First off, reiterating that a diet is supposed to be something you eat on a regular basis --- part of your lifestyle --- not just something you follow for a few weeks to take off a few pounds. And that there's nothing wrong with eating healthfully most of the time while allowing the the occassional "indulgence"... deprivation is just asking for trouble. But today i'm also somewhat incorporating the supplements/nutraceuticals industry into my rant about diets...
Too many "diets" out there declare war on one nutrient or another. No one dietary component (fat, carbs, sodium, whathaveyou) or particular food is the "enemy." Conversely, there is no miracle food or nutrient, either. You need all essential nutrients in moderation for proper metabolism, and a variety of healthful foods is necessary for optimum health. Nutrition should primarily be coming from whole foods, not pills or potions or powders. I abhor the fact that most "health food" stores are little more than vitamin shops. Some foods are better for you than others, and you certainly don't want to risk nutritional deficiency. But go overboard on anything(*cough*including*cough*protein) and you're looking for trouble. As for orthomolecular therapy (taking megadoses of vitamin supplements), it's true that people's needs for various nutrients vary greatly, and i sometimes wonder if the RDA's for certain nutrients are a little lower than are necessary for optimum health. Yet I don't know of many people who need a few thousand times the RDA of anything!
And I hate that scientists notice that a particular food or herb seems to have a certain benefit, and automatically search for some specific chemical that they can isolate, package into a pill or powder, and sell it. What the fruitcake? How do you know it's that particular component that does what it does? How do you know it doesn't have to work with other components of that food or herb in order to function properly? (Vitamin C works best when partnered with bioflavonoids.) How do you know that taking that nutrient in isolation, without the context of the whole food, isn't going to be ineffective at best, or at worst downright harmful? (Smokers taking synthetic beta-carotene supplements have a higher risk of lung cancer --- but the reverse is true if they eat carotenoid-rich foods.) Why not just encourage people to eat more whole foods rich in the nutrient in question?
Oh, that's right. We're a country obsessed with popping pills.
Fortified foods, meh, I can understand that somewhat; you're adding to what's already there. But I don't particularly trust "enriched" products, like flour and other refined grains. If you think about it, it's rather absurd. They get rid of the bran and the germ where all the good stuff is, and because this causes nutritional deficiencies, they're required by law to put some of it back in. Therein lies the rub: the food processors are required to add back some of the nutrients lost in the refining proces, but not all. For example, chromium (needed for proper glucose metabolism) is found in whole foods, including grains, but gets stripped away during processing. You don't see them adding it back into your bread. (This combined with the fact that refined grains have high glycemic loads, is why people who eat so much refined carbohydrate have problems with insulin resistance and related problems. That's the only thing those "low carb" diets have going for them... but i've already done that rant). You also don't see them adding back in the plethora of phytonutrients --- the cancer-fighting qualities of the grains --- back after processing. Riboflavin, one of the B vitamins, doesn't get added back into white rice, either.
Maybe it's a little "primitive" but I still believe in the spiritual or magical qualities of food. Those aren't quite the right words, but they're the best ones i can come up with for now. Since i'm a student of nutrition and have to believe that vitamins and minerals are important, i tend to think that mybe these special qualities manifest themselves physically as chemical nutrients that work together in concert to produce effects in the living beings that consume them. (It's fascinating that organically grown produce has higher levels of phytonutrients than conventionally-grown counterparts. Perhaps there are some metaphysical implications to using synthetic pesticides and sewer sludge on crops, just as these poisons have tangible effects on the environment.) Even if you want to get "scientific" and reductionistic about it, the white coats in the nutraceutical industry still haven't been able to isolate all of the phytochemicals. And I don't think they ever will.
I'm not saying that supplementation is a bad thing... in some cases a little "boost" is necessary, especially considering the depletion of our soil and the fact that some vitamins are deactivated by cooking. But I sometimes fear that in our age of "Better Living Through Chemistry," we forget that the foods we eat are so much more than just the sum of their chemical parts.
