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| Food containing magnesium |
The advices given by medical
dieticians about healthy food oscillate continuously as time goes by. They
rather look like the alternatives of fashion, than the discoveries of science.
Here are a few examples:
•
In the fifties and sixties it was fashionable to disparage
the consumption of olive oil and recommend the use of seed oils, supposed to be
healthier. Heart patients were advised to consume various seed oils, while olive
oil was not even mentioned. Sometimes it was asserted that the consumption of
olive oil increases cholesterol in blood. This policy caused significant damage
to Spain, one of the main olive oil exporters, as stated in a
newspaper article published in 1968:
The economic problems
of the olive grove are motivated, to a great extent, by the change in the taste
of the consumers, who sometime ago were forced to use different seed oils, and
now, when we are trying to bring them back to a higher consumption of olive
oil, they don’t want to do it in the proportion advisable for this market of
the Spanish fruit, as it is rather more expensive.
In the
1980s the situation had changed completely, as indicated by this
article, published in 1983, where a page sponsored by the Ministry of
Agriculture, Fisheries and Food promotes the consumption of olive oil, because
it contains no cholesterol, among other advantages. Three
pages later in the same newspaper issue, olive oil is praised with these
words:
Olive oil is the most
easily digestible fat for the body. It also has an enormous nutritional value
and caloric power (943 calories per 100 grams of pure oil). Let us glorify,
consume and integrate in our organism this outstanding luxury of Spanish
cuisine.
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| White fish (Atlantic cod) |
- Around the same time (the 1950s and 60s) doctors were very clear: white fish (hake, sole, monkfish, cod) were much better than blue fish (tuna, bonito, salmon, swordfish), which was unadvisable in almost all cases:
And we will also say
that the meat of some fish is lean, while in others it is greasy. The first
usually correspond to the so-called white fish, the others to the so-called
blue... The essential thing is that white lean fish is easily digested and
highly recommended for delicate people, while greasy fish is more difficult to
digest.
Today
things have changed completely. Blue fish, as part of the Mediterranean cuisine,
so good for our health, should be eaten three times a week, as it contains omega-3,
the fashion fat.
•
Eggs have long been said
to contain cholesterol and to have negative effects on circulatory diseases. It
was usually advised not to eat more than one egg a week, and some companies even
tried to produce eggs without cholesterol. By 2008, however, the usual
recommendation had been increased to three or four eggs per week. In 2013, a meta-analysis
(a large-scale review of scientific publications) concluded that one egg per
day does not cause harmful effects in coronary heart disease.
•
In the case of palm oil, the evolution has been the opposite. First it was
very good for health, now it is declared dangerous. On the other hand, coconut oil, formerly reviled
because it raised the level of cholesterol, has now become excellent.
•
Let us finish by remembering the scandal raised two
years ago by the media when the World Health Organization (WHO) declared red meats carcinogenic.
All this is
complicated because doctors are continually reducing the normal levels of cholesterol,
and we can detect the first attempts to do the same with blood pressure and
blood sugar. Nasty-minded people could conclude that their objective is pushing
us all into abnormal levels, so that every human being is forced to consume
continuously many different kinds of pills, thus fattening the revenue account
of pharmaceutical companies. But then, the meaning of the word normal
would have to be redefined.
Manuel Alfonseca
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