ContraCrop

I've started this blog to record my thoughts and research about food and health: how we grow our food, what we eat, the nutrition debate, food distribution, food sovereignty and environmental impact.

My life started down a new path after I read an article a couple of years ago in the New York Times magazine. I became fixated on learning all I could about our eating habits, the way our food is made, and the effects that the industrial food industry has had on our culture and our lives - physically and mentally.

This blog joins an ongoing discussion and is a place to voice interest, intrigue, and discovery. This is not a podium for lecturing, so please extend grace to each other if anything is found to be erroneous. Counter-arguments are encouraged with respect, empathy and compassion for other perspectives.

Friday, February 25, 2011

Causes As Yet Unknown

My food initiative all started (as it most likely does for everyone) when I moved out on my own, out of the range of family eating habits and away from the food program and public housing of college (the food came from Marriot Sodexho food service, which is the worst food I've had to endure eating and how I learned to never take food for granted). I finally had the financial means and the absence of influences over how I ate (I had yet to become aware of how much the food industry affected me) to make independent choices, but I had no clue how to start navigating these new considerations. What did I cook for myself that first year of living in my city apartment? I wanted all those nostalgic meals that I recalled from living with my parents, of course: beef spaghetti, tuna-macaroni salad, sloppy joes, lasagna... those and many others had been my favorites.

Gradually, though, I started to come up with meals that my family never ate: burritos, chili, veggie spaghetti, minestrone, Cajun rice & beans, curries (exotic!). The grocery store suddenly became an entirely different experience, and so, admittedly, did surreptitious trips to fast-food drive-throughs! Don't worry, I've already divulged my secrets to those closest to me, but I wasn't able to give up eating that [really yummy and addicting] crap, and some frozen packaged junk food, for years.

Anyway, this is not a memoir about my formative years, so I'll move on. The point is I started to experiment with my diet and found that I wanted to eat differently than I had in my past: breakfast used to be cereal, toast, a banana and juice; lunch was a sandwich, chips, fruit & veggie; dinner was all four major food groups. My family ate a well-balanced diet, but I wanted to eat less meat-and-potatoes and explore a larger variety of vegetables, legumes and grains.

Getting back to me in my apartment, I switched to soy milk based on whispers of its benefits (this is way back in 2001) and ambiguous naysaying about cow's milk. Here is what informed that decision: I had consumed milk without question my whole life; I had a cousin who was lactose-intolerant; and I'd heard several third-hand rumors that milk is beneficial only for weaning. None of that made a clear case either way regarding cow's milk, but the compulsion to decide felt urgent to me. As a first attempt to make a personal choice for my health, it turned out to be seriously misinformed, yet it was a breakthrough moment nonetheless. I had made a choice of my own, and that felt great.

Then I moved into a house with two friends, one vegetarian and one vegan, and a whole new perspective came into view. I developed a greater appreciation for these diets and partook of many a meal that was prepared, gradually adding more vegetarian options to my table. My friends even delved into the raw diet and both worked at a raw restaurant, bringing some raw "cooking" methods into my life, even though I was still cooking a small proportion of meat (I don't know how they lived with me). As I've written in a prior entry, I've never felt as nourished when eating vegetarian food as I feel when I combine plant and animal foods. At the time I thought I was eating the healthiest I had ever eaten, yet my physical reality didn't correspond - I didn't feel better, sleep was hardly ever rejuvenating, my energy level was low, I had headaches all the time - I was uncharacteristically lethargic and tired.

Skip ahead a few years and I had switched back to cow's milk after reading a few articles of new (rather, recently published) dietary information about soy products, soy milk being one of them [see my links at the bottom for two soy articles]. I learned that the risks of soy to my health - decreased testosterone/sex drive, impaired mineral absorption, hormonal imbalance and presence of phytoestrogen, digestive enzyme inhibitors - outweighed the supposed benefit of healthy fat and protein. While I cannot attribute any positive or negative effects to when I drank soy milk (taking into account I only drank soy milk for three years), I can claim a significant increase of my libido when I stopped drinking soy milk. That positive outcome became the impetus for me to actively consider the consequences of what I eat and to change my eating habits if necessary.

I devoted the following two-plus years to confronting my naivete about food and health: scratching the surface by learning about pesticides, growth hormones, fertilizers and animal antibiotics, seeking out natural, local, whole and organic foods, shopping at farmer's markets and my local co-op as much as possible, getting enough exercise, quitting smoking and trying to eat the recommended 5-9 servings of fruit and vegetables every day. Also, my intake of animal products was making a comeback. I started to eat only whole wheat in my pasta, bread, cereal, etc. and began to weed out anything I was eating with high fructose corn syrup, hydrogenated oils and any soy products. I also began looking at all ingredient lists, and gradually stopped buying products with ingredients made in a lab (including so-called "natural flavors" - also created in a lab), although it has proven to be very difficult. Chips became only plain chips with salt and sunflower oil, but the oil still has added vitamin E which had to be mechanically extracted. Cereal had to be whittled down to a few choices that excluded high fructose corn syrup, corn syrup, any other manufactured sugar, any soy ingredient, MSG has always been a big NO, and be made with whole grain, although even the organic/natural cereals all have those added vitamins and minerals from unknown sources. Everything was scrutinized and the best option chosen: pasta, frozen pizza (not really any best option), ice cream, cheese, bacon, black beans, tomato paste, stir-fry sauce, and on and on. One outcome that happened fairly soon after these changes was that my headaches stopped occurring. Was it something I ate? Probably, but how could I know if it was a pesticide, an antibiotic, a reaction to some substance in the "natural flavors" or a ratio of certain nutrients that I wasn't previously eating?

All of the foods that I had always eaten had to be reconsidered with adult eyes and possibly given up. A few months before starting this blog, my wife and I made the choice to stop eating all grains, including flour, pasta and beer, starchy foods such as potatoes and bananas, refined sugars (this one is painful!) and oils. We're not abstaining 100% - no food rule can be that rigid anymore in our world unless you live on or next to a farm and have control over all the food you eat. We are now eating mostly meat, dairy, green/leafy vegetables, fruit, nuts, legumes and seeds, with the occasional exception of a wheat bun or a side of brown rice. The amount of info we don't have keeps multiplying, but I believe we can uncover enough facts to start a contracrop of what foods make the most sense for human health.

So far, I've noticed a few changes in how I feel. Since the days after college when I started to eat a larger percentage of vegetarian food (and possibly more carbohydrates) I've needed to take naps in the afternoon to supplement my nighttime sleep (I get approx. 6-7 hours of sleep every night, including the nap) in order to stay awake through the evening. This is probably related to having had a job that starts around 6:00 a.m. for the past eight years and ends around 3:00 p.m. Another apparent consequence of my diet was that I was always hungry, to the point of getting shaky, getting headaches, losing any function of concentration or exertion, and just wanting to sleep. I don't know whether these things were caused by the reduced amount of animal matter in my diet, or a fact of increasing in age, something unrecognized maybe in the quality or lack thereof in the carbohydrates I ate, or the glucose spike and then crash from eating too many carbs, or a combination of factors.

Regardless of the cause, since changing what I eat that energy crash in the afternoons has greatly decreased in force. I do not take a nap every day anymore, and if I do take one it's reduced to less than half the time it was before. Several other intriguing changes have taken place, but the actual causes are as yet unknown. A related change is an increase in my overall energy level and in my ability to be productive, especially in the afternoons and evenings (which has been difficult for me the past few years). Another change is a decrease in the amount of coffee I desire in the mornings, which is strange because I love coffee and have desired multiple cups for over ten years. A third change is the absence of those shakes and headaches I got when I was hungry (which is not nearly as often), and also an increased flexibility to eat meals at different times of the day, or to skip a meal altogether without physical distress. I am also more satisfied, most of the time, with a smaller portion of food than I was before.

I'm very appreciative of these changes and I hope they continue, but I don't have enough information yet to make a cause and effect connection. I've seen the trap to which trying to sway the available evidence a certain way can lead. I have no interest in that, and none of my money is bet on a particular outcome. If someone scientifically proves that a vegetarian diet is optimal for human health, then I'm moving somewhere with a backyard to start a garden and finding a nearby farm to supply me with dairy! Actually, I'll probably do that anyway.

1 comment:

  1. I enjoyed reading about your journey. I am scrutinizing my food products much more lately. I am especially curious about the connection between what we digest and our emotions. There are many times during feelings of anxiety or depressed feelings when I backtrack mentally to determine if my diet could have triggered something. I'll enjoy reading your future posts! Jon

    ReplyDelete