eat+food.+not+too+much+article+summary-+rebecca

little meat wont kill you, though it’s better approached as a side dish that as a main dish. a. Your much better off eating whole foods than processed food products.

a. Why? Because a health claim on a food product is a good indication that it’s not really food, and food is what you want to eat.
 * 2. Once food was all you could eat, but today there are lots of other edible foodlike substances in the supermarket.**
 * 3. RULE OF THUMB:** if your concerned about your health, you should probably avoid food products that make health claims.

a. Fiber might not fight colon cancer b. OMEGA-3 FATS i. Harvard said: you should eat a couple of servings of fish each week or fish oil. ii. You should cut your risk of dying from a heart attack by more than a 3rd.
 * 4. Studies**

c. Food scientists put fish oils into bread and tortilla, milk and yogurt and cheese.

a. food began disappearing from the American supermarkets gradually to be replaced by “nutrients”- which are not the same thing. b. Things like eggs or breakfast cereal or cookies- claimed pride of place on the brightly colored packages crowding the aisles- but not terms like “fiber”, “cholesterol” and saturated fat” are large print and are see all over the market. c. Nutrients: Eat more of the right ones, fewer of the wrong ones, and you would live longer and avoid chronic disease.
 * 5. 1980’s**

a. Dying of a disease called beriberi, which didn’t seem to afflict Tamils or native Malays. – The mystery was solved: Chinese’s were eating “POLISHED” or white rice while others were eating rice that hadn’t been mechanically milled. b. “Vitamine” the first micronutrient. i. Vitamins brought a kind of glamour to the science of nutrition, and though certain sectors of the population began to eat by its expert lights.
 * 6. “ Macronutrients”: proteins, fat and carbohydrates.**

a. Cultures: Based largely on plants had strikingly low rates of chronic disease. b. Epidemiologists also had observed that in America during he war years, when meat and dairy products were strictly rationed, the rate of heart disease temporarily plummeted.
 * 7. Increase in chronic disease linked to diet- including heart disease, cancer, and diabetes.**

a. The committee had advised Americans to actually “ reduce consumption of meat” b. “ CHOOSE MEATS, POULTRY, and FISH THAT WILL REDUCE SATURATED-FAT INTAKE.
 * 8. All Americans should CUT DOWN ON RED MEAT AND DAIRY PRODUCTS!**

a. FIRST: of a particular food has been deep- sized.- never look for it again in any official U.S. dietary pronouncement. b. SECONDLY: distinctions between entities as different as fish, and beef, and chicken have collapsed; those three venerable foods, each represent an entirely different taxonomic class, are now lumped together as delivery systems for a single nutrients. **10. ideologies are ways of organizing large swaths of life and experience under a set of shared but unexamined assumptions.**
 * 9. “Eat less”-**

a. Scientists and journalists are to explain the hidden reality of foods to us.
 * 11. The key to understanding food is indeed the nutrient.**

a. “let food be thy medicine” b. cultures see foods as: pleasures, say or socializing- makes people no less healthy c. so there is at least a question as to whether nutritionism is actually any good for you.
 * 12. The whole point of easting is to maintain and promote bodily health.**

a. Fats and proteins and whatever other nutrients are on their scope.
 * 13. Fish, beef, and chicken= PROTEIN**

a. The year of eating OAT BRAN- also known as 1988- served as a kind of coming-out party for fod scientists i. Bran’s moment on the dietary stage didn’t last long.
 * 14. Re-engineering thousands of popular food products to contain mre of he nutrients that science and government had deemed the good ones and less of the bad ones.**


 * 15. The fate of each whole food rises and falls with every change in the nutritional weather, while the processed foods are simply reformulated. That’s why when the Atkins mania hit the food industry, bread and pasta were given a quick redesign- while the poor unreconstructed potatoes and carrots were left out in the cold.**

**16. Cocoa Puffs and Lucky Charms= whole- grain goodness.

17. EAT RIGHT, GET FATTER

18. “Dietary goals”** a. We cut down on saturated fat b. Americans did indeed change their diets. Endeavoring for a quarter- century to do what they had been told. c. Low-fat pork, low-fat Snackwell’s and all the low-fat pasta and high-fructose, corn syrup we could consume. d. Many date the current obesity and diabetes epidemic to the late 1970’s when Americans began binging on carbohydrates, ostensibly as a way to avoid the evils of fat.


 * 19. Fats don’t make you fat, carbs do.

20. Americans post- 1977 did begin binging on carbs, and that fat as a percentage of total calories in American diet declined, we never cut down on our consumption of fat.** a. Meat consumption actually climbed.

**21. Eat more low-fat foods.** a. And that’s what we did. b. We were glad to see EAT MORE of something. i. Low fat cookies, low carb beers c. eat fewer meat and dairy products.

a. “The problem with nutrient- by- nutrient nutrition science “ i. is that it takes the nutrient out of the context of food, the food out of the context of diet and the diet out of the context of lifestyle.
 * 22. BAD SCIENCE:**

a. Depending on their evolutionary heritage- you may or may not be able to digest lactose in milk. b. The specific ecology of your intestines helps determine how efficiently you digest what you eat so that the same input of 100 calories may yield more or less energy depending on the proportion of Firmicutes and Bacteroidetes living in you gut.
 * 23. Some populations are metabolize sugar better that others**

a. A diet high in fruits and vegetables confers some protection against cancer. b. One hypothesis: The antioxidants in fresh produce: beta carotene, lycopene, vitamin E. c. Antioxidents supplements actually can increase cancer.
 * 24. People don’t eat nutrients, they eat foods, and foods can behave very differently than the nutrients they contain.**


 * 25. Beta is just one of a whole- food slew of carotenes found in common vegetables; maybe we focused on the wrong one.

26. List of the antioxidants that have been identified in garden- variety thyme:

27. Some of these chemicals are broken down by your digestion, but others are going on to do undetermined things to your body; turning some gene’s expression on or off, perhaps, or heading off free radical before it disturbs a strand of DNA deep in some cell. – It probably doesn’t do any harm, it actually will help us.

28. Today it’s the polyphenols and carteniods that seem all important.

29. We don’t just eat one thing: and when are are eating only one thing, we’re not eating another. We also eat foods in combinations and in orders that can affect how they’re absorbed.** a. Drink coffee with your steak, and your body won’t be able to fully absorb the iron in the meat. b. The trace of limestone in the corn tortilla unlocks essential amino acids in the corn that would otherwise remain unavailable.


 * 30. It is entirely possible to reduce your intake of saturated fat without significantly reducing your consumption of animal protein: Just drink low- fat milk and order the skinless chicken breast of the turkey bacon.

31. The MEDITERRANEAN diet is widely believed to be one of the most healthful ways to eat.** a. Yet what we know about it is from the people that lived in the islands.

a. SUPPLEMENTS are worthless.
 * 32. People who take supplements are healthier than the population at large, but their health probably has nothing whatsoever to do with the supplement they take**


 * 33. A large population is divided into 2 groups. The intervention group changes its diet in the same prescribed manner, while the control does not. The two groups are then tracked over many years to learn whether the intervention affects relative rates of chronic disease.

34. Like most people when asked about their diet THEY LIE ABOUT IT.** a. Studies show the average participant weighed in at 170 pounds and claimed to be eating 1,800 calories a day.

a. Asked her questions about what she ate over the course of 3 months to see what she has eaten and if she knew how many calories she was actually taking in.
 * 35. A survey the writer took:**

a. What we do know is that people who eat the way we do in America today suffer much higher rates of cancer, heart disease, diabetes and obesity than people eating more traditional diets. i. 4 out of 10 leading killers in American are linked to diet/ ii. heart disease has decreased since the 50’s but the rates of obesity and diabetes have soared.
 * 36. THE ELEPHANT IN THE ROOM**


 * 37. Cow’s mile did not start out as a nutritious food for humans, in fact, it is made them sick until humans who lived around cows evolved the ability to digest lactose as adults. This development proved much to the advantage of both the milk and the cows.

38. When the soil is sick or in some way deficient, so will the grasses that grow in that soil and the cattle that eat the grasses and the people that drink the milk.

39. We come to recognize foods by taste, smell, color and our bodies learn what the foods to for it.** a. Our bodies produce chemicals that will break down the foods. b. Health depends on knowing how to read these biological signals: this smells spoiled, this looks ripe, that’s one good looking cow.

b. Food- leads to problems
 * 40. Whole foods govern such things as the speed at which the sugars will be released and absorbed= metabolism.** a. Our bodies have a longstanding and sustainable relationship to corn that we do not have to high- fructose corn syrup.

a. A radical and rapid change not just in foodstuffs over the course of the 20th century but also in our food relationships, all he way from the soil to the meal. b. Offers us the instant gratification of sugar c. “speediness diet”- overwhelms the insulin response and leads to Type 2 diabetes.
 * 41. WESTERN DIET:**

a. Makes them easier to digest, by removing the fiber that ordinarily slows the release of their sugars.
 * 42. Refining grains extends their shelf life**


 * 43. one word that covers nearly all of the changes industrialization has made to the food chain it would be SIMPLIFICATION.

44. We get everything from a diet consisting largely of processed corn, soybeans, wheat and rice.

45. An oversupply of macronutrients as we now have itself represents a serious threat to our health.

46. Most people associate omega 3-fatty acid with fish, bit fish get them from green plants they eat.** a. Plant leaves produce these essential fatty acids. b. Omega 3 fatty acids play an important role in neurological development and processing, the permeability of cell walls, the metabolism of glucose and the calming of inflammation. c. Omega 9 fatty acid: involved in fat storage


 * 47. Official dietary advice since the 1970s has promoted the sonsumption of polyunsaturated vegetable oils, most of which are high in omega-6s- corn and soy especially.

48. Historically low levels of omega- 3 bear responsibility for many of the chronic diseases associated with the Western diet especially heart disease and diabetes.** a. Some researchers implicate omega-3 deficiency in rising rates of depression or learning disabilities.

a. Culture helps our relationship with nature b. Culture says how, when, why, how much you should eat. c. Culture is a fancy word for mom
 * 49. People relied on about what to eat from the national or ethnic or religion culture.**


 * 50. THE QUESTION IS: ARE WE BETTER OFF WIT THESE NEW AUTHORTIES THAN WE WERE WITH THE TRADITIONAL AUTHORTIES THEY SUPPLANTED?

51. RELES OF THUMBS:** a. 1. Eat food- don’t eat anything your great great grandmother, wouldn’t recognize. – Go Gurt, breakfast cereal bars, nondairy creamer b. 2. Avid even those foods products that came bearing health claims. c. 3. Especially avoid food products containing ingredients that are unfamiliar, unpronounceable and more than 5 in a number d. 4. Get out of the supermarket whenever possible e. 5. Pay more, eat less- cost more because it has been grown or raise less intensively with more care. i. Calorie restriction= the single strongest link between diet and cancer prevention.

f. 6. Eat mostly plants especially leaves i. you will consume fewer calories- less energy dense. g. 7.Eat more like the French or the Japanese or the Italians or the Greeks. h. 8. Cook- and if you can plant a garden i. 9. Eat like an omnivore. Try to add new species, not just new foods to your diet.

SOURCES: food article.