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McDonalds serves nutritious meals. I, who advocate healthy eating, am saying this not because I have been bribed or threatened by McDonalds, but because it is true.
The technical definition of nutritious is simply "containing nutrients". And it is certainly true that hamburgers, French fries and even carbonated drinks do contain nutrients. They contain protein, carbohydrates and some vitamins and minerals. Add a slab of cheese and you get calcium. Such foods are definitely nutritious.
The common definition of nutritious is "nourishing" which, in turn, means "promoting growth". So again, these foods fit in nicely with the definition. They certainly promote growth. In fact, that’s the most common complaint about them.
Morgan Spurlock
Super Size Me
One person who "grew" on such foods was filmmaker Morgan Spurlock, who made a documentary about himself eating at McDonalds three meals a day for 30 days.
He grew by 12 kg and gained 65 points of cholesterol. In the process, he became very sick and was constantly throwing up and feeling depressed. He lost his sex drive and almost lost his liver function. His liver became like pate!
Spurlock wanted to challenge McDonalds’ statements that its food is nutritious.
How could he? Such statements are factually accurate and so cannot be challenged. They are infallible!
What Spurlock did, however, was demonstrate that nutritious food can be very harmful to health.
Most people take for granted that nutritious means healthy. No, no, no. The fact that a food contains nutrients – even if it contains plenty of nutrients - does not guarantee that it is good for health. At the same time, there are foods that promote health even though they contain hardly any nutrients.
Milk, meat
Let’s look at a few examples…
Milk is a very nutritious food. Doctors and nutritionists nowadays recommend it highly because it is rich in calcium.
Milk is so rich in nutrients that it has been called a perfect food – although I don’t see how cow’s milk, intended by nature to be a food for calves, can ever be perfect for both baby and adult humans!
Well, do an internet search and you will find plenty of scientific evidence linking milk with all sorts of illnesses, including asthma, allergies, diabetes and even mental and behavioural disorders.
Check out cancer statistics and you will find that the countries with the highest rates of female (breast, ovarian, cervical) cancers are the milk producing / milk drinking countries - England, Ireland, Scotland, Wales, New Zealand, Denmark, etc. Coincidence? Maybe, maybe not.
Meat, too, is highly nutritious. Justus von Liebig (1803 – 1873) and other early fathers of nutrition believed that protein was the most important nutrient and, since meat is rich in protein, it was considered the most important food.
This idea persisted till today, despite tremendous evidence that meat contributes to a host of modern degenerative diseases. Meat and protein are, in fact, making a dangerous comeback with the current "low-carb" diet craze.
Fibre
Now for an opposite example – fibre.
Fibre imparts many health benefits. It improves the functioning of the intestines, reduces fat and cholesterol, removes toxins from the body, and so on. People who eat a high-fibre diet have far lower rates of degenerative diseases, such as heart disease and cancer, compared with those who don’t.
Yet fibre has zero nutrition. For nearly 300 years, natural health advocates had been saying that fibre was essential to health. However, their views were dismissed by nutritionists who asserted that fibre was useless because it contained no nutrition.
It is only now that fibre, a non-nutrient, is recognised as healthy. As recently as the mid-1980s, there were still doctors and nutritionists saying that the benefits of fibre were "not scientifically proven".
Scientific
If you want scientific proof, you may have to wait hundred of years.
Incidentally, Spurlock’s documentary, even though it includes the reports of three medical doctors who examined him before and after his 30-day experiment, does not count as scientific proof. It is, to use a phrase often quoted by dismissive scientists, "merely anecdotal".
For more anecdotal evidence about the difference between nutritious and healthy foods, just walk into any health foods shop, pick up any food item and read the "nutrition information" on the label. You might be surprised to see, "Vitamin A 0%, Vitamin C 0%, Iron 2%, Calcium 1%…"
They don’t seem very nutritious, do they? Rest assured, they are healthy.
One of these foods that I wish to highlight is kuzu, a starch derived from the root of the kuzu plant.
In oriental medicine, kuzu is used to treat a variety of ailments, including fever, digestive disorders and infections. Some years back, Western scientists discovered kuzu to be an effective remedy for hangovers – a fact long known to the Chinese and Japanese.
I highlight kuzu because I once saw it described in a nutrition textbook as having "little nutritional value".
We need to break away from this idea that nutrition equals health. Nutrition is only about what a food contains. Health is a much broader concept. It is about what a food does to you – whether it makes you sick or healthy.
When we fail to differentiate the two, food manufacturers will have plenty of opportunity to confuse and mislead us.
One more example: There is a certain powdered orange drink made from refined sugar, artificial colouring, artificial orange flavouring and artificial vitamins. It does not even contain any trace of real oranges. Yet the "nutrition information" on the label will tell you, "Vitamin C 100%".
You see, McDonalds isn’t the only food company that sells nutritious junk.
Latest: Macrobiotics
Spurlock recovered fully from his “McDonalds Diet” after eight months of following a macrobiotic diet. To learn more about macrobiotics, click here.