Vancouver’s bounty of local produce can make adopting a healthier diet easier here than in other parts of the country.

Credit: J.C.

HEALTH: Eating to Live

The suggestion that we all should eat more healthily than we do has become a white noise through which we move every day — a piece of information so pervasive and familiar, it often achieves the opposite of its intended effect. Much like actual white noise, we know it exists, we hear it, and we’ve excelled in the art of ignoring it.

Dr. Aaron Hoo, a naturopathic doctor and nutritional counselor based in the West End, has witnessed this contradiction time and again: a population armed with more knowledge than ever before, seemingly unable (or unwilling) to begin to know how to use it.

“I find it quite interesting,” he says. “There are very many patients I see who, intellectually, they get it — they get that there is a connection that if they eat a certain food, they feel poorly. And yet they still make that food choice. It’s human nature, I suppose.”

But the good news that Dr. Hoo takes away from this is that his patients have made the crucial first step of admitting their failure and asking for help. More good news is that Vancouver is one of the best cities in North America — if not the world — in which to begin eating better.

Whether you meticulously analyze the nutritional content of everything you put in your mouth or you have an undiagnosed bacon-cheeseburger addiction, you probably know that the national conversation about what we eat has never been as prominent or as complex. Where once a healthy diet was discussed mostly in relation to weight loss (and, by extension, vanity), today it also encompasses quality of life, life expectancy, our burden to the health-care system, environmental responsibility, and ethics of international trade. Exhaustively researched but broadly accessible books including Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma and In Defense of Food, Eric Schlosser’s Fast Food Nation, and Alejandro Junger’s Clean have become best-sellers. The forthcoming film Food, Inc. has drawn an uncommon degree of advance buzz for a documentary. Here in Vancouver — the healthiest city in Canada, according to a 2008 Best Health magazine survey — our already robust culture of wellness has swelled into “almost a critical mass,” says Desiree Nielsen, resident dietician for the Choices Markets chain of specialty grocery stores.

“There are so many options available to us,” Nielsen says of the modern food supply, “and I think for the past couple of decades we’ve simply looked to whatever is new as exciting, as progress, as a good thing. But today we open our eyes and realize that we’re eating foods completely devoid of any nutritional value, and we never stopped to think what that was doing to our bodies.”

And now that more of us are, we’ve come to the conclusion that periodic concessions to nutrition, such as semi-annual “cleanses” or an occasional side salad in lieu of onion rings, aren’t enough. Nielsen says an increasing number of customers are coming to her for guidance on how to effect a dietary overhaul. “The kind of diseases we’re facing now — most of us are not dying of polio and tuberculosis, but we’re dying of heart disease, diabetes, cancer,” she says. “And these are very strongly lifestyle related, and they take decades to develop in the body. And so it’s decades — not periodic cleanses, but decades — of healthy living that help us prevent these diseases.”

Of course, that level of commitment doesn’t come easily for most of us, especially when the very nature of modern life conspires to keep us from achieving it.

“Diet change is one of the hardest things human beings can do,” acknowledges Gerry Kasten, M.Sc, a Vancouver-based Registered Dietician. “We see that most obviously when we talk about weight-loss dieting because, depending on which study you read and how long the study was, somewhere between 80 and 95 per cent of people who lose weight regain it.”

Kasten echoes Dr. Hoo’s experiences with patients when he says, “Most people I talk to know what healthy eating is.” But one of the greatest obstacles Kasten has observed between their goals and their actual achievement is knowing how to make their own meals — arguably the greatest skill one can possess in the quest for a healthier diet. “Cooking is a skill that’s fading,” he says. “It isn’t that hard, but it takes practice, and as people practice more, they’ll get better and better.”

“The worst thing that people have to deal with, in my opinion, is coming home after a long day at work, opening up the cupboard, and seeing that they don’t have very many options,” says Dr. Hoo. “And they will choose the easiest option that’s right in front of them, which may not be the best option: not choosing to take the extra 10, 15 minutes to go to the supermarket and buying a fresh head of lettuce versus a TV dinner.”

That, Dr. Hoo says, is an outgrowth of stress, which leads us to seek out the greatest gratification in the shortest amount of time.

“Chronic stress has a huge impact on the body, in that it triggers a lot of pro-inflammatory chemicals that end up causing myriad problems throughout the body — from stress disrupting sleep to stress resulting in poor eating, such as drinking alcohol to mitigate that stress, or indulging in pastries or refined carbohydrates to deal with that stress. It’s our way of comforting ourselves. There are multiple components to that conundrum.”

Another conundrum, put forward by Gerry Kasten as one of the greatest potential enemies to health, is money — or rather, a lack of it.

“Our health is very dependent on our socio-economic setting,” says Kasten, noting that a study conducted by Dieticians of Canada, titled “The Cost of Eating in BC,” backs this up. “Simply put, those who have more money are healthier; it may not be money specifically, but rather the power that money gives one to exercise control. So, whenever we talk about dietary change, one of the points I always try to make is that those changes are often not accessible to people on low income. Food and nutrition is just one of many aspects of a healthy life, and if you’re spending your life chasing money, then I question your ability to invest in self-care because of the time it takes to do everything.”

Desiree Nielsen would prefer to be more optimistic. “At any income level, the biggest barrier is education,” she says. “Yes, organic packaged goods like an organic cereal is going to be more expensive than a conventional cereal, but the healthiest foods on our planet don’t come in boxes and bags, and they’re very inexpensive. Someone on a very limited income could make a wonderfully nourishing meal from brown rice, canned chickpeas, and a little bit of herb, and it’s a meal that maybe would cost 75 cents a serving.”

All of our experts agree, however, that once we’ve committed ourselves to improving the way we eat, simply living in Vancouver puts as at an advantage people living elsewhere don’t always have.

“There are excellent resources right here in the Lower Mainland,” says Kasten. “We have good access to organic produce, if we choose, including local organic produce. We have things like our farmers markets, so people can directly access the food they buy — they can buy the food from the person who has produced it. You can talk to the person: ‘Well, how do I cook this kale?’ ‘How did you feed the steer that this beef came from?’ Those kind of direct-market options make a huge difference.”

“If you want to be healthy — well, for example, it’s summer, when local blueberries come out,” says Nielsen. “Eat one cup of blueberries every single day. That alone will make you just one step healthier that day. One of the reasons why many people haven’t made changes is that they don’t believe they have an impact. We say, ‘I ate a cheeseburger today, so why would I bother eating a salad for dinner? It’s not going to matter.’ Because people don’t have a deeper understanding of nutrition, they don’t realize that the antioxidants they eat in that salad for dinner will help combat the damage they did with that burger at lunch.”

Nielsen also recommends making use of HealthLink BC’s website (HealthLinkBC.ca) and its 8-1-1 hotline for non-emergency health advice, or “go to the library and look at the nutrition books they have, and choose one that’s written by a dietician or a physician, someone knowledgeable.

“For the most part, keeping it simple is the best option,” she says. “I know that nutrition is a healer, but I’m really a fan of not going too hard on ourselves. Small, sustainable changes that build upon one another are really effective — and then it doesn’t freak people out.”