The Problem with Health Food

I don’t eat health food. I don’t like health food. In fact, I take issue with the whole concept of health food.

The heart of the issue is that good food already is healthy, it doesn’t need to be ascribed this special category just by itself. It doesn’t need to be isolated, and I imagine it wasn’t really until a total invasion of junk food into our lives that we ever even had an idea of what health food was – we just had food. We didn’t need a yin until we had a yang.

Let me differentiate here between “health food” and “healthy food.” That one letter makes a difference. When people think of health food, they generally think of things like alfalfa sprouts and lettuce, exotic flavors like cardboard and drywall, and a Victorian like restraint from anything that could possibly be considered enjoyable. Healthy food, on the other hand, is just food that happens to be good for you. Which, incidentally, most food – actual, real food – already is.

Unfortunately, people tend to equivocate these two distinct things. This is one of the problems with health food.

When you have this idea that the only way to be a fit, healthy person is to deprive yourself of any sort of pleasure from your food, you are bound to start developing a complex about the way you eat. You foster a bad relationship with your food, one that usually leads to a life of dietary extremes – feast or famine – which is never healthy.

I do actually believe that this tendency to deny ourselves the pleasures of eating can be traced back to the Victorian era, if not further. As Americans, we still have a persisting social perspective that if a particular act, any act, is something we can derive pleasure from then there is inevitably a certain moral irresponsibility to indulging in that act with any frequency – or indeed, ever at all. There’s an intrinsic evil to pleasure itself, and those who succumb to it are weak-willed and, frankly, lesser human beings for doing so.

In terms of the Victorian era, this is most often illustrated with discussion of the attitude towards sexuality of the time. But it wasn’t just sex – it was pleasure – so it was sex, food, alcohol, chocolate, the game of hoop-and-stick, whatever. This attitude of restraint only widens the chasm between indulgence and abstinence. And in reality, the Victorians were some of the most creative fetishists and prolific pornographers of their day. It’s actually quite amusing if you ever get to see any of it.

In much the same way, our present day attitude towards food bounces between the extreme and grotesque (like KFC’s Double Down) and an almost equally unhealthy diet of denial (no carbs, no fats, trend-of-the-month dieting, etc.) – leaving very little room in the middle for a healthy medium of well moderated pleasure. There is an appeal to junk food merely because it is “naughty,” for lack of a better way to put it. When we, as Americans and as a society in general, approach our diet from within this paradigm, the result is all too often 4 cups of guilt cut with but a teaspoon of pleasure – and what does it get us? It sure as hell hasn’t turned us into any sort of healthy, fit, well-adjusted society. So, why then?

I’ve got more problems with this whole health food thing, and this issue revolves around the claims that food products make on their packaging. I’m channeling a lot of Pollan here – he wrote on the health claim topic in both In Defense of Food as well as Food Rules.

The problem is the health claims that come as a result of the marketing machine that leaves you with products that scream out, “Buy me! I might be junk but I’m healthier than that other junk at least! Also, some people might possibly think that sometimes I might be good for you in some random obscure way that is not well supported by any evidence!”

100 calorie snack packs, vitamin fortifications, heart health claims. It’s all there. Did you know that Chocolate Cheerios are actually good for you? No? Probably cause they’re not.

Who cares if it’s only 100 calories when it’s 100 calories of crap? Not to mention the tendency to buy one of those boxes, thinking it’s better for you, then sit and eat 3 bags at a time. I know, I’ve done it too.

100 ingredient snack pack is more like it.

My favorite, though, is the cereal aisle. In 2002, the FDA introduced the “qualified health claim,” basically making any and all health claims made on any package completely useless, as companies are allowed to present the claims in any means they like (big font on the front, tiny font for disclaimer, etc.) and also allowed to qualify the claims by using statements that make implications without having much, if anything, in the way of evidential backing.

Chocolate Cheerios may reduce the risk of heart disease. The logic behind this claim is that heart disease is caused by a large amount of saturated fats – so how do Chocolate Cheerios *reduce* your risk of heart disease? Why, by taking the place of something else that might be high in saturated fats – so, if you have chocolate cheerios for breakfast instead of, say, a ribeye steak, you’ll be reducing your risk of heart disease. Great.

I won’t even get into the fact that evidence actually indicates that saturated fat is linked to lowering your HDLs (bad cholesterol) as opposed to raising it.

Here’s another good one…

I can’t imagine a world in which Cookie Crisp is truly a *good* source of anything other than sugar, much less calcium and vitamin D. It’s certainly not the world I’m living in – what about yours?

Pollan advises us to avoid any foods that make health claims, because the fact that there is a need for it to make any claims in the first place is suspect. I agree, but still there’s no need to write it all off – you just need to foster a healthy degree of skepticism in the grocery store today. There is, however, still one section of the store where you’ll never see any health claims being made…

The produce section. All tucked away in the corner and largely forgotten.

I recently saw an episode of Future Food, which by all accounts is a pretty cool show, where the chefs endeavored to use some molecular gastronomy techniques to use health food products and turn them into junk food that we recognize. They used one of those horrendously thick and nasty green sludge drinks and some kind of health bar/snack thing, and turned them into french fries and ketchup. Then they went to a local gym to see what people thought.

It was overwhelmingly well received. And that’s cool. But I really don’t think it’s the right approach. I don’t think we need to eat food that’s that obscenely healthy (I don’t really think it is, but this post is already getting a bit lengthy) and I don’t think we should need to dress it up as something else to make people eat it. It circumvents the problem but it doesn’t eliminate it. The problem is still that people crave sweets, people crave products high in sodium and high in fat. And the market caters to that and more and more products come out that pump people full of it and higher and higher percentages than ever before. This cycle needs to be broken. And I believe it’s going to take nothing short of a whole paradigm shift in the way that Western society views food before we can get back onto the right track.

When a person can learn to find that sweet spot (and I do think for every individual that sweet spot is a little bit of a different place) where they can hover in between Victorian abstinence and utter hedonistic indulgence, where they know which products to really use as a good source of calcium, when they realize that many of their cravings are designed and pushed by food companies who wish nothing more than to expand our waistlines and create larger demand for their supply – then that is when they will learn to take pleasure in being healthy. And it only gets easier and easier from there. They no longer have to concern themselves with eating “health food” or avoiding “junk food” or staying on this or that diet. They can simply eat food – good food – and enjoy it while doing so.

It’s a great thing.

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