David is the founding director of Yale University’s Prevention Research Center. He is a board certified specialist in both Internal Medicine and Preventive Medicine/Public Health. He is the director and founder of the Integrative Medicine Center at Griffin Hospital in Derby, CT.
Processed Food, Processed People
Anyone living and eating in the modern world, and paying even a little attention, knows that we are a very long way from Michael Pollan’s advice to eat real food, not too much, mostly plants. Not only does our food come mostly in bags, boxes, bottles, jars and cans, but mostly it isn’t really food. It’s food stuff. It doesn’t come from an animal or plant, it’s made in a plant. It rolls off an assembly line. And more than food is being processed. We are being processed by food industry marketing distortions.
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Addictive by Design
When Michael Moss, the Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times journalist, wrote an exposé on his work on addictive junk food that recently graced the cover of the paper’s magazine, it revealed that academic debate whether or not food is addictive is at best a side show and at worst a boondoggle. Food companies know full well that food can be addictive and they engage scientists to make it so. Only by choosing natural foods that aren’t processed and adulterated, consumers can preclude food industry mischief.
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A Better Recipe
What we know about diet and nutritional health reminds me of the famous parable, “The Blind Men and the Elephant,” in which each of six blind men seeking knowledge of the beast take hold of a different part of its body, from tail to ear, and reach a different conclusion. Each one of them was partly right but wrong about the whole thing. Likewise, no one thing is wrong with the prevailing American diet, and no one remedy will right it any more than a single part represents the whole elephant in the room.
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The Missing Link in Health Promotion
There was a time when the irreducible unit of human culture was larger than the family. It was the clan or tribe or village. Family used to be what is now called the “extended” family, and traversed several generations. But the “nuclear” family does persevere, and it is the smallest unit of social cohesion at which culture is achievable. And culture will determine the road we take to the future of our health. It is culture that will make all the difference.
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The Hollow Leg and the Hypothalamus
There is a particular ‘Thanksgiving moment’ that occurs as the meal winds down. I set down my fork, groan, and say something like: “My goodness, I couldn’t eat another bite!” This, of course, is promptly followed by: “What’s for dessert?” How can that be? Is that just me? I don’t think so. The answer resides well above the stomach, namely in a part of the brain called hypothalamus.
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Chewing on the Future of Food
For Food Day on 10/24/2012, I was privileged to take part in a panel discussion on the future of food at the U.S. Capitol in Washington, DC. My panel, asked to consider what our diets will be like in 2050, devoted particular attention to issues of culture, cost, convenience and competing priorities. I raised the issue of culture, because it is both the cause of our current crises and the potential cure.
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A Matter of Minutes
A recent study in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) shows that just 20 minutes of daily physical activity is enough to make the difference between the onset of diabetes or dodging that bullet in at-risk children. The researchers randomly assigned over 200 overweight or obese grade school students to 20 or 40 minutes of supervised aerobic activity five days a week, or to a control group in which habitual activity (or lack thereof) was maintained for a period of 13 weeks.
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Taste Bud Rehab
A new study published online in the journal Archives of Disease in Childhood indicates that obese children and adolescents, as compared to lean counterparts, have less sensitive taste buds. The researchers suggest that this difference in taste sensitivity may be an explanation for the development of obesity.
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Having It All
Famously, you “can’t have it all.” Just as famously, the anklebone is connected to the shinbone. Things get interesting when these two tidbits of time-honored truth are juxtaposed and applied to health. I do one or more interviews for newspapers and/or magazines on health topics almost every day. Across the diverse audiences, one of the reliably frequent topics is what foods to eat or activities to do to promote the health (or beauty) of some body part.
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Can We Share a Taste for Change?
If people didn’t want ever-bigger sodas, Mayor Bloomberg would not be inclined to address soda size as a matter of policy in NYC. But is bigger truly better? The notion that more – measured in calories – is better used to make sense. It made sense throughout the long sweep of human history during which calories were a rate-limiting commodity in the struggle to survive. It made sense, even more recently, when calories were still relatively scarce and hard to get, and physical activity was unavoidable.
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Minding Our Business
I believe we should diligently regulate food marketing to children. You may believe I should mind my own business. I agree. There doesn’t seem to be much we can agree on these days across the spectrum of ideologies and politics. But if there is something, it’s that decent adults look out for the well-being of their children. Loving Parents and Grandparents, Inc. could be the most powerful special interest group of all time.
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Spoons Full of Sugar Helping (Too Much) Medicine Go Down
Kids these days – and adults, for that matter – are consuming far too many spoons full of sugar. This sugar excess contributes importantly to the epidemic of obesity, and all of its consequences, diabetes in particular. There has also been considerable attention to the contributions soda (termed by some of my public health colleagues “liquid candy”) makes to the American diet. Soda contributes lots of calories and sugar, and since excesses of calories and sugar are implicated in obesity and ill health, soda is certainly part of the problem.
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Health, Wealth and Conventional Wisdom
Healthy, wealthy, and wise is one heck of a trifecta. But what if you had to choose among them? Conventional wisdom is not always reliable, but “if you don’t have your health, you don’t have anything” is one of those times it’s spot on.
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Brown Fat, Smoke and Fire
Brown fat is hot. It is the focus of two recent research papers, one in mice and one in men, and the marquee item in a recent New York Times Article. Brown fat is hot because it may help keep us warm, burn calories and help keep us thin. But how hot is it? Proverbs tell us that where there’s smoke, there’s fire. But sometimes where there’s smoke, there’s just smoke – and a whole lot of hot air.
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Minding Our Brains
There has been enormous attention of late to the grim and genuinely frightening problem of Alzheimer’s disease. The problem is grim by its very nature. There is little we contemplate with greater dread than the loss of our minds. The problem is frightening at the personal level because we feel vulnerable to this increasingly common condition we don’t know how to cure, and at the collective level, where estimates suggest it could cost the nation a trillion dollars annually by 2050.
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Thanks, But No Thanks
It is at best ironic that America duped its families about food just as Americans gathered for the quintessential celebration of family and food – Thanksgiving. Congress gave us all permission to serve our children pizza as a vegetable. Good health is perennially on the list of reasons any family has to be thankful, and food is among the most potent of influences on health – for good or for ill. The differential effects of pizza and a mixed green salad on health don’t change just because politicians play around with the lexicon.
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Calories Are Personal
Weight loss drugs have historically fared quite badly, and in my view are likely to do so for the foreseeable future. Weight gain is normal when calories in exceed calories out on a daily basis. You cannot medicate away normal human physiology – any more than you give a fish a pill to let it breathe out of water. But there is more to the story of human weight gain than calories in versus calories out. When it comes to weight control, we are all a lot alike, but also quite a bit different.
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The Super Six
I recently saw a patient in clinic who had experienced a potentially life-threatening cancer a year or so ago, is now living in the aftermath of a surgical “cure,” and came to me looking for ways to reduce the likelihood of that cancer ever recurring, or any other ever occurring in the first place. Such collisions with our mortality tend to sharpen the focus of patient and clinician alike. As you might expect, discussion with this patient was far-ranging. He wanted to know about everything he could do to bend fate and probability in his favor.
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A Biological Basis for Our Obesity Bias?
You likely know that obesity is epidemic among children and adults alike and counts among the most urgent of public health threats in the modern world. You may also be aware that among the many consequences of obesity that collectively threaten not only years of life but the life in those years, is prejudice. Bias against obesity runs both wide and deep. However short the list of socially acceptable prejudice has become in an increasingly “PC” world, obesity seems still to be on it.
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The Cost and Value of Food
The conventional wisdom is that more nutritious foods cost more. In the modern food world, government subsidies are largely tied up with mass-production of crops used for purposes other than feeding people. Corn, for instance, is subsidized both for use in fattening feed animals, which are in turn consumed by people, and for production of such derivatives as high-fructose corn syrup. Soybeans are subsidized, and put to an astonishing variety of uses – many having nothing to do with the nourishment of man, or beast.
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“Eggsonerating” the Egg
The United States Department of Agriculture (U.S.D.A.) announced last week that eggs are 14% lower in cholesterol than previously thought. And they are also 64% higher in vitamin D. By itself, the announcement is potentially important news, with wide implications for the American diet. My view, though, is that news about less cholesterol is just one reason among several for … “eggsonerating” the egg.
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Satiety
There is a range of opinions regarding almost everything about weight loss. People differ on what diet is best, what supplements are best, how important exercise is, which lotions, potions, pills or programs work and which don’t. Even the relevance of calories has been challenged. There is, though, one area of universal agreement. If you want to lose weight, you need to eat less. Many diet plans just call for eating less food. Others demand less ofcertain foods. Inevitably, something about dietary intake has got to give.
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Food Dyes: Why People Want Them Despite Potential Health Risks
Studies have shown the powerful role of familiarity in food preferences. Babies prefer the taste of foods to which they are first exposed to through their mother’s milk. Most of us grow up with fond memories of the foods we tasted during early childhood. Cultural variations may also play a role. Inuit babies eat whale, Mexican babies eat habanero peppers. Much the same is true for food colors added through dyes. Our likes and dislikes of colors are largely based on familiarity.
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The articles written by guest contributors are the sole responsibility of the individual writers in terms of factual accuracy and opinion and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher of this blog.
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