White Food Boise ID

Putting White Foods Back on the Table

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By Catherine Guthrie

Americans have a love-hate relationship with food. When we decide an item is just the thing to clear our arteries or prevent cancer, we embrace it with gusto. Olive oil, broccoli, garlic, salmon: We look for every opportunity to load such health-promoters onto our plates.

However, our enthusiasm can just as easily go sour. If we gain too much weight or begin to feel crummy, a particular food can suddenly become the enemy, and instead of cutting down on it, we kiss it good-bye.

Scan the diet section of any bookstore and you’ll note that three food categories tend to take the most heat: dairy, wheat, and sugar. Indeed, walk into any health food store, and you’ll hear legions of tales about chronically ill people who gave up one or all of these dietary demons and suddenly careened back to health.

No doubt about it, these foods represent three of the biggest thugs on many practitioners’ hit lists. “If every chronically ill person gave up dairy, wheat, and sugar, 80 percent would get well,” says Nancy Appleton, an anti-sugar champion of 25 years. Joseph Mercola, a Chicago osteopath and author, thinks that “85 percent of the population should avoid grain at all costs.” And the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, a pro-vegetarianism nonprofit based in Washington, D.C., has put dairy in its crosshairs. “The notion that milk is a healthy food is a huge misconception,” says Amy Lanou, the group’s nutritional director.

Some experts, however, think this all-or-nothing approach is foolhardy. “Americans find the deprivation-style form of eating seductive,” says Dave Grotto, a spokesperson for the American Dietetic Association and a nutritionist at the Block Center for Integrative Cancer Care in Evanston, Illinois. “We’d love to think the reason we’re not enjoying good health is because of one bad food, like sugar or dairy. But that link hasn’t been established. The smoking guns are actually bad overall diet and not enough physical activity.”

He has a point. As a country, our food choices are truly abysmal. And in fact, many of the foods we load up on, and that all practitioners say can be bad for our health—cookies, pasta, ice cream—include the white villains. To compound the problem, few of us get enough exercise to ward off excess pounds. More than 30 percent of Americans are overweight, and obesity-related diseases, including heart disease and diabetes, are skyrocketing.

Still, before you draw a line through the entire category of dairy, wheat, or sugar, it’s worth asking a few simple questions: What are the negative claims against them? Who should eschew them completely? And what’s a reasonable approach for the rest of us?

Dairy
The case against it Lanou ticks off three reasons to shun dairy products (defined as anything made with cow’s milk, including butter, yogurt, and cheese): saturated fat, which clogs arteries; proteins that trigger allergies; and substances that promote cancer growth. Others blame ...

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