We Really Are What We Eat

By Katherine Hobson

When a colleague showed up at work with a mammoth piece of pizza last year, Marion Nestle's first reaction wasn't to ask for a bite. Instead, she photographed the 2,000-calorie, 13-1/2-inch-long slice as yet another example of America's skewed relationship with food: ever on a quest for the next fad diet, yet willing to gobble down grossly oversize portions. Nestle, a nutrition professor at New York University, has addressed food safety and food industry politics in previous books. In her latest, What to Eat, Nestle deconstructs the overwhelming array of products on the shelves of today's supermarkets and sheds some new light on their often-confusing nutritional claims.

QUESTION: Why do we need this book?

ANSWER: When I was growing up, we didn't have big supermarkets. You had small grocery stores, and they had seasonal, local food. The idea of a supermarket that has 40,000 products in it was unheard of then. But I went to buy a head of lettuce, and there were seven different packages of romaine lettuce -- by the head, by the pound, and processed in different ways. If you want to figure out which is the cheapest, you've got to do a research project. If you want organic, you need to do a research project. And then you have to decide how much you want to pay for convenience. To figure out what you're paying for is not so easy. And that's just the lettuce.

QUESTION: What confuses people most about nutrition?

ANSWER: Nobody understands calories. They're hard to understand; you can't look at a food and tell how many calories are in it -- even for labeled products, unless you are sophisticated enough to know how many portions there are in the product. And the concept that larger portions have more calories is not something that is obvious to people.

QUESTION: Isn't it clear that a 6-ounce bagel has three times as many calories as a 2-ounce bagel?

ANSWER: People have an intuitive sense that one unit contains one unit's worth of calories. And if the unit is bigger, they don't think that unit is going to contain any more calories. They think that a bagel is a bagel.

QUESTION: Should we avoid trans fats?

ANSWER: Trans fats are bad, and I don't deliberately choose foods with them. But people see no trans fats on the cereal box and think that means "no calories." Or they see it on a cookie box and think, "Goodie! I can eat the whole thing."

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