animal products are whole foods too

Animal products are `whole foods,' too

Dana Carpender's latest - I couldn't have said it better myself!

Animal products are 'whole foods,' too

Dana Carpender

The nutritional buzz phrase is 'whole foods.' This is encouraging.

I've been watching the nutrition scene long enough to remember when

people who insisted that whole-grain bread was more nutritious than

enriched bread were scorned as 'food faddists.'

But the admonitions to eat whole foods seem to apply only to grains,

fruits and vegetables. Officialdom still recommends discarding large

fractions of animal foods. Yet few see these fractionated animal foods

as the refined, depleted foods they are.

Take dairy. Virtually all recommendations for dairy products include

the qualifiers 'low-fat' or 'fat-free.' But that's not the way it

comes out of the cow. Yes, whole milk has more calories than skim. It

also has far more vitamin A, because it's carried in the butterfat.

(Some skim milk is fortified with vitamin A --- the equivalent of

adding a few vitamins back to nutritionally depleted white flour.)

Because fat aids in calcium absorption, you'll get more calcium from

whole milk. Whole milk from grass-fed cows supplies CLA, a fat that

increases fat-burning and reduces heart disease and cancer risk, and

omega-3 fats, which reduce inflammation, and heart disease and cancer

risk. It is worth paying premium prices for such milk.

And eggs. Oh, poor eggs. There they are, just about the most perfect

food in the world, and what do people do? They throw away the yolks.

The part with almost all the vitamins, including A, E, K and the

hard-to-come-by D, not to mention brain-enhancing choline and DHA.

Eggs from pastured chickens also have yolks rich in omega-3. Better to

throw away the whites, not that I'd recommend that, either. Just eat

whole eggs, will you?

Then there's chicken. When did 'chicken' become synonymous with

'boneless, skinless chicken breast?' Chicken breast is a good food,

but the whole chicken is better. Dark and white meats both have

nutritional strengths. They are not identical in vitamin and mineral

content. Chicken skin is a good source of vitamin A, again because

it's fatty. I wrote recently about liver's nutritional bonanza, and

hearts are nutrient-rich as well, making giblet gravy a great idea.

Simmering the leftover chicken bones yields flavorsome broth rich in

highly absorbable calcium and joint-building gelatin. (I save my steak

bones, too, for beef broth.)

Our ancestors, ever mindful of where their next meal was coming from,

relished every edible part of every animal they killed. Indeed,

paleoanthropologists assert that hunter-gatherers ate the rich, fatty

organ meats first, preferring them to muscle meats, and smashed bones

to eat the marrow. As recently as a century ago, marrow was such a

popular food that special spoons were made for scooping it out of

bones. I love the stuff. I've been sucking the marrow out of lamb-chop

bones since I was a tyke. A 1997 article in the journal Nature asserts

that human brain capacity decreased at the dawn of agriculture 10,000

years ago, very likely because of a reduction in animal-fat

consumption. Whole animal foods are part of our nutritional heritage.

My low-carbohydrate eating habits are often referred to as a 'fad.'

Whatever. If it was good enough for my hunter-gatherer ancestors, it's

good enough for me. Do you want to know what's really a fad? Removing

the fat from milk and the yolks from eggs, and discarding three-

quarters of the chicken, all organ meats and most bones. There's not a

culture in the world where our narrow, refined, low-fat, flavorless