Food Rant

They tell you that the FDA is the Food and Drug Administration. It isn't true. My dad likes to call them the Frantic Dithering Association, which gets closer to the point, but after what I read last week, I'm beginning to think perhaps the Fraud Dissemination Administration might be most accurate.

I don't know where the whole thing started. Maybe it was during the Great Depression and the FDA, like many other social catastrophes that have lingered, was begun as a source of jobs and support for the down-on-his-luck farmer. Or maybe some genius noticed Americans were getting burly and decided we needed a big brother organization to stop it before it got out of hand. I could go look up the history of the FDA, but that is really beside the point. Whatever it is they're meant to do, they aren't doing it right. And I wonder if they should be doing it at all. According to Omnivore's Dilemma, many countries in Europe (notice, I'm not talking about the third word here) have nothing like an FDA or a Food Pyramid or thousands of diet books telling them, in succession, to Eat less red meat... No, it's carbs that are evil... No, wait, we should all only eat raw... No, wait! What other countries have is an established food tradition! And possibly a heck of a lot less corn syrup.

Corn syrup... that, along with the FDA is where the whole collapse began. You can't go to the grocery any more without coming home with something inundated with corn or corn syrup. Even if you read the label, you still end up with more corn than you bargained for. After all, what are our industrially farmed chickens, pigs, and cows fed? Corn. Michael Pollan says, "The eggs are made of corn. The milk and cheese and yogurt, which once came from our dairy cows that grazed on grass, now typically come from Holsteins which spend their working lives indoors tethered to machines, eating corn." No wonder so many people are suddenly discovering an allergy to dairy or an intolerance for normal, seemingly innocuous foods. They're not what they seem, and all you have to go on is the label. And who makes the label? The Fraud Dissemination Administration.

What's so wrong, Hannah, with the FDA trying to regulated our processed foods? Well, a couple of things, actually. But before I get to that, one thing that's wrong is processed food at all. That, at least isn't the FDA's fault. Have you ever baked a loaf of bread, as close to "from scratch" as you could? Even though the ingredients that went into that bread probably came from a grocery store and before that their origins are as mysterious as those of any food we buy, I'll bet you that loaf of bread you baked at home didn't look, taste, or feel anything like one you bought pre-sliced in a plastic bag. What are you saying, Hannah? I'm saying that the further our food gets from being prepared by our own hands, the less we can trust it.  Should we all start milling our own flour? No. Can everyone go out and start a  truly organic subsistence farm? No. But I do firmly believe we all ought to be looking for any and every way to take back our food from the industrial giant.

Industrial giant... now we get to the FDA. The FDA tell us what can and can't go into our food. They tell companies to put labels on everything telling you about its "nutritional content." That nutrition information takes the form of lists of ingredients that don't illuminate the proportion of those ingredients (Is that bread mostly flour or is it mostly that chemical I can't pronounce?) and charts with "grams" of this and that. I don't know about you, but the last time I dealt with a gram was in Chemistry class. When I bake, I deal with teaspoons and tablespoons. You have to have a conversion table to turn grams into tablespoons into calories. Yikes! How will we ever figure out the value of our food!? 

If you manage to wade through that, then you're confronted with the FDA's allowance of completely meaningless statements on those labels. "No Trans-Fats!" "Organic." "No high fructose corn syrup." "Low carb." What does all of that garbage really mean? The answer is, it doesn't mean much of anything. It is all designed to draw our attention and con us into thinking that food is healthy. But "no trans-fat" doesn't mean no fat. And really, why did we all suddenly become terrified of something that is a natural companion to eating meat? "Organic" probably isn't anything of the kind, unless you grew it yourself without pesticides or fertilizers. "No high fructose corn syrup" doesn't automatically signal safety to diabetics or even low sugar content. And when did carbohydrates become the spawn of the devil? The one of these that ticks me off the most is "5 grams of whole grains!" on a package of crackers. What!? All that means is that they made sure there were some chunks of "grains" visible in the final product. If you really want whole grains, you should jaunt on down to the rice isle where you can buy long grain brown rice, whole oats, barley, legumes, and beans. I guarantee you none of those bags brags about how many grams of whole grains one serving contains, and any one of them is better nutrition than that puffed up cracker. We are intelligent people who have been jargoned into a state of frantic dithering by a governmental body with no soul and the brain of a mad scientist in its collective head.

Am I being overly harsh? I mean, "mad scientist brain..." Really? Well, consider with me the two "zero calorie sweeteners" that the FDA considers "safe." You've heard the horror stories about aspartame by now, I'm sure. You've heard how it brakes down in your body into what is basically embalming fluid. Phenyketonurics beware, because it contains phenyalanine. Linked to everything from headaches to Alzheimers, aspartame is the elephant in your diet soda can. Ignore it at your peril. As public opinion turned against aspartame, we began to turn to The Safe no calorie sweetener: Splenda. Wonder-substance! No calories! Tastes more like sugar! As a matter of fact, friends, it IS sugar, just with the molecule rearranged so that you body rejects it! It's like magic, isn't it? No. In fact, it is more like alchemy. That rearranged sugar molecule has had three atoms of chlorine added, among other things. Sure, your body dumps the sugar... but it keeps the chlorine. What? We all have carbon filters on our faucets or buy bottled water to get rid of that chlorine, and now we're going to add it back in? Oops. Don't worry, though. The Fraud Dissemination Administration says you're safe. Go ahead and bake that stuff into the cookies for your kids.

So what is the chemical conscious, sweet beverage craving average American to do? You can't just drink soda. We all know by now what your body does in the first hour after that can of Coke hits the stomach. If you don't, here it is, and not in my words, either:

• In The First 10 minutes: 10 teaspoons of sugar hit your system. (100% of your recommended daily intake.) You don’t immediately vomit from the overwhelming sweetness because phosphoric acid cuts the flavor allowing you to keep it down.
• 20 minutes: Your blood sugar spikes, causing an insulin burst. Your liver responds to this by turning any sugar it can get its hands on into fat. (There’s plenty of that at this particular moment)
• 40 minutes: Caffeine absorption is complete. Your pupils dilate, your blood pressure rises, as a response your livers dumps more sugar into your bloodstream. The adenosine receptors in your brain are now blocked preventing drowsiness.
• 45 minutes: Your body ups your dopamine production stimulating the pleasure centers of your brain. This is physically the same way heroin works, by the way.
• 60 minutes: The phosphoric acid binds calcium, magnesium and zinc in your lower intestine, providing a further boost in metabolism. This is compounded by high doses of sugar and artificial sweeteners also increasing the urinary excretion of calcium.
• 60 Minutes: The caffeine’s diuretic properties come into play. (It makes you have to pee.) It is now assured that you’ll evacuate the bonded calcium, magnesium and zinc that was headed to your bones as well as sodium, electrolyte and water.
• 60 minutes: As the rave inside of you dies down you’ll start to have a sugar crash. You may become irritable and/or sluggish. You’ve also now, literally, pissed away all the water that was in the Coke. But not before infusing it with valuable nutrients your body could have used for things like even having the ability to hydrate your system or build strong bones and teeth.

From the above, we draw a mistaken and wildly extrapolated conclusion. Sugar is evil. That, right there, is what set off the whole frantic dithering, fraud disseminating debacle in the first place. Somehow, we all almost simultaneously became convinced that food as produced by the natural world is terrible for us. Fat! Sugar! Carbohydrates! Oh my! Wait. Calm down. It isn't sugar we need to fear. Sugar isn't terrible for you. After all, you find it in fruits and vegetables alike, along with honey or agave, and starches. The problem is our overindulgence in it. (And lets not forget that the other problem with those sodas is caffeine and phosphoric acid with their attendant side effects.) We have increased our sugar intake by something like 1,000% over the last 100 years.  The taste of "sweet" used to indicate energy producing goodness in a morsel of food. Now we run the other direction... or at least we run to the chemical isle. The solution is not to turn to dicey chemical additives to get the sweetness we crave. Keep your sugar bowl. Just use less. A lot less. Sorry to say it, but it's true. There is no "easy solution." We want sweetness because it is a natural indicator within our body of the potential energy contained in food. But if we don't want diabetes, obesity, mood disorders, and a myriad other problems, we're just going to have to exercise a little wisdom. The first thing we need to do is get over our addiction to "easy" and develop some self control. Then there won't be a problem and we'll be able to quit freaking out about a solution.You want something sweet? Eat an apple. Put honey on your oatmeal. Oh, and by the way, if you were giving your kids the drink with Splenda in it because you don't want them "sugared up and hyper," you might want to read the fine print about how these chemical sweeteners can cause hyperactivity and mood swings in test subjects, then give the kids a glass of milk instead.

Now, I know some people might read that last and say, "But wait, dairy products are no good. You should go dairy free." And probably whole foods, or raw foods, or vegetarian... Friends, whatever works for you, you must do. All I'm saying is, I intend to search for food that is as close to its natural form as I can find it and I won't be following any more trends without doing my own research. And I don't trust the FDA. But don't take my word for it. Read Omnivore's Dilemma and In Defense of Food, for a start. You may look at the contents of your cabinet in a whole new way.

Linky Malinky:

The Truth About Splenda

Michael Pollan, author of Omnivore's Dilemma

If You Grow It, You Can Trust It

Find a Farmer's Market

One Small Look At Carbs