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Food for Thought By
DAN ACKMAN Early in "Terrors of the Table," Walter Gratzer describes the teachings of two of the earliest known students of diet and exercise. Alcmaeon, an early Greek medical writer (circa 450 B.C.), held that good health could be achieved by maintaining a strict equilibrium between what went in and what came out. Hippocrates of Cos, writing around the same time, extolled the virtue of moderation and stressed the value of regular exercise. Such advice endures and could scarcely be improved upon -- although God knows people have tried. The perfect diet is in fact the modern holy grail, and any number of Percevals are ready to lead the quest. To take just one measure: In 2000, Amazon listed 159 books on diets and weight loss in its database; by 2004 the total had ballooned to 378. Mr. Gratzer's book is not number 379. It is, rather, a history of nutrition, a tale that "encompasses every virtue, defect and foible of human nature." As mankind tries to figure out what it should eat, "reason contends with superstition, mountebanks prosper and savants quarrel among themselves." All sorts of characters appear in Mr. Gratzer's account, including scientists who study the body and its digestive processes as well as foods and their nutrients; doctors and public-health workers who battle the disease caused by improper nourishment; food manufacturers who peddle their products as cures; and diet promoters, pill pushers, faddists and quacks, most of whom promise much more than they can deliver. Mr. Gratzer begins with the history of scurvy and rickets, two common diseases that turned out to be easily eradicated by simple improvements in diet. (In short, by oranges and eggs.) Over time -- especially with the advances of the Scientific Revolution -- doctors, chemists and physiologists offered a theoretical underpinning for what Hippocrates and Alcmaeon, to say nothing of your mother, knew instinctively. The major advances in understanding came early in the last century. While liver had been employed as a cure for night blindness for centuries, it was not until 1912 that Casimir Funk, a Pole who emigrated to Britain, coined the term "vitamine," and it was another decade before these trace substances in food were isolated in the laboratory. Before that time, science knew of the existence of fats, proteins and carbohydrates, but the role of trace substances, especially their importance in preventing disease, was unknown, even denied by leading theoreticians. But eating habits have not always kept up with scientific
learning. Indeed, the link between nutritional science and the food intake of
the average man has long been tenuous. Thus the need for "correctives"
to habit, like dietary fads. They are not new, of course. Among the richest
traditions (if fads can have traditions) is vegetarianism, which Mr. Gratzer traces to the 17th century in One of the most durable fads in the Today, a superabundance of food, especially processed food,
has led to an epidemic of obesity and diabetes. At the same time, various
diets -- Pritikin to Mr. Gratzer ends his history by quoting the great anti-nutritionist Mark Twain: "There are people who strictly deprive themselves of each and every eatable, drinkable, and smokable which has in any way acquired a shady reputation. They pay this price for health. And health is all they get for it. How strange it is. It is like paying out your whole fortune for a cow that has gone dry." Sound counsel, to be sure. But nutritionistas ignored Twain in his day, and they ignore him still. Mr. Ackman is a writer in Jersey City, N.J |
