And we're back for part 3 of the AHS talk. Again, that's the Ancestral Health Symposium, not the American Hemerocallis Society, the American Helicopter Society, nor the American Headache Society, all of which come up ahead of Ancestral Health Symposium in a Google search. That needs to change. On to the discussion...Two Ways of Looking at a Food: Nutritionism vs. A Whole Foods Perspective
This wasn't a topic that was covered specifically at the symposium, but some of the presentations touched on it, and that made it a frequent topic of discussion with my friends and I (Amanda at Inspired. and Matthew at whatever-he-will-call-his-new-blog.com). First there was Mat Lalonde's talk about his new system for measuring nutrient density, in which he made bacon look pretty darn nutritious. Cool with me. I liked it far more than the ANDI score system used at Whole Foods, or the NuVal system used at conventional grocery stores, but it was very apparent by the end of his talk that there is no perfect system to quantify the nutrient density of food. Then there was Peter Ballerstedt's talk about grass-fed meat, his main point being that the nutritional differences between grass-fed and grain-fed meat are negligible.
So these two talks generated some discussion about this reductionist perspective of nutrition. Or "nutritionism", if you will. You can measure the nutrients in a food and try to rank its healthiness, but what ultimately matters is the effect this food has on your body as a whole.
A couple of examples... Firstly, I appreciated Dr. Ballerstedt's point, that the nutritional difference between grass-fed and grain-fed meat is insignificant. He mainly focused on the difference in omega-3 fatty acids. And he may be right, there isn't that much more omega-3 in grass-fed meat. But does it matter? A 2011 study, for example, found that eating grass-fed beef significantly increases the composition of omega-3 fatty acids in plasma and platelet, while eating grain-fed beef actually reduced their omega-3 content (1).
Then there's the whole grain thing, which I blogged about recently. Despite being high in antioxidant nutrients (vitamin B6, folate, selenium, zinc, magnesium, and cysteine), whole grains have zero effect on your body's total antioxidant capacity (2).
So, you can talk all day about a food being more nutritious or less nutritious than another, but at the end of the day you're guessing. Okay, that's not quite fair. It's an educated guess. But nutrient composition isn't everything. We don't really know how food acts in our bodies until we study it. Nutrient density can be a great guide, but it's not the end-all-be-all.
