Part Seven: Wholistic Nutrition is Larger than Foods
How to find the “whole” which isn’t only a bunch of broken parts.
Welcome to the final post (of 7) of our special series about holistic nutrition and some of the research behind the Whole Food Plant Based Diet.
To learn more about the series, check out the Introduction here. This is not just another polemic for or against veganism!
These posts are much longer and far more complex than my usual posts. You might find them boring – or the most interesting thing you’ve read in months.
Article sites and sources can be found in the PDF version attached at the end.
We learned last week about a new approach to wholistic nutrition that integrates what most people have eaten for most of history. This isn’t a single diet, but an inclusive perspective on eating that includes all whole foods – what we call on The Healthy Jew Real Food (and some Almost-Real Foods).
Today we’ll conclude this series by taking a closer look at this new, more inclusive wholism, a wholism that finally breaks free from reductionism.
The basic premise of “whole food” wholism is that foods from nature are whole, while those from the factory are not. We saw how this assumption is borne out from observing many successful dietary approaches and it also doesn’t suffer from the inherent shortcomings of focusing on any specific nutrient.
But why is this true? What is more qualitatively whole in an unpeeled apple than an unopened bag of cheese pops? Who gave nature a monopoly on wholeness?
The answer is that the true “whole” will always lie beyond the grasp of the human mind. Our intellect works by perceiving details in the world around us, then combining and contrasting them to form a full picture. Since our sensory input begins with details, we’ll never be able to figure out our way past reductionism. Dr. Campbell tried to do that and failed. He attempted to build the “whole” all by himself, but ended up with a bunch of broken parts.
What researchers can do is look beyond the laboratory at the world around them. True wholistic nutritional science will research how humanity as a whole has always eaten, at the human experience that is larger than any theory or trial. And it will show how to eat the foods that arise from the wholeness of the natural world. It will caution against eating foods that people invented in a laboratory, because their healthfulness can only be determined by reductionist biology.
Examples of the practical utility of this approach abound. We’re constantly hearing of this flavoring or that preservative that has been shown to maybe cause cancer. But has that ever happened to the tomato? Or onion? Or apple? Or egg? Or salmon? Any danger found in whole foods, such as arsenic in rice, or pesticides in pretty much everything, is from the excesses of modern industrial farming. The whole foods that have been eaten for millennia are never inherently unhealthy because they are products of the healthy world itself, not the overreaching human mind.
One specific example worth emphasizing is processed vegetable oils. Until the beginning of the twentieth century, these oils didn’t exist. They were born from the newly invented chemicals process of hydrogenation, and were promoted as cleaner and healthier than the dirty and smelly lard and butter of the pre-industrial world. These oils quickly became wildly popular. But they also drastically changed the fat profile of the modern diet with two major contributions: heretofore nonexistent trans fats and wildly unbalanced levels of inflammatory omega-6 fatty acids. The omega-6 balance question has been fought for decades, and one can reasonably argue that the jury is still out. But what’s by now certain is that the trans fats are quite dangerous creatures. So now butter and cold-pressed oils are back in vogue.
Vegetable oils are a prime example of how we can’t know that the foods we invent are really healthy for us. The human mind just doesn’t have the capacity for that.
Whole Animal Foods
Although The China Study’s critics believe that a whole-food diet will include some animal foods, that doesn’t give a free pass to any product derived from someone that once walked, crawled, swam, or flew. As we learned, some studies implicate processed meat as a cause of disease; animal foods can lose their wholeness like all others.
There are several other concerning aspects of how we eat animal foods that impair their “whole-foodness.”
Denise Minger explains that until relatively recently people consumed whole animals, not just the muscle meat which makes up most of our animal food diet. Organ meats and bone marrow are particularly nutrient-rich. In fact, an amino acid that’s common in muscle meat can increase the body’s needs for certain other nutrients, and even drain the body of another amino acid that is indeed found in the more neglected parts of the animal. On some level, our focus on muscle meats has made animal foods not whole foods. There may also be other, yet unknown, health problems as a result.
Another recent change is the way we cook meat. Unlike those pictures of our early ancestors eating blackened meat around the campfire, research shows that early humans took care not to burn their meat, and recent studies suggest that compounds formed by cooking meat at high temperatures, or charring it, can be carcogenics. This hasn’t yet been conclusively proven, but a historically whole attitude towards animal foods might point toward gentler forms of cooking.
Lastly, and perhaps most significant, is the way the animals that become foods are grown. If you are what you eat, then you are also that which you eat eats. And our animals don’t exactly eat a whole food diet. Instead, they are fed cocktails of macronutrients and hormones that quickly turn them into meat but contain little or none of the foods that they would eat in nature. Instead of grass, feedlot cows eat corn and even other animals. This makes them sick, so they need copious doses of antibiotics. Even unprocessed commercial beef or chicken is a different creature than the one found in nature.
Of course, it would be impossible to produce the large quantities of animal foods that people eat nowadays without these dubious methods. But that’s part of the point: even if animals are whole and healthy foods, they are whole and healthy only in the amounts that can be supported by the whole and healthy world.
All in all, a truly whole animal food is a different food than mass-produced cuts of muscle meat sizzling away on the grill. It’s quite possible that negative health outcomes found from eating animal foods might result from the way we eat them or the way they lived.
Wholism Beyond Nutrition
There’s one last problem with the wholism that’s being suggested by The China Study’s WFPB diet: it’s overfocus on nutrition as the answer to all our health problems.
From the outset, Dr. Campbell fixates on “breakfast, lunch, and supper” as the causes and cures for the litany of illnesses plaguing Americans, while mostly ignoring other aspects of a healthy lifestyle, such as movement and stress management. I’ll concede that the book does often refer to the importance of exercise, but always as an addition to the WFPB diet. As I’ve mentioned many times, exercise often confounds any conclusions about the healthfulness of the WFPB diet.
It also seems to me that The China Study’s downplaying of lifestyle factors is another ironic example of its reductionism. Many of the book’s wide-ranging claims could have been put forth to promote exercise, living mindfully, or mind-body (psychosomatic) medicine. In fact, I can easily think of books on these three topics (and there are more) that indeed cover most of the same diseases as The China Study and come to similar conclusions about their respective topics. For example, Dr. Jon Kabat-Zin’s Full Catastrophe Living offers evidence of the wide-ranging health benefits of mindfulness meditation, Dr. John Sarno’s The Divided Mind for the mind-body connection, and Dr. John Ratey’s Spark and Go Wild for exercise (and more). And yet those books don’t claim panacea status for their subjects. They also don’t ask me to eat drastically different than most human societies.
A truly whole perspective on health must incorporate all relevant disciplines. Such a heterogenous approach might allow for more balanced changes in each specific area because we’ll be well aware of how evidence for any extreme suggestion in one of them might by be confounded by the others. Taking The China Study’s WFPB diet as an example, it’s almost certainly healthier to eat a mostly whole-food diet with some animal foods while exercising and meditating daily than to be stressed out from avoiding all animal products and only eating plant ones in their perfectly natural form.
Strangely enough, The China Study itself suggests as much in the last of its principles of nutrition that sum up the book’s findings. After focusing all throughout the book on nutrition alone, Dr. Campbell then expands his agenda to include other activities, particularly exercise, suggesting a synergy between them that together produces “whole” health. He explains a bit how the health of our planet and its resources also are interconnected with our health. Even better, in Whole he devotes an entire chapter to the subject. I wonder what would have happened had he taken a closer look at this sooner. Perhaps animal foods might have been given a better hearing.
Here’s a PDF version of this post along with all the footnotes:
