Topic 1: Lesson 2 – Perspectives – Health,

History, Science and Society

Video 1
Jackie Coogan in Oliver Twist
• A more recent version shows this image. And
it shows Oliver coming up to the Master, the
person who's handing out the gruel, and he's
very bold and he asks for some more food.
And he gets a "What?" from the Master. And
he still persists and asks again, and the
Master takes a swipe at him.
• But the point is, what Oliver was interested in
getting hold of more of was something that
most of us take for granted. It was essentially
oatmeal or gruel.
• And you can take a look at what these
orphans in the so-called poor house were
actually consuming on a day-to-day and a
regular basis.

Putting the world population into

perspective
• Consider the planet of 7 billion and more as 100. There would be 50/50 females
and males. As it turns out, it hasn't always been that way, but that's what it is
right now.
• There would be 17 people who were essentially illiterate. There would be 16 who
were malnourished. And there would be 21 of that total overweight.
• 7 would have a university education. And that number was one or two 10-20
years ago, and of course, in China and other Asian countries, there has been a
renewal of science education, graduation with a bachelor's degree, and so the
number is approximately seven.
• What we do not hope that happens to you as a result in this course is that you
develop orthorexia nervosa (obsession in eating only the right foods).
• There are really no right foods. There's a good diet.
• The Omnivore's Dilemma is a fine book written by Michael Pollan. And he sums
up this course as "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants."
• Why is there a course about food? The publications that we've seen over the
years, how safe is your food? The publications that talk about, and the food
pyramid, which illustrates in different countries what is the base of that
information, namely what you should be eating more of rather than less of. That's
debatable.

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 • Cartoonists operate on a more sophisticated basis these days. That is, this
gentleman would like some vegetable protein, a bit of glucose or dextrose and
energy and some fiber, and of course this is interpreted by the waiter as a peanut
butter and jelly on toast.

Radio commentary – March 12th 1989, 6:40 am, Plattsburgh, NY

• Unordinary event: I was driving into McGill, comment on the radio, it was a
younger person talking, at least younger than I was at the time, and so I took
note of it. And they were talking about the good old days, back about 100 years
ago, back way back when there weren't that many problems with health.
• Well, be assured that there were a lot of problems with health around the
turn of the 1900s when the expected life for an individual was running under 50
years. And now it's over 80 in North America. And that's a fantastic 60%
increase in life expectancy.
• There was a period of time when the Bellevue Hospital in New York City had
rats.
• And that was a time in the late 1800s in New York, in this depiction, a woodcut,
of individuals scavenging the garbage for food. So we need to look at what life
was 100 years ago and before that, even.
• And we can talk about food in a host of different ways. So food is the prime idea
of what we're going to be dealing with.

Plumpy Nut
• We'll just give you a little question about
what you might have heard about, what is
Plumpy Nut? It's clearly a food. It's a
peanut-based, fat-based, protein-based
food that has a long lifetime. It's produced
and given out in countries where the
young children do not have enough to eat
by the World Health Organization, WHO,
and coupled with UNESCO.
• And there, as you can see in the lower left
picture, they're producing it by the ton. And it seems to be a very major success.

Cartoon by Giuseppe Arcimboldo

• This particular cartoon is by a 16th-century painter,
Giuseppe Arcimboldo. And it's a classic. → “You are what
you eat.”
• And the cartoonists have had kind of a field day with this.
From the New Yorker we get, “you are what you don't
eat.” Because they're being very sophisticated.
• People could also say, you are what your mother ate.
And there's three generations. In Times magazine, they

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 finally went around to say, instead of you are what you eat, we are what we eat.
And they included themselves.
• And then this particular couple from the New Yorker, “we want organic, we want
local and cruelty-free.” And people are becoming very specific about what they
are going to eat and what they will not eat. Organic foods, certainly, we will talk
about as the course progresses.

• The main components of food are just a small handful of elements. Carbon,
hydrogen, oxygen, and a few others.
• Over the last 20 years, there's been pretty significant change in two areas that
are important to an awful lot of people. Namely, the weight and the size of the
receiver, the television screen. 1990, this could have been a typical picture. But
what has been happening in North America is that the individuals are getting
larger and the screens are getting thinner.

• Food issues are in the press almost daily, if not daily. And some newspapers and
magazines have whole food sections. We're concerned about carbohydrates,
sugars and salt.

Worcester iodized salt

• Ad from in the 1920s. The Worcester Salt Company in the United States put
iodide, sodium iodide, in the salt to prevent goiter. This
became the Morton Salt Company, which is a more
famous one, in 1926.
• In WWI, the US Army had difficulties standardizing their
shirts in their uniforms because the necks of many of the
people from the Midwest were too large.
• And they were too large because goiter, a problem of
inefficient and ineffective amounts of iodine in the diet,
where these individuals simply had to be re-formulated for
the size of their shirts. Soldiers from the East Coast, where
they were taking in, much more likely to be taking in fish
products, where there would be iodine in the diet, did not
have this condition.
• We're talking about and will talk about in some detail,
recombinant Bovine Growth Hormone and whether or not products should be
labeled or not, whether there's been modification of the DNA of these foods.

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Milk as the perfect food
• Milk has been in the news a considerable amount. Milk has been judged for
years and years, decades really, to be the ultimate perfect food. Protein, good
protein in there, not too much fat. But over time there have been some criticisms
about milk. The advertisers have taken at least these two film producers, Ron
Howard and Spike Lee, and placed some kind of material on their lip. It certainly
isn't milk. But they've tried to emphasize the idea of drinking milk is good.

Controversy about Big Mac

• Other controversies, some about 15 years ago or so, it was discovered that a big
bucket of popcorn in the movies, which had been cooked in coconut oil and then
doused with butter, had more calories in it than two or three Big Macs. And the
Big Mac issue has been in the news
considerably in a film by Morgan
Spurlock. In Super Size Me.
• For a month, he did nothing but eat
McDonald products. Day 1 to day 30, he
gained a considerable amount of weight,
his cholesterol went up, and he went from
11% body fat to 18% body fat. This is a
representation of the fat that he consumed.
And the center bucket is a representation of
the sugar that he consumed. So
McDonald's took a bit of a hit in this
particular media piece
• However, there was a prison guard in
Wisconsin who in 2011 had eaten his
25,000th Big Mac. He has one every single
day and has done so for roughly 40 years
and has maintained his weight at about 170
pounds and seemingly okay.
• So the Big Mac has been in the news and is
well known, as are the large-size drinks that
Doonesbury cartoon portrays in this situation.
And many of you may know that Mayor
Bloomberg in New York City banned the sale

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 at any given single time of anything bigger than a 16-ounce drink. And the lower
right panel, of course, exaggerates the idea of drinks.

Video 2
Functional foods
• Functional foods have been growing steadily for the last 15 years or so, in terms
of products that are in the billions of dollars.

• One kind of functional food would be milk, of course, but which has added to it
vitamin D for what could be called invisible fortification.
• In Quebec, Arnold Steinberg, who was involved with owning and running a
grocery chain, combined with Charles Scriver, an imminent researcher in
genetics here at McGill to insist that the province add vitamin D to the milk. And
that was, in fact, carried out.
• Other ones that you could add would be probiotic bacteria (e.g. in yogurt). Dr.
Schwarcz talked about the efficacy of omega-3 fatty acids; may be important or
unimportant, but they are put in foods.
• In Canada right now, there are 300 companies that provide these kinds of
products.

Freeganism
• There are many movements, particularly in North America, about food.
• Freeganism, and anti-consumerism group, will simply go to the back doors of
restaurants and find food that's been thrown out that's perfectly good to eat.
• And they can maintain themselves very well on this. This is certainly in cities.
• Other aspects of freeganism would be to take a look at dumps and find, actually,
furniture that's been thrown out and the like.
• Not popular, but very prevalent.

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Rawsome food movement
• There's another movement, at least
substantially in California, of people
who want to eat raw and organic
foods only call the Rawsome food
movement.
• This was from the New Yorker
magazine, called a "Raw Deal"
• It's popular enough that the actor,
John Cusack, has a personal chef
that's been apparently forbidden to
shop anywhere else.
• These are rather esoteric, isolated, small numbers of people who do this of the
actors. But the Rawsome food movement is actually a pretty big one.

Entomophagy
• Of the 7 billion people on the planet, 1.5 billion (more or less) regularly consume
insects, because they're a fine source of protein. And there's about 1,500 species
of what are considered to be edible insects.

• Grasshoppers are in fact very popular in many different countries.

• McGill students were awarded a $1 million Hult Prize for a plan to transform
insects into food.
• One of the major parts of this entire proposal that they made for this competition
of which 10,000 students participated, Hult is a Swedish entrepreneur and
industrialist who provides this prize.
• And lime cricket chips was one of the food items that they talked about.
• They were students from McGill's Business School.
• That's why they got the press by former President Clinton of the United States.
• And the idea is to farm insects, convert them into flour and other processes that
will make food more available to a wider audience.

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 • People have opinions about what foods are good to eat.
• There are many, many meat eaters.
• The meat eaters, particularly in provinces in Canada
that have a lot of meat to grow, “there's plenty of
room for all of God's creatures right next to the
mashed potatoes.”
• Another one that was put up that is, I think,
interesting, let's just say, barbecue is very famous,
particularly in the southern parts of the United States
but, in general, all over North America → “Special
tonight-- vegetarians eat for free, ha, ha, ha!”, where
the Little Pigs stand for barbecue.

Video 3
Household expenditures for food
• The latest that we could find on the percent of household expenditures for food,
show roughly 7% to 10% or 12% for the US, Canada, the UK, and Australia, and
rather higher numbers for a number of other countries.

• Not exhaustive, but it certainly gives an idea that food is clearly an extremely
important part of the menu for individuals of how much money they're going to
spend, and it's really not so much of the income in North America and Australia
and the UK.

• Google is very good for question answering. But you need to be careful about
what source that you're looking at.
• If they're selling something, be wary. But if it's a government site, you can
probably count on it being a pretty good one.
• And so if you're just not sure about a particular word or so, just put it into the
Google search engine-- most of you probably do this anyway-- and then you
won't get caught up asking us questions.
• And this is just to make a little fun of Bart Simpson. He was told not to ask dumb
questions unless you check with Google. But that's really what the point is.

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Food paintings throughout
history
• Historically, people have looked at
food in many different ways.
• Renoir painted these vegetables in
a beautiful painting.
• Right picture: painting of onions
taken from the museum in
Williamstown, Massachusetts, the
Clark Museum
• And one of my own, which we happened to buy, my
wife and I, by Maureen Bourque of New Brunswick.
• This painting is only about this high, but it has an
enormous number of details, just because people
were interested in food or this being, of course, an
unusual mushroom. Well, when you go back a
couple hundred years, you find people who were
starting to work with food, trying to understand what
food was all about.

Antoine Lavoisier
• Antoine Lavoisier was a famous chemist. He did have his head removed from
himself because he was a tax collector at the time of the French Revolution, but
he did some very good science.
• This painting is in the Metropolitan Museum in New York City. It's a very large
painting.

• And that particular flask, whether it's the very same flask or one very similar to it,
was used in some of Lavoisier's experiments.
• He was able to determine how much CO2 (carbon dioxide) was produced by
eating.
• And they were able to determine how much CO2 was in that individual over a
period of time, of course, being produced by the oxidation of his food.

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 • Many experiments were carried out. Some of them causing the individuals to stay
in one place for a long time while they ate their food.
• Their weight changed, and then their weight reduced by their elimination of the
waste products of food. But they were able to show that a conservation of mass
was indeed demonstrated.

Vincent van Gogh

• This is an unusual painting by Van Gogh in his early days in Holland called The
Potato Eaters, and people were only eating potatoes and having coffee. That
was the essential meal, maybe two, maybe three times a day.

• Van Gogh, before he got into his movement when he went to France, painted
some more drab-like pictures of what people were doing, “Women Mending Nets
in the Dunes”, 1882.

Issues with food consumption and malpractice

• Well, people 100 years ago were sometimes searching for food (around the early
1900s or even before) But this has been a problem and a situation that is widely
seen, at least we wish it weren't so widely seen. And even today, young children
sometimes have to do this.
• Through the last 100 years in North America, there have been some reforms that
have taken place.
• In the 1910s and '20s, plaster of Paris was added to the flour to make loaves of
bread heavier, and therefore seemingly to be worth more and to be sold, and
plaster of Paris is nothing more than calcium sulfate (CaSO4).

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 • And another important movement, which
caused in the early 1900s there to be laws in
the United States which spread to a number of
other countries,
• The Jungle by Upton Sinclair was made into a
movie from the book.
• "Quick Jurgis we must recover the body from
the lard vat." → it was very dangerous to work
in Chicago in the meatpacking industry.
• And sometimes individuals who were working
there fell into the lard vat, and they were not
always removed immediately. So they're trying
to cover up a little bit.
• The Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906 helped
to change a lot of this malpractice that was
taking place with food.
• It's gotten better and better. It was illustrated in
the 100th-year anniversary in 2006 by this
stamp.
• And today, there is, in fact, enough food to
feed the entire planet. Very carefully
constructed food areas, whether they be a
plain in the central part of the United States or
Canada, or whether they be the inventive use
of tier kinds of production of food on this
extinct volcano in Madagascar, or whether it's outside of Los Angeles in a
massive field, there's plenty of food for everybody.
• Problems:
o One is food spoils.
o The second one is that it can't be distributed effectively.
o And the other problem is that a third or more of the crops are, in fact,
destroyed by insects. → Cabbage looper, which simply consumes the
cabbage leaves.

Presenting nutritious food to children

• There are problems with food with respect to how good that
food is, and is it being presented properly in restaurants or
in cafeterias, where there are younger children consuming
food? Is it nutritious?
• My colleagues and I gave a presentation some years ago at
a high school, and I took a picture of the menu at that time.
• And all you see is french fries, hamburger, hot dog, soft
drinks, and they're calling it "healthier eating." We kind of
don't think that's quite the right menu to have. That's often
been improved in many schools, but in some, it hasn't been so much improved.

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 Video 4
Comparison of food consumption
• A look at what is eaten by two different societies and the different kinds of food
categories overall (India and the United States, in kilograms per capita per year).

• And for rice in India: 68.2 kg

• The US and/or Canada would be about 1/8 of that overall, very much less in
terms of that product.
• Wheat: more in North America than in India.
• We see sugars and sweeteners about three times as much in the United States
and Canada as opposed to India.
• And meat: vastly more, 30 times or 25-30 times as much meat consumption in
North America as in India.
• And fats and oils are around a factor of three more (33.3 kg)
• Milk products: also very much more in North America.

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Total protein intake per capita

• Darker colour: higher protein intake

• And you see this is certainly true, generally speaking, in the European Union and
in North America and in Australia and New Zealand and much less as the colors
get much lighter in terms of the protein per capita intake overall.

Food consumption comparison between India and the US

• This sums it up for India and the US as of 2009. The grams per capita per day of
protein → 100 something versus about 50
• and the fat much more.
• It doesn't correspond perfectly. But it's roughly the appropriate kind of ratio,
much, much more in the US than in India.

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 Video 5
Molecules of food
• They are becoming much, much better understood than they were 100 years ago
or even 10 or 15 years ago.
• The cellular bilayer and the activities that go on are many.
• There are transporters of molecules going through the cellular bilayer, the
mechanisms for them, linkers of protein materials.
• the little red ball is a molecule that's triggering an action on the other side of the
cellular bilayer (via a receptor)

• And in this case, enzymes are, of course, involved, embedded in the cellular
bilayer, and they're changing molecule A, or X, to molecule Y. And we need
these. We need the amino acids that make up these enzymes.
• We need a good diet that will produce the appropriate amount of enzymatic
material, which is, of course, basically our proteins.

Water (H2O) and chemicals responsible for the flavour in an apple

• What happens when you take a bite out of an apple? There are a number of
things in an apple: flavors, sugar, water and fiber
• But if you look at the flavors, this is probably a third, maybe even a little more, of
the molecules that are in there (acetone, aka nail polish remover)

• Ethanol: there's not enough ethanol to create any kind of physiological effect.
• There's formaldehyde (embalming fluid)

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 • There's methanol: wood alcohol; in high concentrations, can cause blindness.
But the concentrations are extremely, extremely small.
• There’s 2-propanol: rubbing alcohol, and a number of other volatile materials.
• So we are always consuming chemicals.
• Many of these chemicals are not harmful whatsoever in the concentrations in
which they exist. We're not taking milliliters of them. These are parts per million.
• But every time we take a bite of food, we're taking in hundreds and hundreds of
chemicals that have a very complicated set of interactions, one with the other,
which makes sorting out what our food process is all about rather difficult.
• It's even possible to make artificial green apple flavor from molecules that aren't
even in apples, but they just happen to taste like apples.

Number of sugar cubes in an apple

• So let's take a look at an apple as to give you a chance to mentally guess how
many sugar cubes.
• Some sugar cubes weigh about 2, 3 or 4 g (it
depends).
• When an article says so many sugar cubes, you
want to think about what that is. These six sugar
cubes, which constitute 3 g, that's about 18 g of
sugar that's in that particular apple, plus all
those flavors, plus some fiber that's structurally,
chemically, an indefinable material.
• But the other one that's in that apple that's
very definable is water.
• Experiment: You take a couple of pin pricks
in that apple, put it in a vacuum desiccator,
take away the air, and the water comes out
of the apple.
• So we're going to measure this water in
terms of a 140-milliliter beaker. Amount of
water so far = around 60 ml.
• Keep pumping on that, repeat the
experiment until you have a constant weight
of a core of an apple with all of the water gone and nothing but the fiber and the
flavors left.
• So it's significant water consumption when you take in an apple. Percentage by
weight = ~ 85% (may be a little more or a little less, depending on the apple) →
equation: core+water = apple
• And you might be wondering, what other kinds of foods have water in them?
Well, they all have water, and it varies a fair bit.
• The watermelon, many people think, is the highest concentration of water. It's
96%. We have not done the experiment, and maybe we should, but radishes are
touted as 98%.

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Macronutrients
• Definition: nutrients that you can see, e.g., fat, protein, complex carbohydrates,
and sugar.
• That's the percentage by calorie that is thought to be a reasonable spectrum of
percentages for the caloric intake because it turns out that foods don't have the
same caloric value.

• The grams per day for an average-sized person of maybe 60 kg, roughly 1 lb
(pound) of dry food per day with the complex carbohydrates dominating the gram
amounts.
• It's about a one pound of dry food, and we'll talk about this a little bit later.
• Those were the amounts recommended for an average-sized person, as I
mentioned, but the proteins and carbohydrates have about 4 cal/g.
• Fats, there's the problem. It's over twice as many calories (9 cal/g), and it turns
out that fats are stored more easily in the body than are proteins and
carbohydrates.
• So the body does store all of these materials, but it costs less to store the fats as
it turns out. So it's a double-barreled problem with fat overall.
• Fiber is about 2 cal/g, but there isn't that much fiber compared to these
amounts so it's often ignored.

Micronutrients
• The micronutrients are the vitamins and minerals that we're going to talk about.
• There are a great many vitamins and a great many minerals, but they're found in
much, much smaller amounts than are the macronutrients. Some are in the
gram (g) amounts (e.g., calcium).
• Calcium: the only one that hits the 1000 mg category. (1000 mg = 1g)
• And then it is in the milligram (mg) category for iron, and in the microgram (μg)
category for selenium amongst others.

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