WHY NO FOOD, NOT EVEN KALE, IS ‘HEALTHY’
WE ARE told by everyone, from doctors and nutritionists to food magazines and newspapers, to eat healthy food. We take for granted that a kale salad is healthy and that a burger with fries is not.
I submit to you that our beloved kale salads are not “healthy”. And we are confusing ourselves by believing that they are. They are not healthy; they are nutritious.
They may be delicious when prepared well, and the kale itself, while in the ground, may have been a healthy crop. But the kale on your plate is not healthy, and to describe it as such obscures what is most important about that kale salad: that it’s packed with nutrients your body needs. But this is not strictly about nomenclature. If all you ate was kale, you would become sick. Nomenclature rather shows us where to begin.
“‘Healthy’ is a bankrupt word,” says Roxanne Sukol, a preventive medicine specialist.“Our food isn’t healthy. We are healthy. Our food is nutritious. I’m all about the words. Words are the key to giving people the tools they need to figure out what to eat. Everyone’s so confused.”
If I may rephrase the doctor’s words: Our food is not healthy; we will be healthy if we eat nutritious food. Words matter. And those that we apply to food matter more than ever.
Here is a word we think we understand: protein. Protein is good, yes? Builds strong muscles, has positive health connotations. That’s why “protein shakes” are a multibillion-dollar business.
Pork cracklings do not have positive health connotations because we think of them as having a high fat content, but they are little more than strips of fried pig skin. Skin is one of the many forms of connective tissue in all animal bodies and is composed almost entirely of protein, typically undergirded by a layer of fat. When these strips of pig skin are fried, most of the fat is rendered out and the connective tissue puffs, resulting in a delectable, crunchy, salty crackling. I recommend them to you as a “protein snack” for your on-the-go day.
Given the infinitely malleable language of food, it’s no wonder food shoppers are confused.
What is “mechanically separated meat”, a standard ingredient in the turkey, bacon and chicken sausages popularised because of our low-fat love? “Do you know what that is?” a grocery store owner asked me. “They basically put poultry carcasses in a giant salad spinner.” Whatever winds up on the walls of the spinner in addition to meat – bits of cartilage (protein!), nerves (I have enough of my own, thank you), vessels, bone fragments – is scraped off and added to the mixing bowl.
“Mechanically separated meat” engages our imagination only when someone attaches new words to it, such as “pink slime”.
“Refined” is another critical food word. Generally, refined means elegant and cultured in appearance, manner or taste, or with impurities removed. Yet that is what food companies have been calling wheat from which the endosperm and bran have been removed, leaving what is in effect pure starch, devoid of the fibre, oils, iron and vitamins that make wheat nutritious.
That’s not refined, “that’s stripped”, Sukol says – flour stripped of the nutrition that makes it valuable to our bodies but reduces shelf life.
Because it has been stripped, we must “enrich” it. “Enriched.” “Fortified.” Good, yes? To make rich, to make strong. Food companies added the iron they took out during the refining process, but not enough of what we need.
“Refined flour – this resulted in B vitamin and iron deficiencies,” Sukol says, “so they added vitamins and iron. And what do they call that? Enriched and fortified. But they forgot to add folate, vitamin B9, until the 1990s.”
What we don’t know, Sukol says, is how those additions, not to mention the diglycerides and sulphates, combined with the lack of fibre, will affect our metabolism in the long run. So far, she says, “it has resulted in diabetes and metabolic syndrome”.
We will be healthy if we eat nutritious food. Our food is either nutritious or not. We are healthy or we are not. If we eat nutritious food, we may enhance what health we possess.
This is not a judgement on what you choose to eat. If you hunger for a cheese product grilled between bread that’s been stripped of its nutrition, along with a bowl of tinned tomato soup (made with tomato paste, corn syrup and potassium chloride), fine. It was one of my favourite childhood meals. Just be aware of what it is you’re putting in your body and why.
Because, and this is the judgement call, fat isn’t bad; stupid is bad. And until we have better information and clearer shared language defining our food, smart choices will be ever harder to make. – The Washington Post