Food and Nutrition : Facts Vs Myths

Raj

August 21, 2023

Gut microbes routinely send signals to produce the key brain chemicals like serotonin that lift our mood. Prof. Spector clearly states that “gut microbes are key in influencing our thoughts and emotions.”

Let food be thy medicine and medicine be thy food.
Definitely not Hippocrates

Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.
Michael Pollan

The moment had arrived. I was about to buy the most definitive book on how an asteroid wiped off the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. I only needed to wait till I finished the book I was reading – part of my cunning plan to ward off the evil spirits of tsundoku, the act of buying books and letting them pile up without reading them.

Alas, it was not to be. Destiny intervened. Dark clouds of fate filled the sky like temporary files filling up a Seagate Expansion 1 TB External Hard Disk (3 years manufacturing warranty.) A lightening bolt of thunder…

Narrator: (coughs)
Me : Sorry, got a little carried away.
Narrator: Quelle surprise! It’s a common occurrence in authors who are unable to finish their first novel. What was it called again? Man and the Machine?
Me : Ouch!!

What happened was this. I came across an article on the research done by Prof. Gerta Keller, a 78-year-old palaeontology and geology professor at the Princeton University. According to Prof. Keller, the asteroid theory is contradicted by observations. For one, the Chicxulub asteroid did not seem to be that devastating because samples from Mexico revealed that healthy populations of forams, creatures that rely on photosynthesis, managed to survive the impact. Moreover, the asteroid had hit 200,000 years before the extinction. Prof. Keller’s research shows that it was a series of colossal volcanic eruptions in a part of western India known as the Deccan Traps that caused the mass extinction of dinosaurs. To say that Prof. Keller encountered opposition to the Deccan Volcanism theory would be an understatement. Scientists insulted her at conferences, and she had to fight every inch of the way. At one of the conferences, scientists were divided 60-40 in favour of the asteroid theory. The debate continues.

Prof. Keller’s own journey, from what can be gleaned through The Atlantic article, is fascinating and inspiring. Sixth sibling among 12, she grew up in a Swiss village in such extreme poverty that her mother once butchered a pet cat and another time a pet dog to put food on table. As a child, Keller devoured books and completed her siblings’ homework. At 19, young Keller hitchhiked through Spain and North Africa, escaped with a drug trafficker after getting detained in Algeria, set sail to Australia. As usual, on my wish list is a memoir by Prof. Keller followed by a biopic, starring Jennifer Lawrence in the first half and Helen Mirren in the second. What an amazing movie that would make!

After this incident, a pattern of sorts began to form when I chose what to read next. I stayed away from research topics that were hotly debated and undecided, and focused instead on new discoveries with solid proofs. I have resisted the temptation to read books about latest research on dark matter and dark energy, though I must say the Modified Newtonian dynamics (MOND) theory looks very interesting, especially after I watched this interview of Dr. Pavel Kroupa. And I no longer read anything on string theory because “string theory is not physics.” I did not say that, Sir Roger Penrose did. Please don’t kill the messenger.

Instead I follow the same rule that I apply while choosing music, novels, or movies – that it should produce a bodily sensation. In case of science, this means results of the LIGO detector or the fantabulous JWST results. Here’s a hot one from the oven.

PDS 70 is a planetary system 370 light years away, with a star and two gas-giant planets and a lot of gas and dust in between in shape of a disk. JWST detected water vapour in this disk which is mind blowing because planets are forming in the disk as we speak. This means some of these planets will have water right from the beginning.

JWST will be doing another set of observations on PDS 70. This may help answer the question – where did Earth get all this water from? Ergo, the bodily sensation known as goosebumps. Nothing personal dear string theorists, but I don’t feel the same when imagining the universe in 11 or 26 dimensions.

Make PDS 70 your new home! PDS 70 is a K-type star with 5.4 million years of proven track record. We have 24 x 7 unlimited water supply built in around the star that will nourish and flourish your biosphere, with plenty of carbon dioxide for the green communities. Slots will be allotted strictly on first-come-first-serve basis. Applicants from nearby star systems will get preference. Special discount for applicants within 2 lightyears with attractive inter-galactic tax breaks! Hurry, book now, offer closes soon!

Unfortunately, there is one area where I am forced to break this rule because it’s literally a matter of life and death – health and nutrition. There is much confusion in this area and contradictory news abounds, with the news of xyz causing and curing cancer appearing within a space of weeks (replace xyz with coffee, onion, Kiwano melon, Malabar spinach or unicorn milk.)

Moreover, in today’s age, we rarely check the source of information and instead assume that due diligence has been done at the source. Case in point, the famous quote at the beginning of this article, mistakenly attributed to Hippocrates. Dr. Diana Cardenas went through all the writings of Hippocrates and found no evidence that Hippocrates actually said this. And yet, for the last 30 years, at least one biomedical journal has been citing this quotation every year.

How did I first hear about the theory that an asteroid killed off the dinosaurs? Through newspapers, magazines, videos, and memes. Everyone kept repeating it inside the bubble till it became undisputed truth. It’s by sheer chance that I stumbled upon the fact that an alternative theory exists and that the asteroid theory is not as full-proof as we have been made to believe.

For years, I believed in the myth, ‘breakfast is the most important meal of the day’, simply because magazines, newspapers, and everyone else kept repeating it. I stuffed myself silly in the morning and was miserable for the rest of the day – lethargy, sleepiness, and my normal huger cycle gone for a toss. Then I tried the second myth – ‘eat 5-6 small meals throughout the day’ with similar results. The thing that really helped me was skipping breakfast or having very light breakfast. Ironically, fasting was a strict no-no during the eighties and nineties because “No! you should never do that. Your sugar will plummet and you will crash.” What a load of codswallop!

So, I read on health and nutrition from time to time, try to keep myself updated and write about it so that others may learn from my mistakes. There is another aspect to this that is rather heartbreaking. When I was growing up, heart disease was associated with old age and retirement; very rarely did we hear about young people having cardiovascular problems. Sadly, that is no longer the case. Anyone from 18 onwards is having these problems, including people working out in gyms who are supposed to be more careful about their health. Clearly, we are missing a big piece of the puzzle.

Most of the dietary advice is based on what our body needs. Food that is good for muscles, organs, circulation, hair, skin etc. But one important factor is often overlooked – our gut microbes. Our gut has about 100 trillion bacteria, fungi and parasites and 500 trillion mini viruses. Together, these weigh as much as our brain and they need proper nutrition as much as we do. So a major factor in deciding what to eat should be – does this help or harm my gut bacteria?

Two good books on the topic are Food for Life and Spoon Fed, both by Prof. Tim Spector. Prof. Spector is a professor of genetic epidemiology at the King’s College London and honorary consultant physician at Guy’s and St Thomas’ Hospitals. He leads world’s biggest citizen science health project, ZOE Health Study.

As usual, a disclaimer. This is not medical advice. Please consult your physician before making any dietary changes, especially if you are prone to allergies or have a pre-existing condition. The aim of the article is to provide enough interesting information to induce you to read the books.

Food is complex

We often associate food with a single component. Oranges are vitamin C, banana are potassium etc. High resolution mass spectrometry reveals nearly 26,000 different chemicals in the foods that we normally eat and yet the nutritional database focuses on only 150. In addition, the trillions of gut bacteria produce thousands of chemicals during digestion that our cells cannot. Much of what we are told on the product labels in partially true or not true at all. For instance, the so-called prebiotic sauerkraut is often pickled in vinegar to give it a longer shelf life. But the vinegar kills the same bacteria that the product is shouting about from the rooftops!

Chewing is an important part of the digestion process

This really blew my mind. When you change the food structure, for example, from whole almonds to powdered almonds, this changes both the blood lipid levels (fat) and the energy levels (calories). After eating powdered almonds, the fat circulates in your blood for six hours after meal which leads to low level of inflammation. Over time, this may lead to type 2 diabetes, heart disease and weight gain. Same goes for eating an apple vs drinking an apple smoothie. None of this is reflected on the label that shows the food calorie and fat count because the label does not take into account the food structure.

What’s good for the gut?

After collecting 11,000 samples from citizens around the world, the British/American Gut Project Team published its findings. Data was adjusted for all kinds of possible biases such as education level, age, social status, smoking, alcohol, number of children, pets, body weight, medications etc. The main conclusion was this.

It does not matter if you follow a vegan, paleo, keto or fruitarian diet. What matters most for your gut health is the number of different plant species that you eat each week. Note that the emphasis is on different. And the optimal number was thirty.

Lest you visualise a plate full of leaves, branches and roots like an all-you-can-eat buffet for goats, don’t worry. It’s simpler than that. The old nutritional paradigm only focused on major components. The new paradigm focuses on smaller components as well so herbs, spices, nuts, legumes, and seeds all count as plants. While the old paradigm will have no problems if you eat the same broccoli, spinach, avocado lunch for the whole week, your gut will be much happier if you add twenty seven more plants, even in small quantities such as herbs and spices.

Note for fellow Indians – you don’t need to make a major change. It seems that our ancestors have already figured the whole thing out in traditional Indian cuisine. More on that later.

Avoid ultra processed foods (UPFs)

How to recognise UPFs? Look at the ingredients. You know what ingredients are required if you cook that product at home. The more number of unknown ingredients you see, the more processed the food is. But why are all these chemicals added? For three reasons – to increase shelf life, to reduce costs and to make you addicted to the taste. UPFs are a mixture of chemicals and food extracts so that the final product does not resemble the original parts of whole foods. So potato chips have very little actual potato in them; instead heavily processed potato starch is used along with sugar, salts, fats and enticing flavourings. This combination tricks your brain by giving it dopamine boosts so that you eat UPFs even when you are full. The usual feeling of satiety when you eat natural foods is bypassed. That’s why UPFs are highly addictive. UPFs do not contain much fibre and this includes those that have labels like ‘extra fibre’ stamped on them.

The chemicals added in UPFs are there only for commercial purposes. They have no business to be inside your body. Sadly, this includes almost all types of breads, cereals, protein bars, protein shakes, and beverages.

Food and the immune system

Our biggest immune organ is in our gut, lining most of the small and large intestine, covering an immense surface area of over 25 square metres.

The gut microbes play a crucial part in communicating with the immune system and send chemical signals to increase or decrease the immune response activities. Our bodies produce micro-tumours all the time when cells are replicating. The immune system identifies and destroys them. This ability is closely related to the health of the gut microbes. Some studies show that the reason cancer patients respond differently to treatments may also be related to the gut microbes.

There is growing consensus that our moods are closely related to the gut microbes. These microbes also routinely send signals to produce the key brain chemicals like serotonin that lift our mood. Prof. Spector clearly states that “gut microbes are key in influencing our thoughts and emotions.”

Yes, man is a pliable animal—he must be so defined—a being who gets accustomed to everything!
Fyodor Dostoevsky, The House of the Dead

My $247.87 ($0.02 adjusted for inflation)

Until recently, the entirety of my knowledge about the gut microbes amounted to this, ‘we have good bacteria in our stomach that help digestion. Eating yogurt helps these bacteria.’

I have suffered greatly for this ignorance. When I finally woke up and made the necessary changes – stopped eating junk foods and UPFs, started eating healthy foods and started intemittant fasting, the change was like night and day.

You must have seen those videos of deaf babies who experience sound for the first time after putting on a hearing aid. That’s how I felt. I had been eating so much junk food all my life that I never knew what having a healthy gut feels like. It’s like taking the red pill in The Matrix. Great energy levels, clear thinking, and new ideas come to you without any resistance. Earlier, I used to blame external factors for minor ailments like acidity or headaches. It turns out they were all related to my unhealthy gut.

To this end, here are some of the lessons I learned along the way.

Remember, you read it here first.

How to optimise cheat day

I have a salty tooth instead of a sweet one so a packet of chips on a cheat day gets me to within walking distance of heaven. Depending on the brand, the packet of chips will have some of these ingredients (may vary depending on the country)

Maltodextrin, polyglycerol esters, Malic acid, Tartaric Acid, Citric acid, sugar, Glyceryl monostearate, Disodium 5’-inosinate e631, Disodium Guanylate, Gelling Agent, Acidity Regulator, Stabilizer, Flavor Enhancer, Anticaking Agent, Natural & Nature Identical Flavouring Substances, Artificial Flavouring, Preservative, Raising Agent.

If I go to a local vendor, he is cutting the potatoes and frying them right there, with only three ingredients

Potato, salt, oil.

Clearly, this is the lesser of the two evils. Now you might say that one packet of chips won’t do much harm and you may be right. But if you are having chips everyday, like I used to do, the amount of unwanted chemicals that you consume over the years is quite significant. Even more disturbing is the trend of Indian school kids regularly consuming these chips as after-school snacks. By the time they grow up, they will have consumed a huge amount of unwanted chemicals.

Next time you throw a birthday party or an office celebration party, don’t buy these overpriced chemical factories. Contact a local vendor. If the order is big enough, he may even prepare it to your liking, using healthy oil or butter/ghee.

Traditional Indian junk food like Medu Wada, Batata Wada, Pakoda, or Samosa is preferable because it has no preservatives or chemicals provided it is consumed occasionally on cheat days. A regular diet of these foods is unhealthy as well. Dosa and Uttapa are superfoods if the oil is high quality. I never eat Cheese Dosa or Cheese Uttapa because it is not traditional Indian food and you can be sure that the cheese is highly processed.

A new trend in Indian street food is to add cheese to every recipe. Traditional Indian food does not have cheese as one of the ingradients. While good quality cheese like the parmesan cheese is a good source of prebiotics, it is also expensive. (Italy has recently started adding food-safe microchips to parmesan cheese in order to distinguish it from fake parmesan cheese.) So if you are eating an inexpensive food item that had cheese in it, that means the cheese has been highly processed and is not good for you.

Take charge of your food

Open your phone and check the list of most used apps. If food delivery apps or restaurant booking apps are near the top, you have a problem (unless you are travelling constantly.) Don’t get me wrong, I love restaurants. They are great for an occasional trip or during travelling but they are not a replacement for your daily meals. This leaves you with two options.

Learn to cook. I hope silly stereotypes such as ‘boys don’t cook’ are no longer prevalent. Maybe we need a hashtag – something like #RealMenCook. Cooking is an essential survival skill. Besides, there is no excuse today for not learning to cook. You have a kitchen and access to internet. That’s all you need.

Some people may be too busy to cook. In that case hire a cook. This is much more common in India compared to the west. It does not matter if your cook is a simple villager or a 3 Michelin star chef. The point is to have full control over your food so that only healthy, high quality ingredients are used.

Either of these investments – time invested in learning to cook or salary money of the cook – will be one of the most important investments of your life. The benefits as they compound are immense.

Traditional Indian food is a heaven for gut microbes

Traditional Indian cuisine uses vegetables, lentils, pulses, beans, legumes, nuts, and fruits regularly. In addition, Indians love to grow sprouts out of everything that is capable of sprouting. This has nutritional benefits that are too numerous to mention (One cup of broccoli sprouts offers similar nutrition and benefits as 50 cups of broccoli!) Add to this different spices, herbs and condiments routinely used in Indian cuisine, it should easily cover the requirement of consuming 30 plants every week. If you are still falling short, I have one word for you – chutney.

There are literally hundreds of chutneys that are specialities of different parts of India. In principle, you could taste one chutney every day and not repeat it for the whole year. On a more practical level, few chutneys would add great variety to your meals. However, you must be careful.

Chutney comes in two varieties – dry and wet. Wet chutneys are meant to be consumed within few hours or on the same day if refrigerated so if you see a packet of wet chutney, you can be sure that abundant chemicals have been added to it to increase the shelf life. Fresh wet chutneys are great, avoid packed ones. I love that coconut chutney normally served with Idli or Dosa. Idli is a superfood by the way, do try replacing burger and fries with Idli-Sambhar and chutney.

Here’s a typical Sambar recipe. I counted 15 plant ingredients. So if you eat good quality Sambar once a week, you are already satisfying half the requirement of eating 30 plants in a week.

Dry chutneys can be bought from market. Great thing about these chutneys is that they are meant to last for a few months without any efforts so no preservative chemicals are necessary. I am ditching tomato sauce/ketchup (never liked mayonaise) and trying out different chutneys instead. Here are the ingredient lists of the chutneys I am using at the moment.

This is what an ideal ingredient list should look like. Just the necessary ingredients and nothing else.

I would love to add papad to the list. Unfortunately, most commercially available papads have excessive salt (> 50%). If the salt content is regulated, papad is a great source of proteins. A great initiative would be to serve low salt papads to kids in school as an alternative to chips.

I must confess that writing this article was difficult mainly because there is so much data to sift through. Fortunately, Prof. Spector provides useful summary at the end of each chapter that is immensely helpful. Alas, the field of nutrition is changing fast and we have no choice but to keep up.

In the US, 70% of the food research is sponsored by the food industry. Many results that come out of these studies have not been rigerously tested. In 2019, a news was doing rounds that eating walnuts daily prevents cancer. The research was sponsored by the California Walnut Association.

Nutrition science as a career is not an attractive option. Testing food responses is more complicated compared to drug testing because there is no placebo for food.

Dealing with news related to nutrition is the most important test in your life where you must learn how to differentiate facts from myths, brand propaganda and unsupported claims. Sometimes, even seemingly well researched studies are so contradictory that one has to apply common sense. Here’s the latest example.

An article, again in The Atlantic, about a Harvard study claiming that eating half a cup of ice cream everyday reduces the risk of heart disease in diabetics. Common sense tells me that eating that much sugar daily cannot be good for me so I am going err on the side of caution and pass on the ice cream offer.

In the immortal words of Alastor ‘Mad-Eye’ Moody,