I know, I know. It's obnoxious of me to refer to it thusly. I've annoyed everyone I've talked to about this subject, probably because no one wants to think of herself as believing in a 'food religion.' People say, Religion is based on belief. My nutritional choices are based on facts.
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| Wholesome plant nutrition or GMO phytoestrogen? |
Ah, but. Most people make at least some effort to eat healthfully, and we all think our healthy eating choices are based on nutritional fact. And yet each of us chooses, often quite adamantly, to eat different things. One person says beef is artery-clogging, hormone-riddled and murderous, while soy is packed with wholesome plant protein. The other says soy is naught but an allergenic, GMO phytoestrogen, while land meat is the hearty fuel of our ancestors. Old reliable Science does not unequivocally discredit either point of view.
Healthy eating is not strictly about facts. It is also about preference and beliefs. There are beliefs about meat-eating and whether food should be cooked; beliefs about the merits and demerits of fat, sugar, gluten, protein; sects led by online gurus with trim waists and dewy skin. And there is the agnostic default, what health bloggers pityingly refer to as the Standard American Diet or SAD. Those who care about nutrition tend to be willful about their particular beliefs and the pious are often eager to share the good news. (See, for example, my breathless commendation of whole milk, which failed to convert my mom away from skinny lattes.)
FOOD BELIEFS are ever-shifting, subject to new research, fresh trends and the vagaries of life experience. Canola was the "it" oil of the aughts, but among bleeding-edge nutrition hipsters, it is being shunned in favor of the kinds of old-fashioned, solid-at-room-temp fats that used to get teased for being so saturated. Lard is back. Vegetarianism was once considered near-obnoxiously moral and healthy, but there is now a burgeoning cohort of born-again carnivores, taunting us poor veggies with thinly-veiled proselytisms about how vigorous they feel eating flesh.
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| Artery-clogging murder or hearty fuel of our ancestors? |
Much food religious belief nowadays fixates on avoidance of certain foods. The aisles of Whole Foods cry out with claims of freedom from one baddie or another. I bought this veggie burger whose package proudly declared it corn-free, gluten-free, yeast-free, dairy-free, egg-free, soy-free and nut-free. (Plus, you know: meat-free.) Remarkably, there was some food in there. And it was actually most tasty.
But wholesale demonization of basic foods can lead to paranoid worries about what the hell is actually good to eat. I read a hilarious rant on this subject that went like this:
Grains are hard to digest because of their leptins and phytates and their gluten (it’s guaranteed to punch holes right through your gut wall!), and because humans haven’t adapted in ten thousand years to eating them, and we didn’t have them in the stone age...Dairy products – dude, cow’s milk is for cows, not people. That’s gross. Think of all the hormone in there to make baby cows grow so big!! That’s not for humans!!...Think that juicy apple is good for you? THINK AGAIN, SIR! That stuff is WAY too high in fructose – that’s a sugar and all sugar is bad for you! It feeds candida, it spikes your blood sugar, you are on your way to certain diabetes!!!… chard, spinach, and kale? OXALIC ACID!! That stuff binds to calcium and minerals and actually depletes you! and what are you doing?? are you steaming your vegetables!! ARE YOU CRAZY??? They’re toxic that way, along with all cooked food, didn’t you know that??!
If you believed the negative claims against every food, there would never be anything for dinner ever again. Remember that corn-soy-nut-egg-gluten-dairy-meat-free burger? Yeah, that's processed. And if there's one thing almost every nutrition zealot agrees upon, it's that processed foods are bad.
WISE TYPES say you should 'follow your body's intuition' when it comes to eating, which sounds lovely, but who among us feels confidently knowledgeable enough to do so without at least some guidance? We know food is a primary reason why one person is fit and another obese, or why one lives long and another dies of disease. That's way too much pressure. It's tempting to turn those presumably life-or-death decisions over to some nutritional authority.
But then...which authority to trust? Because there are gazillions, and ain't like they all agree. Almost all food religions sound sensible to me sometimes and flat batshit other times. The batshit stuff often comes in the dread comments sections that follow every nutrition article. A paleo type says, "Scientists have done studies saying that vegetarians would die off due to lack of protein leading to a smaller brain." A vegan type says, "Humans shouldn’t be drinking breast milk from a different species...Especially giving it to kids still developing their bodies. Should be child abuse."*
*Both quotes are from comments on health blogs, though the writers' food religious affiliations were not explicitly identified.
But it's not just the quacks on the either end who utterly disagree. The dewy-skinned gurus do too. I go to all these wonderful holistic healer types and want to trust them all, but one touts milk for protein while another considers it too hormoney. Makes a person want to give up and eat the SAD.
The zealotry of food religion in this country at this moment probably has something to do with the, dare I say, dysfunctionality of American food culture. We are but half a century out from the "Better Living Through Chemistry"-era cuisine of margarine, Wonder Bread and Spam, foods designed to be modern and convenient more than healthy and wholesome. Microwaveable frozen dinners and dubious diet shakes boasting their few calories were the 'health foods' of our recent past. Course correction could take awhile.
As a nation of immigrants, lacking a unified food culture, with seemingly infinite choices, a history of junk food abuse and notorious obesity rates, we are highly confused. And to confuse us yet further, there is a new group of techie food engineers who eschew the predominant local/organic/fresh/whole foods religion in favor of neo-Spams like Soylent, a meal replacement drink taglined What if you never had to worry about food again? Soylent purports to contain all the nutrients humans need and is marketed as healthy.
CONVERTS OF all stripes are united in avoiding the SAD, with its corn syrupy sodas and GMO taters fried in hydrogenated soybean oil. So hey: at least we're trying. And we probably oughtn't worry. People from many cultures thrive eating wildly different diets. There is no one right way to eat. We each have to find our right ways, and that's a winding trial-and-error process. New scientific findings, and the trends they engender, are bound to come along and complicate matters, so we also have to strike a balance between heeding those and trusting our guts.
I remain pretty confused myself. I've stopped buying presumalby inflammatory vegetable oils, but I don't trip off eating them in prepared foods and restaurant meals. I've come to Jesus where dairy fats are concerned. They may not be as healthy as some claim, but if I can eat butter and fatted yogurt and not grow plump and feel ill, I will. Because that shit is delicious. Tastes so right, can't be wrong. I'm not giving up on wheat, lest it should make a lard-style comeback after I've suffered years of glutenlessness. (And my twenty-seven year vegetarian phase is not about to end, so kindly refrain from hints about seeing the meat light.) Other than that, who knows.
When I do settle upon a food belief system that suits me, I'll try to remember that it suits me alone. Gluten and dairy make many people sick. Meat makes many people happy. So: do you. As long as we're putting some care into it and eating what seems to nourish us, we'll probably all be okay.
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