At this point in our cultural history, it’s pretty fair to say that to be an American is to have an eating disorder. After all, disorder is just another word for chaos, which is what our collective eating habits resemble as we respond, salivating, to the lure of More and Faster.
Over the past few decades, the fast-food industry has sponsored, and corporate advertising wizards have conducted, the nationwide behavioral-science experiment that is the promise of instant gratification — and we have eagerly participated in it, not to mention funded it. In short, the single, sad fact of the matter is that, as Melanie Plesko, outpatient dietitian at New England Baptist Hospital, puts it, " The American diet is definitely not determined by health concerns, but influenced rather by the marketing departments of Coca-Cola and McDonald’s. "
If the forces working against us are that large and powerful — and if, in this Information Age, the opportunities they have to sell us on the virtues of More and Faster are themselves greater and more frequent — how can we possibly resist them and their glistening cheeseburgers? The federal government, Plesko notes, could take a bite out of them by " tax[ing] fast foods and us[ing] the money collected to fund public-health messages focusing on nutrition " — but, admittedly, the likelihood that our present corporation-loving administration would do such a thing is slim to nil. In the meantime, then, what is in store for the person who strives for health-consciousness in a society that not only takes consumerism so literally, but makes it so mindlessly easy?
According to NUTRITION experts like Plesko and Metabolic Designs, Inc. founder and dietician John Cannova, the answer is obvious: it takes a lot of hard work, made all the harder by the fact that focus, determination, and patience have become — as good qualities go — fairly outmoded in our cut-to-the-chase, instant-message-filled world. That is, the More-Faster mantra conditions our attitudes toward weight loss no less than it does our eating. So it’s not that we don’t know better; indeed, the irony is that we have access to more information than ever about nutrition precisely because we spend so much time in front of our computers with a bag of chips and so little time doing things like exercising or preparing healthy meals. We are so used to the notion that our desires can be commodified, slaked via the marketplace rather than through our own labor, that, in Plesko’s words, we’ve begun to " look to our doctors to basically take the weight off us, instead of dealing with the root causes of obesity ... we’d rather have liposuction or gastric-bypass surgery, or take prescribed medications like fat blockers and appetite suppressants. "
Of course, the feeling among nutritionists is that even if such measures succeed in some instances, they don’t succeed in the grand scheme; they provide crutches at best, and dangers far more immediate than obesity’s at worst (remember Fen-Phen?). At any rate, Cannova points out that " no matter what they come up with, it always comes down to the same thing: how many calories you take in and how much you’re willing to exercise. New diet products, they come and go, but there’s never going to be a pill that you take and suddenly no one’s fat anymore. " Nor, Plesko adds, will there ever be an artificial supplement that actually supplants nature’s nutritional bounty; you simply " cannot get all the benefits of foods from a vitamin/mineral pill. "
None of WHICH means that technology has no part to play in our quest for better health. Nutrition Web sites, even credible ones, abound, offering a range of services such as online nutritional counseling and calorie-calculators, some for free, some for a fee. The USDA Center for Nutritional Policy and Promotion has created an Interactive Healthy Eating Index (http://147.208.9.133) that allows you, gratis, to compute your daily intake and weigh your diet on several different scales, from recommended-daily-allowance requirements to Food Guide Pyramid servings. You can also compare your scores to the national average and track your progress over a period of weeks. And recipe databases on the Net are inexhaustible, so that you can just visit, for example, the site for Cooking Light magazine (www.cookinglight.com) when you’ve got a hankering for, say, low-fat spinach lasagna.
Of course, if you're downloading healthy recipes, you probably intend to cook. In that case, technology has made things more convenient — perhaps at the expense of skill — and come up with lots of timesaving gadgets. Joe Carlin, a regional nutritional specialist for the Massachusetts Department of Health and Human Services, imagines that food science will continue down that road as it feels pressured, above all, to discover " better ways to re-thermalize food. People are too busy working ... and playing with toys to cook. They will increasingly want their food pre-assembled, so all they have to do is heat it. "
And yet Carlin also believes that technology, at its best, could play mother’s little helper to the nervous kitchen novice. He speculates that innovations in kitchen design will, for example, " help us solve the problem of translating the recipe into a finished dish. Fifty years ago, you held a black-and-white copy of The Joy of Cooking in your hand and tried to imagine in your head what the ingredients looked like, what each step in the cooking process was to feel like, and what the final product was to look like," he says. "In the future, home cooks will see a digital video display in living color on their refrigerator door. " Just enter the keywords " low-fat lasagna " and watch as a virtual Julia Child takes you through the procedure step by step.
For DIETICIAN Melanie Plesko, who is also studying to become a chef at the Cambridge School of Culinary Arts, any such return to the kitchen, and to ingredients that weren’t synthesized in a lab beaker, is a step in the right direction. Given that in the past half-century we’ve watched American dieting trends come full circle — from the bunless-hamburger-patty-and-cottage-cheese diet plates of the ’50s to the high-protein regimens of today’s Zone devotees — Plesko hopefully predicts that the next shift will be, as it was in the ’60s, toward a " whole-foods approach. " She points to the recent mainstreaming of herbal products and surmises that it’s only a matter of time before people admit to themselves that it’s counterintuitive to wash down their gingko supplements with McDonald’s milkshakes rather than, say, fresh-squeezed OJ. " I think that as a result of more and more research on the medicinal power of foods ... people will be swayed to include these foods in their diets, " Plesko says. " Food is complex — it contains hundreds of phytochemicals, only a handful of which have been identified. " The implication here is that, aware as we are of the health benefits of fruits and veggies, we may not even know the half of it yet.
Such growing awareness is a welcome touch of green in an otherwise bleak nutritional landscape. John Cannova observes that " the trend of obesity is starting at a younger age than it used to. I have clients nine years old now; I never had that 10 years ago. " So if, in the face of Doritos and Hershey’s, we can think of no other reason to stick to our New Year’s resolution to adopt healthier eating practices, we might consider the single compelling one: setting a positive example for our children, the at-risk population of the new century.
Ruth Tobias can be reached at ruthiet@bu.edu.
