Day 2, in which I reject 'nutritionism'

One of the things that make it so hard to believe that we're doing the 'right' thing for our health at any given moment is the ever-changing parade of 'hero' foods and 'bad-guy' foods.

I've talked about this a lot with my nutrition-minded friends. We've sneered at the food pyramid (completely politically driven, which is to say, bought and paid for by producers and their lobbies. Otherwise, why is dairy on it? Dairy is delicious. But it's not necessary for the health of an adult human being).

We've speculated about how many calories we'd consume if we ate one serving each of all of the "superfoods" that have been 'discovered' by scientists in the last 10 years (one handful blueberries. One handful walnuts. One bowl kale. One half cup carrots, sweet potatoes, or butternut squash. 2 tbsp coconut oil, plus 1/2 cup spread liberally on hair and skin. One half cup seaweed. 1 serving Brussels sprouts (wait, are Brussels sprouts a superfood, or just having a moment?) One cup green tea. No, wait, black tea. Better do both just to be safe. A serving of oily fish. Some grass-fed beef. Coffee with butter, yuck. Luckily. we get to follow it up with an ounce of dark chocolate and a glass of red wine. Make it 5, it's good for you.)

We've also talked, as one inevitably must, about all the big, giant boners nutrition scientists have pulled in our lifetimes. you know, like:

1. All fat is bad for you
2. Margarine is good for you
3. Eggs are evil
4. Lose weight by eating carbs
5. Foods served at high temperatures excite the humors and should be avoided late in the day. OK, that one goes back a little further, but it seems no less moronic than margarine is good for you.

With all this sometimes-conflicting, always-changing information, it's easy to draw the conclusion that all those scientists don't really "know" anything about nutrition, perhaps because the human body is way too complex to understand simply by adding more blueberries to it and seeing what happens. So armed with a vague feeling that maybe health is a bit of a crapshoot, I've always added potato chips to my body and seen what happened, instead.

Good lord, and then there's 'supplementation'.

A lot of the younger guys in my industry (which is not health-related, by the way) have gotten into supplementation as a way to maximize the results from their workouts, have more energy to do the work of their day. Or, as they would probably put it, to "crush it".

Constantly fearing that they're the victim of a dreaded 'deficit', these guys swear by a carefully curated daily buffet of pills, drops, and additives with names that sound to me like characters from a fantasy novel ("I have seized the sword of Tyrosine! On to Rhodolia to conquer the GABA exogenous ketones!"). They treat their bodies like they came out of the factory defective, and that without the intervention of 30--not kidding, 30--supplements each day, they'll be doomed to a life of wimpy muscles, 17% body fat, and sub-par sex lives.

Selling supplements and, more importantly, the secret exactly correct COMBINATION of those supplements, is a multi-billion dollar business with a customer base of people who don't feel confident that bodies that evolved over at least tens of millions of years can possibly get what they need from food, sun, and exercise.

Lord knows I wish there were a magic pill that would make me strong, skinny, flexible, supple, smart, sexy, and 20 years younger. It's so tempting to believe in the supplements (or diet pills or magic blueberries), but what I really believe, deep down, is that (barring some individual genetic accident) we're all designed to function best on the foods our ancestors fed their gut bacteria*.

*(Let me go on record as saying that I predict that future scientists will discover that all human beings are is a housing/transportation service for our gut bacteria, and that everything we think, do, and feel is a result of the ongoing war of the potato chip eating bacteria and the blueberry eating bacteria, being carried out within our digestive tract without our knowledge. And I want credit when that turns out to be true).

All this other stuff: the good and evil foods du jour (Poor gluten. Don't worry, in 20 years you won't be viewed as a poison, any more than tomatoes, an evil food of the past, are today. And coconut oil, before you get too big for your britches, you might want to ask yourself when you last saw Kambucha), the belief that our bodies are a big bag of deficits that can only be cured by precise doses of amino acids and periodic elements in pill form, is all part of the shamanistic diet culture that Michael Pollan, author of  the excellent book The Omnivore's Dilemma, calls "nutritionism".

It's the idea that us normal, non-science people can't possibly understand what foods are good and bad for us, and in what quantities, because it's too complex to grasp without (conflicting) longitudinal studies. So we need a clergy made up of people who are willing to claim (and make a cogent, if nonsensical, argument for) special insight into how to do something humans have been doing for a thousand thousand generations: eating.

It's a religion driven largely by money and power (who do you think funds those studies that show that chocolate is good for you? And the more headlines it garners, the more that particular researcher's lab gets in grants next time, and the bigger his office and sooner his tenure and larger his salary and more jealous his colleagues). And it strips us of OUR power and confidence by making us think that we can't be healthy without their guidance.

I believe that some of the current canons of nutritionism will probably turn out to be true: that too many refined carbohydrates are addictive and make you fat and diabetic (though maybe as much by driving nutritious foods out of your diet as much as by being the yummy, simple molecules they are). That where one's ancestors came from probably has an effect on what one can and can't eat for optimal health (entirely based on a recent trip to Ireland where I swear I ate potatoes and drank Guiness for breakfast, lunch and dinner for 10 days and didn't gain a pound). That skinny people have different bacteria in their digestive tracts than fat people.

I also believe that a lot of what we think today about health will turn out to be totally wrong, and I don't claim to know which part.

But despite the siren song of easy answers ("This pill will melt the fat off of you! Avoid carbs and you'll lose 40 pounds in 1 month!".  I've even tried "Drink this disgusting chemical concoction exclusively for 60 days and guess what? Your starving body will look great at the end!"--and it did, for the 3 months it took me to put all that weight back on), I'm trying to treat my body like it I love it, with an hour a day of exercise and food that looks more or less like it did when it was picked or caught or slaughtered.

It's not my intention, in the long run, to deny myself any food I really want. That's not fun and it's not sustainable. For now (in a 30 day challenge meant to break some habits I've gotten into during a spring of stress and travel), I am completely avoiding alcohol and refined carbs, but that's for the sake of discipline, not a long-term plan.

For now, I plan to do what Michael Pollan recommends:

Eat real food.
Not too much.
Mostly plants.

Because that's what my body and mind--not the priesthood of the nutritionists--tell me is best for me.