Food is not about calories

For years, I have told anyone who would listen to me to eat fruits and not merely drink fruit juice.  For multiple reasons: Juices typically have added sugar; fruits supply fibers too; and eating fruits make the jaw and teeth work.

Of course, rare is a person who listens to me.

Food (and ill health) is not merely about calories.  It is about a whole lot more.  It is about sugars. It is about timeliness.  It is about fiber intake.  It is about, ... well, you get the point.

However, people seem to want some kind of an easy bottom-line, and "calories" meet that want.  I have  even reminded students, a lot, that all calories are not created equal.  The calories from a soda are not the same as calories from an apple.  Yet, the focus is increasingly on calories.

It is well past the time to kill the idea of food calories! Consider, for instance, how the calorie calculation messes things up:

Calorie counts are based on how much heat a foodstuff gives off when it burns in an oven. But the human body is far more complex than an oven. When food is burned in a laboratory it surrenders its calories within seconds. By contrast, the real-life journey from dinner plate to toilet bowl takes on average about a day, but can range from eight to 80 hours depending on the person. A calorie of carbohydrate and a calorie of protein both have the same amount of stored energy, so they perform identically in an oven. But put those calories into real bodies and they behave quite differently. And we are still learning new insights: American researchers discovered last year that, for more than a century, we’ve been exaggerating by about 20% the number of calories we absorb from almonds.

If people listened to me, then they would systematically think about what they eat, and also think about the cultural culinary traditions that sustained people.  Like the green jackfruit, for instance.

Food researchers are trumpeting the potential for jackfruit to become a staple crop on a warming planet. “The thing about jackfruit is that it’s huge – one of the biggest tree fruits in the world,” said Danielle Nierenberg, president of the Food Tank, a Washington DC-based food study institute. “It’s large enough that families can eat one fruit for a long time. It takes relatively little care, doesn’t need a lot of irrigation and is resilient to pests and disease. So if we’re thinking of foods for the future, jackfruit is what we should be thinking about.”

In the global existence of ours, imagine incorporating into our lives the food traditions that have sustained cultures throughout the world.  We could easily have healthy foods that are also tasty, and we could at the same time have a remarkable variety of foods.  Instead of adopting such good things from around the world, we seem to be hell bent on getting hooked on to the bad habits that the modern food industry brainwashes us about. What is the point of being "educated" when we cannot seem to take care of our own selves?