Grandma and grandpa and
unfortunately that means my grandma and grandpa who pretty well missed the
sixties, did fine but also make their own share of questionable choices but
offset them with variety. They still
failed to avoid an excess of sugar which is really public enemy #1.
Or problem is processed
food and the promise of a no think food culture shaped by marketers flogging truly
margin al foods. High quality bread is good
as an occasional food is acceptable.
Refined white bread three times a day is insane and seriously
constipating. Actually, if you must have
a processed food hit, budget it for once a month. Grandma’s cake is delightful and do eat a
cubic inch or one mouthful to give you the taste sensation. That is it though. Let someone else wreak his digestive system.
In fact treat yourself
to a small dish of fresh sauerkraut made properly by yourself or another foodie. I had some this weekend after my daughter volunteered
me into a class to make it properly. What
I found useful was that hard vegetables soften well and all become seriously
palatable to say nothing of showing your digestive system love. Even grandma never quite got all that right
in most cases and chose to cook the result.
Our whole civilization
is slowly waking up to the sustained consumption of high quality foods and our
present era of processed garbage foods will in time simply expire as we will
have a wide range of local foods available to ourselves at all times. In Vancouver we now have street carts forced
to provide a good quality product that make it almost impossible to eat junk on
the run anymore.
It is our decision but
we can make it so also.
What Can We Learn From
How Grandma and Grandpa Used To Eat?
October
25, 2013
Natasha
Longo,
Every
successive generation seems to be getting sicker, with more illness and
disability. This despite government claims that the science of diet has mostly
improved from just 50 years ago. These claims are far from the reality the
modern world and its population experiences. Our grandparents used to make
their own butter, cook with lard, fry their foods, drink full cream milk and
they still looked so healthy while living so heartily. How did they do it? For
starters they ate less, but their food was also healthier. Today we cut carbs,
remove fat, cook less, eat more, consume genetically modified, artificially
sweetened, processed foods and spend most of our time sitting. See the difference?
The
trend becomes unmistakable once fat intake increases for a population. Once
that number passes 30%: countries with higher average fat intake have the
longest life expectancies. Fat intake has been transformed in modern day to low
fat or no fat, high sugar and processed carbohydrates.
Grandfather-of-12
John Golding, who runs a family farm outside Grafton in northern New South
Wales, says food was scarce when he was growing up.
“We
ate less for sure because the food had to go around a big family. There were
seven or nine kids in every family so you didn’t eat much at all. There were no
‘seconds’,” he said.
“We
didn’t overeat and you’d restrict your bread intake because otherwise you’d run
out.
“It
was all healthy food. We always had a huge vegetable garden so we had
cauliflowers growing in the winter time.”
In Unhappy Meals, a piece for The New York
Times Magazine, best-selling author Michael Pollan says we can all cut back.
Science Says Calorie
Restriction Increases Life Span
“The
scientific case for eating a lot less than we currently do is compelling.
‘Calorie restriction’ has repeatedly been shown to slow aging in animals, and
many researchers (including Walter Willett, the Harvard epidemiologist) believe
it offers the single strongest link between diet and cancer prevention,” he
said.
“Once
one of the longest-lived people on earth, the Okinawans practices a principle
they called ‘Hara Hachi Bu’: eat until you are 80 percent full.”
Organisms
from yeast to rodents to humans all benefit from cutting calories. In less
complex organisms, restricting
calories can double or even triple lifespan.
In studies, animals on calorie restriction diets die at an advanced age
without any diseases normally related to aging. In contrast, among animals on a
standard diet, the great majority (94 percent) develop and die of one or more
chronic diseases such as cancer or heart disease.
According
to the results of two
previous studies,
reducing calories activates the silenced information regulator genes, which
prolongs cell life.
Processed Foods A
Culprit
John
says he and his wife Ollie, who does most of the cooking, rarely ate processed
food.
“We
didn’t have any packaged stuff at all,” he said. “When Dad bought this farm
after the war, we’d milk two or three cows so you’d make your butter and
custards.
“We
were reared also on fried scones. We loved fried scones. Instead of baking the
scones, we’d fry ‘em. They were beautiful just with butter.
In Six Rules For
Eating Wisely,
a piece for TIME magazine, Pollan says we shouldn’t eat anything our
great-great-great grandmother wouldn’t recognize as food.
“Imagine
how baffled your ancestors would be in a modern supermarket … (most items)
aren’t foods – quite – they’re food products,” he said.
“History
suggests you might want to wait a few decades or so before adding such
novelties to your diet, the substitution of margarine for butter being the
classic case in point.
Their
promise was that margarine would prevent disease. People around the globe
questioned this advice, especially those who have valued butter for its
life-sustaining properties for millennia. Today we know that butter
is light years healthier than margarine ever could be.
“My
mother used to predict ‘they’ would eventually discover that butter was better
for you. She was right: the trans-fatty margarine is killing us. Eat
food, not food products.”
John,
79, eats everything but grew up on staples of rice, rolled oats and potatoes.
“When
mum was rearing the five of us while dad was at the war she fed us on a lot of
rice because that was cheap. I loved boiled rice with a bit of sugar on it, but
now I don’t have sugar,” he said.
Pollan
says the western diet has shifted radically from whole to refined foods,
complex to simple carbohydrates, leaves to seeds and from food culture to food
science.
Food Culture Is Not
What It Used To Be
Governments
here and abroad have been cautioning the public for decades on the dangers
of high fat diets. Their claims based on “their science” concluded that it
was best to avoid fat because of its extra calories – and saturated fats raise
the risk of heart disease. This low-fat mantra has been questioned for years by
clinicians and nutritional scientists – not least because it has failed to halt
the obesity epidemic. The fact is, high-fat diets
lower blood sugar, improve blood lipids, and reduce obesity.
“The
sheer novelty and glamour of the Western diet, with its 17,000 new food
products introduced every year, and the marketing muscle used to sell these
products, has overwhelmed the force of tradition,” he said.
“Nutritionism,
which arose to help us better deal with the problems of the Western diet, has
largely been co-opted by it, used by the industry to sell more food and to
undermine the authority of traditional ways of eating.
“You
would not have read this far into this article if your food culture were intact
and healthy; you would simply eat the way your parents and grandparents and
great-grandparents taught you to eat.”
Our
grandparents also didn’t spend all day stuck at a desk or hours at night on the
couch. They performed manual jobs and rode their horses everywhere at full
gallop.
Food
intolerances were unheard of back then and no-one, least of all John, feared
carbs.
They
also didn’t deprive themselves.
Despite
becoming a fast food nation, John says his diet has improved with age.
“Our
diet’s changed a little bit. We don’t eat fat or drippin’,” he said.
“The
problem these days is fast food. Bloody McDonald’s.
“If
people are getting big and fat, I don’t know why they keep eating. I can stand
behind people (in line for meals) on a cruise and know what they’re going to
order – greasy fish and chips.
“If
you want to give up something, I think it’s easy. Well it’s easy for me – it’s
just determination.”
Here’s
to that.
Pollan’s nine
principles of healthy eating:
2. Avoid
even those food products that come bearing health claims. Don’t forget that
margarine, one of the first industrial foods to claim that it was healthier
than the traditional food it replaced, turned out to give people heart attacks.
3. Especially
avoid food products containing ingredients that are a) unfamiliar, b)
unpronounceable c) more than five in number – or that contain high-fructose
corn syrup. None of these characteristics are necessarily harmful in and of
themselves, but all of them are reliable markers for foods that have been
highly processed.
4. Get
out of the supermarket whenever possible. You won’t find any high-fructose corn
syrup at the farmer’s market; you also won’t find food harvested long ago and
far away. What you will find are fresh whole foods picked at the peak of
nutritional quality. Precisely the kind of food your great-great-grandmother
would have recognized as food.
5. Pay
more, eat less. There’s no escaping the fact that better food – measured by
taste or nutritional quality (which often correspond) – costs more, because it
has been grown or raised less intensively and with more care.
6. Eat
mostly plants, especially leaves … By eating a plant-based diet, you’ll be
consuming far fewer calories, since plant foods (except seeds) are typically
less” energy dense” than the other things you might eat.
7. Eat
more like the French. Or the Japanese. Or the Italians. Or the Greeks.
Confounding factors aside, people who eat according to the rules of a
traditional food culture are generally healthier than we are. Any traditional
diet will do: if it weren’t a healthy diet, the people who follow it wouldn’t
still be around.
8. Cook.
And if you can, plant a garden. The culture of the kitchen, as embodied in
those enduring traditions we call cuisines, contains more wisdom about diet and
health than you are apt to find in any nutrition journal. Plus, the food you
grow yourself contributes to your health long before you sit down to eat it.
9. Eat
like an omnivore. Try to add new species, not just new foods, to your diet. The
greater the diversity of species you eat, the more likely you are to cover all
your nutritional bases.
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