The Hidden Health Hazards of Lettuce
Lettuce: The Silent Killer/photo by Donna Turner Ruhlman
I know what it was that set me off today. A random article, out of the blue, I shouldn’t even have read it. It referred to great food cooked with rendered fat as “early-grave food heaven.” Why do people say stupid things like this?
Because the media bombards us with the simplistic message that Fat Is Bad For You, and it pisses me off.
Why? Because it’s not true. Fat is good for you. Fat is good for your body. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. Fat doesn’t make you fat, EATING TOO MUCH MAKES YOU FAT! Eating every morsel of your mile high Cheesecake Factory plate is what makes you fat. Eating a whole bag of Doritos is what makes you fat. Eating when you’re not hungry makes you fat!
To argue that fat is bad for you is akin to arguing that homemade chocolate chip cookies or apple pie is bad for you. Is ice cream bad for you? Of course not. Putting away a couple of pints of Rocky Road every night, that probably is. Obviously too much ice cream and too much fat is bad for you. If all you ate was lettuce, lettuce would be bad for you.
When was last time you heard a nutritionist warning you about the dangers of lettuce? Well, I’m here to make you wise. If lettuce is the only thing you eat, you will get sick, you’re going to have serious health issues. It can lead to dangerous malnutrition, grave weight loss, and in women, infertility.
Fat is dangerous only insofar as it’s good, because it’s so much more fun to eat than lettuce and we want to eat lots and lots of it. Yes, it’s calorie dense and yes, for some people, eating a lot of fat can raise their blood cholesterol—not me apparently, thank you mom and dad, grandpa and grandma—which is linked to some serious stuff, heart attacks and strokes.
But good health is not about being fat-free! It’s about BALANCE! Lots of vegetables, plenty of exercise, moderate consumption of meat, dairy and grains, cooked—and this is really really important—cooked by you or by someone you know, preferably where you or they live.
Please, let’s stop repeating the thoughtless mantra that fat is bad. Because fat is good. And don’t get me started on the fat-free labels processed food companies put on their packages that imply, everywhere we look, the falsehood that fat is bad.
You see food in the grocery store labeled fat-free? My advice is go in the opposite direction. Because they’ve either done something to it to make up for the fat, like putting sugars in “fat-free” half-and-half, or it’s a product that is naturally fat-free, like Kraft granola bars—there’s not supposed to be fat in them (it’s the sugar overload that’s bad)! Which means the company is pulling one over on you. Don’t let them.
Fat isn’t bad, stupid is bad.
Think for yourself. Use your common sense.
God this shit drives me crazy.
That does it, next up: Fried chicken. That’s right. DEEP FRIED CHICKEN! Who want’s to talk about DEEP-FRIED CHICKEN?!
If you liked this post on Lettuce the Silent Killer, check out these other links:
- My post on Lunch with Michael Pollan: Two Words of Warning.
- Food Tech Connect is a great website connect modern technology to food system innovation.
- Read Nina Plank’s book Real Food: What to Eat and Why.
- Need to learn more about sustainable agriculture and other food politics visit Civil Eats.
© 2012 Michael Ruhlman. Photo © 2012 Donna Turner-Ruhlman. All rights reserved
Fried chicken yes!
I’d actually love to talk about DEEP-FRIED CHICKEN®. Sounds like a great thing to put under the noses of an anti-fat teetotaler.
Advance question: I’ve heard that the lard that is often found at grocery stores should be avoided, as it’s hydrogenated (or some such thing) for shelflife. Is this true, or is it now more common to find less manipulated lard in a regular grocery store? I’d look into making it myself, but my wife just had a baby and so I’m operating on a limited quantity of Creative Cooking Points.
Look for the lard in the refrigerated section as opposed to the shelf-stable variety sold near the vegetable shortening. The refrigerated variety may be stabilized with BHA/BHT (which sound like scary acronyms but are harmless at the the micro-amounts used), but will not be hydrogenated. The quick litmus test is to check the nutritional info for trans-fats; there shouldn’t be any. Of course, fresh rendered lard is the best, but finding a good source can be tough.
Whereas I have too much lard, as it comes with the pastured pig I buy in bulk. I’m thinking of learning to make soap.
Yes, the standard ubiquitous Sno-cap brand lard is modified. (It probably has the fat break-down on the nutrition info label.) Check with a good butcher for fresh, rendered lard or at least for pork fat that you can render yourself very easily at home.
I’d actually prefer pan-fried chicken, but whichever’s good…
plus, lettuce is now being coated in plastic: www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=Vv-upmzkiHk
ew!
That’s not plastic. It is the upper epidermis of the lettuce leaf.
Boom! I abso-freaking-lutely agree with this post. I’ll be making fried chicken on Friday and while I think our version is perfect, I can’t wait to see your take, so get a move on
Deep deep fried chicken YES!!!
Amen!
“God this shit drives crazy.”
I think you’re missing a subject or object or something. Unless you’re using total metaphor, which I guess works too, since the subject of nutrition in society is a weird bus that never goes in a predictable direction.
I hope you weren’t joking about doing a deep fried chicken post…
Thank you thank you thank you. I keep track of what I eat online and every time someone starts talking about all the “great” fat-free options at their local grocery or brags about how little fat they eat I want to scream, “No, you fool! You’re killing yourself!”
So, this fried chicken…
Agree 100%. Will take natural fat over chemical pseudo-food anyday.
While I don’t think humans should have ever started eating grains and processed vegetable oils, the best article on the goodness of fat (lard, specifically) was written on Dr. Mary Dan Eades blog. “Lardy, Lardy, When Will They Learn?” www.proteinpower.com/drmd_blog/nutrition/lardy-lardy-when-will-they-learn/
Give it a look! It’s the best!
This post … was … beautiful.
Thank you. That’s really all. You made me laugh as well. I will now re post this everywhere.
Amen! Now I am hungry for a deep-fried caesar salad.
Yes, to fat AND fried chicken!
YES!!!!! The whole fat/salt thing in the media makes me CRAZY!
YES!
As in, YES, this shit also drives me crazy. And thank you for this post! I don’t want to hear about how rats forced to eat six Big Macs a day died. If you ate six Big Macs a day, you would also die. Your brain is mostly fat. You need it. You just don’t need insane amounts of it. Or anything else, for that matter. Google soy and estrogen sometime. Too much of a good thing is a still bad thing.
And also as in, YES, please, fried chicken! Do not tease about the fried chicken. Maybe we can all talk about how deep fried foods absorb less fat than pan fried (food myth or not??).
Also, “Fat isn’t bad, stupid is bad” has some t-shirt potential, I think…
Yeah, I’m all about the t-shirt!
Great post. Made me think of the whole, “Guns don’t kill people, people kill people” mantra. Fat doesn’t kill people – stupid people who eat too MUCH fat kills people.
Yeah, remember the Snackwells debacle? People were shoveling cases of those things into their gullets thinking (or not) that it wouldn’t make them fat. Didn’t stop to look at the sugar content. Oops.
It also irritates me to no end to see a headline proclaiming the new dietary evil, especially when it’s a real food and the researchers force feed mountains of it to their lab rats and then “reason” that it’s the food’s fault that the rats died. Even worse is when they take a nutrient or other dietary substance wildly out of context and determine that it can kill you. Or cure cancer.
But we do live in a culture of fear. Maybe it’s because we’ve come so insanely far from what is natural to us as humans (with processed, factory-farmed “food”, for example) that we’ve lost touch with generations of dietary traditions and knowledge. Now we base our decisions on the over-simplified results of the latest bought-and-paid-for nutrition research. And of course whatever it says in big, bold, neon letters on the package that our brought-to-you-by-Monsanto food comes in. I dunno, It’s all getting a little too soylent green for me.
Thank you Michael, I’ve been saying the same things for decades!
You tell THEM Michael! Good to see someone has some sensibility left in this crazy supposedly fat-free, low fat world!
Thank you! We need more people in the media making this distinction. I actually wrote a paper for my Master’s degree on the “demonization of fat” in which I took a historic look at the fat-free trend beginning at the turn of the 20th century. Unsurprisingly my research suggested that this trend has been propagated by socially constructed misbeliefs and stigmas, which medical doctors and business folk then capitalized on, rather than any scientific data or nutritional knowledge. It doesn’t help that the physical characteristic of being larger in size is routinely referred to as being “fat”, thereby creating a false causal link to dietary fat. I do love that you use lettuce as an example, however. It resonates with me on a personal level as I routinely get into the argument with my mother who condemns all things “fat” in favour for eating plain lettuce.
Hey there, fat is an interesting subject and especially for women fats are VERY important. Perfectly pointed out in reference to fertility. I actually just got some WIC vouchers for the first time & part of the nutritional assessment includes weighing in and talking to a dietitian. I came out a lil skinnier than anticipated. The dietitian told me to start mixing oils in my cereal, such as vegetable oils, canola etc. I took her advice with a hefty grain of salt. I am not terribly skinny but weigh less then b4 I had my baby, due to the demands of breastfeeding. What type of oil do you guys suggest I mix into my cereal lol?
Thank you for a great read.
I suggest pure organic virgin coconut oil like the gold label stuff from TropicalTraditions.com, but I would cut out the cereal. Cereals are enriched using chemicals like propylene glycol and genetically modified cornstarch and the vitamins are usually extracted from GMO corn, too. (You could try oatmeal or cream of buckwheat instead of cereal). I am allergic to corn so I must seek out purity and quality with no hidden chemicals or additives. I only suggest a product if it is pure and as close to nature as possible.
It took me a very long time to find corn-free meat and fat so rendering my own lard was out of the question until recently. We used virgin organic coconut oil and extra virgin olive oil exclusively for all our cooking until then because refined oils contain corn additives. If you can find a grass fed butter like Kerrygold or Organic Valley (no natural flavors listed in ingredients!), that’s a high quality fat as