Thoughts on food

Why am I dicing this onion? What do I want from homemade food that justifies the time, effort and onion tears spent? For me it comes down to three things. Most importantly, I want food that contain the nutrients my body needs. It’s better if it is low in things that are detrimental to my health. It’s even better if it makes me happy.

Goal #1 - eat food that contains the things my body needs

Our bodies need large quantities of some things, referred to as macros, and small quantities of many other things - micros. There are five macros - protein, carbs, fibre, fats and water - which make up about 99% of foods, the rest are micros. To be precise, there are three types of carbohydrates - simple carbohydrates and complex ones, which can be starchy or non-starchy. When we say carbs, we typically refer to only the first 2 types of carbohydrates - simple carbohydrates (sugars) and complex starchy carbohydrates (starches) that are broken down into sugars once ingested. Complex non-starchy carbohydrates do not get broken down into sugars, so they are referred to as fibre and we count them as a separate macro. Food packaging implies that we should aspire to eat more protein and fibre, and less carbs and fats.

Protein

Unlike fats and carbs, human bodies cannot store protein. Our inability to store protein has two implications. First, as we’ve all heard, it is important to eat enough protein every day. Second, which gets far less attention, is that excess protein, since it cannot be stored in the body, is stripped of amino groups to be used (or stored) as carbs. The liver and the kidneys deal with excess protein, which means that extreme quantities of protein could be harmful for them.

I have two questions - how much protein do I need? and how much protein do I eat? To answer the latter, I used USDA FoodData Central, and a chicken breast as a benchmark. One 200g chicken breast contains 45g of protein; for comparison I, as a vegetarian, might eat 200g of chickpeas (18g), tofu (34g) or paneer (44g). I usually eat two big meals a day, which according to my rough calculations is equivalent to 1.5 (±0.5) chicken breasts per day.

The amount of protein a human body needs seems to be on the order of magnitude of 1g per kilogram of body weight. I could not find any sources that recommend less than 0.5g or more than 2g per kilogram of body weight. Our individual protein requirements depend on factors like height, level of physical activity, age, genetics, recent injuries, etc. From an evolutionary perspective, human bodies have evolved to deal with shortages but not with excess, so my intuition is that less is better than too much. If I let my intuition run wild, it tells me that rutinely consuming too much protein (or food in general) leads to our bodies becoming less efficient at using these nutrients, a process known to correlate with age, and hence accelerates the aging. Since my craving for protein, i.e. how much I eat on a day when I am not counting, is on the order of magnitude of what my body might need according to scientific evidence, I’m currently not supplementing with a protein powder.

Fibre

Fibre comes from plants. The less processed they are, the more fibre I get. Think fruits instead of fruit juice, salads with whole grains instead of with pasta or bread (flour-based products), and the best bit - not peeling fruits and vegetables unless absolutely necessary. Unlike protein, there is no such thing as too much fibre, so there is no need to count - the more minimally processed plants I eat, the better. There is definitely such thing as too little fibre, and that’s a danger because fibre is the only macro that is not craveable. When eating a low-fat meal, I reach for dairy or olive oil; when eating a low-carb meal, I reach for bread; when eating salad as the only vegetarian option in a restaurant, I crave something substantial (protein); but I’ve never had a “need more fibre” feeling.

Micros

The list of micros our bodies need is long. The most fun strategy for getting enough of all of them is eating a diverse diet. Before refrigeration and supermarkets, diversity was enforced by seasons (though winters were bleak). Nowadays, living in a big city, I have no concept of when courgettes are in season - they are always on a supermarket shelve. And I know what to do with them - I might eat them fresh in a salad, add them into a risotto, a soup or a Thai curry, or eat them fried in a fritter or a sandwich. Instead of getting radishes for my salad, asparagus for risotto, beetroots for soup, pumpkin for Thai curry and mushrooms for sandwiches, courgette is my lazy default. Having healthy defaults is good; buying courgettes every time I’m too tired to be creative is better than ordering a pizza. But when I can, I try to cook with plants I’m less familiar with - celeriac, fennel, okra, radicchio, etc. Luckily there is no shortage of recipes online, and with image recognition even not knowing the name of a vegetable is no longer an excuse.

I’m mindful of fake diversity. Bulgur, couscous, farro, freekeh, fregola, orzo, pasta, semolina, spelt and sourdough bread - sounds like a diverse list of ingredients, but these are all types of wheat and products made from wheat flour. Edamame, tofu, tempeh and vegan chick’n all come from soybeans. A dozen Mexican dishes can be made from wheat tortillas, minced meat, bell peppers and cheese - keep tortillas flat for tlayudas, empalmes (two tlayudas on top of each other) and sincronizadas (empalmes with bigger tortillas), fold tortillas in half for tacos and quesadilla (tacos with more cheese), roll up tortillas into enchiladas, flautas (fried enchiladas) and burritos (bigger tortillas), or cut tortillas into triangles for chilaquiles, etc. Instead of focusing on the names of ingredients or the names of dishes, I focus on the diversity of plants/fungi that I’ll consume, and then combine them into dishes, traditional or experimental. My goal is to have at least one go-to recipe for each vegetable and each whole grain that I could buy.

Avoiding food waste, both in my kitchen and before the products get to my kitchen, is another great strategy for hitting targets for my micros. I don’t peal fruits and vegetables unless absolutely necessary - there are a lot of good micros in the skins. Unpeeled ginger is great in a curry paste and unpeeled kiwi is great in a fruit salad, though many of my friends had to lead by example before I tried the latter. I recently discovered how much I like carrot leave pesto and sautéed beetroot leaves, so I’m getting into the habit of looking for recipes online before binning plant body parts that I don’t know how to use. Since there is an infinite number of online recipes to choose from, I avoid recipes that call for red lentils (peeled green lentils), white rice (wholegrain rice with the bran coating removed), white pepper (peeled black peppercorns), etc. It took energy to produce these skins and bran coatings, they contain a lot of micros, and it takes energy to remove them, so I’d rather eat them.

Goal #2 - avoid the things that are bad for me

We all know that certain things are bad for our health - ultra-processed foods, trans fats, fructose, emulsifiers, etc. Talking about how bad they are doesn’t really help us to reduce our intake, instead we need these questions answered - what can I eat instead? and what to do about my cravings for the unhealthy stuff?

But first, let’s start by examining how these unhealthy things end up inside me. Broadly speaking, there are three categories of foods I consume - restaurant and take away meals (prepared by a business, ingredient list not included), ready meals from supermarkets (prepared by a business, ingredient list provided), meals I make myself (from things I buy in a supermarket, ingredient lists provided). When a business prepares a meal for you, they aim to make something that sells well - it should sound good (so that you buy it) and taste good (so that you buy it again). Keeping the costs down is another consideration; my homemade salad contains many more pistachios than any business would consider reasonable. Finally, businesses have to optimise for longevity of the food: for restaurants it is just how long it keeps, for take aways it is also how well does it travel, for ready meals in supermarkets it is also how good it looks days or even weeks after being made. Unfortunately, these considerations lead to high levels of craveable ingreadients (sugars, fats, salt), ultra-processed ingredients, emulsifiers, preservatives and colorants.

Shopping in a supermarket

Without a kitchen, there is not much I can do about it. But when I have access to a kitchen and I’m deciding what to buy in a supermarket, I have one hard rule - must read the ingredient list before buying. It is a good rule, as even without thinking it encourages me to buy items with no ingredient list (fruits, vegetables, nuts, grains, etc.) and slows me down when I pick up something with a long list. Also reading the ingredient list gives me good ideas, which usually don’t involve buying the product. After looking at a bag of raviolli with mushrooms and mascarpone, I ended up boiling the pasta I already had at home while frying some mushrooms and then tossing the two together with a big dullop of mascarpone. Discovering a red pesto on the shelf, made with sun dried tomatoes, gave me an idea to handblender sundried tomatoes I already had with almonds and fresh garlic - thus accidentally creating an awesome vegan pesto for my pasta. Raspberry coulis looked absolutely irresistible, so I handblendered some frozen raspberries into my vinaigrette and this became my favourite salad dressing.

When reading the ingredient list I try to avoid emulsifiers (bad for the microbiome as they are chemically equivalent to detergents), ingredients that sound scary to a non-chemist (like potassium bromate and sodium benzoate) and products that are mostly sugar. I also avoid things that don’t go bad, like supermarket breads that never mould. I’m suspicious of products marketed as healthy, like juice (fruit sugars without the fibre), low calorie products (they contain zero-calorie sweeteners that mistake our brains into generating an insulin response), products with puffed grain (exploded carbohydrates create huge blood glucose spikes), etc. There are mobile apps that allow you to scan the barcode and be instantly told whether a product is good for you or should be avoided. In my opinion, these apps make us feel like ingredient lists are hard to understand (they are not), provide de-contextualised advice (high sodium capers are great if used instead of salt) and don’t help us make better choices (they suggest alternatives in the same category, when instead of looking for healthier cookies I should consider carrots as a snack).

So, you found what you were looking for and picked the option with the least bad ingredient list, but do you really need this ingredient? I find that unhealthy items end up in my basket when I’m shopping for recipes from distant cuisines or previous generations. Tortillas, that are freshly made and healthy in Mexico, typically have a horrible ingredient list in supermarkets in Europe. So I eat my taco fillings in pitas while in Europe, and I buy wheat tortillas instead of pitas while in Mexico - there’s nothing wrong with falafel tacos. Old recipes that call for canned peas, canned peaches and jams were created before freezers and handblenders became ubiquitous. Finding fresh or frozen substitutes allows me to pack more nutrients into my food; and if these alive flavours ruin the recipe, I pick a different recipe.

The mere presence of an item in a supermarket made me believe that I can’t make it myself, until I read Cooked (2013) by Michael Pollan. Since then I try to make most things from scratch once, and make my conclusions afterwards. Making roasted peppers in the oven turned out fast and effortless, so I don’t buy jarred ones any more. Making paneer involved handling large volumes of hot milk, so I keep buying it to avoid this step, but I’ll switch to making my own if I can’t find a good one. After making pasta and cream cheese, I’m very happy to outsource these to supermarkets. Making gnocchi from scratch put me off completely, so now I neither make them nor buy them. Sometimes it’s a matter of equipment you have; I boil beans and chickpeas myself because I have an electric pressure cooker, but I don’t bake my own flatbreads becauce my oven is not hot enough. Sometimes it’s about your friends; my Indian friends make delicious curries from vegetables and spices, so I learnt from them, but my Thai friends use supermarket Thai curry paste, so I was convinced that making this magic paste from scratch would be impossible. Once I tried handblendering together all of the ingredients listed on a Thai curry paste, and I never looked back. My friends make elaborate veggie burgers with dozens of ingredients, and the supermarket ones have a long ingredient list too; so I kept buying veggie burgers until I was in a country where I couldn’t find any. In a hungry despair, I mashed beans from a can with my hands, adding only tomato paste, paprika powder and salt - these were the best burgers I’ve ever had.

Things to think about outside the supermarket

Breakfasts are typically high in carbs and fats, and low in fibre, protein and diversity. Sweet breakfasts are worse than desserts, as the sugars consumed on an empty stomach, unimpeded by the fibre and protein from previous courses, lead to problematic blood sugar spikes. I am a breakfast anarchist - I skip them if I’m not hungry, and if I am hungry I eat normal food as if it was lunch. If what makes breakfasts special is the lack of time to prepare them, then I make too much for dinner and eat the leftovers in the morning.

Breakfasts is not the only tradition to be scrutinised. I question everything from birthday cakes (why not a savoury pie?) to stale bread recipes. Panzanella salad in Italy, chilaquiles in Mexico, lablabi in Tunisia - there are so many traditions for using up stale bread, which solve the problem I simply don’t have, as I keep pitas and sliced sourdough in my freezer, so they never go stale. After my travels, I wanted to recreate these recipes at home, but then I realised that I don’t need more ways to eat bread, I need more broccoli recipes. What traditions stand in the way of your nutritional goals? And can you create new traditions that would help instead?

Don’t avoid, displace

Lists of unhealthy things to avoid are not helpful, unless they also answer the question of what should I eat instead. Following Dr. Greger’s Daily Dozen for a couple of months transformed my habbits around food. I had to find many recipes with legumes and whole grains to enable myself to eat 3 servings of each every day. Then on top of that there were 5 servings of vegetables per day, some of which had to be leafy greens and some cruciferous. I could eat whatever else I wanted, but I was too stuffed already. After I ate all the nuts, fruits and berries as required, I had no room left for dessert either.

I no longer count my Greger points, but I’m still resentful of pizza that was worth 0 points. If I would have avoided certain foods for a couple of months, by now I would have returned to eating them. But since I had to learn how to incorporate cruciferous vegetables, whole grains and loads of legumes into my diet, I keep eating them to this day, purely by inertia.

Make it fun or deliberately boring

Apart fromm inertia, boredom is another great tool. I only ever buy one type of pasta; so whether I’m making Pasta al Pesto, Macaroni Cheese or Spaghetti Bolognaise, I use the same pasta shape for all these recipes. Because my goal is to eat more beans instead, I always have white, red, black and butter beans on hand; and I’m always looking for new beans to try. So instead of asking myself what could I have for dinner (pasta is always nice!), I ask which of the beans I’m cooking with tonight. Being strategic about the diversity of ingredients in my kitchen, means that I eat less of boring pasta and I am more motivated to find recipes that highlight different flavours, textures, sizes and colours of my beans.

Everything has an opportunity cost

Most foods have “healthy” or “unhealthy” label attached to them. Items that combine characteristics of both classes invite controversy. But really, there is only one question you should be asking yourself. And I do mean yourself, not the internet. Instead of what?

Zero-calorie soft drinks are healthy instead of sugary drinks, but not instead of 100% fruit juice. A whole fruit is healthy instead of fruit juice, but not if it replaces a kale salad. Bananas are healthy instead of jelly in PB&J sandwich, but not instead of kiwis.

I eat a lot of dairy and almost no sesamy seeds, so a creamy tahini sauce replacing a dairy one is great for me. I choose peanut butter over almond butter, because I eat a lot of almonds in other ways, but not peanuts. Farro, a type of wheat, would be super healthy if I’d eat it instead of pasta. But in reality, it doesn’t dent my pasta consumption, it replaces other whole grains like buckwheat and millet. Since I’ll keep eating wheat in a form of pasta, couscous, pitas, sourdough bread and an occasional baguette, I don’t think I should be replacing buckwheat or millet with a healthy type of wheat grain.

Next time you are wondering if something is healthy, ask yourself - instead of what? And come on, be honest.

And what about my cravings?

You are eating broccoli with tahini sauce and loads of legumes. It’s filling, so you are not hungry, and knowing that these foods are good for you makes you happy, but…cravings.

Roughly speaking, cravings come in two flavours - biological and emotional. Biological cravings are mechanisms that evolved in our brain over millions of years to motivate us to look for stuff that was rear during most of that evolutionary period - sugars, fats, proteins and salt. Because leafy greens were abundant in the environment, no mechanism evolved to motivate us to look for them. In fact, 2 million years ago there was a danger that leafy greens would be the only thing humans eat. Everything in the environment contained fibre, apart from the antelope, that was really hard to catch. Our brains, that evolve on a millions-of-years timescale, are not prepared for the modern supermarket, where sugars, fats and salt are abundant.

The problem is not only with what we crave, but also how much. The brain’s ideas about what is not enough and what is too much are relative to the baseline. I get sugar from fruits, carrots and dairy (lactose), and my brain is happy. But if I have a pastry one day and a dessert in a restaurant the next day, that’s enough to adjust my brain’s baseline - now I’m craving something sugary at least once a day. The first ever cheesecake I made myself was a more extreme example (I was very young, don’t judge). I mixed cream cheese with a lot of cream, butter and oil, thus pushing the fat content way beyond reasonable. Eating a slice of it made me unwell. The next day I faced the fact that my first ever homemade cheesecake will have to be binned. But first I gave it another try, just to learn my lesson and do better next time - it was actually totally edible, as long as I kept the slice size small. By the end of the week I was gorging on this gloriously fatty cheesecake.

While in some regards our brains are very silly, they are also increadibly smart in other ways. While I’m eating a pizza I’m loving it - it’s cheesy, it’s crispy and doughy at the same time, and the sweetness of the tomato sauce is so good. But once I’ve inhaled the whole thing, I often feel regret. Sometimes it’s the other way around - the food tastes bland and boring and I barely push it in (think plain lentils boiled in very lightly salted water); but afterwards I have a nourished feeling of “that’s exactly what I needed”. Until I find or make up a better term, I’ll call it the second appraisal. The first one is done by our eyes, nose and mouth - how the food looks (and the other people eating it), how it smells, the tastes and the textures. The second appraisal happens when the brain combines these signals with other, often subconsious, signals about what’s happening in the gut and what’s entering the bloodstream. To know what’s good for me personally, I listen out for these second appraisals.

The brain decides when you stop eating, based on many contious and uncontious signals. I can eat a huge ammount of vegetable lasagna, potato gratin and cinnamon rolls, because I love them so much. Or is it something else? If you like the food, there are two reasons why the amount you can eat in one go is not infinite - the available volume inside you and the perceived nutrient content. I can eat a huge volume of vegetable lasagna, but I wouldn’t be able to eat the same volume of a hearty bean stew. Realising that the reason I’m able to eat so much of some foods is their low density of nutrients, dampened my excitement about them.

My brain is evolutionary programmed to look for sugars, fats and salt - stuff that was rear during most of its evolutionary period. Instead of blaming it for my cravings, after all it’s just doing what it is supposed to do, I create the abundance that keeps it calm. I used to have a stack of chocolate and a freezer drawer full of lasagna, sliced sourdough, slices of cheesecake and chocolate tart. I could eat it any time, but there was no rush as none of it was going bad any time soon. That allowed me to eat broccoli, calmly assured that I could defrost a slice of cheesecake any time. I also stopped buying these things or ordering them in restaurants, since I have a lot at home. This approach is contrary to a more common “if you don’t have it, you won’t eat it” approach, but it works for me.