Why food quality matters more than calories | Dariush Mozzaffarian, M.D.

Jason Wachob (0:00)

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Jason Wachob (2:34)

Americans have been eating the same number of calories or even fewer, and exercising more since 2000, but still gaining weight. Dr. Dariush Mozzaffarian is a cardiologist, one of the world's leading nutrition scientists, and the author of the new book, Food is Medicine. In today's show, we dig into where nutrition science went wrong from the 1941 wartime conference that gave us enriched flour to the low-fat era that sped up ultra-processing. Dariush also explains why he considers seed oils a distraction from the nutrition rules that really matter, why cheese may be the healthiest food in its category, and why calorie counting has failed. I also share my own years-long fight with my ApoB, which even a diet of sardines and salmon couldn't fix, and Dariush gives his take on where food ends and medicine has to take over. If you've ever felt a whiplash from nutrition headlines, this conversation will help you sort out what actually matters.

Where did nutrition science go wrong?

Dariush Mozaffarian (3:36)

Well, there's a lot to unpack there, and I think it's really important. I think one of the take-home messages that I go through in my book is to really understand where we need to go and even where we are, we need to understand how we got here. And a lot of the story about nutrition science and our food system kind of starts in the 80s and the 90s with the rise of ultra-processed foods, which we should definitely talk about the low-fat diet, you know, low cholesterol, low saturated fat. But to really understand where we are, we have to go back just a few decades earlier. And it's really the early 1900s and mid 1900s that set up our food system.

And so we don't have to go into all the details, but the bottom line is really what set up our food system was the last century. And there were two big areas of focus in the last century. The first was the discovery of vitamins. But we think about vitamins in food, we all talk about vitamins, vitamin D, E, you know, all the B vitamins. They weren't even a known thing until around 1930 So vitamins hadn't even been discovered. And there were pretty common diseases like pellagra and rickets and scurvy, many, many diseases that lots of people were suffering from. In Harlem, 90% of black kids had had rickets. In some poor neighborhoods in London, 50% or more of kids had had rickets, which is vitamin D deficiency. In Cairo, in Sydney, Australia, the same thing. People didn't know what was causing these diseases. And so the discovery of vitamins really unlocked modern nutrition science, you know. Healers have always known food is good for our health, but really the modern nutrition science was unlocked the discovery of vitamins around the 1930s. And then that led into the Great Depression and World War II and tremendous fears of food shortages and being ready for war. And so all the early science for like 30 years, 40 years from really 1930 to kind of 1970 was focused on vitamins. And can we get vitamins to people? And the second big theme of the last century that explains where we are today is calories.