A World of Ways to Eat Right
If the nutrition experts are increasingly embracing whole traditional diets, then why does low-fat dairy still appear as a recommendation in Hobson’s article? Low-fat dairy is not a whole food and people eating traditional diets don’t generally consume it. No matter how hard we try to distance ourselves from the “reductionist approach to nutrition science,” we keep ending up in the same place – recommending low-fat or low-carb diets with the same tunnel vision we’ve had in the past.
If we’re trying to figure out how these “traditional” cultures stay slimmer and healthier than Americans, perhaps it is not just about the specific food choices and their synergies but about a whole lifestyle and reverence for food. Traditional cultures don’t eat fast food and processed junk food. They don’t drink sweetened beverages by the liter. They don’t eat food that is shipped thousands of miles from where it is grown. They don’t generally eat food that is grown from genetically modified seed and treated to heavy doses of pesticides and herbicides. They don’t eat meat, poultry, eggs, and dairy from factory farms where animals are routinely mistreated and their health, and in turn our health, is compromised. Instead of looking at specific food choices, we ought to be looking at our entire food system and how we’ve managed to degrade it so thoroughly in such a short period of time. Americans are overfed and undernourished. It’s a simple notion with very complex ramifications.
Filed under: Letters Tagged: | Low fat, Nutrition, Traditional diet
