It’s not often that I am shocked by an article in the weekly food section, but this one from the Seattle P-I has me waiting for Ashton Kutcher to pop out.
When good food goes … bad (January 30):
> There is a dark side to so-called “good foods.”
> The problem isn’t exactly with the foods themselves. The issue is how we so commonly prepare the foods: mixing them with cream or butter or cheese, cooking them in fats and meats, topping them with oils, sweetening them with sugars….
> If you must cook with bacon, use turkey bacon or Canadian bacon.
In the article, the writer chooses three recipes from The Gourmet Cookbook that she says exemplify a “good foods gone bad” approach. She then submits the recipes to three nutritionists for their comments.
The article is by food editor Rebekah Denn, and I found it puzzling for several reasons. Before I enumerate them, I should add that Rebekah is a friend of mine, a good writer, and a loyal booster of my career, and I am hereby presenting her with a license to pick on anything I write. So here goes:
1. Did no one involved in this article get the memo that low-fat diets are, if not totally passé, at least on the ropes? Even Walter Willett of Harvard, probably the most respected nutritionist in the country, no longer advises reducing fat intake. If you don’t trust Willett, trust Michael Pollan, who shreds the “lipid hypothesis” in his new book, In Defense of Food. Major studies have found dietary fat consumption (excepting trans fat) to be unrelated to cancer, heart disease, and obesity, and some studies have found dietary fat consumption to be *negatively* correlated with weight gain: eat more fat, lose more weight. Recall also that Julia Child was right and margarine-peddling nutritionists were wrong: butter is better. This doesn’t mean nutritionists are always wrong, but when one is recommending an engineered substitute (turkey bacon? seriously?) for a traditional food, my money is on the tasty stuff.
2. Cooking vegetables with oils, meat, and dairy is not a new trend. It’s downright prehistoric. I am hard-pressed to think of a traditional vegetable dish that is low in fat. And I am thinking about a lot of delicious vegetable dishes. Indian curries. Peperonata. Szechuan green beans. Tempura. Collard greens with a ham hock. Kale gratin. Sliced summer tomatoes dressed with olive oil and balsamic. (Okay, I thought of a couple: green papaya salad and pickles.) This is not a historical accident, as the nutritionists could presumably tell you: vegetables taste better with fat because most vegetables contain fat-soluble vitamins and are therefore not as nutritious when consumed without fat.
3. In the same vein, “many Americans have not acquired a taste for the slight bitterness that dark leafy greens and cruciferous vegetables such as broccoli can carry,” writes Denn. True, I guess, but as a huge fan of these vegetables I would argue that combining them with fat or dairy doesn’t blunt their bitterness but transforms it into something uniquely savory. There is a primal relationship between green vegetables and pork, milk, butter, or olive oil. It’s not something invented by Gourmet magazine. I cook something in this category at least once a week, and more often in the winter.
3. One of the nutritionists (Myrtle McCulloch of Georgetown) seems to be recommending raw spinach. Here is what she should know about raw spinach: “Oxalic acid, it seems, forms an insoluble complex with calcium and iron–not only the calcium and iron in the spinach itself but other sources of them as well–and renders uncooked spinach a non-nutritious green,” writes Jeffrey Steingarten. (**edit:** He is wrong about the iron; see the comments) This is aside from the danger of food poisoning. Raw spinach should be eaten only occasionally and I wouldn’t serve it to a child; it is not good for you. (**edit:** Cooking spinach, especially by boiling, destroys both *E. coli* and oxalic acid, so have at it.)
4. This is the only time I can remember seeing a column with recipes where the column is advising you *not to make the recipes.* But the kale recipe (sauteed kale with bacon and vinegar) sounds awesome and I’m going to make it this week.
5. “[N]ot many people would make the effort to make mushroom soup regularly,” writes Denn. It’s not clear whether she’s paraphrasing a nutritionist or saying this herself, but in either case, isn’t this the FOOD section, where the writer is supposed to explain why it might be worth spending 30 whole minutes to make mushroom soup from scratch rather than opening a can of Campbell’s cream of mushroom?
5. Finally, here’s what Denn wrote just five days ago:
Mangalitsa Madness: Porcine Foie Gras (January 25):
> I have eaten the pork belly, and suddenly I comprehend the zealot’s gleam in Heath Putnam’s eyes when he implores buyers of his Mangalitsa pigs not to trim the fat. This fat-laden cut — belly with some small ribs — is sinfully rich and salty-sweet. By the time it left its slow braise and joined some glazed turnips and Brussels sprouts on the plate it was practically pork candy, or the pig equivalent of foie gras. It was so tender and moist it fell apart at the touch of a fork.
As a nutritionist, I recommend substituting Sizzlean for the Mangalitsa pork.
Another reason to, as you say, put your money on the tasty stuff: What tastes good is probably better for you.
link
Great article, Lore–thanks.
Hey, folks, I dumbly double-posted this, so I’m copying comments from the other one and deleting it:
Comment by JR
From an outsider’s point of view, it’s very hard not to try to apply the pattern of “barbers telling their customers they need haircuts,†with respect to nutritionists. Now I don’t mean to say necessarily that they are universally doing something intentionally greedy or wrong, I just wonder if the taxonomy is weak and whether they can abandon it given that application of it is, after all, what pays for their meals.
If you view life as a series of healthy and unhealthy actions with very little leeway between the two (“a rare occasionâ€), you can spend a lot of time (even make a career) of trying to force different actions to fall into those categories.
The tip about using spices to make food more tasty has always frustrated me. Spices do not typically help put a dish in balance. Acid, sugar, fat and salt do a big chunk of that work. And if you’re not adding fat, how much is your spice really helping?
Comment by Wendy
I, too, thought when I read this article that it read like something that had been written ten or more years ago.
And I was actually surprised by the low calorie counts per serving of the three recipes given; I’m not sure why the nutritionists were horrified.
I really like the part where the bacon destroys the nutritional value of the kale. That sounds like a battle that Iris would act out with her bacon and kale at the dinner table.
JR, my thought about the whole use-herbs-and-spices-instead-of-salt/fat thing—and I don’t know if this is original or not: this probably started as a far-out recommendation for the people in the world who really do have to limit fat and/or salt because of specific medical conditions. It became mainstream when fat and salt were declared the enemies of all.
I should add that there are many Japanese vegetable dishes that are delicious and very low in fat. The trick is usually salt, acid, and glutamate in the form of soy sauce, seaweed, or fish flakes. For example, in Harumi Kurihara’s wonderful new book, there’s a salad of blanched cabbage with soy sauce, mirin, lime juice, and fish flakes. I think I’ll throw it on the menu tonight.
Thank you for posting about this hoorendous article! I was so surprised to see this outdated and just plain bad advice in the PI this morning. Are they all living under a rock over there?
I think it has a lot to do with our cultures fondness for putting things into black and white categories “good” and “bad”. Both the anti-fat nutritionists and the typical-American-diet eaters seem to get in trouble doing this…
One one hand it’s silly to automatically put kale in the BAAD category because it contains bacon, but on the other hand it’s also dumb to refuse to eat vegetables and fruits because they can’t possibly taste good since they’re “healthy”.
Plenty of other health experts, alas, are still on the fats-are-bad bandwagon. Witness the recent Sally Squires column in the Washington Post in which she approvingly quotes a Mayo clinic endocrinologist:
“I am all for eating whole-grain bread,” he says, “but if we allow our patients to put butter or a slice of cheddar cheese on it, they’d be better off eating Wonder Bread.”
My favorite part was..
“McCulloch frowns on recipes that involve excessive chopping or cooking, which can rob vegetables of their vitamins.”
I’d love to see the science behind that. Especially the chopping part. I wonder if you’re not supposed to chew either…your teeth might steal “the vitamins” and sell them on ebay.
mmmmm…..fat
Dr. Oz (on Oprah) said at least our bodies know butter, the fake healthy stuff is nasty and our bodies don’t know how to process it. I’m sticking with real butter and real pork bacon.
From Caroline’s comment, “‘I am all for eating whole-grain bread,’ he says, ‘but if we allow our patients to put butter or a slice of cheddar cheese on it, they’d be better off eating Wonder Bread.'”
I just don’t understand this all-or-nothing attitude, and think that it gets in the way of people who would make an effort to do the right thing by themselves, whether it be by eating well, or exercising or whatever. But when The Experts tell us that we MUST exercise 90 minutes a day or it won’t help, or we MUST only eat whole grains without cheddar, otherwise our efforts are for naught, many of us will think oh, to hell with it, and stop trying at all. Instead, isn’t it better to do what we can do, whatever that may be? Isn’t a little whole grain better than none? A little exercise better than none?
Sigh…
What about pork rillettes on whole-grain bread?
I can see where a nutritionist might come up with the notion that “excessive chopping” is bad. Water soluble vitamins oxidize upon exposure to air. Chopping produce containing these vitamins would increase the air exposure and reduce the nutritional value. Slowly. I’d expect the food to go bad before all the vitamins have oxidized.
The excessive cooking saw is older than my parents, and has a certain degree of merit. Water soluble vitamins do leech out into cooking liquids. They do not react in most cooking liquids, so as long as you consume the cooking liquid… It’s not an issue. And well, blanched vegetables have such a short exposure that it can be hard to measure nutritional losses.
I still don’t get the low fat thing tho… perhaps the whole wheat bread and cheese thing can be used as a sanity check on nutritionists. For the average person, a cheese sandwich is an excellent idea. Protein, fat, calcium, lots of other nutrients from the bread. But if a nutritionist is condemning it as “worse than Wonder Bread”, it’s a good sign they’re off their rocker.
The sauteed kale with bacon and vinegar is very good, and I highly reccomend it. I have mixed some red chard in too.
Sigh. I get so confused with all this stuff — especially as someone who is trying to lose weight and has been advised by a doctor to cut sodium.
What I do know is that some of Matthew’s best recipes contain bacon!
Pork rillettes on (homemade) whole-grain bread was dinner last night. Huh.
“As a nutritionist, I recommend substituting Sizzlean for the Mangalitsa pork.”
My bank account likes the idea and would like to subscribe to your newsletter.
Caroline, I swear I’m not lurking outside your house.
Most Japanese vegetable dishes, from nimono to ohitashi to sunomono, are pretty low in fat; most of the fat in coastal Japanese cuisine came from fish. (Mountain cuisine was historically lower in fat, I believe, due to reliance on birds and rabbits). But if you’ve actually eaten in Japan, you’ve probably noticed that for most meals a 2 oz. portion of animal bits is fairly typical, except for intentionally more extravagant meals. Try finding a meal with less than 4 or 5 ounces of meat per person in the US.
I don’t think even most “traditional” vegetable preparations in the US or Europe are all that high in fat, but some of our favorites are.
I’m not down with the “let’s make everything low fat” school anyway. I’m with the “American portion sizes are insanely inappropriate for our lifestyles” school.
I favor substituting 2 ounces of margarine with 4 ounces of butter and halving the serving size. I’ll be happier and won’t feel like I was cheated out of the other half.
Have you eaten low fat ice cream, or even just non-premium ice cream, recently? I caught myself eating about twice as much as I would if I had been eating some of the high-fat stuff, hoping that I’d eventually find the flavor I was missing.
That “slow-churned” ice cream is kind of okay–at least, I don’t like it any worse than store-brand ice cream. But I don’t imagine it’s somehow better for me.
Since they discontinued Godiva, Green & Black’s chocolate ice cream is my favorite.
Okay, the raw spinach comment is bothering me. We had a massive spinach-fest in our garden last year and ate a lot of raw spinach in salads, so I’d like to know what the deal is exactly before we plant this year’s garden.
Other sources I’m finding (online, so grain of salt taken) are saying that while the oxalic acid in spinach inhibits you getting any calcium out of the spinach itself, it doesn’t stop you from benefiting from other calcium sources. I also haven’t found anything else mentioning that oxalic acid reacts with iron.
If you’ve got some better sources lurking in your back pocket, could you send them my way?
josh, first, you are right about the iron:
link
Some of the oxalic acid in spinach is already in the form of calcium oxalate, which is just a non-bioavailable form of calcium, but some of it isn’t and is therefore free to form calcium oxalate with other calcium-containing foods.
I’m also finding that eating spinach strongly interferes with magnesium absorption. And that oxalic acid intake causes kidney stones in some people. And that boiling is the best method for removing oxalates, which end up in the cooking water.
The food poisoning outbreaks from raw spinach are extremely unlikely to affect your garden spinach, so I wouldn’t worry about that at all. How much should you worry about the rest of it? Zilch, I should think, unless you are eating a huge amount of raw spinach every day.
Okay, so it’s not really dangerous if the food poisoning isn’t an issue and you’re eating it in sane, moderate amounts; but it’s not a wonder-food with all benefits and no drawbacks either. That I can wrap my head around, thanks.
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Mamster, Dr. Walter Willett believes there are good fats and bad fats, and he classes saturated fats as bad fats.
Here’s what he says in an interview with Discover magazine: (link: http://discovermagazine.com/2003/mar/breakdialogue)
“…healthy fats, such as liquid vegetable oils, that actually reduce the risk of heart disease. The unhealthy fats are the animal fats, mainly from red meat and butter, which are high in saturated fats; even worse are the trans-fats from partially hydrogenated vegetable oils found in some margarines and deep-fried fast foods.”
Willett even developed a Healthy Eating Pyramid which is in his book “Eat, Drink & be Healthy” and also in his latest book “Eat, Drink, & Weigh Less” where he advises that people eat red meat and butter sparingly. (http://www.sciam.com/media/inline/0007C5B6-7152-1DF6-9733809EC588EEDF3lg.gif).
So Dr. Willett does recommend cutting down on animal fats and trans fats, but not fats from plant oils and fish.
JJ, sorry if I implied that Walter Willett had absolved saturated fats. I personally think the case against saturated fats is weak and they will eventually be exonerated, but I don’t mean to put those words in anyone else’s mouth.
Willett does not, as most nutritionists do, advise restricting dietary fat intake to 30 percent of calories.
I whole-heartedly believe in Nina Planck’s Real Food paradigm. Bring on the butter, bacon et al. This was all well and good until I went to visit the cardiologist. My “bad” cholesterol is slightly elevated and I come from a family with a strong history of heart disease. Now I am faced with a quandry since the doctor feels I should attempt to “lower the numbers”. Yet from what I have read, this doesn’t necessarily make sense. Do I seek another opinion? Granted she didn’t tell me to eliminate everything but she was certainly anti-lard. It is easy to blissfully eat whatever you want if there are no ill effects but I surely don’t want to compromise my health. Now I am not sure what to believe but I continue to have my bacon and eat it too..
izzy’s mama, I’m not a doctor and I don’t know what to tell you. I am in my 30s and in perfect health, and it is easy for me to be cavalier about my diet. I have no idea what I would–will–do in your situation. My guess, and this is NOT advice, is that the first thing I would try is a low-carb diet.
You might want to check out ‘Real Food: What to Eat and Why’ by Nina Planck if you haven’t already.
Great article and discussion. Would my health be better if binged on bacon once per month instead of doses several times a week? Does occasional gluttony balance out a life with boring table fare?
izzy’s mama — faced with the same situation, my doctor prescribed — get this — exercise! Just three 30-minute cardio sessions a week and within two months, my HDL/LDL ratio was back to what is considered “good.” Best of luck to you!
Dominic
the zen kitchen
I made the kale last night. It was OK. It’s kind of like the spinach salad Mom used to make. I didn’t use any salt whatsoever; maybe it would have been better with the salt.
Thank you for the post. I agree that you can overwhelm some vegetables with fat and calories. But a little fat and a little salt and lots of herbs and seasonings make food great.
Jason, I’m with you on the portion sizes. I’ve gotten to the point that I split almost all meals in restaurants. They are just to big.
Kathleen- Kale is much better with a touch of salt. I have found that it is better to put salt on at the table and don’t stir it into the food. That way the salty flavor hits your tongue first and you don’t need as much of it.
shaking fistful of greens
You can have my raw spinach salad when you pry it out of my cold, dead hands. It will be sprinkled with real piggy bacon, too.
I am reminded, however, that I just discovered ~2 lbs of leaf lard in the freezer – local, organic pig fat. Yum.