More About the Food for Your Whole Life Symposium

Last week I wrote about a symposium I attended that was sponsored by California Walnuts. There were five excellent speakers, and Dr. David Katz, the founding director of Yale University's Prevention Research Center spoke first. He told us that we should be looking at the overall quality of the foods we choose, rather than focusing on single nutrients, and he gave us fats as an example. For the last several decades we've teased foods apart and focused on the fat content. First all fat was bad, then a few years later, polyunsaturated fats were supposed to be all good and saturated fats were branded as all bad. But them, researchers found that some polyunsaturated fats (the omega-6's) are not so good for us when they're way out of balance with the omega-3s. And turning polyunsaturated fats into trans fats was worse than the original saturated we wanted to replace.

And what about those saturated fats? It looks like some types of saturated fats, like stearic acid, aren't as bad for us as we thought, although myristic and palmitic acids probably still are. Meanwhile, every few years we've been faced with strange new formulations of processed foods that had some, or all, of the fats or sugars removed, depending upon which type of diet was trendy.

It's important to understand how different fats work in your body, of course, and sugars too; but maybe it's time to step back and just look at the foods we buy for their total nutrition (including vitamins and minerals) rather than pick foods based on single nutrients. We know some foods, like walnuts, are good for us. Maybe it's the monounsaturated fats, maybe it's the polyphenols, or the amount of protein, but as long as it's good for us, and hasn't got any added chemicals with names we can't pronounce, who cares? It's good for us, just as it is.

Like Dr. Katz told us, "the active ingredient of a walnut... is probably the walnut."

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