The kids normally have breakfast at 7.30. I make eggs – soft boiled, scrambled or an omelette – sliced cucumber, toast with butter and a bowl of yoghurt on the side. Whether I eat too depends on how much I ate the previous night – and how late.
Last year, I decided I’d skip breakfast altogether. I was reading everywhere about the benefits of intermittent fasting (IF) and it didn’t feel like a huge sacrifice. Apparently, if I managed to avoid food for 16 hours, half of it spent sleeping anyway, I was more likely to sustain weight loss compared with following any other diet. On top of that, fasting periods are said to allow the body to repair cells and, as a result, help to reduce the risk of heart disease, diabetes, general inflammation, memory loss, Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s and other maladies.
So much gain for so little pain; it would be silly not to, right? And it did, for a while, give me that satisfying feeling of an empty stomach, a kind of lightness and a sense that I’d instantaneously lost weight, even before I’d shed a single kilogram. Looking in the mirror, my belly seemed flatter.
After a few days, I noticed that as soon as the 16-hour fast was up, I was starving. I had to have something, immediately. At 10, I had a handful of nuts and an apple, just to keep me going. It was not enough, so I had more nuts at 11 and then the big meal that I “earned” through fasting at 12.30pm. Unfortunately, my job involves trying food throughout the day, which meant that by 3pm I felt too full to work. All I wanted was to lie down and sleep, for ever. Having a wholesome meal at 6pm, before going on the next fast, was a small torture.
I ended up gaining weight. My belly now looked plumper than when I started. The irony is that before hearing about IF and its benefits, I wasn’t thinking that much about my size. Yes, I always wanted to shrink my belly and its associates, the love handles, but it was far from an obsession. Now, suddenly, it was. In short, intermittent fasting messed with my brain and contributed zilch to my physique.
I may be overegging the effect of this fleeting episode, but it serves to make a point. We have all been there. With turmeric and avocado, fermented foods, superfoods, low-fat, just fat, an apple a day, five a day, the Mediterranean diet, keto, paleo, protein. The list goes on and my memory isn’t sharp enough (do I need more oily fish?) to recall half of it. But the impossible length of this list goes to show how ephemeral these dieting diktats are.
It seems to me that if we stopped for one second and allowed ourselves to ignore all this noise, and instead follow the well-established routines we grew up with surrounding cooking and eating, we wouldn’t need such “solutions”. Eating regimes foster self-doubt where there is no need for it. They make us overthink our relationship with food instead of just living it. The world of diets is a trap that locks you in by messing with your head.
The trouble is that there is much to be said for many of these notions. Who would deny the goodness of vegetables or the benefits of fermented foods for our guts? The idea of taking a break from eating for a good few hours every day also makes sense. That’s what our hunter-gatherer ancestors did and they didn’t suffer from our cardiovascular conditions. The point is, adopting a “regime” comes at a cost, there’s a balance to disrupt.
As 21st-century humans, we are always on the lookout for simple ideas that would solve all our problems and eradicate the constant anxiety we suffer. For the past few decades, it seems that nutrition has been the fount of many such simple notions. Mental health, physical health, longevity, wellbeing – everything can be fixed if we sort out our diets.
Others have already pointed out that the problem lies with equating food with nutrients. Nutrients alone don’t make you healthy, but food can make you healthy – and you can also be unhealthy even if you eat an incredibly “healthy” diet.
The American thinker Michael Pollan pointed this out with prophetic clarity in the late 00s, when the media, scientists and food manufacturers were colluding in promoting an ideology he describes as “nutritionism”. The term relates to the unexamined acceptance that food is just the sum of its nutrients. Chicken thigh, potato salad, hummus or a cookie are described using terms such as carbohydrate, protein, saturated fat, fibre, vitamin C or amino acids. This way, we can look right through them. We can forget about food and talk about things that are easy to define, prescribe and sell.
This is completely wrong.
It has been shown, time and again, that our understanding of nutrients is always superficial and partial. For a long time, it was assumed that we can conceive of everything in terms of just three categories: carbohydrates, proteins and fats. Later on, vitamins and the importance of fibre were discovered. This doesn’t even scrape the surface. The deeper we dig, the more we realise how complex our foods are. Pollan lists more than 30 antioxidants in garden thyme alone.
We have a limited idea about all the elements that make our food and, more importantly, we really don’t understand the myriad intricate ways in which they interact with each other and with our bodies, which are all different and have particular needs.
The desire to reduce food to nutrients and then come up with the right set of those as a solution to our daily needs assumes that there isn’t something out there to fulfil those needs. And there is. It is simply food with ingredients that are recognisable and aren’t excessively messed with. I know that the definition of ultra-processed foods, a category that’s much discussed right now, isn’t clearly agreed on yet, but we all know them when we see them.
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Low-fat yoghurts, for example, where fat has been substituted with starches and sugars in order to conform with an orthodoxy that’s been dominating our lives since the late 1970s, are a perfect instance of how nutritionism fails us, colossally. Replacing one “bad” nutrient (fat) with another “good” one (starch) has, most likely, been a major culprit in making us fatter and less healthy.
Yet, even if we accept that nutrients tell a very partial story and that we should probably be talking about a potato, and not about carbohydrates and fibre in isolation, we need to understand that the food we eat, the meals we enjoy, are all part of our very particular cultures, culinary traditions and circumstances.
You would be surprised to hear that even the Mediterranean diet riles me. I don’t dispute that fruit, vegetables, nuts and olive oil are great choices. I eat them all the time and my desert island food is, probably, a Greek salad – tomato juices, olive oil, vinegar, bits of onion – mopped up with fresh bread. The trouble with the Mediterranean diet is that most of us don’t live in Crete, and we don’t necessarily have access to all the fresh ingredients that are cultivated there.
The idea that we can transform our diet in a radical way to make things simple – nutrients, Mediterranean, healthy, happy, satisfied – is an illusion. There aren’t simple solutions.
What we eat and when needs to be removed from most conversations about health. We need to reclaim our meals from the field of nutrition and take them back to the realm of human interaction, of conviviality, culture and the daily activities that define us as humans. As I said, we don’t need food solutions, we have them! They are called meals and recipes; they are called a birthday cake.
The breakfast that I was so willing to give up in favour of intermittent fasting has proved itself for millennia as an effective way to sustain us and to mark the beginning of the day with a social gathering. If I forgo breakfast, what do I replace it with? Isn’t it just like the fat in the yoghurt? Give it up at your peril.
The solution to the bogus question of what to feed ourselves is in front of our eyes. It comes in the form of roast chicken with roasted potatoes. It’s joyful, intuitive cooking: beans on toast, a cheesy omelette, dal with rice, a quick salad or a slow stew. We all know these things. We don’t need to break them down into nutrients or question their credentials.
We know best what we need to eat – and when. The food our parents cooked for us, the meals we made together, the things that come naturally, instinctively, as we walk into the kitchen. That’s what we should be cooking and eating. If we slow down, spend time gathering real ingredients and paying attention as we cook them, we’re already there.
Cook for yourself, cook for others, invite them over, give them a bowl of soup. The rest will follow.