I have to wonder sometimes what most people think "nutrients" are. This peculiar Guardian article tries to discuss the thorny question whether eating meat is a good nutritional strategy, but can't resist the impulse to quote bizarre statements about what kind of nutrition we might expect to find in fruits and vegetables. Supposedly they've somehow been "drained of 50% of their nutrients" in recent decades. It has something to do with selecting for uniform shape and color, and the resulting loss of vitamins and "electrolytes" (which, as we know, are what plants crave).
If you spend any time reading popular literature about diet strategies (I recommend against this), you'll find people trying to argue that a healthy diet requires eliminating carbs, fats, and proteins. They honestly seem to believe there's some other source of calories, or that calories have become optional in the post-modern world. This is what happens when we forget what famine is and start telling each other, "It doesn't matter what I eat, I still put on weight!"--as if the process were magical.
Soon we will be reduced to blood-letting and cupping to counteract the Man's destruction of our precious bodily nutrients.
11 comments:
There seems to be a conflation of ‘micronutrients’ with ‘nutrients.’
Or an attempt to infuse "nutrient" with meaning by using the modifier "micro." If they mean vitamins, or fiber, or living organisms, it would be more helpful to say so. Current usage suggests a belief that there are magic, possibly immaterial particles science has yet to discover, with infinitely shifting causal mechanisms always staying slightly abreast of any attempt to demonstrate their practical effect with double-blind research studies.
I mean, it’s analogous to ship’s biscuit. If made from whole wheat flour, it will contain all the macronutrients you list: protein, carbs, fats. It will be fine to eat it, and it’s got most of what you need to work hard on ship all day.
It is without a micronutrient, Vitamin C, so if you don’t find a source for that you will die. (As recently discussed here, you can substitute narwhal meat.) But it’s full of nutrients, and has plenty of the things your body needs most of from nature to remake itself, even though you’ll die if you eat nothing else.
Yes, the need for vitamins is so well established that it makes complete sense to talk about whether food lacks them. "Vitamin" is an excellent and useful word. When the term starts to get vague and ostensibly applies to other mysterious qualities, the conversation becomes absurd.
I don’t think most Americans could give a better account of what a vitamin is, to be honest. It’s an organic compound that the body requires in quite small amounts; as opposed to organic compounds we require in much larger amounts. “Vita-“ at least makes the organic part plain for those who reflect on etymology. If any.
Agreed re the widespread inability to give a better account, which is what leads people to say things like "fruits and vegetables have suffered a loss of 50% of nutrients and electrolytes over the past few decades." This is just stuff that gets made up out of whole cloth, and vague words are used because it's harder to prove a statement wrong when it's semantically empty.
However, vitamins remain important and our understanding of them is based on respectable science. Fiber is reasonably well understood. Whether there's the slightest evidence that modern fruits and vegetables lack historical levels of vitamins and fiber, I'm less sure. Clearly there are storage methods that can have an effect on vitamins, but this article, at least, seems to be focusing more on darkly misunderstood genetic tampering than on whether we could do a better job with flash-freezing or the like. I call it superstition.
I stick to my old food pyramid: meat, and PBJs. After all, PBJs have the other four major food groups: bread, peanut butter, jelly, and bread.
There're also Schrödinger's Diet Meals: they're simultaneously healthy and good tasting, but you have to open each prepared package to resolve it.
Eric
Claire Berlinski, in her book 'Menace in Europe', has a chapter centered around the French farmer and anti-globalization leader Jose Bove, whose philosophy Berlinski summarizes as “crop worship”….”European men and women still confront the same existential questions, the same suffering as everyone who has ever been born. They are suspicious now of the Church and of grand political ideologies, but they nonetheless yearn for the transcendent. And so they worship other things–crops, for example, which certain Europeans, like certain tribal animists, have come to regard with superstitious awe.”
The title of this chapter is “Black-Market Religion: The Nine Lives of Jose Bove,” and Berlinski sees the current Jose Bove as merely one in a long line of historical figures who hawked similar ideologies. They range from a man of unknown name born in Bourges circa AD 560, to Talchem of Antwerp in 1112, through Hans the Piper of Niklashausen in the late 1400s, and on to the “dreamy, gentle, and lunatic Cathars” of Languedoc and finally to Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Berlinski sees all these people as being basically Christian heretics, with multiple factors in common. They tend appeal to those whose status or economic position is threatened, and to link the economic anxieties of their followers with spiritual ones. Quite a few of them have been hermits at some stage in their lives. Most of them have been strongly anti-Semitic. And many of the “Boves” have been concerned deeply with purity…Bove coined the neologism malbouffe, which according to Google Translate means “junk food,” but Berlinski says that translation “does not capture the full horror of bad bouffe, with its intimation of contamination, pollution, poison.” She observes that “the passionate terror of malbouffe–well founded or not–is also no accident; it recalls the fanatic religious and ritualistic search for purity of the Middle Ages, ethnic purity included. The fear of poisoning was widespread among the millenarians…”
See also this interesting piece about environmentalist ritualism as a way of coping with anxiety and perceived disorder:
https://reason.com/2014/08/22/environmentalism-and-the-fear-of-disorde/
I understand the horror of bad food, but my objections are more aesthetic or even philosophical than nutritional. I also know it's quite possible to become passionately attached to food that you grow. It's amazing how difficult a blow we feel when a crop fails, even if it's a little hobby crop. I can barely imagine how farmers take it.
There are so many reasons to abhor fake, unsatisfying, tasteless food. No need to make up bad science about it. There may even turn out to be persuasive science about it, but I dislike jumping the gun.
"And so they worship other things–crops, for example, which certain Europeans, like certain tribal animists, have come to regard with superstitious awe.”"
Since we in modern society have become quite distant from the means of production of our food, it's no wonder people have started to worship it in some form. When you strip God away, you look for something mystical, and that which you do not understand qualifies well. I see many of my neighbors who have hobby gardens as largely having those for ceremonial reasons and to mark them as 'in', not really because it connects them to their food (although it might do that a bit as well).
Let food be thy medicine and medicine food. Hippocrates concept.
Modern farming has depleted certain trade elements from soil. These metals are more important than pnce thought.
Things like gluten intolerance and food allergies have hinted at imbalances with modern food. As for science, look up orgone
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