What
Should I Eat?
The rules in this section will help you to
distinguish real foods—the plants, animals, and fungi people have been eating
for generations—from the highly processed products of modern food science that,
increasingly, have come to dominate the food marketplace and diet.
1. Eat food.
These days this is easier said than done,
especially when seventeen thousand new products show up in the supermarket each
year. But most of these items don’t deserve to be called food—I call them edible
foodlike substances. They’re highly processed concoctions designed by food
scientists, consisting mostly of ingredients derived from corn and soy that no
normal person keeps in the pantry, and they contain chemical additives with
which the human body has not been long acquainted. Today much of the challenge
of eating well comes down to choosing real food and avoiding these industrial
novelties.
Imagine your great-grandmother at your side
as you roll down the aisles of the supermarket. You’re standing together in
front of the dairy case. She picks up a package of Go-GURT Portable Yogurt
tubes—and hasn’t a clue what this plastic cylinder of colored and flavored gel
could possibly be. Is it a food or is it toothpaste? There are now thousands of
foodish products in the supermarket that our ancestors simply wouldn’t
recognize as food. The reasons to avoid eating such complicated food products
are many, and go beyond the various chemical additives and corn and soy
derivatives they contain, or the plastics in which they are typically packaged,
some of which are probably toxic. Today foods are processed in ways
specifically designed to get us to buy and eat more by stimulating our
preferences for sweetness and fat and salt. These tastes are difficult to find
in nature but cheap and easy for the food scientist to deploy, with the result
that food processing induces us to consume much more of these rarities than is
good for us. The great-grandma rule will help keep most of these items out of
your cart.
Ethoxylated diglycerides? Cellulose? Xanthan
gum? Calcium propionate? Ammonium sulfate? If you wouldn’t cook with them
yourself, why let others use these ingredients to cook for you? The food
scientists’ chemistry set is designed to extend shelf life, make old food look
fresher and more appetizing than it really is, and get you to eat more. They
are best avoided.
Not because high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS)
is any worse for you than sugar, but because it is, like many of the other
unfamiliar ingredients in packaged foods, a reliable marker for a food product
that has been highly processed. Also, high-fructose corn syrup is being added
to hundreds of foods that have not traditionally been sweetened—breads,
condiments, and many snack foods—so if you avoid products that contain it, you
will cut down on your sugar intake.
Labels list ingredients by weight, and any
product that has more sugar than other ingredients has too much sugar.
Complicating matters is the fact that, thanks to food science, there are now
some forty types of sugar used in processed food, including barley malt, beet
sugar, brown rice syrup, cane juice, corn sweetener, dextrin, dextrose,
fructo-oligosaccharides, fruit juice concentrate, glucose, sucrose, invert
sugar, polydextrose, sucrose, turbinado sugar, and so on. To repeat: Sugar is
sugar. And organic sugar is sugar too. As for noncaloric sweeteners such as
aspartame or Splenda, research suggests that switching to artificial sweeteners
does not lead to weight loss. It may be that deceiving the brain with the
reward of sweetness stimulates a craving for even more sweetness.
The specific number you adopt is arbitrary,
but the more ingredients in a packaged food, the more highly processed it
probably is. Note 1: A long list of ingredients in a recipe is not the same
thing; that’s fine. Note 2: Some products now boast, somewhat deceptively,
about their short ingredient lists. Haagen-Dazs has a new line of ice cream
called “five.” Great—but it’s still ice cream. In such cases, apply rule 60 for
dealing with treats and special occasion foods.
Basically the same idea, different mnemonic.
Keep it simple!
This sounds counterintuitive, but consider:
For a product to carry a health claim on its package, it must first have a
package, so right off the bat it’s more likely to be a processed rather than a
whole food. Then, only the big food manufacturers have the wherewithal to
secure FDA-approved health claims for their products and then trumpet them to
the world. Generally, it is the products of modern food science that make the
boldest health claims, and these are often founded on incomplete and often bad
science. The healthiest food in the supermarket—the fresh produce—doesn’t boast
about its healthfulness, because the growers don’t have the budget or the
packaging. Don’t take the silence of the yams as a sign they have nothing
valuable to say about your health.
The forty-year-old campaign to create low-and
nonfat versions of traditional foods has been a failure: We’ve gotten fat on
low-fat products. Why? Because removing the fat from foods doesn’t necessarily
make them nonfattening. Carbohydrates can also make you fat, and many low- and
nonfat foods boost the sugars to make up for the loss of flavor. Since the
low-fat campaign began in the late 1970s, Americans actually have been eating
more than 500 additional calories per day, most of them in the form of refined
carbohydrates like sugar. The result: The average male is seventeen pounds
heavier and the average female nineteen pounds heavier than in the late 1970s.
You’re better off eating the real thing in moderation than bingeing on “lite”
food products packed with sugars and salt.
10. Avoid foods that
are pretending to be something they are not.
Imitation butter—aka margarine—is the
classic example. To make something like nonfat cream cheese that contains
neither cream nor cheese requires an extreme degree of processing; such
products should be labeled as imitations and avoided. The same rule applies to
soy-based mock meats, artificial sweeteners, and fake fats and starches.
11. Avoid foods you
see advertised on television.
Food marketers are ingenious at turning
criticisms of their products—and rules like these—into new ways to sell
slightly different versions of the same processed foods: They simply
reformulate (to be low-fat, have no HFCS or transfats, or to contain fewer
ingredients) and then boast about their implied healthfulness, whether the
boast is meaningful or not. If you avoid products with big ad budgets, you’ll
automatically be avoiding edible foodlike substances. As for the 5 percent of
food ads that promote whole foods (the prune or walnut growers or the beef
ranchers), common sense will, one hopes, keep you from tarring them with the
same brush.
12. Shop the
peripheries of the supermarket and stay out of the middle.
Most supermarkets are laid out the same way:
Processed food products dominate the center aisles of the store, while the
cases of mostly fresh food—produce, meat and fish, dairy—line the walls. If you
keep to the edges of the store you’ll be much more likely to wind up with real
food in your shopping cart.
13. Eat only foods
that will eventually rot.
What does it mean for food to “go bad”? It
usually means that the fungi and bacteria and insects and rodents with whom we
compete for nutrients and calories have gotten to it before we did. Food
processing began as a way to extend the shelf life of food by protecting it from
these competitors. This is often accomplished by making the food less appealing
to them, by removing nutrients from it that attract competitors, or by removing
other nutrients likely to turn rancid, like omega-3 fatty acids. The more
processed a food is, the longer the shelf life, and the less nutritious it
typically is. Real food is alive—and therefore it should eventually die. (There
are a few exceptions to this rule: For example, honey has a shelf life measured
in centuries.)
14. Eat foods made
from ingredients that you can picture in their raw state or growing in nature.
Read the ingredients on a package of
Twinkies or Pringles and imagine what those ingredients actually look like raw
or in the places where they grow: You can’t do it. This rule will keep all
sorts of chemicals and foodlike substances out of your diet.
15. Get out of the
supermarket whenever you can.
You won’t find any high-fructose corn syrup
at the farmers’ market. You also won’t find any elaborately processed food
products, any packages with long lists of unpronounceable ingredients or
dubious health claims, anything microwaveable, or, perhaps best of all, any old
food from far away. What you will find are fresh, whole foods harvested at the
peak of their taste and nutritional quality.
16. Buy your snacks
at the farmers’ market.
You’ll find yourself snacking on fresh or
dried fruits and nuts—real food—rather than chips and sweets.
17. Eat only foods
that have been cooked by humans.
If you’re going to let others cook for you,
you’re much better off if they are other humans, rather than corporations. In
general, corporations cook with too much salt, fat, and sugar, as well as with
preservatives, colorings, and other biological novelties. Note: While it is
true that professional chefs are generally humans, they often cook with large
amounts of salt, fat, and sugar too, so treat restaurant meals as special
occasions. Following are a few useful variants on the human-cooked-food rule.
18. Don’t ingest foods made in places where
everyone is required to wear a surgical cap.
19. If it came from a plant, eat it; if it was
made in a plant, don’t.
20. It’s not food if it arrived through the window
of your car.
21. It’s not food if it’s called by the same name
in every language. (Think Big Mac, Cheetos, or Pringles.)
