Food and Drink

Homemade mayonnaise.  Try it.

Well, I’m breaking my own rules by spending even more time on the food issue, but there is something that is bothering me.  While responding to comments on my earlier post, I realized that I may have implied something in my last post that I didn’t intend. 

A very popular Objectivist blogger, Diana Hsieh, posts a lot about food issues on her blog, and I’m not sure she would call herself a follower of the Paleo diet, but she has certainly referred to it on NoodleFood and her diet is similar.  Since we share quite a few readers, I want to state that my earlier post was in no way meant to insult her or her beliefs about food.  I do not think she is anti-man.  As a matter of fact, her blog is a big part of what has inspired me to look at my diet more carefully, and I think she has done the same for many others.  Thank you, Diana!

I don’t agree with all of Diana’s choices, and she does take much more care about what she eats than I do, but I do not consider her neurotic and I would hate to think that I implied that by not being more specific.  As she wrote recently in a post about the same article I referred to, many food choices are good or bad for an individual.  I wholeheartedly agree.  As I said in my post, most of my convictions are formed from my own personal experience with food and how my own body reacts.   I need to put more thought into what I eat than most people do, and apparently, so does Diana.  Still, I believe very few foods are “bad” for everyone and that moderation is indeed a good principle as regards food, whereas I think Diana takes a much stricter approach and finds much more of the research to be credible than I do.

Since many of my readers read NoodleFood as well, I just realized that people might have thought I was referring to her, and that it was unfair to be so critical about this issue without mentioning Diana and the overall good influence she has had on me, even if we aren’t in agreement on the issue.  She certainly knows a lot more than I do about the latest studies in nutrition and she is one of the few writers whom I respect enough to even bother reading a post from about food.   Her link to the Gary Taubes article is what really convinced me to work harder to avoid unnecessary carbs.  While responding to a comment on my prior post, I realized that my main experience with the Paleo diet came from a doctor I saw who held the position that diet was responsible for all health problems.  I did some research through that doctor’s resources (and one other person who followed the diet) and I found none of it credible and much of it to be disgusting propaganda.  So that’s what I was thinking about and referring to when I was writing.

I reject the Paleo diet, as a whole.  And to clarify some confusion in the comments:  I think the diet is anti-man because, at least from what I’ve seen, the promoters are against modern foods because they are man-made, and will attach all kinds of other anti-progress, anti-business garbage to the diet.  I do not necessarily think that anybody who follows the diet is anti-man, just as I don’t think all environmentalists are anti-man, but the idea of environmentalism is.  I’ll take the parts of the diet that make sense to me based on the knowledge that I have, which includes the knowledge that just about everything we’ve ever been told by scientists about nutrition has been reversed later.

I want to expand a bit on the passing reference I made the other day to people taking food too seriously. 

A lot of bloggers I read are trying to reduce carbs in their diet.  Some have discussed the merits of the Paleolithic diet, which is supposed to replicate the food humans ate before the advent of agriculture.  The reasoning is that humans have not physically adapted away from that diet, and that newer food such as grains, refined sugars, dairy, and processed oils are not digested or metabolized easily (or in some cases, properly), causing all manner of health problems.  “Good” foods include meat, vegetables, fruit, roots, and nuts. 

The paleo diet happens to be a very low carb diet, compared with the FDA recommended diet – you know, the old Food Pyramid, with grains being the foundation. (I can’t link to the FDA’s web site about the Food Pyramid – it seems to be down…hmmmmm.)

My position on the paleo diet is that it is a fad based on anti-man premises.  The idea that man might not yet have adapted to grains and dairy is an intriguing hypothesis, but the champions of the paleo diet (not the bloggers I read, I want to emphasize) do not act as if this is something to be studied.  They act morally righteous about their eating habits and seem to be on a quest to condemn particular foods because they are man made.  I’ve done enough reading to convince me that there is no evidence or reason to follow the paleo diet, as such.  The promoters of the diet lose all credibility with me when they start claiming that every single health problem can be solved by changing one’s diet. 

However, I also believe, based on first-hand experience, observations of the eating habits in our culture, and a little bit of science, that there is a “grain” of truth in the paleo diet, in that that the Standard American Diet (the Food Pyramid) is way out of whack.  I’ll just talk about my personal experience here.  I have read much more about this subject than this post might indicate, but a lot less than some of the people I’m criticizing.  I don’t think you need to judge every study about food to use common sense and to catch on to the fact that we still really don’t know much about proper diet.

To me, grains are not “real food.”  First of all, they have almost no flavor.  I’ve never understood why people love rice, bread, cereal, and pasta.  Even pastries leave me cold.  I’ll eat these things, but only as carriers for something that has flavor and substance.  Bread is great for holding meat and mayonnaise, but the less of it, the better.  Sweet, sugary deserts are nice sometimes, but again, I never used to crave them and I don’t think of them as real food. (I use the past tense because under my husband’s influence I’ve been eating more chocolate and sweets, and the more I eat them, the more I crave them.)

When I first started cooking (instead of eating frozen dinners or soup for almost every meal) I made a lot of pasta.  I like making sauces, and it was an easy way to get started: add some meat, vegetables, and sauce to a bunch of pasta.  Cooking steaks or fish was intimidating.  Even though I had always been thin to normal weight and I was exercising, I gained a lot of weight on this diet.

I also seem to be sensitive to blood-sugar dips.  My father calls it being hypoglycemic, but I’m not sure if that is really accurate.  What I do know is that if I eat carbs with no protein, especially in the morning, I crash within an hour or so.  I start to shake and sometimes come close to blacking out.  I can go much longer eating nothing at all that eating something like a bagel first thing in the morning.

It takes effort to reduce the grains and carbs in your diet, especially at breakfast.  We all were told to stop eating bacon and eggs because of cholesterol (which I think is a huge mistake) and told to eat cereal with skim milk or a whole grain muffin.  I’m sorry, but those things just have no “meat” in them – they do nothing to sustain me.  My body knows this.  Some people don’t have the strong reaction I do to eating pure carbs, but I suspect they suffer in the long-term for it.

So I’m making a conscious effort to reduce carbs and add protein to my family’s diet, but it’s not always easy.  Most convenience food is based on grains.  If you want to make a quick, easy dinner, there is spaghetti, macaroni and cheese, etc., or you can order a pizza.  Grains last much longer than meat and vegetables, so it’s easy to keep them handy on the shelf for emergencies.  I still use these types of foods in a pinch, but I try to plan meals of meats and vegetables for most dinners, and I make enough so that we can eat some leftovers for breakfast and lunch.

But there is no way that I’m going to have steamed mussels without bread, or curry without rice.  Those grains are great to sop up the yummy sauce.  And that leads me to my original point, which is that I think a lot of people are way too uptight about carbs in the same way they used to be uptight about fat and cholesterol.  I think moderation is the key, along with a healthy dash of skepticism about anything the government recommends.  This article talks about how kids are being affected by this latest food fad.  Whether you believe that “orthorexia” is a legitimate new diagnosis or not, it’s pretty easy to see that eating disorders can take many forms, one being obsession with “health” food.  I think it’s a shame when adults are so consumed with eating the “right” foods that they give their kids a complex.

I also think it’s a shame to outlaw any particular food in your home, labelling it “unhealthy.”  This includes cake, cookies, ice cream, and even candy.  These foods are fun, and fun is good.