PHED 352 Quiz 3
Describe what the terms 'reductionist science' means.
Break the thing down into its component parts and study those one by one, even if that means ignoring subtle interactions and contexts and the fact that the whole may well be more then, or maybe just different from, the sum of its parts
How does Pollan use food as a metaphor for racism in America?
"Americans were particularly disturbed by the way many immigrant groups mixed their foods in stews and sucg, in contrast to the Anglo-American practice of keeping foods separate on the plate... Perhaps the disdain for mixing foods reflected anxieties about other kinds of mixing." "Discomfort about the way other people eat: the weird, messy, smelly, and mixed up eating habits of immigrants. How people eat is one of the most powerful ways they have to express, and preserve their cultural identity, which is exactly what you don't want in a society dedicated the the ideal of Americanization."
The revised imitation rule held that as long as the imitation product was not 'nutritionally inferior' to the natural product and had the same quantities of recognized ingredients, it didn't have to use the word imitation. What are the problems with this logic?
"Nutritionism had become the official ideology of the FDA; for all practical purposes the government had redefined foods as nothing more than the sum of their recognized nutrients. Adulteration had been repositioned as food science." Our eating would become more "scientific" and we are now eating far more processed foods. The history of baby formula is an example of how "imitation" foods do not tend to be "healthier" than their original/whole/natural foods. The revised imitation rule is also problematic because consumers may not realize what they are buying is not "natural".
What did one of the Harvard nutritionist's responsible for shaping the guidelines say?
"The question to be asked is not why we should change our diet, but why not?"
In Pollans mind, 'nutritionism' has convinced the general public of three myths. What are they?
1. That what matters most is not the food but the "nutrient" 2. That because nutrients are invisible & incomprehensible to everyone but scientists, we need expert help in deciding what to eat 3. That the purpose of eating is to promote a narrow concept of physical health
When was it repealed and why was this timing significant?
1973, the FDA repealed the 1938 rule concerning imitation foods. It buried the change in a set of new, seemingly consumer-friendly rules about nutrient labeling
How many antioxidants have been identified in a leaf of thyme (circle one):
<5 5-10 20-40 40-60 100+ answer: 20-40
Describe the flaws in each of the main research approaches to nutrition research: case-control, cohort, and intervention trials.
Case control: when people get sick they may change the way they eat, so the diet they report may not be the diet responsible for their illness. Cohort: the reliance on food-frequency questionnaires, and the sample that was chosen to study was relatively uniform and even more carnivorous than the U.S. population as a whole. Intervention trials: the focus was on dietary fat rather than on any particular food, such as meat or dairy. Also, no distinctions were made between different types of fat.
In the original document for the 1977 Dietary Guidelines, what were the original set of guidelines?
Cut down on the consumption of red meat & dairy products
What two specific things actually happened to Americans diet?
Eat more low-fat foods and eat less meat and fewer dairy products
What was important about the 1938 Food, Drug, & Cosmetic Act?
Imposed strict rules requiring that the word "imitation" appear on any food product that was an imitation If a food resembles a standard food but does not comply with the standard, that food must be labeled as an "imitation"
Explain why Pollan writes, "Nutritionism might be the best thing that ever to happen to the food industry..." (≈p. 52). Provide some examples if you can.
Favoured even more novel kinds of highly processed foods. Enlisted government to promotion of said products.
What is orthorexia? Have you witnessed this first-hand? What is the irony of orthorexia in North Amercia?
Greek 'ortho' (right & correct) + 'exia' (appetite) = right appetite Orthorexic's are people with a unhealthy obsession with healthy eating First proposed in 1996 by the American physician Steven Brahman Notably unhealthy population preoccupied with nutrition & diet & the idea of eating healthily The irony of orthorexia is that no people on earth worry more about health consequences of their food choices than Americans do & no people suffer from as many diet-related health problems
What are some interesting findings from Rozin's nutritional psychology research?
Half of us believe high calorie foods eaten in small amounts contain more than low calories than low-calorie foods eaten in much larger amounts. A third of us believe that a diet absolutely fat free a nutrient essential to our survival) would be better for us than a diet containing even just "a pinch" of it. In one experiment, he showed the words "chocolate cake" to a group of Americans and recorded their word associations. "Guilt" was the top response. Whereas the response of the French eaters to the same prompt was: "celebration". They're seeing more people more and more patients suffering from "an unhealthy obsession with eating healthy".
How did these guidelines end George McGoverns political career?
He had many cattle ranchers among his South Dakota constituents so he was forced to beat a retreat when the dietary guidelines recommended to eat less red a meat & dairy
Describe two major documents that signalled the "age of nutrition"
Identification of the three principal constituents if food (protein, fat, carbohydrate) and the identification of macronutrients in soil (nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium); all plants need to live and grow are those three elements. The theory of metabolism that explained life strictly in terms of a small handful of chemical nutrients.
Describe the basic logic used in studying food nutrients and provide an example of how that can backfire.
It encourages us to take a simple mechanistic view of that transaction: Put in this nutrient get our physiological result. This doesn't work because people differ depending on their genetic makeup. Also, people don't eat nutrients; they eat foods, and foods can behave very differently from the nutrients they contain. They focused their investigative energies on how these bad nutrients might cause disease rather than how the absence of something else, like plant foods or fish, might figure in the etiology of the disease. Nutrition science has usually put more of its energies into the idea that the problems it studies are the result of too much of a bad thing instead of too little of a good thing. What people don't eat might matter as much as what they do.
Explain what Pollan implies by using the word nutritionism
It is comprised of error prone, scientists & food marketers only too eager to exploit every shift in the nutritional concerns us. Together, & with some crucial help from the government, they have constructed an ideology of nutritionism
Describe some of the nutritionism practices of Kellogg and Fletcher
Kellogg, "scientific" practices as hourly yogurt ememas, electrical stimulation and "massive vibration" of the abdomen; diets consisting of grapes (10-14lb a day) Fletcher, practice of chewing each bite of food approx. 100 times. The theory was thorough mastication would reduce protein intake
What were the forces behind this movement? (Age of nutrition)
Metaphysical forces such as "vitalism" (living organisms are fundamentally different from non-living entities because they contain some non-physical element or are governed by different principles than are inanimate things
Define nutritionism & some of the 'unexamined assumptions' that follow from this ideology (in Pollans mind)
Nutritionism is a paradigm that assumes that it is the scientifically identified nutrients in foods that determine the value of individual food stuffs in the diet.Nutritionism is an ideology that consists of a widely shared but unexamined assumption that the key to understanding food is it's nutrient. Foods essentially are the sum of their nutrient parts "Unhappy Meals" as an unchallenged ideology that judges food solely on its nutrients The key to understanding doos is indeed the nutrient & that the whole point of eating is to maintain & promote bodily health
While diet's role in obesity is discussed, what do you think Pollan has failed to acknowledge about the obesity epidemic in this chapter?
Obesity is a severe public health crisis, and the more obese children their are they are more likely to become obese adults therefore if we don't change our diets the diseases associated with obesity will surge
What were the arguments against speaking about food in terms of nutrients?
People were getting sick even though they were getting a sufficient amount of protein, fat, and carbs. Chronic diseases related to diet, including heart disease, cancer, obesity and diabetes, started increasing at alarming rates. It's not about how much you eat it's about what you eat.
Explain the significance of the Geoffrey Cannon footnote in this chapter.
Points out that nutrition labels have become the single most ubiquitous medium of chemical information in our lives, "are advertisements for the chemical principle of nutrition"
From whom does Pollan suggest food needs to be defended?
Pollan suggests that food needs to be defended "from nutrition science on one side & from the food industry on the other, & from the needless complications around eating that together they have fostered"
What is suspicious about nutrition science funded by industry?
Remarkably reliable in its ability to find a health benefit in whatever food it has been commissioned to study
Describe how nutritionism and health claims are leaving whole foods 'out in the cold'
Scientists can find nutrients in almost any food (processed), its a whole lot easier to slap a health claim on a box of sugary cereal than a raw potatoe or carrot
In Pollans opinion, who benefits from complicating eating?
Scientists, food marketers, (often an unhealthy alliance) & the government benefits from complicating eating "with its ever-shifting dietary guidelines, food labeling rules, and perplexing pyramids"
Explain "parking-lot science".
Something may not be the cause, but it's the easiest explanation. "Cholesterol was the only factor linked to heart disease that we had the tools to measure."
What four industrialized food practices does Pollan link to the chronic diseases that kill humans?
The rise of highly processed foods & refined grains The use of chemicals to raise plants & animals in huge mono cultures The superabundance of cheap calories of sugar & fat produced by modern agriculture The narrowing of the biological diversity of the human diet to a tiny handful of staple crops, notable wheat, corn, and soy
Describe some of the inherent problems with nutritional science. Provide some examples of these problems.
The tools at the scientists disposal are in many ways ill suited to the task of understanding systems as complex as food and diet. Most nutritional science involves studying one nutrient at a time, which takes the nutrient out of the context of the food, the food out of the context of the diet, and the diet out of the context of the lifestyle.
What are some of the confounding variables that are probably responsible for increased health of people who consume supplements?
Their health probably has nothing to do with the supplements. Supplement takers tend to be educated, more affluent people who, almost by definition, take greater than usual interest in personal health.
What is the one strong asssociation reported in the review by Hu et al., (2001)?
Type of fat that the low-fat campaigners have spent most of the last 30 years encouraging us ti consume more of: transfat.. "Higher intake of transfat can contribute to increased risk of CHD through multiple mechanisms " Lowers good cholesterol and raises bad cholesterol It promotes triglycerides It promotes inflammation and possibly thrombogenesis It may promote insulin resistance Twice as bad as saturated fat
What is the eater's manifesto that Pollan puts forth?
What humans should eat in order to be maximally healthy. "Eating a little meat isn't going to kill you,, thought it might be better approach as a side dish than as a main. You're better off eating whole fresh foods rather than processed foods"
The most troubling feature of nutritionism is proposed. Describe what this is and why it is so troubling. Who is NOT troubled by this?
When the emphasis is on quantifying the nutrients contained in foods, any qualitative distinction between whole foods and processed foods is apt to disappear The companies are not troubled by this as they are making money from the sales of processed foods