Eagles! Four of us drove up to Lackawaxen, PA several weeks ago to hit a spot where the Lackawaxen River meets the Delaware River on the New York border and bald eagles like to congregate. For the fish. It wound up being pretty exciting because I was thinking about how, growing up in the 70s and early 80s, the word on the birds was that they were disappeared, very rare, nearly extinct. To actually see them around now is exciting and probably worthy of some sort of American Indian quote about soaring hearts or summ'at, but no. We saw about seven of them. My pictures are lame though, because I need a better telephoto lens. Mine is cheap-o. Also, that's all I have to report. So the rest of this blog will be other bad bald eagle pictures, and a response I had to write for English class last year on an article in the NY Times by Michael Pollan. Yup, I'm scraping up the dregs.
Michael Pollan artfully defines “food”
as anything your great-great-grandmother would recognize as such, and his point
is that in modern times the industry has drastically altered our perception of
what qualifies as real food. Pollan says that part of the reason people have a
difficult time eating real food is that when you walk into a grocery store the
“most healthful foods in the supermarket sit there quietly in the produce
section, silent as stroke victims, while a few aisles over, the Cocoa Puffs and
Lucky Charms are screaming about their newfound whole-grain goodness.” He has a
decidedly sneering attitude about such health claims, and with good reason; in
1977, George McGovern “prepared what by all rights should have been an
uncontroversial document called ‘Dietary Goals for the United States’… calling
on Americans to cut down on red meat and dairy products.” The red-meat and
dairy industry bellowed, and this very practical advice was drowned out. In
Pollan’s view and in mine, the food industry has since waged a campaign of
misinformation about American health.
In 2007, at 35 years old, 5’ 11” and 220
lbs., my doctor told me my cholesterol was high and wrote a prescription for
Lipitor. Concurrently I had seen a specialist about my arms frequently going
numb during sleep and was told that I had pre-carpal tunnel syndrome, meaning
that it wasn’t full-blown and not too late to fix it with arm braces and some
other types of treatment. I had a brief conversation with myself at that point
that went something like this: “Self, you’re 35. You’re falling apart. You’re
too young for this shit.” I decided that I needed to get in better shape. I
never filled the Lipitor prescription because of my personal conviction that it
is a junk drug, meant to treat a symptom but not the actual problem. I never
wore the arm braces because I couldn’t bear the idea of starting down that path
towards riding a jazzy with a big-slurp in Wal-Mart. I got a gym membership and
lost 35 pounds in about a year. I slowly began changing my diet to whole foods,
which became easier the more I exercised because I didn’t want to ruin a good
workout with empty calories. I also started getting into vitamins.
Pollan believes that separating
individual vitamins and nutrients from food is missing the forest for the
trees. I agree with this to an extent in that I strongly believe that vitamins
are not a substitute for healthy
food. However, since I began taking natural, non-synthetic vitamins in addition
to my healthier diet and exercise, I haven’t had a single cold. I have felt a
bit run-down on occasion, which I strongly suspect were cases of my body
fighting off what would normally be some such common sickness. I did get
bronchitis once, but it only lasted about two days which is unusual for such a
normally debilitating condition. While I could attribute this to exercise and
healthy eating, and I’m sure that’s a part of it, I know plenty of people who
eat well and exercise and yet still get regular illnesses.
While my evidence for the health
benefits of vitamins is anecdotal and hardly scientific, I am wary of ending my
vitamin regimen as Pollan, while offering much sage wisdom, had little in the
way of science in his opinions on individual vitamins to offer either. My own
feeling from reading various sources is that today’s farming practices have
reduced the amount of minerals and nutrients in our soil, therefore reducing
the health benefits of even the most naturally grown whole foods, which is why
I feel that supplementing a healthy
diet with natural vitamins is still important.
Pollan seems to fall into the same trap
that he warns us of, asking that we take so-called scientific studies done by
nutritionists with a grain of salt and yet at the same time citing a study that
says “in the case of beta carotene ingested as a supplement, scientists have
discovered that it actually increases the risk of certain cancers.” The error
in this stance lies in what he leaves out; that many such negative vitamin
studies are done using synthetic vitamins. Synthetic vitamins have been shown
in fact to be very bad for you, however when the naturally occurring forms of
these vitamins are used in more honest studies, no such negative health
consequences are found. Therefore it seems obvious to me that the hype
surrounding the supposed danger of vitamins is simply more misinformation from
the industry.
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