Last updated April 10, 2022

Status:: #literature/books/finished Author:: Medium:: { Books MOC Tags:: Links: { In Defense of Food- An Eater’s Manifesto Application

{ In Defense of Food- An Eater’s Manifesto

Introduction

• Protein shouldn’t be main, but side dish

Structure

• Current state of nutrition beliefs
• Western diet and health issues
• Tips

Nutritionism

• Instead of advertising food, there has been a growing emphasis on their nutritional composition
  • ex) Only 100 calories, no trans fat, etc

Nutritionism

• Belief that foods are essentially the sum of their nutrient parts. From this basic premise flow several others

• A possible flaw in nutritionism is how processed foods with better nutrients may be posed as more healthier than natural foods with less nutrients

  “even processed foods may be considered to be ‘healthier’ for you than whole foods if they contain the appropriate quantities of some nutrients.”

Nutritionism to market

• Attempts to make common foods more healthier via alternatives (ex. margarine)

Lipid hypothesis

• The belief that fat causes heart disease is wrong
• Trans fats bad

  • “a higher intake of trans fat can contribute to increased risk of CHD through multiple mechanisms”; to wit, it raises bad cholesterol and lowers good cholesterol (something not even the evil saturated fats can do); it increases triglycerides, a risk factor for CHD; it promotes inflammation and possibly thrombogenesis (clotting), and it may promote insulin resistance. Trans fat is really bad stuff, apparently, fully twice as bad as saturated fat in its impact on cholesterol ratios.

Western Diet

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. We also know that when people come to the West and adopt our way of eating, these diseases soon follow, and often, as in the case of the Aborigines and other native populations, in a particularly virulent form.

Getting over nutritionism

Only eat things your great grandmother would recognize

• Be wary of complex ingredients
  • Unfamiliar, unpronounceable, max 5 ingredients, high-fructose corn syrup
    • Are not inherently bad but are signs of highly procesed foods
• things that don’t expire
• Edges of a store usually have fresh/natural stuff

What to eat

Plants

• Diff plants have diff kinds of antioxidants, so don’t solely have one kind
• Less calorie dense

Meat

• Less than 1 serving a day? WTF
• Should be flavor principle rather than main course
• Why?
  • excessive saturated fat, omega-6, carcinogens
  • Being top of the food chain, concentrates both nutrients and toxins
• Wild game
  • Feed on natural greens, less chance of chemicals
  • Lamb, fish, etc
• take a multivitamin-and-mineral pill after age fifty
• Have a well-rounded array of foods, not one thing will magically improve your diet

Alcohol

• Especially red wine, helps with preventing heart disease ?
• No more than 2 a day

How to Eat

Cultural

the French eat very differently than we do. They seldom snack, and they eat most of their food at meals shared with other people. They eat small portions and don’t come back for seconds. And they spend considerably more time eating than we do. Taken together, these habits contribute to a food culture in which the French consume fewer calories than we do, yet manage to enjoy them far more.

• Different cultures promote different eating styles, and I’m failing to acknowledge mine ?
  • Saving appetite for dinner, eating with family, etc
• The french don’t normalize seconds

Process

Add inconveniences to eating

• If we buy expensive food, we’re more likely to be more stingy, and will eat less as a result
  • Cheaper calories are generally mass-produced and are unhealthier
  • More expensive foods are generally higher-quality, and are more fulfilling which makes us need less to feel satisfied
• If we make the cooking process more time-consuming, then we will be less inclined to eat a lot
  • Snacks, microwavables, packaged food all require little effort and are bingable
  • Taking time to cook your own meal takes time

Snacking

• If you really want to cut on calories, be strict on only having meals

• But the biggest threat to the meal-as-we-knew-it is surely the snack, and snacking in recent years has colonized whole new parts of our day and places in our lives

  • Harsh but true in a sense? I’ll need to do research to see if it affects energy levels, but yeah at times my constant snacking can be rather extreme, and it is quite normalized
• Have all food at a table instead, no casual snacking
• Eat together and set it as a habit for the only time you’re allowed to eat

Mindsets

Americans typically eat not until they’re full (and certainly not until they’re 80 percent full) but rather until they receive some visual cue from their environment that it’s time to stop: the bowl or package is empty, the plate is clean, or the TV show is over

• Cues are more external than internal in comparison to French, which rely more on how full they are

Shared meals are about much more than fueling bodies; they are uniquely human institutions where our species developed language and this thing we call culture.

• I probably should huh

Eat slowly and mindfully

• Consider the process that created the food, and the mere concept of having such an opportunity

  Eating with the fullest pleasure—pleasure, that is, that does not depend on ignorance—is perhaps the profoundest enactment of our connection with the world. In this pleasure we experience and celebrate our dependence and our gratitude, for we are living from mystery, from creatures we did not make and powers we cannot comprehend

• Get involved with food production so you’re more aware of the process

Backlinks

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Created:: 2022-03-30 15:03