It’s high time we correct that omission. People get more out of a meal, not just emotionally, but physiologically, when the food is a pleasure to eat. In one of my favorite studies, Swedish and Thai women were fed a Thai dish that the Swedes found overly spicy. The Thai women, who liked the dish, absorbed more iron from the meal. When the researchers reversed the experiment and served hamburger, potatoes, and beans, the Swedes, who like this food, absorbed more iron. Most telling was a third variation of the experiment, in which both the Swedes and the Thais were given food that was high in nutrients but consisted of a sticky, savorless paste. In this case, neither group absorbed much iron.1
Similarly, studies of dieters find that those who regard pleasure as unimportant in their food choices enjoy their meals less and are more likely to be dissatisfied with their bodies and exhibit symptoms of eating disorders.2
Then there’s the much discussed French Paradox, the factthat the French eat a lot of what Americans believe will kill them, yet they die of heart attacks at about the same rate. The standard explanation, made famous in a 60 Minutes segment in 1991, credits wine drinking, but there’s surely more to the story. Serge Renaud, who first brought the paradox to light and runs a research institute at the National Institute of Health in Bordeaux, suggests that another part of the answer lies in the types of fat the French consume. Goose and duck fat may do for the French what olive oil does for southern Euro peans, Renaud hypothesized, namely, elevate their HDL (“good cholesterol”). Gascony has the lowest rates of heart disease in France, he noted, and people there eat a fair amount of foie gras.3
As my grandmother used to say, from his mouth to God’s ear. Imagine if our risk of heart disease dropped with every bite of the sautéed Moulard duck foie gras with pickled white nectarines, onions, and arugula that my wife and I feasted on at the French Laundry on a recent birthday, or the poached foie gras with a marmalade of greengage plums that I will never forget from another dinner there.
More likely, any benefit to our health from Thomas Keller’s wondrous cooking resulted from the happiness it brought us. Renaud’s critics have appropriately pointed out that Gascons probably have other traits in common that protect them from heart attacks besides a fondness for foie gras.
One candidate is their attitude toward eating. Paul Rozin, a psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania, organized a study in which 1,281 people in France, Japan, Belgium, and the United States were questioned about their attitudes toward food. Among the findings: the French view food as pleasure, while Americans worry about food. Asked what words they associate with chocolate cake, the French chose “celebration” and the Americans chose “guilt.” Asked about heavy cream, the French selected “whipped”; Americans chose “unhealthy.”4
We Americans see pleas urable and healthy eating as mutually exclusive. In a survey in 2000, Newsweek asked readers whether they consider long-term health when planning their diet. The four answers the magazine offered—“yes,” “not as carefully as I probably should,” “I pay more attention to my weight,” and “no, I enjoy life and eat what I want”—show how dreary and dichotomized the American view of eating has become.
The results of the survey underscore the point. Fewer than one in four respondents selected “enjoy life.”5
A Satisfaction Not Easy to Attain
We get that joyless view from nutrition writers and scientists who extol self-denial as a key to good health. “Spoil your appetite,” Walter Willett, chair of the Department of Nutrition at Harvard, advises readers of his book on food and health. Have a snack of carrots or whole-grain wafers prior to mealtime, he recommends, so you don’t eat as much at the table and risk gaining weight.
Willett’s book overflows with plea sure- busting suggestions. He proposes, for example: “You may eat less if your entire meal is a chicken dish and vegetables than if you prepare several tempting dishes.”
The very title of Willett’s book announces that happiness is beside the point. Eat, Drink, and Be Healthy, he named it.6
Willett follows in a long line of nutritional scientists who have regarded the pursuit of pleasure at the table as either immaterial to good health or downright detrimental. Writing in a popular magazine in 1902, a physician looked forward to the day when “man has conquered his palate and no longer allows it to dictate the quantity and quality of the things he swallows.” In Literary Digest in 1913, a chemist went further still. “It would be a hundred times better if foods were without odor or savor, for then we should eat exactly what we needed and would feel a good deal better,” he declared.7
Present-day proponents of the doctrine of naught would banish some of nature’s swellest edibles from our tables. The humble potato, for instance, is “part of the perilous pathway to heart disease and diabetes,” according to Willett. A baked potato may look innocent enough, but it turns to glucose, he cautions, which produces dangerous surges in blood sugar and insulin. Instead of classifying potatoes as vegetables and encouraging people to eat them, as it currently does, the U.S. Department of Agriculture should call them carbohydrates and have us consume them only occasionally, Willett maintains.8
Never mind that the potato was the principal source of sustenance in Ireland in the late eighteenth century and the early nineteenth century, providing most of the calories, protein, and vitamins that kept the peasant population alive. “Hard as is the fate of the labouring man, I think he is greatly indebted to the potato for his flow of spirits and health of body,” wrote Asenath Nicholson, an American diet reformer who spent four years in Ireland in the 1840s and published her observations in a book titled Ireland’s Welcome to the Stranger.9
Historians credit the potato with having made possible the population upsurge in central and northern Europe in the 1700s and 1800s, and as recently as the late 1990s, in a bestseller, Potatoes Not Prozac, this versatile tuber was being heralded as a cure for depression. But in 2002, Time magazine ended a feature article about foods that purportedly prevent disease with a sidebar titled “And Now the Bad News: Potatoes.” The piece quoted one of Willett’s colleagues in the Department of Nutrition at Harvard explaining that potatoes push down good cholesterol and drive up triglycerides.10
Pity the poor soul who took Willett and company’s advice and swore off spuds. “Baked slowly, with its skin rubbed first in a buttery hand, or boiled in its jacket and then ‘shook,’ it is delicious,” M. F. K. Fisher, the eminent food essayist, rightly wrote. “Alone, or with a fat jug of rich cool milk or a chunk of fresh Gruyere, it fills the stomach and the soul with a satisfaction not too easy to attain.”11
On Joel Robuchon’s list of the eight primary ingredients in his cuisine, the potato appears alongside caviar, scallops, truffles, crepes, sweetbreads, chestnuts, and almonds. Of the many extraordinary dishes at Jamin, Robuchon’s legendary three-star Paris restaurant that closed in 1996, the potato puree is the most famous. Made from the finest butter (a great deal of it, eight ounces for every pound of potato) and la ratte, an heirloom potato with a hazelnut flavor, Robuchon’s mashed potatoes changed lives. In conversations with food enthusiasts in the nearly twenty years since I tasted that dish at Jamin, I have discovered that I am far from the only person who credits that potato puree for a lifelong interest in great cooking.
Forgo potatoes? Better to follow the lead of some of the greatest chefs of our age and find ever more inventive uses for them. “I think potatoes are a magic ingredient,” Michel Richard told me during an interview one morning in the kitchen at Citronelle, his celebrated restaurant in Washington, D.C., and afterward, a friend and I had lunch at the restaurant and Richard proved his point. Each of the five courses he sent us, save the dessert, included potatoes. Buttery whipped potatoes lay beneath the foie gras. Crispy potatoes encircled the tuna tartare. Cumin-flavored potato chips accompanied the squab.
And there was the potato course itself, a glorious risotto made of Yukon Golds cut into eighth-inch dice and cooked to the texture of rice in a creamy, garlicky broth. Somewhere around his third bite, I saw on my friend’s face the look of revelation I must have had at Jamin. He’d had no idea, he told me, that potatoes could be as good as sex.
Walking on Eggs
The truth be known, they’re good for you too. “Potatoes are a fat- free, sodium- free and cholesterol- free food. They are high in vitamin C and potassium and provide a good source of vitamin B6 and dietary fiber,” notes a brochure published by Oldways Preservation Trust, a food advocacy group based in Boston.
A close look at the brochure reveals one of the secret failings of the church of naught. Though they like to pretend otherwise, the priests disagree among themselves. On the flip side of this pro-potato message is a picture of none other than Walter Willett. He is one of four “top nutrition experts” who provided blurbs in support of the Mediterranean Diet Pyramid that Oldways has been hyping and that calls for less meat, more plant and vegetable oil, and plenty of potatoes. (“Get into a Mediterranean frame of mind by creating quick and easy potato-based meals,” the brochure urges.)
Willett’s blurb does not say anything about potatoes per se, but the fact that there could be a head shot of an anti-potato man on the reverse side of a pitch for potatoes speaks volumes about the folly of most dietary mandates. Oldways and like-minded organizations go to great lengths to devise clear and consistent lists of what the public should and should not eat. They convene special conferences and call together panels of experts from around the world for that express purpose. Scrutinize their proclamations, however, or the process that produced them, and you find a gumbo of confl icts, contradictions, politics, and personalities.
“Like most contemporary issues, the question of what people should eat in order to maintain good health cannot be neatly split into matters of ‘fact’ and matters of ‘values,’ ” Stephen Hilgartner, a professor in the Department of Science and Technology Studies at Cornell, concluded after a detailed study of three influential reports on diet and health from the National Academy of Sciences. “The question, ‘What are the facts?,’ is entangled in questions about the criteria for determining facts, which in turn are connected to questions about who can be believed, which institutions are credible, what scientific methods are reliable, and how much evidence is needed to justify altering the status quo.”12
Committees of experts convened by the government sometimes are unable to resolve those questions or reach agreement about particular dietary advice. When they do achieve consensus, a great deal of what Hilgartner politely refers to as “information control” and “persuasive rhetoric” is involved. The committee’s chair sees to it that differences of opinion among committee members are kept within bounds and the views of qualified scientists who disagree with the official statement don’t muddy the waters. Skeptical scientists are excluded from the committee in the first place, or their concerns are downplayed in a carefully worded consensus report.13
Advocacy groups have to be political too in deciding which foods to damn in their public documents. Had Oldways moved potatoes to the condemned end of the food pyramid, the group’s leaders would have avoided the embarrassment of contradicting Willett, but in so doing, they would have broken ranks with another of their well-known supporters. Jane Brody, the New York Times health columnist and a frequent speaker at Oldways meetings, had been championing potatoes as nutritious and nonfattening for the past quarter century.
In 1981, when Jane Brody’s Nutrition Book came out, she told an interviewer that her husband has been “a confirmed meat-and-potatoes man with the emphasis on meat” before he began typing the manuscript for her book. “But in the pro cess of typing,” she said, “he became a convert to my nutritional philosophy, so now he’s a meat- and-potatoes man with the emphasis on the potatoes.”14
No enemy of potatoes is a friend of Jane Brody’s. During an interview, when I asked her about Walter Willett’s recommendations about them, she could barely contain her ire. “His research may be fine, but his opinions really leave me cold,” she replied. The fact that a potato can raise blood sugar is “absolutely meaningless,” she says, because people don’t eat potatoes by themselves. “A Mars bar is likely to be eaten that way, but how many baked potatoes have you eaten without anything else? I’ll bet none. When you eat the potato in the context of a meal, it doesn’t do the same thing because it’s mixed with many other nutrients, which neutralizes the glucose-raising effect of the potato.”15
When she finishes her defense of potatoes, I ask about the item that had accompanied my hash browns at breakfast. Eggs, I remind her, were on the condemned-foods list not long ago. To those of us who like to eat, Brody’s more than one hundred articles over the years cautioning against a lengthy list of foods, from meats (except on special occasions and then only lean and skinless cuts smaller than four ounces) to Girl Scout cookies (“they should be banned from the face of the earth,” she declared at an Oldways conference) have been excessive, to say the least. But she makes light of the fact that she and fellow preachers of the gospel of naught have been known to damn a food one year and absolve it the next.16
“I use that Humpty Dumpty analogy,” Brody replies. “The egg had a very bad rep, but we are putting Humpty Dumpty back together again. I’ve resurrected the egg and so has the American Heart Association. The Heart Association now says the vast majority of people can eat one egg a day without any problems. But if you happen to be a person whose body is sensitive to dietary cholesterol, and that may be as much as 10 percent of the population, then you have to be careful about those high- cholesterol foods.”
When her twin boys were young, she frequently fed them a dish she called “Eggs Jane”—an English muffin, a slice of turkey breast, poached egg white, and a slice of cheese heated in a toaster oven. “It was my version of Eggs Benedict, but without the bad things,” she says, adding that nowadays she eats yolks.
Back in the 1970s and 1980s, Brody had been among the chorus of nutritionists and health writers who warned the American public that yolks are packed with cholesterol. The more cholesterol a person ingests, the theory went, the higher his blood cholesterol and the greater his odds of a heart attack, so eggs were seen as potentially lethal. And as a result of the bad publicity, egg consumption in the U.S. plummeted.17
Yet Brody says she does not regret having discouraged people from eating eggs. In her view, she was merely reporting the state of knowledge at the time. “We know something that we didn’t know then,” she says. “We now know how important HDLs are. When we only looked at LDLs, the bad cholesterol, it looked terrible to eat a lot of eggs. But if you look at the ratio of total cholesterol to HDL, the good cholesterol that cleanses your arteries like Drano, then for a lot of people who thought they couldn’t eat eggs, eggs are okay.”
The Wit to Eat Whole Yogurt
I have learned to expect this type of rejoinder whenever I ask defenders of the doctrine of naught about the considerable quantity of crow they have had to eat for vilifying foods that deserved better. We had no way to know, they insist, when in actuality, there was reason to withhold their negative judgment. At the time they were castigating the egg, for example, not a single study had shown that eating eggs produced higher rates of heart disease.18
Nor has research since that time. On the contrary, nutritionists have long known that eggs have much to commend them as staples in the human diet. They supply protein, B vitamins, and other nutrients at low cost, and although they’re rich in fl avor, they go well with a range of other ingredients in recipes. What’s more, they’re amenable to just about every major method of cooking, from boiling to baking to frying, and to more textures and shapes, from foamy to fluffy to firm, than any other food.19
Eggs were one of many victims of an unfortunate campaign against dietary cholesterol that began in the 1950s and still continues by virtue of the government-mandated nutrition label on every food product. Since 1994, food manufacturers have been required to include in their packaging a table of “Nutrition Facts” that directs consumers to restrict total daily cholesterol to little more than the amount in one large egg. Even though Jane Brody has come to acknowledge that most people can consume more than that amount of cholesterol with little or no adverse effect on their blood cholesterol levels or their hearts, cholesterol remains one of five demonized nutrients on food labels, along with saturated fat, sugar, sodium, and trans-fatty acids.20
Rather than call all of that to Jane Brody’s attention during our interview, I raised a more general question. I asked if she receives much criticism of her views about food.
She said no, but then told a story that helped me understand the appeal of her philosophy of food for large numbers of people. “Somebody did just ask me,” she recounts, “how I can recommend fish when fish has all this stuff in it that’s not good for you, mercury and I don’t know what else. I said, ‘Well, we have to eat every day, and we have to make choices, and everything has a downside.’ If you eat four hundred carrots in one day, you’ll probably die because four hundred carrots are poisonous. That doesn’t mean you can’t eat two or three carrots.”
Some of us see eating as something we get to do, a privilege and source of joy. Others view eating as something they have to do. For those who take the latter view, Brody’s columns are the journalistic equivalent of Powdermilk Biscuits. Like Garrison Keillor’s fictitious product, they “give shy persons the strength to get up and do what they have to do.” Her columns embolden them to eat what they ought to eat and sidestep the rest.
“You’re either a fat slob who eats junk all day, or you’re a perky person who weighs out bits of skinless chicken and drinks low-fat milk,” Emily Green, a feature writer at the Los Angeles Times, paraphrases Brody’s view of the public. “What’s wrong with cooking and eating and living in a fulfilling way that is actually conducive to healthfulness? What’s wrong with having a good meal and working in the garden in the afternoon?” asks Green, who did precisely those things on the afternoon I interviewed her at her home. She prepared a resplendent lunch for us, and after our meeting, returned to work in her backyard garden, an urban Eden of green and flowering plants that attracts many-colored butterflies and birds.
Relatively little of our lunch complied with the dietary advice Green lambastes. The spinach, steamed and dressed in extra-virgin olive oil from Nice, conformed, but not the omelet stuffed with cheese, and certainly not the whole-milk yogurt from Straus Family Creamery, a small producer located near San Francisco. Lusciously thick, it is infinitely more satisfying than the nonfat yogurts that monopolize the dairy cases of American supermarkets.
Green has written eloquently against nonfat dairy products, low-fat sweets, and the like—products she christens “non-undelows” because their names begin with non-, un-, de-, or low. “In a superb sleight of hand, we have been led to believe that the leaching of those pesky ‘nutritive’ elements from our food and drink is somehow good for us,” Green has written. She argues, to the contrary, that the health benefits of nonundelows remain unproved, and their proliferation has contributed to a rise in obesity. “Yes, of course there are other factors in the fattening of America: We drive more and walk less, and so on. But my own guess,” she says, “is that we can’t stop eating because non-undelows leave us hungry.”21
Partly to prove her point, Green put herself on a weight-loss diet that included no nonundelows. “To my knowledge, not a single low-fat food passed my lips,” she says of the diet and exercise plan on which she lost fifty-two pounds in f i fty-two weeks without denying herself what she calls “non-negotiable pleasures” like meals at great restaurants.22
Green did cut back on some things. She limited her candy intake to one Valrhona dark chocolate a month, wine to one glass with dinner, and bread to a few times a week (garlic bread at a beloved lunch place and the bread basket at Campanile Restaurant). The only foods Green gave up entirely were pasta, cookies, doughnuts, and non-undelows.
She assails others journalists who do not “trust us with real food, with the wit to eat whole yogurt, real milk or cream when we want something filling, and an apple when we want a light snack.” The very mention of low-fat or nonfat milk enrages her. “It’s thin and nasty and has all of its goodness stripped out of it,” she says when I broach the subject. “If there’s too much fat in something, have less of it. I don’t go with the idea, ‘Oh, Picasso’s canvases are too big, let’s just cut them in half.’ ”
That sort of reasoning, along with the “One Percent or Less” low-fat milk campaign initiated by the Center for Science in the Public Interest, an advocacy group, and promoted by assorted nutrition writers and government agencies, has resulted in abandonment of whole milk in the U.S. Consumption has decreased by two-thirds over the past three decades, while sales of low-fat and non-fat milk have more than tripled.23
Where Hot Dogs Trump Spinach
Many Americans, including some serious gastronomes and accomplished home chefs, have not tasted whole milk in years. A few weeks after my visit with Green, at a special dinner of Turkish food presented at a Los Angeles restaurant, the first item brought to our table was a large bowl of what looked and tasted like a rich, creamy, exotic pudding. My wife and the couple who joined us—all practiced cooks and savvy diners—scoffed when I identified it as yogurt. I would have been in the dark myself had it not been for my visit with Emily Green, a fact I chose not to reveal. I opted for smug silence when Evan Kleiman, the feast’s chef, came to our table and responded to my wife’s query about the mystery dish. Americans are so unaccustomed to fullfat yogurt, Kleiman said, that it tastes spectacular to us.
What’s more, dairy fat contains conjugated linoleic acid (CLA), which studies suggest inhibits cancers of the colon, breast, and stomach and decreases the risk of heart attacks. But devotees of the doctrine of naught get hardly any CLA in their diets unless they lapse and partake of verboten foods that contain it. Which raises a question: If future studies confirm the benefits of CLA, ought nutrition writers to urge Americans to swear off skim milk and eat ice cream?24
Personally, I would love an excuse to consume Ben & Jerry’s Cherry Garcia, which does wonders for my soul. Sadly, though, the same cannot be said for my body. Half a cup of Cherry Garcia delivers 260 calories, as much sugar as a Mr. Goodbar, and a hell of a lot of saturated fat. You don’t want to eat too much, CLA or no CLA.
No one would seriously advocate ice cream as a health food, though in fact that advice is no less fallacious than its opposite, a faulty logic that assumes if a steady diet of something is harmful, going without it must be healthful. That wrong-headed reasoning is rampant. For one of his studies, Paul Rozin presented the following scenario to a diverse sample of Americans: “Assume you are alone on a desert island for one year and you can have water and one other food. Pick the food that you think would be best for your health.” Seven choices were offered: corn, alfalfa sprouts, hot dogs, spinach, peaches, bananas, and milk chocolate.
Fewer than one in ten people chose hot dogs or milk chocolate, the two foods on the list that come closest to providing a complete diet because of the fats and other nutrients they contain.
In response to another set of questions, half of Rozin’s respondents said that even very small amounts of salt, cholesterol, and fat are unhealthy. More than one in four believed that a diet totally free of those substances is healthiest, when in reality, of course, they are crucial nutrients for human health. Without them, we could not survive.25
Most nutrition writers are not likely to correct those misconceptions. Their goal is not to elucidate the virtues of hot dogs, fats, and seasonings, but rather, as Emily Green put it, “to keep nasty food out of people’s mouths.” Nor is there much incentive for other journalists to challenge the conventional wisdom. Those who do typically find themselves accused of being an enemy of public health.
Green and other doubters routinely receive caustic criticism from advocacy organizations such as the Center for Science in the Public Interest and from readers who accuse them variously of ignorance, naïveté, or duplicity. After Gary Taubes, a veteran science writer, argued in a New York Times Magazine piece in 2002 that foods such as steak and cheese, “considered more or less deadly under the low-fat dogma, turn out to be comparatively benign,” and that “cutting back on the saturated fats in my diet to the levels recommended by the American Heart Association would not add more than a few months to my life,” he was decried by spokespeople for advocacy and governmental organizations, and more vehemently still, by nutrition writers. Jane Brody devoted an entire column to repudiating him, and in a phone interview I had with her the day after Taubes’s article came out, she dismissed his claims as “total conjecture” and “irresponsible.”26
“Laughable” was the word that Sally Squires, the nutrition columnist at the Washington Post, chose to describe Taubes’s argument, even though an earlier version had been published in Science magazine and won a National Association of Science Writers award. “Get real,” Squires demanded in one of three disapproving pieces she published soon after Taubes’s article appeared. Recalling Woody Allen’s 1973 movie Sleeper, in which a man wakes up two hundred years hence and informs doctors that steaks and cream pies were once believed to be unhealthy, Squires counseled readers: “We laughed then, and we should be laughing now.”27
Those are pretty harsh words from one Columbia Journalism School graduate about another, especially considering that Taubes does not actually deny the central tenet of the doctrine of naught. Neither in his articles nor in his book does Taubes disagree that whole classes of delectable and nutrient- rich foods should be largely eliminated from the American diet. Instead he demonizes a different group of foods, “those refined carbohydrates at the base of the famous Food Guide Pyramid—the pasta, rice and bread—that we are told should be the staple of our healthy low-fat diet.” In Taubes’s scheme, eggs at breakfast are fine, but hold the toast. Steak dinners can’t be beat, assuming you skip the potatoes.
(Taubes eats what he preaches, by the way. He and I have had several lunches together at restaurants that serve warm, fragrant breads before the meal, and with my main course, pan-fried red-skinned potatoes or homemade pasta. Yet Taubes feasts away on his meat, unmoved by the pleasures on my plate.)
Notes
1. Guidelines, Swedish and Thai study, and related research: Tufts University Health and Nutrition Letter, October 2000. The original study: Leif Hallberg, E.Bjorn- Rasmussen, et al., “Iron Absorption from Southeast Asian Diets. II. Role of Various Factors That Might Explain Low Absorption,” American Journal of Clinical Nutrition 30 (1977): 539–48. See also Paul Rozin, Claude Fischler, et al., “Attitudes to Food and the Role of Food in Life in the USA, Japan, Flemish Belgium, and France,” Appetite 33 (1999): 163–80.
2. Marjaana Lindeman and K. Stark, “Loss of Plea sure, Ideological Food Choice Reasons, and Eating Pathology,” Appetite 35 (2000): 263–68.
3. Molly O’Neill, “Can Foie Gras Aid the Heart?” New York Times, November 17, 1991; Angela Smyth, “Do Not Beware the Fattened Goose,” Independent (London), December 24, 1991.
4. Rozin et al., “Attitudes...”; Laura Fraser, “The French Paradox,” Salon, February 4, 2000. For alternative (including diet- based) hypotheses, see Malcolm Law and Nicholas Wald, “Why Heart Disease Mortality Is Low in France,” British Medical Journal 318 (1999): 1471–80, and in the same issue, a commentary on that paper by Meir Stampfer and Eric Rimmin.
5. “Periscope,” Newsweek, September 11, 2000, p. 6.
6. Walter Willett, Eat, Drink, and Be Healthy (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2001), p. 54.
7. Warren Belasco, “Future Notes: The Meal- in- a-Pill,” Food and Foodways 8 (2000): 253–71 (quotes appear on pp. 260 and 261).
8. Willett, Eat, Drink, and Be Healthy, pp. 19–20.
9. Redcliffe Salaman, The History and Social Influence of the Potato (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1949); Ellen Messer, “Three Centuries of Changing Eu rope an Tastes for the Potato,” pp. 101–13 in Helen Macbeth, ed., Food Preferences and Taste (New York: Berghahn, 1997). Nicholson quote is from Barbara Haber, From Hardtack to Home Fries (New York: Free Press, 2002), p. 11.
10. Hans Jurgen Teuteberg and Jean-Louis Flandrin, “The Transformation of the Eu rope an Diet,” pp. 442–56 in J. Flandrin and M. Montanari, eds., A Culinary History of Food (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999); Kathleen DesMaisons, Potatoes Not Prozac (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1999); Janice M. Horowitz, “Ten Foods That Pack a Wallop,” Time, January 21, 2002, p. 81. See also Richard Wurtman and Judith Wurtman, “The Use of Carbohydrate- Rich Snacks to Modify Mood State,” pp. 151–56 in G. Harvey Anderson and Sidney Kennedy, eds., The Biology of Feast and Famine (New York: Academic Press, 1992); Judith Wurtman, The Serotonin Solution (New York: Fawcett Books, 1997).
11. M. F. K. Fisher, The Art of Eating (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1990), p. 23.
12. Stephen Hilgartner, Science on Stage (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000), p. 29.
13. Ibid.: 9–20. See also Marion Nestle, Food Politics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), pp. 70–72.
14. Edwin McDowell, “Behind the Best Sellers,” New York Times, September 20, 1981, p. 42.
15. Jane Brody, interview, April 26, 2002, and see her “Personal Health” column about this: New York Times, June 11, 2002, p. F8.
16. See, for example, Jane Brody’s articles and “Personal Health” columns in the New York Times of June 18, 1980; June 24, 1981; September 24, 1986; May 10, 1995; May 14, 2001; June 26, 2001; October 9, 2001; June 11, 2002; July 16, 2002; March 9, 2004. Quote is from Brody’s remarks at an Oldways conference, San Diego, California, April 23, 2002.
17. Jane Brody, “Personal Health,” New York Times, January 18, 1984: C1; and April 4, 1984, p. C1. She is more favorable toward eggs elsewhere, for example in Jane Brody’s Nutrition Book (New York: Bantam, 1981). On the fall and rise of the egg more generally, see Joyce Hendley, “Cracking the Case,” Eating Well (Spring 2003): 25–32.
18. Over time, Brody contradicts her own advice about fats and cholesterol. For examples from the 1980s, see Russell Smith, The Cholesterol Conspiracy (St.Louis: Warren H. Green Publishers, 1991), pp. 28–29.
19. Frank Hu et al., “A Prospective Study of Egg Consumption and Risk of Cardiovascular Disease,” Journal of the American Medical Association 281 (1999): 1387–94; Stephen B. Kritchevsky and D. Kritchevsky, “Egg Consumption and Coronary Heart Disease,” Journal of the American College of Nutrition 19 (2000): 549S–555S; Harold McGee, On Food and Cooking (New York: Macmillan, 1984), chap. 2.
20. U.S. Food and Drug Administration, “Guidance on How to Understand and Use the Nutrition Facts Panel on Food Labels” (http://vm.cfsan. fda.gov/~dms/foodlab.html); David Kritchevsky, “Diet and Artherosclerosis,” Journal of Nutrition, Health, and Aging 5 (2001): 155–59; Pirjo Pietinen et al., “Intake of Fatty Acids and Risk of Coronary Heart Disease in a Cohort of Finnish Men,” American Journal of Epidemiology 145 (1997): 876–87; Uffe Ravnskov, “Diet–Heart Disease Hypothesis Is Wishful Thinking,” British Medical Journal 324 (2002): 238; Hester Vorster et al., “Egg Intake Does Not Change Plasma Lipoprotein and Coagulation Profi les,” American Journal of Clinical Nutrition 55 (1992): 400–410; Paul N. Hopkins, “Effects of Dietary Cholesterol on Serum Cholesterol: A Meta- Analysis and Review,” American Journal of Clinical Nutrition 55 (1992): 1060–70; Esther Lopez- Garcia, M. Schulze, et al., “Consumption of Trans Fatty Acids Is Related to Plasma Biomarkers of Inflammation and Endothelial Dysfunction,” Journal of Nutrition 135 (2005): 562–66.
21. Emily Green, “No—Less Is Less,” Los Angeles Times, May 10, 2000.
22. Emily Green, “The Low-Fat-Free, Diet-Food-Free Diet” and “Virtue with a Touch of Gloss,” Los Angeles Times, March 13 and July 24, 2002.
23. Estimate is based on data from the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
24. See David Kritchevsky, “Antimutagenic and Some Other Effects of Conjugated Linoleic Acid,” British Journal of Nutrition 83 (2000): 459–65; Rosaleen Devery et al., “Conjugated Linoleic Acid and Oxidative Behaviour in Cancer Cells,” Biochemical Society Transactions 29 (2001): 341–44; Marianne O’Shea et al., “Milk Fat Conjugated Linoleic Acid (CLA) Inhibits Growth of Human Mammary MCF- 7 Cancer Cells,” Anticancer Research 20 (2000): 3591–601; Jean- Michel Gaullier, J. J. Halse, et al., “Supplementation with Conjugated Linoleic Acid for 24 Months Is Well Tolerated by and Reduces Body Fat Mass in Healthy, Overweight Humans,” Journal of Nutrition 135 (2005): 778–84. For additional studies on CLA, see www.wisc.edu/fri/clarefs.htm. Contrary to the impression given by advocates of the gospel of naught, whether low- fat diets are optimal for reducing the risk of heart disease and related outcomes remains an open question. See for example Kulwara Meksawan, David R. Pendergast, et al., “Effect of Low and High Fat Diets on Nutrient Intakes and Selected Cardiovascular Risk Factors in Sedentary Men and Women,” Journal of the American College of Nutrition 23 (2004): 131–40.
25. Paul Rozin et al., “Lay American Conceptions of Nutrition,” Health Psychology 15 (1996): 438–47. See also Michael E. Oakes, “Suspicious Minds: Perceived Vitamin Content of Ordinary and Diet Foods with Added Fat, Sugar or Salt,” Appetite 43 (2004): 105–8.
26. Jane Brody, “High- Fat Diet: Count Calories and Think Twice,” New York Times, September 10, 2002.
27. Gary Taubes, “What If It’s All Been a Big Fat Lie?” New York Times, July 7, 2002; Sally Squires, “Into Our Stomachs and Out of Our Minds,” “Experts Declare Story Low on Saturated Facts,” and “The Skinny on Author Gary Taubes,” Washington Post, July 28, 2002, and August 27, 2002. For Taubes’s response to Squires, see Gary Taubes, “Dietary Fat, Cont’d.,” Washington Post, September 24, 2002.
By Barry Glassner in "The Gospel of Food - Everything You Think You Know About Food Is Wrong", Harper Collins,USA, 2007,excerpts p. 11-26. Adapted and illustrated to be posted by Leopoldo Costa.