6. Article Review – Read the article Harvard Gives Us Food For Thought in the learning guide. a. Write a brief synopsis of the article (approximately 1 page in length). Include the Reference information using APA format. (10 marks) b. Analyze the article. (i) Agree or disagree with EACH new food grouping in the proposed new Food Guide in the article. (ii) Discuss the placement of each new food group within the proposed food guide, the number of servings and the food groupings. Use information from Canada's present Food Guide to Healthy Eating, and information from this and/or previous units in this course to support your position (approximately 2 pages typed, 12 font, double spaced). Use the proposed food group names (below) as headings for each of the 10 sections. PROPOSED NEW FOOD GROUPS: Whole grain foods Vegetables Nuts, Legumes Dairy or Calcium supplement Plant oils Fruit Fish, Poultry, Eggs White rice, white bread. potatoes, pasta, sweets Multiple vitamins, Alcohol, Daily Exercise and Weight Control Red meat, butter (iii) Use a highlighter to highlight the various sections in your review that pertain to course information. (10 sections @ 3 marks each = 30 marks) Eggs, it seems, are getting thumbs up from most everyone, with some saying it's OK to eat up to one a day. Fish is great. Red meat remains something to keep on the low side. Olive oil, canola oil and sunflower oil are all recommended, but don't go overboard. Butter and margarine remain a debate for many. Soy is still being touted as a good alternative to meats, chicken remains on the good list and nuts and legumes continue to gain favour. But nothing is gospel. New science continues to alter the picture to some degree. And nutritionists still scream the words “balance, moderation and variety. לל Althea Zanecosky, spokesperson for the American Dietetic Association, recommends taking simple steps to improving diet and recommends an easy 5, 4, 3, 2, 1 approach: Eat five fruits and vegetables, beans and legumes four time a week, three dairy products daily, two servings of fish per week, and one multi-vitamin per day. Zanecosky also notes that none of this works if you don't handle the information sensibly. For instance, Willett talks about eating more nuts and allowing for alcohol in moderation. But go home and have a couple of beer with handfuls of beer nuts every night while watching the tube, well, that's not so healthy. That leads to the other common theme: exercise, exercise, exercise. The calories you take in must be balanced with the calories you expend. Beth Mansfield, a spokesperson for Dietitians of Canada, suggests that a real priority should be downsizing our dishes. We just eat too much of everything. Mansfield points to one study in which two groups were given different sizes of plates, both filled to 75 percent capacity. There was little difference in how full either group felt after eating. There is another message to be taken in this - healthy eating isn't just about weight control. Let's try that again because it's a tough message in a society obsessed with body image. Good eating isn't simply measured by the impact on your bathroom scale. Healthy also means good for your heart, brain and energy level. The Hamilton Spectator March 8 Harvard Gives Us Food for Thought Agnes Bongers Just what are we supposed to eat? It seems every day a new study comes out detailing the latest in what should or should not be on the dinner plate. Do we load up on spaghetti or just go for that big fleshy slab of meat? Is milk poison or should we be drinking more of it? Are eggs a heart attack waiting to happen or just about three-zillion times better for you than eating boxed cereal for breakfast? Do we spread with butter or margarine? The latest controversy hails from the Harvard School of Public Health, which released a new version of the U.S. food guide pyramid – the American equivalent to Canada's old standard, the Canadian Food Guide to Healthy Eating. You likely know the Canadian version even if you don't follow it: eat 5-12 servings of grains, 5-10 of fruits and vegetables, 1-3 of milk products and 2-3 servings of meat and/or alternatives every day. Like a magician working with cards, Walter Willett, head of the nutrition department at the Harvard School, has taken this stack of guidelines, magically doubled them and then scrambled them into a surprise. He's taken some of those great staples of the dinnertime repertoire - white rice, potatoes, white bread and pasta – and thrown them into their own very small category labelled “use sparingly”. Red meat and butter fall victim to the same heading. Meanwhile, he's taken plant oils like olive, canola and sunflower and given them their own prominent spot. Nuts and legumes are given their own special spot, as are fish, poultry and eggs. Dairy, however, takes a decreased role. Multiple vitamins are recommended for daily use, as is alcohol in moderation. One final category is placed at the prized base of this pyramid to emphasize its importance - daily exercise. Willett offers a plethora of reasons for his changes, all based on scientific research, from Harvard and elsewhere. The American media has been eating it up. His views have headlined issues of Newsweek and Discover magazines, he's been featured on the television show 20/20 and given voice in the New York Times magazine. But that's the way it is with this whole nutrition thing. Willett and his new food pyramid are the latest jargon rolling off the tongues of the throngs lapping up diet news. His stuff joins the ranks of other in-vogue titles and authors such as Atkins, The Zone, and Body for Life, although he's unlikely to be watched as closely as an Oprah or a Fergie when it comes to eating habits and weight. "The bookshelves are lined with new ways to eat,” notes John Webster, a spokesperson with the Center for Nutrition Policy and Promotion of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, one of two government organizations that put out the food pyramid. “There are so many people out there that have come out with their own pyramids, their own eating requirement... that we're not commenting on them.” Regardless of the big press and direct attack. Spokespersons for dietitian's organizations in both the United States and Canada say government eating guidelines remain a solid blueprint for the average person to eat well. That is, the average guy or gal wanting to eat well and maintain a healthy weight, not someone with specific health or disease concerns. But, notes Heidi Reichenberger, a spokesperson with the American Dietetic Association, the Canadian and American food guides are, “not sexy, it's not new and extreme is what sells.” 9 It seems to sell better than the Canada food guide. While Health Canada spokesperson Stefa Katamay maintains no one has lost faith in a guideline that was introduced in its original form during wartime, studies indicate that Canadians are much more interested in turning to friends, colleagues, or magazines for nutritional information, rather than a government information source. Another study backs this up by showing that most Canadians are not taking in the daily nutrient requirements recommended by the food guide - no by far. Instead they're filling up with junk food. It's no wonder obesity has become the obsession of the new millennium. Willett, of Harvard's school of public health, suggests it's the combination of wrong advice, searches for a quick fix and a lazy society. In Discover magazine online he says: “We've created the great American feedlot. Farmers have known for thousands of years that if you want to fatten up an animal, you put it in a pen so it can't run around and you feed it lots of grains. People are not too different." But is the latest voice right? Is this the one we should be listening to? Certainly almost everyone says that the population should base its eating habits on solid science and Willett's guides are backed up with science. The question is, is it enough and the right kind of science? beans cause cancer. It's the lead item in the newspaper that day and there's similar coverage on Let's look at a manufactured scenario. Let's say a new research study says green TV and radio. Next thing you know there's a book about how to eat well without green beans. Surely green beans are now the enemy. Would that mean you should avoid green beans? Not unless you know this is a well- done, scientifically based, long-term study involving plenty of people - and it's backed up by numerous previous studies that all came up with the same conclusion. You get a sense that his is correct by hearing the same message over and over again from reputable sources. Nutritionists say we've got to listen to the body of evidence over a length of time. A study or two and a book may change the eating patterns of a number of people who follow that line of thinking, but it's the volume of solid evidence that causes shifts in thinking over the long term. It's where thinking like the whole “fat is bad” – “fat is good” debate comes into play. Willett , the latest to jump into the “fat is good” camp, suggests that the whole “fat is bad” fad was based on misunderstanding, simplification of science and marketing exploitation. He and a colleague write in Scientific American that U.S. food guidelines regarding fat intake are based on information from the early 1990s that drew a relationship between coronary heart disease and fat intake, distilling it down to “fat is bad”. The message was supposed to be that certain fats are bad, such as saturated fats. The food industry picked up on the simplifies message with low-fat chips and cookies and a whole slew of other “low-fat” and “no-fat” products, sometimes replacing that fulfilling fat taste with sweeteners like corn syrup. And we've eaten them up. Willett contends that the simplified “fat is bad” message steered people away from all proteins because some are high in saturated fat. Rather than differentiating which ones were high or los in specific fats, it was easier to move to the fall-back position of filling up on carbohydrates. Hence, “carbs are good. >> Science, according to Willett and many others, is now noting that there is a great division among fats. The healthy ones, like fats from plant oils such as olive oil, canola and sunflower, actually seem to help the body fight off disease, while bad fats - those in high levels in red meats and stick margarines - raise bad cholesterol levels and can cause harm. Then there is the whole “carb” debate. Willett argues this is really about something we now call the glycemic index. Foods with high glycemic levels such as white rice, spaghetti and white bread, spike the sugar levels in the body very quickly, and are potentially linked to heart problems and diabetes, and cause a body to become hungry quicker. (Slower processed proteins fill the body longer.)
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