DAY 47_HEALTHY FOODS HEALTHY LIVES

30 September 2010

The University of Minnesota has an institute called Healthy Foods, Healthy Lives which works to improve the Universities and surrounding communities access and understanding of healthy foods by funding research and increasing connections and communication.  They put on a conference annually which I attended with a few friends today.  The conference was a day of listening to speakers about various food topics, the general consensus being that Americans need to eat MORE PLANT FOODS. 

The first speaker-Paul Coates-talked about dietary supplements.  50% of Americans use dietary supplements resulting in a $26 billion/year industry with over 50,000 products on the market.  Why are people so into dietary supplements?  Because we don't get enough nutrients from the diets we currently eat.  Ironically, the majority of people using dietary supplements are the ones who don't really need them.  They are the people who already eat generally healthy diets, are concerned about their health and exercise regularly, so these supplements really aren't successfully filling a need.  While supplements can be an important part of someones diet, they should not be used to 'replace' real nutrients found in foods.  The most healthy way to get the nutrients you need is to EAT them.

David J.A. Jenkins then spoke about foods for disease prevention and his 'Portfolio Diet' experiments.  His argument was similar to the one the author of "Green For Life" (green smoothies) book that I mentioned earlier, that our genes have not changed significantly over evolutionary time and we should be eating diets more more similar to our close primate relatives than the Standard American Diet (SAD).  Jenkins had done 3 test diets which had various levels of vegetables and greens integrated.  The most extreme version was the Simian Diet in which participants needed to eat 63 servings of fruits and vegetables a day in order to maintain their body weight.  This would be about 9-10 hours of eating, a total of 5.5 kg of food in and 1 kg of feces out a day (constipation is not a problem in this diet). 

A lunch of acorn squash stuffed with a wild rice mixture and steamed brussel sprouts and carrots was served to us. All local!  And we ended up sitting at a table of nutrition graduate students and the woman behind Spoonriver (a local foods restaurant in Minneapolis) - Brenda Langton.  I asked Brenda about the local foods served at Spoonriver and she gave me the same answer that many local foods restaurants have that they serve local food when it is in season exclusively, but as the weather gets cold, they switch to a conventional diet.  I can see why restaurants want to avoid freezing, drying or canning foods if not necessary (because they can get it fresh from another source) but I would be really interested and excited to see a local foods restaurant that was year-round local. 

After lunch, Melissa Laska spoke about food public policy issues.  She had some interesting statistics:
_$517.7 billion is spent annually in the U.S. on food at home, whereas $445.1 billion is spent on food service.  This means we eat 42.4% of our food from restaurants and fast food. 
_Food accounts for 11.8% of our total incomes (much less than in almost every other country of the world) Families below the poverty line, however, spend about 20% of their income on food.
_Each household spends an average of $6,000 on food/year.

There were some shocking statistics on how much of our food is imported:
On average:
79% of fish
16% of wine/beer
32% of fruit/nuts
13% of vegetables
12% of grains
11% of sweets
11% of red meat

98% of our limes come from Mexico, 51% of our garlic comes from China, 8 countries account for 80% of spices.