21 Pounds in 21 Days (6 page)

Gluttons for Punishment?

Not only do Americans eat harmful food, we eat way too much of it. In fact, we eat so much food that Pollan believes we have a “national eating disorder.” I agree. Only one generation ago, people ate three square meals a day and perhaps a snack. They drank milk, water, and maybe some orange juice for breakfast or an occasional soda for a treat. Folks socialized and had fun without food's being involved. Today, eating is the focus of almost everything. There's a good chance we'll be chowing down whether we're exercising (sports drinks, flavored waters, energy bars), at our child's basketball game (soda, hot dogs, candy), socializing (chips, beer,
soda, ice cream), dating (dinner dates), watching TV (chips, beer, soda, hot wings, pizza), meeting clients (power lunches, drinks, business dinners), or picking up the kids from soccer practice (fast food). Turn on the TV and what do you see? Food, food, food! And let's not forget beverages. The average American teenager drinks twenty-two ounces of soft drinks and fruit drinks (13 percent of their calories) each day compared to just nine ounces of milk, according to
Liquid Candy: How Soft Drinks Are Harming Americans' Health
, a report published by consumer watchdogs Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI).
⁴
Soda pop has bumped milk off the top of the list of beverages young people drink most. Americans literally eat and drink all day long—and we don't see anything wrong with it.

How did an entire society's eating habits change so quickly? According to one of the nation's leading nutritionists, Marion Nestle, PhD, MPH, professor and former chair of the department of nutrition, food studies, and public health at New York University, Americans are experiencing the flip side of what she calls the “paradox of plenty.” During most of human history, the food supply has been erratic. Our bodies literally adapted to survive in either “feast or famine,” primarily famine since food has usually not been plentiful. But we've advanced so quickly technologically that American industry now produces an overabundance of food, particularly corn and soybeans. In fact, if you add up the number of calories each person living in America needs to maintain a healthy weight and compare that to the number of calories food companies produce, you'd find there's twice as much food available as we need to be healthy. Not surprisingly, food producers want to sell as much of this food as profitably as they can. Their strategies range from inventing innovative (read: overcivilized) products and making them look sumptuous in television ads to lobbying government officials to buying out experts to advertising to children, who don't know that they're being manipulated. It does not matter to them if selling more food occurs at the expense of public
health, Dr. Nestle writes in her book
Food Politics: How the Food Industry Influences Nutrition and Health.
“The leading [health] conditions related to diet—coronary heart disease, cancers at certain sites, diabetes, stroke, and liver cirrhosis, for example—could be reduced in prevalence or delayed until later in life if people ate less of the dietary components that increase disease risk. Advice to eat less, however, runs counter to the interest of food producers.
⁵

In an interview on Amazon.com's streaming video show
Amazon Fishbowl
, Pollan charges that Americans are “deliberately confused by an industry that spends $36 billion a year on marketing messages precisely to persuade us to eat more, and eat at different times, eat in the car, eat in front of television, and eat highly processed foods, because that's where the money is.” Dr. Nestle says the food industry intentionally keeps us confused about whether foods like chocolate, coffee, and eggs are good or bad for us and whether food labels like “low fat,” “low calorie” and “natural” really mean as much as they imply. Though I am not an expert on food industry economics, recently I witnessed an example of food-marketing hype firsthand. I saw packages of carrots that were labeled low fat. A low-fat label on a carrot? What nonsense! Of course they're low fat—they're carrots!

Food manufacturers do so much marketing—and very effectively—that they have changed the meaning of food from something we use to nourish ourselves, which is how we thought of it only one generation ago, to something we consume whenever we want to celebrate something, nourish, reward, comfort, or rev ourselves up. No wonder so many of us now live to eat rather than eat to live.

Where does the government stand on all of this? Some experts charge that the FDA experiences a conflict of interest inherent in its mission statement: that it must choose between promoting foods American farmers grow and directing consumers not to eat too much. “No government agency has the funds to promote dietary recommendations in competition with food advertising,”
Dr. Nestle writes. As a result, she claims, “The major sources of nutrition advice for most people are the media and the public relations efforts of the food industry itself.” In his 2004 testimony before Congress in hearings to evaluate the government's role in curbing obesity, Bruce Silverglade, legal affairs director for CSPI, explained to congressional panel members that food company marketing budgets alone dwarf those of the government's healthy-eating campaign—$7
billion
to $4 to $5 million. It's no surprise, then, that the message that Americans should eat less doesn't get emphasized.

How Being Too Toxic Makes You Fat

If you look under a microscope at somebody's blood right after they've eaten, you can see how the food they've eaten is affecting their body. During my studies, we used to do an experiment where we would ask people to eat a typical American convenience meal—say, fast food or pizza—then we'd draw their blood and examine it. If their diet was at all healthy, when we'd look at their blood cells before they ate, we'd see circular cells with space between them. But after a fast-food meal, the space between the blood cells was gone. Instead, they would be crowded next to and stacked on top of one another. We would show these “before and after” pictures to the volunteers. They'd be shocked to witness in their blood cells proof of why they felt sluggish and tired. Next, we'd ask them to consume five to ten digestive enzymes, whose job it is to eat up all the crud, allowing cells to swim in oxygenated blood. In less than an hour, the person would feel better and become more energetic. When we looked at their cells under the microscope, we could see that the cells were less crowded and able to breathe.

On a molecular level, when toxins enter the body in our food, the body tries to digest them. Once it realizes it's dealing with something unnatural, it mobilizes more and more enzymes as it tries (unsuccessfully) to break down the synthetic ingredients. When we feel ourselves becoming tired, bloated, gassy; experiencing heartburn, GERD (gastroesophageal reflux disease), or an upset
stomach; getting diarrhea; or even becoming constipated, this is often the reason why. It's also the reason 20 percent of Americans have digestive problems, and digestive aids like Tums, Milk of Magnesia, Pepcid, Prilosec, Zantac, Gas-X, and Imodium AD are among the best-selling over-the-counter and prescription medications. Eventually, the body realizes these substances are indigestible (hmm…that's awfully similar to the word
indigestion
). At that point, it moves them out of the stomach to the colon, one of the body's major trash cans. But even the colon doesn't know what to do with them. After sitting there for a while—constipating us, causing gas, body odor, and other problems as it tries to figure out what to do—they migrate into the lymphatic system, the body's drainage network. When the lymph system doesn't know how to deal with them, it dumps these toxins into our fat cells, whose primary job is to cushion and insulate our organs, but whose side gig is to store trash.

Over the course of our lifetime, as more toxins are shoved into our fat cells—on top of the fat—the cells get crowded and congested. When they get congested, we feel congested. We also develop cellulite, which is merely garbage stored in our fat cells that isn't supposed to be there. As our fat cells are stuffed fuller and fuller, we bloat, we get heavier, our clothes get tight. Over time, our cells become crowded so closely together that they can't get enough oxygen. In an effort to find someplace to put the junk we pile into it, our body creates more fat cells. They, too, get crammed full of crap until they can't take it anymore. They begin to wither, become misshapen and their growth becomes retarded. Eventually, they literally suffocate. Making matters worse, these overcivilized foods turn the colon, kidneys, and liver—organs whose job it is to filter harmful items out of the bloodstream and remove them from the body—into toxic cesspools. Over time, they become overloaded and unable to function, literally leaving us sick and tired. We are able to feel that something's not right with us, but because the problem exists at a microscopic level, only the most knowledgeable people are aware of exactly what's going on. The rest of us wonder why we feel symptoms like fatigue, sluggishness, foggy thinking, confusion, headaches, allergies, and
body aches. This toxicity manifests itself in more noticeable ways, including symptoms like wrinkles, age spots, skin that is overly dry or oily, acne, allergies, and body odor.