It’s just about the food: It’s not about the place, the price, the surroundings, the crowd or the nutritional value — it’s just about good food and where to find it.

Good food can be found anywhere: We built Foodspotting to work in any city, small town or country from the start. It encourages exploration — trying new things vs. following the crowd.

So here I can find out what dishes people are recommending in Colombia. That mazorca in the photo here is one of my favorite street foods in Colombia – this one came from the Usaquen district in Bogota.

Belgium is there, a place I really enjoy traveling.

Or in my new home city of Tampa.

So go explore food over at Foodspotting

WHY are Americans getting fatter and fatter? The simple explanation is that we eat too much junk food and spend too much time in front of screens — be they television, phone or computer — to burn off all those empty calories.

One handy prescription for healthier lives is behavior modification. If people only ate more fresh produce. (Thank you, Michael Pollan.) If only children exercised more. (Ditto, Michelle Obama.)

Unfortunately, behavior changes won’t work on their own without seismic societal shifts, health experts say, because eating too much and exercising too little are merely symptoms of a much larger malady. The real problem is a landscape littered with inexpensive fast-food meals; saturation advertising for fatty, sugary products; inner cities that lack supermarkets; and unhealthy, high-stress workplaces.

In other words: it’s the environment, stupid.

The main idea, as stated by Dr. Dee Edington, “If you change the culture and the environment first, then you can go back into a healthy environment and, when you get change, it sticks.”

A little anthropology would be nice here, along with the economic prescriptions such as food pricing, advertising and availability. Inequality makes fast food, which is cheap, quite appealing to people without a lot of cash. Rich people also have dedicated spaces for exercise and the like, since our environment does little to make us move. Food also means something – simply declaring it “unhealthy” and labeling the number of calories are appeals directed at an audience assumed to be rational: cost/benefit analysis should win out, right?

For those who want a little anthropology, you can go to the Food, Obesity and Eating page, which rounded up a lot of the writing I did on this early on. For some relevant pieces, go directly to:

Culture and Inequality in the Obesity Debate

Successful Weight Loss

Calories, Not Diets

Comfort Food and Social Stress

The original article, Impact of diet in shaping gut microbiota revealed by a comparative study in children from Europe (urban Florence) and rural Africa (Boulkiemde province, Burkina Faso), by Carlotta De Filippo and colleagues, is open access on the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences website, so you should definitely surf over there if you find this interesting.

De Filippo and colleagues discuss the microbiome, the ‘complex consortium of trillions of microbes, whose collective genomes contain at least 100 times as many genes as our own eukaryote genome’ (see also Gill et al. 2006). This enormous, varied ecosystem in the gut, a symbiotic community, supplements human metabolic capabilities, provides a first line of defense against pathogens, modulates gastrointestinal development and even informs the configuration of the immune system (paraphrased from De Filippo et al. 2010).

Different gut ecologies brought about both by environmental factors and by food production techniques, dietary preferences, and even food handling practices are one way that human groups might inadvertently induce biological variation in our species, a subtle culture-biology link through the populations in our gastrointestinal tracts. Now De Filippo and colleagues has gone out and actually demonstrated this variation empirically, using high-throughput 16S rDNA sequencing and biochemical analyses of fecal microbiota.

What’s on YOUR plate?

In Burkina Faso, children’s diets after weening were ‘low in fat and animal protein and rich in starch, fiber, and plant polysaccharides, and predominantly vegetarian.’ Diet was primarily composed of cereals (millet grain, sorghum), legumes (black-eyed peas), and vegetables, providing ample amounts of nonanimal protein, carbohydrate and dietary fibre (children in Burkina Faso were getting more than three times the fibre eaten by the comparative population from Italy).

The children in Burkina Faso got very little animal protein, primarily a bit of chicken from time to time and, during the rainy season, termites (also interesting because of their role in chimpanzee diets, but we’ll be back to the termites because they’re the punchline of the article).

In contrast, the Italian children, after being weaned at an earlier age, on average, were taking in a diet much higher in animal protein, sugar, starch, and fat, with lower fiber (in part due to greater food processing) and much greater energy.

Startlingly, the children, 2- to 6-years-old, in Burkina Faso got 996 kcal/day compared to the Italian children who were eating 1,512.7 kcal/day; even prior to the age of 2, children in Italy were taking in an average of 60% more calories than Italian children! (This also harkens back to our discussion of what makes WEIRD populations truly odd.)

The community inside them

The faecal samples from children in Burkina Faso especially differed from the Italian subjects because of the presence of Prevotella, Xylanibacter (Bacteroidetes), Treponema (Spirochaetes), and Butyrivibrio; all appeared in the African samples but were not found in the Italian. The researchers hypothesize that these distinctive bacterial genera might help to extract energy from the polysaccharides in the children’s heavier fiber diet. Theses bacteria are capable of fermenting cellulose and xylan through a number of carbohydrate-active enzymes, producing anti-inflammatory effects at the same time.

From the Science News article by Dickey:

Children from Burkina Faso, who ate millet grain, sorghum wheat, legumes and vegetables, had high numbers of bacteria that digest plant fibers. Also found in the guts of termites, these bacteria break down fibers that humans typically can’t. The bacteria make short-chain fatty acids that give people energy and protect them from inflammatory gut diseases such as Crohn’s disease and inflammatory bowel disorder.

Burkina Faso’s children also had decreased numbers of diarrhea-causing bacteria compared with children from Italy. That finding surprised the team, because the African children often drank water polluted with such bacteria.

The diminished diversity of microbiota in the human gut is especially interesting because some theorists have pointed to this dietary-provoked transformation, together with increasing hygiene and anti-bacterial technologies in human environments, as possible contributors to an upsurge in rates of allergies, auto-immune disorders and inflammatory bowel diseases (see, for example, Strachan 1989). Recent research has suggested a relationship between ecological imbalances in gut microbiota and obesity, and inflammatory conditions in the bowel have been directly linked to changes in gut microflora. For example, bacterial species correlated with a high-fat, high-sugar diet promote obesity in gnotobiotic mice (Turnbaugh et al. 2009). In other words, the diet can have a twin-pronged attack on our ability to maintain low body weight, as it provides both higher calories as well as a shift in microbiota to a population that promotes obesity.

The team led by De Filippo compared the diversity of microbial life in the fecal samples from both locations, finding that the African samples, by several measures, had greater diversity and richness of symbiotic life.

Exposure to the large variety of environmental microbes associated with a high-fiber diet could increase the potentially beneficial bacterial genomes, enriching the microbiome. Reduction in microbial richness is possibly one of the undesirable effects of globalization and of eating generic, nutrient-rich, uncontaminated foods. Both in the Western world and in developing countries diets rich in fat, protein, and sugar, together with reduced intake of unabsorbable fibers, are associated with a rapid increase in the incidence of noninfectious intestinal diseases. The potential protective effects of the diet on bowel disorders was first described by Burkitt [1973] who, working in Africa in the 1960s, noticed the remarkable absence of non-infectious colonic diseases in Africans consuming a traditional diet rich in fiber.

The fact that the youngest children in both populations had similar microbial profiles in their GI system suggests that diet primarily is effecting the difference between the two populations; while both groups are still breastfeeding, they are more similar, only diverging later when they start to eat their distinctive cultural diets.

Horizontal transfer of microbial life

The short piece in Science News makes clearer, in my admittedly non-specialist reading, an interesting little wrinkle in the story of diet affecting gut microbiota: the horizontal transfer of microbes from our food to our own guts. As Gwyneth Dickey writes:

A termite a day may keep the doctor away. African children who eat a high-fiber diet (and the occasional wood-digesting insect) have gut bacteria that help them digest plant fibers and protect them from diarrhea and inflammatory disease, a new study finds.

What I’m struck by here, and I’m not sure if this is Dickey’s interpretation or something one of the researchers said, is the suggestion that some of the microbes most able to turn whole grains into short chain fatty acids might be colonizing the large intestines of children in Burkina Faso through the rainy season practice of dining upon termites! (She quotes co-author Duccio Cavalieri warning, ‘We’re not saying you should eat termites,’ but it’s unclear where the original suggestion might have come from – Dickey or the research team.) I have absolutely no idea if this is actually possible, but there is the case of microbes being transferred from food to Japanese individuals who dine on some forms of algae (see Hehemann et al. 2010).

The more I think about this possibility – that we might pick up symbiotic microfauna by eating the guts of other animals – the more I find it both weirdly fantastic and simultaneously plausible. After all, what living organism is more likely to survive the digestion process to colonize the human gut than a microbe that’s already adapted to the gastro-intestinal tract of another animal?

But if it’s happening, we have a case where children are picking up microbes that will live in their guts and help them to digest dense fibrous foods by eating termites. What could be a better example of a kind of dietary ‘contagious magic’ than eating an animal and gaining some of its distinctive powers of digestion?! Eating termites might make it possible for your body to digest ‘woody’ food sources.

Further reading:

It’s not the gut, but I’ve written about the microbial life on the skin back in The human ‘super-organism’.

Image:
Gut population cartoon originally from Yakult.

References:

Burkitt, D. P. 1973. Epidemiology of large bowel disease: The role of fibre. Proceedings of the Nutrition Society 32:145–149. doi:10.1079/PNS19730032

De Filippo, Carlotta, Duccio Cavalieria, Monica Di Paolab, Matteo Ramazzottic, Jean Baptiste Poulletd, Sebastien Massartd, Silvia Collinib, Giuseppe Pieraccini, and Paolo Lionetti. 2010. Impact of diet in shaping gut microbiota revealed by a comparative study in children from Europe and rural Africa. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Published online August 2, 2010. doi: 10.1073/pnas.1005963107.

Gill, Steven R., Mihai Pop, Robert T. DeBoy, Paul B. Eckburg, Peter J. Turnbaugh, Buck S. Samuel, Jeffrey I. Gordon, David A. Relman, Claire M. Fraser-Liggett, and Karen E. Nelson. 2006. Metagenomic analysis of the human distal gut microbiome. Science 312:1355–1359. doi: 10.1126/science.1124234

Hehemann, J. H., G. Correc, T. Barbeyron, W. Helbert, M. Czjzek, and G. Michel. 2010. Transfer of carbohydrate-active enzymes from marine bacteria to Japanese gut microbiota. Nature 464:908–912. doi:10.1038/nature08937

Strachan, David P. 1989. Hay fever, hygiene, and household size. British Medical Journal 299:1259–1260. doi:10.1136/bmj.299.6710.1259

Turnbaugh, Peter J., Vanessa K. Ridaura, Jeremiah J. Faith, Federico E. Rey, Rob Knight and Jeffrey I. Gordon. 2009. The effect of diet on the human gut microbiome: A metagenomic analysis in humanized gnotobiotic mice. Science Translation Medicine 1:6ra14. doi: 10.1126/scitranslmed.3000322

One of the ‘Quotes of the day’ in Time Magazine on the 21st of April 2010 was:

“They have made the mistake of letting the Marlboro Man into the country. “

A photo is featured alongside the quote. In the photo, there is a billboard advertising L.A. Lights cigarettes and an upcoming Kelly Clarkson concert in Indonesia. The Tapei Times writes: “Just a few kilometers after passing a towering Marlboro Man ad, a second billboard off the highway promotes cigarettes with a new American face: Kelly Clarkson.” Radiosophie report: “The marketing ploy comes two years after Alicia Keys objected to a similar tobacco-fuelled sponsorship deal in Indonesia.” The Los Angeles Times and Jakarta Globe also covered the story.

Since the scandal, Kelly Clarkson has allegedly cancelled her tour and her Tobacco-company sponsorship, but the same cannot be said for the Tobacco-company sponsored tours of Incubus (Jakarta, 5 March 2008), James Blunt (Jakarta, 21 May 2008), or Jamiroquai (Bogor, 8 April, 2009). Tickets to these concerts cost little more than Four US dollars ($US4), so it is clear that without huge sponsorship deals from Tobacco companies, the big artists simply would not perform in Indonesia. It makes me wonder, how many other Pop artists escape the Paparazzi radar and perform with Tobacco-company sponsorship in Indonesia?

For me, these billboards exemplify what globalisation brings and what it doesn’t bring to the developing world. It brings the products but not the ethics. 

One of my early fieldwork conversations was with a middle aged gentleman who was explaining to me why so many people smoke in his country. “It’s to help our economy,” he said, “People in the developed world are buying less cigarettes and a lot of our economy depends on Tobacco. So we have to buy more cigarettes because you are buying less.” 

From this man’s words, it suddenly became apparent to me that the widespread middle-class ethics that encourage people in the developed world not to smoke had effects in the developing world that I had never thought of before. Packets of cigarettes in Indonesia may have a wrapper that states “Merokok dapat menyebabkan kanker” (Smoking can cause cancer), but the shere quantity of smokers in Indonesia indicates that these few words have little effect on cultural habits. As the developed world weens itself off nicotine, is the developing world compensating for our lack of demand?

I remembering talking more with this gentleman as we walked down a busy litter-filled street. I unwrapped a snack and looked for a rubbish bin but saw none in sight. I pocketed the plastic wrapper and continued attending to the conversation. My companion stopped. “I love that about foreigners,” he said.
“What?” I asked.
“I love that foreigners look after their environment like you just did and don’t throw their rubbish everywhere. Us, we don’t do that. I really admire that you kept your rubbish.”
I really didn’t know what to say because keeping the wrapper until I could dispose of it appropriately seemed so natural to me. In fact, I was surprised that this man even noticed my behaviour. Judging by the amount of rubbish around the streets, in public parks and even in rice paddies, I just assumed that littering was not something they really thought about. I would have liked to know more about this gentleman’s thoughts on the matter but unfortunately I didn’t find the right question to ask. We started to talk about other matters. After a short while, the gentleman pulled out a packet of cigarettes to have a smoke. He peeled off the plastic wrapping and threw it on the ground by the side of the road. Products may be expediently transported and consumed through the global economy, but ethical behaviour takes a longer time to adopt.

For several hours we talked about obesity with the resident doctors at the local family clinic. After covering the typical recommendations for losing weight, such as eating healthy and increasing exercise, Dr. B informed us of the most practical treatment method they use. “I usually ask the patient to complete a food journal.”

According to Dr. B and the other residents, a journal can provide concrete evidence of successes and areas in which adolescents could improve their diets. So we asked about the success of such an assignment. Dr. B chuckled and said, “I’ve never had a patient complete a food journal.”

As soon as he said this, two other doctors in the room added their own experiences. One echoed Dr. B’s statements, and the other told his one and only success story:

“The patient was fourteen years old. He didn’t like how big he was becoming and decided to play sports. After he started playing sports he lost thirty pounds.”

As we explored the issue of adolescent obesity within our community, we found that while the recommendations for losing weight may appear simple, successful results were not easily obtained. Our goal was to better understand the prevalence and treatment of adolescent obesity through patient observation and interviews with resident doctors in this mid-Western city.

During our semester-long research, we examined the three main influences related to adolescent obesity: familial, social, and environmental. The results below express how residents view the problem of obesity among adolescents who live in lower socioeconomic circumstances. We also examine how text messaging might be a better way to build a behavioral health intervention for these adolescents.

Family Influence

“It’s just not all that surprising when obese children have obese parents…”

Until they leave home, most adolescents are dependent on their parents for food and nutrition. Adolescents do not have much influence in what foods are provided and what meals are cooked. If the parents fail to provide healthy options on a consistent basis, an adolescent’s overall health will likely suffer, and his or her probability of becoming obese increases.

The residents we interviewed commented that the role a parent plays as a provider for their children is closely connected to the development of that child’s health. They developed this point by saying that it is difficult for parents with lower collective incomes to provide as many healthy choices as parents with higher incomes. This is due to the fact that processed foods and fast food items tend to be less expensive than healthy food options. This socioeconomic factor makes the family’s influence on adolescent obesity even more complex.

The probability of adolescents becoming obese is also influenced by the parents’ own habits. One resident said the “parents are key” – changing the behavior of parents will effect change in their children. Rather than the typical lecture to eat better, which residents called “do as I say, not as I do”, parents should model “do as I say AND as I do”. In other words, parents should tell their adolescents how to eat and exercise in a healthy way while also eating well and exercising themselves. It is important for adolescents to see the advice their parents give them put into action because they are more likely to learn through example.

Peer Influence

“There is a reason why heavier kids don’t go out for sports, such as the swim team… they care about how their peers view them.”

The doctors stated that peers are more influential than parents regarding behaviors affecting weight. While parents control home life, peers influence life outside the home through social groups, which is of significant importance during adolescence. In particular, peers influence the adolescent’s body image. The doctors believed that obese adolescents are particularly susceptible to developing a negative body image, which, they say, may lead to feelings of isolation and depression.

Doctors cited poor self-esteem as a causative factor and product of negative body image. Overweight and obese adolescents are often less outgoing because they do not want to draw attention to themselves. The doctors agreed that their overweight and obese patients were not in the “type” of crowd to play sports, which could aid in losing excess weight.

Isolation, depression, and low self-esteem can also lead to destructive behaviors, such as involvement in drugs, alcohol, smoking, and sexual activity. The doctors stated obesity takes a backseat to the more “immediate” issues of sex and drugs, as well as acute care problems like the flu. With these problems in the foreground, doctors often do not have the time to address weight issues.

Environmental Influence

“These kids just don’t have the same opportunities to go out and play as they should.”

Our community suffers through 6 months of cold, often bitter weather. Most outdoor activities are simply out of the question for half of the year. Even when the snow has disappeared, outdoor exercise is questionable. The city suffers from both a lack of sidewalks and crime, discouraging people from walking or running.

Dr. H also stressed that the lack of gym class in middle and high school significantly influences adolescents’ weight. As both students and faculty in schools often overlook health classes, the importance and effort needed for healthy lifestyles is neglected. Additionally, the lack of neighborhood youth programs prevents access to organized sports from even the most motivated kids. Given the adolescents’ socioeconomic backgrounds, a gym membership is something that the residents of the community often do not have the luxury to afford.

Intervention: Food Journals to Texting

The increasing prevalence of adolescent obesity is a problem faced by the entire country. The Surgeon General’s Call To Action To Prevent and Decrease Overweight and Obesity (2001) reported that adolescent overweight and obesity has become a nationwide problem as the prevalence of overweight adolescents has increased from 5% in 1976-1980 to 17.4% in 2003-2004, corresponding to 12.5 million individuals ages 12-19.

As an adolescent increases in weight, he or she also increases health risks, such as asthma, cardiovascular problems, diabetes, sleep apnea, hypertension, early maturation, orthopedic problems, and the psychological effects of social stigmatization. These facts demonstrate the importance of preventing weight gain, treating overweight and obesity, and improving one’s quality of life. As behavioral and environmental factors are large contributors to overweight and obesity, they provide the greatest opportunity for intervention (Call To Action, 2001; see also the Center for Disease Control’s page on obesity).

According to Dr. K, 20-30% of his adolescent patients are overweight or obese. When he tries to help, the patients are either “noncompliant” or their lifestyles are not conducive to healthy changes for many of the reasons covered above.

One of the most common treatment methods doctors instruct overweight or obese adolescents to do is to keep a food journal because it is relatively easy and has been shown to work. For a period of four to seven days, the adolescent writes down everything he or she eats. After that week, the patient comes back in to the clinic for a follow-up visit to discuss his or her diet and nutrition.

Keeping a food journal has proven to be a mildly successful treatment method in our community, largely because patients either fail to make a follow-up appointment or don’t complete the food journal. However, we believe many of the ideas behind the food journal approach can be adapted to a medium that adolescents already use: text messaging.

The majority of adolescents in America have cell phones and use them constantly to text message. The idea we propose is for the patient to text everything he or she eats to a responsible party in the clinic, such as a dietician. The responsible party could keep track of the patient’s meals for him or her, so the only responsibility the patient has is to text in the meals and make a follow-up appointment. To reduce the risk of forgetting to text in a meal, an automated text messaging service could be implemented to send reminders to patients participating in this program.

Despite all the barriers and influences facing obese adolescents, we believe a relatively simple texting program can significantly increase the number of success stories in our community. T9, abc, or qwerty, adolescent obesity will be yesterday’s text.

The one I want to highlight is Sweetness, Gender and Power: Rethinking Sidney Mintz’s Classic Work. That classic work is Sweetness and Power: The Place fo Sugar in Modern History, which links the production of sugar in slave plantations in the Caribbean with the rise of sugar consumption in England – economic history explained through anthropology. Given my interests in consumption, here’s what he writes early in the book:

What turned an exotic, foreign and costly substance into the daily fare of even the poorest and humblest people? How could it have become so important so swiftly? … The answers may seem self-evident; sugar is sweet, and human beings like sweetness. But when unfamiliar substances are taken up by new users, they enter into pre-existing social and psychological contexts and acquire – or are given – contextual meanings by those who use them… Uses imply meanings; to learn the anthropology of sugar, we need to explore the meaning of its uses, to discover the early and more limited uses of sugar, and to learn where and for what purposes sugar was produced (6).

The Radcliffe conference features four prominent academics – Amy Bentley, Vincent Brown, Judith Carney, and Sucheta Mazumdar – who place their work in light of Mintz’s ground-breaking book. The topics cover the academic study of food, enslaved women, gender and capitalism, and China and sweet potatoes. Mintz himself wraps up the conference with his own retrospective on his work, including an early line from his friend Eric Wolf, “Well, Mintz is a peculiar anthropologist.”

Link to the Sweetness, Gender, and Power: Rethinking Sidney Mintz’s Classic Work conference videos.

Changes in weight and waist circumference at 6, 12, 18, and 24 months were indistinguishable among groups: At 2 years, only about 15% of each group had lost at least 10% of body weight. Attendance at group counseling sessions strongly predicted successful weight loss.

So there’s the catch! The weight loss was modest. As the Journal Watch title puts it, “Four low-calorie diets yield the same mediocre results. Dieters ate different amounts of protein, fat, and carbohydrate — but, after 2 years, most were still obese.” Still, many people would accept an average loss of 9 pounds and 2 inches less of waistline.

The main implication of this study is that calories matter, not diets. As Frank Sacks emphasized in a great interview on Science Friday, most research on diets has focused on the short-term. But weight loss is a long-term problem – and there calorie restriction is what really adds up. How to achieve that is a major issue, which I considered at length in a previous post on successful weight loss.

In the Science Friday interview Sacks himself ends up advocating a “very common sense approach – to have portion control, to cut out the highest calorie stuff you are eating, and getting some exercise. It’s all an integrated whole.” To that end, Sacks says that individuals should experiment with different diets to see what works for him or her.

On the research side, Sacks bluntly states that “we should move on from trying to figure out which diet is best.” Rather, we should examine why individuals vary so much in their response to weight loss programs. “The difference in individual response just overwhelms any possible dietary difference.”

It was this focus on the individual, not the diet, that struck me most in the New York Times write-up of Sacks et al.’s research, Study Zeroes In on Calories, Not Diet, for Loss. Sacks repeats his individual mantra, “The effect of individual behavior is humongous. We had some people losing 50 pounds and some people gaining five pounds. That’s what we don’t have a clue about. I think in the future, researchers should focus less on the actual diet but on finding what is really the biggest governor of success in these individuals.”

But how do we conceive of the individual? That is a crucial point. The present approach is to focus on willpower and finding the right diet – the lone individual finding the perfect set of techniques. It’s very Western and very Protestant, and bears little relation to how people actually function. Dr Sacks almost gets this, saying that the real question for researchers is, “What are the biological, psychological or social factors that influence whether a person can stick to any diet?”

I say almost, because Sacks still thinks of “factors” as separate from people and as somehow slotting into nice academic categories of biological, psychological and social. It works well for academia, but not in the real world. At least it’s better than popular paleofantasies about the perfect diet, but it doesn’t quite get to the interacting systems and ethnographic realities that play such a role in eating and obesity.

Indeed, Sacks says that while colleagues advocate policy changes, he believes we should try education and displays of calorie counts as a way to deal with obesity in the Science Friday interview. Here he reverts back to a rational individual-perfect technique model, and forgets the lesson from this study – individual variation matters. So education won’t work for everyone. Particularly with eating, education does not address the many social and emotional reasons that people eat, often times more than they are burning (can we say, comfort food!). It also does not address the context of eating – of how culture and inequality shape eating and individual lives.

Here is where I found the accompanying New England Journal of Medicine editorial quite revealing. Martijn Katan goes beyond just discussing the Sacks et al. study in the context of the present literature.

Katan writes, “Thus, even these highly motivated, intelligent participants who were coached by expert professionals could not achieve the weight losses needed to reverse the obesity epidemic. The results would probably have been worse among poor, uneducated subjects. Evidently, individual treatment is powerless against an environment that offers so many high-calorie foods and labor-saving devices. It is obvious by now that weight losses among participants in diet trials will at best average 3 to 4 kg after 2 to 4 years and that they will be less among people who are poor or uneducated, groups that are hit hardest by obesity. We do not need another diet trial; we need a change of paradigm.”

Katan proposes a community solution:

A community-based effort to prevent overweight in schoolchildren began in two small towns in France in 2000. Everyone from the mayor to shop owners, schoolteachers, doctors, pharmacists, caterers, restaurant owners, sports associations, the media, scientists, and various branches of town government joined in an effort to encourage children to eat better and move around more. The towns built sporting facilities and playgrounds, mapped out walking itineraries, and hired sports instructors. Families were offered cooking workshops, and families at risk were offered individual counseling.

Though this was not a formal randomized trial, the results were remarkable. By 2005 the prevalence of overweight in children had fallen to 8.8%, whereas it had risen to 17.8% in the neighboring comparison towns, in line with the national trend. This total-community approach is now being extended to 200 towns in Europe, under the name EPODE (Ensemble, prévenons l’obésité des enfants [Together, let's prevent obesity in children]).

A total community approach, with a focus on diets as integrated wholes and individuals as biological, psychological and cultural, would definitely mark a paradigm change. And that’s the kind of paradigm change we want to push here at Neuroanthropology! This point was captured by one caller to Science Friday who said, “Everything we put in our mouths is a part of our diet,” while highlighting a change in lifestyle as the main reason why she recently lost a significant amount of weight.

Lifestyles can be considered anthropologies, not individuals or cultures. And anthropologies of food and eating require the development of a whole range of analyses.

As one example, the integrated view of lifestyles is one reason that exercise is also not the be-all end-all of the obesity problem. As recent research indicates, level of exercise might not even make a major difference in population-level weight. In his interview, Sacks indicated that exercise played a minor role in weight loss, as it can be difficult to maintain vigorous exercise “day in and day out” and that most people tend to eat back the calories they burn off. But he did say that exercise can play a central role in maintaining a lower weight – 100 calories burned off a day are still a 100 calories burned off.

A range of factors that intersect with a range of individuals will help achieve the overall reduction and maintenance effort. The EPODE program in France does that, as described at length in this piece Thin Living. EPODE achieves success because it is an integrated effort, as Katan described. But outcomes matter as much as efforts. So what is one particular outcome that has made a difference?

Here’s the line that stands out for me, “The results showed that not only had the children acquired a better knowledge of nutrition but they had also significantly modified their eating habits. For example, the number of families that ate chips once a week fell from 56% to 39% (www.epode.fr). Obesity in children did not increase during 1992 to 2000; in the rest of the region, childhood obesity doubled.”

Knowledge, habits, and community effort – sounds like anthropologies in action.

As she wrote to me, “I think this post sums up what anthropology should be: deep critical analysis leading to more, pretty much, unanswerable questions. That is the beauty of the discipline.”

In asking What is American Cuisine?, Melissa writes “the term “cuisine” means more than just food, but rather means the big picture around food–the form of expression through food and cooking and how people use food and cooking and eating as a way of expressing identity, even if it is an unconscious or understated form of affiliation and identity.”

By way of answering, I will use some photos from Melissa’s own Flickr site (with a whole range of photos, not just food) – the old cliche of American pie and our signature holiday, Thanksgiving.

So go enjoy more of What is American Cuisine?

Let’s take a more mixed example. Mattel the toy company. Its popular 99 cent Hot Wheel toy cars weren’t so popular last year. But American Girl, dolls built around an experience and an identity, is doing well. John Sherry, the anthropologist who heads up Notre Dame’s Marketing department, recently wrote, “The staging ground for the brand’s performance and enactment, American Girl Place, has become a commercial Mecca, a secular pilgrimage site to which female believers throng.”

In my recent piece on what one day at Kotaku the gaming site shows us about our modern world, I wrote:

On this particular day, January 12th, a range of pieces captured why the video game phenomenon has so much to tell us about our modern obsessions, from sex to shopping, drugs to drinking. These eight stories show us the powerful convergence of people looking for fun and industries looking for profit. From pleasure to despair, this convergence is the story of our post-modern lives. It’s not commodities anymore, it’s activities.

We are seeing the emergence of a new type of economy amidst a new type of globalization, and it’s going to produce its own winners and losers, both on the economic side and on the people side.

Want to know how the world is changing? Just look at this Coke avatar ad from the Super Bowl, where the online world meets the iconic brand. It gives us a walk through a modern urban life and ends with romantic tension. Coke is right there in the middle of our enjoyments and our desires, and its enhanced sweetness and pitch-perfect iconic value part-and-parcel of how we live now.

Last April in Cellphones Save the World, I wrote the following:

To basically summarize everything, our world is going to see a transformation through the convergence of four factors: people-driven processes, change for the rest of us, human-centered science, and emerging methods. All four of these are age-old, but now, reformed and resurgent, they will help shape our world in years to come. Welcome to the new globalization. It lurks behind the bright lights, big city view peddled in academia and media alike.

People want, or come to want, these sorts of “basic” activities – eating, entertainment, communication, ritual involvement. Technology engages us and we use it to engage each other. Humans live their lives through activities, not just manufactured goods or the services provisioned by doctors and governments. And companies are figuring out new methods to keep us eating, searching for information, playing and all the rest.

Google is a good example to end on. One of its most recent endeavors is Google Books, providing us with pages and pages locked away in libraries. Here’s how Daniel Clancy, one of the chief engineers of Google Book Search, recently put it: “Our core business is about search and discovery, and search and discovery improves with more content.”

In driving demand for our own “need” for search and discovery, what is Google’s plan? “Eben Moglen, a law professor at Columbia and a free-culture advocate, puts it this way: if the fight over digitization of books is like horse-and-buggy makers against car manufacturers, Google wants to be the road.”

McDonalds supersizes us, American Girl is a secular pilgrimage, Coke is fused into our urban walkabout, and Google is the road for search and discovery. The new roads aren’t about getting us from place to place. They are about getting us from experience to experience, activity to activity.

These companies want us to do this strange mix of their and our thing. It’s not about “the freedom of the road,” even if most of us are just driving to work. It’s about shaping our search and discovery, our way of eating, our way of playing. And they do that through the inroads they make into our lives. Engagement equals success. Their surplus value derives from their ability to shape the way we live, not just taking and selling what we produce.

They do it well. I use Google Scholar all the time. I like Coke, enough that its acidity eats at my teeth. I play video games, even though I know I’m not “producing” the knowledge that makes me valuable to my university.

Google isn’t making us stupid or smart. It’s giving us what we want, a supersized sweet secular search engine.

In that mix brain pathways, our paths through life, and overall ways of life get wrapped up in one. Like Nicholas Carr, we might critique it. I’d prefer that we figure out other ways to make creative roads than what profit-driven companies and policy-driven governments try to set down for us. That is an act of imagination. Our own search and discovery.

Paleolithic dieter? Not exactly...

When I talk about diet and human evolution in my freshman class, I have to point out that there are a tremendous number of complications, including the fact that the vast majority of us do not have the cultural knowledge to get ANY nutritional resources out of the environment around us (see my earlier post with my slides from that lecture, if you like). It’s all well and good to say, ‘Eat meat, roots and berries,’ but that just means spending our time in the grocery store aisles a bit differently for most of us, not actually transforming the ways that we get food, how we relate to our environment, or even the quality of the meat, roots and berries we’re getting (after all, even the meat we get is from the animal world’s equivalent of couch potatoes, not the wild stuff on the hoof– or for that matter, dead on the ground where we can scavenge it).

Zuk draws on Leslie Aiello’s concept of ‘paleofantasies,’ stories about our past spun from thin evidence, to label the nostalgia some people seem to express for prehistoric conditions that they see as somehow healthier. In my research on sports and masculinity, I frequently see paleofantasies come up around fight sports, the idea that, before civilization hemmed us in and blunted our instincts, we would just punch each other if we got angry, and somehow this was healthier, freer and more natural (the problems with this view being so many that I refuse to even begin to enumerate them). It’s an odd inversion on the usual Myth of Progress, the idea that things always get better and better; instead, paleofantasies are a kind of long range projection of Grumpy Old Man Syndrome (‘Things were so much better in MY day…’), spinning fantasies of ‘life before’ everything we have built up around us.

Zuk describes how, she was initially enthusiastic about the ‘evolutionary mismatch’ argument around health and diet, but that, upon closer inspection: ‘The notion that there was a time of perfect adaptation, from which we’ve now deviated, is a caricature of the way evolution works.’ Zuk asks which particular stage in hominin evolutionary development was the age at which we were perfectly in harmony with our environment:

How much of the diet during our idyllic hunter-gatherer past was meat, and what kind of plants and animals were used, varied widely in time and space. Inuits had different diets from Australian aboriginals or Neotropical forest dwellers. And we know little about the details of early family structure and other aspects of behavior. So the argument that we are “meant” to eat a certain proportion of meat, say, is highly questionable. Which of our human ancestors are we using as models?

In fact, the idea that our bodies were perfectly suited to a particular environment is an adaptationist fantasy. Processes of evolution, including variation and natural selection, niche creation and co-evolution, even catastrophe and fluctuating rates of evolutionary change, suggest that adaptation is usually imperfect, with abundant glitches that, as long as they don’t constitute abject failures, usually continue to exist unless selection and variation conspire to find a way to get rid of them.

We have never been a seamless match with the environment. Instead, our adaptation is more like a broken zipper, with some teeth that align and others that gape apart. The paleontologist Neal Shubin points out that our inner fish constrains the human body’s performance and health, because adaptations that arose in one environment bedevil us in another. Hiccups, hernias and hemorrhoids are all caused by an imperfect transfer of anatomical technology from our fish ancestors.

I’ve been recently reading a book that I have to review which follows this line of thinking: that evolution shaped us for one sort of environment, but that civilization, technology, social life, and culture all demand something radically different from us, so we’re stuck. There’s an odd inconsistency there: on the one hand, we’re perfectly adapted to paleolithic life; on the other hand, our bodies just can’t get with the last 10,000 or 50,000 years of change. Usually the argument is that ‘we’re just changing too fast now to adapt.’

I think the biological evidence points to the fact that both of these impressions is incorrect, as Zuk suggests: we are neither so perfectly well adapted to foraging (or scavenging or living in trees or whichever stage we develop paleonostalgia for) nor are we so ill-suited for our own environment (in spite of our health problems, we actually live a long time compared to our ancestors, for example).

So before we start waxing nostalgic about all the health benefits of a Pleistocene diet, perhaps we should remember that our ancestors’ food often came in this nasty packaging which tended to run away, attack them, or just go missing entirely when they were really hungry. Zuk’s conclusion is a very balanced one:

This isn’t to say that we wouldn’t be better off eating fewer processed foods. And certainly we have health concerns that never struck our ancestors. But we shouldn’t flagellate ourselves for having modern bodies, and we shouldn’t assume that tweaking our diets or our posture will rescue us from all our current ills. That’s just a paleofantasy about the future.

We are, quite simply, a species of our Age, shaped by the environmental forces around us, just as our ancestors (and us) were also shaped by their Age (whether the Holocene, Pleistocene, or earlier). We drag the history around in our bodies, but we also bear the stamp of our own time, especially in things like diet, as the food choices we make end up affecting the very molecular structure of our bodies and brains. I don’t think we’re fat or have heart disease or live longer because we’re stuck in Stone Age bodies, but rather because we’re fashioning Information Age regimes of food, activity, and environments. We tend to look at our bodies and see their inadequacies, but we could just as easily see them as the perfectly logical products of the developmental processes we create, for all their strengths and weaknesses.

Update: If you still haven’t had enough of discussions about diet and evolution, I’ve put up a brief discussion of Richard Wrangham’s work over at the new site: Food for thought: Cooking in human evolution. And bonus, Prof. Wrangham actually responded to the post and dressed me down for presenting a simplified version of his argument.