On Health

After an embarrassingly long hiatus, I am attempting to resume posting here. It's kind of mind-boggling just how much time and energy grad school eats up. I mean, I knew it wouldn't be a walk in the park, but it somehow manages to creep into every spare minute of my day in a way I did not expect. But I am relatively free for the summer, with only a half-time research assistant position to keep me busy, so I am going to try harder to get my thoughts down in writing here.

So anyway, the bad news around here is that my mother was diagnosed with breast cancer last week. The good news is that it was caught very early, and it's not an aggressive kind and is highly treatable, possibly even without chemo. The past week has been a bit of a nightmare, but now that we know more about the prognosis and treatment recommendations, we are relaxing a bit.

The whole thing has gotten me thinking, though, about what the future holds for me health-wise—and what the future holds for our country and world health care-wise. I am apparently at higher risk for breast cancer now that my mom has it, though it's unlikely that I'd get it until I'm older, like my mom. But will treatment for things like breast cancer be available when I'm 62?

Breast cancer treatment has apparently made HUGE progress even in just the past five years, since my aunt had  it. Seriously—if you're going to treat the symptoms (cancer) and not the cause (pollution, crap food, toxicity in the places where we live, etc.) this is the way to do it. But do I want to rely on this type of treatment to be around in 35 years? Wouldn't it just be better to try to prevent the cancer in the first place? In one worst-case scenario à la Jim Kunstler, fossil fuel depletion (and our complete lack of planning for it) combined with climate change, financial collapse, government corruption/ineptitude, and other social failings would drastically change the industrialized way of life, limiting access to things like highly-technological (and therefore expensive) health care. It's not that such things would not exist at all—they would just not be available to the average person anymore. Even less doomy views on the future—at least those held by people mindful of the very real constraints on the continued existence of our modern way of life—predict a future characterized by far less prosperity than we enjoy today. Between our borrowed wealth (individual and national), our rate of natural resource extraction/use (which is well beyond replacement rates for renewable things like forests and soils), and the fact that fossil fuels provide the average American with the equivalent of 147 "energy slaves" and are neither renewable nor easily replaced by the less energy-dense alternatives available, it is not hard to see why today may be a period of unusual prosperity, ease, and access to things like advanced health care technology.

Such a gloomy future may never come to pass, but I feel better planning as if it will, and this includes the health front. If you are young and healthy, NOW is the time to work to preserve that, rather than waiting for the symptoms to appear. Mainstream science and media make modern cancer rates out to be somewhat of a mystery, but the truth is that a lot more is known—or at least suspected—about what causes cancer than we are generally told. The complicated part is that there are so many factors that come into play—everything from what you put into and onto your body, to the materials used to build your home and place of work, to where you live in relation to power lines and such. But the good news is that you can control some of these things, and doing so isn't that hard, once you know what to look out for—and where to get your information. The easiest place to start is probably with what you eat—it's the factor over which you have the most control.

Modern nutritional science will have you believe that modern ways of eating are perfectly good for you, so long as you heed the advice to eat your fruits and veggies, use fats sparingly, and all that stuff. But there is a fair amount of information out there that suggests that no matter how careful you are, the modern diet is nutritionally-inferior to the traditional diets consumed by humans for most of our evolutionary history. It goes beyond all the things you already know you aren't supposed to eat—white flour, trans-fats, foods high in sugar, and all those unpronounceable ingredients in pretty much any packaged food you buy. Modern fats (and I'm not talking trans-fats), modern meats, modern fruits and veggies, and modern grains are nearly all nutritionally inferior to those of hundreds of years ago because of the way they are grown or produced, as are the modern meals we make out of these foods, not only because the foods themselves are inferior, but because we've stopped preparing these foods in ways that take maximum advantage of the nutritional benefits they have to offer.

The benefits of traditional diets over the modern, industrialized diet was first brought to light in the 1930s by a dentist named Weston Price, who researched many then-extant traditional cultures all over the world and noted that a really astounding array of ailments common in industrialized cultures—including not only poor dental health but also allergies, asthma, and cancer—just weren't present, or were extremely uncommon, in these traditional cultures; however, when these cultures adopted an industrialized diet, these ailments all appeared. The same phenomenon has been observed by others all over the world, as traditional groups eating traditional foods have made the switch to processed, packaged, industrially-produced, and/or otherwise modern foods. As Michael Pollen notes in In Defense of Food, Dr. Price and others have investigated what facets of traditional diets are so beneficial, and what they found was surprising: according to the logic of modern nutrition, which looks at things like calories, fat content, and cholesterol, there were no clear patterns among traditional diets. Some groups ate high-fat diets and some ate low-fat diets; some ate high-cholesterol foods and some did not. None of these things seemed to matter.

Michael Pollen discusses the implications of these findings for the modern diet, but he barely scratches the surface. A more thorough treatment of the wisdom of traditional diets can be found in the quasi-cookbook Nourishing Traditions by Sally Fallon (thanks to Sharon Astyk for recommending this book in her blog). This book combines research by Dr. Price and others regarding traditional diets with the results of food studies that did not receive their funding from the food industry (and which, unsurprisingly, report significantly different findings than studies that DO receive food industry funds). The book begins with an 80+ page introduction to the health benefits of traditional foods over modern ones, and then provides recipes for everything from condiments to desserts. While I don't find these recipes overly inspiring, the techniques used are easy to incorporate into my favorite dishes. Sometime's it's merely a matter of ingredient choices, and sometimes it's a more complicated question of preparation, but the majority (though certainly not all) of what she recommends is relatively easy to incorporate into home cooking, provided you can get your hands on the right stuff.

It would be impossible to go into great detail about the foods and techniques this book recommends, but here are a few basics:

1. Fat is good for you—but only the right kinds.
And I don't mean trans-fat versus non, or any of that modern nonsense. (Trans-fats were created in a lab; obviously they're bad for you, but it goes beyond that.) Fats from animals raised in confined feeding operations, doped up on antibiotics and being fed foods that their stomachs were not designed to digest, are generally not that good for you (this should be perfectly intuitive, yet somehow we don't often stop to think about what our food eats). On the other hand, fats from animals raised without antibiotics or other drugs, eating exactly what they've evolved to eat, are actually quite good for you, even in quantities exceeding the fat intake generally recommended by modern nutritionists. Meats and meat byproducts like soup stocks and lard, as well as milk, butter, and eggs from free-range animals eating their traditional foods contain a better balance of fatty acid types and more; you may not notice these differences, but your body definitely does. Free-range meats and eggs are increasingly available at stores like Whole Foods, but milk and butter from grass-fed animals is still pretty hard to find in most places. (Ask at a natural foods store to see if they are available in your area.) These foods are more expensive than their factory-farmed alternatives, but most people find them far tastier, and they can be thought of as an investment in long-term health.

In terms of vegetable-derived fats, Fallon recommends only two for cooking: olive oil, and, when you need an oil with a high smoke point and a neutral flavor, coconut oil (the flavor of which is noticeable when concentrated but not when diluted in a dish). Canola (rapeseed) is actually quite unhealthy for you (see her book for a molecular explanation of why). Fallon also notes that the fats found in avacados are extremely healthy as well.

Another fat to watch out for is rancid fat, which is carcinogenic and has been demonstrated to contribute to stomach and intestinal cancers. Many of us can't taste rancid fats in our foods, but you should definitely be able to smell them—they smell old and musty and generally not like something you'd want to stick in your body. (Find an old bottle of oil or an old bag of whole-wheat flour and stick your nose in it to find out what it smells like.) Rancid fats are common in processed foods, and are present in any oil or oil-containing food that's outlived its shelf life (which varies, so it's always best to smell first).

2. Soaked grains are healthier than unsoaked ones.
When grains are soaked for several hours or overnight, something or other breaks down that, when not broken down, inhibits the absorption of other nutrients in the grain. In fact, Quaker Oatmeal boxes used to include overnight soaking in their preparation instructions, but this got shed somewhere along the way, in our fast-food culture. Grains like oats, rice, and barley which get cooked rolled or whole will be more nutritious if soaked prior to cooking (and they'll cook faster to boot). Foods made of flours, like bread, will be more nutritious if the production process allows for more soaking time—such as leavened breads that require a long rise time. Assuming you cook/bake things from scratch, working this into your food preparation is easy once you make it a habit.

3. Sprouted seeds are healthier than unsprouted ones.
Okay, so back in the day, wheat/oats/rye/etc. used to be harvested with a scythe and then stood up in shocks in the fields to finish drying for a couple weeks. They would inevitably be exposed to rain/dew and sun, and would sprout in the process before being put away into storage. Little did we know when modern farm equipment eliminated this standing-out-to-dry process that these once-sprouted grains produced by old-fashioned farm techniques provided several times the nutritional value of their non-sprouted counterparts.

Fortunately, we can get the same nutritional benefits from eating sprouts—which, by the way, are easy to make at home; you don't have to spend like four bucks on a little box of them at the store. Here is a tutorial that shows you how.

4. Fermented foods are all sorts of nutritious.
Fermentation has been used for ages to preserve foods that would otherwise go bad. And as it turns out, these foods, like sprouted foods, have a host of nutritional benefits that their unfermented counterparts do not. This one is a little trickier to work into your daily diet, as fermenting your own beer or saurkraut is a lot trickier than soaking your oatmeal the night before (and storebought options often don't provide the same benefits due to the production process). However, fermented foods taste AMAZING, so I've been gradually learning how to make more of them and figuring out how to incorporate them into my life.

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So, armed with information like this, can I preserve my good health for longer and stave off diseases like cancer? I'd say it's my best bet. I'm grateful for the medical technology that will treat my mom's condition, but I'd prefer to nip these things in the bud, rather than rely on said medical technology to always be there and available to me. It's unfortunate that an unhealthy diet has become so integral to the modern lifestyle that most of us have no idea what even constitutes a truly balanced one. Fortunately, however, this modern failing is one from which you can easily opt out.