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"Eating closer to nature" has become the latest imperative of the food faddist. To some, this means eating food raw (and not irradiated) whenever possible, which carries considerable risks. Raw can be dangerous, since the largest source of salmonella in the United States is uncooked sprouts, which cannot be rendered safe by any means (including being washed with chlorine). And irradiation probably wouldn't be popular with the raw foods crowd. Some heating is allowed by the nature-eaters, as long the temperature does not exceed 118 degrees — which is a marvelous temperature to multiply most microorganisms. A dedicated food faddist may make reservations four months in advance and pay $69 or more per person for a meal at an uncooked-foods restaurant. There are even uncooked foods cookbooks.
One pundit maintains that "if you want to be healthy, you have to stay as close to nature as possible. When an animal or plant is raised in an organic environment, you are giving your body what Mother Nature intended." Whatever "nature intended," our biological endowment tells us otherwise. The changes in physiology that produced larger brains and erect posture and freed our hands for tool-making were accompanied by changes in our dentition and jaw muscles and by the development of a digestive tract that cannot digest cellulose and raw starch. We simply do not have sufficient gut for the fermentation necessary to break down many complex carbohydrates. Cooking has rightly been described as a type of "external, partial predigestion."
Some of our relatives don't need cooking as much as we do. Gorillas can sit around munching on high-fiber vegetable matter, which lands in their large hind gut, where it is slowly broken down, drawing out whatever nutrients it contains. Human physiology is adapted for a high-energy-dense diet, which involves meat and fruit along with other foods. Lacking storage capacity, we pass fiber through our system quickly, extracting little nutrient from it.
Vegetarianism is a companion food fetish for those who want to "live closer to nature." Given our ancestors' need for energy-dense food, strict vegetarianism is anything but natural. The modern abundant availability of fruits and refined foods makes vegetarianism a greater possibility today than it was for our hominid ancestors. Both cooking and meat-eating gave our ancestors the high-caloric-density food to fuel the energy-demanding human brain, making the most of the recent evolution of a large brain and greater intelligence.
The raw and uncooked are presumed to be "living foods." But "eating closer to nature" is not "natural," whatever that means; it still deprives us of vital nutrients, as it did our hominid ancestors. Even with our greater access to an incredible array of foods, we need heat, germination, and fermentation to make some nutrients accessible.
Fish is a source of the B vitamin thiamin, essential for metabolizing carbohydrates and for the maintenance of neural activity. Its deficiency in adults results in beriberi. Unfortunately, fish has the enzyme thiaminase, which inhibits utilization of the thiamin — but thiaminase is destroyed in cooking, increasing the availability of the thiamin. Cooking does not destroy the nutritious oils in fish.
"Eating closer to nature" may be trendy and give one a sense of superiority, but nutritionally it doesn't make sense. Luckily, modern science and technology has made nutritious food so abundant that it takes a truly extreme food fetish to cause substantive harm. Probably the best nutritional strategy is variety: eating a number of different vegetables as well as meats, grains, and fruits and eating your vegetables in a variety of forms, both raw and cooked. Most of us already do just that without any help from the food police.
The fetish for "eating closer to nature" is part of a larger complex of beliefs critical of modern life in all its forms: our food supply, modern medical care and pharmaceuticals, or any number of advances in science and technology. In the twentieth century, we added nearly thirty years of life expectancy while reducing infant mortality by 90% and maternal mortality by 95% or more. We live longer, healthier, and safer lives. Somehow, there is a widespread belief that the very forces that have so bountifully transformed our lives are a threat to them and must be completely changed. Such beliefs would be laughable except that adherents are assiduously working to turn their views into policies they can impose on the rest of us.
Thomas R. DeGregori is an ACSH Director, a professor of economics at the University of Houston, and author of The Environment, Our natural Resources, and Modern Technology (Iowa State Press). |
