This episode of Inquiring Minds, a podcast hosted by bestselling author Chris Mooney and neuroscientist and musician Indre Viskontas, is guest-hosted by Cynthia Graber. It also features a discussion of the new popular physics book Trespassing on Einsteinâs Lawn, by Amanda Gefter, and new research suggesting that the purpose of sleep is to clean cellular waste substances out of your brain.
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The paleo diet is hot. Those who follow it are attempting, they say, to mimic our ancient ancestors â minus the animal-skin fashions and the total lack of technology, of course. The adherents eschew what they believe comes from modern agriculture (wheat, dairy, legumes, for instance) and rely instead on meals full of meat, nuts, and vegetables â foods they claim are closer to what hunter-gatherers ate.
The trouble with that view, however, is that what theyâre eating is probably nothing like the diet of hunter-gatherers, says Michael Pollan, author of a number of best-selling books on food and agriculture, including Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation. âI donât think we really understand ⊠well the proportions in the ancient diet,â argues Pollan on the latest episode of the Inquiring Minds podcast (stream below). âMost people who tell you with great confidence that this is what our ancestors ate â I think theyâre kind of blowing smoke.â
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The wide-ranging interview with Pollan covered the science and history of cooking, the importance of microbes â tiny organisms such as bacteria â in our diet, and surprising new research on the intelligence of plants. Here are five suggestions he offered about cooking and eating well.
1. Meat: Itâs not always for dinner. Cooking meat transforms it: Roasting it or braising it for hours in liquid unlocks complex smells and flavors that are hard to resist. In addition to converting it into something we crave, intense heat also breaks down the meat into nutrients that we can more easily access. Our ancient ancestors likely loved the smell of meat on an open fire as much as we do.
Ken Light
But human populations in different regions of the world ate a variety of diets. Some ate more; some ate less. They likely ate meat only when they could get it, and then they gorged. Richard Wrangham, author of Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human, says diets from around the world ranged greatly in the percentage of calories from meat. Itâs not cooked meat that made us human, he says, but rather cooked food.
In any case, says Pollan, todayâs meat is nothing like that of the hunter-gatherer.
One problem with the paleo diet is that âtheyâre assuming that the options available to our caveman ancestors are still there,â he argues. But âunless youâre willing to hunt your food, theyâre not.â
As Pollan explains, the animals bred by modern agriculture â which are fed artificial diets of corn and grains, and beefed up with hormones and antibiotics â have nutritional profiles far from wild game.
Pastured animals, raised on diets of grass and grubs, are closer to their wild relatives; even these, however, are nothing like the lean animals our ancestors ate.
So, basically, enjoy meat in moderation, and choose pastured meat if possible.
2. Humans can live on bread alone. Paleo obsessives might shun bread, but bread, as it has been traditionally made, is a healthy way to access a wide array of nutrients from grains.
In Cooked, Pollan describes how bread might have been first created: Thousands of years ago, someone probably in ancient Egypt discovered a bubbling mash of grains and water, the microbes busily fermenting what would become dough. And unbeknownst to those ancient Egyptians, the fluffy, delicious new substance had been transformed by those microbes. Suddenly the grains provided even more bang for the bite.
As UC-Davis food chemist Bruce German told Pollan in an interview, âYou could not survive on wheat flour. But you can survive on bread.â Microbes start to digest the grains, breaking them down in ways that free up more of the healthful parts. If bread is compared to another method of cooking flour â basically making it into porridge â âbread is dramatically more nutritious,â says Pollan.
Still, common bread made from white flour and commercial yeast doesnât have the same nutritional content as the slowly fermented and healthier sourdough bread you might find at a local baker. Overall, though, bread can certainly be part of a nutritious diet. (At least, for those who donât suffer from celiac disease.)
3. Eat more microbes. Microbes play a key role not just in bread, but in all sorts of fermented foods: beer, cheese, yogurt, kimchi, miso, sauerkraut, pickles. Thousands â even hundreds â of years ago, before electricity made refrigeration widely available, fermentation was one of the best means of preserving foods.
And now we know that microbes, such as those in our gut, play a key role in our health, as well. The microbes we eat in foods like pickles may not take up a permanent home in our innards; rather, they seem to be more akin to transient visitors, says Pollan. Still, âfermented foods provide a lot of compounds that gut microbes like,â and he says he makes sure to eat some fermented vegetables every day.
4. Raw food is for the birds (too much of it, anyway). Thereâs paleo, and then thereâs the raw diet. Folks who eat raw tout the health benefits of the approach, saying that theyâre accessing the full, complete nutrients available because theyâre not heating, and thus destroying, their dinner. But thatâs simply wrong. We cook to get our hands on more nutrients, not fewer. According to Wrangham, the one thing absolutely all cultures have in common is that they cook their food. He points out that women who move towards 100 percent raw diets often stop ovulating, because even if in theory theyâre tossing sufficient food into the blender to fulfill their caloric needs, they simply canât absorb enough from the uncooked food.
Our hefty cousins, the apes, spend half their waking hours gnawing on raw sustenance, about six hours per day. In contrast, we spend only one hour. âSo in a sense, cooking opens up this space for other activities,â says Pollan. âItâs very hard to have culture, itâs very hard to have science, itâs very hard to have all the things we count as important parts of civilization if youâre spending half of all your waking hours chewing.â Cooked food: It gave us civilization.
5. Want to be healthy? Cook. Pollan says the food industry has done a great job of convincing eaters that corporations can cook better than we can. The problem is, itâs not true. And the food that others cook is nearly always less healthful than that which we cook ourselves.
âPart of the problem is that weâve been isolated as cooks for too long,â says Pollan. âI found that to the extent you can make cooking itself a social experience, it can be a lot more fun.â
But how can we convince folks to give it a try? âI think we have to lead with pleasure,â he says. Aside from the many health benefits, cooking is also âone of the most interesting things humans know how to do and have done for a very long time. And we get that, or we wouldnât be watching so much cooking on TV. There is something fascinating about it. But itâs even more fascinating when you do it yourself.â
This story was produced as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.
