Bringing Common Sense Back To Food

Did you see the Oct. 11 New York Times Magazine? “The Food Issue”? I, of course, was all over it.

There is an article called “The Calorie Restriction Experiment.” It’s about a study with the premise that restricting calorie intake by 25% may have a pretty substantial effect on preventing “secondary aging” diseases like diabetes, heart disease and cancer.

According to the article, it doesn’t matter what the volunteers in the study eat, as long as they stay within their daily caloric target. This would be difficult to accomplish if they ate at Starbucks for breakfast, Mickey D’s for lunch and Olive Garden for dinner, so they get intense diet counseling and, for the first 28 days, someone else makes all their meals. They learn what kinds of foods and in which portions will keep them on their ambitious target.

They must record every single bite of food they eat and count calories all day long. Um… fun!?

So far, the study looks promising. Those volunteers who have been able to stick to the rigorous discipline have lost weight and are indeed showing signs of improved health, like lower blood pressure and cholesterol. However, others have left the study because of increased risk of anemia and bone mass loss.

The researchers know that the premise of the study is unrealistic for the general population — how many people can severely reduce their calorie intake for the long term? The hope is that they will be able to use the data they’re collecting to develop a drug that would mimic the effects of calorie restriction.

Now, that sounds very nice, but here’s the thing: These “secondary aging” diseases where virtually nonexistent 200 years back — when people ate Real Food.

Real Food is what you would eat if you used your common sense. For example: Eating animal products that come from healthy animals makes absolute sense, because you can be only as healthy as the food you eat (and the food your food ate!). But when was the last time you asked about the provenance of that big, fat steak in your cart? Did the cow eat food healthy for her? Was she treated with respect? Was she killed humanely?

Another example: Eating whole eggs, yolks and all, instead of only the whites makes sense because — well — that’s the way they come! Eating only the whites won’t provide you the goodness you should get from eggs (the fat in the yolk helps assimilate the protein in the white and most of the minerals are in the yolk). Yet, we need studies validating this simple fact before we can trust nature.

The medical establishment won’t go there. The idea of applying common sense to the way we eat is too “simplistic.” And it seems like learning from our ancestors is somehow against evolution.

Most people today eat highly processed foods and then supplements and assume that we know better than nature. If we accepted the fact that our highly processed diets ushered in the diseases we now fight with drugs, maybe we would focus less on the drugs and more on the food?

We will count calories and pop pills, we’ll even do crazy things like voluntarily and severely reduce our caloric intake. Eating simple, clean, unprocessed food and respecting our natural appetite is so common sense that it doesn’t fit our complicated brains any more.

And yet, we can’t upgrade our “obsolete” bodies…

This post is a part of Real Food Wednesday hosted by Cheeseslave

Tagged as: calorie restriction experiment, real food, whole eggs, whole food