Real Food & Real Science?

The “real food” or “whole food” movement has taken off among the health-conscious and environment-conscious.

Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma, Nina Planck’s Real Food: What to Eat and Why, and of course Sally Fallon’s Nourishing Traditions are bibles for real food disciples.

Real foodies are begging for local producers, farmers’ markets, and Trader Joes’.

And they want to know what I think about the movement.

This is where the opinionated RD falls silent.

I don’t know what I think about the movement. I don’t know what I think about the claims of Real Food prophets and evangelists. I don’t even know how to start to evaluate them.

For starters, the “real foodies” are not too keen on people like me. In the extreme, they use terms like “politically correct nutrition” and “diet dictocrat” to deride my science and my profession as Sally Fallon does on the cover of her Nourishing Traditions. In the less extreme form, many warily eye me as a well-intentioned but brainwashed agent of the machine.

It’s difficult to get past the sometimes offensive language of Real Foods’ chief prophetess enough to actually explore her claims. It’s harder yet to avoid being on the defensive.

But the hardest part of all is simply figuring out how to handle the sheer volume of the “Real Food” claims. Fallon’s Nourishing Traditions is 600 pages long. Nina Planck’s Real Food contains at least 84 distinct health claims in the first chapter.

I’ve been reading through Planck’s book, underlining health claims as I come upon them, trying to evaluate them as I go. But frankly? It’s not easy.

I know the truth about some of Nina’s claims right off the top of my head. It doesn’t take me much to see the problem with her statement that “a BMI of almost 25” is “squarely in the ‘overweight category’.” (A “normal” BMI is from 18.5 to 24.9. Almost 25 is still within the normal range. Furthermore, a BMI at the top end of “normal” is likely healthier anyway.) I don’t have to look anything up to confirm that humans are omnivores and are not by nature vegans. (Vitamin B12 is an essential nutrient that has NO vegetarian sources. It is only because of the marvels of modern science that we now have bacteria who can manufacture B12 for vegans to take as a supplement.)

For other claims, I need to grab a reference material just to make sure I don’t make a silly mistake. I’ll look it up quickly and see that yes, brain is high in polyunsaturated fats; no, broth is not “rich” in calcium and minerals (it contains some, but less than 2% of the daily value of calcium per cup). Nina’s not quite right in claiming that Vitamin B6 is only found in small amounts in plant sources–in truth, there are some rather good plant sources of B6; and nearly everything has a little bit of it (which means that anyone with a varied diet, especially one rich in vegetables and whole grains, is likely to get enough.)

And then there’s the stuff I need to really research because I honestly don’t know whether the “Real Food” claim is correct or not. Is oxidized cholesterol a better marker of atherosclerosis than LDL and HDL? Does conjugated linoleic acid actually fight cancer? Does diabetes significantly decrease one’s ability to convert beta-carotene to Vitamin A?

I’m working on it. Trying to evaluate it. Trying to give an informed and objective opinion. But I’m not yet convinced that the “real food” movement is “real science.”