Evolve: Nutrition, Prevention, Evolution

By Mary e Parkinson

How do we evolve our legacy of eating? How do we make better choices to create a better legacy for our children? How did America’s health care arrive in the state of crisis that we are in today and how do we eat our way out? We should not need a degree in chemistry, biology, nutrition nor medicine to comprehend what we should be eating. We

• Language: English
• Publisher: Mary Parkinson
• Release date: Feb 1, 2018
• ISBN: 9780999019092

Book preview

Evolve

Mary Parkinson

Evolve

Copyright © 2017 by Mary Parkinson

Nutrition Consultant: Khalil Dumas

All Rights Reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the copyright holder, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in review.

Other Works:

Chomp the Chimpanzee, children’s companion book

Neither the author nor the nutrition consultant is engaged in rendering professional advice or services to the individual reader. The ideas and suggestions contained in this book are not intended as a substitute for consulting with your physician. All matters regarding your health require medical supervision. Neither the author nor the publisher shall be liable or responsible for any loss or damage allegedly arising from any information or suggestions in this book.

Printed in the United States of America

ISBN: 978-0-9990190-2-3

First Edition

For My Family

Evolve Our Legacy

Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some to be chewed and digested.

~Sir Francis Bacon

Contents

Introduction: A Different Perspective

Part One: Nutrition

Chapter 1: Our Food Legacy

Chapter 2: Meat, Dairy, and Grain

Chapter 3: Salt Sugar, pH, and Water

Chapter 4: What’s in a Label?

Part Two: Prevention

Chapter 5: Gender of Food and Medicine

Chapter 6: What the Doctors Aren’t Saying

Chapter 7: Golden Pills and Silver Bullets

Part Three: Evolution

Chapter 8: 98.6% DNA Guaranteed

Chapter 9: Primate Plate

Chapter 10: How Do I Evolve?

Afterword: The Future of Nutrition

Bibliography

EVOLVE

Introduction

A Different Perspective

Here’s to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently. They’re not fond of rules. And they have no respect for the status quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them. About the only thing you can’t do is ignore them. Because they change things. They push the human race forward. And while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do. ~Rob Siltanen

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his is not a book about a study. I am not a doctor, and I did not want this book to be another book that discusses the complexities of carbohydrates, fats, and lipids, disassembling amino acids, or the magic of omega 3. Quite frankly, the way in which nutrition books are written is part of the crisis of health care. We should not need a degree in chemistry, biology, nutrition, or medicine to comprehend what we should be eating. I represent the missing perspective of the mother who is struggling to put a meal on the table for her family. The mother who drudgingly drags herself to the grocery store week after week and feeds everyone. The woman who takes her children to the doctor and worries about what everyone is eating or not eating. This book represents one mom’s perspective of why we eat like we do and why our health is failing as a nation. We need simple terms and logic what to eat and why. Average Americans do not want to count carbohydrates nor can they identify a good carbohydrate versus a bad one. None of us have time in our busy lives to dissect every meal and figure out continuous proper proportions for their calorie counters or point systems. I am grateful to nutrition science and to those who have published their life’s work, but as I pored through the body of work in this field and the complicated manner in which it is communicated, I believe that part of the problem is the perspective of the physician as well as science’s continual pursuit of the golden pill of nutrition from one single ingredient.

There are several industries affecting Americans’ health, and we are at a crisis. Nutrition is like boiling the ocean. The complexity is immense, so each industry picks up a tiny piece and feeds it back to the American public. We are on a roller coaster ride where scientists identify one fad food or property that might save us and it becomes the rage. Examples of this include vitamin E, omega 3, gogi berries, soybeans, coffee, grapefruit, protein, and gluten. Then you have the producers who quickly react to the scientific study and build up an array of products that are focused on this one miracle cure. Labeling, advertising, and marketing changes reveal now that their food has the magic to heal you with buzzwords like gluten free, antioxidants, and protein.

However, food producers are not the only ones involved in the breakdown of our health care system and our nutrition as a nation. Doctors are also at the top of the list. Doctors take an oath that they will prevent disease whenever . . . [they] . . . can, for prevention is preferable to cure, but many doctors do not address preventative medicine. They do not talk about nutrition as the best and first medicine, but rather act as a branch of the pharmaceutical industry, always ready to write a prescription. Let’s not leave out the pharmaceutical industry and its three-minute commercials for the next best drug with only two hundred side effects! And lastly, there is the government, which we pay with our taxes to help keep us safe, but which has allowed the dairy, meat, processed food, fast food, and other lobbyists to affect the recommendations, regulations, labeling, and dietary guidelines that are supposed to keep us healthy.

And yes, we pay for all of this craziness in our society. We pay for the grants that fund the scientists through our taxes. We pay for the products that we buy, and a portion of this money goes to advertising. We pay for our doctor visits. We pay for drugs every year to fix us. And we pay for health care. Americans spent $3.2 trillion in 2015 on health care. And don’t be fooled—we pay for the entire bill, whether it is through our taxes, out of our own pocket, as a copay to an insurer, or a benefit from our job that negatively affects our check. We pay.

United States National Health Care Budget

Source: Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services; National Health Expenditure Data; Table 3—Source of Funds

In 2016, national health spending exceeded $10,000 per person. According to the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), which collects global information regarding health care, the United States spends much more on health per capita than all other countries, two and a half times greater than the global average per capita and 50 percent higher than Norway and Switzerland (the next-biggest-spending countries). The United States has the highest use of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and computed axial tomography (CAT) scans. We also spend the most money of any country on drugs, $324 billion in 2015, which equates to one-third of the global pharmaceutical industry. And we spend all of this money and do not even have universal health care like the other top forty wealthiest nations in the world. Even after the Affordable Care Act, only 91 percent of Americans are insured. What are we getting for our money?

Not health. The World Health Organization reports that the United States is thirty-first worldwide for average life expectancy, at 79.3 years. If we are spending $10,000 a year per person in health care, should we not be living at least past 80? There are twenty-nine countries that have an average life expectancy above 80 years old—but not us. The United State ranks forty-fourth worldwide in deaths of children under age five at 6.5 deaths per thousand. This is a shame. These are our nation’s children! A country spending more money per person on health care is usually associated with lower mortality rates and higher life expectancy, but this is not the case for the United States. We have been throwing money at our health care and for what? More drugs, sicker people, a lower life expectancy, and a higher mortality rate for our children. Is that the legacy that we want to leave for our kids?

With the amount of money we spend on health care, we should have phenomenal health. But look at us, we are paying for the continued propagation of affluent diseases, including cancer, heart disease, obesity, strokes, and diabetes. The leading causes of death annually in the United States are predominantly preventable diseases:

Leading Causes of Death

Heart disease: 614,348

Cancer: 591,699

Chronic lower respiratory diseases: 147,101

Accidents (unintentional injuries): 136,053

Stroke (cerebrovascular diseases): 133,103

Alzheimer’s disease: 93,541

Diabetes: 76,488

Influenza and pneumonia: 55,227

Nephritis, nephrotic syndrome, and nephrosis: 48,146 (kidney disease)

Intentional self-harm (suicide): 42,773

Source: Health United States, 2015 Table 19 https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/deaths.htm

We know as a nation what prevents these diseases. There is a body of evidence that supports the prevention of them. And as a nation, we are not listening.

It’s estimated that as much as 80 percent of all healthcare dollars are spent on treatment of conditions that are preventable.

At the end of the day, there is one more culprit in the line of the responsible parties for America’s breakdown in our health as a nation. It is you and me. We walk around exhausted from overworking and malnourishing ourselves by making poor choices regarding our nutrition. Quite possibly, we are in a position where we don’t even know what a good nutritional choice is anymore. Instead of making changes in our lives and choosing to eat better, many of us just want the golden pill or a silver bullet. Just give me a pill to fix my blood pressure, cholesterol, or diabetes. As long as I can still eat my fried chicken, steak, and ice cream, then I am happy to take a pill, regardless of the side effects. It is so much easier to take a pill every day than to confront the food choices that we make for our instant gratification. We choose to propagate our family illnesses to our children rather than to make nutritional changes. We choose to make ourselves unhealthy and our children unhealthy. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention:

70 percent of adults are overweight;

20 percent of children are overweight;

12.6 percent of adults have diabetes;

33.5 percent of adults have high blood pressure; and

8.5 percent of adults have cancer

The cures for all of these diseases are related to our nutrition. Therefore, it is impossible to separate the outputs of illness or good health from the input of what we consume, including food and pills. Nutrition and health are inextricably linked and perpetually inseparable. The objective of this book is to understand our personal legacy and our legacy as a nation. How did we get here and how do we dig ourselves out? Why are we undernourished and overfed? What is our legacy of food, nutrition, and health care? Why is our country so sideways? And how do we move forward to create a better legacy for our children? The objective of this book is also to explain food choices in layman’s terms and to provide an extremely simple guideline for making good choices regarding nutrition and good health for our families and our nation.

I want something simple that we can all understand, to provide for the future of our kids. A nutritional guideline that requires no counting, no overthinking, no fad, no dieting, no in-depth knowledge of carbohydrates, lipids, or proteins. A nutritional guideline that allows us to evolve into our best selves—one step at a time. We will learn together why we eat like we do, what we should be eating and what we should be feeding our children. I am also evolving every day and in my own place of development like each of you. As a nation, we can evolve together. Thank you for caring enough about yourself, your children, and our collective legacy to read this book.

part one

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NUTRITION

Chapter 1

Our Food Legacy

My mother always told me that as you go through life, no matter what you do, or how you do it, you leave a little footprint, and that’s your legacy. ~Jan Brewer, Arizona governor

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ach of us carries with us a food legacy. Each of us has been taught how, what, and when to eat by our culture, our society, our media, and our parents. Our individual food legacies have been cultivated and grown into our individual eating habits that we have today. Each of us has a unique history with food. We have been taught our relationship with food. The importance of understanding our legacy with food lies in the old adage that history repeats itself. Until you understand what you eat and why you eat it, you will not be able to change your nutrition habits and you will be teaching these same habits to your kids. These habits are so deeply ingrained that most of us just reach in the cabinet and pull something out to eat. We probably have not thought about why that item is what we are choosing, how we feel about food, or why we eat what we eat.

What you remember about food is the start of revealing your relationship to food. We might remember our mothers forcing us to finish everything on our plates at dinner. We might remember going to bed hungry or our favorite meal. We might remember how our food was served growing up or what time we ate. What are the individual memories in your life story? What is your backstory regarding food? And how do you feel about food today?

If we are parents, each day we wake up and teach our children about food. We teach them that breakfast is an over sweetened granola bar or some Pop-Tarts. We teach them about the fast-food restaurants and that when they are tired or in a rush they can purchase a meal that will make them happy. It is, after all, a Happy Meal! We pass on processed meats in the form of a hot dog for dinner with some potato chips. We teach them that making a salad is too much work compared to just microwaving a frozen meal. Consciously or unconsciously, we are generationally passing on our food legacy to our children. We have the responsibility to do better for our kids to provide a better legacy for them. Let’s begin by examining our current and historical relationship to food and how it relates to our current diet.

FOOD = CONTROL

I realize now that I cooked like my mother. Meat and potatoes. Three meals a day. My mother makes steak and potatoes and salad for dinner. If she is being really healthy, maybe some Italian dressing will be on the salad instead of ranch. When we were young children, my mother would make hot dogs for the kids’ dinner and steaks for the adults’ dinner. There was always something that the kids couldn’t eat because it was special for our father. Don’t touch the ice cream—that’s your father’s. Don’t eat your father’s potato chips—I bought those for him.

Food equated to a measure of control for my mother. We always had to finish the plate before we were allowed to leave the table. On the nights that she made liver and onions, we knew it was going to be a very long evening as we sat at the kitchen table to finish the plate. I would take bites of the liver, chew, spit the liver in my napkin while pretending to cough, and lower the napkin to the dog under table. Or there was always the famous tuck the liver underneath the edge of the plate and then state loudly that it was your job to clear the table.

The other night we went to dinner at my mom’s house. She served a cured ham, white potatoes that were split and then baked face down in butter, and corn on the cob. My mother cooks like her mother, but her mother emigrated from Poland and her food included a Polish flare. Meat and potatoes are still meat and potatoes even when cabbage is added in. I have always eaten Breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Three meals a day.

FOOD = ANXIETY

My husband says that he did not actually know that people ate three meals a day until he went to camp when he was ten years old. He tells a story that on the first day at camp, they woke up and were led to the lodge for breakfast. He says that there was a ton of food and they could eat as much as they wanted and it was good. After breakfast, his belly was full and they went to the lake to swim. After what seemed to be an hour, they were brought back to the lodge and told that they were going to eat again. He couldn’t believe that they were already eating another meal because he was still full from breakfast, but he figured that he better fill up because this would definitely be the last time he ate that day. Once again, they went back outside to play, and you would not believe it but, sure enough, a few hours later they were brought back to the lodge for dinner. They ate. Three times a day. Amazing.

At his childhood home in inner-city Detroit, one pot was usually on the stove, filled with pork and beans or black-eyed peas and greens or chitlins. That one pot generally served as breakfast, lunch, and dinner. During the school year, a school-provided lunch was the main meal. His food legacy is different from my food legacy. He recently came across a phrase that resonated with him: food anxiety. In other words, the deprivation of food creates an anxiety that there will be no food available. Therefore, when there is an opportunity to eat, one tends to overconsume.

FOOD = LOVE

The other part of my food legacy is that in my family, food equals love. Each of us has earned the reputation and esteemed title of Food Pusher. I have been told that the number of ingredients you use in a dish equals the amount of love that you have for the person you are feeding. Family, especially elders, should be served the best cut of meat. Every part of a fruit or a sandwich has a best part or best bite, and if you love me, you will give me that bite. Offering food repeatedly toward the end of a meal is a way that I have been taught to show love. Please take that last bite. I know that you are hungry for dessert. I don’t want to wrap the leftovers. You have room to finish this. My kids have literally said to me, Mom, stop pushing food and, You get that from Grandma.

FOOD=TRADITION

For the women in our family, one of