When I was on Crete, all they were eating was the little fish. They’re easily line caught; they’re right offshore, so you don’t need a lot of gas to get yourself out to them; and they’re very rich, proportionately incredibly high in omega-3 fats. Two little helpings of sardines a week will give you your weekly dose. They have one problem, though: They taste like fish. And a lot of people want their fish to taste like Chicken McNuggets.
We need to do some work in general about accepting foods that taste authentically as they should taste. There’s been a lot of breeding of various strong-tasting vegetables—like Brussels sprouts, for example, which are very much bred to taste un-Brussels-sprout-y. I’ve actually been really intrigued by this playground-culture thing going on with the extra-hot Cheetos. My 13-year-old daughter has been buying them, and it’s become a cool thing for kids to have these contests eating these things. And I’m thinking, well, they have 40 ingredients, and every dye under the sun and every other additive, and they’re absolutely horrific for you. But how interesting that this [extreme spiciness] is something that they’re valuing. Can we harness this in some way? Why not a real fresh jalapeno full of vitamin C?
CH: Yes, the taste of hot is lost from a lot of people’s palates in the U.S., I think. Hot and sour and fermented are all sort of erased from the average American diet, so we basically just have sweet, salty, and fatty.
DM: Absolutely. There is hot, but it’s very combined with sweet. Hot is not actually an instinctual taste that we seek out, like sweet, salty, and fatty; hot is a learned healing taste. So [the food industry has] harnessed the idea that hot is somehow good, but matched it with loads of high fructose corn syrup so that it becomes palatable.
But fermented is probably one of the greatest losses, I’m figuring out. I swear, if we could get everybody in this country to eat one serving a day of a really good-quality yogurt that was relatively unsweetened, and truly made through a fermentation process, I think that in itself would be a major step forward in terms of public health. That, or some other fermented food. But most people have nothing that’s truly fermented in their diet. Even the pickles and sauerkraut and things that you can buy in some supermarkets across America aren’t made through a true fermentation process anymore. So they lack all the health benefits. But recently the medical literature has been showing that genetic information is actually put into our gut through eating fermented foods. It’s becoming really obvious that this plays a key role in everything from food allergies to possible cancer prevention.
CH: And I remember a couple of years ago a study showed that there was a difference between the gut bacteria of obese people and non-obese people. Although of course it’s impossible to attribute obesity to any one factor.
DM: Yes, absolutely. I sat on a panel last week with someone who’s made a big splash in the Times with a book about obesity, where he’s connected it specifically to one thing. And that just makes me giggle, as someone who’s out there in clinical practice, that we would ever be able to find Occam’s razor for obesity. It’s just so multi-factorial at this point. It’s not the hypothalamus. It’s not the insulin receptor. It’s not the fact that your mother didn’t give you enough food when you were young. It’s not the thyroid. It’s all of it. Obesity is a symptom of a really messed-up relationship that our entire culture has with food.
CH: And so it’s really telling to look at cultures where Western diseases just don’t exist.
DM: Right. And the proof positive is that we’re exporting this disease now. So effectively. Okinawa was just amazing: You have this culture that is so remarkable for longevity and low rates of cancer, and within one generation, our food corporations have achieved near-magical results in terms of transforming Okinawans into a group of obese diabetics with metabolic syndrome. You have these grandmothers who are 100 watching their great-grandchildren waddle around and suffer from obesity.
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