Monday, February 16, 2009

The food pyramid

Recently, my cousin, who is in education, sent me something both horribly disturbing and terribly familiar: the food pyramid. The pyramid he sent me was the standard US model in favour up until the early 90s; apparently, it can still be found on a lot of American food labels.

The first thing I noticed was fats, oils and sweets up the top: it’s hard not to get the sense that this section is made up entirely of party glitter/fairy dust, which is forever drifting gently and benignly down onto the other foods in the pyramid, covering everything in a protective golden film.

I’m not a nutritionist, but this pyramid, in shape and colour and message, seems more to me than the road map to Enormo County it has proven to be: each time I look at it, it seems to radiate the backward, slightly comic feel of those quaint, hopelessly outdated medicine books that used to recommend taking mercury and squill as a diuretic, or rubbing butter on burns. If it weren’t still in use when I was growing up, and the guiding logic behind the way billions of people eat, it would be harmless and funny, something we did before we knew better.

Though Australian recommendations, as far as I know, never made use of that exact pyramid, our dietary guidelines from the same period, ‘The Australian guide to healthy eating’, are equally ridiculous: for men aged 19-60, 6-12 serves of grains were recommended daily (considering a serving of grain is two slices of bread, this might mean up to 24 slices of bread a day); fruit and vegetables, on the other hand, were to be kept to a total of seven servings.

Understandably, with Australia hurtling toward some kind of obese super future, in which we all wear backpacks full of slurpee and communicate by pawing at one another with our massive buttery hands, the Australian pyramid has been toned down somewhat. (The Americans have also revised theirs: the party glitter and grain basement are gone, replaced by a black abstract figure—think part Olympic mascot, part grim reaper—climbing up a prism of various colours.)

Gone are the 12 servings of grains per day—in fact, the serving recommendations are gone altogether. Now we have more general guidelines, divided up into things we should eat less of, things we should eat moderately, and things we should eat more of. Fruits and vegetables have now moved down a rung to sit alongside grains in the ‘eat more’ section. Which seems like a reasonable enough evolution, until you delve a little deeper into the website of Nutrition Australia, the body responsible for the pyramid.

Considering everything we actually know about refined flour, the cognitive dissonance required to put this page together is really something. Offering no distinction between wholegrain and refined products (except that grains should ‘preferably’ be wholegrain), it goes on to say how bread and cereal are ‘nutrient dense’, and as such, the nutritional equivalent of fresh fruit and vegetables.

Australia’s spectacular rise to become the world’s fattest nation notwithstanding, such advice, says Nutrition Australia, has been a great triumph: ‘The unrivalled success of the Healthy Eating Pyramid as an educational tool over the last 20 years has been in its simplicity,’ it beams, ‘and it continues to be in great demand by publishers, educators, health workers and the general public.’ An ‘unrivalled success’?

If the great existential destiny of man is really just one enormous eating contest, then I can understand. But if they’re actually concerned with having a health system that can stand up without teetering violently and falling over, we probably need to start thinking differently about the way we eat.

So where do we begin? Let’s start with breakfast, agribusiness’s most important meal of the day.

For many people, and not just fruitarian weirdos, a couple of pieces of fruit are all they need in the morning. Fruit, they find, doesn’t burden the digestion, and keeps everything moving. Not according to the Nutrition Australia website, which specifically warns against such a start to the day. Only reefing refined flour into our maws, the site says, keeps us on the level: ‘A breakfast of cereal, milk, and toast, crumpets or muffins with fruit juice, will provide you with the carbohydrate, protein, vitamins and minerals you need for that early morning “kickstart”.’

Old habits die hard. The new American pyramid, though slightly less ridiculous than its predecessor, still pushes the same line. In their new pyramid scheme, we should still be eating more meat, grains and dairy than we should fruit and vegetables. While the website, with its brightly coloured prisms and attempts to take different ages, sexes and needs into account, makes a good stab at seeming more reasonable, ultimately, underneath the veneer of complexity, it’s not hard to see the same old calloused hands.

Dr Walter C Willett, Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School, has been responsible for some of the most comprehensive, long-term studies of diet and health ever undertaken. His research, which was recently the subject of a bestselling book, has involved 300,000 test subjects over almost three decades. Not surprisingly, he’s not such a big fan of the new pyramid. The USDA food pyramid “…ignores the evidence that’s been carefully assembled over the past 40 years…” he says. “Indeed, it actually steers you away from foods that can improve your long-term health.”

Nutrition is big business, and business can’t handle too much straight talking about health. If we actually knew what we needed to sustain us, there would not be such a demand for camp pie and cheese in a can, and from there, there might be no going back. Take a second to mentally walk into your local supermarket. Wander down the aisles, and think of how many of the aisles are stocked with whole foods, and how many are filled with processed food. How many, at a conservative estimate, would fit into the first category? 10%? Less? If the proportion were reversed, like most independent nutritionists recommend for proper dietary balance, most of the companies who brought us up under the yolk of these guidelines would fold.

It’s no real secret that large food companies in the grain, dairy and meat industries have been deeply involved with the formulation of public health policy in most, if not all, Western countries for as long as there has been such things. What is less commonly known is how they’ve gone about it.

As Michael Pollan wrote in his wonderful New York Times piece, in an attempt to obscure the real facts of health and nutrition, the act of eating actual food has been replaced by ‘nutritionism’. In nutritionism, there is almost no allowance for the complex interplay between the elements in foods, just as there is often no distinction made between whole and unprocessed foods. Instead, everything that is edible is just a delivery system for the mysterious, invisible ‘nutrients’ that science and the food industry say keep us alive.

In the world of nutritionism, which forms much of the conventional dietary wisdom on which we’ve been raised, a loaf of Tip Top white bread enriched with folate would serve a pregnant woman’s health as well or better than, say, a cup of asparagus, because they both apparently contain the same beneficial nutrient. Very little attention is given to the incredibly complex ways the many different elements in a particular food interact with each other and how this affects them; even less focus is put on these elements’ relationship with other foods and with the particular constitution and genetic make up of whoever eats them.

Nutritionism serves these companies incredibly well: it allows them, in an age of great scientific advancement, to pass off the same processed, food-like products that made them their fortunes in the first place as healthy, simply by adding health claims to the packets and assuming that people are too stupid to know what’s going on. With their claims leaping out from every label and billboard, and their fingers in public policy, this, in time, becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. But at what point did we become too retarded to know what to eat ourselves? When did we stop having an active relationship with food, based on simplicity, experimentation and sensitivity, as pretty much every generation before our grandparents did?

These days, as Pollan writes, our knowledge of nutrition is largely determined by three parties: nutritional science, the food companies and journalists, who are all involved in a cosy dance that benefits everyone except the butterball kids with the arteries of 45 year olds.

Science, in trying to isolate the particular elements that make whole foods healthy so they can inject (‘fortify’) them into processed non-foods, has forgotten that the whole matter of nutrition is really fucking simple: eat whole foods, mostly plants, and don’t eat too much. But, as Pollan says, this kind of talk is not interesting to journalists and editors—we want to hear about the antioxidants in red wine, how coffee makes us better lovers—just as it would represent financial suicide to the food industry if it really took hold. Even we’re getting tired of hearing it.

So instead we live in a fog of conflicting studies—eat more carbs, eat less fat—that suspends us in a state of perpetual confusion, constantly trying to work out what our bodies actually need. Collectively, we end up with a kind of information fatigue, easy prey to the fluorescent lights and gaudy claims of the food industry, who tell us that there’s no reason we can’t have our cake and eat it too. The cake, after all, is now fortified with niacin and folate!

Knowing the way these things are put together, we can probably never rely on a pyramid, no matter how elaborate or colourful, to tell us what to eat. What we can do is look to traditional cultures like the Okinawans, whose mainly plant based diet saw them among the world’s longest living people until the US air base, with its attendant fast food, was built, and they became among the unhealthiest people in Japan.

We can look to recent immigrants to the heftier Western countries, who have quickly taken on the ‘diseases of affluence’ that are rarely a concern in their home countries, just as we can take notice of how different foods affect us, both in the moment and over time.

In the West, we have a massive health system explicitly set up to support our malfunctioning, giving us the freedom to eat however we like and know that, at least most of the time, we can get cut up and drained and put back together. After generations of backward nutritional education, you can’t blame people for having no idea as to what they’re actually meant to do to be healthy.

Years ago, I was watching a late-night American show on Jared Fogle, the Subway spokesman who lost enormous amounts of weight eating only Subway sandwiches. The show followed him as he travelled to colleges and community centres telling people his story. After one speech, a teenage girl accosted him and began telling him about her health problems, confessing her desperation to break the cycle of obesity and ill health that plagued her and her family. She broke down, sobbing. It was a bizarre and heartbreaking scene. She knew she was killing herself, she just had no idea how to do anything else. The strange rawness of the moment seemed to shock Jared out of his practiced corporate smoothness, and he seemed genuinely moved to help this girl. But what could he do? Refer her to the food pyramid? Recommend the brand of sandwiches he was contractually obliged to?

Saddled with agribusiness pamphlets in the form of nutritional advice, doctors and nutritionists face this same conundrum every day. Their information, while getting more reasonable, is still a long way from being right, which puts the onus squarely on us to eat in a way that doesn’t kill us.

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