Health Tips & People Health Tips

There is an interesting dilemma for those who would influence nutrition. In many places in the world, there are governmental agencies concerned with food security, food safety, agriculture, health, and trade that may, from time to time, implement policies that are at least intended to reduce the risk of chronic diseases. Most often, when the goals of agriculture and human health clash, it is the will of the agriculture sector that prevails (remember the European Union’s “butter mountain” and “wine lake”?). In the United States, perhaps more than anywhere else, this has left an opening for self-help nutrition books. In a land where individuality and self-reliance are valued above many other virtues and where disease is sometimes seen to be a mark of personal failure, gaining access to the best data on health-related food consumption may be central to maintaining control over one’s health. The quality of such books varies enormously, from the bizarre to the mundane. The feature they share is the promise of better health and control over one’s destiny. Only occasionally do bona fide researchers step into the maelstrom. Enter Walter Willett of Harvard University and Eat, Drink, and Be Healthy.

You would have a hard time finding someone in a better position to write this book. Dr. Willett is chairman of the Department of Nutrition at the Harvard School of Public Health, a professor at Harvard Medical School, and he heads some of the most important long-term studies of how nutrition affects health. In this up-to-date book, you will learn what the latest research shows about how eating, alcohol use, exercise and not smoking can help you avoid some diseases and birth defects. The book also explains how to read the latest health headlines and interpret the studies they are based on in the future. The lessons are summarized into a Healthy Eating Pyramid that you will find easy to understand, apply, and remember. The book contains a lot of helpful information about how to shop for more nutritious and healthful foods, and easy-to-follow recipes. I was particularly impressed with the summaries of the data on how weight and eating relate to various diseases. The book’s only obvious flaw is that it does not attempt to refine the overall research into subsegment groups like those with different blood types, different genetic tendencies, age levels, and so forth.

This book is a breath of fresh air among a noxious swarm of books that claim to know how we must eat in order to be healthy. They recommend a bewildering variety of diets, megadoses of vitamins and minerals, herbs, extracts, and heaven knows what else, all guaranteed to make us healthy. Some even peddle the nonsense that they can stop, or even reverse, aging.
In contrast, Walter Willett’s book is based on solid science, obtained by careful research involving, in some cases, more that 100,000 persons. There is no intuition here. The recommendations are based on facts. And mighty interesting facts they are. We see that the famous, heavy-on-carbohydrate USDA food pyramid has little evidence to support its role in health. Instead, it appears to support the income of the food industry. He presents his own pyramid, based on daily exercise and weight control. Sitting on this base are whole grain foods, vegetable oils, fruits, vagetables, nuts, legumes, fish, poultry, and eggs. At the top of his pyramid are small amounts of dairy products, and even smaller portions of red meat and carbohydrate. He presents evidence to support his pyramid, and the result is impressive. He leads us through things that we should know about fats, carbohydrates, proteins, fruits, vegetables, and whole grains. We even get recipes. For me, a biochemist, the book’s strong point is its lack of the unsustantiated claims that I see in so many of the popular books on nutrition. Walter Willett is one the persons best qualified to write an outstanding book on this subject, and the result is excellent.

In place of the USDA pyramid, Willett and allies create a new pyramid correcting these errors. It also adds a strong recommendation for exercise, an endorsement of a multivitamin, and a confirmation of the beneficial properties of small amounts of alcohol, primarily red wines. More of that Mediterranean thing!

As someone who has always been fond of both bread and pasta, my biggest puzzle over these recommendations is that how can, for example, the southern Italian diet be seen as being so healthy when it is literally loaded with these two sources of carbohydrates. I suspect the answer lies very much with portion size and the wisdom of several courses spread out over a longer time at the table than most Americans seem to afford.

Please read this book and consider its recommendations very carefully. I suspect some of these recommendations will change as science moves on and I hope the prospects for animal fats improve. But meanwhile, this is as good as it gets for recommendations on nutrition.

If you want to buy this Book, you can find it here: Eat, Drink, and Be Healthy: The Harvard Medical School Guide to Healthy Eating