Jan 29, 2007

You are what you eat! 20 years of eating chemicals...

"If you're concerned about your health, you should probably avoid food products that make health claims. Why? Because a health claim on a food product is a good indication that it's not really food, and food is what you want to eat."

It was in the 1980s that food began disappearing from the American supermarket, gradually to be replaced by “nutrients,” ... chemical compounds and minerals in foods that nutritionists have deemed important to health, "with the promise of scientific certainty; eat more of the right ones, fewer of the wrong, and you would live longer and avoid chronic diseases. But as American food culture went down this dimly lighted path we see an alarming increase in chronic diseases linked to diet — including heart disease, cancer and diabetes.

“eat less” of a particular food has been deep-sixed; don’t look for it ever again in any official U.S. dietary pronouncement. Second, notice how distinctions between entities as different as fish and beef and chicken have collapsed; those three venerable foods, each representing an entirely different taxonomic class, are now lumped together as delivery systems for a single nutrient. Notice too how the new language exonerates the foods themselves; now the culprit is an obscure, invisible, tasteless — and politically unconnected — substance that may or may not lurk in them called “saturated fat.”

This thing is a "must read"! Snip's from an extensive (12 online pages!) essay in today's New York Times by UC Berkeley ... (source boing,boing)