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CHAPTER 1
Our Food Is Killing Us
It was the summer of 2011. The last part of my Marine Corps training consisted of a multiweek mission in the Mojave Desert. We were stationed aboard Marine Corps Air Ground Combat Center Twentynine Palms, a 932-square-mile sprawling expanse of desert and mountains nearly the size of Rhode Island. The base is so big that several years ago, a marine got lost in training during a night exercise. He wandered off into the desert, following lights on the horizon. His skeleton was found four months later.
The Mojave was fierce and unrelenting. Home to cacti, rugged snowcapped mountains, North America's most venomous rattlesnake, and twenty-three thousand tons of dropped explosives per year, Twentynine Palms was about as far removed from the rest of America as you could get while being in the continental United States.
Our company of Marines spent most of our time at Twentynine Palms awake, moving, and trying to convince our instructors that we were thriving. But surviving, let alone thriving, was not easy. We went days on end without sleeping. Temperatures in the midday sun reached over 120 degrees. We hiked over broken ridgelines, carrying hundreds of pounds of ammunition, weapons, communication gear, and water. No matter how much water I drank, I was constantly suffering from dehydration headaches. And the "food." Let me tell you about the food.
This won't come as a surprise to you if you've spent any time in the military — or in a zombie apocalypse — but military-grade MREs are probably the worst food humanity has ever invented. Worse than Spam. Worse than a Hefty garbage bag filled with candy. Worse than the flaccid undercooked mystery meat you find in a Cincinnati airport lounge. And potentially even worse than a KitKat lasagna.
We didn't eat fresh food for weeks. Instead, we tore into MREs anytime we had five minutes to scarf down calories. Sometimes, when I was feeling masochistic, I'd look at the ingredient list on the back of the desert-drab package. The recipe title for menu 16 was "Rib Shaped Barbecue Flavor Pork Patty." I could run a whole seminar breaking down those six words. What the hell is "rib shaped"? What word is "barbecue flavor" modifying, or is it its own food group? And pray tell, what the F is a "pork patty"?
Once I'd torn into the main package, the smaller cardboard boxes inside were covered with the names of dire-sounding chemicals and preservatives that you would never find in a standard American kitchen. Dextrose, sodium tripolyphosphate, sodium diacetate, corn syrup solids, cellulose gum, malic acid, smoke flavor, maltodextrin, partially hydrogenated cottonseed oil, modified corn starch, tricalcium phosphate, and my favorite, flavorings. Some of that stuff was harmless, as I learned from a quick Google search, ingredients you'd find in the baking powder sitting innocuously in your pantry. But I couldn't even figure out what half those words were, let alone pronounce them. And there I was, eating nothing but these strange-sounding concoctions every day, because like my mom always said, "Hunger is the world's greatest chef."
Food was at the forefront of my mind, more than it had ever been before. We were out in the middle of the desert, sweating and bleeding and learning how to hump gear and shoot guns to serve our country. And what were they feeding us? Consumable Riskily Altered Provisions — CRAP. I understood why, too. Most MREs have to be highly processed so that the food survives the extended shelf life of active duty. You can't exactly eat a warm spinach salad with herbed goat cheese and heirloom pears when you're out fighting guys in Afghanistan.
But what happens when the troops come home? The real problem is that it isn't just marines and soldiers on active duty eating riskily altered foods. It's millions of Americans — civilians living out their daily lives, many not even aware that the food they eat is killing them. I started rooting around for some hard statistics, and what I found shocked me. During the whole war on terror, 6,717 American servicemen and servicewomen died in combat or due to terrorist attacks. Meanwhile, in 2013 alone: 611,105 Americans died from heart disease; 584,881 died from cancer; 75,578 died from diabetes. According to a study in the American Journal of Public Health, obesity is associated with nearly one in five U.S. deaths. That's one in five of your friends, family, and colleagues, dying every year from preventable causes — most of which are related to our riskily altered American diet.
As pediatrician Dr. Harvey Karp said in the documentary Fed Up, "If a foreign nation was causing our children to become obese — that's going to affect their health and hurt their happiness, cause them to be depressed, have poor self-esteem — if a foreign nation were doing that to our children, we'd probably go to war."
During my time in the desert, I thought a lot about what it meant to eat riskily altered provisions versus real food. After a long mission, let alone a yearlong deployment, marines talked of "the golden loaf" — this referred to both the trans fat–infused corn bread snacks in MREs and the appearance of a bowel movement after exclusively eating the snacks for weeks on end. Neither was pleasant or natural.
How had my eating choices affected my health and happiness in ways I had never admitted to myself or anyone else? I knew well enough the kind of riskily altered stuff my friends and I ate back in New York even when we weren't in the middle of the desert with limited options for keeping food fresh and edible.
After finishing my active duty and returning to New York to work on Wall Street, I was still a long way off from being an Evolved Eater. One night, I tried to cook for my wife, Nimmi, and nearly burned the house down. I had pawed through a truly terrifying number of processed foods in our own pantry. Why wasn't I eating good food? Why wasn't I cooking good food?
If America had a disease when it came to eating, I had it, too. I was hooked on a FAD — the Flawed American Diet. I needed a palate cleanser. The question was, where to begin?
Why Our Food Is Killing Us
The United States is called a melting pot for a reason. As a relatively young country stewed together from the raw ingredients of many different immigrant traditions, each with its own depth of food culture, America has never had a unifying culinary tradition to guide us. My dad is a Turkish Jew who grew up eating hummus, baba ghanoush, and baklava in Istanbul. My mom's family is of German stock — they've farmed their own homestead in South Dakota since the 1880s, and my grandma kept warm potatoes in her pockets when she walked to school across the frozen prairie (we'll hear a lot more about this in chapter 4 when I pay a visit to the ol' family farm). I married an Indian gal whose parents emigrated from Andhra Pradesh and Tamil Nadu, where they grew up eating dosa, idli sambar, and veda.
My story is far from unique. Most Americans boast equally diverse legacies, hailing from a long line of rich cultural traditions. But while our culinary tradition affords us a tantalizing mélange of tastes, the lack of a consistent food culture has left us vulnerable to the modern-day food marketer.
After being yelled at through TV ads, magazine spreads, and celebrity endorsements for the vast majority of our lives, how can we not be both schizophrenic and confused about how to even define what "good food" means? I sure didn't know how to define it. Add to this every new diet fad — many of which are championed by a New York Times bestselling book, and several of which I've tried — and our bewilderment is justified.
Why is it so hard to find the truth? Why is there so much confusion and conflicting advice? These were the questions I started to ask myself. I wanted cold facts and hard data on what to eat, how much of it, and why — and I couldn't find anything conclusive. This baffled me. I needed to take a different approach.
I went to my buddy Lance Martin, who had just received his Ph.D. in applied physics and bioengineering at Stanford. Lance lives and breathes this sort of stuff — big data, analytics — and I wanted to get his take on nutrition science. I knew he would have a well-formed opinion on the matter — and he did.
Lance had taken Peter Thiel's start-up class at Stanford. Peter Thiel is the billionaire cofounder of PayPal. He was the first outside investor in Facebook, and he has invested in and cofounded multiple other billion-dollar businesses. It is not outrageous to claim that he is one of the best venture capitalists in history.
Lance told me about Peter's talk about "secrets" — things that other people aren't thinking about that might have big potential for a start-up. To paraphrase Peter: Most top scientists have gone into fields other than nutrition over the past couple of decades. There's not really an incentive to study nutrition today, and nutrition science has been chronically underfunded. And now we have an obesity explosion. As Lance says, "Getting nutrition right isn't quite low-hanging fruit, but there are reasons to think that the right people haven't been incentivized to look at it hard enough." Or more insidiously, that the wrong people have been incentivized to look the other way in the face of data that would otherwise help us solve our nutrition problems.
"I think Peter's right," Lance said. "Having done a Ph.D. at Stanford, I've spent the last few years around a bunch of top scientists. There is plenty of interest in health data — molecular mechanisms, cancer, disease models, those sorts of issues. But very few people are really looking at wellness and nutrition. I have come across very few top research programs that offer a program in nutrition. The top scientific journals are rarely, if ever, publishing articles on it, and almost no one is funding these kinds of studies."
Why not? The answer to this question involves a much more nuanced answer that we'll unpack in chapter 7. Lance has one of the best minds of anyone I know. He completed Peter Thiel's class, where he was advised to pursue a "secret" no one was investigating — namely, nutrition. But did he jump into a research project or launch a start-up around the idea? Nope. Lance works on the data science team at Uber.
Knowing that certainly didn't help me, an average guy who just wanted to feel healthier, look better, and enjoy my food instead of constantly stressing about it. My own body was sending me confusing messages. I wanted to look good. I was a fitness junkie — I never wanted to go back to being the chubby kid who gets poked in the tummy at the pool, but I also wanted to stuff my face with greasy, sugary, delicious nomnoms, especially after a few drinks. I was finally becoming aware of the glaring disconnect between how we eat and who we aim to be — but I still didn't have a clue what to do about it. And that is true for most Americans.
We crave movie-star abs, but we choose processed carbs and sugary drinks over leafy greens. We want to feel and look great, so we hit the studio that offers the latest fitness craze after work — and then grab a greasy slice of pizza to sate our appetite after one drink at the bar. Guilty as charged; I've done all these things.
Here in America, we have irrational expectations about eating. We have irrational expectations about a lot of things, actually, but eating is the one thing we all do every single day. Food is, in so many ways, at the heart of our lives — and when we fail at food, we fail miserably.
As I returned to New York fresh out of the Marine Corps to start my new corporate job, I felt weighed down by reality. Tens of millions of Americans were struggling with obesity, shoveling in riskily altered provisions every day, and suffering significant consequences. But what if we took control over this and understood we had the power to change our circumstances? Or even if we were already eating okay, how could we make it easy to eat great?
In America, stories of food failure are quickly becoming the "new normal." More than one-third of U.S. adults are obese: a whopping 34.9 percent, or 78.6 million people. We pay a premium for obesity: The estimated annual medical cost of obesity in our country is over $190 billion — nearly 21 percent of annual medical spending in the United States.
But the real cost is not financial; it's about losing the people we love. Reams of research linking obesity to poor health has been done over the last few decades, and the verdict is in: Obesity leads to heart disease, stroke, and type 2 diabetes — three leading causes of preventable death.
Emphasis here on preventable. But in order to prevent something from happening, you have to know how it happens in the first place. As an incoming high school freshman, I was six foot two and two hundred pounds. You know that awkward big kid lumbering through the halls of your high school who didn't know what to do with his hands and feet? That was me. I played basketball and lacrosse, but the football coaches were always trying to recruit me. My mom was scared I'd get a concussion and wouldn't let me play — she has always been ahead of the curve.
I was made fun of in elementary and middle school because of my weight. I weighed the same in seventh grade as I did in twelfth, but once my height shot up and I leaned out, the teasing stopped. But this seminal time of being chubby and the center of many fat jokes had a profound impact on me. Even today as a thirty-two-year-old who can deadlift five hundred pounds and run three miles in under eighteen minutes with single-digit body fat, I still harbor an internal echo of my adolescent overweight self.
For the more than seventy-eight million obese Americans — and the inflammation, the arthritis, the high blood pressure, the diabetes that comes with obesity — feeling crummy is a given. When you're heavy, it's hard to exercise, which fosters a vicious cycle. The Lancet, one of the world's most prestigious medical journals, recently reported that physical inactivity has now surpassed smoking as a leading cause of death. The study estimates that 6 percent of heart disease, 7 percent of type 2 diabetes, and 10 percent of colon and breast cancers are linked to a lack of activity.
Always interested in human psychology, I started thinking about food in terms of Maslow's hierarchy of needs. Abraham Maslow was a psychologist who studied positive human qualities and the lives of world-class humans. In 1954, Maslow created the hierarchy of needs and expressed his theories in his book Motivation and Personality. As you can see in the rendering below, ahead of even safety and security, food forms the base of the pyramid. Food is the most fundamental need we have as humans.
If you don't figure out food, hardly anything else matters — not family, friends, self-esteem, confidence, creativity, or self-actualization. That's because without a strong food foundation, it is impossible to experience the emotions, ambitions, and relationships that make life worth living.
You Get What You Pay For
The fast-food phenomenon is a major culprit in perpetuating the FAD. As modern-day Americans, we want everything in our lives to be fast, from our transportation to our Wi-Fi connections. Unfortunately, this preference has spilled over into our food.
Fast food is all about supersized portions and low prices. Like so much else in life, with food, you truly get what you pay for. Fast food chains are able to sell hamburgers for under a dollar by stripping out quality. And low-quality food literally kills us. There's ample evidence that frequent fast-food consumption contributes to overeating and weight gain. One study followed three thousand young adults for a period of thirteen years, ultimately finding that those who had higher fast-food-intake levels at the beginning weighed an average of thirteen pounds more than their non-fast-food-eating counterparts by the end.
There are so many problems and there is so much work to be done that it's easy to get overwhelmed. But unlike many of my predecessors who wrote great books that condemned the industrial food complex, in this book, and in my life in general, I try to be both an optimist and a doer.
Let's be honest — we have come a long way already. Many elements of our twenty-first-century food world are much better than they were twenty, fifteen, or even five years ago.
Food has taken center stage. The celebrity chef movement has brought cooking into millions of people's lives through various avenues ranging from "gourmet airplane food" to network TV competitions. What appears on the menu in Williamsburg quickly makes its way to the gastropub in Dallas and eventually influences everyday food culture. And cooking, while still hard to fit into our hurried lives, is becoming viewed less as a chore and more as a joy.
As chef Dan Barber writes, "After Wolfgang Puck reimagined pizza in the 1980s at his fine-dining restaurant Spago, in Los Angeles — smoked salmon instead of tomatoes; crème fraîche instead of cheese — gourmet pizza spread to every corner of America, eventually culminating in the supermarket frozen food aisle. We now have the power to quickly popularize certain products and ingredients — in some cases, as with certain fish, to the point of commercial extinction — and increasingly we do, with dizzying speed and effect. But we also possess the potential to get people to rethink their eating habits."
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "The Evolved Eater"
by .
Copyright © 2018 Nick Taranto.
Excerpted by permission of St. Martin's Press.
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