Avoid foods your great grandmother wouldn't recognize

This lengthy column in The New York Times slices through the last 40 years of the American experience with nutrition and health claims. In the end, there is much to commend this piece by Michael Pollan.
Some great lines:

Once, food was all you could eat, but today there are lots of other edible foodlike substances in the supermarket. These novel products of food science often come in packages festooned with health claims, which brings me to a related rule of thumb: if you’re concerned about your health, you should probably avoid food products that make health claims.

Humans deciding what to eat without expert help — something they have been doing with notable success since coming down out of the trees — is seriously unprofitable if you’re a food company, distinctly risky if you’re a nutritionist and just plain boring if you’re a newspaper editor or journalist. (Or, for that matter, an eater. Who wants to hear, yet again, “Eat more fruits and vegetables”?) And so, like a large gray fog, a great Conspiracy of Confusion has gathered around the simplest questions of nutrition — much to the advantage of everybody involved. Except perhaps the ostensible beneficiary of all this nutritional expertise and advice: us, and our health and happiness as eaters.

In the end, Pollan does list a few food rules of his own, some bringing with their advice the unmistakable tone of an elitist. Here are a few:

Don’t eat anything your great-great-grandmother wouldn’t recognize as food
Pay more, eat less.
Eat mostly plants, especially leaves.
Eat more like the French.

Even if they may seem condescending to the Oreo-loving masses, these are rules fruit and vegetable growers and marketers would gladly see followed by millions more Americans.

More fuel for the fire

A University of Minnesota study has been released that shows that teenagers are eating fewer servings of fruits and vegetables compared with even a few years ago. As teenagers get older, the number of servings they consume declines. Here are a few sobering excerpts that point out the need for intervention:

The study, which also says that these eating habits only get worse as kids grow older, has researchers worried, for fruit and vegetable intake is important for the prevention of future chronic disease.
During the transition from middle school or junior high to high school, teens decreased their intake of fruits and vegetables by almost one serving per day, Larson and colleagues found, from roughly four servings to three servings for girls and roughly two and a half to fewer than two servings for boys.They also found that from high school to early adulthood, the teens decreased their consumption by almost the same amount.The researchers also compared consumption of fruits and vegetables between one group of middle adolescents in 1999 and another in 2004. They found that mid-adolescent girls in 2004 consumed almost one serving per day less than girls the same age in 1999. Mid-adolescent boys were also eating about a half a serving less of fruits and vegetables in 2004 than in 1999.

The upshot is that researchers conclude that "new and enhanced efforts" to increase fruit and vegetable consumption are merited. Just education is not enough, experts say. Teens already know that fruits and vegetable are good for you.

If this isn't a Clarion call for an expanded fruit and vegetable snack program at schools, nothing is.

Danger zone

We came home from church this morning and I spied a tub of blueberry cream cheese and some mini-bagels on the kitchen counter. Having moved too slowly to nab some before church, I spread the cream cheese on a bagel before my daughter stopped me. "That has been in the danger zone - what are you doing?!"

My 16-year Betsy has been taking a foods class this semester, and I've heard plenty about the danger zone - food set out on the counter is in immediate peril and likely to morph into something bad, I've gathered. I can only say that if all young people are as mindful of the danger zone as our daughter, the world will be a much safer place in a few years.