by Barbara Berkeley, MD
The Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee, which convenes every five years, have come out with its latest recommendations. Sugar is out. Eggs are back in. Fat? Still unclear.
While we are finally starting to move in the right direction---a little---these guidelines remain mostly in the mode of previous directives. Count teaspoons, eliminate or add back individual elements, dissect your diet into ever-changing parts. Keep your eyes peeled for the latest change. We might be wrong! As frequent readers of this blog know, I am adamantly opposed to this approach.
When did eating get so complicated? When I was growing up, I don’t remember my mother advising me to keep my fat intake at 30%, avoid saturated fats, boost monounsaturates, keep a mental list of low glycemic index foods, or keep track of my antioxidants. We didn’t worry about where our fiber came from or whether we ate whole grains rather than plain old Uncle Ben’s converted rice. Of course, in those halcyon days, very few people were overweight. Today, we think about these things all the time and we’re fatter and sicker than ever before.
The American way of dealing with modern eating is rather strange. I call it the “Science Push-Pull”. With all of the experimental power available to us, we can now deconstruct practically anything into its smallest pieces. Normally, these micro-discoveries are of interest to researchers but are of less practical value to the lay person. Here’s an example: does the fact that your iPod actually consists of a bunch of atoms and molecules affect the way you listen to a song? Unless you are a physicist, the answer is probably no.
Science has enabled us to deconstruct our food sources into mini-elements and to look at our food consumption in terms of optimal percents, grams and components. This isn’t always good. On one day, we discover that foods that seem healthy for us contain omega-3 fats. Like lemmings, we all rush to push more omega-3 into our diets. The next day, we hear that saturated fats are bad. Soon, we all move to pull saturated fats from our pantries. The more science learns, the more complicated these little pushes and pulls become. Can we possibly eat enough fiber while balancing our intake of protein? How many grams of salt are ok? Are we getting enough potassium? And what about the fact that everyone seems to have a vitamin D deficiency? The rapidly advancing march of science is enough to give anyone who has to eat a full-blown anxiety attack.
At one time, not very long ago, eating was something that you did without thinking. It was natural to eat and you did so. But as our diet started to fail us and we started to pay the price in weight and in health, we took an odd turn. Let’s take a look at another thing we do without thinking. Let’s examine breathing.
We breathe air because it’s there and because we must breathe to survive. What would happen if our homes suddenly became polluted with dangerous smoke? We would start to become sick and our breathing mechanism would suffer. One response might be to start looking at the complexities of the problem.
What is the smoke made of? Perhaps it has a lot of particles in it. We could construct filters to screen them out. Maybe scientists would find out that we do best when we breathe a certain mixture of gases. We could pump them into the smoke. We could do all sort of experiments about the cycles with which we breathe. Perhaps we could train ourselves to breathe differently. We might even devise an expensive and complicated surgery that would divert our breath so that it bypassed part of our lungs and gave us less exposure. We could do the old Science Push and Pull. We could do all of these things or we could open the door to our house and go outside where there isn’t any smoke. Then breathing would become entirely natural and we could stop thinking about the complexities of our air and our lungs.
What is so odd about our American approach to diet and illness is that we can still go outside. But we don’t. Instead of the complicated Push and Pull approach full of percents, grams, nutrients, phytochemicals, antioxidants and rules, we can use the Clean Slate approach. We can return to the basics of human eating. It’s (relatively) clean and unpolluted. And it’s right outside our door.