There is a widespread belief among our mothers and families that foods are �heating�or �cooling� in nature and have different effect in the body depending the type of body, and indeed thereare some foods which are "balanced� or �neutral�. It has absolutely nothing related to food's temperature.To make it easier to understand lets have one simple example-some people catch cold faster on having curd; the same chilly will release different degree of heat in different body. Many of us have been ignorant regarding food, its meaning and the uses in healthcare. Diet therapy is performed all around the world. In this issue, we would like to discuss on the heating & cooling system of food which we have been unenticingly adopting in house hold.
The opinion may be traced back to the time of Hippocrates. His later disciple, Galen, would be the person who really popularized the idea. The entire system, as worked out by Galen, involves four conditions: hot, cold, wet and dry. Every single part of this system is associated in one or the other way with elements of Greek Science, fire, air, water and earth.
Their particular interaction generates four body fluids known as �humors.�The hot & dry humor is blood; hot & wet make phlegm; cold & wet make bile whereas cold & dry create black bile. There isn't anything we know called black bile, which was thought to lead to melancholy, yet early accounts make it clear that the term refers to the dysfunction associated with blood that clog the bile duct, liver, and sometimes intestines in cases of malaria and liver ailments. These kinds of humors have been thought to influence persona & people do fall into several extensive persona types that seem to be natural. Sanguine individuals are much like the extraverts of recent psychology-in reality; Carl Jung designed the idea of �extraversion� by modernizing the old humoral classification in the light of recent medical information. Extremely melancholic individuals are now known as �depressed,� �paranoid,� or �schizophrenic�.
Foods can heat, cool, dry, or wet the body. Spicy and oily dishes are heating. Water is cooling-not wetting, because if you fall into water you get chilled, but your body parts do not get wet. Wetting meals are those that cause preservation of liquids. Later authors recognized a system of degrees, from first degree (very mild) to third or fourth degree (fatal). A food could be heating to the third degree and drying to the first degree.
For Hippocrates, slim barley soup was the excellent cure-all. Depressed individuals were usually put on a regimen-a way of life or routine-of barley soup and bed rest. The global use of pearl barley in healthy soups owes its source to this era. Pearl barley seems to be dropping its popularity now, but it was globally used in both Euro-American and Chinese healthful soups.
Galen had written much about different kinds of bread, beans, waters, meats, and other foods. He had extremely distinct and infiltrating feedback on these, though he was prone to embellish their significance in regards to health care. More complex systems developed. Arabic, Persian, and Jewish physicians of the Near East and Muslim Spain also added their contributions later on.
Quite a few contemporary foods have been advanced together in the Galenic period. In Europe, salads balance cooling greens using salt along with oil, pork is normally balanced by mustard, along with hefty foods for workers balance light foods for the not so active.
The Galenic system spread through the European countries and also to the Midst East, influencing medicine throughout South, Southeast and East Asia. Along with European expansion the idea multiplied around the globe. From the mid-twentieth century, it was without doubt the most prevalent system on earth.
In Europe, it continued to be the orthodox opinion till it was replaced by modern nutritional science in the late 19th century and early 20th century. It still survives well throughout the Middle East and in much of Latin America. A number of different ethnic groups have produced related practices: yin along with yang in China, hot along with cold in native America, independent heating/cooling system in Malaysia. Everybody knows than an individual whose body is too hot (feverish) is actually sick, and individual whose body is too cold (hypothermic) is in problems. Everybody knows affliction of diarrhea, vomiting, fever, pain are caused by poorly kept food. We know that a feast with much alcohol and spicy and oily foods is followed by headache and indigestion. We know that poor nutrition leads to weakness, and low body temperature; the modern nutritionist calls this �anemia.� Nothing could be more natural and easy than to assume that food affects all of health.
Humoral medicine spread to China along with its acceptance of Buddhism around 400 AD and fused with the Chinese yin-yang theory. In modern Chinese medicine, high-calorie foods are regarded as heating, low-calorie foods as cooling. This is indeed a way of expressing a truth that the Chinese know perfectly well: you get more metabolic heat out of the former. The Chinese have had enough experience with hunger and famine to know which foods maintain body heat in cold weather. The most perfectly balanced food however is cooked grain, which has around five hundred calories per pound. (All over the world, the most balanced food is usually the local staple: rice in China, bread in the Near East, tortillas in Mexico.) Foods that feel burning are, of course, heating: ginger, alcohol, chili, black pepper. Foods that are bitter tend to be heating; sour, cooling. Foods that are �hot� colors (red, bright yellow, etc.) are heating; foods that are pallid and greenish are cooling. Foods that cause a burn like reaction (reddening, swelling, irritation) are heating; thus if you are allergic to a �cold� food and get a rash from it, it�s �heating� for you, even though it would be considered �cooling� to most people.
Foods that treat such burn like conditions are cooling, while foods that treat �cold� conditions are heating. Herein lays the real value of the system. Lacks of vitamins A and C are classic �hot� conditions (reddening, sores, dry skin, etc.), and vegetables are the cure. It works. Anemia is the classic �cold� condition (pallor, weakness, etc.), and gently warming meat, especially organ meats and blood, is the standard cure. It works. So the system is validated in the eyes of those who use it. In short, the Chinese observed cause and effect quite accurately. But they then in some case inferred an incorrect or over generalized intervening variable- a mystic internal �heat� or �coolness� in this case. They then logically extended the system in inaccurate ways, as when red-bean soup is used to �heat� and dried-green-bean soup to �cool� people, just because the former has a hot color, the latter a cool color. Nutritionally they are identical.
However, China did not have an adequate research-and-publication system. Nor did the Chinese have an advanced chemical science that could isolate vitamins and mineral nutrients. They also didn�t have a public media system that made new findings widely available. So although Chinese nutritional science remained the best in the world well into the nineteenth century, it was easily supplanted by international biomedicine, which was western based and western orientated. Still, Asia remained a leader even in the latter field.
The first vitamin (B1) was discovered in what is now Indonesia (around 1900s). Chinese and other East Asian scientists were involved in modern nutritional science from the beginning. The old hot/cold theory lasted in both China and the west well into the twentieth century, but was supplanted by newer concepts that stood up better under experimentation. Still today, China and Chinese scientists remain in the forefront, continuing a tradition that has lasted for twenty-five hundred years.
China, in addition to the Galenic system, has a whole series of beliefs, some of them pure superstition, connected with dangerous food combinations, poison-potentiating foods, tonic foods, strengthening foods, energy foods, and so on (Anderson 1988). This has led to the extermination or near-extermination of hundreds of species of plants and animals; believed to be tonic foods, they have been hunted into extinction. India has a quite different but equally rich and complex system of beliefs, based on sattvic, rajas and tamasic foods and the effects they have. Most western traditions-European or Islamic-are based on the Galenic tradition, but they added from their own experiences, with modifications and changes; the results are often very different from each other. Nutritional beliefs of smaller societies are less well known, but they do exist and deserve further attention.
Health, status, and pricing all influence each other. Today, formerly very expensive foods like white bread and white sugar are very cheap, thanks to industrial processing techniques. They were believed to be the healthy and high status foods. Today, with the brown forms more expensive, the nutritional beliefs have shifted; brown is good. In fact, white is less rich in nutrients but is more digestible. When white was expensive, digestibility counted for much. Today, with brown more expensive, vitamin content get featured. On the other hand, formerly very cheap foods are now very expensive or even unavailable, because of environmental devastation. Not only are wild game and caviar depleted; we are also now facing the loss of ordinary vegetables, which require good soil, care and fertilizer. They are getting rapidly more expensive in the First World and are often completely unavailable in Third World cities. Similarly, local staple starches are losing out to processed grains. Fruits, ever more expensive, are losing out to white sugar.
Today, health and food interact in many ways. Starting around the end of the nineteenth century, western Europeans began to react against processed foods. The movement reached the United States, and found its natural home. Americans disturbed by rapid urbanization and immigration were especially prone to adopt the gospel of whole grains and simple country foods.
Sylvester Graham, inventor of the graham cracker, was the first preacher of this gospel to win fame. He inveighed against white sugar, white flour, and other processed foods. They were not only poor in nutrition (which is true enough); they were signs of a degenerate life associated with the city. He taught that people should live largely on Graham flour: the whole wheat grain, bran and all, ground into meal. This and pure water was his version of a perfect diet. His disciples were desperately short of vitamins. Ironically, the graham cracker is now mostly sugar and white flour-the very things he hated.
Yogurt abounds today thanks to one man: Nobel Prize winner Elie Metchnikoff, who worked out the dynamics of the immune response system. He wondered why people in rural parts of his native Bulgaria were extremely long-lived in spite of their poverty and poor health care. The most obvious difference between them and other European peasants was that they ate great quantities of yogurt, a food almost unknown at the time. He settled on yogurt as the only reasonable explanation for the longevity. We now know that, although yogurt does indeed have many virtues, the Bulgarians owe more to the fruits, vegetables, herbs, and vegetable oils in their diet. Whole wheat bread, breakfast cereals, and many other foods owe their initial popularity to health concerns. In China, countless foods are eaten for this reason, from wild duck to wolfthorn berries. Medicinal value is the only real reason for the cultivation of the wolfthorn, whose leaves and fruits are nearly tasteless but incredibly rich in vitamins and minerals; its nutritional value was known long before vitamins were discovered.
By the mid-twentieth century, the �health food� movement remained largely committed to whole grains and vegetarianism. Unprocessed nuts, fruits, and vegetables were advocated. From Graham onward, the concept of �naturalness� was critically important and increasingly hard to define, to be sure, but always valued (as it still is). The resulting diet was not, however, either very natural or very healthy. Far too much highly processed brown sugar, oil, and starch got into it. Lack of full understanding of the role of iron and of vitamins A, C, E, and the minor B vitamins led to far too little advocacy of fresh vegetables. Health-food eaters tended to be elderly, and either strongly religious Seventh-Day Adventists or strongly conservative white Americans in the old anti-urban, anti-immigrant tradition. Clearly, what defined �health food� was more a matter of rebellious opposition than of health. The category was established long before vitamins and minerals were known to be nutritionally significant; vitamins were not even discovered until almost eighty years after Graham�s first work. Instead, the issue was unprocessed versus processed: whole grain versus white flour, brown sugar versus white sugar, and so on. Also, such urban or imported items as alcohol, tea, and coffee were anathema to this health food movement. Whole grain is indeed a nutritionally valuable commodity, but brown sugar and even honey are not significantly different from regular sugar. Vegetarianism can be healthy and is definitely environmentally friendly, but only if one is very careful about vitamins B12, B6, and so on.
Into this mix came, quite suddenly, two dramatic new factors. First, Ancel Keys�s findings on heart disease implicated animal fats and gave the vegetarian and vegan movement a great boost. Keys�s findings unleashed a whole new field in nutrition studies. Second, the hippy movement of the late sixties took up the cause of health food with a vengeance-but they were far more concerned with fruits and vegetables, and they consumed a number of plant substances that were far from acceptable to the older health food consumers! The result could be most entertaining.
Propaganda from food-processing companies told that the processed foods were the healthy foods. Meanwhile, it was clear that �healthy eating� was becoming a trademark of hippies, yuppies, and others. The very phrase �white bread� was used in the late twentieth century as a disparaging way to refer to conservative Americans. Predictably enough, many of the new �health� foods were not particularly healthy, though the level of sophistication of the new consumers was high enough to guarantee some awareness of ongoing scientific progress. Vegetarianism received added impetus from other liberal causes, from animal rights concerns to fears that too much grain was going to animals rather than humans.
Meanwhile, even the most unaware could not remain totally ignorant of new findings. Beef and whole-fat dairy products suffered a massive decline in popularity. The Consumption of beef and of other dairy products declined in the late twentieth century. Yet, gourmet ice cream bucked the trend, becoming popular to the point of near universality just as full-fat milk and cream were becoming rare commodities in many markets. Organ meats or offal almost disappeared, considered to be disgusting as well as unhealthy-in spite of the fact that they are the best of all sources of vitamins and minerals. Fish, considered healthy in spite of its high levels of toxins and mercury, became far more abundant and expensive.
Similar changes, meanwhile, were taking place in Europe and elsewhere. Animal-rights activists made vegetarianism common in England. Germany began to slide away from beer, its historic drink. By the turn of the century, beer production was up but consumption was down. However, in the United States, microbrewery beer became more popular. In all these cases, the common theme was clear: �healthy� eating often has as much to do with image as with health. What is often thought to be unhealthy turns out to be what is associated with those whom one does not like.
Anti-alcohol agitators claimed that alcohol produced nothing but violent drunks. Vegetarians have often condemned meat for making people act wild, savage, and vicious, like carnivorous animals. By the turn of the century, the health-food movement had fragmented into many streams. Some people depended heavily on dietary supplements. Others had taken up the Mediterranean diet, known to be associated with longevity. Others were still devouring sprout-and-avocado sandwiches on whole-grain bread. The general trend though has been to abstain from high-fat foods, especially animal fats. Eating Salad and yogurt has exploded in popularity-in spite of the exceedingly high-fat dressings on the one and the heavy sweetening usually found in the other. Much of this really is healthy, but sellers of fads know how to manipulate images, and use Hollywood stars and other highly visible beings. They thus sometimes sell their messages more successfully than the real nutritionists do.
Health concerns inevitably lead us to chicken soup, traditionally the health food of the Jewish world, but equally popular as a health stew in China, India, and most other old civilizations. It conveys messages far beyond mere disease control. It is associated with family, with caring, with love and tenderness. The scent of a good chicken soup is intensely evocative to a very large portion of humanity.
Food habits hallowed by tradition and family are often bound with love, with feeling, and with life itself. Philosophers have spent much time discoursing on the phenomenology of food. Poets have sung of it. Writers have concentrated on it; few indeed are the novels that do not draw on the symbolism of food and drink. For all of us, food is about much more than nourishing the body. It is nourishment for the soul.
Throughout the world, there is today a rise of food based on white flour, white sugar, and oil. Particularly prominent are mass-produced sweet and salty snacks; white bread and white-flour, mass-produced baked goods; hamburgers and fried chicken; and various processed potato products such as French fries. The rise of such food, sometimes (at its worst) called �junk food,� was originally due to two factors. First, it is seen as modern and powerful. Second, it is cheap to make and store. (This food is, of course, also high in those things people crave: sweetness, salt, fat. This may �taste better� to some, but in areas notably Hong Kong and Mexico, such food is popular but not because of-its taste; people prefer their own foods.)
The healthiest-eating areas of the world have begun to fall from medical grace. The �Mediterranean diet� has been held up as a model of health. However, many of them are based on complex carbohydrates supplemented by olive oil, herbs, vegetables, fruits, and small amounts of dairy products-a healthy diet indeed. In Cyprus and other modernizing areas of the Mediterranean world, a massive shift away from this diet and toward the international processed-food diet has sent rates of degenerative diseases skyrocketing.
The rise of fast food and highly processed food has a long and complex history, involving a great deal of political manipulation. This story has been so well told by Marion Nestle and Eric Schlosser. The giant food corporations, who are often also the giant tobacco corporations, have lobbied industriously to get their products blessed rather than banned by local and national governments. Many �food experts� writing on food health were propaganda agents for the corporations.�Revolving doors� between government regulatory agencies and food corporation directorates have also been noted: today�s food corporate manager sometimes reappears as tomorrow�s regulatory agency director, and vice-versa. Food corporations also are often closely tied to agriculture, and farmers vote in large numbers, making their interests paramount to governments around the world. Developed countries give them huge subsidies, making �the free market� a useless and empty phrase. Industrial chain-outlet junk food is here to stay.
Getting people to change their food habits will require a sea change in thinking. Fortunately, this is slowly coming to pass; among other things, some international chains have recently responded to criticism by upgrading the nutritional quality of their offerings. Peanut butter is a case of a successful health food. Invented by John Harvey Kellogg, the cereal man, it was propagated by people such as Ellen White, his associate, who founded the Seventh- Day Adventist Church and dedicated it to healthy eating. Popular with children, cheap, and easy to use, peanut butter was a great success story, though it too has suffered from adulteration with sugar and cheap oil.
In Guatemala, the famine relief agency INCAP developed a nutritional supplement for the desperately poor, in the late 1940s. This �Incaparina� was sold or given away as a food for the poor. Of course, no one would touch it. Anthropologically sophisticated nutritionists Nevin and Mary Scrimshaw took over the program. Immediately, they promoted Incaparina as an elite food. They persuaded Guatemalan stars and celebrities to consume it with (apparent) relish and delight on public media. Incaparina succeeded brilliantly. By contrast many campaigns for healthy eating and against �junk� food have failed dismally.
There are basically four common serious problems. Firstly, such campaigns are usually preachy. Young people everywhere hate to be preached to; yet young people are the ones who most need the message. Secondly, these campaigns are usually designed strictly in terms of health-especially the health of old people. They do not address the fact that people choose foods for many other reasons. Thirdly, the campaigns tend to nest in health and social- welfare agencies, not in food markets or shopping areas. Fourth, the campaigns are rarely very visible in the schools. Even if they are taught in the classrooms, they do not affect the actual food habits of the school.
What should be done?
Nutritional educators should target their campaigns toward active people between ten and forty, unless they are specifically concerned with the elderly.
They should do everything possible to make good food and nutrition the prestigious, stylish and fashionable option.
Junk food is the choice of fools or the impoverished, people who are neither with it nor health conscious, people who are gullible and out of date.
They should talk about health positively: this will improve your looks, your sex life and your whole life. People at the stage when they are forming their lifelong food habits are far more concerned with these positive matters than with dark thoughts about the future.
However, scare stories about heart disease, cancer, and diabetes are also appropriate. These problems can start early, and lifelong food habits are laid down early. On the other hand, campaigns focused on these issues should be directed mainly at people old enough to be directly and immediately concerned with those conditions.
Campaigns about infant nutrition should, again, be directed at mothers: young, often confused, concerned about everything from survival to maintaining their looks. In the Third World, they are usually poorly educated, impoverished, and forced to work twelve- to sixteen-hour days to survive. Even in the First World, the luxury of staying at home with the baby is simply no longer economically viable. Yet nutrition campaigns still talk as if there is a full-time mother and homemaker on the receiving end. Long, difficult routines are advised and Shortcuts are not even suggested.
Above all, all nutritional campaigns should be based�on word of mouth. This is not to say there should be any cutbacks on media use. The Media is an extremely useful tool in disseminating knowledge about health issues. However, people rely-still-on what they hear from their friends and from trusted health providers in their communities. This is especially true of the Third World peoples and impoverished First World populations that we most want to reach.
Various books and reference materials were referred while preparing this article.
Their particular interaction generates four body fluids known as �humors.�The hot & dry humor is blood; hot & wet make phlegm; cold & wet make bile whereas cold & dry create black bile. There isn't anything we know called black bile, which was thought to lead to melancholy, yet early accounts make it clear that the term refers to the dysfunction associated with blood that clog the bile duct, liver, and sometimes intestines in cases of malaria and liver ailments. These kinds of humors have been thought to influence persona & people do fall into several extensive persona types that seem to be natural. Sanguine individuals are much like the extraverts of recent psychology-in reality; Carl Jung designed the idea of �extraversion� by modernizing the old humoral classification in the light of recent medical information. Extremely melancholic individuals are now known as �depressed,� �paranoid,� or �schizophrenic�.
Foods can heat, cool, dry, or wet the body. Spicy and oily dishes are heating. Water is cooling-not wetting, because if you fall into water you get chilled, but your body parts do not get wet. Wetting meals are those that cause preservation of liquids. Later authors recognized a system of degrees, from first degree (very mild) to third or fourth degree (fatal). A food could be heating to the third degree and drying to the first degree.
For Hippocrates, slim barley soup was the excellent cure-all. Depressed individuals were usually put on a regimen-a way of life or routine-of barley soup and bed rest. The global use of pearl barley in healthy soups owes its source to this era. Pearl barley seems to be dropping its popularity now, but it was globally used in both Euro-American and Chinese healthful soups.
Galen had written much about different kinds of bread, beans, waters, meats, and other foods. He had extremely distinct and infiltrating feedback on these, though he was prone to embellish their significance in regards to health care. More complex systems developed. Arabic, Persian, and Jewish physicians of the Near East and Muslim Spain also added their contributions later on.
Quite a few contemporary foods have been advanced together in the Galenic period. In Europe, salads balance cooling greens using salt along with oil, pork is normally balanced by mustard, along with hefty foods for workers balance light foods for the not so active.
The Galenic system spread through the European countries and also to the Midst East, influencing medicine throughout South, Southeast and East Asia. Along with European expansion the idea multiplied around the globe. From the mid-twentieth century, it was without doubt the most prevalent system on earth.
In Europe, it continued to be the orthodox opinion till it was replaced by modern nutritional science in the late 19th century and early 20th century. It still survives well throughout the Middle East and in much of Latin America. A number of different ethnic groups have produced related practices: yin along with yang in China, hot along with cold in native America, independent heating/cooling system in Malaysia. Everybody knows than an individual whose body is too hot (feverish) is actually sick, and individual whose body is too cold (hypothermic) is in problems. Everybody knows affliction of diarrhea, vomiting, fever, pain are caused by poorly kept food. We know that a feast with much alcohol and spicy and oily foods is followed by headache and indigestion. We know that poor nutrition leads to weakness, and low body temperature; the modern nutritionist calls this �anemia.� Nothing could be more natural and easy than to assume that food affects all of health.
Humoral medicine spread to China along with its acceptance of Buddhism around 400 AD and fused with the Chinese yin-yang theory. In modern Chinese medicine, high-calorie foods are regarded as heating, low-calorie foods as cooling. This is indeed a way of expressing a truth that the Chinese know perfectly well: you get more metabolic heat out of the former. The Chinese have had enough experience with hunger and famine to know which foods maintain body heat in cold weather. The most perfectly balanced food however is cooked grain, which has around five hundred calories per pound. (All over the world, the most balanced food is usually the local staple: rice in China, bread in the Near East, tortillas in Mexico.) Foods that feel burning are, of course, heating: ginger, alcohol, chili, black pepper. Foods that are bitter tend to be heating; sour, cooling. Foods that are �hot� colors (red, bright yellow, etc.) are heating; foods that are pallid and greenish are cooling. Foods that cause a burn like reaction (reddening, swelling, irritation) are heating; thus if you are allergic to a �cold� food and get a rash from it, it�s �heating� for you, even though it would be considered �cooling� to most people.
Foods that treat such burn like conditions are cooling, while foods that treat �cold� conditions are heating. Herein lays the real value of the system. Lacks of vitamins A and C are classic �hot� conditions (reddening, sores, dry skin, etc.), and vegetables are the cure. It works. Anemia is the classic �cold� condition (pallor, weakness, etc.), and gently warming meat, especially organ meats and blood, is the standard cure. It works. So the system is validated in the eyes of those who use it. In short, the Chinese observed cause and effect quite accurately. But they then in some case inferred an incorrect or over generalized intervening variable- a mystic internal �heat� or �coolness� in this case. They then logically extended the system in inaccurate ways, as when red-bean soup is used to �heat� and dried-green-bean soup to �cool� people, just because the former has a hot color, the latter a cool color. Nutritionally they are identical.
However, China did not have an adequate research-and-publication system. Nor did the Chinese have an advanced chemical science that could isolate vitamins and mineral nutrients. They also didn�t have a public media system that made new findings widely available. So although Chinese nutritional science remained the best in the world well into the nineteenth century, it was easily supplanted by international biomedicine, which was western based and western orientated. Still, Asia remained a leader even in the latter field.
The first vitamin (B1) was discovered in what is now Indonesia (around 1900s). Chinese and other East Asian scientists were involved in modern nutritional science from the beginning. The old hot/cold theory lasted in both China and the west well into the twentieth century, but was supplanted by newer concepts that stood up better under experimentation. Still today, China and Chinese scientists remain in the forefront, continuing a tradition that has lasted for twenty-five hundred years.
China, in addition to the Galenic system, has a whole series of beliefs, some of them pure superstition, connected with dangerous food combinations, poison-potentiating foods, tonic foods, strengthening foods, energy foods, and so on (Anderson 1988). This has led to the extermination or near-extermination of hundreds of species of plants and animals; believed to be tonic foods, they have been hunted into extinction. India has a quite different but equally rich and complex system of beliefs, based on sattvic, rajas and tamasic foods and the effects they have. Most western traditions-European or Islamic-are based on the Galenic tradition, but they added from their own experiences, with modifications and changes; the results are often very different from each other. Nutritional beliefs of smaller societies are less well known, but they do exist and deserve further attention.
Health, status, and pricing all influence each other. Today, formerly very expensive foods like white bread and white sugar are very cheap, thanks to industrial processing techniques. They were believed to be the healthy and high status foods. Today, with the brown forms more expensive, the nutritional beliefs have shifted; brown is good. In fact, white is less rich in nutrients but is more digestible. When white was expensive, digestibility counted for much. Today, with brown more expensive, vitamin content get featured. On the other hand, formerly very cheap foods are now very expensive or even unavailable, because of environmental devastation. Not only are wild game and caviar depleted; we are also now facing the loss of ordinary vegetables, which require good soil, care and fertilizer. They are getting rapidly more expensive in the First World and are often completely unavailable in Third World cities. Similarly, local staple starches are losing out to processed grains. Fruits, ever more expensive, are losing out to white sugar.
Today, health and food interact in many ways. Starting around the end of the nineteenth century, western Europeans began to react against processed foods. The movement reached the United States, and found its natural home. Americans disturbed by rapid urbanization and immigration were especially prone to adopt the gospel of whole grains and simple country foods.
Sylvester Graham, inventor of the graham cracker, was the first preacher of this gospel to win fame. He inveighed against white sugar, white flour, and other processed foods. They were not only poor in nutrition (which is true enough); they were signs of a degenerate life associated with the city. He taught that people should live largely on Graham flour: the whole wheat grain, bran and all, ground into meal. This and pure water was his version of a perfect diet. His disciples were desperately short of vitamins. Ironically, the graham cracker is now mostly sugar and white flour-the very things he hated.
Yogurt abounds today thanks to one man: Nobel Prize winner Elie Metchnikoff, who worked out the dynamics of the immune response system. He wondered why people in rural parts of his native Bulgaria were extremely long-lived in spite of their poverty and poor health care. The most obvious difference between them and other European peasants was that they ate great quantities of yogurt, a food almost unknown at the time. He settled on yogurt as the only reasonable explanation for the longevity. We now know that, although yogurt does indeed have many virtues, the Bulgarians owe more to the fruits, vegetables, herbs, and vegetable oils in their diet. Whole wheat bread, breakfast cereals, and many other foods owe their initial popularity to health concerns. In China, countless foods are eaten for this reason, from wild duck to wolfthorn berries. Medicinal value is the only real reason for the cultivation of the wolfthorn, whose leaves and fruits are nearly tasteless but incredibly rich in vitamins and minerals; its nutritional value was known long before vitamins were discovered.
By the mid-twentieth century, the �health food� movement remained largely committed to whole grains and vegetarianism. Unprocessed nuts, fruits, and vegetables were advocated. From Graham onward, the concept of �naturalness� was critically important and increasingly hard to define, to be sure, but always valued (as it still is). The resulting diet was not, however, either very natural or very healthy. Far too much highly processed brown sugar, oil, and starch got into it. Lack of full understanding of the role of iron and of vitamins A, C, E, and the minor B vitamins led to far too little advocacy of fresh vegetables. Health-food eaters tended to be elderly, and either strongly religious Seventh-Day Adventists or strongly conservative white Americans in the old anti-urban, anti-immigrant tradition. Clearly, what defined �health food� was more a matter of rebellious opposition than of health. The category was established long before vitamins and minerals were known to be nutritionally significant; vitamins were not even discovered until almost eighty years after Graham�s first work. Instead, the issue was unprocessed versus processed: whole grain versus white flour, brown sugar versus white sugar, and so on. Also, such urban or imported items as alcohol, tea, and coffee were anathema to this health food movement. Whole grain is indeed a nutritionally valuable commodity, but brown sugar and even honey are not significantly different from regular sugar. Vegetarianism can be healthy and is definitely environmentally friendly, but only if one is very careful about vitamins B12, B6, and so on.
Into this mix came, quite suddenly, two dramatic new factors. First, Ancel Keys�s findings on heart disease implicated animal fats and gave the vegetarian and vegan movement a great boost. Keys�s findings unleashed a whole new field in nutrition studies. Second, the hippy movement of the late sixties took up the cause of health food with a vengeance-but they were far more concerned with fruits and vegetables, and they consumed a number of plant substances that were far from acceptable to the older health food consumers! The result could be most entertaining.
Propaganda from food-processing companies told that the processed foods were the healthy foods. Meanwhile, it was clear that �healthy eating� was becoming a trademark of hippies, yuppies, and others. The very phrase �white bread� was used in the late twentieth century as a disparaging way to refer to conservative Americans. Predictably enough, many of the new �health� foods were not particularly healthy, though the level of sophistication of the new consumers was high enough to guarantee some awareness of ongoing scientific progress. Vegetarianism received added impetus from other liberal causes, from animal rights concerns to fears that too much grain was going to animals rather than humans.
Meanwhile, even the most unaware could not remain totally ignorant of new findings. Beef and whole-fat dairy products suffered a massive decline in popularity. The Consumption of beef and of other dairy products declined in the late twentieth century. Yet, gourmet ice cream bucked the trend, becoming popular to the point of near universality just as full-fat milk and cream were becoming rare commodities in many markets. Organ meats or offal almost disappeared, considered to be disgusting as well as unhealthy-in spite of the fact that they are the best of all sources of vitamins and minerals. Fish, considered healthy in spite of its high levels of toxins and mercury, became far more abundant and expensive.
Similar changes, meanwhile, were taking place in Europe and elsewhere. Animal-rights activists made vegetarianism common in England. Germany began to slide away from beer, its historic drink. By the turn of the century, beer production was up but consumption was down. However, in the United States, microbrewery beer became more popular. In all these cases, the common theme was clear: �healthy� eating often has as much to do with image as with health. What is often thought to be unhealthy turns out to be what is associated with those whom one does not like.
Anti-alcohol agitators claimed that alcohol produced nothing but violent drunks. Vegetarians have often condemned meat for making people act wild, savage, and vicious, like carnivorous animals. By the turn of the century, the health-food movement had fragmented into many streams. Some people depended heavily on dietary supplements. Others had taken up the Mediterranean diet, known to be associated with longevity. Others were still devouring sprout-and-avocado sandwiches on whole-grain bread. The general trend though has been to abstain from high-fat foods, especially animal fats. Eating Salad and yogurt has exploded in popularity-in spite of the exceedingly high-fat dressings on the one and the heavy sweetening usually found in the other. Much of this really is healthy, but sellers of fads know how to manipulate images, and use Hollywood stars and other highly visible beings. They thus sometimes sell their messages more successfully than the real nutritionists do.
Health concerns inevitably lead us to chicken soup, traditionally the health food of the Jewish world, but equally popular as a health stew in China, India, and most other old civilizations. It conveys messages far beyond mere disease control. It is associated with family, with caring, with love and tenderness. The scent of a good chicken soup is intensely evocative to a very large portion of humanity.
Food habits hallowed by tradition and family are often bound with love, with feeling, and with life itself. Philosophers have spent much time discoursing on the phenomenology of food. Poets have sung of it. Writers have concentrated on it; few indeed are the novels that do not draw on the symbolism of food and drink. For all of us, food is about much more than nourishing the body. It is nourishment for the soul.
Throughout the world, there is today a rise of food based on white flour, white sugar, and oil. Particularly prominent are mass-produced sweet and salty snacks; white bread and white-flour, mass-produced baked goods; hamburgers and fried chicken; and various processed potato products such as French fries. The rise of such food, sometimes (at its worst) called �junk food,� was originally due to two factors. First, it is seen as modern and powerful. Second, it is cheap to make and store. (This food is, of course, also high in those things people crave: sweetness, salt, fat. This may �taste better� to some, but in areas notably Hong Kong and Mexico, such food is popular but not because of-its taste; people prefer their own foods.)
The healthiest-eating areas of the world have begun to fall from medical grace. The �Mediterranean diet� has been held up as a model of health. However, many of them are based on complex carbohydrates supplemented by olive oil, herbs, vegetables, fruits, and small amounts of dairy products-a healthy diet indeed. In Cyprus and other modernizing areas of the Mediterranean world, a massive shift away from this diet and toward the international processed-food diet has sent rates of degenerative diseases skyrocketing.
The rise of fast food and highly processed food has a long and complex history, involving a great deal of political manipulation. This story has been so well told by Marion Nestle and Eric Schlosser. The giant food corporations, who are often also the giant tobacco corporations, have lobbied industriously to get their products blessed rather than banned by local and national governments. Many �food experts� writing on food health were propaganda agents for the corporations.�Revolving doors� between government regulatory agencies and food corporation directorates have also been noted: today�s food corporate manager sometimes reappears as tomorrow�s regulatory agency director, and vice-versa. Food corporations also are often closely tied to agriculture, and farmers vote in large numbers, making their interests paramount to governments around the world. Developed countries give them huge subsidies, making �the free market� a useless and empty phrase. Industrial chain-outlet junk food is here to stay.
Getting people to change their food habits will require a sea change in thinking. Fortunately, this is slowly coming to pass; among other things, some international chains have recently responded to criticism by upgrading the nutritional quality of their offerings. Peanut butter is a case of a successful health food. Invented by John Harvey Kellogg, the cereal man, it was propagated by people such as Ellen White, his associate, who founded the Seventh- Day Adventist Church and dedicated it to healthy eating. Popular with children, cheap, and easy to use, peanut butter was a great success story, though it too has suffered from adulteration with sugar and cheap oil.
In Guatemala, the famine relief agency INCAP developed a nutritional supplement for the desperately poor, in the late 1940s. This �Incaparina� was sold or given away as a food for the poor. Of course, no one would touch it. Anthropologically sophisticated nutritionists Nevin and Mary Scrimshaw took over the program. Immediately, they promoted Incaparina as an elite food. They persuaded Guatemalan stars and celebrities to consume it with (apparent) relish and delight on public media. Incaparina succeeded brilliantly. By contrast many campaigns for healthy eating and against �junk� food have failed dismally.
There are basically four common serious problems. Firstly, such campaigns are usually preachy. Young people everywhere hate to be preached to; yet young people are the ones who most need the message. Secondly, these campaigns are usually designed strictly in terms of health-especially the health of old people. They do not address the fact that people choose foods for many other reasons. Thirdly, the campaigns tend to nest in health and social- welfare agencies, not in food markets or shopping areas. Fourth, the campaigns are rarely very visible in the schools. Even if they are taught in the classrooms, they do not affect the actual food habits of the school.
What should be done?
Nutritional educators should target their campaigns toward active people between ten and forty, unless they are specifically concerned with the elderly.
They should do everything possible to make good food and nutrition the prestigious, stylish and fashionable option.
Junk food is the choice of fools or the impoverished, people who are neither with it nor health conscious, people who are gullible and out of date.
They should talk about health positively: this will improve your looks, your sex life and your whole life. People at the stage when they are forming their lifelong food habits are far more concerned with these positive matters than with dark thoughts about the future.
However, scare stories about heart disease, cancer, and diabetes are also appropriate. These problems can start early, and lifelong food habits are laid down early. On the other hand, campaigns focused on these issues should be directed mainly at people old enough to be directly and immediately concerned with those conditions.
Campaigns about infant nutrition should, again, be directed at mothers: young, often confused, concerned about everything from survival to maintaining their looks. In the Third World, they are usually poorly educated, impoverished, and forced to work twelve- to sixteen-hour days to survive. Even in the First World, the luxury of staying at home with the baby is simply no longer economically viable. Yet nutrition campaigns still talk as if there is a full-time mother and homemaker on the receiving end. Long, difficult routines are advised and Shortcuts are not even suggested.
Above all, all nutritional campaigns should be based�on word of mouth. This is not to say there should be any cutbacks on media use. The Media is an extremely useful tool in disseminating knowledge about health issues. However, people rely-still-on what they hear from their friends and from trusted health providers in their communities. This is especially true of the Third World peoples and impoverished First World populations that we most want to reach.
Various books and reference materials were referred while preparing this article.
