“Super food” is a pop nutrition term, generally applied to the vegetable du jour (e.g., asparagus, avocado), or to some exotic tropical fruit of which you’ve never heard.
The idea: there are some foods which are super-duper, a cut above, far more nutritious than most of what goes on your plate. And the implication is that you should eat more of these super foods, and less of everything else, if you are serious about living well, losing weight, whatever it is you want from food.
Here in this post I will subvert that pop culture notion.
Imagine a food so able to create bodily energy, the capacity to do work, that a few crusts of it would allow a peasant to walk behind a team of oxen to plow a field, all day from dawn to dusk. That’s a super food—from the very specific standpoint of the ease with which this food can be converted into chemical energy that enables the human body to sustain arduous physical labor. Translated into nutritional science: a food with an awesome ability to mobilize insulin to the end of creating blood sugar and thereby, “energy.”
Now dial the clock forward a few centuries. The great-to-the-nth grandchild of that peasant is now an affluent American, a white collar office worker. Here is how he lives: he sits down to breakfast, sits in his car as he commutes to his job, sits at his desk to work, goes and sits down for lunch, comes back and sits in his office again, sits in his car as he drives home, where he sits down to dinner, and then sits down to watch TV, before he lies down for bed.
At the same time, he consumes our putative ultimate super food, perhaps five or six times a day. He has cereal, pancakes, waffles, or toast for breakfast, has a croissant for a morning snack, has a sandwich for lunch, has a cookie during the afternoon break, eats pasta for dinner, and then snacks on a few pita chips in front of the TV.
Now repeat every day for three decades. What would be the predicted result if a sedentary office worker eats a super food every day all day, a food whose scraps could fuel a peasant in the field? And what if the affluence of our office worker enables him to eat that super food, in abundance, as much as he wants, morning, noon and night, with snacks in between?
He’ll get fat. It won’t happen while he’s a college student, walking to class every day, up and down the hill, enjoying the active metabolism of the twenty-something. But when he gets an office job, and drives to that job in his car, and then comes home to sit in front of his TV, while continuing to consume our super food in larger amounts—after all he’s making good money—what happens then?
He puts on the ounces, year by year, six, eight, twelve ounces per year, every year. As he gets both more sedentary, and as his metabolism slows with age, the pounds gained follow a logarithmic path. By age 50 he’s got quite the belly. By age 60 its worse.
So he’s told to eat more whole grains. He switches to multi-grain waffles, whole wheat bread, and whole wheat pasta. He eats a salad—with plenty of croutons. But he doesn’t cut his consumption of wheat in the slightest. Does he lose weight? No; he’s still consuming prodigious amounts of this super food, while continuing to live his life in a chair rather than behind a plow.
***
There’s a vast Internet literature gunning for wheat. Search on “wheat belly” to get the gist. Gluten-free is everywhere. If this literature is to be believed, wheat is an awful food that you should avoid.
Here in this post I’ve turned that attitude on its head, arguing that wheat is a super food, providing far too much usable energy for the office worker to dare to consume very much of it. The argument: If you are sedentary, and unhappy with your weight, you dare not consume this super food called ‘wheat’, in other than negligible quantities—and not every day.
By contrast, if you work as a laborer in a steel factory, bicycling to work while running triathlons in your spare time, I suspect you can eat all the wheat you want. You should still avoid snacking—the human body wasn’t designed for that sort of affluent, indulgent leisure. But hey—have a sandwich for lunch. Enjoy that pasta for dinner.
But the office worker—the sedentary modern—had best be very, very wary of the ultimate super food.
How much wheat did you consume last week, how many times a day, spread over what proportion of your waking day? And how do you feel about your weight?
Please connect the two.
PS: a slightly different version of the argument would connect wheat to maximum insulin response, more powerful even than white sugar, and thus, even more unhelpful than dessert when the goal is to lose weight, and when excessive insulin is believed to be a culprit, per Dr. Fung’s work.
PPS: but remember again that ethnic heritage may significantly moderate the physiological effects of wheat consumption. Some humans probably can eat wheat every day while sitting down all day. You won’t know until you do the self-experiment.
PPPS: is corn that much less of a super food? Is rice? If so, gluten-free won’t lose you a pound. Grain, and especially grain flour, is your culprit.
And if a few potatoes kept an Irish peasant alive, behind the plow, in the cold and damp–what do you suppose a serving of hash browns in the morning, followed by chips at lunch, and French fries for dinner, will do for the office worker, seated all day while enjoying the benefits of central heating? Those potatoes will also act like a super food.
If you are not super active, you should not eat very much of these super foods.
Be First to Comment