Staying sharp in the food wars
Dream other dreams, and better. Strange, indeed, that you should not have suspected that your universe and its contents were only dreams, visions, fiction! Strange because they are so frankly and inherently insane … Mark Twain
Look, I just need to step out amongst the arrows and slingshots, amongst the brickbats and foul ad hominem accusations. Not because of food, what I eat or what you eat but because of what can be learned in the war zone. So 700 Canadian doctors wrote recently to their government to get an urgent change to the national food guidelines: unprecedented.
I am after how we think, not to mention how we think we think and how we feel about how we think. For half my life I had no truck with pleadings to eat this or not eat that, whether they came from the medical establishment or the food industry or from animal rights activists. I had no truck with McDonalds or pizza deliveries or sweets or anything else that didn’t look like food. I grew veg and brought up the kids to be active. I regarded such thinking as horse sense.
My mother (its always the mother!) when I was a teenager made cooked breakfasts of thick smoked streaky bacon to keep me going at school and topped me up with doorsteps of white bread and a pint mug of tea when I came in again. But when her three children became overweight in their thirties she started to nag about eating properly. Now there is a phrase to grapple with — eating properly.
The fundamental mis-think is this: putting on weight means you are eating too much. The calorie story writ large. It is so obvious that when you eat more than you need you put on weight. How much of that is our own crappy linear thinking and how much is “education” by people who should know better I can’t disentangle. Of course, there is a world-wide diet industry and a million magazines that sell (often a disgustingly hard sell) ways of eating less. The neoliberal angle on this is that of course our body image is down to us. Sort it, no-one else’s business.
I’d better put a different concept on the table for comparison. Inflammation. When the body is asked to deal with things it can’t deal with it becomes inflamed. We are very used to inflamed joints and to asthma, to irritable bowel and arterial sclerosis. We are not used yet to understand that a major reason why fat gets laid down in the body is an inflammation reaction.
Lets look at the thinking confusion. Just run with me for a while with metabolic syndrome. Insulin is the hormone that is there to signal to the body what to do with the fuel in the blood, especially glucose. When the system becomes totally overloaded with glucose so that both glucose and insulin are too high we get protein damage and inflammation. Fat gets laid down. Now supposing we go on a calorie controlled diet. Restricting food input will restrict carbohydrates and therefore glucose in the blood, and this will have a temporary beneficial effect: the diet will “work”. So it must be calories and it must require willpower. Arghh!
What I want to do in this blog is to say: look, in the food wars you can understand how you mis-think. This is a real gift, to watch yourself change your mind, or not. To feel the extent to which the collective subconscious subverts our ability to be clear. Magic.
Addictions and norms
The next mis-think is to look around with our social sense to see what is normal. Almost everyone heading to middle age has an expanding waistline. A colleague pointed out how this is true in different cultures around the world. So that must be the natural progression of the human body with aging right?
For those who study these things, sugar is more addictive than cocaine. But that is a weird statement because that would mean the great majority of people in the UK and US were addicts. We are used to addicts being misfits who can’t cope with life and turn to chemical stimulants. Someone in fact who we can project our weakness and disapproval onto. But if we are all addicts …
And it can’t be an addiction proper can it? It doesn’t really do harm the way opioids do … Well it is making more than half the population ill, is at the root of diabetes and its amputations, strokes and all their debilitation and dementia. It is passed on to the next generation ruining their life chances …
The history of cigarettes is one of deliberate psychological manipulation of people to get them addicted. It involved the systematic disruption of any evidence that smoking actually caused lung diseases and cancer. We know in great detail how marketing people thrive on substances that people can become addicted to. It is the perfect way to build a huge and robust market. We absolutely know that the same disinformation campaigns are underway constantly. And we can observe the regulatory capture of the sources of advice by the giant food corporations like Kellogg’s.
What we call “hunger” in our society is mostly the effects of the cycling of glucose concentrations in our blood. We get a high (sugar and starch remember, all processed carbohydrates whether wholegrain or not) which comes round to a dip telling us we desperately need to eat. The very anatomy of an addictive cycle. Now my senses are attuned I can see when people are addicted. In the trial of Tim Noakes in South Africa for giving correct dietary advice, the defence team who we all on keto diets outperformed the prosecution who were so sleepy in the afternoon: as told by Nina Teicholz.
It was difficult enough to tackle smoking via the political process. Even the tippiest top of the iceberg in fizzy drinks is causing political difficulties tackling sugar. Bread is several steps too far, politically. Bread is healthy, well ensconced in the official eating guidelines. But this makes me queasy. One of the big casualties of a wrong diet (and we still need to say a really wrong diet, not what you and the government are saying is a wrong diet) is mental acuity. This is too close to a dystopian nightmare of suppressing people’s consciousness the better to govern them.
The norm question drags in other issues. It seems that the advice to cut down salt is the right advice for people addicted to carbohydrates but absolutely wrong if you are not: I have to take salt as a supplement. So the distortion of the norm into ill-health means that many, many medical “facts” are related to a context which is itself all wrong. I think I once heard a surgeon saying that the first time he operated on the lungs of a country person he thought the lungs were diseased they were so bright red and puffy: “normal” lungs are subject to air pollution.
Just for reference, once you have metabolic syndrome and insulin resistance then the advised maximum intake of all carbohydrates in a day is 20g. Remember that vegetable and especially fruit have plenty of carbohydrates. One of the things I am pondering is that since the majority of people in the UK and US now have metabolic syndrome, then what is an agriculture policy that moves away from cereal/grain based diets?
You can do the other thinking experiment as well. This morning for breakfast I ground up some seeds (pumpkin, linseed) and mixed in some coconut. Then I loaded it with butter and double cream before adding boiling water to mix. That is a breakfast I can thrive on, be really healthy, and lose weight steadily. But hang on — saturated fats in quantity, surely that is bad for me and my heart? Well no, that was all indoctrination with no evidence. But I can still feel the weight of opinion when I do it. A little bird on my shoulder if you like.
If you went on the weight of “scientific” opinion you would not end up where I am with this argument. This is the other norm problem. You only get research money and other opportunities in you agree with Josef Stalin and don’t embarrass any of the establishment figures.
Evidence
This blog really is about thinking, using food wars as an example. Why don’t we know what is good for us? By reference to our own health and wellbeing? Including it seems mood given how that is controlled by our gut biome?
So far we have offered two answers. One is that official misinformation and heavy marketing are capable of distorting what we know, as evidenced by whether people think smoking is bad for them. And the second is that sugar and carbohydrates are highly addictive and the addiction is capable of overwhelming the evidence of our own bodies. Indeed to the extent that our bodies lower our self-esteem that effect compounds our not-knowing.
The food wars however go wide and they go deep. George Monbiot would have us believe that we must be vegetarian because there is no way to include livestock and still feed the world. There are lots of passionate vegetarians and some recent well-funded propaganda films to make their case. I saw a call for researchers to be able to have conversations at their conferences without declaring their allegiances and falling out with each other. I expect to lose readers by writing this piece: what does that say about thinking?
In case you think war is too strong a word or just a metaphor, Australian dietary advice is literally wiping out some of the northern Aborigine tribes. I have seen a good case made for calling this genocide, taking people from fit and healthy to a raft of long term conditions that shorten their lives. The same applies to some of the Inuit people. People dying of official advice and healthcare is not even a reason to review the advice.
This is also a generational effect. It is within my generation that people have gone from having waists to not having waists. And now many infants are born already having insulin resistance. It seems too close to home and too attached to our complexes formed in childhood, about sweetness and love, about physical comfort and comfort food. Fascinating and lethal.
The medical establishment are absolutely failing to pay attention to the evidence. With brilliant, noble exceptions GPs follow official guidance rather than pay attention to what they see in front of them. Led, strangely by South Africa, there are popular movements that are starting to reclaim health a bit the way we talk about reclaiming the streets. We really should pay attention to how practical thinking changes.
