Paths to healthy eating

The topic of healthy living by avoiding processed food has drawn renewed interest in recent months in the US because of President Donald Trump’s selection of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. (RFK) as the Secretary of Health and Human Services in his cabinet. RFK was known for fighting the major food companies in his past career as an attorney. He is a strong advocate against processed food and food additives; he also believes that USDA has been easy on the food industry allowing them to prioritize profit over people’s health.

I didn’t even know the word “processed food” when I was growing up in India. We had no refrigerator, and our domestic help went to the bazaar every day to buy groceries. While living in the US, I have been hearing for the past several decades that processed food is bad for our health. Now India has also entered this market. I do not know how much processed food is consumed in the country, but India reportedly exports processed food to more than 100 regions world-wide, mainly because of migration of Indians to foreign countries and acceptance of Indian food in other countries.

Advertisement

However, processed Indian food has some nutritional value because of the use of whole grains, legumes, beneficial spices and vegetables. The immediate questions are: What is processed food?, Why is it bad for our health? and Why do we even process the food? Here are the answers in the simplest layman’s language. Processed food is a generic name to indicate that food has been changed from its natural original state. There are two main types of processing: a) altering the food, which includes cutting, peeling, chopping, grinding, crushing, smashing, freezing, packaging, and so on, and b) adding some artificial ingredient to natural food for the purpose of making it more flavourful or lengthening its shelf-life or to ensure that food retains its structure.

Hormones injected into animals and birds to speed up their growth fall in the second category. Sometimes colour is added to food just to make it attractive to consumers. It is harmful because our body does not know how to deal with anything artificial. At a molecular level, there is a friendly interaction between cells in our body and molecules of natural food, be it vegetables or proteins in meat and fish. A foreign synthetic molecule or even molecule of food that has been significantly altered does not interact with natural organic molecules in a normal way. It is almost like introducing aliens or severely altered human species in a mass gathering of normal human beings.

There would be no usual interactions with this strange intruder in that case. As a result, the normal functioning of the body is disrupted, paving the way for various diseases, including diabetes, cancer, high blood pressure, high cholesterol, dementia, obesity etc. Processed food is especially harmful to children because their bodies are in a developing stage and need all the nutrients for healthy growth. This results not only in physical issues but also impacts their emotional development causing stress, anxiety and depression. Shockingly, in the US, 80 per cent of food consumed by children is processed food. In rural areas, people subsist on natural food: fruits and vegetables from the farm, fish from rivers and lakes and meat from poultry and butcher shops.

There is no need for refrigerators or packaging the food. Food processing is intimately connected with urbanization which requires food to be available in smaller quantities on an as-needed basis from grocery stores and preserved for an extended period in a refrigerator or freezer. This avoids frequent trips to buy groceries which are inconvenient because of lack of time, money or transportation. Of course, one can shop for organic and natural foods even in urban areas, but an economic factor kicks in. Any handling of food not done by automated machines requires manual labour which is expensive in western countries. Furthermore, it is necessary to ship food from where it is grown, usually in a different part of the country and sometimes even a different country to urban areas in a cost-effective way.

That necessitates cutting and packaging in various boxes and containers, as well as adding various preservatives. Some additives are deliberately put in food for making it artificially tasty (such as fruit flavors) or worse, addictive to the consuming public. For example, sugar is added to almost every food – even crackers and potato chips – to make the public addicted so that they eat more. RFK has targeted this latter category of food processing as his first order of business and that is a good start. However, achieving major goals like replacing junk food by fruits in school menus would probably be financially prohibitive. RFK might settle by restricting his agenda on food to changing dietary guidelines, relabeling of food packaging and making changes in USDA.

There is already a movement, labelled “Make America Healthy Again” (MAHA) in progress and even many liberals who cannot stand Trump have joined in. Is it even possible to get rid of processed food from our everyday diet, especially diets of children? Unfortunately, I do not see how that can be done in existing urban areas. However, when we have the opportunity to design a new city from ground zero, we can plan for green areas just like parks and lakes and label them “community farms”. Members of the community can grow vegetables and keep chickens, goats, etc there. They can share labour and expenses involved in buying seeds and fertilizers and reaping the output.

The members of the community can also hold frequent “farmer’s’ markets”. A more fundamental change is possible by going back to Gandhiji’s “self-sufficient village” (SSV) concept (“Gram Swaraj”), even though it sounds like an obsolete idea in the modern age of fast living and international trade. In Gandhiji’s vision, an entire state or a country can be divided into large numbers of these SSVs whose charter would be to manage themselves. The village itself will take care of education, food supply, housing, employment, security, infrastructure and all other public services for all its residents without relying on others.

Each SSV can have farmlands, and it would be straightforward to supply fresh vegetables and meat/fish products to all the residents without processing the food. If the SSVs are small enough in area, there would be no need to package, transport and refrigerate. Perhaps, Trump’s tariff war is a blessing in disguise because it would discourage shipping of processed food across the globe. However, we must keep in mind that processed food is not the only cause of detrimental effects on our body.

Others include pollution in air and water, impurities in food not related to processing as well as a variety of personal genetic traits and habits. I am fortunate that I survived and lived a productive life eating mostly processed food. I believe the reason to be my first twenty-three years spent in India on natural organic food, thus giving me a resilient foundation and immunity that lasted a lifetime. My advice to my fellow Indians: “Do not follow Western culture when it comes to food. Be thankful that you are in a country where natural food is still easily accessible and affordable”.

(The writer, a physicist who worked in industry and academia, is a Bengali settled in America.)