Diet water?

I'll be the first to admit that I insulate myself somewhat from mainstream media. I watch TV only while falling asleep in hotel rooms in strange cities. I only listen to CBC radio. My occasional magazine reading is limited to things like Harper's, Shambhala Sun, The Walrus, and The NewYorker. Somewhere along the way, the world went even crazier than I had suspected.

Today I was at my cushy Yaletown dentist and absentmindely picked up some glossy pop culture mag in the waiting room. As I was flipping through, an ad for some kind of diet product got my attention. When I looked closer, I realized the ad was for water. It only had 25 calories, in comparison to the competitor's water which had 125 calories. Now, I know I didn't finish my dietetic internship, but last I checked water didn't have calories. It's water. WA-TER. But, this ad wasn't for any old water; it was for Propel Fitness Water. Apparently, PepsiCo has found a way to make water—one of the most ubiquitous substances on earth and the one that constitutes almost 2/3 of the human body—even better. These guys are good.

The word is out. Get out there and get your Propel, because you'll have to exercise a whole lot more to burn off the calories in that old brand of water.

.....SSSSSHHHHHH. Nobody tell PerpsiCo, but there's stuff that's been around for millennia, ironically also called water, that has absolutey ZERO calories, and in much of the world it's even FREE (for now).

Michael Pollan is plagiarizing my mind

I found myself saying that the other day while talking about Michael Pollan's new book In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto. Nothing personal Michael, but there are some ideas in there that relate closely to what I have been planning to write either in my thesis (which, sadly, is still just in my mind) or to a lesser extent in a different sort of manifesto that I plan to write. The elusive thesis, of course, is really about the cultural and spiritual place of food and its relationship to health and sustainability. It's about caring and thinking about what you eat — eating mindfully, you might say — so that all the rest (nutrition, rural livelihoods, community vibrancy, social relations, culture, etc.) just falls into place without use having to be so conscious of it. If we are mindful of our food, what it is, how it got to us, who grew it, how they grew it, who's handled it in between and what they did with it, we'll probably eat things that are good for us, good for the farmers, and good for the ecological life of the planet. My not insignificant job is to try to figure out how to go about making this the norm. I realize this is a somewhat radical departure from my dietetics and epidemiology training, but what can you do?

When I talk about what I do, people inevitably ask me what they should be eating. Over time, I've heard myself repeating many of the same things. I started to compile an unofficial manifesto in my mind of how I think people should eat. A colleague and friend from the Schumacher Centre for Development in India suggested I write it down in an article for one of the Delhi newspapers because he thought it was useful stuff for people to hear, and most people had no idea about. My roommate is encouraging me to create a website information about food, health, culture, and sustainability. These ideas, and a few others that are still being filtered through the maze of my mind, were close to being written down when I read Pollan's fabulous new book.

So for what it's worth, here is my own set of guidelines for how and what to put in your body:

• Eat things that taste and feel good, and enjoy them.
• Eat foods, not brands.
• Eat food, not nutrients.
  
• Eat foods with as little packaging as possible, preferably none. Avoid eating things that come in a box.
  
• If it has more than 5 ingredients on the label, don't eat it.
• If you can't identify or pronounce an ingredient, don't eat it.
  
• If an ingredient name includes a number or an acronym, it's not a food, it's a substance.
  
• Don't be afraid of fat or carbs. They are not evil. They are your friends.
  
• If it seems strange that it doesn't need refrigeration, be wary. (I have seen various forms of bacon, French fries, cheese, and cream in the aisles of grocery stores.)
• Don't eat anything without a shelf life. Real food rots.
  
• Avoid too many white foods. Eat foods with colour, but not dye.
• If it makes a health claim, be suspicious.
  
• It's made to be microwaved, don't eat it.
• If it's fortified, think about why that is necessary, and find something that actually contains those nutrients.
• "Improved" on a label really means "less bad."
  
• If it seems impossible to make at home (culinary skills notwithstanding), it's not real food.
• Run screaming from high fructose corn syrup (aka fructose, corn syrup, dextrose, maltose, golden syrup, .... the list goes on).
  
• If the ingredients for a recipe have ingredients themselves, it's not cooking but home assembly (kind of like "building" IKEA furniture).
• Avoid the middle aisles of the supermarket, or better yet, avoid the supermarket altogether.
  
• Visit a farm. Hug a farmer.
• Join a Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) group, buying club, or go to a farmers' market.
• Eat as many different things as you possibly can.
• If it seems too cheap, it probably is.
  
• Eat mindfully.
• Eat with people you love.

Side note: I should clarify here that I am not actually accusing MP of plagiarism. I love his writings. That title is just something that came out of my mouth and I liked the way it sounded. I'm actually quite glad that these ideas are not as freakish as they might have seemed a few years ago, largely thanks to folks like MP. And just to clarify, all the stuff above is from my own mind and not a book.

With An American in Paris

I had the great fortune to spend my most recent birthday in Paris. It was my first trip to Paris, to France, and to continental Europe, which was exciting. It was my first real vacation in a few years. It was a much needed break in the midst of lots of work. And I was going to visit Nathan, which was even better than all that.So, Paris. It's hard to sum it all up. Mostly, we ate, walked, and then ate some more. In between all the eating and walking we did a little shopping, looked at some art, and saw some really old and really nice buildings. And all those stereotypes about French people walking around with baguettes in their purses: true. Thankfully, the stereotype about everyone smoking may still be true, but it's kept in check by a recent ban on smoking in bars and restaurants in Paris. The stereotype about all the meat and dairy eating is also true, so I was glad that I've successfully re-introduced dairy products into my diet and that I've been making selective forays into the consumption of flesh.

Side note for those of you who don't know yet: I broke my 20 years of vegetarianism with some homemade bacon on a farm last summer. Sure, I've been eating the occasional fish for the last few years, but mammals and birds was a whole new world. I couldn't really say no to farmers who offered me any kind of food produced on their land, so I ate the meat when it was offered. I kinda liked it, so from there I've gradually starting eating little bits of meat when I feel comfortable with what I know about where it came from.


Anyway...... some highlights of Paris, from my nerdy foodie perspective:

• Bread is serious business. There are laws in France about allowable ingredients for certain types of bread. To be called a baguette there can only be a few specific ingredients. And the same goes for many different kinds of loaf. Even fava bean meal is considered an adulterant. This is refreshing after reading the ingredients on an average loaf of whole wheat health bread in a Canadian supermarket, or after being in India where the adulterants of concern are actual toxins rather than a deviation from the traditional recipe.
• The shops and supermarkets are full of yoghurts, crème fraishe, and beautiful cheeses. The average supermarket chain carries more and better cheese than most specialty cheese shops in Canada. I bought goat cheeses I had never seen, and sheep's yoghurt in tiny glass pots. Even Picard, the new chain of frozen food shops, sells beautifully constructed frozen meals. Perhaps these are the beginning of a slippery slope to TV dinners, but for now they are real meals that happen to be frozen. If you are not going to cook, which is difficult in the tiny little Paris apartment kitchens, these aren't so bad.
  
• Meals in restaurants are slow, long, important events. You stay as long as you like, and everyone seems to eat dessert. (I've developed a whole new appreciation for dessert after all the crème brulée, and the amazing cake Jess brought for my birthday dinner.) Being a waiter or any kind of service industry workers is considered a career and people are given respect. People seem happy to be doing this work and are respected for doing it.
  
• Breakfast, it seems, is bread (if you must) and coffee. The place we went for breakfast on my birthday listed the menu as bread, butter, orange juice, coffee. So that's what we had.
• The best ice cream in the world is on l'Ile de la Cité. Maison Berthillon. Yummy. €3,50 for two tiny delicious scoops. The vanilla would be worth selling your first born for. I also tried the fig, and the cherry, both fabulous.
• Coffee (café) is treated with the respect it deserves. There is no drip coffee, no syrupy lattes, although I did see a few sad little Starbucks popping up here and there. Normally, there is only espresso, or espresso with milk. I didn't have any that blew my mind, because I didn't find the specialty places, but every random brasserie and bistro had good coffee.
  

All in all, a pretty amazing visit. Nathan. My dear friend Jess. And more wine, coffee, cheese, bread, sugar, and fat than I thought possible to fit into my little body.

The complexities of taste

So the latest news from the New York Times is that MSG ain't really so bad for you after all. The Guardian came up with the same idea two years ago. They put forth a good argument. MSG is a synthetic form of the the amino acid glutamate. It was first commercialized by the Ajinomoto* Corporation in Japan in 1909.

According to these articles, glutamate is naturally found in many foods, most notably Parmesan cheese and tomatoes, which are often used to season dishes. Traditionally, glutamate was added to foods in Japan by boiling kombu seaweed to produce a broth. Apart from the naturally occuring glutamates, the synthetic monosodium glutamate is added to all kinds of things, under all sorts of names, including monopotassium glutamate, glutavene, glutacyl, glutamic acid, autolyzed yeast extract, calcium caseinate, sodium caseinate, E621 (E620-625 are all glutamates)**, Ajinomoto, Ac'cent, and Gourmet Powder.

Apparently, the MSG myth has been debunked; there is no evidence to support that people are sensitive or have health effects to it. The authors of these articles suggest that MSG is in a lot more than Chinese foods and people are eating it all the time. I disagree, as I have been aware of many of its names and avoid eating it in anything. Not so hard, since I avoid eating those foods - soup mix, Worchestershire sauce, Doritos - for so many reasons.

My argument is this: there is a difference between the naturally occuring and synthetic forms of any chemical. MSG is not identical to what you get when you boil seaweed. So it makes sense that people will react differently to the two substances. For example, I like corn (the vegetable). Corn the vegetable tastes good and feels good. I also like fruit, which naturally contains a sugar called fructose. Corn syrup and processed corn in all it's ubiquitous glory does not agree with me so well. I can tell immediately if I've accidentally eaten something with corn syrup, especially high fructose corn syrup. Once you start messing with things in the lab, they are different, and our bodies react differently to them. (I could go on at length about the biochemistry behind behind synthetic corn syrup metabolism, but I'll spare you unless you really want to know.) Moreover, MSG is manufactured from starch, which in today's world pretty much always come from processing corn. In the end, I'm not convinced yet that synthetic MSG, or fructose, are just like what is found in real food, and I'm still not gonna eat it.

There's just one problem. The Guardian article singles out the "yeast extract" in Marmite as MSG. I thought it came from the sludge left behind after brewing beer, and according to the Wikipedia entry for Marmite this is true. If it really is MSG, it would be the only form of synthetic MSG I've willingly consumed, and I haven't noticed any serious aftereffects. I don't eat it often, but it's a food I hold in high regard - a vegan source of vitamin B12!!. (Yes, I am on the pro side of the Marmite debate. I don't believe it is a weapon sent to destroy society, as some people I know do.) So what to do? I'm going to have to get me a new jar and test it out, or else do a little research on the Marmite company. I hope they don't let me down!


*This explains why, after months of trying figure out how to ask for food without MSG in the many mediocre Chinese and Thai restaurants in India, I finally discovered it was referred to as Ajinomoto. This didn't sound very Hindi to me, but now I know why.
**Another mystery of India explained. These E### additives were in so many packaged foods in India that I refused to buy. It was described as an "approved food additive," which is true but sneaky. In a place with so many problems of food adulteration with unapproved additives, I guess this is important to know.

So many bugs, so little time

Now that I am living back in Canada and have regular email access, I can't seem to post any blog entries. Hmmm. Time seems to go by at warp speed here, unlike in India where weeks can seem like months (and vice versa at times). Coming back to the western world, living in Heather's spare room for 2 weeks, moving into a new home, and getting to know a new roommate took a lot more energy than I had been counting on. Seems like I just managed to pull it together enough to do what needed to be done for the two classes I am TAing: Land Food and Community III and Nutrition Education in the Community. That's been really fun, but a steep learning curve and pretty time consuming, especially the first time around.

Still, TAing 2 courses, which can be expected to take more than the 15 hours per week I'm getting paid for, shouldn't be a full time job. So why was I so exhausted and not even able to think about my thesis? I couldn't still have jetlag after a month, could I? And fatigue, as it turns out, is even more tiring when you are struck with waves of nausea every couple of hours combined with the occasional bit of vomiting. Memories of eating and drinking questionable foods and walking barefoot in the jungle sent me to the doctor for a checkup.

After spending a fun Saturday morning mixing my poo in little vials containing formaldehyde, I learned that my body was riddled with parasites. Not just one kind, but three little critters had been sqatting in my body for who knows how long. I was the proud host to Giardia lamblia,

Entamoeba histolytica (you may have heard of amoebic dysentary?),

and my personal favourite, Blastocystis hominis.


so it's amazing I was walking around at all.

On the up side, I got some Flagil, a nasty drug that turned the skin on my face to leather and made me itch all over, I started to feel better just in time to go to Paris. I think I've said a final goodbye to my unwanted guests, but will get the confirmation in a week or so. Hopefully I can stop feeding the parasites and start feeding my brain so I can finally get some writing done!