September 7, 2004
You Are What You Eat... Let's take five with Moira Gunn. This is "Five Minutes."
There's science, there's personal experience, there's traditional wisdom, and there's common sense. Sort of the big four, as far as I'm concerned, when it comes to making decisions on what we eat.
I listed science first, because you can't pick up a paper or watch television without running smack into science. See a headline which reads "Popular Activity A" is linked to "Horrible Condition B," and it's a dead giveaway.
Take the latest popular science making the rounds: 50,000 nurses were studied for over a decade, and the ones who started with one sugary soda a week and ramped it up to roughly one sugary soda a day gained almost 20 lbs. Of course, once you start reading the fine print, you find that the soda-drinkers tended to smoke more, be more sedentary and eat more calories in general.
So while you're left wondering "Was it the sodas, or wasn't it?"? there' some comfort in knowing these nurses are also human just like the rest of us.
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After science, the next stop on the diet choice parade is personal experience, and in this instance, my personal experience with sugar started late. I never had much of a sweet tooth, but an Olympic athlete I once knew wanted me to make a dessert that went well with beer. While the answer is basically "bread pudding," along the way I pretty much found out that a dessert's a dessert.
You almost always start with a cup or two of flour, and then prepare yourself for a shock. Next you take a pound of butter — four whole sticks, and before you know it, it all disappears into the bowl. Add several full cups of sugar and an egg or two and maybe some milk, and you basically have the core of most desserts. And guess what? That would be a dessert that only served a few people.
Calorie-wise, fat-wise and every other-wise, I knew instantly that I was looking into the abyss.
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Are you hooked on chocolate cake? Go ahead and make one from scratch. Or make yourself a nice dessert plate with half a stick of butter, two-thirds of a cup of sugar and a couple of squares of chocolate, and see if you can wolf it down with the same gusto.
Which brings me to traditional wisdom and common sense, and I think this is where technology plays a sneaky hand. Our ancestors never had a can of soda, much less a refrigerator to keep it cold. You see, there can't be any traditional wisdom regarding many of the foods we eat — because they didn't exist!
Which leaves us only with common sense. Informing me that a soda contains high-fructose corn syrup is not much different from telling me how many calories there are in that chocolate cake. It doesn't compare to the visceral experience of seeing sticks of butter and mountains of sugar disappear into the batter and then reappear as a tiny dessert.
What we eat, when we eat and why we eat is not and never has been an intellectual decision based on numbers. Remember, restaurant reviews and movie critiques always show you a number of stars or a little man clapping. Visually, it clearly tells you a lot more, and quicker, than any number could.
Think about it. Maybe it's time to take food labeling to the next level.
I'm Moira Gunn. This is Five Minutes.
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