This has been a recurring question for me over the past couple of weeks. M and I have been doing South Beach, hoping to be more trim and attractive for our wedding photos. If you don't already know South Beach, like Atkins, is all about Carbs. The difference is in some flexibility and that Atkins would seem to prefer that you eat deep fried butter for every meal, whereas with South Beach they sort of also discourage that.
The commonality about carbs has to do with body craving, insulin, blood sugar, and fat. The idea being that carbs are easily digested and more readily turned into fat and saved for the future. My own understanding of this is that thousands of years of conditioning, and whatever number of years of evolution before that, have programmed our bodies (not so much our brains) that there MIGHT BE NO FOOD TOMORROW!!! And therefore it is really important to save food for later, you body does this in the form of fat. Should nuclear winter come next week, I will live longer than my sister in the same way that John Goodman would likely outlive Calista Flockhart.
Of course the problem is that there will be food tomorrow. We keep eating, and get fat. Ideally we could have some kind of software upgrade that would let our system know that in all likelihood there will be food tomorrow and that it can relax. Unfortunately the closest we come to this is a deconditioning through diet.
So I am on a diet.
The thing I discover on this diet though is less about me and more about food. It leads me to this question: why is there so much bad food? For year I used to say that it didn't really concern me if McDonald's burgers were beef or seaweed, just as long as they taste good. It seems that we should be in a day and age where some cooks could get together with some guys in lab coats and just solve this thing.
The culprits appear to primarily be white flour, white sugar, white rice, potatoes, and corn. South Beach bans all of these things rather emphatically. Interestingly, whole wheat flour, brown sugar, & brown rice and marginally allowed. This shows up most prominently with rice and pasta, and also some with bread.
Which is where the questions start...
If white flour is so bad, why can we buy standard pasta so easily? Why isn't most pasta whole wheat pasta? If white rice is so bad for us, why isn't most rice brown rice? Why is there such a thing as white bread, at all? Would anyone really miss white bread?
I believe that at one point or another this was about convenience or preservatives or something, but come on, this is the 21st century aren't we beyond this? Sadly, I think that the answer is more about momentum, infrastructure, and money more than anything else. The answers to the the questions above are a probably a depressing "because that's what we do."
You can see a demonstration of this with corn. We grow so much corn we don't need that we have to find other uses for it. A huge portion of it gets made into sweetener for soda - which leads to fat, and a lot of fat at that.
I wish some of the larger food purveyors in this country were more into this subject. Decisions by say McDonalds, Burger King, Kraft, and PepsiCo could likely force a change of epic scale. Whole wheat and rye bread, sweet potatoes, brown sugar and sugar substitutes, and maybe some genuine concoctions done with beans and soybeans. A group like that could not only change public opinion but could throw enough weight around to change the market structure. Do you think ADM cares whether it processes corn or soybeans? They will go where the cash is.
Why not put your cash where it won't make you fat? Just a thought.
