I heard about this book on my favorite podcast (Stuff You Should Know) and I downloaded the audiobook version to my phone from our library website (a first! I figured out how to do it!). It was super interesting and I really enjoyed listening to it. The main premise really struck me: Schatzker's thesis is that the current obesity epidemic is caused not by the unhealthy ingredients in foods, but instead by the lack of natural flavor in foods, which means that most foods (even foods like raw meat and chicken, and even fruits and veggies) are only getting their flavor by chemicals being added by food scientists. (Like Doritos, everything is over-flavored now.) He strongly makes the claim that our bodies have natural nutritional wisdom, where our bodies crave the foods that give us the nutrients we need, but only if the flavors we eat match the nutrients we are eating. All foods taste blander now than they did even fifty or sixty years ago, because they have been bred for yield and bug resistance and not flavor, and this blander food requires the addition of flavoring to make them palatable. Since so many of the foods we eat have added flavorings that make them taste like what they're not, our bodies are totally thrown off and we end up eating and needing more and more. When we eat things that are truly flavorful, we are fully satisfied by the end of the meal and don't need to keep eating and eating. And as an added bonus, truly flavorful foods in nature are also the most nutritious, as all of the chemicals that provide taste in foods also are linked to the vitamins and minerals and nutrients in each of those foods.
Near the end of the book, he summarizes his points with these three statements:
1. Humans are flavor seeking animals. The pleasure provided by food, which we experience as flavor, is so powerful that only the most strong-willed among us can resist it.
2. In nature, there is an intimate connection between flavor and nutrition.
3. Synthetic flavor technology not only breaks that connection, it also confounds it.
I was very interested in a lot of the research that he discusses in the book. He talks a lot about the experiments done by a researcher at Utah State with sheep and goats, and proving that nutritional wisdom truly does exist. The most interesting study that stood out to me was in 1926 when a woman took fifteen children and for six years let them eat whatever they wanted from a list of 34 foods that provided a balance of nutrients (fruits, veggies, meat, etc.). The children naturally fed themselves balanced diets, even as their preferences and needs changed. Their bodies knew what nutrients they needed, proving that anyone can be a nutritionist if their bodies can make the connection between what they're eating and what's in it.
Schatzker suggests that you avoid eating things with flavorings (which means processed foods, plus a whole lot of other "natural" foods), but I think that's pretty difficult to do when you don't have farmer's markets easily accessible and lots of money to put towards buying heirloom chickens or tomatoes. Maybe someday we could have chickens, but not now. I really enjoyed this book and the perspective he included (he seemed very balanced and not super aggressive against Big Agriculture, just a little bit), although the last chapter really bugged me. He ended the book with a big meal made of all these heirloom foods he'd talked about through the book, and dragged out how dramatic it was to get the meal ready at the same time, and blah blah blah. It was pretty annoying. But I appreciated his overall argument nonetheless.
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