Or, Why I Love Monsanto
That last part is a joke. Really. I’m not a fan of that company, but for their aggressive and (I believe) immoral business practices, rather than any research they engage in or products they make. But it’s a little early to start a digression of that magnitude. [edit: Monsanto isn’t really that evil. I was misinformed, and, dare I say it, unskeptical about Monsanto and the oft-repeated claims about their “business practices”. Here’s a great video talking about the business practices in question. On with the show.]
In this first of a three-part series, we’re going to take a look at some of the myths and misinformation surrounding food – and eventually, some of the claims made by the film Food Fight, and the beliefs surrounding all of the things that we eat. We’re not setting out to “debunk” anything, but even so, as our friend Michael Shermer says, “there’s a lot of bunk out there”. It seems that everyone has a pet idea about food – that you shouldn’t eat “processed” foods, or foods with any hydrogenated oils, or should only eat organic, or that pasteurization of milk destroys all of its nutritional benefits. There are always scientific-sounding claims given along to support these ideas – conventional pesticides are poisoning us, and the evil big food corporations are ignoring it for the sake of profits, or that we didn’t evolve to eat pasteurized foods, or that high-fructose corn syrup is somehow digested differently than some other chemically-identical sugars that we might happen to ingest. But popular notions also invoke moral reasoning – current high-tech farming techniques are poisoning the planet, or support the immoral large food producers and don’t support the small local farmers.
“After a hard day farming, I go home, sit on a huge
pile of cash, and eat babies. You should try it.”
But before we examine the specific claims floating around out there, we have to lay the groundwork. We need to step back – way, way back, and learn exactly what food is, what it’s made of, exactly what – from a chemical perspective – we are putting into our bodies when we eat anything, from a giant bunch of locally-grown, pesticide-free organic kale to a Twinkie. We need to examine food and nutrition as a whole, including the digestive process and what it does to the things we eat.
Because understanding the answer to this question – what IS food? – is essential to our understanding of the issues at hand. Food is made up of six basic compounds. All food is made up of some combination of these six basic compounds.
Amino acids!
Amino acids are the building blocks of proteins, which are absolutely essential to our bodies and health. When we eat proteins – which we all must do – they are broken down by our digestive systems into their constituent amino acids, then reassembled into whatever proteins our body needs. There are nine amino acids that our bodies cannot synthesize, and therefore we must get from the food that we eat, and about 12 others that are nonessential and also conditionally essential – needed by certain populations more than others – growing children, low-birth-weight infants being two prime examples. The body generally makes use of any amino acid that you give it. Further, proteins in food like enzymes and hormones aren’t generally used by the body as those compounds – they too are broken down into the amino acids of which they are made and used as building blocks for what the body needs.
Carbohydrates!
This group contains sugars and starches, and they all break down into monosaccharides: the single sugars glucose, fructose, galactose, xylose, and ribose. Two of those together may come from a disaccharide like table sugar (which is made of a combination of glucose and fructose); a longer polysaccharide chain may come from the carbs in a granola bar. When we eat these carbohydrates, they get broken down into monosaccharides which fuel our bodies and other metabolic processes, like the aforementioned building of proteins our bodies need. Any extra monosaccharides get put together into space-saving polysaccharides for storage. (Not necessarily something you want.) There a few exceptions to this digestive process – certain populations have enzymatic deficiencies that prevent them from digesting certain sugars like lactose – galactose and glucose – leading to lactose intolerance.
Fatty acids!
Fatty acids come in essential and nonessential varieties like amino acids, and are important in nutrition because when metabolized, they yield abundant levels of adenosine triphosphate – one of the major fuels your body uses. Omega-3 and omega-6 are two fatty acids that we cannot synthesize on our own, and must get from the food that we ingest. Three of the others are conditionally essential, needed by certain populations. All the rest of the fatty acids are nonessential – our bodies use them, but it can make them itself, so we generally want to avoid eating more of these than we need. These include saturated fats (where all available chemical bonds are “saturated” with a hydrogen atom) and the non-essential unsaturated fats, which include monounsaturated, polyunsaturated, and trans fats.
Vitamins!
What IS a vitamin? There’s a simple, clear, definition: any other organic compound that our bodies need, that we cannot synthesize enough of and must get from the food that we eat. We discovered vitamins (as chemical compounds, they were “known” earlier but not understood) in the first half of the 1900s, and each time we learned about a new one, we gave it a successive alphabet letter: A, B, C, and so on. After we learned about vitamin B, we discovered that it was in fact eight different compounds, and so we called them B1, B2, B3, and so on. (Fun fact: there’s currently gaps in the numbering system of these vitamins because we used to think there were more than 8, but learned that some of the compounds we thought were essential are actually synthesized by the body. This is why there’s no longer a vitamin B4, for instance.)
Vitamins come in two basic flavors: water-soluble, and fat-soluble. The water-soluble ones will be discharged in your urine if you eat too much of them (vitamins B and C), but the rest will be more challenging for your body to clear and in extreme overdose cases can lead to hypervitaminosis, which can be extremely dangerous. With a few exceptions, anybody who eats anything close to something resembling a balanced diet in any industrialized nation gets more than enough of all the vitamins their bodies need, and thus supplementation amounts to a useless waste of money. It’s like pouring water into an already full bucket.
Minerals!
Minerals are any inorganic (in the chemical sense, meaning no carbon bonds) that our bodies need. There are sixteen essential elements (they’re not technically “minerals” in the geology sense, but you get the idea) including iron, potassium, zinc, sodium, and magnesium. There are some half-dozen others considered conditionally essential, but if you stick with the sixteen you’re probably all right. Minerals must be consumed in the food that we eat – we aren’t stars, we can’t fission together some heavy elements whenever we need to.
Just like vitamins, with few exceptions, anybody who eats anything resembling a balanced diet in any industrialized nation gets more than they need of their essential minerals. There are a few populations for whom this is not true, most notably pregnant women and people who avoid dairy products for whatever reason.
Water!
Obviously. The most important inorganic solvent known to man. Can’t live without it. If you are deficient in this, you’ll know it.
And there we have it: the six basic building blocks of all the food you can eat, and the basic argument against any and all “you shouldn’t eat this or that”. ALL food is made of these building blocks, and the first thing your body does when you eat any food is to break it down into its constituent components so that your body can make use of the stuff – and these are building blocks that you’re going to get from eating either a Twinkie, or that organically-grown free-of-corporate-hate-energy bunch of kale.
Of course, the basic response to this is that some of the building blocks are good (essential amino acids) and some are bad (like trans-fats) and the food that we eat delivers different proportions of these, and so we should eat foods that deliver good stuff while avoiding foods that have more of the bad stuff. This is a no-brainer, really, but it’s generally not what the arguments in popular media like Food Fight put forth: their arguments are largely based on non-sequitors and hand-waving about “toxins” and vague claims about how “modern” food is making us sick. (An interesting topic that we’ll address later.) And where these arguments fall short objective grounds, they are placed firmly into the realm of ideologies. And there is nothing wrong with ideologies, but – and this is important – they do not count as food science.
There is little fundamental difference between the Twinkie and that kale. At a chemical level, they are made of the same stuff. Clearly, you should not really eat that Twinkie. Nobody worth listening to is making the opposite argument. Foods have different nutritional contents, and that Twinkie packs a load of sugars and fats that you don’t need. But it’s all the same fundamental stuff. The Twinkie doesn’t contain anything that your body isn’t made to handle, it just happens to be a load of empty calories that you probably don’t want.
Further, cooking foods, or pasteurizing them, introduces chemical changes that are, for the most part, identical to the first steps in digestion. There are even some compounds that cannot be digested without cooking first to break certain chemical bonds. Almost all claims that cooking “destroys” nutrients are wrong – it’s simply the same steps that your body would take anyway. Pasteurization in milk introduces certain very small chemical changes1, 2 that are well-understood and if necessary, compensated for by fortification.
The bottom line is that if you wish to evaluate any given food’s nutritional value, you must look at what it actually delivers. Simply considering where it came from, or who designed it, is not a useful assessment of its actual substance. You can claim otherwise, but then you’re firmly in the realm of pseudoscience.
In part two of this series, we’ll examine organic farming, and whether it delivers on the grand promises it makes about healthfulness, being better for the environment, and safety.
Exit, stage left.
Sparks
1: A systematic review and meta-analysis of the effects of pasteurization on milk vitamins, and evidence for raw milk consumption and other health-related outcomes. Journal of Food Protection, 2011 Nov;74(11):1814-32. doi: 10.4315/0362-028X.JFP-10-269.
2: Influence of the heat treatment of human milk on some of its protective constituents, Journal of Pediatrics, 1977 Jan;90(1):29-35.