Fooducation
Americans don’t know how to eat. It is time to learn.
I’ve never had a normal relationship with food according to the Standard American Diet (SAD). I grew up without access to sugary cereals, soda, or processed cheese. I never tasted a Happy Meal. My mom worked in a health food store in the 1970s, and I was well-acquainted with carob (a chalky, bitter chocolate substitute). My favorite lunch at the age of five was an avocado cheese-melt at the juice bar, long before avocado toast was on the hipster brunch menu.
I went with my grandpa to the milk farm every Sunday, where we would buy fresh milk and eggs for the week, directly from the farmer. We went to a grocery store with a live butcher for our meat, where you could watch the cattle grazing in the woods next to the parking lot.
My mom spent a lot of time trying to talk me into vegetarianism, so I absorbed all of the environmental, ethical, and health-based arguments for giving up meat at an early age, but I ate most of my meals at my grandparents’ house, where meat was the cornerstone of the meal. I ate meat until I reached my PETA phase in high school, but when I finally went vegetarian, I did it all wrong. Like most Americans — no one had ever taught me the basics of food.
The Unhealthy Vegetarian
I stopped eating meat when I was sixteen. At the same time, my mom started giving me a whopping $25 per week to feed myself. We were living on her tiny SSI check and food stamps, and she had gone macrobiotic — which meant that whatever she was I eating I would not touch with a ten-foot fork. It looked and tasted like mold.
I decided to see how little I could spend on my own food without starving. My grandpa took me out for dinner every Sunday, so that was my one actual meal of the week. For breakfast, I stuck to triple-strong instant coffee and Froot Loops — my first foray into sugary cereal. I either skipped lunch, or picked up a doughy, sugary cinnamon roll for a dollar at the school cafeteria.
For dinner, my staples were Top Ramen, spaghetti with sauce from a jar, and the 99-cent bucket of french fries from Zip’s Drive-In (with tartar sauce). If I was feeling fancy, I might make a mushroom stroganoff — which involved cream of mushroom soup and sour cream mixed into egg noodles.
Do you see a pattern here? All simple carbs, no vegetables or protein. I was depressed, anxious, fatigued and gaining weight. I carried around No-Doz in my purse to keep my energy up during the day.
Unfortunately, I did not get into healthy eating even after I was living on my own and spending more than $25 per week on food. Carbs and convenience were the cornerstones of my diet. I took a multivitamin to try to compensate for rarely eating a vegetable, and I believed that as long as I got enough calories and leaned toward healthy carbs and away from meat and fat, I would be fine. I was wrong.
The Low Fat Fallacy
We now know that a low-fat, high carb diet is bad for you, yet all through the 1980s and 90s that’s what the “health experts” were telling us. Avoid that avocado, but snack on granola bars with added sugar! Just eat whole grains and stay away from red meat and fast food. Learn how to make cakes with no oil (prune puree!) and always ask for your salad dressing on the side.
It wasn’t all terrible advice. Whole grains are definitely a better choice than highly processed flours. But red meat is good for you — especially if you stick to the grass-fed stuff — however, you still don’t want to be subjecting your colon to a 12 ounce steak every day. Fast food is still bad. There are fast food chains with healthier options on the menu, but it’s not worth risking the apple pie and soda temptation, or the toxic oils and sugar added to the salad dressing.
Some fats really are bad — primarily the industrially produced vegetable oils that are found in processed foods many-a-grandma’s kitchens. They throw off your Omega 3/6 balance. Consuming a high ratio of Omega 6 fats — such as those that make up factory-produced vegetable oils — increases inflammation in the body, which we now know is a big contributor to diseases such as cancer and heart disease. It’s the inflammation — not the healthy fats or dietary cholesterol — that cause the problems.
It turns out that most fats that are close to their original food source offer more benefits than harms. Avocados and fatty fish are your friends. Butterfat is no longer considered a heart disease risk (it may even help prevent it). We’ve known for a while that olive oil helps prevent heart disease. The high fat Keto diet is one of the fastest ways to lose weight. It turns out healthy fats don’t make you fat.
Essential fatty acids are called “essential” for a reason. We actually need them to stay alive, along with essential amino acids that come from protein. There’s no such thing as an essential carb.
Unfortunately, many of us who lived through the low fat health craze have developed fat phobia. It feels weird to butter my vegetables or intentionally use bacon as an ingredient. Are my veins and arteries becoming clogged? It’s hard to get past all of the anti-fat indoctrination.
But there have been several credible studies that show that eating minimally processed fats — even saturated fats — does not actually increase your risk of disease.
The Real Enemies: Sugar and Processed Foods
Americans eat something ludicrous like 150 pounds of sugar on average per year. This is not something the human body is built to deal with. In nature, sweet foods are rare and hard to acquire, so for millennia humans ate almost nothing sweet. Ripe fruits and berries only lasted for short periods. Honey was guarded by bees. Refined sugar first became an indulgence of the very wealthy, and then the industrial revolution and the slave trade conspired to make sugar available to the masses.
Now, it’s added to everything. Packaged food makers try to make their products as addictive as possible, and one way to do that is to add sugar. Our poor brains are still adapted to a world where it was a GOOD idea to eat as much as possible if you found some ripe berries or managed to get past the bees for a bit of honey. Our brains are maladapted in a world where infinite sugar is readily available.
Highly processed flour acts much like sugar in the body — it is quickly turned into glucose and causes insulin to spike. Insulin resistance is becoming a very common malady that makes it almost impossible to maintain a healthy weight, and can ultimately lead to diabetes.
The solution is simple enough: Don’t buy or eat processed or packaged food. And if you do buy packaged food, read the ingredients carefully to avoid added sugars (which can be called many things) and other ingredients you don’t want to put in your body.
And don’t eat sugar. I know, that’s a hard one, because most of us (myself included) are to some degree addicted to sugar. It is just as addictive — and in many ways just as harmful — as hard drugs like cocaine and heroin. Would you put a teaspoon of cocaine in your morning coffee? Well, maybe you would…but I wouldn’t!
It is hard to cut out all refined sugar. Not just because you are addicted to it, but because it is everywhere. I recently went through radiation treatments for breast cancer, and the receptionist kept a bowl stocked with candy on her desk. On Fridays, another staff member brought in cookies. Given that sugar unequivocally feeds cancer cells, this is insane. And yet totally normal.
To really have a healthy diet, you have to educate yourself — because no one else will — and be willing to be a rebel when it comes to treats everyone else gets to eat. Be the one who says no to donuts at the office. You have to become vigilant about what goes in your body. Yes, it is work! But totally worth it.
The Standard American Diet is SAD (for a Reason)
The scary thing about the Standard American Diet (SAD) is that is almost wholly dictated by corporate food interests. Soybean oil is in almost everything because soy crops are subsidized and the oil is cheap and profitable. But it is not good for you.
Even in my unhealthy vegetarian years, I knew olive oil was a better choice than soybean or canola oil for my own kitchen. But I didn’t think foods with soybean oil listed as an ingredient as anything but benign. It came from a plant, after all! I didn’t know about the harm done to the body when overloaded with Omega 6 oils, or the toxicity produced in the manufacturing of these cheap oils. I didn’t know because the industrial food complex worked very hard to make sure I thought these products were healthy. Or at least safe.
The practice of making cheap, unhealthy food-like products has had an astronomical impact on the health of people around the world. The diabetes epidemic. The cancer epidemic. The obesity epidemic. Children getting fatty liver disease from drinking soda. Children developing more and more cancer.
And yet, the United States government continues to subsidize soy and corn and give into food lobbyists when it comes to dietary recommendations. They pussy-foot around the science, which is screaming: EAT REAL FOOD.
It’s a pretty simple equation, but it seems almost impossible for many Americans to grasp, because no one taught them how to cook or eat. Cheap, convenient, processed food is…well, cheap and convenient. But it is not good for you.
Do you want to let corporate food interests dictate your health? If not, you once again need to be the rebel. If it’s not real food made from whole ingredients, don’t eat it. This means asking questions when dining out, too. Find out what all of your food is made from.
It also means learning to cook healthy food. We are all so hooked on convenience, we’ve forgotten how to use a kitchen. Meal kit services like Sun Basket and Green Chef are helping a new generation learn their way around a kitchen, but it’s an uphill battle if you were raised on Hot Pockets and Kraft Macaroni and Cheese.
My best childhood friend died suddenly at the age of 42, and I blame the Standard American Diet. He had grown up on that neon orange Mac’n’Cheez, Betty Crocker cakes, and no vegetable that didn’t come from a can. I was the weird one, with birthday cakes made from scratch, fresh vegetables and carob smoothies.
He became obese in his twenties, but never really fixed his diet. He became a foodie and wrote reviews of local restaurants, but still mostly lived on convenience foods. He didn’t have any diagnosed heart problems when he died, but a massive cardiac event caught him nonetheless. If he had known what his food choices really meant for his health, would he have made different choices? Unfortunately, I can’t ask him if it was worth it.
I had way more of a food education than most Americans get, by virtue of my mom’s health food store job and constant lectures on the topic. But I still only had a vague understanding of what was healthy when I reached adulthood. I still reached for cheap and convenient often, rather than chopping veggies. I still packed my diet with “healthy” carbs and wondered why I struggled with depression and weight gain.
We need to start teaching children how to eat and how to cook. Don’t send your kids off to college without a few healthy recipes they know how to make. No one should be living on Top Ramen and cafeteria food. High schools should have mandatory food education courses that teach the science of nutrition and how to choose healthy foods.
Until we have a food education system, it is critical that we save our own lives by educating ourselves. Look up Dr. Mark Hyman and read his excellent books as a starting point for your food education. If you are a SAD eater, I’m sorry to say the road to healthy eating may be long and hard. But totally worth it.
