myth

Please Just Shut Up About the “Family Meal”

Jan 17 2011

The most remarkable thing about my mother is that
for thirty years she served the family nothing but leftovers.
The original meal has never been found.
-Calvin Trillin

Don't they look like they would talk in Comic Sans?   
Image Credit: She Knows.com

Every few months, someone publishes another article claiming that the “family meal” is dead or dying, and that if we could only revive it, it would help us fix a laundry list of societal ills from obesity to teen pregnancy. These stories usually make four main rhetorical moves:

1) Invoking Tradition and History: They universally portray the family meal as a long-standing tradition that Americans lost sometime in the recent past. For example, a post on Epicurious last week was titled “Radical Call To Take Back The Family Dinner,” which not only implies that it’s something we had at some point but also that something or someone took it from us, possibly without our consent. Frequently, these articles conflate cooking from scratch, eating at home, and eating with the members of your nuclear family, which makes it difficult to pinpoint exactly which behavior they think has declined, or what counts as a “family meal” in the first place—if a nuclear family eats together at a restaurant, does that count? What about eating take-out at home? Is eating in a car an automatic disqualifier, even if the food is homemade and everyone talks about their day?

The historical timeline is also usually pretty fuzzy. It’s almost never clear when the author thinks the “family meal” supposedly prevailed or when we “lost” it—the 1920s? the 1960s? The 1980s? And yet they’re sure it existed at some point. Much like the missing “original” meal in Calvin Trillin’s joke about leftovers, it’s an absent referent.

2) Explaining Why the Family Meal Is a Panacea: Whatever they think it was, and whenever they think we lost it, the authors are clear about at least one thing: family meals are a good thing and we need to get them back. That’s often exemplified by the titles, like the Huffington Post article linked in the Epicurious post: “How Eating at Home Can Save Your Life” or Miriam Weinstein’s 2005 book, The Surprising Power of Family Meals: How Eating Together Makes Us Smarter, Stronger, Healthier and Happier. The authors often point—or at least gesture vaguely—towards studies that have shown correlations between how often children eat with their parents and higher GPAs, lower BMIs, lower rates of alcohol & drug use, and a decreased likelihood of developing an eating disorder. Because everyone knows correlation = causation, right?

3) Blaming Individuals Instead of Structural Changes: Authors sometimes initially point the finger at structural changes like the increasing reliance on industrial-scale agriculture and processing to feed a growing & urbanizing population (dated either to the post-Civil War or post-WW II era) and growing numbers of women in the workforce after the 1960s. However, they all find a way to shift blame, and thus responsibility, back onto individuals. That’s rhetorically necessary, because the goal of the articles is usually to change individuals’ behavior. Also, it would be futile and/or offensive to suggest that the “answer” is a massive population cull, giving up city living, and/or  women leaving the workforce en masse. Indeed, many feminists were rankled by Michael Pollan’s article “Out of the Kitchen, Onto the Couch,” even though he specifically notes that the amount of time spent on food preparation has declined dramatically even for women who don’t work outside the home and specifically calls on women and men to “make cooking a part of daily life.”

The factors they end up blaming instead are nonsense or, at best, totally un-measurable. My favorite is when they claim that the problem is that Americans are busier than ever…but also lazier than ever. From Epicurious:

We're certainly at a lazy point in history, though ironically, for all the conveniences at our disposal, we seem even shorter of actual time.

We’re working more hours than ever, but as a culture, we’ve gotten lazy. American kids are running around trying to do more extra-curriculars than ever, especially if they’re college-bound, but they also spend all their time on passive, mind-slushifying electronic entertainments. Chefs, farmers, and food writers have achieved celebrity status, the Food Network and shows like Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution and Bravo’s Top Chef achieve stellar ratings, and there’s never been more interest in eating organic, natural, fresh, local food…but we’re a fast food nation addicted to HFCS and cheap, industrially-processed, “empty” calories. Yadda yadda, a dozen other unsubstantiated, contradictory clichés that tell us nothing about what is responsible for Americans cooking and/or eating together less (if indeed they are cooking and eating together less).

4) Calling for Change: All of which leads up to the same old rallying cry: Even if you think you don’t have time, you should make the time! If you don’t know how to cook, you should learn to cook! If you and/or your kids prefer fast food and convenience foods, you’re basically a failure at life and you should learn to roast Brussels sprouts and grow an adult palate, stat. Then they make perhaps the stupidest claim of all: not only is cooking at home and eating together a moral obligation to your children, family, and nation, the real reason you should do it is because it will make you happier. After all, there is no greater joy than sharing a home-cooked meal with the people you love.

I make that face all the time, which may make me a snarky, whiny adoescent. But tell me how I'm wrong. American Beauty dir. Sam Mendes 1999 (from Orange Crate Art)

The “family meal” lecture would be annoying enough as it is—smug, hectoring, and totally unoriginal—but worse, it’s almost entirely based on myths, lies, and logical fallacies. Read more

In Praise of Fast Food by Rachel Laudan

Sep 7 2010

is this really inferior...

to this?

I don’t normally just post links to other content, but I think this article is such a smart and elegant polemic against “Culinary Luddism,” or the idea that “traditional” foodways (many of which aren’t actually traditional) are sacrosanct and modern industrialism has just ruined everything. I found myself nodding enthusiastically throughout and felt called to arms when I reached the conclusion:

What we need is an ethos that comes to terms with contemporary, industrialized food, not one that dismisses it; an ethos that opens choices for everyone, not one that closes them for many so that a few may enjoy their labor; and an ethos that does not prejudge, but decides case by case when natural is preferable to processed, fresh to preserved, old to new, slow to fast, artisanal to industrial. Such an ethos, and not a timorous Luddism, is what will impel us to create the matchless modern cuisines appropriate to our time.

YES. It is naive—at best— to believe that the world before industrial, processed food was idyllic in terms of nutrition, the distribution of agricultural and culinary labor, or the quality and variety of culinary experiences. At worst, ideas about what counts as “natural” or “real” with little basis in historical or scientific fact are used to reinforce social inequalities and make people feel either guilty or morally superior to others because of how they eat. Laudan corrects mistaken assumptions about the “halcyon days of yore” and critiques common beliefs about the inherent superiority of local, slow, artisanal, etc.

At least for now, the whole article is available for free. If you want to know why “modern, fast, processed” food isn’t such an unmitigated disaster after all, and why we may actually need mass-production, even if it’s a more considered, regulated, ethical form of mass-production, this is a good place to start:

In Praise of Fast Food

Hipsters on Food Stamps Part II: Who Deserves Public Assistance?

Apr 8 2010

Man should not be ready to show that he can live like a badly-fed animal. He should decline to live like that, and should either steal or go on the rates, which is considered by many to be a form of stealing.–Oscar Wilde

avocado is another tricky one: relatively expensive and often considered delicious, but technically "fresh produce" and generally considered to be healthy despite being high in fat; how would the people who would have food stamps restricted to virtuous, non-luxury items feel about it? would it matter if it was organic? image from Look At This Fucking Hipster http://www.latfh.com/search/avocado

It’s been a couple of weeks, so first a brief recap: in the first entry, I looked the recent article on Salon about “hipsters” using food stamps to purchase luxury foods, which was maddeningly imprecise about the employment and financial circumstances of newly-qualified food stamp recipients and what they’re actually buying, as opposed to merely sauntering past. Relying almost exclusively on anecdotal evidence and rumor, the original article seemed designed primarily to build on popular stereotypes about “hipsters” and elicit outrage about this potentially-apocryphal trend in food stamp use.

In less than a week, the article attracted nearly 500 comments (Salon closed it down at 473). I didn’t read all of them, partially because a few themes emerge pretty quickly and they all start to sound the same. Here are the primary camps:

1. Outraged sheeple—a lot of people were completely sold on the veracity of the trend and responded exactly the way the article primes them to, i.e. how dare people who receive food stamps shop at Whole Foods, purchase gourmet or exotic ingredients, or ever buy anything more expensive or pleasurable than the bare minimum required to ensure their survival. This camp is split between people who object only to food stamps being spent on non-“essential” foods and people who apparently believe that people receiving public assistance should not be able to purchase anything that might be construed as a “luxury,” even with their own money.

2. Better than Doritos—another group of people who believed the story thought it was a good thing, at least as long the food they’re eating is healthier. This was frequently accompanied by the suggestion that eating “better” food would prevent them from getting fat and becoming a drain on the health care system. Virtually no one defended the purchase of “premium” foods on the grounds that they might be more pleasurable than whatever kind of gruel or cabbage soup might be the cheapest way to fulfill your nutritional needs.

3. Critics of the article and the sheeple—a number of people brought up the work requirement for food stamps (which has been temporarily lifted in most states by the emergency relief act). Others noted that people qualify for some set monthly allotment of food stamps so it’s not like they get more assistance if they choose to purchase expensive things. This was often expressed as a hope that this article or the idea of hipsters taking unfair advantage of the public food assistance wouldn’t be used as political leverage against food stamp programs or welfare in general.

4. Critics of welfare qua welfare—a lot of people who commented on the article seemed less concerned about what people are buying with food stamps than the fact that anyone who might be described as a “hipster” would qualify in the first place: 

My issue lies with the fact that young, healthy, educated people are receiving government assistance in the first place. Rather than sully their precious hipster cred with some dreaded, uncool job such as waiting tables or manning the counter at Borders, these spoiled, art-damaged infants decide to go on food stamps. –SadieG

I belong to the third camp, which is basically what the first entry covered. I’ll look at the first two responses in more depth some other time. In this entry, I look at the misconceptions and anxieties expressed by this last group of comments and explain why some people find the idea of educated, young people being the recipients of food stamps—whether they’re using them to buy ramen or rabbit—so very infuriating.

Choosing to Be Poor

One of the main factors in this flavor of outrage is the mistaken assumption I discussed in the first entry that people have to be unemployed to receive food stamps. What seems to rankle the welfare critics is their belief that that young, able-bodied, educated people must be unemployed by choice and thus responsible for their poverty. SadieG was far from alone on this:

These are able-bodied 20/30-somethings with education. Granted, the job market is extremely weak but I have a hard time believing these people truly exhausted their options. Did they look into fast-food, janitorial services, retail? Those types of jobs have lots of turnover, so there's almost always something available. Did they look into picking up a trade? I would say the chances are No - these type of jobs don't fit into their self-image as an artist or whatever. So, even though this is a situation of their own making - they're expecting the government to subsidize their lifestyle. And its all being paid for by people who actually bite the bullet and work at jobs they don't necessarily love do what they do in order to support themselves and their families and not be a burden to society. Yeah, its pretty appalling. –CBFE

I don't like that food stamps and unemployment are so readily handed out to people who are arguably unemployed or underemployed by choice for years at a time. –ohthatkate

It amazes me that people can insist on saying they would never do anything they consider "beneath" them, that is never some kind of job that is not "art related", and therefore status-y, but still have no problem taking charity handouts. These people need to either find a way to make a living or face reality. –Luccianna

Maybe a degree in post feminist analysis of Sumerian Temple Prostitutes wasn't such a wise choice after all. —Senator Neptune

The author of the original article didn’t actually specify whether the people she interviewed were unemployed, and none of the people she interviewed said anything about refusing jobs that were “beneath them.” However, her anecdotes certainly implied that this trend was largely driven by Even making $10/hr working 35 hrs/wk, a single wage-earner in a family of three would qualify for $288/month in food stamps: http://www.cbpp.org/cms/index.cfm?fa=view&id=2226unemployed artists and people with humanities degrees. For many readers, the anecdotes clearly spoke louder than the dismal unemployment statistics she mentions or the fact taking a low-wage job you might be overqualified for wouldn’t actually disqualify you from receiving food stamps.

As the original article notes, unemployment rose by 176% between 2006 and 2009 for college-educated people between the ages of 20 and 24. The biggest caveat attached to the recent economic “recovery” has been the persisting unemployment disproportionately affecting young people. Increasingly, even for people with college degrees, unemployment or underemployment isn’t a choice right now.  

But even setting the reality of the job market aside, let’s take this brand of outrage to its logical conclusion: if it’s wrong for people with college degrees (or certain kinds of college degrees) to get food stamps, then presumably, that should be added to the list of disqualifying factors. In light of the specific ire directed at the arts and humanities, the exclusion could be limited to graduates with degrees in the actual analog of Senator Neptune’s “post feminist analysis of Sumerian Temple Prostitutes.” It wouldn’t even be difficult to enforce—I’m sure the administrators of the program could check for applicants’ degree history just as easily as they can verify that senior citizens in the program have no more than $2,000 in assets, and there wouldn’t even need to be a debate about what counts—states could just use the CIP codes for the “humanities” assigned by the U.S. government.

Based on that system, a low-income college graduate who majored in something like math, astronomy, or sociology could still get supplementary nutritional assistance, but one who majored in history, linguistics, or philosophy would be out of luck. Would that really make any more sense or better fulfill the goals of the Food Stamp program? Are people who study art history and end up working minimum wage jobs any more culpable for their poverty than sociology majors? Should the government really deny assistance to people with the naïveté or gumption to major in poetry writing, but extend benefits to journalism majors who chose to ignore the fact that the profession they were training for was in the middle of a precipitous decline?

Especially in the current economic climate, no one is guaranteed a job—let alone one that pays more than poverty wages—regardless of how much education they have and what kind. Aside from unfairly punishing people whose particular interests or talents might not have been well-served by one of the sciences or a pre-professional program, this kind of policy might well discourage people from finishing their degree if they don’t have guaranteed employment. College drop-outs would at least still have a safety net. It might also discourage students who don’t come from wealthy backgrounds from majoring in English or History.

The primary faulty assumption these comments seem to rely on is that if you have a degree, you should be able to get a job, and if you can’t, you have done something wrong—gotten the wrong degree, been unwilling to accept menial or low-paying work, failed to consider all your options, etc. And therefore, taxpayer dollars shouldn’t go towards making your life even marginally more tolerable. Read more

Sourdough-Risen Whole Wheat Bagels and the Sweetness of the Old World

Mar 18 2010

Happy day after St. Pat's! Can I offer you some carbohydrates? Perhaps slathered in some fat?  

“Authentic” Bagels: Boil, Bake, and Bluster

There are three things that distinguish bagels from other breads:

The first, perhaps obviously, is the shape. There are at least four different theories about the origin of the word “bagel,” and all of them refer to the shape (etymology notes below the recipe for fellow word geeks). However, you can’t just make a standard bread dough into rings, throw it in a hot oven, and expect it to develop the glossy crust and dense, chewy interior that most people associate with bagels.

The second difference is an issue of method: bagels are traditionally boiled before they’re baked, which causes the surface starch to gelatinize, producing their characteristic smooth, shiny crust. The same is Or maybe the bagel married in, likely to the tacit (if not explicit) alarm of some of the older members of the Christian family.true of pretzels, which originated in the same region and, according to Maria Balinska, who wrote a 2008 book about the history of the bagel, are probably related. She specifically calls them “cousins,” whatever that means in terms of food history. She also notes that the Polish obwarzanek—another boiled, ring-shaped bread often sprinkled with sesame or poppy seeds—is an “older and Christian relative,” so perhaps that’s the spinster aunt who devoted herself to Jesus. Google translates the Polish entry on “Obwarzanek” to “Bagel,” and this travel guide refers to them as “pretzel rings.” I’m sure different people have different ways of distinguishing between the three, but the boil-then-bake method they share probably makes them more alike than different. So, for example, some people might think pretzels have to be shaped like folded arms whereas other people accept rods or rings as “pretzels,” but either way they’re formed from ropes of dough that maximize the surface area exposed to the boiling water, just like their relatives.

The third difference is an ingredient—bagels are the only bread I know of whose recipes frequently call for malt extract. Pretzel recipes occasionally include it, but not nearly as often as bagel recipes, many of which claim that the malt extract is the key to making “authentic” bagels or achieving a truly “bagel-y” flavor.

The idealized referent of bagel authenticity is usually the “New York bagel,” rather than their Polish-Jewish ancestors. However, when I lived in New York City, I ate plenty of bagels—even at delis on the Lower East Side—that were indistinguishable from the ones available at chains like Brugger’s and Einstein’s nationwide. Perhaps that’s just further evidence of the declining standard described here (accompanying a recipe that demands malt powder):

I can't count how often expatriate New Yorkers would stop me on the street with tears in their eyes, telling me that mine were the best bagels they'd had since they left "The City," and that they were better than most in "The City" these days. The reasons are simple. I didn't cut corners and used good ingredients. I don't know why so many bakeries cut corners on making bagels these days, it's really NOT that hard!

But I think it’s more likely that the idea of the superior New York bagel is primarily the product of nostalgic fantasies and social decline narratives—it’s something that never was and tells you more about contemporary anxieties and desires than anything real in the past. The tears in those expatriates’ eyes say more about contemporary feelings of depthlessness and transience, the desire for connections to the past and a sense of community, and the myriad dissatisfactions that make people want to think everything was better in the “good old days” than what makes a bagel delicious or “authentic” to anything.

Malt Extract: the Ancient Sweetener in your Bud Light

Given how the same bakers describe malted barley extract on their ingredients page, its presence is probably one of the so-infuriatingly-cut corners they’re talking about:

We wouldn't dream of making bagels or kaiser rolls without barley malt extract, and neither should you! Barley malt extract improves the taste and texture of the breads it is used in. It goes by a number of names. barley malt extract and malt extract among them. If a malt extract doesn't specify what grain it is made from, chances are pretty good it was made from barley. Barley is a grain used mostly in brewing beer and making Scotch Whisky. IBarley makt [sic] extract adds a nice taste to breads where it is used. For our recipes, you can either liquid or dry, diastatic or non-diastatic malt extract and not worry about changing the recipe, any combination of these will work just fine. The important things to avoid are hopped malt extract which is really only useful for making beer and the malted milk powder sold in many grocery stores as a milk flavor enhancer which has too little malt in it and too much sugar.

From an 1896 Harper's Magazine @ http://danshuihistory.blogspot.com/2009/11/li-hung-chang.htmlMalt extract is basically just sugar made from grain, usually starting with barley. According to Harold McGee, it’s “among the most ancient and versatile of sweetening agents, and was the predecessor of modern-day high-tech corn syrups.” Just like corn syrup and agave nectar, malt extract is produced by breaking starches into their constituent sugars. Rather than adding enzymes or acids, malting works by simply germinating or sprouting the grain. As a grain germinates, it produces enzymes that digest the grain’s starch to fuel its growth. Those enzymes can be dried and mixed with cooked grains (usually rice, wheat, and barley), which they can also digest, producing a sweet slurry containing lots of glucose, maltose (glucose+glucose), maltotriose (glucose+glucose+glucose), and some longer glucose chains.

It’s not as sweet as sugar, but before sugar colonialism, it was one of the primary sweeteners available in Europe and Asia (the other two were honey and molasses made from sorghum). According to McGee, it was the primary sweetener in China until around 1000 CE, and is still used in China and Korea for confections and the sweet, caramelized gloss on dishes like Peking Duck. Malt extract is also still frequently used in beer brewing—a friend who does home brewing told me recently that American brewers are especially likely to use it to adjust the alcohol content of their beers midway through the brewing process. Apparently the laws regarding how closely the alcohol percentage matches what’s on the label are fairly strict and as the sugars in malt extract are highly available to yeast, it’s a good way to increase the yeast activity quickly and reliably.

cocktails to anyone who knows the mug's year Read more

Restaurants of New York: Stop Serving Assemblyman Felix Ortiz Food Prepared With Salt In Any Form

Mar 15 2010

My sincere apologies to any lookalikes. Perhaps you could go moustache-less for a while? No salt for you!

Just over a week ago, a New York state assemblyman from Brooklyn named Felix Ortiz proposed a bill that would prohibit “the use of salt in any form in the preparation of any food for consumption” with penalties of “not more than one thousand dollars for each violation.” Presumably that wouldn’t prevent restaurants from providing salt for customers to add at their own discretion, but the bill offers no further details about what would and wouldn’t be considered a “violation” of the law or what is and isn’t included in the definition of “salt in any form”: see the full text here (hat tip: Reason).

Surely table salt (NaCl) would count, but what about any of the other edible ionic compounds that are chemically considered to be salts, like MSG (a sodium salt with the molecular formula C5H8NNaO4) or cream of tartar (a potassium acid salt with the formula KC4H5O6)? What about salty condiments like soy sauce, fish sauce, and ketchup? Would a restaurant that serves a ketchup-topped meatloaf have to forego the salt in the loaf mixture but still be able to slather ketchup on top (if so, why wouldn’t they just start adding ketchup to the mix as well, and finding ways to incorporate condensed soups and bouillon into dozens of other things that don’t already have them)? Or would they have to find or make their own salt-free ketchup—obviously a much larger burden on some kinds of restaurants? Even if it could make you live forever, would it be worth it?What about all the other prepared foods that already include salt and get used as ingredients in the preparation of other foods? Would Momofuku Milk Bar be banned from serving its famous compost cookies, which call for the addition of two “snack foods” like potato chips and salted pretzels?

House-baked, cured, and brined things would clearly suffer most from a law like this. It's one thing to have to salt a soup or curry or burger at the table, but everything from deli pickles and salami to homemade cinnamon rolls and pie crusts would become completely unpalatable, if not impossible, without salt. When questioned by the Albany Times Union about salt-cured meats and pickles:

Ortiz didn't have answers, saying repeatedly, "This all needs to be debated."

Of course, it’s probably not worth worrying about the ramifications of a bill that I can’t imagine has any chance of passing. Even the NYTimes has backed down from their initial, crazypants coverage of the recent NEJM study that claimed a small reduction in sodium consumption would save 44,000 lives a year—which is exactly the sort of statistic that gives legs to hysterical nutritional crusades (hysterical both in the funny-ha-ha sense and in the wandering-uterus-induced-insanity sense). The best example of that phenomenon is probably the equally batshit claim that obesity causes 300,000 deaths per year, but even anti-obesity crusaders have struggled to get far less aggressive measures passed, like the mandatory inclusion of calorie counts on fast food menus (which, incidentally, do not seem to reliably reduce how many calories people purchase).

Ortiz’s bill is actually so preposterous and so much more aggressive than the other recent proposals for reducing salt consumption, like the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene’s campaign to persuade food manufacturers to reduce the salt content of processed food by 40 percent over the next 10 years, that I initially thought it might be a sort of “straw man” bill designed by restaurateurs and/or salt-reform-skeptics to win people over by making salt reform seem even crazier than it actually is. But according to Ortiz, it was actually inspired by his father’s death:

He said he was prompted to introduce the bill because his father used salt excessively for many years, developed high blood pressure and had a heart attack (Albany Times Union).

Pity his father’s heart attack couldn’t be attributed to excessive exposure to creepy moustaches. Read more

Don’t Drink the Agave-Sweetened Kool-Aid Part I: “Natural” my foot

Mar 2 2010

UGH the subtitle. I really want Ms. Catalano to show me exactly where in "nature" she gets her agave nectar. Also, I find the use of "ultimate" to mean "exemplary" or "best" instead of "final" or "last" grating, but that's a petty battle against usage change that "Ultimate Frisbee" has clearly already won. Still, I like to think of it as "Frisbee for the End Days" Just as "wholesome" as any other hydrolyzed, refined sweetener. If you've been snarky about the Corn Refiners' Assn's recent "Sweet Surprise" marketing campaign, but have a bottle that looks like this in your cupboard, I have some delicious all-natural snake oil to sell you, good sir or madam.

This entry was nearly titled “Things That Might Not Kill You In Moderation But Certainly Won’t Make You Any Healthier Vol. I,” or “Hydrolyzed, Refined Sweeteners Masquerading as ‘Natural,’ Whole Foods,” but those seemed a little unwieldy. They do, however, capture the essence of the argument: agave is nutritionally no better than most other refined sweeteners, including high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS). If anything, it’s probably worse because it contains more fructose than table sugar or HFCS. It’s also no more or less “natural” than HFCS—it’s actually produced in a remarkably similar process that was first used on the fibrous pulp of the agave in the 1990s. While, as its proponents claim, the higher proportion of fructose has enabled people to call it a “low glycemic index sweetener,” sometimes alleged to be safer for diabetics and recommended by weight-loss programs like Weight Watchers, recent research suggests that large amounts of fructose aren’t healthy for anyone, diabetic or otherwise.

I mentioned agave nectar in passing in the HFCS post, but there’s enough conflicting information about it to merit its own post(s). A lot of the misinformation comes from agavevangelists, who can sometimes get a little sanctimonious about their avoidance of the demon HFCS and preference for “natural” sweeteners. Even this Vegfamily article that concludes “the physiological effects of all [caloric] sweeteners are similar” nonetheless claims:

Given the choice between sugar, HFCS, and agave nectar, I'll stick with organically-grown, unbleached cane sugar (evaporated cane juice) and organic raw agave nectar that are free of pesticides, herbicides, and chemical bleaching agents; not genetically engineered; and still retains some nutrients, as well as being vegan. Since HFCS is not available in organic form and is highly processed, I would never use it.

But agave nectar is just as processed as HFCS.

HFCS and Agave Nectar: One of These Things is Not Almost Exactly Like The Other

1910 magazine advertisement from http://goldcountrygirls.blogspot.com/2009/10/then-and-now-49-karo-syrup.html Like most starches, corn starch consists of large glucose polymers—70-80% the branched, non-water soluble amylopectin and 20-30% linear, soluble amylose. Normal or non-HFCS corn syrup, like Karo, is produced by breaking those polymers down into their constituent glucose molecules using acids, enzymes, and/or heat. For the history buffs: the acid hydrolysis of starch was first discovered because of the 1806 British blockade of the French West Indies. Napoleon I offered a cash reward for anyone who could come up with a replacement for cane sugar, and a Russian chemist named Konstantin Kirchhof found he could produce a sweet syrup from potato starch by adding sulfuric acid. The same process was first applied to corn in the mid-1860s, and gained popularity in the U.S. during the sugar shortages of WWI (source: The Oxford Encyclopedia of Food and Drink in America).

HFCS is produced by converting the glucose into fructose using an enzyme technology developed in Japan in the 1960s (detailed here). The resulting syrup, which contains up to 90% fructose, is then typically mixed with corn-based glucose syrup to produce HFCS-55 (the kind used in soft drinks, which has 55% fructose/45% glucose) or HFCS-45 (the kind used in baked goods, which has 45% fructose/55% glucose). Some people, like Cynthia commenting on Daily Candor, have suggested that the fructose and glucose in HFCS are absorbed into the bloodstream faster because they’re “free" instead of bound the way they are in the disacccharide sucrose, which is broken into glucose and fructose by the enzyme sucrase. Theoretically plausible, but apparently not true:

Sucrose is hydrolysed by brush-border sucrase into glucose and fructose.
The rate of absorption is identical, regardless of whether the sugar is presented to the mucosa as the disaccharide or the component monosaccharides (Gray & Ingelfinger, I 966, cited by H. B. McMichael in “Intestinal absorption of carbohydrates in man”).

I'm going to start refering to packaging like this as granola-washingJust like HFCS, agave nectar is produced by breaking down a plant-based polymer into its constituent sugars. In the case of agave, the relevant molecule is inulin, a fiber composed mostly of fructose units with a terminal glucose. Just like with corn and potato starch, there are different methods of hydrolyzing the sugars in inulin.  Blue Agave Nectar uses a thermic process. Madhava uses an enzyme process, just like HFCS.

Agavevangelists like to claim that agave nectar is a traditional sweetener used by native peoples, which appeals to the popular notion that the foodways of the past were generally healthier (e.g. Michael Pollan’s advice not to eat anything your great-grandmother wouldn’t recognize as food). Some, like Lynn Stephens of Shake Off the Sugar, merely note that the agave plant itself “has long been cultivated in hilly, semi-arid soils of Mexico.” That’s true, although it’s about as relevant as the long history of corn cultivation. Others claim that agave nectar itself has an ancient history. Flickr user Health Guy says of agave nectar: “It is 1-1/4 times sweeter than sugar, so you need less, and it has been consumed by ancient civilizations for over 5,000 years.”

Wrong. According to the website for Madhava Honey:

Agave nectar is a newly created sweetener, having been developed during the 1990's. Originally, the blue agave variety was used. This is the same plant used in the manufacture of tequila. During the late 90's, a shortage of blue agave resulted in huge increases in cost and a sweetener based on this plant became uneconomical. Further research was done and a method using wild agave was developed. Overcoming the language barrier between the Indians able to supply the nectar from the wild agave on their land and the Spanish speaking local manufacturer was the key that finally unlocked a supply of raw material and has led to our bringing this wonderful new product to market.

Still doing some native-washing (wild agave harvested by Indians who don’t speak Spanish—can’t you just feel the virtue?), but here’s what happens to the agave sap after harvesting, as described in the abstract of the 1998 patent issued for the production of fructose syrup from the agave plant:

A pulp of milled agave plant heads are liquified during centrifugation and a polyfructose solution is removed and then concentrated to produce a polyfructose concentrate. Small particulates are removed by centrifugation and/or filtration and colloids are removed using termic coagulation techniques to produce a partially purified polyfructose extract substantially free of suspended solids. The polyfructose extract is treated with activated charcoal and cationic and anionic resins to produce a demineralized, partially hydrolyzed polyfructose extract. This partially hydrolyzed polyfructose extract is then hydrolyzed with inulin enzymes to produce a hydrolyzed fructose extract. Concentration of the fructose extract yields a fructose syrup. (via Patentstorm)

Probably the healthiest sweetener pictured here and the one most shoppers in the market for a "natural sweetener" would be least likely to purchaseIt’s true that the corn used in HFCS is less likely than agave to be organically-grown, but you can get organic-certified corn syrup from the same manufacturer as the blue agave nectar pictured above and nutritionally, the main difference between that, the HFCS used in most processed foods, and agave nectar is the ratio of glucose: fructose. The regular corn syrup is 100% glucose, HFCS is usually 55/45 glucose/fructose, and agave nectar 56-90% fructose, depending on the plant and the process.

I’ve already talked a little about fructose vs. glucose here and here, but more coming soon in Agave-rant Part II concerning:

1) whether the fructose in agave is somehow better than, or indeed, different in any way from the fructose in HFCS

2) whether the fact that it’s sweeter than sugar makes it a lower-calorie alternative to sugar

3) whether its “low glycemic index” rating makes less likely to produce insulin resistance than table sugar and

4) whether it’s safer for diabetics

All of which people have claimed. I won’t keep you in suspense, especially given how long it may take me to put all of that together. The short answers are:

1) not in any nutritionally meaningful way

2) perhaps very slightly, but a <10 calorie/serving difference likely doesn’t make up for the increased risk of fatty liver syndrome and insulin resistance

3) no, it’s actually more likely to produce insulin resistance and

4) in miniscule amounts, perhaps, but recent trials involving diabetics and agave nectar were halted because of severe side effects.

Things That Won't Kill You Volume 4: Saturated Fat Part II: Cholesterol Myths

Feb 5 2010

image In retrospect, this probably could have been an entirely separate article in the "things that won't kill you" series, as many people still believe that dietary cholesterol (i.e. cholesterol in food) is a bad thing. For example, the article that image was taken from claims:

If you get too much dietary cholesterol (over 300mg a day) the extra cholesterol will accumulate in the walls of the blood vessels, making your LDL (bad) blood cholesterol levels rise. Over time, your arteries will become narrower, which can cut off the blood supply to your heart (causing a heart attack), or your brain (causing a stroke).

However, that's pretty easily dismissed—even Ancel Keys, "Monsieur Cholesterol" himself, never argued that dietary cholesterol was related to serum cholesterol or heart disease. In a 1952 article in Circulation, the journal of the American Heart Association, Keys noted that although rabbits and chickens that eat high-cholesterol diets will develop high cholesterol and atherosclerosis, or hardening of the arteries:

No animal species close to man in metabolic habitus has been shown to be susceptible to the induction of atherosclerosis by cholesterol feeding…. Moreover, even in the favorite species for such  experimentation, the herbivorous rabbit, the necessary concentration of cholesterol in the diet is fantastically high in comparison with actual human diets. Moreover, there is reason to believe that man has a greater power of cholesterol regulation than does the rabbit or the chicken. From the animal experiments alone the most reasonable conclusion would be that the cholesterol content of human diets is unimportant in human atherosclerosis.

Two "moreovers" in one paragraph, people! “Most reasonable conclusion”! Moreover, five decades of subsequent research haven't given anyone any reason to think differently. In 1997, Keys was even more direct:

There’s no connection whatsoever between cholesterol in food and cholesterol in blood. And we’ve known that all along. Cholesterol in the diet doesn’t matter unless you happen to be a chicken or a rabbit.

Research done in the interim on the relationship between diet and heart disease in humans like the Framingham and Tecumseh studies showed no relationship between cholesterol consumption and blood cholesterol or heart disease. I'm not even going to modify this with "probably" or "as far as we know": There is no reason to believe that how much cholesterol you eat has any effect on your health.

But that doesn’t stop the AHA from recommending that “most people…limit cholesterol intake to less than 300 mg per day” and claiming that “an egg can fit within heart-healthy guidelines for those people only if cholesterol from other sources — such as meats, poultry and dairy products — is limited.” Despite repeated studies showing that egg consumption is not associated with higher serum cholesterol, myocardial infarction, cardiovascular disease, or all-cause mortality. Read more

Salt Headlines That Make The Vein In My Forehead Throb

Jan 27 2010

Salt has been all over the news this week because of a study just published in The New England Journal of Medicine claiming that if everyone in the U.S. reduced their sodium consumption by 3 grams/day, there would be 32,000 fewer strokes, 54,000 fewer heart attacks, and 44,000 fewer deaths every year. The story that got my attention was:

Remaining Arctic Ice Seen Melting Away Completely! (...on a computer screen)

That’s surprising, I thought. Everything I’ve read suggests that the relationship between salt consumption and cardiovascular disease is weak, inconsistent, and probably only valid for 20-30% of the population. So I expected the article to refer to some new research where, you know, “big benefits” were “seen.” As in observed. Like, in the world. And, given the claim about the magnitude, probably also measured.

To their credit, the authors of the study claim no such thing. The numbers are projections based on the application of several assumed effects of salt reduction, adjusted for different demographics and then applied to a model of the entire U.S. population. Thus, the title of the study: “Projected Effect of Dietary Salt Reductions on Future Cardiovascular Disease.”

The article seems to grasp the essentially speculative nature of the findings. The very first sentence uses the conditional tense:

…scientists writing in The New England Journal of Medicine conclude that lowering the amount of salt people eat by even a small amount could reduce cases of heart disease, stroke and heart attacks as much as reductions in smoking, obesity, and cholesterol levels.

The headline, on the other hand, seems to have confused the “scientists” with clairvoyants. Never mind doing any checking into the validity of their assumptions.

And the claim about how the benefits compare to smoking and obesity reduction led to a few headlines like this:

webmd salt

This crazypants idea initially sounds a lot like what the study’s lead author claims:

"The cardiovascular benefits of reduced salt intake are on par with the benefits of population-wide reductions in tobacco use, obesity, and cholesterol levels."

But the logic behind the claim is that a small improvement in the health of every single American would be as significant as a large health improvement in the health of every single smoker:

Dr. Bibbins-Domingo said that for many people the decrease in blood pressure would be modest, which is why, she said, “many physicians have thrown up their hands and said, ‘I’m not going to advise my patients to reduce salt because it’s too hard for patients and the benefits for any individual are small.’

“But small incremental changes in salt, such as lowering salt in tomato sauce or breads and cereals by a small amount, would achieve small changes in blood pressure that would have a measurable effect across the whole population,” she said. “That’s the reason why this intervention works better than just targeting smokers.”

For any given individual, there is no question about whether cutting salt is even close to “as good” as quitting smoking. The evidence for the link between smoking and lung cancer and death is strong, reliable, consistent, and has a clear causal mechanism (carcinogens). The link between salt and cardiovascular disease and death is weak, inconsistent, and still poorly understood.

That latter point starts to get at the problems with the study itself, and not just the headlines it inspired. A number of the assumptions the projection was based on are either demonstrably false or simply unsubstantiated. More on this some other time; for now, a few quotes and links to the essays they come from in Esquire and the medical journal Hypertension:

In a more recent statement, the founder of the American Society of Hypertension, Dr. John Laragh, goes further: "Is there any proven reason for us to grossly modify our salt intake or systematically avoid table salt? Generally speaking the answer is either a resounding no, or at that, at best, there is not any positive direct evidence to support such recommendations."

Studies show that 30 percent of the Americans who have high blood pressure would greatly benefit from a low-sodium diet. But that's about 10 percent of the overall population -- the rest of us are fine with sodium. And drastically cutting out sodium may actually hurt some people. ( "Go Ahead, Salt Your Food")

And:

The available data suggest that the association of sodium intake to health outcomes reflected in morbidity and mortality rates is modest and inconsistent. Therefore, on the basis of the existing evidence, it seems highly unlikely that any single dietary sodium intake will be appropriate or desirable for each member of an entire population.... The decision to adopt a low sodium diet should be made with awareness that there is no evidence that this approach to blood pressure reduction is either safe, in terms of ultimate health impact, or that it is as effective in producing cardioprotection as has been proven for some drug therapies. (Salt, Blood Pressure, and Human Health)

Things That Won't Kill You Volume 4: Saturated Fat, Part I

Dec 14 2009

I know this is misleading because lard is mostly unsaturated, but it's been one of the major icons of "bad" fat and also, how graet is this image? from http://www.npnworldwide.com/lard

This is probably going to be an even harder sell than MSG, but I swear I'm not just trying to be contrary. It's true that all the major sources of public health and nutrition advice, including the Harvard School of Public Health, Mayo Clinic, CDC, and American Heart Association continue to refer to saturated fats as "bad fats" and suggest that people avoid them as much as possible, limit them to <7-8% of their total caloric intake, and replace them with "good," i.e. unsaturated fats, whenever possible. It's also true that there are a few studies that suggest that increased saturated fat consumption is correlated (albeit weakly) with cardiovascular disease (CVD).

However, many other studies have found no increase in CVD associated with saturated fat consumption. And several recent review articles have concluded that the evidence for a connection between saturated fat consumption and CVD is inconsistent, insufficient or nonexistent.

There are basically three things that have convinced me that saturated fat isn't independently responsible for heart disease or death:

1) groups of people who eat vastly more saturated fat than most Americans frequently have lower rates of CVD—or no apparent CVD at all

2) the study that first inspired many people to think saturated fat was a bad thing had a lot of obvious flaws and has been thoroughly discredited

3) there's no good evidence that the proposed mechanism actually works—briefly: saturated fat supposedly causes heart disease by raising serum cholesterol levels because cholesterol is what clogs arteries and causes heart attacks and strokes, but serum cholesterol turns out to be a really poor predictor of CVD 

1) The French (and Polynesian and Melanesian and Masai and Fulani and Sri Lankan) Paradox 

photo by Arun Ganesh http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:PlaneMadThe most confounding phenomenon for the theory that saturated fat consumption causes heart disease (sometimes called the lipid hypothesis or lipid-heart hypothesis or diet-heart hypothesis) is the virtual non-existence of CVD in multiple populations that eat way more saturated fat than most Americans. This has primarily been documented in the Pacific islands where coconuts, which are very high in saturated fat, are a staple food. For example, before the 1970s, the inhabitants of the island Tokelau got an estimated 55% of their calories from saturated fat, but heart disease was virtually unknown (according to Gary Taubes and Stephen Guyenet; notably, since their diet has shifted to include less saturated fat but more sugars and refined carbohydrates, many health indicators have worsened). Read more

Things That Won't Kill You Volume 3: MSG

Oct 14 2009

From Flickr user "The Other Dan" taken in Corktown, Toronto 

Unlike juice, which has sort of a mixed reputation even among contemporary nutritionists and doctors, MSG has been consistently demonized. Most people can't tell you why, they just know that it's bad. If pressed, they might tell you that it's "unnatural," that food manufacturers put it in processed foods to con people into eating "junk," that it's basically salt (which I'll address in a future post in this series), or that it gives some people headaches. Or they might just gesture to the fact that it's common knowledge that MSG is basically some kind of poison—after all, why would Chinese restaurants be so eager to reassure you that they don't use it if it were completely benign?

A recent commercial for Campbell's New Select Harvest Light (which is the sort of self-satirizing product name I'd expect to find in David Foster Wallace's fiction) suggests that even if people don't know what MSG stands for, they know that it's bad—potentially bad enough to deter people from buying a particular brand. Reading from a Progresso Light can, blonde #1 gets through "monosodium" but stumbles on "glutamate"—fortunately, the rainbow coalition includes an Asian woman who can translate that jargon into something we all understand: "That's MSG."

Although people may still associate it primarily with Chinese restaurant cooking, the Campbell's ad hints at its broader prevalence—MSG and other forms of glutamic acid are omnipresent in processed foods. They're especially likely to be found in foods designed to taste like things that have a lot of naturally-occurring glutamate (or similar molecules like inosinate or guanylate). Stock, broth, and bouillon often contain MSG, as does anything cheese-flavored or ranch-flavored, like Doritos, which actually contain five different forms of glutamate. I taste it the most in instant ramen and Chex Mix, but even though I know what it tastes like on its own, I can't always tell when something contains it or not. When used sparingly, it may not even be possible to discern because whether the glutamate in a dish comes from a mushroom or a salt, once it's dissolved in liquid or on your tongue, it's the exact same molecule:

from Wikipedia, showing up weirdly gray here

So even people who think it's "bad" and expect to feel bad after eating it probably eat MSG, at least from time to time, without even knowing it, and without suffering any negative effects. Read more