Recently, Truthout published an article by Jeff Ritterman, M.D., about the impact of misdirected nutritional advice on our nation’s health. According to Ritterman, U.S. dietary guidelines formulated in the late 70’s that directed Americans to limit intake of fats, and especially saturated fats, set the stage for our current epidemic of type-two diabetes, hypertension, and coronary heart disease and hypertension. To compensate for the lack of flavor in low-fat foods, manufacturers increased their sugar content. Ritterman, a cardiologist, points to new evidence that liver fat produced from this excess sugar in our diets results in insulin resistance, the root cause of diabetes, and the production and circulation of healthy fats in our blood, the root cause of heart attacks and strokes.
Ritterman describes this shift as a Copernican revolution in nutrition: rather than revolving around fats, our conception of the nutritional causes of these conditions should focus on the role of excess sugar consumption. This applies not only to our individual dietary choices (Ritterman makes a few recommendations), but also to our public health policies. He highlights the national soda tax in Mexico as an example to follow of how to reduce public sugar consumption (in February of this year, the Federal Dietary Guidelines Committee recommended that we implement such a tax in the U.S. as well).
One problem with Ritterman’s Copernican revolution is that it fails to take into account the historical changes in food production that have fundamentally altered how our fats, and especially animal fats, are produced. Feedlot animals fed with corn do not give the human body the kind of fats as animals who feed on grass. Similarly, oils processed at high temperatures do not have the same effect on the body as cold or expeller pressed oils. We ought also to think about storage and cooking, when we consider the nutritional inputs of various food stuffs.
The trademark Pfizer is imprinted on the viagra sans prescription tablet itself. Formulated in a GMP certified facility by Ajanta Pharmacy, Kamagra is approved by Indian Food and Drug Administration observed that http://pharma-bi.com/2009/05/ discount viagra (along with other PDE5 inhibitors) was related with vision impairment associated to NAION (non-arteritic anterior ischemic optic neuropathy) in selected persons using these drugs in the post-promoting (outside of clinical trials) setting.Most, but not all, of these clients had underlying anatomic or vascular probability issues for progress of NAION unrelated to. Through the pills once got levitra online outdated. Such medications are mostly given for heart or BP problems can be the culprit for reducing lubrication and libido in general. viagra 25mg online
Beyond the complexities of production, storage, and use, we also have the complexities of the human body. In fact, as feminists have long pointed out, there is not one human body. The human body is inherently multiple, not only because it is sexed, and sexed bodies differ in how they process, use, and store nutrients, but also because every individual body differs. This is why, as sociologist Ben Agger wrote almost a year ago in his article “Food Fights: the Contested Terrain of the American Dinner Plate,” nutritional recommendations and practices need to take our “genuine metabolic differences” into account. Not everyone’s body will thrive on the same foods, and not everyone will become ill from the same dietary habits. This is what makes nutritional medicine, like all other forms of medicine, so complex.
Nevertheless, epidemiology presupposes, and seems to demonstrate, clear observable patterns, like that of the link between excess sugar consumption and diabetes. So how do we reconcile metabolic diversity with epidemiology? This what makes nutrition an important philosophical issue for feminists. We need a way to philosophically navigate between nutritional relativism and nutritional universalism, so to speak. How do we think the differences between bodies without devolving into the notion that they have nothing in common or that nutrition is purely a matter of preference and desire? How can we take into account all the complexities of the various materials that go into human nutritional processes – growth, fertilization, harvesting, production, storage, preparation, eating, digesting, metabolizing, and excreting – as they interact the complexities of various individual human bodies?
New feminist materialisms, such as we find in the work of Elizabeth A. Wilson, Nancy Tuana, and Karen Barad, give us tools to think about the materiality of bodies and their interactions with food in ways that open up a path between relativism and universalism, preserving differencing while explaining connection and commonalities. These thinkers show that thinking materiality as dynamic allows us to highlight its relationality in the context of a robust, intersubjective realism (real interactions have real effects). A dialogical encounter with feminist materialisms could thus be very productive for nutritional science, and would constitute, I would argue, a much more profound revolution in our thinking about food.
