health foods

health foods The importance of food to good health is one of the oldest and most significant notions in human material culture. Obviously people must eat or they will die, but the concept of ‘health food’ carries with it moral, religious, and even political meanings that go far beyond mere nutrition. For most people just getting enough to eat can be a struggle. But for those living beyond the margin, the selection of what one ought to eat or to avoid to recover or to preserve health is profoundly revealing of cultural attitudes and of the relationship of the body to what enters it.

The biblical book of Leviticus offered a daunting array of dietary restrictions to the Jews, embedded among other laws they had to observe in order to keep their covenant with God. Much later commentary on the lists of forbidden foods notes, for example, that prohibition of pork was done for ‘good reason’, because pork would have carried an unusual amount of disease. Such logic does not, however, apply to the prohibition of rabbit, for instance, and we must look elsewhere for a better explanation of these enigmatic documents. Leviticus itself suggests an answer. After promising his people a land of milk and honey, God continued:
‘I have made a clear separation between you and the nations, and you shall make a clear separation between clean beasts and unclean beasts and between unclean and clean birds …You shall be holy to me, because I the Lord am holy’(Leviticus 20: 24–6).


If God's people obeyed his laws, which included eating certain foods and avoiding others, they would enjoy a life of plenty and would be holy before the Lord. If they polluted themselves, they would lose God's favour.

Many cultures throughout history have observed similar restrictions. Adam and Eve were told to avoid apples, which they did not. The Pythagoreans shunned beans. Hindus do not eat beef and Moslems avoid pork. History offers numerous examples of pious Roman Catholic women who claim to exist on the wine and bread of the Holy Sacrament alone. ‘Health food’, in this sense, implies certain dietary restrictions that affirm a person's place in the social order and assure them that they are doing something that will keep them from bodily or spiritual harm. The more positive approach — that certain foods actually are better for one than others — also has a long history.

The ancient Greek science of dietetics embraced not only what one ate but also one's physical activity and emotions. Each person's diet was individualized according to gender, class, age, and occupation. Healthy food was food that was peculiarly suited to one's unique constitution or complexion. Food was essential to keep the bodily fluids in balance and to maintain harmony with the world of nature. In the Greek system, which dominated medical philosophy in the West until the seventeenth century, the distinction between food and medicine was never clear. A disordered constitution, one affected by fever for instance, could be returned to balance with temperate foods that would have a moderating influence. The body would require a long time to return to normal, however, and this sort of medicine never dealt very well with acute conditions. By the seventeenth century, more radical treatments, often chemical, came into fashion and the gentle, gradual, and individualized diet fell out of favour.

A returning focus on food came when scientists began to study diseases that were caused by deficiency of nutriments, required in tiny amounts, that came to be called vitamins. Scurvy, which was revealed as a problem by long ocean voyages, was identified and treated by eighteenth-century naval physicians. By the 1880s, beriberi and other vitamin deficiencies were being identified, and by the 1920s most major vitamins had been identified and supplements like cod liver oil were being recommended, especially for children.

‘Health food’, in the modern sense of what one might buy in a health food shop, has its immediate roots in the nineteenth century. In the US, new Protestant sects like the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (1830) and the Seventh-Day Adventists (1861) avoid tea, coffee, alcohol, and tobacco, believing that the body, as the temple of the soul, must be protected.

vegetarianism in various forms is increasing in popularity even outside of religious groups. Many vegetarians avoid meat out of compassion for animals and because they believe animal products are unnecessary or unnatural. But some associate meat-eating with capitalism and the exploitation of the environment, and are making a political as much as a nutritional statement. The macrobiotic movement, which claims to have originated in mid-nineteenth-century Japan, returns to more ancient concepts of healthy eating. One popular regimen, lasting seven years, emphasizes cereal grains and the consumption of local and seasonal fruits and vegetables only, because only locally-grown produce can restore balance and harmony.

Popular interest in health foods is becoming more widespread, especially as scientists explore the importance of micronutrients in disease prevention. ‘Whole foods’ that have been minimally processed are recommended in the mass media as being more nutritious, as are ‘natural’ vitamins that are thought to be more complex and not chemically-produced. Health food restaurants and juice bars are no longer the sole property of fashionable parts of New York and California, and shops are crammed with ‘lite’ and ‘no-fat’ alternatives to butter, sugar, beer, and eggs. Health foods, ironically, are becoming less ‘natural’ and more ‘processed’ as science excites popular anxiety about proper nutrition and as eaters attempt to observe the rituals they think necessary for long life and good health.

Faye Getz

Bibliography

Bynum, C. W. (1987). Holy Feast and Holy Fast: the religious significance of food to medieval women. University of California Press, Berkeley.
Cook, H. J. (1993). Physical methods. In Companion encyclopedia of the history of medicine, (ed. W. F. Bynum and R. Porter). Routledge, London and New York.
Douglas, M. (1966). Purity and danger: an analysis of concepts of pollution and taboo. Routledge, London.

See also cholesterol; diets; fasting; food; taboos; vegan; vegetarianism; vitamins.