Transcript
Question: Can you be a food lover and a
healthy eater?
Mark
Bittman: I think if you are a true food lover,
you are a healthy eater. Well,
first of all, the term foodie is completely ridiculous because for someone to
-- when you meet somebody and they say, "I really love to eat," I
think the appropriate answer is who doesn’t? So, I mean look around. Who do you know who is not a food lover? Everybody's a food lover.
The question is
do you eat responsibly? Do you eat
for your own benefit? Do you eat
for your planets benefit and do you eat the best food possible? If the answer to all of those things is
yes then you're eating well. If
you're eating, if your style of eating is bad for your body, if your style of
eating is bad for the planet then you are not really eating good food. You're eating lousy food and there's
plenty -- as we know, there's plenty of lousy food around.
Question: What is the most environmentally
responsible way to eat?
Mark
Bittman: The principled way to eat, if you were
going to say, "I want to eat entirely for my own benefit, I want to eat
entirely for the benefit of the planet, I want to eat in the most responsible
way possible to minimize my carbon footprint, to minimize my impact overall, to
minimize my effect on animals," you would be a vegan. That's the bottom line.
Veganism is the
most principled way to eat that there is.
From the perspective of your own body, from the perspective of the
planet, from the perspective of animals, very few people are going to be
vegans. Let's be real.
So what's
next? I mean, if on the one hand
you have vegans and on the other hand you have people who eat whatever they
feel like eating, there's a middle ground. The problem with the way most Americans eat right now is
that we are about as far from veganism as we could be. So a vegan would get 100 percent of his
or her calories from plants.
Most Americans
get 90 percent of their calories from processed food, junk food, and animal
products. So, the goal, I think,
is to move in the direction of eating more unprocessed plant food than we do
now and everybody's got a different starting place. If you eat 20 cheeseburgers a week, or the equivalent, you
might look at eating 15 cheeseburgers a week or the equivalent. If you're eating 15, you might look at
eating 10 and so on, and I think if people think about what's best for their
body, what's best for the planet, the answer is eating unprocessed plant food
and then think about how can I eat more of that stuff at the expense of meat,
which was the question, but also at the expense of processed food and junk
food.
Question: What are some of the main things you
can do to eat healthily?
Mark
Bittman: The idea is to
eat as many unprocessed plants as you can. What are
plants? Plants are vegetables,
fruits, legumes, which means beans, nuts and seeds; what am I leaving out? I think that's about it. So the idea is to eat as many
unprocessed plants as you possibly can and to eat those instead of eating
processed foods, junk foods, and animal products.
Well, it works
for me -- what's worked for me for just about three years now, what works for
me is to eat a very, very strict diet of plants only and unprocessed plants
only from the time I wake up in the morning until dinner time. So from the time I wake up until
roughly dark I eat a lot of fruit, I eat a lot of vegetables, I eat some whole
grains and sometimes I have some beans and that's pretty much it. And then at night I eat whatever I want
and that’s, which includes meat, which includes wine and which includes pasta
and bread and stuff like that.
That's a huge
change for me. I think that if you
think of your diet as a seesaw with the animal products, the processed or the
junk food on the heavy side as it is for most people and the unprocessed plants
on the light side as it is for most people, I think for me my seesaw went from
looking something like this to looking something like this. I think to the extent other people can
eat that way they will have a lesser impact on the planet, improve their
health, probably lose weight, feel better.
Question: Why did you decide to change the way
you ate?
Mark
Bittman: Well I think I decided to change the
way I ate because of some of the things we've been talking about here. One is that I recognize that one of the
highest contributors to greenhouse gases and global warming is the industrial
production of livestock. So I
decided okay that was one good reason to eat less meat. The other good reason to eat less meat
is that I was in my mid-50s and my health wasn't what it used to be. So I was overweight, I had bad knees, I
had sleep apnea, had high cholesterol, I had high blood sugar or borderline
high blood sugar, I think that's enough.
So
I decided to change my diet and it's so obvious to everyone who pays any
attention to nutrition at all that if you want to be healthier the way to do
that is as I've already said is to eat fewer animal products and eat less
processed and junk food. So I
started to do that and it worked.
I lost 35 pounds; gained five of them back but hey. Sleep apnea went away, I slept better,
my knees bothered me much less, in fact, they ran the New York marathon last
year. My cholesterol is back to
normal and my blood sugar is back to normal.
So it all worked
and it's not a coincidence. I mean
no one would say it was a coincidence.
Question: Are there any foods you avoid because
of health reasons?
Mark Bittman: Actually not. There's some things I don’t like. But I think that it's important to recognize that there is
no sort of single, I mean, arsenic and cyanide aside, there's not really a
single ingredient that's going to outright kill you. There's actually some evidence that a single can of soda can
trigger diabetes, but there's not a lot of evidence about that. In general, one ingredient, one little
kind of food, one meal, one day, even one week. That's not what's determinant of your overall health or of
your impact on the planet. What
determines is your overall diet and if it's moving in the right direction,
which for most Americans is towards plants and away from animal products and
processed foods, than I think hip, hip, hooray. That's the way to go.
