Pregnant women shouldn't eat salads?

"The Weighty Responsibility of Drinking for Two"

The most interesting lines, to me, in this article about drinking during pregnancy are:

Just try to buy unpasteurized cheese in England, or to eat salad in France when you’re pregnant,” wrote a friend living in York, England. (Many French obstetricians warn patients that raw vegetables are risky.)

I hate salads. I had briefly taken up eating them because it is healthy after all. I'm not pregnant, but after reading this I now have an excuse to stop eating them.

Raw Food Veganism

"Totally Uncooked"

This is another New York Times food article, reprinted at another site. There is apparently a diet in which nothing is cooked, although foods are allowed to be heated to 118 degrees. The reason people give for following this diet is that they think that cooking foods destroys its beneficial enzymes. The tone of the article is very snarky, but the author doesn't emphasize the objections I would have. Here are my main problems with raw food veganism:

1. The whole justification for the diet--enzymes in foods will be preserved--is dubious because, as mentioned in the article, we don't use plant enzymes anyway.

2. Natural toxins in vegetables. From the article: "As for cooked food being poison, raw vegetables turn out to be a veritable trove of toxins. Those parsnips Roxanne Klein is so fond of, for instance, naturally contain small amounts of light-activated carcinogens, whereas the cancer-fighting nutrient in tomatoes is released only when cooked. " Harold McGee says in his "On Food and Cooking" that fruits are the only plant foods that are designed by the plants themselves to be eaten. This is why they taste so good raw (and why they are so sweet). On the other hand, the plants themselves are often laced with varying levels of toxins because they do not want to be eaten. So is it a good idea to eat vegetables, which are various parts of plants (leaves, stems, roots, etc.), raw? Cooking destroys some of these toxins in vegetables.

3. Environmenal toxins in vegetables. With this E. Coli problem affecting vegetables, isn't it a little scary to eat them raw?

4. Not mentioned in the article: A lot of vegetables reduce in volume when cooked. They also become easier to chew and easier to digest. If you are a raw foods vegan, I'm sure you would have to cosume enormous quantities of vegetables. Is it possible to eat such large quantities of raw or dehydrated vegetables? Would anyone want to? From the article: "According to one of the few studies available on raw-foodists, the body-mass indices of a quarter of women and a fifth of men who maintained the diet for an average of four years were below normal, and a third of the women had stopped menstruating. " The article also mentions that one of the star proponents of the diet subsists on 800 calories a day. It doesn't say why exactly these people aren't eating enough calories. But I would think it is because people cannot eat that much raw broccoli or spinach or whatever. Animal and milk products are calorie dense. Fruits and vegetables are not. It is probably very difficult to get all the calories you need from this diet.

5. This point was briefly mentioned. Most vegetables don't taste good raw, but they improve dramatically in taste if you cook them. Personally, I hate the taste of raw vegetables. I'm a vegetarian, and I never eat salads. Traditionally, vegetarian Indians don't eat salads.

6. This point is almost never mentioned in articles about any diet. Will anyone be able to live on this diet day in and day out for the rest of his life? But this diet is so wacky and few people will try it that this point is not relevant.

Last year I ate: 1,460 chocolates, 51 kilos of yoghurt, 21 kilos of cheese, 7,300 olives ...

I *love* the way the Nigel Slater talks about food:

"I cannot even begin to tell you how much I love eating. Hot, rustling chips with slightly too much salt on them, a piece of crisp-skinned duck or a round of thick white toast dripping with butter. Sometimes I just have to stop what I am doing and make a bacon sandwich or walk down the road to get a piece of cake. And although I prefer to eat something with a perfect provenance and made with the very best ingredients, I am not half as fussy as I could or should be. The way I look at it is this: a slice of commercially made chocolate cake might not be as good as a home-baked one, but it's better than no chocolate cake at all."

I object to this bit here though:

"I also discovered one or two helpful things. The first was the question of whether I was actually hungry or just thirsty. Now, I like to think I'm a fairly bright guy, but I have to admit to getting these two confused. So often, when I thought I was hungry, my body was just telling me it was dehydrated. This, more than any other single thing , is what has helped me to lose fat. In other words, next time you think you need a Mars bar, a pile of Pringles or a slice of cheesecake in between meals, try a glass of water or juice first. You might be as surprised as I was. To give you a clue, I downed over 600 litres of Evian in 2002...The other thing I discovered was water. There was never a day when I drank less than 1.5 litres of Evian, sometimes as many as three. The downside is that I pee like a horse. "

I think this is completely wrong. If you are dehydrated, you will feel thirsty. Most likely what is happening is that the water or juice is itself staving off the writer's hunger pangs.

I just don't understand this whole drinking water fad. Drinking something when you are not thirsty is so unpleasant. How does anyone make himself do it? I would have thought a gastronome like this Slater fellow would have recognized that. And the other downside, having to go to the bathroom all the time, is also awful. The few times I've tried to take up drinking 8 glasses of water a day, I've immediately given it up.

"Here is exactly what I ate last year...
I ate 72 kilos of fish (not counting 40 fish fingers and 472 pieces of sushi) which is only slightly less than the average polar bear. In fact it actually comes in at just over 200g a day. I should explain, quickly, that fish, rather than meat or poultry is my protein of choice. I love its silky texture and the fact that it is light on the gut. Gram for gram I ate more smoked salmon than almost anything else (9.7kg, I know it's hideously expensive, but I don't smoke or drive a car, so give me a break), hotly followed by rollmop herrings at 7.3kg. The reason for this is my habit of having a little of each as I'm preparing dinner. Light as they are, they soon add up. I also managed to swallow 12kg of mackerel, most of which I grilled so that the skin was all black and toasty, 4kg of halibut (and rather a lot of Hollandaise sauce), 2.5kg of cod, 16 dressed crabs, 17 whole plaice, 13 sea bass, 3.5kg of smoked mackerel and 194 oysters. I saw off 10 squid, five grilled sole, 1.2kg of skate and 500g of salt cod. What I didn't eat much of were scallops (a measly two) and tuna (of which I am honestly not fond). I did manage 472 pieces of sushi, seven bowls of moules marinière (two of which came up again), and 3.7kg of salmon, (which didn't). The best fishy thing I ate all year was a crab salad at Nahm in the Halkin Hotel, though it was difficult to
beat the piece of halibut I cooked at home with bearnaise sauce and green beans
from the garden..."

The description of the other things he ate is just as good.

Diet and Tradition

"EATING MY SPINACH
Four Days on the Uncle Sam Diet ..."

I love this William Grimes article on the 2005 government dietary guidelines, the ones which recommended 9 servings of fruits and vegetables a day. What I love about this article is that he discusses the role of culture and tradition in maintaining a diet. How are people supposed to stick to a diet day in and day out for the rest of their lives?

As a cultural document, the guidelines are strange. They set themselves the worthy but futile goal of imposing a style of eating for which Americans have no model. It's all very well to announce that everyone should eat five servings of vegetables a day. But where does that fit in the culinary template that Americans instinctively consult when planning a meal? The typical American dinner is an entrée with a starch and a vegetable, preceded in some cases by a salad or soup and followed with dessert.

For Asians, it's quite normal to eat multiple vegetable dishes at the same meal (even at breakfast), and to prepare very small quantities of fish or meat with much larger quantities of rice. But Americans rarely eat multiple vegetable dishes except on Thanksgiving. If they are going to triple their vegetable consumption, they'll have to greatly enlarge the vegetable portions they do eat, throwing the meal off balance, or else walk around nibbling on carrots and cauliflower florets from a plastic bag.

The new guidelines are not just health policy, they're cultural policy, too. To comply fully, Americans will have to rethink their inherited notions of what makes a meal, and what makes a meal satisfying.

That is a very tall order - even taller than the daily mound of uncooked leafy vegetables that everyone is supposed to eat.