WELLNESS WEDNESDAYS: The Elephant in the Room
"What we know is that people who eat the way we do in the West today suffer substantially higher rates of cancer, cardiovascular diseases, diabetes, and obesity than people eating any number of different traditional diets." --- Michael Pollan from In Defense of Food 2008
Michael Pollan writes in several of his books, including Food Rules, about “the elephant in the room” – the pattern of eating a
Western diet and a deepening confusion about nutrition. I have been thinking about his statements and I
disagree with Mr. Pollan. Maybe it is because of where I grew up (Sacramento,
California) and how I grew up (access to lots of fresh fruits and vegetables as
a child and my mother enjoyed cooking).
Dinners were a family event. My
two brothers and I were expected to be at the dinner table when dinner was
ready. We were not allowed to eat in our
bedrooms in front of TVs. We had fruit
for snacks after school. Our house on
Bausell Street was built in a walnut orchard in Sacramento. We earned money picking up bags of walnuts,
then shelling them. No wonder I love
walnuts so much!
I am not confused about nutrition. For more than half my life, I have studied
nutrition in relation to my health, my extended family’s health, and the
absence or presence of disease. I have
been mindful of what I eat (most of the time!) and where my food is coming
from. This lifelong interest in the
relationship between food, health, and disease is largely the reason why I went
to University of Alabama at Birmingham to study public health in graduate
school.
It is clear that food and agriculture are Big Business in
the U.S. The more you process food, the
more money you make. The more processed
food you eat, the sicker people will be.
The sicker people become, the more drugs will be prescribed by doctors
because doctors don’t learn about nutrition in medical school. They are taught to give pills, not kale and
kiwi. The more drugs doctors prescribe,
the more visits you have to make to see if the drugs are working. The more visits you have to make to the
doctor, the richer the doctor gets. And
you are still sick.
It is clear that eating foods filled with sugar, salt, and
fat cause us to want to eat more foods with sugar, salt, and fat. There is a scarcity of health literacy in
this country. You are what you eat. When people learn to question the quality of
the foods they eat and ask what the ingredients are they need to be healthy,
then we will shift the burden from treating disease to preventing disease. When people start asking about the quality of
the water they drink and the chemicals used to grow the foods they eat, then we
will begin to shift cancer morbidity and mortality.
Become clear about what you are eating, who grew it, where
it was grown and with what chemicals, if any.
How many days was it between when the food was harvested and when it was
on your dinner table? How far did someone
have to drive your food to get it to your local store so you could buy it? Become clear about these questions. Learn the answers. No elephants allowed.
Nancy Heinrich
Growing Healthy Kids, Inc.
