Bruce German Fixes Dinner, Part V
This is the fifth and final part in a series of Medium posts. They start here. Excerpted from All Natural: A Skeptic's Quest to Discover If the Natural Approach to Diet, Childbirth, Healing, and the Environment Really Keeps Us Healthier and Happier, from Rodale, which comes out January 29th.
Part V: Control
Assumption 3: Institutions, not individuals, should be in charge of diet.
It would be impossible for institutions to fabricate and furnish tailor-made diets for every individual on a national, or industrial, scale. To accomplish this, people would have to devise guidelines for themselves, which seemed like a recipe for disaster to early nutritionists. The example of milk, however, shows that people are capable of learning and adapting to personalized dietary guidelines by the time they are six-months old.
Breast milk, as it shapes itself to the needs of the baby, is also shaping the infant to its surroundings. Long before babies are capable of speech, mothers communicate with them through flavors and scents to provide a personalized education in nutrition. This education starts in the womb, where babies begin to imprint on volatile compounds they inhale with amniotic fluid, and continues through the breast as they drink milk. Scents are transmitted from foods into milk (a phenomenon that the dairy industry studied extensively since cows that eat wild onions or garlic can dramatically alter the flavor of dairy products). Researchers sniffing breast milk have successfully detected the smell of garlic, alcohol, vanilla, and carrots after mothers had ingested the same. And babies are more likely to welcome foods the moms have regularly eaten during pregnancy and breastfeeding. It seems that a mother tunes her children’s tastes, using the knowledge she has accumulated over her lifetime about what foods best satisfy the needs of her genotype, along with the cultural knowledge built up over several lifetimes about what combinations of foods best meet the needs of someone living in the local climate, among the local of plants and animals, and within the local economic system.
“You see this not just in humans, but in all mammals,” said Julie Mennella, a scientist at the Monell Chemical Senses Center who is responsible for many of the discoveries on the development of flavor preferences. “Information about what plants to avoid, what plants to eat occasionally, and when plants are at their peak nutritional content is not innate knowledge, it’s learned. And it’s learned through the amniotic fluid and milk. These are the biological mechanisms on which culture acts when it comes to food.”
Cultures place great importance on establishing these food preferences—the food traditions tend to outlast language when people immigrate to new countries. “When a cuisine disappears, that’s when a culture is truly dead,” Mennella said. And not only is the cuisine of every culture different, each mother offers her own twist, eating only what works for her and imbuing the infancy of her children with powerful flavor memories—be they of Parisian madeleines or brown rice. “When we think of the emotional potency of these flavor-based memories, those that take us to our past, those that trigger the reward centers in our brains, they all originate early in life,” she said.
The early nutritionists eschewed this complexity. They understood that everyone needed slightly different amounts of nutrients, but figured it wouldn’t hurt to provide double and triple doses in some cases. So they made food companies the stewards of our health by asking them to fortify the food supply. When it came to curing deficiencies, this strategy was wonderfully successful. Salt companies added a few drops of iodine to their crystals, and within a decade, goiters disappeared from America. Bakers cut rates of neural tube defects at least 25 percent by mixing folic acid in flour. Adjusting the nutrients at the national level led to the near eradication of pellagra, beriberi, and rickets. The great triumph of the uniform, top-down approach to nutrition was in providing an abundance of cheap nutrients. Rather than trusting individuals with the tools to solve our dietary problems, nutritionists simply drowned those problems in a flood of calories. By now, however, it has become clear that in attacking the nutrient-deficiency problem we created a super-sufficiency problem.
The education an infant receives through breast milk, of course, is only as good as the knowledge of the mother. And today, after years of misinformation have convinced people to mistrust the dietary evidence they observe in their own bodies, the lessons babies are learning from breast milk are not the result of years of optimizing and experimentation by the mother, but instead the dictates of the industry.
I’d gone to German with hopes of finding a prescription for how to eat, but the problem with eating scientifically is that it’s not supported by science. The microscopic view of nutrition has provided enough information to tell people how to avoid getting goiters and scurvy, but not enough to tell a healthy person how to be healthier. Instead, it reveals just enough to enable hordes of well-meaning (or profit driven) reformers, each selling a diet book. But instead of the certainty that sells diet books (and makes German want to incarcerate their authors), there is boggling complexity.
German has great ideas for tackling this complexity: He talks about biomarkers, metabolomics, and a moon-shot investment in dietary science. Most of all, he talks about education. Rather than teaching nutrition as a set of laws delivered from on high to be memorized and obeyed (no matter how wrong they are in context), German wants to candidly explain the limits of our knowledge to students, then set them loose on the mystery.
“We need a new generation to solve this,” he said. “I have a set of pre-assumptions that I’m not even aware of, and it’s dictating what I’m thinking. We need these young minds when they’re not stuck.”
As it stands, the greatest contribution of the milk science seems to be the excavation of nutritional nonsense—it has defined the negative space in our understanding and explained our dietary confusion. It also offers some indication of how to proceed. It suggests that we’ve been too fixated on the chemistry and not attentive enough to context. looking not just at the chemistry, but also the context that alters the fate of any given nutrient. If the relationships between nutrients is important, surely the way a food is constructed and consumed is as well, which then makes it important to understand the history and economics—in short the culture of a food.
The nutritional assumptions that Bruce German was doing his best to debunk had all served to help industrialize our food culture. The assumption that structure did not matter allowed technologists to rebuild foods—mostly by removing fiber while adding sugar, salt, and fat—to increase shelf life and withstand the rigors of long-distance transportation. The assumption that everyone should eat the same diet facilitated mass production. And the assumption that industry was better situated than individuals to control nutrition put a healthy halo over processed foods, while making traditional foods look bad. As early as the 1930s, the food writer M.F.K. Fisher was already able to observe that we were losing flavor in this victory of industry over tradition: “The foundation of all French cookery is butter,” she wrote, “as that of the Italian is olive oil, German lard, and Russian sour cream. In the same way, water or drippings may be designated, unfortunately, as the basis of the English cuisine, and perhaps the flavor of innumerable tin cans, of American!”
Whatever nutritional mysteries remain, we now know without a shadow of a doubt that there’s something about this tin-can culture that leads to obesity. Someday food technologists and diet-book writers will surely benefit from the information derived from the study of milk. Until that time individuals might improve their health by simply seeking non-industrial nutrition, and governments might work to offer alternatives to the food culture of mass production. Perhaps it should be no surprise that a food culture structured primarily around the logic of mass production also increases the mass of it’s consumers.
If you enjoyed this series, check out All Natural: A Skeptic's Quest to Discover If the Natural Approach to Diet, Childbirth, Healing, and the Environment Really Keeps Us Healthier and Happier.
