I am aware that no university will award me an honorary doctorate for my work after choosing a title as scatological as the one that gives this book its name. But I have never aspired to go down in the history of nutrition, nor do I have the ambition to flaunt solemn titles in front of or behind my surnames. My goal is to reveal. That is to say, removing that veil that prevents us from seeing clearly that there are multimillionaire interests that persecute that we swallow food unworthy of being called that while we think that nothing is happening (“do they not sell it?”), that one day is a day (“I know which is not good, but [ponga aquí una excusa]… “), or that we eat ambrosia (“it is organic and enriched with 87 vitamins and 309 antioxidants!”). Also, of course, that we feel like social pests if we don’t gobble it up daily. It is a double-edged knife: there are those who feel bad for not eating it and those who suffer for doing so, because they know that it is not healthy. The very existence of this “food” makes us feel bad, whatever we do with it.
“Shit” according to the Royal Academy is “Badly done or poor quality thing” (fourth definition, in the dictionary). As I expand on in chapter XX, I recently came across a woman in a supermarket. Chocolate palm the size of Alaska at a ridiculous price and that covers, by itself, our daily caloric requirements (the energy we need for a whole day). Sugar, refined flour, unhealthy fat and salt, with a disastrous nutritional quality. Isn’t it a “poorly made or poor quality thing”? Of course it is. The problem is that this is not an exception. The problem is that, as we will see throughout this book, we live surrounded by shit. We buy it, we transport it, we store it… and we eat it. And that’s not the worst. The worst thing is that there are those who intend to inoculate the social imaginary with four terrifying ideas:
1.- that shit is nutritious and can even be healthy,
2.- that it is part of our historical and cultural heritage (“Cookies have always been eaten and we are not so bad…”),
3.- that if you don’t have a stash at home with a good dose, you are, at best, an eccentric maniac, an apprehensive antisocial, an inflexible radical or an orthorexic patient, and
4.- that if you don’t allow your children to eat it daily, you are going to turn them into outcasts, misfits and, above all, unhappy.
Right after its definition, the RAE offers us this example: “This umbrella is shit”. Reading it, I asked myself: Why is it right for the RAE to consider a poor quality umbrella to be “shit”, but why is it wrong for me to say that the unhealthy products that surround us are shit? As we will see, the nutritional quality of most of the food products that we have within our reach is poor. very bad
“I think”, then ill
At some point I thought of naming the book “We eat I think”. It makes sense, because we ingest a good part of our calories from mixtures of raw materials that are difficult to classify, as is the case with compound feed given to animals and regulated by article 15 of regulation 187/2002. But such feeds are not necessarily unhealthy, that is, they are not unsafe ultra-processed food products (I expand on this concept below) that are sold under the umbrella of current regulations, as is the case with the concoctions reviewed in this book. Nor do they contain huge amounts of substances designed to make it almost impossible for the animal to stop eating. The definition of the nutritional values of feed is more careful than that of junk food: bridging the gap in relation to other parameters, feed manufacturers specifically define the nutritional profile of their products, prioritizing factors that are discarded in the manufacture of many of the food products that constitute an essential part of the diet of many people. So I scrapped the idea.
Instead, I did want to modify Descartes’ well-known quote “I think, therefore I am”, because it allows for a fun play on words. On the one hand, “I think” makes us sick, as you will see in chapter 3. But, on the other hand, despite the fact that many of us believe that our thoughts will keep us from an unhealthy diet, the truth is that it is very difficult for them to achieve this. On the research “Parental freedom as a barrier against the advertising of unhealthy food products aimed at children”, coordinated by the lawyer Francisco José Ojuelos (author of the insurmountable epilogue of this book), it is justified that the knowledge of children, their mothers and fathers, the general population and even health professionals and legislators does not allow to face the explosive cocktail that surrounds us, made up of fuels such as the following:
- A huge offer of unhealthy products,
- predatory marketing,
- The inability of minors to protect themselves,
- Management of obsolete concepts by administrations,
- The disinterest of the courts, which have a double standard: one for the protection of consumers and another for the protection of commercial interests.
- A massive breach of food advertising rules, despite being made by the industry itself (can you imagine making your own rules, and then not abiding by them?).
The spark that lights the fuse of the explosive cocktail begins in early childhood, since the forces that conspire so that our children do not receive breast milk, but instead receive infant formula, are unkind and very powerful.
As much as we think, it is a huge effort to counteract the manipulated information we receive from feed manufacturers.
The Food Safety Trick
Every time someone blurts out “all the food we can buy today in developed countries is safe” a nutritionist dies somewhere in the world. Why? Because the common mortals interpret that they are innocuous. And it is not the same to talk about food security than about food safety. Food safety is what protects us, for example, from serious poisoning infections that not so long ago killed millions of people (I talk about food safety in chapter 3). But today we know, especially since the publication of the book The right of nutrition of the aforementioned lawyer Francisco José Ojuelos, that a “safe” food from a microbiological point of view may not be from a health point of view. Especially if it has a high amount of so-called “critical nutrients” (such as salt, free sugars or fats of low nutritional quality). And that’s where the concept of “nutritional safety” comes in. Ojuelos explains, in his article “For food science and technology in favor of full safety: some notes from the Law“, what:
“[…] The global food legislator did not face a critical nutrient-high unsafety problem at the dawn of codification. Today, however, an important part of the offer is made up of unhealthy products. Our food law is designed to deal with biotic and abiotic agents that lead to food contamination, including the natural presence of pathogens within the concept of ‘contamination’”.
I explain the above because we are all very close to skilled shellmen who, after calculated conjurer movements, ask us in which cup is the little ball labeled with the words “food safety”. When they raise the cup they will congratulate us for having won the bet (“Congratulations, it was the one in the middle: ‘all foods are safe’”), without being aware that we have been victims of a trap. When we return home we will miss our wallet, stolen by the smuggler’s cronies, who surrounded us while we felt victorious. In the wallet there was no money but something much more valuable still: our health.
‘Eat Shit’. Julius Basult. Vergara, 2022. 327 pages. €18.90.
Julius Basult (@JulioBasulto_DN) is a Dietician-Nutritionist who tries to convince the world that eating badly is not compensated with a carrot. He also gives lectures, works as a teacher in several academic institutions, collaborates with different media and is the author of numerous scientific and informative publications (www.juliobasulto.com).
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