Anyone read "Unhappy Meals" in the NYT mag?

Here’s the link. You might need “Times Select” (sorry if you do).

This was a very interesting article about food science and diet.

The author touched on many things, but his major point was that we’ve reduced food science down to a component-based analysis where we specifically identify which nutrients are good/bad for you. Then, diets and food products are sold based on those nutrients (“low fat!” “more omega-3’s” etc.) and yet Americans have become fatter, have higher instances of heart disease, etc etc etc.

His ultimate conclusions: eat less, mostly vegetables. Don’t eat anything your grandparents wouldn’t recognize as food (go-gurt, breakfast bars) or eat like some kind of traditional diet be it Greek, Japanese, Italian or French.

He thinks that while we’re good at identifying a healthy component of food, say omega-3’s, we’re not good at figuring out how those things work in the body when they’re in the presence of all the other nutrients in the foods they’re in. For instance, some unhelathy nutrient might not be so bad when it’s in the presence of some other component of that food.

He also takes issue with the fact that when one of these healthy components is identified, you end up seeing absurdities like cocoa puffs being able to advertise “now with whole grains!” while a carrot has to sit on the shelf silently.

Anyway, I can’t do it justice by trying to summarize here what the author said in a couple thousand words, but I thought someone might find it interesting. This nutrition shit seems to come up a lot.

I read the article. I think your summary does a better job of conveying the basic advice than the article does. Very good advice in that article (even if I didn’t care much about the article itself). Starting today, I am beginning to apply those ideas. Worth a read, I think

I read it – and printed it out to file. AFAIK, you don’t have to have Times Select, but you do have to register.

I think it’s one of the better “survey” type articles out there. The biggest thing I took away from it (aside from his suggestions at the end of the article) was the preponderance of “confounding factors” in every food or diet study out there.