Dietary Advice for the Gluttony Season

Now that the gluttony season is upon us, you may be re-re-re-evaluating your diet; or perhaps you’ll be stewing on it four weeks from today, making commitments to do better before summer.

We are confused. Many people have the gnawing feeling that “nothing” is fit, safe, wise, or ethical to eat, and the $61 billion diet industry encourages us to dwell on this uncertainty. We buy too much of the wrong stuff because it is affordable, satisfying, plentiful, and aggressively marketed. Then we seek the cure for what that toxic regimen causes. It’s a dizzying merry-go-round.

There’s no question that the safety thing is confounding, and it’s not something individuals can do much about: You can avoid some chemicals by eating organic food, but that’s not an option for everyone. Besides, even that doesn’t address issues involving heavy metals or salmonella or god knows what else in our food supply. These are environmental problems, and one governmental responsibility on which everyone ought to agree is that environmental problems should be regulated until they’re solved.

But nutrition advice need not confound; in fact, it’s simple and has barely changed since you were a kid (it doesn’t even matter when you were a kid). “Eat a variety of foods” almost does the trick, if the foods you’re eating are real, which means food with one ingredient or maybe four or six. (Most real bread, for example, is water, flour, yeast, and salt, with the possible addition of olive oil or a seasoning or two, and the possible subtraction of yeast. Yeast conditioners and ingredients with five syllables have no place in real bread.)

I asked Marion Nestle, who is among the wisest and sanest people I know when it comes to nutrition, how she might sum up dietary advice, and after noting that not much has changed since the ’50s, she said: “The basic principles—then and now—are variety (eat many different kinds of foods to get all needed nutrients), balance (don’t eat too much of any one food category, especially meat, dairy, and junk foods), and moderation (balance calories). To these, we can add: Eat more fruits and vegetables.”

Some of this requires judgment, but it’s safe to say that the less junk food (especially sugar and the like) and the more fruits and veggies you eat, the better off you are. We needlessly complicate things when we think about “nutrients” rather than “foods,” and we often take rigid, extreme positions.

It was health warnings about cholesterol and fat that set off the low-fat, high-processed-carb craze, which led pretty much directly to the current obesity crisis. Indeed, if the nutrition advice of the ’70s and ’80s had been “eat most things in moderation, and don’t eat too much junk,” many pounds would have remained ungained. Instead we were told to eat low-fat foods, and we downed SnackWell’s as if they were health food. Voilà.

When food is deconstructed into “nutrients” and we start worrying about how much oat bran or how little saturated fat we eat, we play a losing game, one that gives the marketers of processed foods—a very high percentage of which is not food at all—the opportunity to sell high-oat-bran or low-saturated-fat products as “healthy,” regardless of their other properties.

Thus one purpose of “marketing” is “confusing,” trying to persuade us that we must know a lot to make intelligent food choices. But little research on individual nutrients is conclusive. All you need really worry about is whether what you’re eating is actually food, and if you’re eating too much of one type, or simply too much. Except, again, fruits, vegetables, and other minimally processed plants, of which you’d have a hard time eating too much.

Which brings us to the extremism thing. On one end of the spectrum is the typical American diet, which is extreme in its contribution to chronic disease, environmental degradation, animal cruelty, and, we might add, setting a bad example. So we flee to the other end and deify veganism, now in the news every time someone famous announces they’ve “gone” vegan. The latest is that Al Gore has joined Bill Clinton in animal-free land, though there are the inevitable reports that maybe Clinton cheats. (Not that there’s anything wrong with that.) Gore, presumably, finally recognized that the typical American diet of something like 600 pounds of animal products a year is inconsistent with a progressive or even realistic view of slowing global warming. Or maybe he just wanted to lose some weight. Or both—he didn’t respond when I emailed him.

There’s never any press when people simply decide to eat less junk food or more plants or less meat, yet both anecdotal and sales evidence show that meat consumption is down significantly in the United States. And yet it’s the simple advice—the eat less meat and junk, eat more plants—that’s going to make the biggest difference, because not only will more doctors and other advice-givers preach it but more people will also be able to heed it. Not likely true of veganism.

Besides, there’s no guarantee that eschewing animal products will give you a healthy diet; it’ll just give you a diet without animal products. (Jelly Bellys, Coke, and fries are all vegan.) It’s true that veganism is an ethical response to the world’s food problems (feed less to animals, and more to people) and it’s obviously the only response if you don’t want to kill animals to eat them, ever.

But there is logic to integrating animals into the agricultural landscape (Simon Fairlie makes that argument very well), and there is nutritional logic to eating some animal products.

Where there’s no logic is in maintaining the status quo. I have no beef (forgive me) with vegans; in fact anyone who argues for a greater proportion of real plants in the diet is arguing for part-time veganism. But you don’t need to go to the opposite end of the spectrum to avoid the standard American diet; you just need to follow the advice you already know.

DECEMBER 3, 2013