Open Up…And Say ‘Ah Ha’!
How do we decide what to eat? That was the subject of today’s Rethinking Diets panel discussion and debate. Most of us there expected some blue sky thinking but to say the skies turned a little thundery in our little room is an understatement.
The Soil Association’s Richard Young made a fascinating case for bringing back indigenous pasture fed animals because not only can they thrive in our climate but the simple act of eating a natural diet of pasture means they have a healthier fat profile that mixes saturates, monosaturates and polyunsaturates in pro portions that are optimal for human health.
Richard’s view of the research, which was echoed by that of Dr Nastasha Campbell-McBride is that we’ve demonised animal fat at the expense of our hearth (though few agreed with Dr Campbell-McBride’s view that vegetarians were suffering from a form of mental illness!)
Of course this is absolutely the antithesis of message we’ve all grown up with and a hard sell in the marketplace.
Nevertheless, compelling research shows that the link between fat and heart hearth remains unproven and indeed the ‘fat is bad’ mantra has been used to skew dietary advice to a spectacular degree making it harder for any of us to make clear decisions about how we eat.
As Sue Dibbs of Sustain said, many of us just eat what’s there, because busy lives mean that we rely on others (such as supermarkets) to make the choice for us. Yours truly suggested that it’s time to at least put the notion of choice editing on the table for a proper discussion – really do we need supermarkets with 20,000 different products to feel ‘free’?
Suddenly it becomes clear that for all the blah blah blah that we hear on the topic of food on a daily basis, real discussion about what we eat, how we eat, how our food is produced, what’s healthy and what isn’t, and how the data on this is misdirected and misinterpreted to serve not so healthy corporate aims, is very rare indeed.
How do we decide what to eat? Well maybe we could start with more conversations like this that put it all on the table for everyone to digest.
- This blog was part of a series of live blogs from the Soil Association conference Facing the Future: Innovation in Food and Farming, March 2, 2012
