Basic Nutrition

BOOKS on nutrition tend to be either highly technical, that is to say full of impressive biochemistry which is not really essential for the household and kitchen manager, or they set out to rescue us from one or another kind of starvation by filling us up with amino acids, vitamins, and minerals on the debatable thesis that we are all dying from "hidden hunger". Usually the sins of excessive nutrition are lightly treated in regard to calories and ignored in regard to fats; in other words books on nutrition too often slight the very problems which should be of most concern to us at present.

The elements of good general nutrition must not be neglected, however, in our concern about fat food, fat people, and the art of cookery. A brief summary of basic nutritional facts, oriented towards the purposes of this book, is provided here. Though we have tried to provide automatic assurance of attaining general nutritional excellence in the recommendations and menus in this book, nothing takes the place of understanding. If you wish more details, the References at the end of this book are recommended.

Since the art of cookery and the science of nutrition emphasize different values and for the most part appeal to different temperaments, a happy marriage of the two will not come about until cooks and gourmets on the one hand and nutritionists on the other admit that neither of their specialities alone is enough for the truly civilized man. There is more than a little antagonism between White Coat in the laboratory, whose best efforts sometimes threaten to end up only as an ideal mixture for growing rats, and White Hat in the kitchen, who is sometimes irresponsible about health and whose delightful concoctions may put blubber on our bodies and clog our arteries.

The triumphs of nutrition consist in discovering the chemical entities in foods and the way in which they are converted into fuel for energy and into the very substance of our bodies. "Mann ist was er isst," "Man is what he eats," as Goethe said, and the universal acceptance of this aphorism means that, like the oracles of Delphi, each of us can interpret it to fit his personal bent. Man is a good deal more than a collection of chemicals, and life is more than a sequence of anabolism (growth), metabolic steady state, and catabolism (breakdown). But unless the collection of chemicals is nicely balanced and the metabolism so well ordered as to be unobtrusive, we are not free for the cerebral and aesthetic pursuits in which we can be contemptuous of unadorned nutrients. The continuance of life in at least a reasonable state of health is pre-requisite to the cultivation of any of the arts, including cookery.

Given an abundant supply of natural foods in great variety, human instinct would undoubtedly select a pretty good diet were it not for man's irrepressible ingenuity. With great skill he invents ways of storing and preparing foods that make for convenience and economy but sometimes involve loss of nutritional values as well as changes in flavour. And, let us face it, a good deal of the art of cookery goes into the solution of the problem of persuading people to eat more than they need or want. Finally, the diets we might naturally select are distorted by a host of customs and ideas that once may have made some sense but now bear no relation to either nutritional or gustatory values.

Religious taboos cling to us, though British people suffer less from them than do East Indians, South Sea Islanders, and many other peoples. Far more pernicious are the universal habits of measuring food value in terms of food expense and of equating luxury in foods with the least effort in chewing and swallowing them. Finally, our modern diets may reflect the commercial interests of food processors whose advertising copywriters are sometimes more persuasive than accurate.

Calories

The calorie, which is a dirty word in some families, is simply a measure of heat energy. The energy value of the food we eat is either stored as body fat for later conversion, or it is burned in the body - "metabolized" is the technical word - to produce heat and muscular work which is calculated as heat. The basic nutrients used in this way are carbohydrates, fats, and proteins, represented in their purest forms in ordinary foods by the examples of sugar and cornflour, by lard and salad oil, and by cottage cheese and egg white, respectively.

In the dried form, free of water, carbohydrates and proteins supply about four calories per gramme (114 calories per ounce) while the same weight of fats supplies about nine calories (256 calories per ounce). Weight for weight, olive oil or lard supply somewhat more calories than coal and slightly fewer than fuel oil when they are burned in a suitable furnace. The special feature about foods is that the body can burn them.

Since most of the carbohydrate we eat is in the form of potatoes, bread, and other cereal products in which water accounts for a good deal of the weight, the addition to such foods of even modest amounts of fats and oils, which contain little or no water, greatly increases the calorie content. Take a medium-sized baked potato (1/3 pound), add three pats of butter (3/4 ounce) and the calories go up 250 per cent (125 + 188 = 313 calories).

Most so-called "protein foods" are actually low carbohydrate foods and their main calorie content is in fats, not proteins. The fat calories are more than double the protein calories in whole milk and in whole eggs; three-fourths of the calories in a mutton chop may be fat calories. The more of these "high protein" foods we use and the more we add fats and oils to our diets, the more concentrated in calories become our diets. To some extent this is offset by the high satiety value of fats. If you would be "filled up" by a half pound of carbohydrate, you probably would reach the same level of satiety with a good deal less than half a pound of fat.

Calories are in bad repute lately but most of the history of mankind has been a struggle to get enough calories and many of the world's peoples could use more than they get. Besides, calorie satisfaction is the only pleasure to be had daily at every age from birth to the end of old age. (To this solitary universal pleasure a cynical philosopher could add the pleasure of excretion !) The real difficulty is that sedentary modern life reduces calorie expenditure to such a low level that even indulgence in a modest degree of calorie satisfaction may lead to obesity.

Obesity is discussed in a separate chapter. Here it is enough to note that obesity is always the result of taking in more food calories than the calories expended as work and heat. In terms of energy, a calorie is a calorie, equally capable of inducing obesity, no matter what the source, but proteins, fats and carbohydrates, the three components of our food energy, are physiologically very different in other respects.