Real Food and MAHA

 

The trouble with "nutrition science" is there isn't any such thing.

Real Food for Real Americans

This is one of those things which depends on discoveries and advances now centuries old, and then gets frozen in place.

Food Pyramid 1950
Cereal/Bread 11 x daily

Modern nutrition science began with scurvy, a truly horrific disease which afflicted sailors during the age of sail and wooden ships in the 18th and 19th centuries. Isolate cohorts of human beings in a self contained bubble, and you have a very nifty laboratory for experiment, as so many things available to human beings living in a community on dry land, with access to food, sunlight, fresh air, heat and sanitation have to be consciously provided on board.

RFK/MAHA: No fake food
What is "Nutrient Dense"?

So, when men sailing on ships were deprived of vitamin C--the whole concept of vitamins being then unknown--they developed dreadful mouth ulcers; old wounds and fractures re opened; fatal hemorrhaging; loss of teeth and swollen gums.  Then a simple observation: in ships where men had access to limes, scurvey simply did not happen. There was something in those limes. Eventually, that something was discovered to be vitamin C.

                       Would this Nurse Lie to You?

A whole belief system ensued: if there was one vitamin which could do all this, there might be/must be others, and if you were going to launch a man into space, where resupply of limes and other nutrients would be impossible, perhaps we could micro manage and simply provide a diet with all the necessary "nutrients" and vitamins and that would be compact and light weight enough to fit on a space ship and enough to maintain health. 

All we needed to do was to break down the components of foods, biochemically, to understand what we needed to send a long with the astronauts.

And thus: Tang!

But life is not usually that easy, and it turned out neither was feeding man based on a chemistry lab.

A typical American meal, whatever that may have been since the 18th century, has always contained thousands of different molecules beyond vitamins, and it was the great hubris of 20th century scientists to imagine we knew what they all were and how they interacted. 

And then there were insights from diseases: The lining of arteries got clogged with cholesterol rich plaques and thus eating cholesterol is BAD! Because  how could that cholesterol have got into those arteries beyond eating it? Turned out, it came from somewhere else entirely.

Norman Rockwell Repast

Meanwhile, American children growing up in the 1950's were shown food pyramids in all their schools, posters devised with the help of the American Dairy Council, which, unsurprisingly, showed diary products as the most healthy and necessary features, and along the way other commercial interests (Wonder Bread)  got their say and products were placed before the American public for fun and profit, but not based on science.

He thinks he knows. 

Mad Dog once spent all afternoon in a medical library searching through journals of nutrition and he was alarmed to discover that he could not find a single article anywhere in the "medical literature" he could call "science."

Science requires hypothesis, testing (experiment), challenge, confirmation. 

Beyond hypothesis, nutrition science in medical journals had little to none of any of this. Double blind experiments were, of course, impossible. The subjects and the researchers ordinarily knew what it was they were eating, although in a few studies something like chocolate or a vitamin was encapsulated in a pill and given to the subjects, but if you are eating a banana or an apple, you and the researcher know it. 

And then there was the problem of controls. You eat one thing and another person in a control group does not eat that. But just try enforcing that. We did one study at Yale which involved keeping subjects on the fifth floor Metabolic Research Ward and feeding them nothing but white turkey (thought to be pure protein, but of course it was much more)  and water. These subjects were carefully instructed in what the project entailed and were paid to live and eat on that ward. 

The problem was, the hospital cafeteria was also on the fifth floor, just around the corner and down the hall. Subjects were stealing off undercover, down the hall and buying the cafeteria's truly scrumptious oatmeal cookies, and when the results were in, the researchers could not find any effect of a strictly turkey (all protein?) diet, because, in fact, the subjects had not been eating a strictly turkey diet but they were  eating an oatmeal, sugar, salt, fat and turkey diet.

There have been occasional studies from Israeli kibbutz's which have enough control of what is eaten to approximate a ship at sea, but these are few and far between.

For the most part, dietary recommendations reflect the beliefs, the nutrition faith and ideas about what is a healthy diet which borders on religious beliefs of the person making the recommendations. Mad Dog is not talking about religious proscriptions against pork but he is saying the beliefs about what constitutes healthy food are just beliefs, as dearly held as religious beliefs, but with no actual science on which to base these beliefs.

It's sort of like the scouting reports from baseball scouts: if a player "looks good in jeans" i.e., if he looks well built, looks like a great athlete, he'll be able to hit the ball out of the park reliably. But that's just bias, not science.

And so, when we look at RFKJR's criticisms of "processed foods," we can well imagine he may be on to something. Just look at the ingredients on the label--which, it must be admitted, list the things we know are in those cookies, or that frozen lasagna but not the stuff which is in there we don't know about. But the stuff listed looks bad enough.

The director of a biochemistry lab at the National Institutes of Health once told Mad Dog about the coffee maker in his lab which was made whole by whoever got in first in the morning. There were 10 people in the lab and they consumed 40 cups by 10 AM. 

Then, one day, a summer intern, a college sophomore, did what kids that age might be expected to do, which is to say, he got up to mischief, and he brought over a cup of fresh coffee to the NMR (nuclear magnetic resonance) machine, a very expensive, sophisticated instrument which shows a graph of the different molecules in any sample, and he sucked up coffee into the machine using the little plastic sampling tube and forty different molecules printed out from the coffee, only twelve of which were known compounds or molecules.

After that, the coffee pot remained full all morning and the lab director eventually felt compelled to remove it because nobody in the lab was drinking coffee anymore.

"But did the NMR did not show anything bad," I asked. "I mean, no poisons or known bad actors?"

"No," the lab director said. "But what bothered everybody was all the things in coffee nobody knew anything about. It freaked everyone out."

"But if you did that for an entire meal on your tray, there would likely be thousands of molecules nobody recognizes."

"Might well be," the lab director said, "But the difference is nobody knows about all those mystery molecules. We haven't actually seen them print out on the NMR. And after that coffee NMR, nobody wanted to sample any other foods. Ignorance is bliss."

Mad Dog makes no recommendations about diet to anyone.

Personally, he does not eat barnyard animals or meat because he doesn't like the idea of killing animals or raising them in industrial settings. He eats salmon, which are suicidal fish and would just wind up belly up upstream after they've released their eggs and sperm and provide a feast for some lucky bears. So salmon, are okay to eat. And things without faces, like shrimp and lobsters. No guilt there, although, truth be told, Mad Dog buys his lobsters cooked--he does not have the heart to throw a living lobster into a pot of boiling water and listen to that hissing sound.

Having held a living fish in his hands, wriggling, trying to escape, desperately wanting to live, Mad Dog has wilted at the idea of becoming a full pescatarian, not with any sense of moral superiority--far from it--he realizes he is not morally superior to meat eaters--he's just a wimp when it comes to killing things that want to live.

But what is good for you? What is a "healthy diet"? 

Mad Dog has only the vaguest idea. Something uncontaminated by bacteria and parasites. Things not in the middle aisles of the grocery stores in boxes. Those things have been through some assembly line.

Better maybe to just take things off the tree or the vine or to pull it out of the ground and cook it. Add nothing but the spices from your pantry--and who knows what's in those, but a chance Mad Dog is willing to take.

Beyond that, Mad Dog believes, nobody really knows.