Nutrition 104: Getting to good (+ staying there)
You now have access to all of the resources you’ll need to understand your current nutritional state (what healthy items you’re eating and drinking, what healthy items you’re missing and what unhealthy items you’re eating and drinking). And you have all of the information that you need to chart a path forward, avoiding the traps placed in your way.
Assuming that you’re fortunate enough to live in a region with easy access to healthy food and can afford to consistently purchase fresh food, all you need to do now is establish habits that help you avoid unhealthy foods and beverages. There are many great online resources to help you establish (and maintain) these habits.
The Center for Disease Control has published a process for reflecting, replacing and reinforcing healthy eating habits. Harvard’s School of Public Health has created the Healthy Eating Plate, which ‘provides detailed guidance, in a simple format, to help people make the best eating choices.’ The 2015 Dietary Guidelines for Americans recommends the daily amounts of food from each healthy food group in a chart that is “designed to meet nutrient needs while not exceeding calorie requirements and while staying within limits for over-consumed dietary components.” PBS has published A Guide to Eating Well that includes guides, maps and multimedia resources.
Once armed with these tools, you’ll want to approach the improvement of your nutritional state with patience and curiosity. The story of Dahni-El Giles provides one illustration of a striver whose years-long commitment to nutritional exploration has supported his quest for greatness.
From an early age, Dahni-El learned to monitor what he ate, at first in an attempt to avoid foods with pork or animal fat. Shopping at the bodega or accompanying his mother on grocery runs, Dahni-El grew accustomed to reading food labels to avoid food with the ingredients that he couldn’t eat. And when he encountered an unfamiliar ingredient on a product’s label, Dahni-El would ask his mom for help.
[A label] might say lard, it might say gelatin, it might say beef fat … So, the things I didn’t understand I had to go ask my mom, “But what is that?”
I’ve been reading labels since elementary school.
Dahni-El’s curiosity and attention to eating grew through his high school years at St. Paul’s School in Concord, NH, where he’s now a member of their Board of Trustees. While a student at Harvard, Dahni-El cultivated an awareness of the relationship between his food and his body.
Physically, I didn’t always feel ready to learn. I mean, as soon as I sat down I just felt super tired. And so, I just started trying to figure out, “Well, what am I doing that is resulting in this?”
I started looking at food as the culprit. And I started trying to see what would happen if I have a bagel, not a bagel. If I had a drink, not a drink. If I had water, not water. And trying to see if there’s any correlation between that stuff. And as I started to look at food more closely, I started looking at the quality of the food that I was eating.
By the time that Dahni-El graduated from Harvard University and joined the professional ranks — as the Operations Director for DonorsChoose.org, a nationwide $475M+ non-profit organization that he co-founded in 2000 — he had become a vegetarian and began shopping-for and preparing his own food, which instigated an even greater attention to nutritional wellness. He supplemented his label-reading with advice from friends and recreational study. Over the next few years, Dahni-El would read “Eating Animals,” “The China Study,” “Omnivore’s Dilemma,” “The Fat Flush Plan,” “Heal Thyself” and “Food Rules” as well as articles about food, health, and nutrition. He watched the films “Food Inc.,” “Forks Over Knives” and “The Future of Food.”
This exploration nudged Dahni-El from vegetarianism to veganism and encouraged him to think more critically about the impact of mass food production on the world. It would not be surprising if your curiosity and exploration encourages you to consider bigger-picture food-related issues and to question why we Americans eat the way that we do.
Most of us already know that sugar, salt and saturated fats are unhealthy and should be avoided. So what stands in-between this understanding and a change in our behavior? Here’s a preview of three important, big-picture issues that you may encounter as you strengthen your understanding of food and the factors that may play into your struggle to optimize your nutrition.
Cultural Habits
In many communities, the cultural practices associated with specific (sometimes unhealthy) food groups form strong bonds that aren’t easily broken. In a 1996 study on the cultural aspects of African American eating patterns, researchers interviewed African Americans recruited from an urban community in Pennsylvania and the participants “identified eating practices commonly attributed to African Americans and felt that these were largely independent of socioeconomic status.” For this group of surveyed African Americans “cultural attitudes about where and with whom food is eaten emerged as being equivalent in importance to attitudes about specific foods.”
Unhealthy cultural rituals can also be found embedded in many offices. While the five-martini-lunch, Mad Men era has ended, at many American companies — especially at some young start-ups — it’s not uncommon for employee-bonding rituals and alcohol to go hand-in-hand, with company sponsored happy-hours, in-office kegs and the like. It’s also not uncommon for employees who are light or moderate drinkers to be socially or professionally ostracized in organizations with these types of environments.
While there’s no denying that a cold beer after a long day’s work tastes darned good — in the same way that there’s no denying that enjoying an ice cream sundae on a hot summer day tastes good — you should be cautious of adopting this habit. There are clear benefits to gathering with coworkers in a relaxed non-work setting — and positive and constructive examples of how to drink — but in your quest for optimal nutrition, alcohol is not your friend.
If you’re faced with an unhealthy cultural routine that you’ve inherited from generations or employees past, you are responsible for breaking this tradition if you’re committed to greatness.
Promotions + Endorsements
In addition to establishing new healthy eating and drinking habits, you’ll also need to protect yourself against the organizations and individuals who actively promote unhealthy foods and beverages. Many multi-national companies mass-produce, widely-distribute and heavily-market processed foods and beverages, made primarily of the ingredients that — according to Dr. Mosconi and most other scientists — you should avoid eating; foods and beverages that many of these company’s executives wouldn’t think of feeding their children. In spite of their entertaining television ads featuring celebrities, athletes, animals and actors and their sponsorship of popular athletic, artistic and cultural events, these are not products that will aid your pursuit of greatness.
While the companies that produce these goods support lobbyists and trade associations that actively protect your right to freely consume their foods and beverages — in the name of championing consumer freedoms and shielding low and middle income families from higher taxes — most of these products will significantly retard your pursuit of greatness. And the most opportunistic of these companies even focus their promotional efforts more heavily on populations whose paths to greatness are already significantly challenged. You’re free to eat and drink whatever products the FDA allows onto the grocery shelf, but never forget that your greatness is rarely the end goal of the companies that are producing unhealthy products.
Policymakers
Beyond overcoming traditions and corporations — if you’re living in America — you’ll also need to combat policymakers in your pursuit of optimal nutrition. The 2014 US Farm Bill is massively intertwined with nutrition in America. The Farm Bill influences “what crops get subsidized, how much foods cost, how land is used and whether low-income Americans have enough to eat.” And to the detriment of our countrywide health, the Bill does not support the nutritional interests of the average American, but the economic interests of certain parties.
If you examine how [the Farm Bill’s] incentives line up, you quickly see that it strongly favors the industrial agriculture of the Midwest and South over that of the Northeast and West; methods requiring chemical fertilizers, pesticides and herbicides over those that are organic and sustainable; and commodity crops for animal feed and ethanol rather than “specialty” crops (translation: fruits and vegetables) for human consumption. Because its benefits are proportionate to production levels, it promotes crop overproduction. This makes food hugely competitive and forces the manufacturers of processed foods and drinks to do everything possible to encourage sales of their products. The result is a food environment that encourages overeating of highly caloric, highly processed foods, but discourages consumption of healthier, relatively unprocessed foods. (Marion Nestle, POLITICO)
Regardless of your current level of health, establishing and maintaining healthy eating and drinking habits requires hard work, dedication and sacrifice. Optimizing your nutrition might require your upending personal & cultural routines, rejecting popular brands and withstanding criticism from your peers. As Dahni-El transitioned from vegetarianism to veganism, he experienced derision from people who seemed to take his nutritional choices personally.
I can say, “Hey, I don’t want to go see that movie because it doesn’t interest me,” and everyone’s like, “Okay, fine.” But if I say, “Hey, I don’t want to have that burger, it doesn’t interest me,” it’s like DEFCON four on the conversation scale. I’ve encountered that kind of response or reaction often [within] various diverse groups … it doesn’t matter what race, class, gender, socioeconomic status.
The occasional public disdain didn’t discourage or derail Dahni-El and I hope that it doesn’t take you off your path either. Greatness never comes easy — nothing worth achieving ever does.
