Eat food.

The New York Times ran a brilliant piece this weekend entitled Unhappy Meals. It begins:

"Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.

That, more or less, is the short answer to the supposedly incredibly complicated and confusing question of what we humans should eat in order to be maximally healthy."

As a person who has a newfound appreciation for food and the effects of eating it, this article made me want to find the author and deliver a big sloppy bearhug. I encourage you to make your way through it. It's 12 pages. It's worth it.

Edit: Discussion of the NYT piece led to this San Francisco Chronicle article about high fructose corn syrup, which I think is a really good wake-up call while still being conservative in its scientific claims. Anyway.

Antipasto

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I've always loved food, you see, including food that was bad for me but tasted goooood. However, as my son got older I began to notice that he had some really major mood swings and concentration issues. He had trouble at school and needed a behavior-tracking program. I started doing research into hyperactivity, which seemed to be the cornerstone of his issues. I read a lot about the Feingold Diet and its supposed impact on children with ADHD, but I don't like paying for that kind of information, I felt what they described was so restrictive it would make him miserable, and much of what they proposed in broad terms rang true to what I'd learned a few years earlier: you can feel a lot better (and lose a lot of weight if you need to) if you just don't eat stuff that comes in boxes.

And so began my odyssey. I phased out stuff in the house that had artificial ingredients of any sort. I shopped at Whole Foods. When my son suddenly became able to concentrate, more pleasant to be around, more capable of solving problems and developing complex strategies, and when he started bringing home glowing behavior reports from school, I knew I was on to something. So I started adding things back in, one at a time. It didn't take me long to discover that the worst offender in his behavior issues was high-fructose corn syrup.

Just this weekend, I agreed in a rare treat to allow him to have an orange soda. (Second ingredient on the list, behind carbonated water: HFCS.) He had just had a serving of cheese. We'd had a good breakfast three hours prior. He couldn't even finish the whole soda, and when he was halfway through it, he told me, "Mom, I am so hungry I can barely think." Well, this was odd.

He said he didn't want to finish the soda, and asked to go home and have lunch, which we did. But I started thinking to myself: he loses his ability to concentrate, which can be a side effect of hunger or of insulin response. He has HFCS and immediately feels intensely hungry, which can be a side effect of insulin response. I have this funny feeling that what HFCS does to him is make his insulin/hunger responses go completely batshit. And it's in practically everything.

The good news for him is that he knows he feels worse when he eats junk, especially HFCS. He rarely asks for it and has gotten to where he'll turn it down or ask what's in something before he agrees to eat it. The bad news for him is that HFCS is in everything in the normal grocery stores in the US, it's in stuff in restaurants, it's everywhere.

The interesting thing for me is that I feel better when I eat what he eats, and worse when I just eat junk to get by. I've never had a sweet tooth and I've often had bad reactions to refined sugars (headaches, dizziness, sudden exhaustion, etc.). I wonder if he's inherited something from me that never got as bad for me because HFCS wasn't around when I was young and still drank sugared soda and ate sweet stuff.

Anyway, see infra for what I'm really getting at here. Eat food. Maybe not so much of the stuff that comes in boxes with pictures of food on the outside, and more of the stuff that is actually food when you take it out of the grocery store bag.