ummertime is traditionally a time when people read books, or think they’re going to read books. It’s time for a bit of John Grisham on the beach or Patricia Cornwell by the lake. I read recently that when people buy books what they really think they’re buying is the time to read them. Over the past few months there have been some excellent, and entertaining, books in the area of the role of food and its connection to wellness. I’ve selected a few that are interesting, readable and which might just change your life. I will provide you with a segment or two of each book so that you can see how you like the style and subject matter of the authors.

Omnivore’s Dilemma by Michael Pollan

If you’re going to read one non-fiction book this summer, this is the one. The title might be a little daunting and is perhaps better explained by the sub-title, “A Natural History of Four Meals”. Author Michael Pollan takes us from the dinner table to the origins of what we eat. He writes with a clarity and detail that must terrify the giants of industrial agriculture, because the last thing they want you to know is the journey your food takes to arrive on your plate or Styrofoam container.

Pollan is a great writer and investigative journalist and in order to draw you into the book I can do no better than include a few segments.

(I) Mr. Pollan’s section entitled “Corn’s Conquest” is brilliant.

The great edifice of variety and choice that is an American supermarket turns out to rest on a remarkably narrow biological foundation comprised of a tiny group of plants that’s dominated by a single species: Zea Mays, the giant tropical grass most Americans know as corn.

Corn is what feeds the steer that becomes the steak. Corn feeds the chicken and the pig, the turkey and the lamb, the catfish and the tilapia and, increasingly, even the salmon, a carnivore by nature that the fish farmers are reengineering to tolerate corn. The eggs are made of corn. The milk and cheese and yogurt, which once came from dairy cows that grazed on grass, now typically come from Holsteins that spend their working lives indoors tethered to machines, eating corn.

Head over to the processed foods and you find ever more intricate manifestations of corn. A chicken nugget, for example, piles corn upon corn: what chicken it contains consists of corn, of course, but so do most of a nugget’s constituents, including the modified corn starch that glues the thing together, the corn flour in the batter that coats it, and the corn oil in which it gets fried. Much less obviously, the leavenings and lecithin, the mono-, di-, and triglycerides, the attractive golden coloring, and even the citric acid that keeps the nugget “fresh” can all be derived from corn.

To wash down your chicken nuggets with virtually any soft drink in the supermarket is to have some corn with your corn. Since the 1980s virtually all the sodas and most of the fruit drinks sold in the supermarket have been sweetened with high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS) – after water, corn sweetener is their principal ingredient. Grab a beer for your beverage instead and you’d still be drinking corn, in the form of alcohol fermented from glucose refined from corn. Read the ingredients on the label of any processed food and, provided you know the chemical names it travels under, corn is what you will find. For modified or unmodified starch, for glucose syrup and maltodextrin, for crystalline fructose and ascorbic acid, for lecithin and dextrose, lactic acid and lysine, for maltose and HFCS, for MSG and polyols, for the caramel color and xanthan gum, read: corn. Corn is in the coffee whitener and Cheez Whiz, the frozen yogurt and TV dinner, the canned fruit and ketchup and candies, the soups and snacks and cake mixes, the frosting and gravy and frozen waffles, the syrups and hot sauces, the mayonnaise and mustard, the hot dogs and bologna, the margarine and shortening, the salad dressings and the relishes and even the vitamins. (Yes, it’s in the Twinkie, too.) There are some forty-five thousand items in the average American supermarket and more than a quarter of them now contain corn. This goes for the non-food items as well: Everything from the toothpaste and cosmetics to the disposable diapers, trash bags, cleansers, charcoal briquettes, matches and batteries, right down to the shine on the cover of the magazine that catches your eye by the checkout: corn. Even in produce on a day when there’s ostensibly no corn for sale you’ll nevertheless find plenty of corn: in the vegetable wax that gives the cucumbers their sheen, in the pesticide responsible for the produce’s perfection, even in the coating on the cardboard it was shipped in. Indeed, the supermarket itself – the wallboard and joint compound, the linoleum and fiberglass and adhesives out of which the building itself has been built – is in no small measure a manifestation of corn.

The ingredients listed in the flyer suggest a lot of thought goes into a nugget, that and a lot of corn. Of the thirty-eight ingredients it takes to make a McNugget, I counted thirteen that can be derived from corn: the corn-fed chicken itself; modified cornstarch (to bind the pulverized chicken meat); mono-, tri-, and diglycerides (emulsifiers, which keep the fats and water from separating); dextrose; lecithin (another emulsifier); chicken broth (to restore some of the flavor that processing leaches out); yellow corn flour and more modified cornstarch (for the batter); cornstarch (a filler); vegetable shortening; partially hydrogenated corn oil; and citric acid as a preservative. A couple of other plants take part in the nugget: There’s some wheat in the batter, and on any given day the hydrogenated oil could come from soybeans, canola, or cotton rather than corn, depending on market price and availability.

According to the handout, McNuggets also contain several completely synthetic ingredients, quasiedible substances that ultimately come not from a corn or a soybean field but from a petroleum refinery or chemical plant. These chemicals are what make modern processed foods possible, by keeping the organic materials in them from going bad or looking strange after months in the freezer or on the road. Listed first are the “leavening agents”: sodium aluminum phosphate, and calcium lactate. These are antioxidants added to keep the various animal and vegetable fats involved in a nugget from turning rancid. Then there are the “antifoaming agents” like dimethylpolysiloxene, added to the cooking oil to keep the starches from binding to air molecules, so as to produce foam during the fry. The problem is evidently grave enough to warrant adding a toxic chemical to the food: According to the Handbook of Food Additives, dimethylpolysiloxene is a suspected carcinogen and an established mutagen, tumorigen, and reproductive effector; it’s also flammable. But perhaps the most alarming ingredient in a Chicken McNugget is tertiary butylhydroquinone, or TBHQ, an antioxidant derived from petroleum that is either sprayed directly on the nugget or the inside of the box it comes in to “help preserve freshness”. According to A Consumer’s Dictionary of Food Additives, the TBHQ is a form of butane (i.e. lighter fluid) the FDA allows processors to use sparingly in our food: It can comprise no more than 0.02 percent of the oil in a nugget. Which is probably just as well, considering that ingesting a single gram of TBHQ can cause “nausea, vomiting, ringing in the ears, delirium, a sense of suffocation, and collapse.” Ingesting five grams of TBHQ can kill.

With so many exotic molecules organized into a food of such complexity, you would almost expect a chicken nugget to do something more spectacular than taste okay to a child and fill him up inexpensively. What it has done, of course, is to sell an awful lot of chicken for companies like Tyson, which invented the nugget – at McDonald’s behest – in 1983. The nugget is the reason chicken has supplanted beef as the most popular meat in America.

(III) At first sight, the traditional farm with a variety of animals and crops appears inefficient until one looks more closely at how they operate, and what efficiency really means.

For example, in nature there is no such thing as a waste problem, since one creature’s waste becomes another creature’s lunch. What could be more efficient than turning cow pies into eggs? Or running a half-dozen different production systems – cows, broilers, layers, pigs, turkeys – over the same piece of ground every year?

Most of the efficiencies in an industrial system are achieved through simplification; doing lots of the same thing over and over. In agriculture, this usually means a monoculture of a single animal or crop. In fact, the whole history of agriculture is a progressive history of simplification, as humans reduced the biodiversity of their landscapes to a small handful of chosen species. (Wes Jackson calls our species “homo the homogenizer.”) With the industrialization of agriculture, the simplification process reached its logical extreme – in monoculture. This radical specialization permitted standardization and mechanization, leading to the leaps in efficiency claimed by industrial agriculture. Of course, how you choose to measure efficiency makes all the difference, and industrial agriculture measures it, simply, by the yield of one chosen species per acre of land or farmer.

By contrast, the efficiencies of natural systems flow from complexity and interdependence – by definition the very opposite of simplification. To achieve the efficiency represented by turning cow manure into chicken eggs and producing beef without chemicals you need at least two species (cows and chickens), but actually several more as well, including the larvae in the manure and the grasses in the pasture and the bacteria in the cows’ rumens. To measure the efficiency of such a complex system you need to count not only all the products it produces (meat, chicken, eggs) but also all the costs it eliminates: antibiotics, wormers, paraciticides, and fertilizers.

One of the most important yet unnoticed changes to the human diet in modern times has been in the ratio between omega-3 and omega-6, the other essential fatty acid in our food. Omega-6 is produced in the seeds of plants; omega-3 in the leaves. As the name indicates, both kinds of fat are essential, but problems arise when they fall out of balance. (In fact there’s research to suggest that the ratio of these fats in our diet may be more important than the amounts.) Too high a ratio of omega-6 to omega-3 can contribute to heart disease, probably because omega-6 helps blood clot, while omega-3 helps it flow. (Omega-6 is an inflammatory; omega-3 an anti-inflammatory.) As our diet – and the diet of the animals we eat- shifted from one based on green plants to one based on grain (from grass to corn), the ratio of omega-6 to omega-3 has gone from roughly one to one (in the diet of hunter-gatherers) to more than ten to one. (The process of hydrogenating oil also eliminates omega-3s.) We may one day come to regard this shift as one of the most deleterious dietary changes wrought by the industrialization of our food chain. It was a change we never noticed, since the importance of omega-3s was not recognized until the 1970s. As in the case of our imperfect knowledge of soil, the limits of our knowledge of nutrition have obscured what the industrialization of the food chain is doing to our health. But changes in the composition of fats in our diet may account for many of the diseases of civilization – cardiac, diabetes, obesity, etc. – that have long been linked to modern eating habits, as well as for learning and behavioral problems in children and depression in adults.

Research in this area promises to turn a lot of conventional nutritional thinking on its head. It suggests, for example, that the problem with eating red meat – long associated with cardiovascular disease – may owe less to the animal in question than to that animal’s diet. (This might explain why there are hunter-gatherer populations today who eat far more red meat than we do without suffering the cardiovascular consequences.) These days farmed salmon are being fed like feedlot cattle, on grain, with predictable result that their omega-3 levels fall well below those of wild fish. (Wild fish have especially high levels of omega-3 because the fat concentrates as it moves up the food chain from the algae and phytoplankton that create it.) Conventional nutritional wisdom holds that salmon is automatically better for us than beef, but that judgment assumes the beef has been grain-fed and the salmon crill-fed; if the steer is fattened on grass and the salmon on grain, we might actually be better off eating the beef. (Grass-finished beef has a two-to-one ratio of omega-6 to –3 compared to more than ten to one in corn-fed beef). The species of animal you eat may matter less than what the animal you’re eating has itself eaten. The fact that the nutritional quality of a given food (and of that food’s food) can vary not just in degree but in kind throws a big wrench into an industrial food chain, the very premise of which is that beef is beef and salmon is salmon. It also throws a new light on the whole question of cost, for if quality matters so much more than quantity, then the price of a food may bear little relation to the value of the nutrients in it. If units of omega-3s and beta-carotene and vitamin E are what an egg shopper is really after, then Joel’s $2.20 a dozen pasteurized eggs actually represents a much better deal than the $0.79 a dozen industrial eggs at the supermarket. As long as one egg looks pretty much like another, all the chickens like chicken, and beef beef, the substitution of quantity for quality will go unnoticed by most consumers, but it is becoming increasingly apparent to anyone with an electron microscope or a mass spectrometer that, truly, this is not the same food.

The Hungry Years
Confessions of a Food Addict by William Leith

William Leith is a fat man, who doesn’t like being fat. He is filled but unfulfilled.

“I am fat. Therefore everything I do is fat. This morning I take a fat shower, squirming around in the suds like an oversized cherub. Fatly, I towel myself dry. Fat people absorb water like sponges. Fat people sweat more. Fat people don’t want to walk half-naked out of the bathroom to a place that is less hot and steamy. Fat people don’t like being exposed. Fat people take their clothes into the bathroom, so that they can emerge magically, fully dressed, if a little damp and uncomfortable. Fat people wear fat clothes.”

“Hunger is the loudest voice in my head. I’m hungry most of the time. I also feel bloated most of the time. I am always too empty, and yet too full. I am always too full, and yet too empty. Last night I ate three platefuls of mash and gravy. I also had chicken and vegetables. I can barely remember the chicken or the vegetables. The mash was fluffy, starchy. I could not relax until it had all gone. Then I licked my plate clean. I picked the plate up and licked the starch residue and congealing gravy. It tasted delicious, vile, shameful. People sometimes ask me why I have crusty stains on the lapels of my jacket or the bib area of my shirt.

My girlfriend said, ''I hate it when you do that.''

''I thought you thought it was funny.''

''No, I hate it.''

''It’s a tribute to your cooking.''

''No, I hate it.''

Now it’s early, and I want toast. God, I hope there’s some bread in the kitchen. God, I hope there’s some sliced bread in the kitchen. I really don’t want to do any slicing. In the morning, with low blood sugar, it’s like slicing a stone with a long, bendy razor blade. I could easily have an accident. I swing myself out of bed, my belly tight and sore under my T-shirt. When I was slim, I slept naked, but now I dress for bed, or rather don’t fully undress; I wake up damper, hotter, hungrier. My hunger frightens me. The fatter I get, the more I want to eat. The fatter I get, the more comfort I need. Right now, I want thick slices of warm white bread, crispy on the outside, with butter soaking into the middle.

In the kitchen, there is most of a loaf of sliced bread, and — yes! — the butter has been left out all night, so it will be soft enough to spread. When I was a kid, when I had my worst hunger, I hated cold butter. Later, it didn’t bother me so much — I was patient enough to pare off thin slices, which I would arrange carefully on the toast. Then I would wait until the butter had melted, something I can’t imagine now.
Now I’m in a hurry. The bread is brown. Damn. Still, I put two slices in the toaster, and, while I’m waiting, I take another slice from the loaf, butter it, fold it over, and eat it in three bites. I pop the toast, to see if it’s nearly done, but it’s not — nowhere near — so I butter another slice, and try, and fail, to eat it slowly. Now, when I pop the toast, it is slightly crisp, and slightly warm, so I take a slice, butter it, eat the disappointing, mushy result, and put another slice in the toaster. And then I realize I should have put the second slice in the toaster before I ate the first. As usual, I am falling behind.

I am in a toast frenzy. I have an urge, like in the Burger King ad, in which ''urge'' is an integral part of the word ''Burger''. Although, of course, ''urge'' isn’t an integral part of the word ''toast''. But I am aching for toast. It’s like a Mac Attack. (I have actually suffered from Mac Attacks.) It’s like a nicotine fit.

I know about willpower. Looking at the toaster, glaring at it, listening to the buzz of its little engine or whatever, I stop for a moment to make a cup of instant coffee, and ask my girlfriend if she wants any toast.

''No thanks,'' she says. She never eats breakfast.”

Healthy Aging by Andrew Weil, M.D.

Andrew Weil is one of the more renowned and respected writers in the general area of wellness. He’s been on the cover of Time magazine and is a frequent contributor to the Larry King Show. This book is a follow-up to “8 Weeks to Optimum Health” and in typical Andrew Weil style dispenses common sense, good references and the wisdom that comes from a lifetime in the field. Dr. Weil is now in his 60s and reminds his readers of the inevitability of aging and provides numerous intelligent insights into how to enjoy the aging process rather than attempting to stay forever young.

Some things improve with age:

I like to ask people to think of examples of things that improve with age. Some common answers are wine, whiskey, cheese, beef, trees, violins, and antiques. I would like to examine the qualities that aging brings out in these things in order to see whether comparable benefits come with aging in people.

Cheese, in the words of one writer, is “milk’s leap toward immortality.” It has also been called the “wine of foods” – that is, the food that is closest to wine in its essential nature. Originally invented as a way to preserve milk by concentrating its fat and protein and discarding most of its water, cheese has become a favorite food of many peoples in the Western world, and in some countries (France, Italy, Spain, Switzerland, and the British Isles especially), the art of cheese making has reached stupendous heights. The key step in the production of the most famous and treasured examples of the cheese maker’s art is aging, a process the French call ‘affinage’ and English speakers often call ‘ripening’.

If you thought whiskey making and wine making were complicated, I can only tell you that they pale into simplicity beside the making of fine cheese.

All you need to know about the effect of stress on health an be said in one sentence. Cortisol, the adrenal hormone that mediates stress responses, is directly toxic to neurons in the part of the brain responsible for memory and emotion. If you want to minimize age-related deficits in mental function, you must know and practice strategies for neutralizing the harmful effects of stress on the brain and other organs.

Recently, scientists demonstrated a direct correlation of objective and perceived stress on cellular aging. They measured length of telomeres, telomerase activity, and oxidative stress in white blood cells in healthy premenopausal women who were biological mothers of either a healthy child or a chronically ill child. The women who experienced more stress in their lives had shorter telomeres, lower telomerase activity, and greater oxidative stress than their less-stressed counterparts. All of these changes indicate accelerated aging and, probably, increased risk of age-related diseases. In this study the changes correlated with perceived stress and its chronicity (that is, duration over time); the greater the perception of stress and the longer it lasted, the more harmful it was.

Some years ago, researchers went to several remote regions to try to verify claims of extraordinary longevity. Three of these were Abkhazia in the Caucasus region of the former Soviet Union; Hunzakut, a valley in Pakistan; and Vilcabamba in Ecuador. The only one that I have personal experience of is the last, which did not seem different to me from any of the other Andean Indian villages I visited in Ecuador.

In every case, the claims turned out to be unsubstantiated, because there were no reliable birth records. In fact, strong evidence turned up that old people in these places exaggerated their ages for various reasons, even that some of them used the birth dates of deceased older siblings. In Abkhazia, investigators uncovered a clear pattern of state-supported falsification of birth records in order to develop unusual longevity as a national resource and tourist attraction.

Before the scientific community reached a consensus about the lack of evidence for these claims, many articles appeared in the popular press about the lifestyles of Abkhazians, Hunzakuts, and Vilcabambans that attempted to find commonalities. Most of the residents of the regions, as one might have expected, were physically active into old age; indeed, their traditional lifestyles demanded it, because they had to herd animals, gather wood, carry water, and till fields. They ate well, eating more fresh foods than typical Westerners and no fast or processed foods. The Abkhazians had frequent feasts, featuring local fruits, vegetables, and meat, as well as yogurt, which is often touted as a magical rejuvenator. They also consumed alcohol at these gatherings. In all of the regions, strong communal ties were evident, and early investigators made much of the contribution of these ties to supposed unusual longevity.

Don’t Eat This Book by Morgan Spurlock

Morgan Spurlock is the man who brought us the movie documentary “Super Size Me”. His writing style is hard hitting and ‘in your face’, somewhat like the film. However, his book goes far beyond an indictment of McDonalds and is a sweeping look at how the American lifestyle has been hijacked by big business to the detriment of millions. Mr. Spurlock alerts us to the fact that many of the American organizations associated with specific diseases (e.g. cancer, diabetes) are funded by some of the very companies whose products are part of the problem.

The American Dietetic Association, for example, calls itself “the nation’s largest organization of food and nutrition professionals,” and says it serves the public by “promoting optimal nutrition, health and well-being.”

But really, the ADA serves its corporate sponsors and, as the Center for Media & Democracy notes, hauls in large sums of money advocating for the food industry. Its stated mission is to “improve the health of the public,” but with 15 percent of its budget, more than $3 million, coming from food companies and trade groups, it has learned not to bite the hand that feeds it. “They never criticize the food industry, “ says Joan Gussow, a former head of the nutrition education program at Teachers College at Columbia University. The ADA’s website even contains a series of “fact sheets” about various food products, sponsored by the same corporations that make then (Monsanto for biotechnology; Procter & Gamble for olestra; Ajinomoto for MSG; the National Association of Margarine Manufacturers for fats and oils).

How messed up is that?

Big American Dietetic Association funders ($100,000 plus) have included Kellogg, Kraft Foods, Weight Watchers International, Campbell Soup, the National Dairy Council, Nestle USA, Ross Products Division of Abbott Labs, Sandoz, Coca-Cola, Florida Department of Citrus, General Mills, Nabisco, Uncle Ben’s and Wyeth-Ayerst Labs. The ADA’s 2004 donor report lists other interesting Big Food names like ConAgra, Goya, Sunkist, the Cattlemen’s Beef Board and Sodexho (who run school-lunch programs as well as prisons – a nice combo for your kids, don’t you think?)

Similarly, there are good reasons the American Cancer Society seems to focus all its energies on promoting cancer drugs and treatments, then falls almost silent when it comes to identifying potential carcinogens in our food, air and water, and is downright quiet about strategies for cancer prevention. The ACS recruits board members and receives huge donations fro the very pharmaceutical, chemical, food and biotech companies that sell cancer drugs, manufacture pesticides, experiment with genetic modification, peddle foods that are bad for us and pollute our environment.

According to its own 2002 annual report, the American Cancer Society’s major donors that year included 3M Foundation, Abbott Laboratories, Amgen, Avon Products, Inc., BFI Waste Systems, Bristol-Myers Squibb Company, Colgate-Palmolive, Dr Pepper, DuPont, the Eli Lilly & Company Foundation, Genentech, GlaxoSmithKline, IDEC Pharmaceuticals, International Flavors & Fragrances, Johnson & Johnson, Merck & Company, Nissan, Novartis Pharmaceuticals, Ortho Biotech, Pfizer, Procter & Gamble, SmithKline Beecham Consumer Healthcare, Unilever/Bestfoods, Warner Lambert, Wendy’s and Winn Dixie.

The whole scam of labeling kids’ foods as healthy and good for them came to its most despicable low in 1998, when, as Marion Nestle explains, “the American Heart Association *(AHA), long a distinguished champion of research and education promoting low-fat and other dietary approaches to prevention of coronary heart disease, decided to raise funds by labeling foods ‘heart-healthy.’ The AHA would identify foods that met certain standards for content of fat, saturated fat, cholesterol, and sodium with a logo consisting of a red heart with a white check mark and the words ‘American Heart Association Tested & Approved.’ The AHA planned to collect fees from food companies that made approved products and expected to benefit from company advertising and promotion of the partnership.”

Get it? For a fee, we’ll declare your product healthy! Pretty soon, you had manufacturers like Kellogg promoting all their “heart-smart,” AHA-approved brands…..like the notoriously sugar-laden Cocoa Frosted Flakes, Fruity Marshmallow Krispies and “Low-Fat (but by no means low-sugar) Pop-Tarts.” Remember? And now, General Mills is making the same American Heart Association claims for most of its cereals, including Cocoa Puffs and Frosted Cheerios. Sure, none of these cereals and others like them are fat laden, which most people associate with heart trouble, but the AHA seal of approval sends an overall message that the product is healthy.

• Former Secretary Ann M Veneman served on the board of the biotech company Calgene.
  
• Her chief of staff, Dale Moore, had been an executive of the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association, the enormously powerful corporate meatpackers’ lobby.
  
• So had her director of communications, Alisa Harrison.
  
• Her deputy chief of staff (who left in 2004) was vice-president of the International Dairy Foods Association, the also extremely powerful milk-and-cheese industry’s lobby.
  
• Deputy Secretary of Agriculture James Moseley was a partner in Infinity Pork LLC, a corporate pig farm in Indiana.
  
• Under Secretary J. B. Penn was an agribusiness consultant.
  
• Under Secretary Joseph Jen came from Campbell Soup.

Lousy food and little play
Makes kids fatter every day.

Three new books

Three more new books, which deal with the ethical, human, financial and environmental cost of a food industry, which puts profit so far above other considerations that little else counts. Everything looks wonderful in our supermarkets with uniform, blemish-free fruits in cartoon-like brightness, exotic vegetables available 365 days a year and aisles of refrigerated meats that have no visible signs of the squalor and confinement from which they originate. I’ve yet to read these new releases but they look interesting.

1. The Way We Eat – Why our food choices matter. By Peter Singer and Jim Mason
2. The End of Food – How the food industry is destroying our food supply, and what to do about it. By Thomas Pawlick
3. What to Eat – An aisle-by-aisle guide to savvy food choices and good eating. By Marion Nestle