Annemarie Colbin, Ph.D.
For several days I have been hearing lots of commentary about an article written in Time Magazine by Dr Mehmet Oz, who I’ve known for many years. He seems to say that choosing organically grown foods is elitist because it costs more than conventional, and he seems to assume that in a choice between more expensive foods and cheaper ones most people will choose the less pricey kind.
When I started out noticing food and its effect on health, I didn’t care how much it cost. Even when I was flat broke, I spent the money on organic and health-supportive foods. I couldn’t have justified giving my children harmful, pesticide-laden foods because they were “cheaper.” I would imagine there are still people out there like me, who go for good quality regardless of price.
Dr Oz does not seem to think so. He says “a lot of the foods we ate in childhood can be good for you and good to eat” – IF (note the caveat) you know how to shop. Of course, the food that he and others of his age ate in childhood was better, less contaminated, less industrialized.
It’s true that in many neighborhoods it’s hard to find fresh produce, whole grain bread, and the like. But why should we settle? Why not educate people to demand fresh food from the corner bodega? They’ll stock it if we demand it and buy it.
Dr. Oz considers frozen and canned food equivalent to fresh. Hm. Years ago journalist Suzanne Hamlin of the New York Times wrote about someone who was eating only frozen and canned foods, and the health problems this person encountered. I couldn’t find the article, but I remember it was dire – also, that it disappeared quickly from the archives, for obvious reasons. Who wants to know that such common food could kill you and, what’s more, that it could cause memory loss and mental confusion. Frozen meats may be OK – frozen vegetables maybe not.
Go on, Dr. Oz. Try a week eating only canned and frozen vegetables. I bet not even you would be willing to do that. As a “food lover,” he ignores the subtler aspects of food: “Nutritionally, an egg is an egg. Cage free is kinder but much pricier.” Perhaps, but it also tastes very different. Commercial eggs taste sulfuric and, if you happen to pass some wind (forgive the indelicate reference) it smells really bad. And if you burp – forget it. You stink yourself up. For that reason, I only buy organic or free range eggs. They taste much better. And your whole body smells normal.
Dr. Oz points out that free-range chickens and pasture-fed meats are also kept free of hormones and antibiotics. If that is important to you and you have the money to spend, he suggests, by all means opt for pricier organic meats. Otherwise, obviously, you’re stuck eating all those hormones and antibiotics. Considering antibiotics are given to cattle so as to fatten them up, we need to ask what these elements contribute to the epidemic of obesity everyone is wailing about. I wonder. The heaviest people, young and old, are the ones who eat these “cheapest” foods. Well, as has often been said, you get what you pay for.
In Dr. Oz’s article, canned foods are considered “winners.” He considers canned salmon equivalent to fish fresh out of the water. But that is not all that counts. I will never order a dish in a restaurant that gives me a slab of canned salmon instead of fresh, would you? I find they taste very different, although they may have the same amount of protein. Well, if I’m in a bunker, war is coming, and there is no other food, OK, it will keep me alive, thank you very much.
I appreciate the fact that the risk of famine has pretty much disappeared from our world – but we are left with a completely different problem: How to choose foods that are good for us? That is just as important as choosing foods that will keep us alive. The two are not equivalent, as a heart surgeon would know.
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