Modernist-Cuisine-Vol.-1-Small

4
The latest buzzwords in the food
industry are “local” and “sustainable.”
These terms have come to
describe many of the same qualities
that once characterized organic
foods: hiqh in quality and sold soon
after harvest for optimal taste. This
pursuit of excellence is a wonderful
goal, but the open question is
whether this focus on quality will
last. In the case of organic food,
industrial-scale food producers
quickly caught on and ultimately
undermined the meaning of the
term. It remains to be seen
whether “local” and “sustainable”
will experience that semantic
degradation.
temperature of 46–47 °C / 115–118 °F, which
supposedly prevents the breakdown of beneficial
enzymes in food.
Is raw food better for you? As of this writing, no
large randomized and controlled clinical studies
of a raw food diet have been published. Several
teams of investigators have evaluated the health
status of participants in the raw food movement,
however, and what they have found is disturbing:
people who stick to raw food diets for several years
show many signs of malnutrition.
For example, when researchers examined more
than 500 subjects who had been eating a raw food
diet for an average of nearly four years, they found
that 15% of the men and 25% of the women
studied were underweight. Nearly one-third of the
women in the study had stopped menstruating.
The more raw food the subjects ate and the
longer they had been on a raw food diet, the
lower their body mass index. The investigators
concluded that, over the long term, a strict raw
food diet cannot guarantee an adequate energy
supply.
Another study found that the mean body mass
index of raw foodists was 25% lower than that of
people who ate a typical American diet. Raw
foodists had lower bone density in their backs and
hips than those eating conventionally. And
because of the large amounts of fruit acid that raw
foodists regularly consumed, they had more
dental erosions than those who ate a normal diet.
Although a raw food diet seemed to confer
cardiovascular and cancer-preventing benefits, it
also led to dietary deficiencies. As a group, strict
raw foodists had low serum cholesterol and
triglyceride concentrations, which are considered
heart-healthy. Nevertheless, because raw food
diets are typically low in vitamin B 12
, subjects who
ate a strict raw food diet were deficient in this key
nutrient. As a result, they had low serum HDL
cholesterol levels and high homocysteine levels,
which are both considered risk factors for heart
disease.
Most raw food dieters in yet another study had
lycopene levels in the blood that were just a quarter
of those present in people who ate cooked food.
Lycopene is an antioxidant found primarily in
tomatoes, and lycopene levels in cooked tomatoes
are much higher than those in raw tomatoes.
Raw foodists believe their diet provides a way
to achieve vibrant health, but the evidence
suggests that eating food raw is a poor alternative
to eating it cooked. After all, women who do not
menstruate probably cannot conceive. Any diet
that renders many women unable to propagate
their genes puts the species at an evolutionary
disadvantageand that may be the strongest
evidence yet that humans were not meant to eat
all their food raw.
Moreover, raw foodists do not eat as our
primate forebears did because they rely on highquality
fats from vegetables and seeds, machineprocessed
grains for ease of digestion, and juicers
and blendersmodern creations, all of them.
Cooking has been practiced by every known
human society for good reason. It reliably increases
the digestibility of food, and in so doing,
makes it more nutritious.
THE CHEMISTRY OF
Those Dreaded “Toxins”
“Toxin” is a perfectly appropriate word for a substance that
is toxic or poisonous. Unfortunately, the word has been
widely used inappropriately by people who promote
various dietary systems. Vegans, raw foodists, organic food
fans, and proponents of faddish dietary systems all tend to
claim that their approach either excludes toxins or, better
yet, “flushes toxins from the body.”
One of the more successful detox diet divas is Ann Louise
Gittleman, author of the 2001 New York Times bestseller The
Fat Flush Plan. Gittleman explains her diet this way: “excess fat,
sugar, alcohol, and caffeine—along with antidepressants and
birth control pills—work to sabotage your weight loss efforts
by creating a tired and toxic liver that can’t efficiently burn
body fat. The Fat Flush Plan is designed to clean out the liver
and help you drop a dress size or two.”
The liver does need numerous vitamins, minerals, and amino
acids to do its job of processing and removing drug metabolites,
pesticide residues, and hormone-disrupting chemicals.
It is doubtful that detox “diets” like the popular Master
Cleanse—which requires consuming nothing for 10 days but
lemonade sweetened with maple syrup and spiked with
cayenne pepper—can provide enough of these nutrients to
keep the liver functioning properly for very long.
Moreover, the misuse of the words “toxic” and “toxin” by
food faddists is so pervasive that the safest bet is to assume that
any claim that a diet removes toxins from the body is almost
certainly false.
Your body does not produce toxins that need to be exorcised.
Although waste products of metabolism, including
carbon dioxide and urea, must be expelled, they are not toxic
in the sense that they cause poisoning in a healthy person.
Indeed, waste products from metabolism are always found at
some level in your body. True toxins, on the other hand, kill or
harm you even at low concentrations.
Statements to the effect that meat or cooked food is “full of
toxins” are plainly false (see Is Grilled Meat Bad for You? on
page 221). Many foods do contain small quantities of naturally
occurring substances that can, in high concentrations, be
harmful (see Natural Toxins, next page). But there is no general
need to “flush” these toxins, and claims that particular dietary
systems or food items exert a beneficial effect by removing
these so-called toxins are not backed by scientific evidence.
The theme of purification is common to virtually all food
superstitions and shamanistic practices throughout history,
so it’s not surprising that advocates of fad dietary systems
promote the removal of “toxins.” It is the dietary equivalent
of exorcising demons or evil spirits. To sell people on
a scheme you need to tell a story, and a purification story
makes intrinsic sense to people, even if the details turn out
to be false.
Natural Toxins
Many of these chemicals are present in a variety of foods, but poisonings involving these
particular vegetables have made them the poster children for natural toxins.
Potato
Toxin: glycoalkaloids
Effect: causes severe stomachache,
nausea, vomiting, difficulty
breathing, even death
Red kidney bean
Toxin: phytohemagglutinin
Effect: eating undercooked beans
can cause severe nausea and
vomiting with diarrhea
Rhubarb
Toxin: oxalic acid
Effect: at highest amounts in
leaves; causes stomach irritation
and kidney damage
Parsnip
Toxin: furocoumarins
Effect: causes stomachache; skin
contact increases sun sensitivity
and can cause blisters
248 VOLUME 1 · HISTORY AND FUNDAMENTALS
FOOD AND HEALTH 249