Food: Part 4

Here are Parts 1, 2 & 3 of this series in case you missed them.

To answer my last question, no. I’m not going to serve my family cod liver oil and organ meats.

But I have been rethinking the way we eat.

I checked Weston A. Price’s book Nutrition and Physical Degeneration out from the library (I’m a nerd and I’m okay with it). I was just going to skim it, but his photographs drew me in and I found myself reading each page. In the 1920s and ‘30s Price studied isolated and modernized Swiss, Irish, North American Indians and Eskimos, Melanesians, Polynesians, African Tribes, Australian Aborigines, New Zealand Maori, Torres Strait Islanders, and Peruvian Indians.

It was the same story every time. When the people were isolated from modern society and eating an all-natural diet, they thrived. They had beautiful straight teeth, broad facial structure, and few diseases. But groups located near new highways and railways who suddenly had access to modern foods (sugar, white flour, and canned foods) began to deteriorate. Their teeth rotted and their children were born with more narrow faces. Many of these children had trouble breathing through their noses. Diseases spread rapidly. And with little access to dentists or doctors, they suffered terribly.

There is so much I don’t know about health and nutrition. Price’s theories are controversial and I’m not saying he was right on all counts. But I’m also not sure it’s wise to think we as modern Americans have it all figured out. It sounds like there have been plenty of healthy people who flourished without the latest research study, without nutrition facts, and without low-fat, low-carb, low-cholesterol, low-sodium, portion-controlled, perfectly packaged, processed food.

Compared to most of the world, Americans have quality healthcare. But instead of spending so much time and money trying to fix what’s broken, wouldn’t it make more sense to look at the root of the problem? “An American born in 2000 has a 1 in 3 chance of developing diabetes in his lifetime,” writes Michael Pollan. Our bodies don’t seem to like our current diet, but instead of changing the way we eat, we now have “a vast new diabetes industry”. We keep moving forward even when it makes more sense to go back.

I’m not saying my family will never eat sugar or processed food again. We have cereal in our pantry right now. We have no plans to try raw dairy at this point (mainly because it’s not legal in the state of Florida) and I’m not sure I’d eat organ meat no matter how healthy it is. But I do want to make more of our food at home from better, more pure ingredients. I’m beginning to see that fat, even animal fat, is not the enemy; it actually helps us better absorb vitamins and minerals. Most of the people Price studied believed it was essential for reproductive health. It’s also very yummy.

We’re trying to learn more about how our food is grown and to be more connected to the process. Two weeks ago we went to a farm about 15 minutes from our house to get some beef and chicken. We were there a couple months ago and the owner took us on a tour to see his cows, pigs, chickens, and turkeys as they roamed through the grass, eating what God intended them to eat. But once again, I was struck by my own ignorance. The chicken we just bought was, well, a chicken. And I’d never cooked a whole chicken. Just boneless, skinless chicken breasts. So I didn’t know how to cook our chicken, but thanks to a helpful blog, I learned. It turns out it’s really easy to cook a chicken and it makes your entire house smell like a Sunday-afternoon-at-your-Grandma’s feast.

I don’t want health to become my religion. I think Jesus would have thankfully eaten anything He was served. He never made people feel condemned, not even the prostitutes or tax collectors. When it comes to treats at church or with friends and family, I want my kids to enjoy themselves. It might be healthier in the physical sense to live in total, self-sustaining isolation, but we live in a community we love and need in many ways.

Still, the glowing faces of the remote people in Price’s book will probably stay with me. I don’t think sugar or processed food is as harmless as we like to believe. I don’t have my family’s nutrition all figured out by any means, but I know which direction I want to go—backwards. Away from processed, packaged food and toward more fruits and veggies. Away from low-anything and toward healthy fat. Away from the hysterical, ever-changing diet advice on the news and toward a steady, simple philosophy: doing what I can to find natural, real food, fixing as much as I can at home, and enjoying it with family and friends around the table.