March 2008 Archives

It seems like everywhere I turn these days health is for sale. Take Airborne, the self-described “effervescent health formula” that purports to “boost your immune system to help your body combat germs.” The product’s claims (though recently outed as overblown) are all about the preservation of pristine health: Every time you’re about to get on a plane or go to show-and-tell at your daughter’s germ-infested kindergarten, goes the message, Bam!, down some Airborne and you’ll be immune to colds, the flu, and, implicitly, every other manner of illness and disease. Then, of course, there are the “probiotic” yogurts, which are said to boost the immune system and aid digestion, about a billion other fortified foods, and still other "edible food-like substances" as Michael Pollan describes them. Now welcome the rise of immunity-boosting restaurants (?!), toss in a feng-shui styled McDonalds (meant, I guess, to promote serenity and better digestion while you slurp down fries), supersize yourself a fortified soda that millions of lobbying dollars fought to get into your (and your elementary school children's) hand, and you’ve practically got picture-perfect health being handed to you in a bag at the Drive-Thru window. It’s as though a critical mass of companies finally caught on that more and more consumers are concerned about health, so they’re packaging up the promise of it, slapping on a shiny label, and selling it back to us at 100-times the price of the exponentially healthier experience of, say, walking through the woods while drinking filtered tap water with a slice of lime. (Cost of entire adventure? Around $.15 for the lime slice.) Even some of the sacred territory in the legitimate health-food matrix — the idea that whole, real, organic, local, foods are the true best friend of good health — is quickly, if silently, eroding. Large corporations are waking up to the power of the “local, organic” brand to sell products and are buying up small farms [Check out this amazing and scary interactive graphic (courtesy of a professor at Michigan State University) that shows the corporate buyout of organic products. For more specific info on which dots mean what, click here]. What these giant companies are destroying in the process are the very real health, environmental, cultural, social and economic benefits inherent in locally-produced food. Who am I to say that "fortified soda" isn't a health panacea? (Okay, well, I AM a health editor so I think I do get to comment. And my comment is: “Of course they’re not!” followed closely by, “Blech!” And if you aren’t willing to take my editorializing as evidence, check out this recent study on the link between diet sodas and metabolic disease.) But the packaging up of health seems a phony and misguided endeavor because health, by it's nature, can't be sold. It isn’t a thing you can buy, it is a pursuit, a way of living, a set of choices and conscious decisions. It runs deeper and wider than eating yogurt that supposedly helps you poop. Here's Pollan again in an interview with Tara Parker-Pope on the better way to think about food and health:

"I think health should be a byproduct of eating well, for reasons that have nothing to do with health, such as cooking meals, eating together and eating real food. You are probably going to be healthy, but that is not the goal. The goal should just be eating well for pleasure, for community, and all the other reasons people eat. What I'm trying to do is bring a man-from-Mars view to the American way of thinking about food. This is so second nature to us — food is either advancing your health or ruining your health. That is a very limited way to think about food, and its's a very limited way to think about health. The health of our bodies is tied to the health of the community and the health of the earth. Health is indivisible."

So while we're free to buy all the "health in a bottle" we want, its not likely to do us any significant health favors in any real and lasting way. What good WILL buying all these products do? Make this guy rich.

My everyday routines are so deeply ingrained that I almost never think of them as choices. For example, I don’t always put a slice of lime in my water glass, then fill the glass approximately 1/3 the way with star-shaped ice cubes, then top the glass off with filtered water, then chomp down all the ice, and only then drink the water because it’s what I choose to do. No, no. I do it because that’s how water is drunk, of course! The severity of my “routine blindness” caught up with me the other day in the grocery store. I’d been watching a podcast of the irrepressible Michael Pollan (a food journalist and one of my personal heroes) lecture at Stanford about his new book In Defense of Food and about the reductive nature of “nutritionism,” the notion that individual nutrients and vitamins are the healthiest part of a food and, hence, can be isolated and repackaged in bottles as "Vitamin A" or "Beta Carotene" or what-have-you with the same healthy effets. As EL has covered ("The Whole Thing" from the March 2008 issue), and Pollan and others continue to report, nutrients in isolation don’t appear to do our bodies any health favors. Tara Parker-Pope writing in The New York Times ("The Case for Real Food," November 5, 2007) summarizes the research findings of David R. Jacobs, an epidemiologist at the University of Minnesota School of Public Health on the failings of nutritionism.

"Dr. Jacobs believes that nutrition science needs to consider the effects of “food synergy,” the notion that the health benefits of certain foods aren’t likely to come from a single nutrient but rather combinations of compounds that work better together than apart."

So, anyway, with all this on my mind, I was cruising the aisles at The Wedge and thinking “Gosh, I need to eat more fruits and vegetables.” Yet my next actual thought was: “Well, crap! Now how in the world am I going to do that?!” I’m so set in my ways — even at the grocery store — that it didn’t even dawn on me that the answer to eating more vegetables was, ahem, buying more vegetables. Instead of moving through the produce section and grabbing what I always grab (bananas, apples, limes, mandarins, garlic, onions, cauliflower, carrots and parsley), I could grab — gasp! — anything else I wanted. Lettuce? Sure! Cabbage? Of course! Broccoli? Yes! Fennel? Why not! I could even grab more of what I already grab. (Sometimes big discount stores put limits on that week’s specials — No more than six supercheap and really sugary juice packs per customer, please! But no one’s going to stop me from buying 10 bunches of carrots if I want to!) So mechanized was I at the grocery store that I’d stopped even seeing other fruits, veggies and foods. I’ve been going to the same co-op three times a week for 6 years and last week I had to ask where the scallions were (pretty embarrassing). So now I’m trying to go to the grocery store at least once a week at a time when I’m not in a hurry. I make sure the dogs have been walked and I’ve gotten a handle on household chores and any other pesky life detritus, and then when I go to the store I’m able to just order the world's best chai from the deli and then leisurely stroll around and really, really SEE the foods I’d been ignoring in my zombie-like state and everyday haste. It’s actually made grocery shopping fun, and I’ve made some marvelous-tasting discoveries — crisp new varieties of olives (not just the Kalamatas I always get), tangy Miso, brisk pink and gray sea salts with delightfully nuanced flavors. And the bonus? It’s healthier, too.

Frida fuels up for healing. Reliable studies continue to show the significant role pets play in healing. (Blogger's note/rhetorical question: With three dogs and one cat, why am I not the healthiest person on earth?)

Laine and her cat, Sylvia, just seem happy. Studies show they're miserable sots. Here’s what Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert has discovered about humans: Our memory (or our experience of the past) is malleable and often inaccurate. Our perception (or our experience of the present) is subjective and incomplete. And our imagination (or our experience of the future) is dangerously unreliable. In short, we’re terrible at accurately assessing what happened in the past, what’s happening in the present moment, and what will happen in the future. Basically, we have no idea what’s going on. Gilbert highlights these psychological findings in the context of the human search for happiness. He uses the evidence to support the thesis of his latest book: that humans are terrible at predicting what will make them happy. At first, the news made me despondent (If I have no hope of ever knowing what will make me happy, how will I ever be happy?) and kinda relieved (At least I don’t have to put in any more hard work on the happiness front! That means more TV for me which, let’s face it, seems to make me happy enough). But there’s an illogic to my initial reaction: just because we have trouble telling what will make us happy — even in the present moment — doesn’t mean we can’t and don’t ever experience happiness. We just have to work harder to recognize it when it’s happening. That’s the advice of the self-described pessimist and French psychiatrist/happiness scholar, Christophe Andre. He says we are often too frenzied and distracted to notice when we are happy and, hence, miss out on the experience of our happiness. The key, he says, is cultivating mindfulness, the ability to be truly present in the moment. It sounds so easy. But try putting it into practice and you discover it’s significant challenges. How often have you realized only after a party that you had a good time? What then? If your only experience of happiness is a memory of it, did you really experience happiness? And, per Gilbert’s research, if our memory is a sorry record keeper of our actual experiences, how can we trust it? And what were you thinking about/paying attention to during the party when you were supposedly so happy? What to make for dinner tomorrow night? Where Sally got those adorable shoes? Was what you just said to Susanne impolite? Were you really happy if your mind wasn’t fully engaged in the happy experience as it happened? Andre also says that happiness means accepting that we’re a gloomy lot to begin with — in terms of evolutionary biology, says Andre, our hunting and gathering ancestor’s survival depended on “a certain degree of concern. It was prudent to remain alert to dangers and problems, which is why we are geared to focus on the negative.” That’s a whole extra hurdle we have to jump to find more happiness. There’s a classic Calvin and Hobbes comic strip where Calvin is slumped in a chair watching TV when Hobbes walks by and asks him what he’s up to. Calvin responds, “I’m killing time waiting for life to shower me with meaning and happiness.” Calvin will be waiting a long time. Happiness, it turns out, is a lot of work.

Blowin' in the wind. I don’t talk specifics when it comes to politics. It can just be too incendiary and I hate conflict. But it’s been a wild election season and ever since the caucus whirled through Minnesota, I’ve noticed a curious political contradiction playing out — literally — on the street in front of my house. The night before the MN caucus, the campaigns canvassed residential neighborhoods with shiny get-out-the-vote fliers. The fliers indeed had helpful information — what time to vote, location, directions, etc. But now it’s been several weeks and the fliers are still floating on the wind in my neighborhood. They cake the sidewalk, ride ice floes toward the storm drains, stick to the trunks of trees. In a year when every serious presidential contender is talking about the environment, isn’t having shiny, probably-took-a-lot-of-energy-to-produce fliers that subsequently become free-floating environmental garbage a big fat contradiction? Perhaps it’s an unintended consequence of the grueling demands of presidential campaigning (I couldn’t do it. You can see in their eyes exactly how much sleep they aren’t getting. It makes me tired just watching them…), but it irks me. Every time I walk the dogs, I see a candidate’s smiling face blow past me just like “the most beautiful” plastic bag in American Beauty (oh, Alan Ball, do you ever do anything short of a masterpiece?) on its way to clogging up my watershed. How do I believe a candidate’s professed sincerity about fixing the environment while I’m peeling their garbage of the bottom of my winter boots?

Here's a picture of my dogs cuddling. They have nothing to do with this post. They're just cute. A friend once asked my better half if it was tough to live with me sometimes because I’m, like, so “into health.” What if you just want to eat grizzly nachos and drink soda all day one day, the friend asked? Does Laine let you? First of all, I try never to force anyone to conform to my health habits, such as they are (more on this in a second) because (1) there’s nothing attractive about a pedant, (2) much as I secretly believe otherwise, I’m not the boss of anyone’s life choices, and (3), and perhaps most significantly, being preachy and dictatorial isn’t effective. In fact, it often has the opposite effect. Of course, I wish everyone on earth shared my worldview on health and eating, on the environment, on what constitutes quality TV programming, etc. But I’m not going to win them over by being preachy. Instead I just try to do what I think is important and what makes me feel happy and healthy, and I try to have no expectations for anyone but me. And if, along the way, someone says, “Wow, that olive and feta quinoa bake didn't taste as bad as I expected!” so much the better. But this brings me to what I really wanted to talk about: the expectations we have for certain “types” of people, say the health conscious, or athletes, or hard driving executives, or stay at home parents, or artists, or University professors, or teenagers, or you-name-it. The type of expectations some people have about "health nut" me. Now we’ve all read those sweet little essays about the NFL player who’s passionate about ancient Greek poetry or the top neurosurgeon who listens to Kelly Clarkson everyday on his commute, and we know all about how we should dispense with our preconceived notions and be more open-minded blah blah, so I’m not going to repeat that discussion here. What I’m going to do instead is go straight to the fun bit, the “dirty secrets revealed!” portion of every “preconceived notion” story. That’s why we read them in the first place, right? To revel in the contradictions. To match them up with our own. To affirm this person’s humanity and subsequently our own. To delight in our shared imperfection. It’s like that time I read that the Queen of England eats breakfast cereal every morning out of an old Tupperware container. More than just being titillated, I (and the whole of England) was overcome by the sheer humanity of this detail. I’m not the Queen of England and I won’t even pretend to pretend that anyone would interested in knowing how I eat breakfast cereal (or anything else about me for that matter), but I am, as Desi’s friend suggested “into health” — someone who eats mostly vegetables, fruits, nuts, seeds; who eschews corn syrup and white rice; who’s an environmentally-conscious grow-my-own-food-and-buy-only-second-hand-clothes sort — which adds up to a whole set of expectations worth shattering. Hence: The Secrets of a Health Magazine Editor Revealed! Here are some of my less healthy habits: 1. I eat cookies like it’s my job. I can resist ice cream, brownies, cupcakes, etc. But stick a plate of cookies in front of me and I’m like a 4 year old. I will eat them until I’m sick. 2. I love TV. I believe TV is one of life’s purest pleasures and I’ll watch it before I’ll engage in any number of other pursuits. I know full well that I could probably spend my TV-watching time in healthier and more fulfilling ways, but I won’t give it up. They’ll have to pry my TV out of my cold, dead hands. 3. I do not go to the dentist twice a year like I’m supposed to. I usually go once a year. Maybe. 4. How do I love thee, caffeine? Let me count the ways….. The stuff makes me jittery, uncomfortable and agitated, and I know it. I drink it anyway. I love its boldness, it’s electricity, its snap and richness. I love the way it makes me feel even when it makes me feel bad. 5. Point of sale displays in big-box stores were designed specifically for me. I know these things are meant to sucker me in and I know I should be savvier (and, if I do say so myself, I’m fairly responsible with my money). But plop me in the check-out line at Target, get me started perusing the POS display and suddenly I realize that a tube of Carmex, a few packs of triple A batteries and a discount DVD of Corky Romano are life necessities. How did I ever live without these things? Seriously, I have no idea. So there you have it. My point with all of this... well, okay, I don't have much of one other that I love these types of stories and so I assume others must too. Though, also, I think part of living well is embracing our humanity, our contradictions, our whole lives. Otherwise we can wind up feeling compartmentalized and ashamed about who we are, and that just ain't right. Sure, we should always be on a path to improvement and healthier living and all of that, but meanwhile, I'm proud to say that I'm a TV-addicted, caffeine-swilling, cookie-devouring impulse shopper. And hooray for that.