We may not quite hold these truths about food as self evident, but frankly, we should:
- Food is the one and only building material for the growing body of a child, and the growing body of a beloved child should NEVER be constructed out of junk.
- Food is the fuel that runs the human body, and a high-performance body requires high-performance fuel.
- To be a consistent source of pleasure, food should also be a source of health, because healthy people have more fun!
- We should be able to love food, but it should also love us back.
Michael Pollan is right that we should “eat food, not too much, mostly plants,” but we still need to get there from here… through a labyrinth of bags, boxes, bottles, jars, and cans. We are, quite literally, what we eat.
In just the same way that our homes are made from lumber without looking like trees, our bodies are made from nutrients we extract from the foods we eat – no matter how little we look like those foods. The nutrient composition of our foods determines the composition of our cell membranes, our bone marrow, our blood, and our hormones. The average adult loses roughly 50 to 100 billion cells to wear and tear every day, and must replace them. The construction material for that job comes from our food, and nowhere else. Any adult inclined to refashion their own cells each day with material from the culinary equivalent of a scrap heap should pause to consider if they feel that way about a child they love.
I gave a presentation in a school recently, and a little guy named Brandon helped me out. I asked Brandon if he intended to get taller, and he told me he did. I then asked him what he intended to grow that extra ‘Brandon’ out of – junk, or good stuff? Those are his choices – and yours. Understood as the building material of human bodies, large and small, food suddenly starts to seem rather important. “Junk” food suddenly starts to seem a rather dubious concept.
How dubious? Deadly dubious!
In 1993, two epidemiologists – Drs. Michael McGinnis and William Foege – changed the way we think about causes of death by publishing a paper in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) entitled ‘Actual Causes of Death in the United States.’ Up until this time, we thought of diseases – such as heart disease and cancer – as causes of death. In their groundbreaking paper, McGinnis and Foege looked beyond the diseases that are obvious and immediate causes of death to ask the question we should have been asking all along: what caused them? They concluded that fully half the annual death toll in the U.S. – roughly a million deaths – could be prevented (or more accurately, postponed) with the modification of just ten behaviors, and that the list of ten was in turn overwhelmingly dominated by the top three: tobacco use, dietary pattern, and physical activity.
In 2004, a group of scientists at the CDC, again publishing in JAMA, reassessed this issue, and came to much the same conclusion. The same ten behaviors, dominated by the same three, persisted as leading causes of both premature death and chronic disease. There was a slight shift, however. Because of some success in reducing smoking rates, the toll from tobacco had gone down. But due to epidemics of obesity and diabetes, the toll from eating badly had actually gone up.
In the summer of 2009, a paper by CDC scientists revisiting this terrain was published in the Archives of Internal Medicine. The authors examined a group of over 23,000 German adults and asked them about a mere four behaviors in the simplest way possible: are you eating well, yes or no?; are you physically active, yes or no?; do you smoke, yes or no?; is your weight under control, yes or no? Since one of these four – weight control – is not a behavior, per se, but mostly a by-product of two other behaviors already on the list – eating well, and being active – there really were only three behaviors in my opinion.
Here’s the punch line: those with three good answers (eating well, active, not smoking) as compared to those with three bad answers (not eating well, not active, and smoking) were 80% less likely to have ANY major chronic disease. Flipping the switch for any one of these behaviors from bad to good was associated with a 50% lesser risk of developing any major chronic disease. Imagine if a perfectly safe pill could reduce our risk of heart disease, cancer, stroke, diabetes and dying prematurely from any cause by 50-80%! Who wouldn’t rush out to get that prescription? There is no such pill, but there is what we do each day with our forks- along with our feet and fingers.
Read more from Dr. David Katz about how to outsmart chronic disease
And there is one more thing. You have probably heard about “nature versus nurture.” This refers to the relative importance of nature in the form of our genes, over nurture – how well we are cared for and how “nurturing” our environment is – in determining our fate. It turns out the two are not really distinct, because we can nurture nature!
A number of researchers have shown this, but my friend Dr. Dean Ornish and his colleagues have produced some of what I consider the most compelling results. Assigning men with prostate cancer to an intervention that included a wholesome mostly plant-based diet, regular physical activity, and stress management, they demonstrated a marked reduction in the activity of genes that can promote prostate cancer growth, and a marked increase in the activity in genes that can control it. Eat well, in other words, and we can nurture our health at the very level of our genes.
Let’s sum up the importance of the foods we choose. Our bodies are replacing billions of cells every day – and using the foods we choose as the source of building materials. Our kids’ growing bodies are being manufactured before our eyes from the specific nutrients in the specific foods we serve them. Eating well is part of the lifestyle formula that can reduce our risk of any major chronic disease by 80%, and reach into our innermost selves to improve the health of our very genes.
Food choice matters! But standing between us and a health-promoting diet of “mostly plants” is a junk food industry valued at tens of billions of dollars annually just in North America. What do we do about that? We can’t just ignore it, and most of us won’t simply avoid it. So we are left with one good option: to navigate expertly through it. To make the better choice in every food category. To unjunk our junk food! There is far more opportunity to do this than most people realize, and more profound repercussions of improving our diets one well-informed choice at a time than you may know.
The NuValTM nutritional guidance system I helped develop (www.nuval.com) assigns a score for overall nutritional quality on a scale from 1 to 100 to all foods; the higher the number, the more nutritious the food. With more than 70,000 foods now scored, one thing is very clear: there is an impressive range of nutritional quality in just about every food category. There are very nutritious chips – just as there are some rather dreadful ones. There are very nutritious cereal and snack bars; crackers; cookies; and so on – just as there are some pretty awful choices in each of these categories as well. If you can have your chips, and have them be good for you, too – if you can love a snack that loves you back – why wouldn't you? We can have snack foods, without having 'junk' foods. No food should be junk.
Read more about the Scary Seven ingredients to avoid
As for the repercussions of choosing foods wisely, they extend to the matter of life and death! In a Harvard study of over 100,000 adults, using NuVal scores to assess the quality of foods consumed, those men and women who chose more nutritious foods on average were significantly less likely to get any major chronic disease or die prematurely from any cause, than those who chose less wisely. All that’s left, then, is the challenge of making those better choices. For that, you have the solution in your hands!
Naturally Savvy provides more than expertise in nutrition and health. They know the food supply inside and out. They know not only what’s good for you but what tastes good too! If there’s a better choice in any nook or cranny of the sprawling, modern food supply – they can find it! Expertise, insight, and a trademark brand of ‘savvy’ come together to create an incredibly user-friendly program to guide to better eating, one well-chosen food at a time.
Changing everything about the way you eat, giving up whole categories of food- is hard. That’s why most people don’t do it. Choosing better versions of the foods you already like to eat is easy- as long as you know how to find them. Now, you do.
Written by David L. Katz, MD, MPH, FACPM, FACP
Director, Prevention Research Center
Yale University School of Medicine
Principal Inventor, NuVal Nutritional Guidance System
President & Founder, Turn the Tide Foundation, Inc.
Image: Olearys
