The Lonely Savage

Earlier today, I read an entry named “Minimalist Eating” on the minimalist blog. It’s a great blog that I enjoy reading, but today I didn’t feel entirely comfortable reading dietary advice that – at least depending on your interpretation – flew in the face of established nutrition theory. That’s why I decided to write my own post on what I consider to be minimalist eating.

One of the first statements in the mnmlst blog post on Minimalist eating was that “A minimalist would more likely eat less, prepare food simply with few ingredients, eat mindfully, and eat sustainably“. While this is probably essentially true, eating food with few ingredients is seldom a good idea. A problem in the modern (western) diet is already that we’re eating too few species (of animal and plant), so a suggestion to reduce it even further cannot be condoned. Instead, we should try to eat more species than we’re eating today. The New York Times article named “Unhappy Meals” claims that:

Today, a mere four crops account for two-thirds of the calories humans eat. When you consider that humankind has historically consumed some 80,000 edible species, and that 3,000 of these have been in widespread use, this represents a radical simplification of the food web. Why should this matter? Because humans are omnivores, requiring somewhere between 50 and 100 different chemical compounds and elements to be healthy. It’s hard to believe that we can get everything we need from a diet consisting largely of processed corn, soybeans, wheat and rice.

However, if we open the floor to interpretation, the recommendation to eat “few ingredients” still holds true in a different way. A quick look at the list of ingredients on a Twinkie, for example, contains the following (according to its Wikipedia entry):

• Enriched Wheat Flour – enriched with ferrous sulphate (iron), B vitamins (niacin, thiamine mononitrate [B1], ribofavin [B12] and folic acid).
• Sugar
• Corn syrup
• Water
• High fructose corn syrup
• Vegetable and/or animal shortening – containing one or more of partially hydrogenated soybean, cottonseed or canola oil, and beef fat
• Dextrose
• Whole eggs
• Color added (yellow 5, red 40)
• Sorbic acid (to retain freshness)
• Caramel color

Twinkies also contain 2% or less of:

• Modified corn starch
• Cellulose gum
• Whey
• Leavenings (sodium acid pyrophosphate, baking soda, monocalcium phosphate)
• Salt
• Cornstarch
• Corn flour
• Corn syrup solids
• Mono and diglycerides
• Soy lecithin
• Polysorbate 60
• Dextrin
• Calcium caseinate
• Sodium stearol lactylate
• Wheat gluten
• Calcium sulphate
• Natural and artificial flavors

It doesn’t take long to realize that most of what we see on this list isn’t food, it’s ingredients. The recommendation to reduce the amount of ingredients, if interpreted as not reducing the amount of things identifiable as food, now becomes a rather good piece of advice. I hope this is how they meant it. You can still eat pasta, vegetables, cow, fish, fruit, nuts, ham, and all of the normal foods, but once you start looking at foodstuff that has a long list of ingredients, you’re probably no longer eating food.

Recent studies have shown that while vegetarians are the healthiest people among us, flexitarians are no less healthy. This seems to indicate that eating meat is not a bad thing per se, but that an imbalance in the diet where one eats mainly meat can be quite harmful. As long as meat is treated as one of many pieces of food on your plate, and as long as it doesn’t have to be there, you’re probably eating healthy. Imagine a plate with salad, cucumber slices, an apple, five slices of ham, half a baguette, some carrots, a leg of chicken and two potatoes. None of these foods is the main part of the dish, but all play together to create a whole meal. Now compare this to a BBQ steak dripping with sauce along with some french fries. While you’re getting proteins, fats and carbohydrates, the lack of biological diversity in your meal is staggering.

Lastly, one of the tips from the Minimalist Eating article that I can completely get behind is their suggestion to eat less; to reduce your overall calorie intake – unless, of course, you are underweight. Instead of eating a meal until you feel ready to explode, it is suggested to eat until you are approaching a feeling of being full. Say 75-80% full. This eases the digestive process and is far friendlier on the digestive system, but also reduces the chance for heart attacks, cholesterol buildup and other related problems.

All of this can be summarized in the three sentences that contain everything you need to know about healthy eating.

Eat food.
Not too much.
Mostly plants.