The more you process any food, the more profitable it becomes. Why? Well, there’s a lot of money in the Western diet. Instead, the focus is on identifying the evil nutrient in the Western diet so that food manufacturers might tweak their products, thereby leaving the diet undisturbed, or so that pharmaceutical makers might develop and sell us an antidote for it. Yet, oddly enough, these two (or three) sturdy facts are not the center of our nutritional research or, for that matter, our public health campaigns around diet.In one analysis, a typical American population that departed even modestly from the Western diet (and lifestyle) could reduce its chances of getting coronary heart disease by 80 percent, its chances of type 2 diabetes by 90 percent, and its chances of colon cancer by 70 percent. We have good research to suggest that the effects of the Western diet can be rolled back, and relatively quickly. There is actually a third, very hopeful fact that flows from these two: People who get off the Western diet see dramatic improvements in their health.Except, that is, for one: the relatively new (in evolutionary terms) Western diet that most of us now are eating. What this suggests is that there is no single ideal human diet but that the human omnivore is exquisitely adapted to a wide range of different foods and a variety of different diets. But much the same holds true for more mixed traditional diets. These diets run the gamut from ones very high in fat (the Inuit in Greenland subsist largely on seal blubber) to ones high in carbohydrate (Central American Indians subsist largely on maize and beans) to ones very high in protein (Masai tribesmen in Africa subsist chiefly on cattle blood, meat, and milk), to cite three rather extreme examples. Fact 2: Populations eating a remarkably wide range of traditional diets generally don’t suffer from these chronic diseases.Fact 1: Populations that eat a so-called Western diet-generally defined as a diet consisting of lots of processed foods and meat, lots of added fat and sugar, lots of refined grains, lots of everything except vegetables, fruits, and whole grains-invariably suffer from high rates of the so-called Western diseases: obesity, type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and cancer.And, even more important for our purposes, these facts are sturdy enough that we can build a sensible diet upon them.
All the contending parties in the nutrition wars agree on them.
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