Comida “diet” engorda?
Quando penso no passado lembro de meus avós comendo de tudo, com ou sem gordura, sal ou açúcar, muito tempero, muita carne de todo tipo, muita salada, massa, doces e muito mais. Mesmo assim, tinham vida saudável, viveram longos anos e não eram obesos.
Olhando para o povo dos Estados Unidos, parece que vejo uma relação direta entre obesidade e oferta de produtos “diet”. Light, fat-free, sem trans-fat, diet, sugar-free, caffeine-free, não-sei-o-que-free. Mesmo assim, não há lugar em que não haja várias pessoas bem acima do peso ideal (seja lá o que isso signifique – talvez mais apropriado seja dizer “peso da moda”).
Num artigo recentemente publicado no jornal The New York Times e entitulado “Unhappy Meals” (em vaga alusão ao nome Happy Meal ou, no Brasil, McLanche Feliz), o autor Michael Pollan traz vários aspectos sobre como a nossa ignorância do metabolismo humano, manipulado pelos interesses da indústria alimentícia (para citar apenas uma), faz com que acreditemos nas promessas de alimentação saudável.
FROM FOODS TO NUTRIENTS — It was in the 1980s that food began disappearing from the American supermarket, gradually to be replaced by “nutrients,” which are not the same thing. Where once the familiar names of recognizable comestibles — things like eggs or breakfast cereal or cookies — claimed pride of place on the brightly colored packages crowding the aisles, now new terms like “fiber” and “cholesterol” and “saturated fat” rose to large-type prominence. More important than mere foods, the presence or absence of these invisible substances was now generally believed to confer health benefits on their eaters. Foods by comparison were coarse, old-fashioned and decidedly unscientific things — who could say what was in them, really? But nutrients — those chemical compounds and minerals in foods that nutritionists have deemed important to health — gleamed with the promise of scientific certainty; eat more of the right ones, fewer of the wrong, and you would live longer and avoid chronic diseases.
Antes que nós, brasileiros, deixemos de lado a gostosa feijoada e o internacionalmente famoso churrasco por termos ouvido alguém falar que carne vermelha faz mal, Michael Pollan dá mais uma cutucada na ignorânica nossa de cada dia:
This brings us to another unexamined assumption: that the whole point of eating is to maintain and promote bodily health. Hippocrates’s famous injunction to “let food be thy medicine” is ritually invoked to support this notion. I’ll leave the premise alone for now, except to point out that it is not shared by all cultures and that the experience of these other cultures suggests that, paradoxically, viewing food as being about things other than bodily health — like pleasure, say, or socializing — makes people no less healthy; indeed, there’s some reason to believe that it may make them more healthy. This is what we usually have in mind when we speak of the “French paradox” — the fact that a population that eats all sorts of unhealthful nutrients is in many ways healthier than we Americans are. So there is at least a question as to whether nutritionism is actually any good for you.
E para aqueles que ainda insistem em contar calorias, ou recitar as vitaminas que toma por dia:
BAD SCIENCE — But if nutritionism leads to a kind of false consciousness in the mind of the eater, the ideology can just as easily mislead the scientist. Most nutritional science involves studying one nutrient at a time, an approach that even nutritionists who do it will tell you is deeply flawed. “The problem with nutrient-by-nutrient nutrition science,” points out Marion Nestle, the New York University nutritionist, “is that it takes the nutrient out of the context of food, the food out of the context of diet and the diet out of the context of lifestyle.”
Michael Pollan dá ainda uma lista de como se alimentar direito:
1. Coma comida. Nada que a sua avó não reconheça como tal;
Eat food. Though in our current state of confusion, this is much easier said than done. So try this: Don’t eat anything your great-great-grandmother wouldn’t recognize as food. (Sorry, but at this point Moms are as confused as the rest of us, which is why we have to go back a couple of generations, to a time before the advent of modern food products.) There are a great many foodlike items in the supermarket your ancestors wouldn’t recognize as food (Go-Gurt? Breakfast-cereal bars? Nondairy creamer?); stay away from these.
2. Evite comidas que se auto-denomiam saudáveis;
Avoid even those food products that come bearing health claims. They’re apt to be heavily processed, and the claims are often dubious at best. Don’t forget that margarine, one of the first industrial foods to claim that it was more healthful than the traditional food it replaced, turned out to give people heart attacks.
No artigo de Michael Pollan você encontra sete outras dicas. Quem sabe, em tempo de evitar que os brasileiros sigam o mesmo caminho dos americanos (Overweight and Obesity).
