Good enough to eat? The toxic truth about modern food | Books | The Guardian

Good enough to eat? The toxic truth about modern food | Books | The Guardian



...What we eat now is a greater cause of disease and death in the world than either tobacco or alcohol. In 2015 around 7 million people died from tobacco smoke, and 2.75 million from causes related to alcohol, but 12m deaths could be attributed to “dietary risks” such as diets low in vegetables, nuts and seafood or diets high in processed meats and sugary drinks.



...The nutrient content of our meals is one thing that has radically changed; the psychology of eating is another.



...no population in the world eats exactly the combination of healthy foods that a nutritionist might prescribe.

Every human community across the globe eats a mixture of the “healthy” and the “unhealthy”, but the salient question is where the balance falls. 

...The occasional bowl of instant ramen noodles or frosted cereal is no cause for panic. But when ultra-processed foods start to form the bulk of what whole populations eat on any given day, we are in new and disturbing territory for human nutrition. More than half of the calorie intake in the US – 57.9% – now consists of ultra-processed food, and the UK is not far behind, with a diet that is around 50.4% ultra-processed. The fastest growing ingredient in global diets is not sugar, as I’d always presumed, but refined vegetable oils such as soybean oil, which are a common ingredient in many fast and processed foods, and which have added more calories to what we eat over the past 50 years than any other food group, by a wide margin.

...If you want to find the people who eat the most wholegrains, you will either have to look to the affluent Nordic countries where they still eat rye bread or to the poor countries of sub-Saharan Africa, where nourishing grains such as sorghum, maize, millet and teff are made into healthy main dishes usually accompanied by some kind of stew, soup or relish.