

He encourages once you find great quality meat, get a deep freezer and keep it there.  The elements of produce and meat do not get affected from freezing.  That will help in the long run.

Interestingly, we can attain all the ingredients we need from plants without meat except for B12.  But there is trace amounts of B12 in produce that also is manufactured from your own bacteria in your gut.  Although great amounts of meat can lead to heart disease, a single serving a day has not been established to be detrimental to your health.  If one does not want to get rid of meat from the diet, one does not need to do so.  It is just important to eat better meat in smaller quantities with enough leafy plants along with that meat.

What is truly fascinating is that it is believed that our body’s access to Omega 3s and 6s is a zero-sum game.  If we eat too many food items with Omega 6s in them, then we get very little benefit from any ingested Omega 3s.  The ratio is what counts.  Unfortunately, in our Western diet, we consume on average 10 to 1 Omega 6 to 3 ratios, whereas in the pre-refined grain era we were consuming about a 3 to 1 ratio.

In Japanese and Eskimo cultures that consume vast quantities of fish compared with grain items, their level of heart disease is remarkably lower.  In fact, it is known that Omega 3 receptors are found plentifully in the heart tissue that can lead to a more stable heart rhythm, less thrombogenesis (clot formation), and a smoother arterial wall.  Unfortunately, with all of the processed foods we are eating we are displacing our Omega 3s making them practically useless. This goes against the grain (sorry for the pun) that some nutritionists argue that the Omega 6 found in seed oil is still so much better than consuming saturated fats.  But this may not be the case.  Rising Omega 6s may lead to poor bioavailability of Omega 3s.

Omega 3s may cut the chance of heart disease and heart attacks by a full third.  That is amazing.  I have incorporated Omega 3s as supplements (this is about the only supplement I currently take, 4 pills a day to total 2000 mg of combined EPA/DHA fatty acids, other than Vitamin D since I am sun deprived) into my diet but now I realize the importance of reducing my Omega 6 exposure.  In short, eat more leaves and eat fewer seeds.

What is very interesting too is that most processed foods take any remaining Omega 3s out of the equation. Omega 3s have short shelf life and cannot be maintained well.  The reason that many diets of the world have moved to higher Omega 6 to 3 ratios (that is a Western diet) is that Omega 3s are rapidly processed in the body and can lead to repeat hunger, whereas Omega 6s typically satiate better.  However, all of us need to be more conscious of how Omega 3s can help us for better cardiovascular health, brain/neurological health, and to limit the chances of chronic diseases.

Realizing that diseases like beriberi and pellagra were a direct result of a loss of B vitamins from these refined products, millers started to add B vitamins back into powdered grain and rice products.  But what valuable nutrients have we lost in the process?  A study from the University of Minnesota by David Jacobs and Lyn Steffen found that despite adjusting for dietary fiber, vitamin E, folic acid, phytic acid, iron, zince, magnesium, and manganese in the diet (all the good things that we get from whole grains), there was still considerable health benefit to just eating the whole grains themselves, as none of the sum of these nutrients alone could explain.  As they concluded, “This analysis suggests that something else in the whole grain protects against death.”

Interesting, the absence of these micronutrients that we can’t even label or understand how their synergestic actions may work may lead to even more hunger.  Bruce Ames, a Berkeley biochemist, purports a theory that the hunger we experience in eating large quantities of non-nutritious food may stem from our body’s unrelenting desire to attain these missing ingredients so we consume more of bad food to get what we need and are missing.

A diet high in whole grains leads to fewer chronic diseases like diabetes, heart disease, and cancers; whereas the inverse is certainly true.  One of the biggest changes in American diet since 1909 has been the rise of calories coming from sugars, from 13 to 20 percent.  Then add the percentage of calories coming from carbohydrates (about 40 percent, or ten servings, nine of which are refined!), we see that Americans are consuming a diet that is at least half sugars in one form or another. With the rise of fructose along with glucose, we have the perfect storm for our diseased state.  The high sugars spikes our insulin levels leading to a crash as the glucose enters are cells, returning us to hunger.

It is not fat that is killing us, it is refined sugars and grains in our diet that no amount of scientific tinkering can overcome.

A group of ten Australian Aboriginals who had left the Outback for Western society started to develop obesity, diabetes, and were chronically ill.  As part of a study, they were asked to return to their native tribes for 7 weeks part of the time split between the coastlands and part of time further inland to see what would happen.  Without prepackaged foods, they subsisted on turtles, crocodiles, fish, shellfish, indigenous plants, and even insects.  After 7 weeks in the wilds of Australia, the average weight loss was 17.9 pounds, diabetes disappeared, blood pressure was dramatically lowered, and their blood levels of omega-3 skyrocketed into the stratosphere.

Weston Price, a Canadian dentist, travelled the world in the 1930s to investigate the incidence of dental decay in less “civilized” cultures.  Surprisingly, he found in cultures that had no processed flour, sugars, and other packaged goods, there was almost no evidence of tooth decay despite an absence of brushing and flossing.  In fact, it did not matter if the diet consisted of meats, blood, and milk like the Masai of Africa or fruits and vegetables in other cultures, there was almost no dental compromise.  Even in mountaineers who had a thick coating of green ooze covering their teeth, underneath it all, their teeth were in almost pristine condition.

In summary, what we tout to be Western advances for our health actually may only be a mask that has, in general, despite the advances of medicine and technology actually led to the demise of our health.  Just look at the statistics:  2/3 of Americans are overweight or obese; ¼ have a metabolic syndrome; 54 million are prediabetic; and the incidence of type 2 diabetes has climbed from 4 to 7.7% in the adult population (which is equivalent to more than 20 million Americans).   We need to get back to basics:  whole grains, plants, and fewer sugars and fast food detours.

A study was conducted in America with the first word response that occurred in one’s mind after hearing “chocolate cake”.  Americans instinctively said, “Guilt”.  The French given the same query said, “Celebration”.  I, like many Americans, have an adversarial relationship with food.  “I can’t eat that, I’ll feel guilty.”  “That I could eat, but I know I won’t like it but I should.”  These thoughts pollute my mind and create an unnatural relationship with food that, well, can’t be healthy.  I believe that my intention in the coming days, weeks, months and hopefully for perpetuity is to remove the shackles of my puritanical mindset and give up a large degree of guilt about food and just savor freshly prepared meals without calorie-counting:  “Oh I ate too much fat” and “I need to workout tomorrow” mentality that divides us Americans from those Europeans.  I believe the timing of my reading In Defense of Food and my concurrent travels abroad is no coincidence.  We have a lot to learn from other cultures, as much as other cultures have a lot to gain from ours.

When we try to apply science to food through nutritionism, we get too many variables because the interaction of various components within food acts through mechanisms we may not understand and this is the same with how food interacts with us.  For example, studying cultures that eat lots of plants and fruits we see a low incidence of cancer. So nutritionists try to extract the elements of “anti-oxidants” within these food items to deliver a scientific menu of what we should consume.  However, some studies have actually shown that ingesting just plain beta-carotene as an anti-oxidant can in fact raise the risk of cancer, whereas ingesting it within plants and fruits can lower that risk.  Why?  We don’t know.  The way that nature has created a piece of fruit or plant is so complex that scientists may never know what precise interaction within the myriad ingredients of a food item leads to nutritional benefit when an engineered version does not or could actually cause harm.

Why do nutritionists focus on nutrients?  Simply put, a scientist must have measurements of definable subunits otherwise there is no longer any science.  Pollan calls for this kind of science to be dismissed (to some degree at least) and refocus on eating more plants, eating less food overall, and eating less processed food to get the right mix.  Stop tinkering with Mother Nature he exhorts.

The “lipid hypothesis” of the 1960s and 1970s – that has persisted into the early 2000s and is now only being recently challenged and is in the process of unraveling – has been the force behind our low fat craze showing up in the form of Snackwell’s and other famed low fat foods.  But is eating low fat foods going to help stave off heart disease?  Actually, maybe no.  In the process, we developed the engineered butter known as margarine that was touted to replace the saturated fats of butter with polyunsaturated fats.  Little did we know that through a process of hydrogenating the vegetable oils, we developed a lethal fat known as trans fats that we probably would have avoided doing so.  Now trans fats have been removed and vitamins added.  Is that concocted recipe that much better?

In 2001, a Harvard School of Public Health review entitled “Types of Dietary Fat and Risk of Coronary Heart Disease:  a Critical Review” concluded “It has now been increasingly recognized that the low-fat campaign has been based on little scientific evidence and may have caused unintended health consequences.”  The study looking at the slew of studies in the past came to the following conclusions in short:  very little connection between the intake of saturated fat and coronary heart disease (CHD), between the benefit of taking polyunsaturated fats and reducing CHD, and between the serum cholesterol levels and CHD.  The conclusion of the study found that only one element had a significant impact on the risk of thrombogenesis (creating clots in the heart) and heart disease was the presence of trans fats in the diet, that could in turn lead to higher triglycerides in the blood and promote insulin resistance, leading to heart disease.  Interestingly, trans fats were unwittingly touted as being favorable for over 30 years until this report.  In addition, the desire to replace fat with carbohydrates led to increasing weight gain in a population already overweight.

It is rather a propos that I am writing this first blog on a plane ride out of France, where I spent the past few days indulging in French cuisine that may be steeped in butter but may have far more potent health claims than the foods we Americans eat burdened with nutritionist claims, which will be discussed in the coming blogs.  When I lived in New York, I ate far less than in Texas and I walked far more.  That combination was a great one for my body and mind.  In Texas I gained weight as soon as I returned due to eating heaping amounts of processed foods in indescribable quantities then getting into my car and driving around.  What a terrible combination.

Pollan argues that we are not suffering heart disease and cancer from a high-fat diet but from a highly processed diet of refined sugars and other terrible chemicals (unfortunately also bathed in bad fat).  In fact, in this blog series, we will challenge the thesis that fat is a bad thing in and of itself, i.e., the “lipid hypothesis” generated in the 1970s that still holds doctrinal sway in the U.S.  As Pollan says, if the book were written before the 1960s, the book would not make sense since a lot of the food was fresh.  If the book were written in the 1980s, there would be no options to get fresh food.  Today in what he describes as a “post-industrial era” for food, we have access to relatively fresh options that are still not quite as good as those in France or other countries.  However, as I sat in a small bistro in the Place du Tertre in Monmartre district of Paris, my waitress opined that unfortunately the era of French farming of fresh foods is rapidly giving way to the chemically treated, overly refined processing that is common place throughout the U.S. Quel dommage!