Do you think low fat, sugar or calorie products are the best? Think twice, because perhaps they are the ones that make you fat.
If you walk around the supermarket, you find a can of peaches that offers 50 percent fewer calories. While the frescoes rest in a basket without the need for signs. Some “spreads” scream that they lower cholesterol, while perfectly healthy butter stays in the refrigerator. Why are we bombarded with such cursory statements? It is due to marketing, but part of the blame is on science. The researchers isolate and identify the nutrients, which sounds like a logical way to analyze food, but it is not. According to Lisa Young, a dietitian at New York University: “We eat food, but not nutrients.” This focus on individual nutrients can lead to misleading conclusions. Gyorgy Scrinis, a science sociologist at the University of Melbourne, Australia, calls this way of thinking “nutritionism,” and explains it this way: “It is the tendency to celebrate or demonize a particular nutrient. In addition to removing it from the context in which it is embedded and where it exaggerates its effects on health. ” As a result, nutritionism goes unnoticed as it guides consumers to processed foods rather than away from them. Of course, there was a time before food science.
For centuries, human beings have followed cultural traditions and not the guidelines of a designer’s diet. The era of nutritionism took hold in the 1970s, when health officials, in an attempt to combat chronic diseases, launched some campaigns that slandered the natural components of food, such as fat. Physician Frank Wu published in the Journal of the American College of Nutrition that: “In response to the campaign to reduce fat, the food industry created numerous commercial products labeled” low “or” fat-free, “but with high amounts of refined carbohydrates and sugar. But just as fat consumption has decreased in the United States, rates of obesity and type 2 diabetes have increased dramatically. The Solution: Ignore nutrient hysteria to focus on real ingredients and whole foods. As noted in an editorial letter in the Journal of the American Medical Association, except for Omega-3s, GMOs, and salt, “the more you focus on nutrients, the less healthy [processed] foods become.”
Truth # 1 Sugar is healthier than high-fructose Corn Syrup
According to Nutrition Expert at Marion Nestlé at New York University: “Even the dietary guidelines of the US Department of Agriculture are influenced by companies that sell food.” In the American Journal of Preventive Medicine, Nestlé and Dr. Stephen Woolf, a professor of philosophy at Commonwealth University in Virginia, write that “in the food industry: ranchers, restaurateurs, and beverage producers, as well as their groups of pressure, they are famous for exerting this last one to eliminate or soften the language in the guidelines that harm commercial interests ”. That is why these guidelines never recommend eating less than a particular food, such as steak. Instead, they defame individual foods, such as saturated fat. Those demonized ingredients end up distracting our focus on whole products. According to Michelle Simon, author of the book Appetite for Profit: “There is an approach to a nutrition policy that every day there is a different bad ingredient, first was saturated fat, then GMO and now it is high-corn syrup fruitful. “But when we focus on one ingredient, we end up with products like potatoes without saturated fat or soda with high-fructose corn syrup.
Truth # 2 Improve nature
A trick of the manufacturers is to inject all kinds of food with their “good nutrients”. But any benefit is more marketing than science. Fiber, for example beans and some vegetables provide many benefits for the body, fermentation and water retention while passing through your colon is one of them.
Because nutritionism signals this advantage in plant fiber, the giants of the food industry extract fiber from chicory root. And then they sell it under the name of inulin to companies like Kellogg`s, who later incorporate it into processed foods, like cereal bars. According to Lisa Young: “This ingredient is unlikely to have the same benefits of real fiber in the body. In fact, studies show that inulin does not lower cholesterol in the same way as fiber in whole grains. Worse yet, it is wrapped in refined carbohydrates, which raise triglycerides and destroy good cholesterol. Another example is Omega 3 fatty acid. You might believe that foods fortified with this product can reduce your risk of heart disease. Nevertheless,
Adding Omega 3 increases sales. This is explained by Michael Pollan in his book In Defense of Food. “Natural foods cannot compete under the rules of nutritionism: you cannot save a banana.”
Truth # 3 Magical Foods
Food is much more than a means of acquiring the nutrients found in supplements. Lisa Young tells us: “In some studies on the benefits of food supplements, people who took vitamin E or beta carotene were no healthier than those who did not take these vitamins.” According to Dr. Scrinis, “the benefits of Omega 3-type fatty acids and antioxidants in isolation have also been overstated.” The fact is, science has a long way to go when it comes to understanding the healthy components of food. According to Dr. Young, “We cannot be sure why fresh foods offer protection against disease, since the components are not isolated.” As if that were not enough, the synergies that work have not been fully understood.
The health benefit seems to come not from a single nutrient or a whole food, but from mixing them in natural foods. ” According to a study by epidemiologist David R. Jacobs, published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition: “A person or animal that is fed based on a diet consisting solely of nutrients, without the advantage of coordination inherent in whole foods, will not be strengthened and definitely not in optimal health.” This explains why some nutrients, such as beta-carotene, are ineffective when analyzed in isolation. Young tells us: “We have to ask people what else they eat. Take for example the Mediterranean diet, which is based on unprocessed foods, but if on the other hand we take a healthy fatty acid, such as olive oil (similar to the one we can find in walnuts), but if we empty a bottle on top of it from olive oil to a salad stuffed with cheese and walnuts, the final effect of this meal changes a lot. ” Dr. Jacobs and his colleagues tell us:
Truth # 4 Saturated fat is evil
In the 1960s and 1970s, some health officials began to make a distinction between “good” and “bad” fats. And then nutritionism turned the advantages of diets into enemies. According to Scrinis: “Natural saturated fats have been demonized, while transgenic fats were highly promoted and made no distinction between natural and chemically processed foods.” The problem is that natural saturated fats do not really deserve such a bad reputation, in fact, the arguments against them are almost dismissed. Yes, consuming saturated fat raises high-density lipoproteins, but it does so primarily with benign forms. So the supposed role of these fats in heart disease has been discredited. According to a study published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition by lipid scientist Dr. Ronald Krauss and colleagues: “There is insufficient evidence from the perspective of epidemiological studies to conclude that saturated fat in the diet is associated with an increased risk of acute coronary syndrome, heart attack, or cardiovascular disease. ” If nutritionism had not pointed to saturated fats as “enemies of nutrition”, today we would not be trying to avoid so many trans fats.
Truth # 5 Superuntables save lives
Food manufacturers have created a new class of “spreads” free of transgenic fats. These products promise lasting health, simply by spreading whole wheat bread every morning. But although their labels announce that Omega 3-type fatty acids and the plant sterols they contain can help reduce cholesterol levels and improve heart health, science is still not very clear. In fact, consuming margarine enriched with Omega 3 does not prevent heart attacks. A recent study of 4,800 heart attack survivors, published in the New England Journal of Medicine, found no difference in the number of heart attacks between those who ate spreads added with Omega 3 and those who did not. Furthermore, the European Heart journalist argues that plant sterols can lower high-density lipoprotein cholesterol, although there is no evidence that they lower the risk of heart disease. What’s more, some researchers even believe that plant sterols can amplify that risk. In other words, that miraculous spreadable reaches this far. He always questions the hysteria and declarations on the labels on the packaging. Generally speaking, the less health slogans you have, the better it is probably for you.