Happy New Year!
I’ve been silent for a while: a year, to be exact. Over the course of this past year, I’ve served as the invited guest blogger for the American Society of Nutrition (ASN), for which I had to write 4 blogs. I decided to write the first 3 of those blogs on the challenges of reviewing the evidence from nutrition studies and using the results to set guidelines. I wasn’t sure what I’d do the 4th blog about until life presented my husband and me with a 6-year-old foster child, and my eyes were opened to the world of feeding little kids in the 2000s. Talk about challenges! She has since gone on to another foster home, but maybe I’ll repost that blog at some point, because there is so much we forget or take for granted when we see kids and their parents—or sometimes just the parents—going to the mat over ordering off the kid’s menu vs. a meal that contains a vegetable (we drew the line at no chicken fingers… or Lunchables(TM)). But in the meantime, to catch us all up, I’m going to do a little review of the year in nutrition. And if you make it to the end, you will see links to two nutrition gifts!
If I had to sum up this year’s most popular food and nutrition stories in a tabloid headline, it might be something like, “What? Meat?” The two issues that seemed to dominate popular nutrition and food news were whether red/processed meat is killing us and whether we might just want to switch to fake, plant-derived “meat.
Is Bacon Really Killing Us?
You probably don’t remember that a couple of years ago, the venerated United Nations World Health Organization (WHO; no really, WHO!) declared that meat, specifically red meat and especially processed meat like bacon, was a danger to human life (because of its apparent link to cancer). The WHO issued a guideline recommending that we should stop eating red and processed meats or at least significantly curtail how much we ate and how often.
Over the past few years, an independent group of scientists—nutritionists and review methodologists without conflicts of interest—have decided to tackle some of the biggest challenges of reviewing nutrition studies to set guidelines and make recommendations (I won’t review these challenges here or how they attempted to overcome them, but if you’ve read some of my previous blogs, you have an idea, or you can google my ASN blogs, which explain them in detail). To test out their new review process, which they call NutriRECS, the scientists re-reviewed the evidence linking consumption of red and processed meat with cancer, the same studies the WHO used to support their advice. The articles reporting results of the new analyses, two of which I was invited to peer-review, were published in a prestigious medical journal, Annals of Internal Medicine. These articles basically concluded that the WHO had over-exaggerated the strength of the evidence linking cancer and meat and that the recommendation to eliminate red meat and processed meats from our diets was essentially baseless. Interestingly, The Center for Science in the Public Interest has been silent on the latest chapter in this controversy. The Center is an advocacy organization that purports to scrutinize food and nutrition research and industry marketing tactics and has indeed helped educate consumers about a wide variety of important nutrition issues via its monthly magazine,.. I suspect they are having a difficult time reconciling the idea that an impeccable body of researchers—with no ties to industry—has challenged the nutrition gospel and appears to be siding with “Big Meat.”
My advice: if you like red and processed meat, eat it, but keep your portions modest (no 8-slice bacon sides for your ham and cheese omelet breakfast and no routine 22-ounce porterhouse dinners).
Should We Reach for the “Impossible,” and Go Beyond Meat?
So even if you managed to escape hearing about the red meat controversy, you probably couldn’t avoid the ads for the new meatless, “plant-based” burgers. What are they, exactly? Are they healthier than their real meat counterparts? And why this thing now?
First, what are they? They are not ground up plants or beans like the meatless burgers you may be used to. One of the two new products, Impossible Burger(R), gets its protein from soy and potatoes, including the protein leghemoglobin, a soy version of hemoglobin, the protein in our blood that gives it its red color (however, the leghemoglobin used for this product is actually synthetically produced from cell culture). The remaining ingredients include coconut and other vegetable oils, a variety of thickeners and other food additives, and a few vitamins thrown in. The other product, Beyond Meat(R), gets its protein from wheat (you know, that stuff gluten avoiders run from), but other than that difference in protein sources, the ingredients are pretty similar between the two products. But what these products are not are plant-based foods.
Although the manufacturers of these products are hoping to capitalize on the trends among consumers of eating more plant-based foods or actually becoming vegetarian or vegan, you need to know that these products are about as similar to vegetables, legumes, and whole grains as are those tubs of whey or soy protein powder you see at health food stores. The very nutrients that make plant foods healthy, essential components of our diets—fiber, vitamins, minerals, and other beneficial phytochemicals (plant compounds)—are completely stripped away in the process of purifying the soy or wheat protein used in these products. Furthermore, the iron naturally supplied by red meat (and commonly lacking in vegetarian and vegan diets) is absent from these products, and the vitamin B12 (also in short supply in vegan diets) added to the products may not be easily absorbed by our bodies. Worse, evidence does not suggest coconut oil, the fat used in these products, is a healthy alternative to the fat naturally found in meat. And if those drawbacks aren’t enough to make you think twice, the products deliver about the same number of calories as beef burgers and way more sodium! In short, these products are no substitute for adding more veggies, whole grains, and beans to your diet. In fact, they are the ultimate in ultra-processed foods, which also made headlines this year, and not in a good way (see below)!
What about the environmental impact of manufacturing these products compared with that of meat production? The developer of one of the products has said that his primary motivation was to develop a meat alternative that would circumvent the well-known toll that meat production takes on the environment. But some evidence suggests that the processes used to isolate the soy and wheat protein for these products may damage the environment just as much as meat production itself!
My advice: unless you are a devout vegan or vegetarian who is dying for a hamburger, just choose the hamburger. These new products are not a free pass to enjoy hamburger-like things daily.
Dieting in the News…What Else is New?
It probably comes as no surprise that stories about what diet works best to lose or maintain weight made news this year, even though major studies in past years have shown that there is no perfect diet for everyone.
An LA Times piece on intermittent fasting discussed the need to experiment by varying the length of eating and fasting windows to see what works. But the article also emphasized that intermittent fasting does not work for everyone and may not be a long-term solution for anyone.
I will devote an upcoming blog to some interesting recent research on weight gain, weight loss, exercise, and artificial sweeteners. Feel free to send me questions: sydnen96@gmail.com.
Are Ultra-Processed Foods Killing Us? Making Us Fat?
Studies published in early 2019 reported an association between consumption of ultra-processed foods and higher risk for cardiovascular disease and death. What are ultra-processed foods? Although nearly all the foods we eat undergo some processing to render them edible (even if it’s just peeling or cooking), some of the things we eat, particularly some convenience foods, bear no resemblance to food in its original form. Either the ingredients that make up the food (think of those puffy or crunchy cheese snacks) has been totally changed, or nothing in the product is even derived from any actual food (think powdered fruit-flavored drink mix). On the one hand, it’s tempting to dismiss these studies, because they were merely observational and can’t do more than show an association (between eating ultra-processed food and disease): Who’s to say it’s the ultra-processed food, and not just the absence of real foods with real nutrients? On the other hand, these studies reinforce a pretty important principle of nutrition: that we need to eat real food to stay healthy!
In a further, and maybe more credible, attack on ultra-processed food, an actual trial conducted by scientists at the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Disease found that a group of people who were required to consume diets high in ultra-processed foods ate an average of 500 calories more each day than a comparable group offered a diet of relatively unprocessed foods. What’s more, the ultra-processed group gained significant amounts of weight, and the unprocessed group actually lost weight: concrete evidence for avoiding ultra-processed foods!
Intuitive Eating? What’s Old Becomes New Again
A popular press book that came out in 2019 advocates the seemingly novel idea that we can take control of our eating and our weight by intuitively deciding—and eating—exactly what we want to eat. The idea is that the more we deprive ourselves of what we really want to eat, the more of it we end up eating, and that the willpower needed to control our eating can last only so long. I happen to believe this idea has some merit, although it doesn’t work for everyone, and those who attempt it need to be willing to risk gaining weight before they lose it. But my bigger beef(!) is that this idea was first presented at least 30 years ago in a still-available book called Making Peace with Food, which I’ve read. To be fair, I haven’t read the new book, so I don’t know whether the author credits the earlier book with her idea, but if you think it’s worth a try, I’d start with the original.
Probiotics Again
In 2018, I was interviewed by an editor for CBS’ 60 Minutes who was putting together a segment on the topic of probiotics: whether they actually do anything and whether they’re safe. And then she interviewed me again, and again, interspersed by lots of email exchanges. The show was supposed to air in February 2019, but here we are in 2020, and it still hasn’t aired. As the editor shared with me, the topic has grown out of proportion, kind of like the probiotic organisms themselves, I guess. It’s now expected to air sometime this year, but in the meantime, in early December, the NY Times published an unusually accurate piece on probiotics…in the Style section! My bottom line remains the same: no evidence supports the routine use of any commercial probiotic for any condition, and only limited evidence supports the use of several prescription-grade probiotics for one or two very specific – conditions.
Finally
So if you’ve read this far, I want to share a couple of valuable resources from 2019:
A guide to “healthy” eating from the National Institutes of Health, and
A guide to how to read and understand scientific studies, written by a new-ish nutrition site that tries to separate the wheat from the chaff, so to speak. I have a couple of bones to pick with the piece that I may share in my next blog, but overall, it’s a gem. And if you do take the time to read it, don’t forget to also read the real story about the chocolate diet study hoax.
Welcome to 2020!