Forks Over Knives

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Colin Campbell, Documentary Film, Dr. Caldwell Esselstyn, Forks Over Knives, Nutrition, The China Study, Veganism

Far more than a polemic for veganism on ethical grounds alone

Based in part on the results of a ground-breaking observational and epidemiological study on nutrition and degenerative disease in China, in the late 90s. by 2 leading scientists, one American and one Chinese, this film pulls no punches and does not pussy-foot around the links between obesity, diabetes, many cancers, coronary heart disease, osteoporosis and other degenerative conditions, and the typical Western industrialised McDiet. That is, a diet high in artificial processed foods, heavily laced with saturated and hydrogenated fats, corn syrup and other sweeteners, salt, meat and dairy produce from factory farmed methods, heavy on the additional growth hormones, antibiotics and fed on pesticide rich vegetation as the least offensive option. Several recent food scandals showed factory farming has also resulted in herbivores being fed ground up animal remains in order to boost weight, with predictable results.

Colin Campbell

This is a documentary and educational film which takes that study, and others, hooking up Colin Campbell, one of the aforementioned scientists, and author of the mainstream book brought out from those findings, The China Study, with work done with seriously ill patients, treated by radical changes in diet, rather than pharmaceuticals, by clinician Dr Caldwell Esselstyn

Colin Campbell, co-author of The China Study (the book which rendered more suitable for lay readers, that study, which took several years) and clinician Dr. Caldwell Esselstyn go further than linking our additive rich, tampered with, factory farmed chunks of flesh rich diet as the prime cause of the rise in degenerative disease.

Their evidence heavy material convinces that whether heavy meat and dairy consumption is processed or of more natural, traditional provenance, it is the high protein concentration itself which is the problem. There are some sobering cross-over lab studies cited around high levels of protein switching on and low levels of protein switching off tumour development. Sure, these are lab rat studies, and we do always have to question the validity of studies applied to one animal being extrapolated over to another species, but, sobering and thought provoking.

This is of course not new material – there have been many, smaller studies, reaching the same conclusion. What is interesting about The China Study – and this film based largely around those findings, is that both Campbell and Esselstyn, nutritional scientist and clinician, respectively, are not vegans on ethical grounds, or banging a drum for their dietary beliefs through vested financial interests. Rather, both of them, originally from farming (cattle rearing) stock, CHANGED their views because of the evidence they found – Campbell from a life-time in nutritional research, initially espousing the we need more protein line, and Esselstyn working at the start with seriously ill heart attack patients who were so far down the line there was little that could be done for them except a dreadful cocktail of surgery or drugs which were not expected to extend life beyond months. Years later, survivors both from his initial cohort, and later patients, tell their own surprised and miraculous (to them) stories of the rapid and positive changes in health caused by moving to a plant based wholefood diet.

Dr Esselstyn

As this short, direct, fierce and sensible film wears on, other reasons for vegetarianism are woven in, beyond the compelling evidence for personal health. These include some references to the ethical arguments, the arguments around the waste of resources in terms of land as the clearing of rainforests to provide arable land so that the developed world can continue to eat itself to unwellness continues apace. They lay out information about starvation in some parts of the world happening precisely because resources are going to feed the animals that will feed the haves, rather than the land being used for plant material to feed the have-nots of mankind directly. There are also the economic arguments about the unsustainable costs of healthcare in the developed world, as more and more expensive pharmaceutical drugs are seen as the cure for, or control of, degenerative and debilitating conditions which have been caused by our poisonous diet.

Not to mention tie ups between the interests of big pharma, big agri, and politics.

The film makes the telling case that logic, ethics, evidence, environmental concerns all point to a simpler answer. In the words of that other politics of food prophet, Michael Pollan

Eat Food. Eat Less of It. Eat More Plants

This is not a film presented by sweet hangovers from the love and peace brown rice, flowers in the ringlets and lentils era – this is hard edged, well argued, with plenty of evidence from all sorts of surprising people, including a group of fire-fighters, medal winning runners and a rather well-muscled martial arts experts, that wholefood plants based diets are for seriously fit people. In fact, I thought this film was putting a stake through the vampire heart of the steak-and-pharma industries.

Forks Over Knives Amazon UK
Forks Over Knives Amazon USA

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Michael Pollan – Cooked

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Book Review, Cooked, Food politics, Health and wellbeing, Michael Pollan, Nutrition

A deep meditation on alchemy in the kitchen

Michael Pollan is a writer whose mind so excites me that I often feel I need to take a cold shower in order to calm down my over stimulated thoughts, which start veering off into several directions simultaneously.

Pollan is a philosopher and mystic of the mundane, in my book. Some philosophers and mystics begin from the ineffable and the intangible and whirl you around in concepts almost impossible to get a handle on.

By contrast, Pollan is like another favourite writer of mine who performs the same trick, – Sharman Apt Russell Hunger: An Unnatural History. Both start with the quotidian (Bread, potatoes, barbecued pigs, roses and the like) and expand outwards , opening them out to reveal worlds – anthropology, evolution, economics, psychology, desire, history, chemistry, biology, physics, feminism, capitalism, poetry, metaphor, the interconnectedness of all…………….I could spool on, endlessly, the big concepts Pollan (and Apt Russell) connect, by starting on the basic stuff of matter – food, shelter, and weaving it all together

In this book, he examines something so basic, cooking – and indeed the lack of it, in the `developed’ Western world. Something which once created social bonds and community disappears as we spend more time in front of screens, eating `convenience’ ready meals which have not been made by anyone we know.

Almost the first gauntlet which Pollan throws down is the one which asks, `just what is it which makes us human, and different from `dumb beasts?’ And as the things which formerly we thought of as `human’ – for example, language, empathy, ability to problem solve, are increasingly shown by animal behaviourists to occur in other species – he concludes `we are the cooking animal’ – and perhaps controversially suggests that from cooking all else of our developed, intelligent humanity, flowed

That sounds a ridiculous statement – except when it is put together with the fact that cooking not only tenderises sinewy animal muscle, softens and makes available resistant plant fibres – but means we no longer have to spend most of our waking hours chewing, in order to get at nutrients. Even more usefully the chemical changes produced by cooking releases nutrients more easily, in an easier to assimilate form. More calories available for less expenditure of calories. Less work for the gut (and the jaw) and a higher yield of glucose for the brain.

Cooking is all about connection….between us and other species, other times, other cultures…..but, most important, other people

This book compares cooking to alchemy – and indeed, he breaks his chapters down to the poetic and alchemic four elements of fire, water, air, earth.

At the beginning of each section of the book, are different displays of circle logos. Don’t miss these – they are actually quite profound in terms of visually, what they are saying about the inner nature of each cooking process. Pollan thinks like a mystic!

Cooking is one of the more beautiful forms that human generosity takes;…….the very best cooking…..is also a form of intimacy

Fire, the first, the earliest cooking – the `dangerous’ primitive cooking of the hunt (and still, today, men are more willing to take charge of the `mysteries of the `barbie’ then to move indoors to the deeper alchemy of the kitchen)

Water – the next major step, the more mysterious, more advanced `inside the home’ cooking – which needed to wait for the development of cooking vessels – this became what was seen as `women’s work’ – cooking in a liquid. No longer the fire directly heating the food, fire tamed to heat liquid which heats a more complex possibility of flavour, not to mention a greater complexity of chemistry, as this is cooked in combination with that, that and that.

Air – the mysterious agency when our `cooking’ gets done by some other transformational agent – yeasts, enabling us to finally access the nutrients in grain (as we evolve to an agricultural society) – the alchemy of yeast, grains and breads. In this section he almost for me rounds the journey of the book. He reminds us again of the evolutionary advance cooking represents – a way of processing what is, or what might be, edible, in order to make more of its nutrients available, so giving us the advantage towards greater health and wellbeing. Traditional bread making, whereby WE are able to get at the seed potential, the embryo for the germination of new seed.

And then, as he reminds us, we score a fatal own goal – moving from the health giving ‘processing’ of cooking itself, to OVER processing whereby we strip what is nutritious, producing a substance quickly (the commercial white bread loaf) that not only has no nutritional value at all, but is in fact detrimental to health. This then has to have other, synthetic forms of what WAS nutritious in the first place, added back in. The contrast between mankind’s initial discovery of how to utilise the goodness of whole grains – time an integral part of the process, allowing slow fermentation to break down and transform proteins, fats and carbohydates – and modern breeding of strains of wheat which are easier (quicker) to process, fitting modern machinery, but are less rich in nutritional value, is clear.

The final chapter, `earth’ continues the process with preservation through the fermentation process without ‘cooking’ – salting, pickling, cheesemaking, brewing – or, as Pollan much more evocatively subtitles this section – Earth – Fermentation’s Cold Fire. Indeed, he takes his conceit further, what we are seeing, in fermentation is the move from life to death – the grape, once perfectly ripe, begins to decay, break down, and ferment to wine; the milk soured into yoghurt or cheese; the cabbage into sauerkraut. Or, put another way

” these transformations depend on the fermenter’s careful management of rot, on taking the decompositions of those seeds and fruits and fleshes just so far and no farther”

I could go on – and on – and even more on about the delights of this book, but really, yours is the journey to make.

If you don’t much enjoy cooking, this might inspire you to connect with its mysteries (though its not `a cookery book’) if you love cooking, you will feel like some entrant into ancient mysteries as you engage with your next kitchen assignment

‘Hand taste’…is the…experience of a food that bears the unmistakable signature of the person who made it – the care and thought and idiosyncrasy that the person has put into the work of preparing it….Hand taste is…I understood all at once….the taste of love

Pictures: Barbecue, Braise, Wikimedia commons
Finnish Rye Bread; Commons, Flicr; Pickles, Flicr originator link inactive; Cheeses Flicr North Devon Farmer

Cooked Amazon UK
Cooked Amazon USA

Felicity Lawrence – Not On The Label: What Really Goes Into The Food On Your Plate

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Book Review, Felicity Lawrence, Food Industry, Not on the Label: What Really Goes Into the Food on your Plate, Nutrition

Angering and disturbing

As someone who has always found feeding, eating, preparing and sharing food one of life’s pleasures, and as a vegetarian, with a keen interest in health and wellbeing, who has read fairly widely about the subject, I thought this passionate and starkly laid out book would have little to teach me about ‘what really goes into the food on your plate’

I’m a keen follower of information about the paucity of nutrition in the average Northern Europe and North American shopping basket. I abjure and loathe junk food, eat far more than my 5-7 portions of fruit and vegetables, avoid trans fats, prefer butter to marge, avoid anything labelled ‘low fat’ (what is put into it, is the question for me, what ghastly made up synthetic chemistry or manipulated molecular structure we are not evolved to process), never knowingly eat anything with artificial sweeteners, read labels to make sure that ingredients are RECOGNISABLE if I do buy anything ready made.

So I thought I was going to be smugly and superiorly nodding at everything I knew, and patting myself approvingly on the back for my nutritional choices. Which, in the main, I was.

However, where Lawrence delivered a huge gut punch to me was in her section on what is staple in my diet – fresh fruit and vegetables. And the punch was not due to nutritional value information – I knew already that monoculture factory agribusiness, intensive crop growing has depleted the soil, is depleting the soil, and that in the main our fruit and vegetables are no where near as nutritious as they used to be, since the trace nutritional minerals have been taken out of the soil plants grow in. Way back, we husbanded, and grew crops in rotation, and were prepared to leave fields fallow, allow weeds to grow and die back in, to remineralise. Different plants have different mineral needs, so rotation growing was a skilful nurturing of the earth, what grew in it, and what we ate.

The big shocker for me was Lawrence’s revelation of the existence of virtual slavery, yes, even in this sometimes green and pleasant land. The bullying techniques of supermarkets and just in time delivery has placed all the power in the hands of multinational bullies and their shareholders. Farmers are forced to comply, the independent small holding goes to the wall – this I knew, but what I didn’t realise was how deeply the grower’s margins are squeezed – so that in the end, the only way to make a profit, is to cut what costs you can – wages, of a mainly unskilled, often seasonal, often migrant, ununionised workforce. The production of even our ‘buy British’ fruit and vegetables is often linked with terrorised, exploited workers, living in overcrowded, substandard accommodation, recruited (often by being forced to pay hefty backhanders to gangmasters – some of whom are linked with organised crime and human trafficking). Lawrence shocked me by saying ‘do not think slavery was abolished a couple of hundred years ago – it is still going on, in all but name – and in THIS country’

She comes from a solid, investigative journalist tradition, and indeed worked undercover to experience what goes on in this country (as well as others) in slaughterhouses, meat processing plants, bakeries, and in the fields.

And, sadly I believe that though this book is quite elderly now, its lessons are still largely unheeded

Other books, by another writer writing equally well and starkly about how far we have departed from any sort of sensible relationship with our daily bread and more, is the excellent Michael Pollan Food Rules: An Eater’s Manual; In Defence of Food: The Myth of Nutrition and the Pleasures of Eating: An Eater’s Manifesto

Not on the Label Amazon UK
Not on the Label Amazon USA