In Defense of Food

Public awareness of the health risks of sugary sodas has been growing. But proposals in California and New York to reduce soda consumption by taxing it or limiting its serving size were both defeated after the soda industry spent millions to fight them. But Mexico has passed a soda tax, and the city of Berkeley, California recently did too. Will measures like these prove to be effective?

Today, we're consuming more sugar than people ever did before, in sugary drinks and sweetened foods. And eating too much sugar contributes to the rise of obesity and to organ damage caused by an excess of the sugar molecule fructose. Diets with lots of sugar and processed carbohydrates like white rice and white flour may also increase diabetes risk by straining the body's ability to use insulin.

Food manufacturers have long used the latest scientific theories about food, many of them badly flawed, to sell their products. The Kellogg brothers’ invention of corn flakes stemmed from the mistaken belief that eating protein foods for breakfast made people sick. And by adding vitamins, manufacturers sold us everything from beer to white bread as if they were health foods..

For thousands of years, people in widely varied environments have constructed diets from the foods they get from nature. The staples in traditional diets vary from potatoes to fatty fish and seals to cattle blood and meat, but they all keep people healthy. The Hadza people in Tanzania still hunt and gather their food and do not suffer from the same diet-related diseases that we do.

Michael Pollan offers some practical tips for navigating supermarket aisles, where prominent health claims adorn so many packaged products. Though this attention-getting strategy has been effective in boosting sales, the profusion of health claims has fostered confusion about food and health. And the actual health benefits of these products are often questionable at best.

Nutrition science is a science. But nutritionism, the belief that what really matters in a food are the nutrients it contains, is not a science, but an ideology, and one that has led us badly astray. It classifies nutrients as good or evil, but over time those labels have been constantly changing. And that leaves us confused and vulnerable to questionable nutrient-based health claims.

We thought the vegetarian dinner Carmen Sabaté made the night we filmed her family was so delicious (the Sabaté’s generously fed the whole crew after we finished) that we asked her to do a quick on-camera demo so that we could all learn some of her secrets. Now you can too!

Fiber is the part of plant foods that we can't digest. But it provides many benefits to our health, one of which may be the prevention of colon cancer. Fiber feeds bacteria in our colons that produce a protective substance called butyrate. Researcher Stephen O'Keefe found that when he switched people to a high fiber diet, levels of butyrate in the colon increased substantially after only 2 weeks.

More than 90%of the nation’s broccoli is grown in California, because its sunny days and cool desert nights are perfect for the vegetable. But if you live in the East the broccoli you buy is likely to be a week old. So Cornell’s Thomas Bjorkman is trying to breed new varieties that will thrive in the east. His goal: fresher, better-tasting local broccoli that will entice more people to eat it.

In the early 20th century, Dr. John Harvey Kellogg attracted health-seekers to his famed Sanitarium in Battle Creek, Michigan. To combat what he considered the toxic effects of protein foods like meat, he prescribed all-grape diets and yogurt enemas. And to give Americans a carbohydrate-based alternative to the bacon-and-egg breakfast, he and his brother Will invented the flaked cereal.

More and more people are developing new food products made in home kitchens that are free from artificial additives. But to distribute their products further away than the local farmers’ market, they need to find ways to prevent them from spoiling during shipping or on a store shelf. That’s the challenge Eric Glandian faced with Zen Monkey, a new breakfast food.

Brian Wansink is an expert on how things to which we don’t give the slightest thought—such as the order in which we see foods—influence our choices. By studying buffets and cafeterias, he’s found that we tend to load most of our plates with the first foods we see. So he is working with schools to re-design lunch lines so kids see the healthiest foods first—with very impressive results.