What is going on deep in the Soul of a carrot that makes it SO GOOD for you?

Sometimes, at the Intentional Table, well, actually, any Intentional Table that I happen to be sitting at is a place where I tend to do what I do to so many things in life, which is anthropomorphize them. I think it started when I was about 4; when riding in the car, I would stand with my arm around my dad’s neck, and when I saw the moon, I would always say, “Mr. Moon!” Yes, this was 1966, so no seat belts, car seats for kids, or any of that. My dad’s ‘62 Valiant had no such thing as safety in any way.

Me and Dad on my first day of school. 1966 Valiant, brand new!

I've recently refined that, too. Trying not to scribe behaviors or characteristics of humans to inanimate objects but rather to come to a more beautiful and mindful description, which, for the purpose of our conversation today, I will call ‘Animism.’ Maybe even Sacred Animism! The thought that everything in the universe is composed of the same mishmash of atomic ingredients, just run off of a different 3D printer. My 3D printer was my mother, of course. I am her seedling. This often helps me feel connected when I am lonely, which is often.

Eating in our time has gotten complicated, needlessly, so, in my opinion. I will get to the ‘needless’ part in a moment but consider first the complexity of how one attends to this most basic of creaturely activities. When you need a cheeseburger, you NEED a cheeseburger. Most of us have come to rely on experts of one kind or another to tell us how to eat, such as doctors or diet books, or media accounts of the latest findings and nutritional science government, advisories and food pyramids, the proliferation of health claims on food labels. We may not always hear these expert's advice, but their voices are in our heads. Every time we order from the menu or wheel down the aisle of the supermarket. Just like the overculture of capitalists love, love to do, your head is full of disembodied voices informing you and ‘watching out’ for your health. With health like this, it’s a wonder we are still here. Are you even aware that they are there, in the background, silently running the show? If you need more awareness and access to that, I will suggest a teacher of Intentional Creativity near you, free of charge!

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Also, in our heads today resides an astonishing amount of biochemistry. How odd is it that everybody now has at least a passing acquaintance with words like antioxidant, saturated fat, omega-3, fatty acids, carbohydrates, polyphenols, folic acid, gluten, and probiotics? It's gotten to the point where we don't see food anymore but instead look right through it to the nutrients (good or bad) they contain, and of course to the calories. All these have some secret and invisible qualities in our food that, properly understood, supposedly hold the secret to eating well. The zeitgeist of information, bundled for you; why you are nearly a nutritionist already!

But for all the scientific and pseudoscientific food baggage you've taken on in recent years, we still don't know what we should be eating. Should we worry about the fats and the carbohydrates? Then what about the good fats or the bad carbohydrates like high-fructose corn syrup? How much should we be worrying about gluten? What's the deal with artificial sweeteners? Is it really true that this breakfast cereal improves my focus, or does the other cereal protect me from a heart attack? When did eating a bowl of breakfast cereal become a therapeutic procedure anyway?

Some years ago, feeling as confused as everyone else, I set out to get to the bottom of a simple question. What should we eat? What do we really know about the links between our diet and our health? I'm not a nutrition expert or a scientist; I'm just a cook, just a curious cook, hoping to answer a straightforward question for myself.

Most of the time, when I embark on such an investigation, it quickly becomes clear that matters are much more complicated and ambiguous. Several shades grayer than I thought going in. The deeper I delved into the confused and confusing thicket of nutritional science, sorting through the long, running ‘fats versus carbs wars’, the ‘fiber skirmishes’, and the raging dietary supplement debates, the simpler the picture gradually became.

I learned that, in fact, science knows a lot less about nutrition than you might expect. That in fact, nutrition, science is to put charitably, a very ‘young science.’ It's still trying to figure out exactly what happens in your body when you drink a coke (nothing good, btw.) or what is going on deep in the soul of a carrot to make it so good for you and why in the world would you have so many neurons, so many brain cells in your stomach.

As nutritionists themselves will tell you, they're not there yet, not even close to nutrition science, which, after all, only got started less than 200 years ago today, approximately where surgery was in the year 1650. It is very promising and very interesting to watch, but are you ready to let them carve on you? I think maybe I'll wait.

Case in point: last March in 2023, I was diagnosed with kidney cancer and had to have one of them removed. When I was in the hospital, they were most concerned about proteins as the kidneys eliminate protein, and with only one kidney left, I had to have less of it. They referred to it as a low-protein diet. A young nutritionist came to my room for a nutrition consult. She was very nice and seemed like she really had my best interest in mind. She asked me a litany of questions about my diet and exercise, and eating patterns. She prescribed a low-protein diet for me. The food that followed was astonishing: pork chops, mashed potatoes, soggy vegetables, sweetened iced tea. You get the idea. I was absolutely astonished that this was an example of a modified protein diet. Suffice to say, I lost some weight and a kidney while I was there.

I've learned a small number of very important things. These are my takeaways for you! We do know about food and health. This is what I meant when I said the picture was simpler and deeper as I went.

There are basically two important things. You need to know about the links between diet and health to facts that are not currently in dispute. All the contending parties in the nutrition wars agree on them, and even more importantly, for our purposes, the facts are sturdy enough that we can build a sensible diet upon them, and here they are.

Fact 1

Populations that eat a so-called Western diet are generally defined as a diet consisting of lots of processed foods, lots of added fats and sugar. A lot of refined grains, lots of everything really, except vegetables, fruits, and whole grains. These people invariably suffer from high rates of the so-called Western diseases: obesity, type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and cancer. Virtually all of obesity and type 2 diabetes, 80% of cardiovascular disease, and more than a third of all cancers can be linked exactly and precisely to this diet. Four of the top 10 killers in America are chronic diseases linked to this diet. The arguments and nutritional science are not about this well-established link; rather, they are all about identifying the culprit nutrients or ingredients in the Western diet that might be responsible for chronic diseases. Is it the saturated fat or refined carbohydrates, or the lack of fiber, or the trans fats or omega six fatty acids? What’s the point? We know all that we need to know to act on this diet for whatever reason is the problem. The suspect in this crime scene is the food chemist and his capitalist broker.

Fact 2

Populations that are eating a remarkably wide range of traditional diets generally don't suffer from these chronic diseases. These diets run the gamut from one's very high in fat, like the Inuit in Greenland, which subsist largely on seal blubber, to one high in carbohydrates, like the central American Indians, which is focused largely on corn and beans, to one's very high in protein like the Massai tribesman in Africa, who is focused chiefly on cattle blood, meat and milk, to cite three rather extreme examples, but much of the same holds true for more mixed traditional diets.

What this suggests is that there's no single ideal human diet but that the human omnivore is exquisitely adapted to a wide range of different foods and a variety of different diets, except that is for one, the relatively new, at least in evolutionary terms, the western diet. Most of us now are eating. What an extraordinary achievement for a civilization to develop the one diet that reliably makes its people sick. While it is true that we generally live longer than people used to, most of our added years are attributed to gains in infant mortality and child health.

There is actually a third very hopeful fact that flows from these two people who get off the Western diet to dramatic improvements in their health. We have good research to suggest that the effects of the Western diet can roll back relatively quickly. In one analysis, a typical American population that even modestly diverged from the Western diet and lifestyle could reduce its chances of getting heart disease by 80%, Its chances of type 2 diabetes by 90%, and its chances of colon cancer by 70%.

These two or three sturdy facts are not the center of our nutritional research or, for that matter, public health campaigns around diet. Instead, the focus is on identifying the evil nutrient in the Western diet so that food manufacturers might tweak their products, thereby leaving the diet undisturbed, or so that pharmaceutical makers might develop and sell an antidote for it. Yeah, we see you.

Bonus: an easy mantra. Eat Food, Not Too Much, Mostly Plants. You will have it all down quickly.

Thanks for reading!

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