Before we begin, tonight I had beans that I had cooked a couple of days ago with a ham bone. ?I used a mixture of pinto, small red, small lima, great northern, and black beans and looked and washed them. ?I soaked them overnight in the refrigerator, then cooked them with the ham bone (a really meaty one). ?I seasoned them with a large onion, chopped, two cayenne pods, four bay leaves, garlic, some MSG, and of course salt and pepper. ?That, along with a pan of from scratch corn bread, made a fabulous meal.
This subject (actually a related set of subjects) is so huge that I could literally write a 500 page tome on it and still not cover it very well. ?Thus I shall confine this discussion to include a few examples and make an attempt to illustrate the complexity of what is really an extremely confused set of, often, conflicting ideas and philosophies. ?Before we attempt that, I mean to tell you what I consider healthy eating is. ?It is really pretty simple.
To have a healthy diet, just eat lots of diverse stuff. ?Keep the fat content at a reasonable level (I have a near zero tolerance for trans fat, although in tiny quantities they are "natural"), keep saturated fats low, but do not be afraid of fats in general. ?We have to eat them to live. ?The good ones are the monounsaturated ones (think olive oil) and the polyunsaturated ones (like canola oil). ?Living without fat intake is not really feasible, so just be sensible.
Protein is also important, but many of our sources have lots of baggage, most of that being bad fats. ?I love meat, but eat much less of it now than I used to eat. ?Meat, and organ meat, is not inherently evil, but too much is not good for anyone. ?You have to have enough protein, but meat is not the best way to get it on a regular basis. ?It is often laden with bad fat, but an occasional steak, pork chop, or roast is not only healthy, but also delicious.
Now is where we in the US fail. ?We take in way, way too many carbohydrates in the form of sugar and starch! ?I am not saying that the slice of whole grain bread is bad for you, but the forth and fifth ones certainly are! ?Especially bad are the sugary drinks, like soda, sweetened tea, and that third spoon of what my major professor (Norbert Pienta) called "the white death". ?We HAVE to have carbohydrates, but the form in which they are delivered in the US, and most of the developed world, is horrible.
Here is Doc's recipe for a fairly good diet. ?Eat fresh fruits and vegetables, raw if you find them palatable. ?They are low in fat, high in potassium (almost all Americans do not get enough of that), low in sodium (most Americans get way too much of that), have a good balance of those two ions, and have trace phytochemicals that are essential for good health.
OK, I said it! ?I used the word "chemicals"! ?As a professional natural philosopher, I really object to the prejudice that chemicals are bad. ?EVERYTHING that we can touch is made of chemicals! ?The very air that we breathe to live is a rather complex mixture of chemicals, the major ones being nitrogen, oxygen, argon, carbon dioxide, and some obscure rare gases that you might recall if you read my Pique the Geek series. ?Unfortunately, there are also some toxic ones here now that were not very common until the internal combustion engine and huge power plants were part of our experience.
The very water that we drink is a chemical! ?Some net jokes reference dihydrogen monoxide poisoning, and most of us call it drowning. ?Yet without water, we would surely die not far behind not having air to breathe. ?Can you see where I am going here? ?The subject is complex.
Now that we have established that "chemicals" are not inherently evil, let us take, say, ten examples of food that we eat and look at them from a scientific viewpoint. ?I am choosing them sort of ramdomly, based on my diet.
Bread, the staff of life.
This material predates proper civilization as far as we know. ?Good bread is a wonderful food, with lots of carbohydrates, protein, good fats, and lots of fiber. ?But "good" bread is sort of rare now, because we in the developed world like ours white and bland. ?This preference is actually a Romney thing, because the bread that is healthy sort of got milled out of the crude flours that our ancestors ate. ?The upper crust (please pardon the pun) decided that only the "best" part of the flour was good enough for them, and so bread devolved from the staff of life to a glycemic nightmare. ?We (not me) mostly eat what my grandmum called "light bread", and it is horrible from a health standpoint.
It has almost no fiber, and we in the developed world are deficient in that anyhow. ?Can you can colon cancer? ?Sure you can! ?Back when our species was evolving, the entire grain was crudely crushed, hull and all in many cases, and made into what is sort of like a flatbread. ?Those breads were replete with the natural contents of the whole grain, and that grain was consumed before much decomposition had knocked out the good phytochemicals.
Today? ?Wheat is almost universal, it is milled until almost nothing but the endosperm is left. ?No bran, no germ. ?Just the long keeping, starchy (but with some protein) and good tasting part. ?In most developed countries millers are required to put back some of the vitamins that are removed in the milling process, that that is only a pale effort to restore that original nutritive value.
But it gets better! ?Even though flour is highly processed, it is still sort of a natural product (if not grown on fertilized fields or treated with pesticides, as almost all wheat in the US is). ?That is until it gets "improved". ?It turns out that fresh, white flour does not make what we now call "good" bread! ?To make "good" bread, the flour has to be oxidized.
Now, in the day, this oxidation was done by taking finished flour and putting it in silos, exposing it to oxygen from the atmosphere, and turning it week to week to make sure that it was all exposed to oxygen. ?During this process the flour got whiter and its baking properties improved, making it pretty close to modern flour. ?But such storage vessels and labor are expensive, so now we bleach flour chemically. ?Egads, I used that word again!
Modern economics do not allow for something as common and cheap as flour to take up valuable space and time in a silo. ?We now use extremely harsh chemical treatments to "bleach" flour in a matter of hours to make it bake as we would expect. ?There are numerous chemical agents, not all of them benign, that are used. ?Elemental chlorine has been used, but is banned in most nations. ?Chlorine dioxide is the one of choice now, but ozone is also used, as are a few others. ?Now we cross the line into the artificial.
Is this too vague? ?If you want flour, get the unbleached kind, but it is still treated with bromate. ?You CAN NOT get away from flour, the bread from which it is baked, and your plate, unless you grow and mill you own!
Now riddle me this? ?If you bag of flour does not explicitly specify what is in it, how can your loaf of bread do so?
I am getting tired now, and will splice the piece that I wrote a couple of weeks ago here and integrate it to be the piece for this evening. ?If there are repetitions, that is because I am more in tune with her than with my readers, and I trust that you all will understand that.
Here, without markup, is the original text.
Here is where the problem comes: ?hype. ?Processed food companies like to sell their products based on claims that may or may not be correct, and believe you me there is many a marketing major at every large company that looks at public sentiment, and designs what is actually propaganda to sell their products. ?I dislike dishonesty, and it is my job tonight to enlighten you to those claims.
But this is a difficult proposition, because the terms are so convoluted. ?For example, table sugar (sucrose) is "natural" in that it exists in lots of fruits. ?However, it is NEVER found in nature in a pure form, but only diluted with lots of water and combined with many other organic and inorganic materials. ?To produce table sugar, either sugar beets or sugar cane, the raw material is processed in extremely advanced refineries from a very complex juice to a very pure, concentrated material. ?So, sucrose in fruit is natural, but dilute and always mixed with other things. ?Is table sugar "natural"? ?It depends on how one looks at things.
In my perspective, sucrose is natural. ?But concentrated table sugar certainly is not, because of the extensive refining processes required to make it what my major professor called "The White Death". ?Are you getting an idea how complex this subject is? ?Perhaps it would be better to take a few case studies and investigate the nuances.
Let us take, for example, all purpose wheat flour. ?It is made my milling soft wheat until the endosperm (wheat germ), the cuticle (wheat bran), and the starchy bulk of the wheat grain can be separated. ?After milling is complete, we have three bins, the smallest filled with wheat germ, the fatty part that goes off rapidly and contains lots of food value. ?The second bin is filled with bran, with little caloric value but lots of good fibre. ?The largest bin in filled with what we think of as flour, made from the starch and gluten filled bulk of the grain. ?Is this natural? ?Perhaps. ?I would argue that the entire wheat grain, just milled enough to make bread, is natural. ?The separation is artificial, but it really does not create new "chemicals".
It is pretty well established that whole grain products are more healthy than refined grain products. ?So are the refined products natural? ?The government says yes. ?My scientific background says no.
But there is more. ?Millers have known for centuries that white flour does not make very good bread the minute that it is separated from the bran and the germ. ?It has to stand in the air, and be "turned" (originally with shovels in the flour attic) in order to react with oxygen in the air for some of the starch and gluten to be transformed into oxidized products that make better bread. ?Is that natural? ?The chemist in me says no, because we are making new chemicals in the flour because of the oxidation. ?But it only reacts with oxygen in the air, so perhaps it is natural. ?But is not as it came from the grain, and humans used technology, perhaps crude technology, to modify it.
It costs too much to air treat flour now. ?In the US alone, so much flour is used that we would have a decades old backlog if we aged it that way. ?These days we use synthetic oxidizing agents to treat flour, like chlorine dioxide, ozone, and several others. ?Is that natural? ?I think that everyone will agree with me that it is not. ?But we still think of flour as "natural". ?I defy anyone to find commercial flour that has not been oxidized.
As a sidenote, look at the label on your flour, and even the "unbleached" kind will say that it is "bromonated" most of the time. ?It turns out that bromides, somewhat toxic oxidizing inorganic chemicals, are added to improve baking properties. ?You have to look hard to find unbleached and unbromonated flour. ?This is not at all natural. ?Finally, most flour contains "malted barley flour" or "malted barley extract". ?This IS natural, because the enzymes in barley malt help to accelerate the chemical process to turn starch (GASP! ?A chemical!) to sugar (GASP! Another chemical!) that yeast can use to make the bread rise by a (GASP, chemical process!) that converts sugar to alcohol (GASP! ?A chemical!) and carbon dioxide (GASP again! ?Another chemical!). ?The carbon dioxide is the principal thing that makes bread rise, but the alcohol also is important because it further affects the gluten in the bread, and slowly evaporated at baking temperatures to lighten the loaf or roll.
I think that you get the point. ?And this is just simple flour! ?Let us try something a bit more complex. ?How about cheese?
All real cheese is made from milk. ?Try this experiment. ?Put half a cup of milk into a shallow container and let it sit at room temperature for two or three days. ?I can practically guarantee you that on the third day, unless it all dried up, up that you will not be able to stand the scent of it. ?That is because it rotted, being eaten up with random bacteria and fungi. ?That is natural.
But how do we get cheese? ?We treat the milk chemically! ?This has been done for thousands of years. ?It is lost in antiquity when the discovery that putting milk in the little stomach of a milk fed calf will cause the milk to form curds and whey. ?That is the first thing about making cheese, and it is a chemical transformation. ?The enzymes in the calf's stomach do the magic. ?Is that natural? ?Well, probably, but it is a chemical change.
These days we use enzymes that are grown from specially genetically altered bacteria to produce that same enzyme (there are not nearly enough little calves for that now, considering how much cheese is eaten). ?Is that natural? ?Probably not, but the cheese is just as wholesome as cheese made from calves' stomachs.
Here is my point. ?Humans have been altering the things that we eat from before recorded history. ?Cooking food causes chemical changes, so should we eat everything raw? ?Certainly not!
Whilst we are on this natural versus artificial thing, consider this: ?the naturally occurring botulinum toxin is lethal at a NANOgram per kilogram in humans by iv. ?That means that under ten pounds of that toxin is all that would be required to kill every person on the globe, if everyone got the same dose! ?So much for natural being always good.
Now that I have your attention, let me give you my take on things. ?I personally believe that there are way too many things added to food, particularly processed food, than should be. ?I shall give you a list of my specific ideas about bad actors in a bit. ?On the other hand, without some of these materials food would not keep long enough to eat before becoming rotten.
Additives have been put in food for preservation reasons since prehistory. ?Salt is the oldest, and still one of the most common, ones. ?Put enough salt into any food and it becomes bacteria and fungi proof. ?Yet salt is an essential nutrient. ?Is salt natural? ?Well, in impure forms it is. ?Highly purified salt like we have now is fairly recent, but nothing like table sugar. ?Some natural salt deposits are in the high 95%+ purity levels, so I give it a pass.
How about nitrate and nitrite? ?Those are essential parts of the traditional cures for bacon, ham, and many sausages, and it turns out that bacterial action converts nitrate to nitrite. ?Nitrite is responsible for the pink color of ham and bacon, but it has a much more important purpose. ?It turns out that just a little nitrite keeps botulinum toxin from being produced in those meats, and thus is a lifesaving additive. ?That is why I never eat home cured meats unless I did it myself, or know the person who did very well. ?Nitrate is a naturally occurring substance, so is it bad? ?Too much certainly is, but a little is OK.
These traditional uses of preservatives were necessary to keep food from killing us, or to be inedible when we needed it. ?Things are different today.
Now we have refrigeration and freezing to keep meat (and other things) good. ?We also have global transportation, so we can have fresh strawberries in December. ?I am not convinced that this is such a hot idea, but we need to add refrigeration to the list. ?Is it natural? ?Well, in cold climates it is. ?But only in the last 150 years, give or take, have we relied on it for food preservation globally. ?So it is quite artificial in many areas.
Now we see that the lines betwixt "natural" and "artificial" are a bit blurred. ?Are you ready for me to blow your mind? ?Look on many products and you will see sodium benzoate added as a preservative. ?I am looking at a 2 L bottle of Dr. Pepper right now and see it. ?Bottled lemon juice also contains it. ?Boy, sodium benzoate really sounds like an artificial thing, so it must not be good for us, right?
Well, not so much. ?It turns out that some samples of natural cranberry juice contain benzoic acid, as potassium benzoate, at levels up to 0.13%. ?The legal limit for added sodium benzoate in juice products and soft drinks is 0.10%, so cranberry juice can have over the legal limit of added benzoate naturally!
Now, there some things that do not occur in nature to any significant degree. ?One is trans fat. ?Animal fats contain up to around 5% trans fat, but vegetable shortenings can contain up to 45% of them. ?Recent studies implicate trans fats as really bad actors for blood chemistry, raising bad cholesterol and lowering good cholesterol. ?So why do we have them? ?Convenience and cost are the two drivers.
Natural shortenings are relatively expensive. ?Vegetable oil is cheap. ?The key property of a shortening is to have a relatively high melting point so that crusts turn out flaky rather than gummy. ?To make vegetable oil have a higher melting point, some of the double bonds are treated with hydrogen under pressure and with a catalyst to "saturate" the bonds, raising the melting point (and making them less prone to oxidation as well). ?That is fine. ?The problem is that the catalyst (generally finely divided metallic nickel) affects the double bond, changing the less thermodynamically stable cis geometry to the more stable trans one.
Thus, to increase shelf life (resistance to oxidation) and to make nice crusts, quite healthful vegetable oil is transformed into something much less healthy. ?Until only a decade or two ago the adverse health effects of trans fat were not known, but now they are. ?I strongly advise people to avoid these fats, and the only way that you can tell is by reading the ingredient statement. ?The "zero" grams trans fat per serving is meaningless, because serving sizes are often artificially small AND if there is half a gram of less per serving, manufacturers can call it zero! ?Look on the ingredient statement and if you see "partially hydrogenated vegetable oil" you can be assured that there is trans fat in it. ?If it says "completely hydrogenated vegetable oil" there is not any trans fat, but now you face the problem that the fat is completely saturated, not quite as bad but still not good in excess.
My solution for this problem is simple. ?I use real butter (it might contain 4% trans fat, compared to old style margarine that could have 15%) and if I make a piecrust I use either butter or lard. ?I prefer lard because it is easier to work with than butter, being a little more tolerant of higher kitchen temperatures. ?My grandmum used the original Crisco, full of trans fat, for decades and lived to be 101.5 years old and ate lots of it. ?However, her husband died at 53 years of heart disease, and he ate the same things that she did. ?For frying (which I rarely do, but love the taste) I just canola or soybean oil that has not been hydrogenated.
Sweeteners have also been the subject of modern modification. ?For millenia honey was the most concentrated source of sugar available. ?Then cane sugar, discussed already, became the sweetener of choice. ?Recently, high fructose corn sweetener has become popular. ?The reason for that is almost entirely economic, with strong political ties. ?Want to hear a really obscene story?
It turns out that in the US sucrose, table sugar, is supported by tax dollars in price. ?For example, in 2008 the average price for sugar in the US was $0.5350 per pound. ?The world price that year was $0.1792, so the US price was almost three times the world price. ?Thus, any imported sugar used in the US has its cost artificially increased at taxpayer (and consumer) expense. ?This is why the only Life Savers candy manufacturing plant for North America was moved from the US to Canada in 2002, since sugar is by far the largest component of them. ?It turns out that finished products are not subject to the price supports, so it is cheaper to make them in Canada where sugar prices are low and then import the candy itself.
What does this have to do with high fructose corn sweetener? ?Lots. ?Now, if you want to make hard candies, you have to use sucrose because of its melting point and heat resistance. ?But if you just want to sweeten other things, like soft drinks or prepared sweets, those properties do no matter, just the sweetness. ?Enter high fructose corn sweetener, which I shall HFCS because I am lazy. ?Please bear with me, because this gets a little Geeky.
Sucrose is a disaccharide, meaning that it is a molecule composed to two simpler sugars. ?In sucrose, one molecule each of glucose and fructose condense by elimination of a molecule of water to form a molecule almost twice as large as either of the constituents. ?Sucrose is arbitrarily given a sweetness value of 100 for comparison purposes. ?Now, HFCS is made, as you probably surmised, from corn. ?The sugar in corn is exclusively glucose, existing as long chains that are not sweet at all, known to everyone as cornstarch. ?It turns out that you can hydrolize cornstarch to get the monosaccharide glucose, and the original clear Karo corn syrup is just that, a heavy water solution of glucose. ?But there is a problem.
Glucose is only 70% as sweet as sucrose, and has the same calorific value. ?So you have to use LOTS more glucose than sucrose to get the same sweetness intensity. ?However, it is possible to modify the process of hydrolysis of cornstarch to produce approximately equal amounts of glucose and fructose, and fructose rates at 120 on the sweetness scale. ?By jiggering the process, you can get a mixture of fructose and glucose that has the same sweetness level as sucrose, and by law this material is NOT subject to price supports! ?So it is easy to substitute HFCS for sucrose in, for example soft drinks, for a much lower cost since it is dissolved anyway.
The use of HFCS is controversial, and the potential health effects are controversial as well. ?It is known that the sugars in HFCS are more rapidly absorbed than sucrose since no disaccharide bond has to be broken. ?But here is where it gets really funny. ?The ratio of free fructose to glucose in an average honey is 1.22:1. ?In HFCS the ratio is 1.31:1, almost the same! ?Thus, HFCS is much closer to the REALLY natural honey in the ration of fructose to glucose than is sucrose, at almost exactly 1:1. ?So is HFCS bad for you? ?Sure it is, taken in excess. ?But so is sucrose, honey, salt, alcohol, and even water if overused. ?The entire controversy is really sort of silly, because if eaten in reasonable quantities, it really does not matter what kind of sweetener you use. ?In excess, all of them are very bad for you.
Here is an aside, but an interesting one. ?Milk contains 12 grams of sugar per eight ounces. ?My bottle of Dr. Pepper contains 27 grams per eight ounces. ?However, my milk does not taste nearly as sweet as it should, almost half as sweet as Dr. Pepper. ?The difference is that the sugar in milk is lactose, and lactose rates only 40 on the sweetness scale. ?Thus the milk is, after correction, only 18% as sweet as Dr. Pepper.
Now let us go back into history. ?Do you remember in the spring of 1985 when the Coca-Cola company announced that it was going to reformulate its flagship product? ?Right, that is when New Coke came to be, or at least later that year. ?Everyone thought that it was in incredibly stupid marketing move, but I think that it was cynically brilliant. ?They did change the flavor profile to some extent, but the major change was to replace sucrose with HFCS. ?The company ate their little crow and came back not long after with Coca-Cola Classic, with the original flavor profile. ?But they retained the HFCS for economic reasons. ?The former Mrs. Translator, at the time a connoisseur of Coca-Cola, told me that the Classic version was not the same as the original formulation.
She was right. ?It turns out that the sweetness intensity is only one measure of the perception of sweetness. ?It is sort of like musical notes, where the attack, decay, sustain, release envelope define the sense of sound. ?For example, a flute playing given note sounds much different than a piano playing the same note, because the attack curve is much less aggressive in the flute than in the piano, the decay is longer, the sustain usually longer, and the release variable. ?The end result is that the sensory impact is quite different.
Sweeteners are like that. ?Sucrose has a moderate attack curve, a very long decay, a moderate sustain, and a rather long release. ?That is in part because our saliva actually begins to digest sucrose once it reaches the mouth into fructose and sucrose, so there are chemical and physiological reactions occurring. ?In contrast, HFCS has a very fast attack, a short decay and sustain, and a fast release since those sugars are already hydrolized. ?Although the peak sweetness intensity might be similar, the sensory experience is quite different. ?I am told that Coca-Cola from Mexico, available at ethnic markets, is much more like the original, pre 1985 product than the US Coca-Cola Classic is, but I drink so little soft drinks (yes, I have that two liter bottle of Dr. Pepper that I opened day before yesterday and that I expect to last until Halloween) that I am not the palate with the expertise.
There are so many products used as food additives on the market that I literally could write a 500 page tome on them, in small, Geeky, print, and still not begin to cover the subject. ?I think that it would be better for me to await specific questions in the comments than to continue very much more here, but I shall be true to my word and give you a short list of things that I believe should be avoided either entirely or at least a conscious effort be made to reduce intake. ?This is not a complete list by any means, but one that I try to use in my life. ?There is one notable exception, and if any of you can help me find or make a substitute that tastes and has the same mouth feel, please do so. ?The reason will be evident soon.
Things to avoid
Trans fat. ?Trans fat is fairly easy to avoid if you read labels like I pointed out earlier.
Salt. ?Well not entirely, but watch the labels. ?I had a bowl of Campbell's Lentil soup for dinner tonight (it is actually quite good), but one serving contains 33% of the recommended sodium allowance. ?A can makes, in Campbell's estimate, 2.5 servings, so I got almost all of my sodium at one sitting. ?I defy anyone who is using that as dinner to eat only 40% of the contents.
Sugar. ?Again, not entirely. ?We have to have some, either as sugar or starch that we break down into sugar to live. ?Just be aware of hidden sugar or HFCS, because it is EVERYWHERE.
Soft drinks. ?These are probably the most pernicious items in most peoples' diets. ?They are full of sugar (thus calories) and contribute NOTHING except sugar to the diet, and we get plenty of sugar anyway. ?I do drink some, but to me they are a treat, not a diet standby. ?My two liters of Dr. Pepper will last around four weeks, so that amounts to about 2.2 ounces per day (of course, I drink more than that at each sitting, but not every day), or 7.3 grams of sugar, amounting to around 28 empty calories per day. ?You are actually better off drinking a beer or a glass of wine with dinner, because both of those have important microcircuits, vitamins, and antioxidants.
Chips. ?This another source of empty calories. ?I eat them, occasionally, because they are good tasting. ?The bag of potato chips that I have indicates that that a 28 gram (one ounce) serving has 150 calories, 90 of them from fat. ?It goes on to say that that is about 15 potato chips. ?Who eats only 15 potato chips? ?Other than lots of fat and salt, they contribute almost nothing nutritionally.
Juice. ?Yes, juice, either fruit or vegetable. ?My container of 100% juice cranberry blend has 35 grams of sugars in eight ounces, close to Dr. Pepper. ?If it were not fortified with ascorbic acid (Vitamin C), those would be pretty much empty calories as well, but there are trace nutrients in it that ARE good for you. ?However, the calories are really pretty empty. ?Vegetable juice is almost always really high in sodium, and we get much more than we need of that. ?Once again, moderation is the key. ?I drink probably eight to 12 ounces per day, diluted with carbonated water because I like the "fizz". ?You are always better off to eat the whole fruit, raw being the best but even whole fruit cooked is better than juice.
By the way, giving fruit juice to little ones in bottles and sipper cups except as a once a day treat is a really bad idea. ?You might as well IV them with Coca-Cola, and that would avoid the tooth decay that fruit juice and other sugary drinks cause.
I could go on, but I think that you get the idea. ?We can discuss specific questions of yours in the comments. ?I plan to be around until at least 8:30, when Ashley is putting Alexis down for bed. ?Tonight we are going to make a from scratch pumpkin roll and a from scratch (including the crust) pumpkin pie. ?We made a pumpkin roll the other day and her mum raved about it so much that I agreed to make another for her tonight. ?I shall try to get some pictures and post the recipe next week if all goes well.
Warmest regards,
Doc, aka Dr. David W. Smith
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