Philosophy of Food Spring 2018 Class Notes

JAN 18: 1

• First Day Food Survey

• Course Content: A brief look at the major course research questions.

• Course mechanics:

• Websites in this course. alfino.org --> wiki and courses.alfino.org
• Roster information -- fill in google form
• Main Assignments and "Grading Schemes"

• To Do list:

• Send me a brief introduction through the "Tell Me" form on the wiki. (Soon, please.)
• Login to wiki for the first time and make a brief introduction on the practice page. (3 points if both are done by Friday.)
• After rosters are posted, login to courses.alfino and look around. Note "Links" for pdfs. Retrieve reading for Monday (and read it).
• Browse wiki pages, especially some of the old food news.
• Get the book. Pollan, In Defense of Food
• Start printing pdfs. Highly recommended.

• The Prep Cycle -- recommendations for success in the course!

1. Read - Check out Advice on Reading. Look at last year's class notes for the reading, if available. Be ready for quizes.
2. Make sure your in-class notes link class notes and problems and issues to readings. This is how you get a high level of information and detail to work with in your thought and expression.
3. Class -- Our pattern is to consolidate our understanding of the reading and then engage in philosophy on the basis of it. Small group discussion is a training experience. Everything is a training experience.

This is the basic pattern for our coursework. From this cycle we then develop short philosophical writing and position papers using by instructor and peer review.

JAN 23: 2

• show survey results; Spending on Food by country

Food Inc Notes

Fed Up!

JAN 25: 3

Gastrpod, "The End of the Calorie"

• Sanctorio Sanctorius - 30year practice for weighing inputs and outputs.

• Antoine Lavasier — Guinea pig in coffee urn - we “burn” food chemically. Change in temperature of water the pig is in. 1st “calorimeter”. Axed in French Rev.

• Later defined by a german scientists (Favre and Silbermann in 1852 or Mayer in 1848) as: Amount of heat energy to raise 1 gram of water by one degree centigrade from 14.5 to 15.5 at sea level.

• We still use calorimeters......museum of calorimeters also. Visit to contemporary calorimeter. Converted walk in cooler. Implication that the woman with the sewing machine “made a mess”?

• Bomb calorimeter. You burn the food. Segment on how it works.

• Wilbur Atwater. Atwater values. USDA scientist. “Father of nutrition science” (Nestle likes him.). 4,000 food values. Method...omg. Potental energy (bomb cal value) - excretion = value. 4 cal carb / protein. 9 fat. (9 alcohol).

• Recent evidence about variability of calorie values — researchers repeating Atwater research, but using additional measures. David Baer and Bill Rumpler both work at the Food Components and Health Laboratory at the USDA-ARS headquarters, in Beltsville, Maryland. Check out Baer and his colleagues' papers on the difference between the calories on the label and those our bodies can extract for almonds and walnuts.b. “The food is free, but you have carry ...”. 5-6% off on tree nuts, 30% on almonds, 21% walnuts,

• How does cooking change calorie availability?
• RICHARD WRANGHAM'S COOKING RESEARCH
• Richard Wrangham is the author of Catching Fire: How cooking made us human. His co-authored paper on the difference that cooking makes to the availability of calories in meat was published here.
• Harvard medical anthropologist. —
• First to show that cooking changes food to allow earlier digestion (small intestine) and greater calorie recovery. 40% for starch. Also cooked meat, peanuts. All research on mice (and pythons). Still hard to say what the variation will be for us. Maybe 20-40%. What about heat extrusion? (Used in cereals.). Industrial food might raise calorie levels relative to atwater values.

• Sarah Haley — scientist claiming counting calories didn’t work.

• CALORIES AND THE GUT MICROBIOME

• Peter Turnbaugh's lab at the University of California, San Francisco, promises "better living through gut microbes." In our conversation with him, we discussed this study on the effects that transplanting gut microbes from lean and obese twins had on the weight of mice. Further examples of the impact of microbes on energy balance can be found in this paper on one woman's weight gain following a fecal transplant, and this paper on how risperidone is associated with altered gut microbiota and weight gain.

• microbiota creates variation in calorie capture.

• 36:45. Sarah Hailey comment.

• CALORIE REPLACEMENTS?

• Susan B. Roberts is the creator of the satiety-based "iDiet." She has also done extensive research into the accuracy of calorie counts on menu labels. David Ludwig's book, Always Hungry?, also proposes measuring foods based on their satiety score. Adam Drenowksi's Nutrient-Rich Food Index is explained here.

• They acknowledge that we don’t have a better standard, but other methods might tell us more.

• DAVID WISHART AND METABOLOMICSDavid Wishart's research group is based at the University of Alberta. You can check out the Human Metabolome Project Database online here. And the Israeli study on personalized nutrition based on individual glycemic responses is available online here.

• WHY THE CALORIE IS BROKEN
• We wrote a feature article for Mosaic, the online publication of the Wellcome Trust, to accompany this episode. You can read it online here.
• THE CHEMICAL DEFINITION OF THE CALORIE
• In the episode, we say that a calorie is the amount of heat energy needed to raise the temperature of one gram of water by one degree centigrade, from 14.5º to 15.5º, at one unit of atmospheric pressure. This is accurate, but it is misleading, because throughout the rest of the episode, we are discussing a different kind of calorie—the kilocalorie, which is the amount of heat energy needed to raise the temperature of one kilogram of water by one degree centigrade. The kilocalorie is the number we see on our food labels and recommended daily allowances, but no one other than chemists actually calls it the kilocalorie. Instead, it has been shortened to "calorie" on labels and in everyday usage. Throughout our episode, we follow common practice by calling a kilocalorie a calorie, but then we mistakenly gave the definition of a true calorie without noting the difference. We apologize for any confusion!

• The University of Alberta's David Wishart offers us a glimpse of the future, in which truly personalized nutrition advice will evolve from the emerging science of how the chemicals in our bodies interact with all the different chemicals in the food we eat. And Susan Roberts, director of the energy metabolism laboratory at the Tufts USDA nutrition center, suggests an alternative unit as a replacement for the traditional calorie.

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Groopman, Jerome, "Is Fat Killing You, Or is Sugar?"

• the author, a medical doctor, start with 1960's cholesterol culture in US and his own experience with diet and statins to change his levels.

• Fat is back -- oils and nuts are good again, Atkins and paleo diets (ketosis diets) make health claims. But looking at a study underlying one of these claims for the med diet, one finds the significance of the science overstated.

• Sylvia Taylor, Secret Life of Fat
• Gary Taubes, The Case Against Sugar

• Digest of Taylor's case: You need in your body to metabolize many vitamins, to signal regulatory mechanisms for appetite (leptin). She also espouses an inflammation theory of obesity. Groopman is critical of the quality research here. There is no easy dietary advice that follows from understanding lipids. (But note that it could still be helpful in training our intuitions against simplistic dietary advice!)

• cites historical models for "moral diets" like Brillat-Savarin, Graham, Fletcher....

• Wibur Atwater -- still a census: Calories matter.

• Post WW2 AMA declares obsesity a major health problem. Ancel Keys -- Promoted low fat, low unsaturated fat diet, such as Med. Diet.

• traces Taubes early food journalism, "What is Its all a Big Fat Lie?" 2007: Good Calories, Bad Calories. Taubs makes a strong case for sugar as the "culprit" in the Western Diet and tells the Big Sugar political story, e.g. "the food industry has systematically tried to obstruct scientific research that exposes the dangers of sugar, just as tobacco companies tried to hide the risks of smoking." (note that Groopman agrees with this claim.)

• traces history of sugar industry effort to refute the claim that is is an "empty calorie" (makes a food calorie dense)
• research funding history, research funding wars.

• Groopman claims that Taubes overstates the evidence for sugar as a single cause. Follows his somewhat unscientific reasoning. He lumps lots of very different diseases together. The analogy between tobacco and sugar doesn't carry over to the molecular level. (Note: This does not mean that glycemic response is not an important area of recent research, just that it can't be recruited in this fashion.)

• Note his closing critique of diet books: oversimplification, overreliance on macronutrient theories, or behavioral tricks. Meta-research on diets undermines their efficacy.
• (To the extent that diet books are effective, it's because their advice overlaps to some degree with mainstream advice. The "trick" in the diet isn't what's effective.)