CH: Like, “here are the five vegetables that will change your life.”
DM: Exactly. And the story day in and day out for me in my practice is that I see people who are getting modern chronic diseases at a very young age. And in their minds, they’re not just pulling up to the 7-11 and the McDonald’s three times a day. They’re being good, they’re trying, they’re following the diet du jour, and their bodies and their lab tests are continually telling them that they’re screwing up. And that’s really what pushed me to want to spend a bunch of time on this project. Because it just felt like there had to be another way.
CH: Your chapter about diabetes was really interesting in that respect. Your patient had tried the low-carb regime without any success, and he decided that he’d be better off just eating what his Mexican grandmother ate, because she was healthy—so he starts eating these massive burritos every day, from a taqueria in San Francisco.
DM: Yes, for me probably one of the most profound moments was when I was in Copper Canyon, Mexico, and I bought burritos there and compared them to what we call a burrito in San Francisco. You can barely call it the same animal. But that happens everywhere. Look at Chinese food versus Chinese-American food. The first time I ate authentic Chinese food I just couldn’t even believe it, because Chinese-American food is this sickly sweet, white flour-y stuff with the occasional vegetable and chunks of deep fried meat—this is what we think of as Chinese food.
CH: You discuss this in regard to West African food, too—we always think of that cuisine as being deep-fried, with lots of fritters and that kind of thing. But as you say, it’s actually more of a special occasion thing. Nobody eats deep-fried stuff at every meal.
DM: Oh, absolutely. The oil is just too pricey, and it’s actually an issue of fuel, too. If you’re going to really traditional areas, if you want to deep-fry, go ahead and try and deep-fry over an open fire, I challenge you. It’s really hard. Things get burned on one side and uncooked on the other, mushy in the middle. Deep-frying is, by and large, a product of modern technology. Just the way that the oils that we deep-fry with are.
At a conference last week I was asked to help people determine what’s a healthy oil and what isn’t, because it’s so confusing. So I sat down and looked at traditional oils, which are oils that have been used for cooking for thousands of years, versus the oils that we’ve had since the Industrial Revolution (essentially for the past 100 years or so, or a little less). The way that you can make the distinction easily is to take a mortar and pestle and see if you can make that oil—if you even have a fighting chance of making that oil. Take a kernel of corn, for example, and stick it in your mortar and pestle and go at it. And you call me when you get that corn oil, okay? Versus take something like a palm fruit or an olive or a piece of coconut or something like that—you’re not going to make gallons of oil [when you grind it yourself], but you’re going to get something greasy. So I think that that is a really helpful distinction for people; [industrial oils] are produced using acetone and denaturing heat, not just by grinding.
CH: In a lot of the traditional diets you explore, one of the central protein sources is fish—but buying fish is so incredibly stressful these days, with all the considerations about overfishing and mercury.
DM: Fish is the one thing that I struggle with in this whole concept of healing yourself, healing the planet. I’m working with that one. Because traditionally, if we were anywhere near the ocean or a stream or a pond, we ate fish—it was a cheap, easy, delicious source of protein. And it’s really the first place where everybody is suffering as a result of global warming. You might still be able to afford your SUV and water your lawn and things like that, but you’re not getting fresh fish. Not only did we mess up with fishing in terms of mistreating our waterways, and trying to get too much bang for our buck by farm-fishing and fishing with nets rather than lines, but also we were eating too high on the food chain with fish for too long. So I’m really encouraging people to start going for those little tiny fish. You know, the ones that we used to feed just to other fish, or to our sheep or whatever.
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