Feminism and the S.A.D.

The connection between feminism and the Standard American Diet (appropriately referred to as S.A.D.), may not seem apparent to most. Bear with me in this rather long piece, as I belabor to make the point in showing this connection, and how it's contributed to so much ill health in America today.

Laura Wood, The Thinking Housewife, wrote a short post in which she quoted a Salon.com feminist's reaction to a great article by Michael Pollen in the New York Review of Book, The Food Movement, Rising.

The feminist's complaint?

Michael Pollan blames the movement for our fast-food culture. What about untold men who've never tied on an apron?

Laura Wood responded to the feminists complaint humorously:

Men have been doing nothing all these years while women slaved away in the kitchen. Here’s an all-points bulletin: Do not accept a dinner invitation from anyone named Anna Clark. Unless you like chicken nuggets.

While I found Laura's quip in response hilarious, these two articles have a lot more content worthy of consideration. Pollan's first mention of how the feminist movement changed the food culture of America was to tie it to the rise of fast food:

Besides drawing women into the work force, falling wages made fast food both cheap to produce and a welcome, if not indispensable, option for pinched and harried families.

Of course it did. Women who chase the chimera of "having it all" live in denial of the fact that their are only so many hours in a day, and when you invest your time in one area - like your career - you simply don't have the time to dedicate to the other areas of your life, like homemaking and cooking. This is common sense. Than again, no one would accuse feminists for having an abundance of that particular virtue...

Many anti-feminists correctly recognize that feminist ideology is essentially a cult-like belief with articles of faith that are accepted at face value without question...and if any facts or evidence is presented that contradicts a feminist tenet, than the facts or evidence must surely be wrong, falsified, or just not relevant. The standard method of dealing with the cognitive dissonance of reality contradicting feminist doctrine is to simply shift the focus of debate.

Note the Salon feminist Anna Clark is a self-described fan of Pollan's work:

 I'm a fan of the journalist who has become the food movement's top chronicler. I pass on copies of "The Omnivore's Dilemma" and "An Eater's Manifesto" like it's my job. I social network the living daylights out of Pollan's articles.

That is of course until Pollan dares to skewer one of Anna's sacred cows...note her reaction:

So while reading Pollan's latest piece in The New York Review of Books, I was nodding along as he articulated how the local food culture manifests the good kind of movement fragmentation -- threading together diverse interests to create a powerful force. I was nodding, at least, until I got to the part where he discusses Janet A. Flammang's new book, "The Taste of Civilization: Food, Politics, and Civil Society." Pollan writes:

"In a challenge to second-wave feminists who urged women to get out of the kitchen, Flammang suggests that by denigrating "foodwork" -- everything involved in putting meals on the family table -- we have unthinkingly wrecked one of the nurseries of democracy: the family meal."

Pollan chooses not to challenge the assertion that second-wave feminists are responsible for "wrecking one of the nurseries of democracy" because they urged women to explore possibilities outside of cooking the family meal. Nor does Pollan question the notion that feminists are to blame for "urging" women to leave the kitchen, when one might imagine that those who left the aprons behind were thinking beings who made their own choice to leave, regardless of the persuasions of feminists and family alike.

Now why would he challenge or question those assertions? The second-wave feminists did in fact demean the role of the American housewife...this is indisputable. And is it really a stretch to say that cooking and feeding the family was one of the primary chores the housewife role entailed, for which the feminists so bitterly attacked? The famous feminist description of the domain of the housewife in her domicile as a "comfortable concentration camp" comes to mind...

Note that instead of recognizing the truth of Pollan's indictment, Anna does what all lefty femi-nazis do when confronted with the truth - blame men!

My take, as a feminist and local foodie? Blaming feminism for luring women out of the kitchen, stealing the ritual of the family meal, and thereby diminishing "one of the nurseries of democracy" is both simplistic and ridiculous. It's true that shared meals are powerful spaces for building relationships and "the habits of civility." But if we're going to talk about who's to blame for our current culture of processed food, why not blame untold generations of men for not getting into the kitchen, especially given Pollan's characterization of the family meal as having a meaningful role in cultivating democracy? If it's so important, why is their absence excusable?

Because those "untold generations of men" were out working to earn the money to pay for the house and the appliances and the food that the women were cooking for the family to eat, you deluded dolt! Feminism preached that women should get out of their "concentration camps" and get into the workforce and compete with the men...equality bayyybbeee!

This didn't result in the mass exchanging of gender roles...it just made life harder and more difficult for both men and women. But I digress...

Pollan concluded his article with some points I wish to expand upon:

...perhaps the food movement’s strongest claim on public attention today is the fact that the American diet of highly processed food laced with added fats and sugars is responsible for the epidemic of chronic diseases that threatens to bankrupt the health care system. The Centers for Disease Control estimates that fully three quarters of US health care spending goes to treat chronic diseases, most of which are preventable and linked to diet: heart disease, stroke, type 2 diabetes, and at least a third of all cancers. The health care crisis probably cannot be addressed without addressing the catastrophe of the American diet, and that diet is the direct (even if unintended) result of the way that our agriculture and food industries have been organized.

As I've covered before, there is an almost synergistic relationship between feminism and the industrialization of our food supply. The industrialization of the food supply was every bit as important for the cultural-Marxist, social engineers that carried out the long march through western institutions, as was the advent of feminist ideology to subvert and destroy the Patriarchal nuclear family. The two have gone hand in hand, and we've all suffered for it in both our physical, spiritual and mental health...it literally affects every area of our modern lives.

That being said, I have a small bone to pick with Pollan's conclusion:

the American diet of highly processed food laced with added fats and sugars is responsible for the epidemic of chronic diseases that threatens to bankrupt the health care system.

While this is technically correct, the distinction between the types of fats that are added has a lot to do with it as well. This topic is fast becoming a pet peeve of mine, as I notice so many people that regurgitate the lipid hypothesis-based memes regarding "fat" as the primary culprit in causing heart disease.

Not all fats are equal.

More precisely, one of the primary contributors to ill health is the ratio of Omega-6 and Omega-3 fatty acids in your bodies cells...and the Standard American Diet contributes to a massive imbalance in the average person, with way too much Omega-6 fatty acids and not enough Omega-3's. This is why you sometimes hear about the need for eating more fish from some health "experts," to increase your Omega-3 intake.

What most people don't know, is that eating more fish won't make a bit of difference in your Omega-6 to Omega-3 ratio if your diet is still heavy in Omega-6 fatty acids...and the S.A.D. which is largely composed of the Federally subsidized grain and seed oil crops is THE single biggest source of Omega-6 in the S.A.D.

So why do the health "experts" always talk about fish as the necessary food to boost your Omega-3 levels?

One scientific researcher, Susan Allport, did extensive research into the differences between Omega-3 and Omega-6's and the role they play in human health. She wrote a book entitled The Queen of Fats: Why Omega-3s Were Removed from the Western Diet and What We Can Do to Replace Them.

While I've yet to read this book, I've read an excellent interview (pdf)  she conducted in promotion of this book, in which she gave some eye opening insight into the topic.

First, she discussed the major difference between these two essential fatty acids and why they are related to our biology and the changing of the seasons:

We finally began to understand that the omega-3s are predominantly concentrated in the green leaves of plants and the omega-6s are concentrated in the seeds of plants, and that basically what we’re talking about here is two families of fats that allow us animals to prepare for the changing seasons, to either speed up, get ready for times of activity and reproduction when green leaves are available and abundant — or to slow down, hunker down, get ready for times of survival — when the fats of seeds are more prevalent.

It’s really a cool system. Plants use the changing light as the Earth makes its orbit around the sun — they adapt to the changing light, and then we adapt to the change in plant food. It really is an amazing thing, but it’s not generally understood. We just think, oh, we’ll eat this food, if we eat enough fish we’ll be healthy. There is a much bigger story than just how much fish we need to eat, or which seed oils to eat.

Two important points regarding the distinction between the two - your not going to get enough of the Omega-3 you need by eating a bunch of leafy plants. This is where animal foods play an important role in getting enough Omega-3 in your diet. To put it succinctly - in plant form, Omega-3 fatty acids are largely in the form of ALA -- alphalinioleic acid -- for which the human body's digestive system is very poor in using. Our bodies need docosahexaenoic acid and eicosapentaenoic acid...aka EPA and DHA.

While the human digestive system doesn't do a good job of converting ALA into the needed DHA and EPA that we need (it will do it somewhat...but nowhere near as much as we require), other animals are very good at it...cows eating grass (the leafy greens rich in ALA) and convert it into DHA and EPA and store it in their meat and fat. This is precisely why free range, pastured cows (and other ruminants like buffalo) contain Omega-3 fatty acids while the feedlot produced meat and dairy contains almost none.

Feedlot ruminants are predominantly fed o6-rich grains. Same goes for factory farmed chickens and pork. The quality of food products that come from animals raised on feedlots versus open pasture is affected dramatically.

From The Health Benefits of Grass Farming.

When cattle are taken off grass and shipped to a feedlot to be fattened on grain, they lose their valuable store of LNA as well as two other types of omega-3 fatty acids, EPA and DHA. Each day that an animal spends in the feedlot, its supply of omega-3s is diminished.

When chickens are housed indoors and deprived of greens, their meat and eggs also become artificially low in omega-3s.

Eggs from pastured hens can contain as much as 20 times more omega-3s than eggs from factory hens.

Switching our livestock from their natural diet of grass to large amounts of grain is one of the reasons our modern diet is deficient in these essential fats. It has been estimated that only 40 percent of Americans consume a sufficient supply of these nutrients. Twenty percent have levels so low that they cannot be detected.11 Switching to grass fed animal products is one way to restore this vital nutrient to your diet.

The CLA Bonus: The meat and milk from grass fed ruminants are the richest known source of another type of good fat called "conjugated linoleic acid" or CLA. When ruminants are raised on fresh pasture alone, their milk and meat contain as much as five times more CLA than products from animals fed conventional diets

This is why we are told to eat more fish (but not too much...mercury poisoning!), or to take fish oil pills to boost our Omega-3 intake. It's not because fish are the only source...just the only source left in the S.A.D. that still eats leafy greens at the base of their food chain. (Which, of course, brings to mind the difference between farmed fish versus wild caught fish...).

As Allport noted:

All the omega-3s in seafood come originally from plants. Fish are so important to us because they’re one of the last animals in our food supply that still eat greens. That is one of the reasons why fish have become so important.

Another is that because they live in water, they require more of those omega-3s in their tissues in order to move around in that much colder environment, under pressure. So they require omega-3s in their diet, and because we now feed the majority of our animals grains instead of grasses, they’re one of the last animals we’re eating in any kind of quantity that eats greens.

Eating fish is one way to correct this imbalance of 6s and 3s in our food supply. But it’s not the only way, and it is not the best way. We have to eat 10 times as much fish to get a really healthy balance of those two families of essential fats is we would if we were eating healthy amounts of the omega-6s. If our omega-6s were at healthy levels, we would need just tiny amounts of fish or omega-3 enriched eggs or cattle that have been raised on grass.

So we now understand why American diets are so deficient in Omega-3's...because most of our meat and dairy comes from animals fed Omega-6-rich grains. Why is the ratio between Omega-6 and Omega-3 so important anyways? Allport explains:

These two families of fats compete for enzymes, for positions in our cell membranes, which don’t care whether they get loaded up with omega-6s or omega-3s. They don’t care for a reason — because they’re built that way so that they can change with the changing seasons and the changing food supply. They’re meant to go through these seasonal changes, slight seasonal changes. The reason we’ve run into problems is because we eat this high omega 6 diet year round.

So we know why the S.A.D. doesn't have enough Omega-3 in it because of the Omega-6 rich feed for our food animals...but that's not the only reason why we the S.A.D. has such a dramatic imbalance in Omega-6 vs. Omega-3's. Thanks to the marketing efforts of agricultural corporations and their incestuous relationship with the US Government to promote propaganda like the USDA food pyramid and the whole "saturated fat causes high cholesterol which causes heart disease" meme, Americans began shying away from animal fats and began using o6 rich vegetable oils instead.

From the vegetable oils that have replaced butter and lard, from other fats in our diet, from the processed and packaged foods that use vegetable oils as a convenient and inexpensive fat, from the process of partial hydrogenation, which specifically eliminates omega-3s, turning them into 6s as well as trans-fats, from the fact that our livestock are no longer fed grass and other greens but are fed grains, which are much richer in the omega-6s. . . . I don’t know how many ways! We wouldn’t need to eat as much fish if we’d stop eating those high omega-6 vegetable oils.

So what vegetable oils specifically? Corn, soy, sunflower, safflower, peanut, cottonseed and canola are typically the most widely used oils in the SAD. Not only is most manufactured, processed  junk food made with these oils, but so too are most fare cooked in restaurants (fast food and slow food alike), and many Americans have also responded to the USDA/Pharmaceutical industry propaganda by substituting "non-fat' and "low-fat" cooking oils and margarine instead of the traditional oils like butter and lard in their own cooking.

So what specifically are the long term effects of having an Omega-6 rich diet year round? Remember Allport's initial explanation regarding the seasonal role of these two essential fatty acids: Omega-3's are kind of like a lubricant, meant to get things flowing and operating at a higher metabolism on a cellular level - which is why fish living in cold, dark water are so dependent on Omega-3's to move about - while Omega-6's slow down your metabolism, and promote inflammation. It's this overabundance of Omega-6 that contributes to inflammation on a cellular level. Over a long period of time, this inflammatory condition begins to contribute to a whole host of degenerative diseases. Allport expands on this, here:

Remember, we’re talking about every cell in the body — and we’re talking about these fatty acids first winding up in the cell membrane, every cell, which is why every day you see a new disease that’s being linked to this imbalance.

The last one I saw was Parkinson’s disease. I’ve seen recent reports on autism, obesity, Type 2 diabetes, macular degeneration, all of those. OK, so you’re picturing every cell, and every cell likes a certain amount of polyunsaturate in it,
and that’s what keeps it moving optimally, right? But that amount can be made up either of omega-3 or omega-6 fats, so it’s got that discretion, which is meant to work with the changing seasons.

The rest of the fats in those cell membranes will be fats of the saturated and the monounsaturated families. Those are fats that we make ourselves, depending on what we need. So, given anything that we eat, we can make whatever saturated and monounsaturated fats we need, but the polyunsaturated fats we need have to come from the diet, and each different cell type is going to want a slightly different
ratio of polyunsaturated than the others, but the family that it comes from
depends upon what you’re eating.

As detailed earlier, we know what kind of polyunsaturated fatty acids predominates in the S.A.D....Omega-6.

And this effect of having way too much Omega-6 and not enough Omega-3 in the body?

Let’s say that omega-6s are a little stiffer, and omega-3s are a little looser. That looseness enables all those enzymes in the membrane — and that’s where most enzymes live, in cell membranes — it enables them to go about their business that much faster. You can imagine it is kind of a WD-40 for the entire body, or you can think about doing jumping jacks in the air versus doing them in a thicker medium like water — that’s what the difference is. You have this slowing-down effect when the omega-6s have replaced the omega-3s, and that fits in with that hunkering down for times of leanness and survival. You’re putting on weight, and you’re slowing down.

These two families have different overarching effects. They are also snipped out of the membrane and used to make important cell messengers called prostaglandins. The first thing that we knew about these two families of fats was the fact that they made very different cell messengers. The ones made from the omega-6s are highly inflammatory, highly likely to promote blood clotting or increased blood pressure — they affect all kinds of bodily processes linked to diseases such as heart disease, obesity and diabetes. The omega-3 messengers are far less likely to promote inflammation.

So remember this the next time you read, see or hear someone blaming high fructose corn syrup for the American obesity epidemic. Yes, HFCS definitely contributes...but it's not the only thing behind the epidemic of obesity, diabetes and heart disease. You have to factor in the chronic inflammation caused by too much Omega-6 in the S.A.D. America's too fat, because we eat too much sugar AND too much inflammatory Omega-6 fatty acids.

And of course, lets not forget the pivotal role the feminist movement had in creating the society wide demand for fast and convenient foods, which have now become the mainstay of the S.A.D. Since Feminism was one of the primary cultural and political drivers of promoting the types of foods that promote Omega-6 fatty acid imbalance in our diet, one could say that feminism has certainly been inflammatory in more ways than one.