The US Department of Agriculture has announced new standards for school breakfast and lunch programs around the country: more fruits and vegetables, a greater variety of fruits and vegetables, more whole grains, less animal fat and sodium. Here’s an article that describes the changes in more detail.

The Rapid City Journal interviewed Janelle Peterson, food services director for the Rapid City Area Schools, about changes being made to the district programs. Chicken fajita salad for lunch. Oatmeal with blueberries for breakfast.

Peterson sees herself as an educator and the school food programs as opportunities for students to learn about nutrition and to try new foods. You can read the RCJ article here.

In a recent post I mentioned the Paleo diet, and now I’ll examine that diet in some depth, in part because it’s defensible from a science perspective, and in part because it brings to mind our deep connection with the natural world and the importance of keeping that in mind when we make food choices.

Just looking at our bodies and thinking about how they function we can see that we have color vision that makes it possible for us to locate brightly colored ripe fruit hanging from a tree. We have the teeth of an herbivore—designed to bite and grind. Our single stomach rules out grass and woody plants as primary food sources. Fairly long intestines suggest the need to digest a lot of non-woody fiber—leaves, stems, roots. A gall bladder that stores bile for efficient digestion of fat means we’ve eaten animals for a long time. Our taste buds like sweet, meaty, and fatty. Put these all together and you come up with a likely ancestral diet of meat, eggs, fat, fruits, vegetables, and nuts—the foods of the Paleo diet.

Paleo is short for Paleolithic, the time period when humans were hunter-gatherers and used stone tools. They ate insects, nuts, berries–whatever they could find in nature–and took in more meat as their tools and hunting skills improved. This was way before the development of agriculture when humans started planting grains and domesticating animals for food. So the modern Paleo diet designed to replicate what our Paleo ancestors ate excludes all the grains—corn, wheat, rice, oats, barley–and leaves out dairy products, vegetable oils, sugar, and salt but includes large amounts of protein in the form of beef, buffalo, game animals, poultry, eggs, and seafood. This diet, say its advocates, makes sense because it is the one that we humans evolved with and to which our bodies are attuned.

The archeological records of the Paleo period show that early humans had strong bones and teeth and that once agriculture was introduced, they became smaller, weaker, more prone to disease. So advocates of the Paleo diet use these facts plus their own robust health to promote and defend their position. Among the promoters of the Paleo diet is Professor Loren Cordain of Colorado State University, whose website is a magnet for true believers. Mark Sisson is another advocate and speaks his truth at the website Mark’s Daily Apple.

One of the draws for the Paleo diet is the ease with which advocates say they have lost weight. Getting calories from fat rather than from carbs avoids the energy peaks and troughs that result from too much sugar in the blood. They do have their critics, though. For details go to the Wikipedia Paleo Diet post, where the controversies are discussed.

Since we’re promoting good nutrition here at DLFN as a way of getting 2012 off to a good start, let’s think about the relationship between sodium chloride (table salt) and potassium salt.

Because life evolved in the ocean, and ocean water contains sodium and potassium salts, all living things require both. Together they control the passage of fluids into and out of cells.

But…there’s a wild card here. Sodium and potassium must be in balance for us to be healthy. And the average American diet contains way too much sodium—3400 mg per day. Average potassium intake is 2000-2500 mg per day. A recent study found that people who have a one-to-one ratio of potassium and salt have the lowest risk of heart attack and stroke. Those who have the highest ratio—twice as much salt as potassium—or more—were at the highest risk for cardiovascular-related illnesses.

So what do we do—consume less sodium or more potassium? Well, both. And it’s easy. Potatoes, bananas, grapes, greens and citrus fruits are good potassium sources. Coconut water is now in the stores and a cup contains 485 mg. Chips, crackers, pretzels, on the other hand, contain a lot of salt. So do frozen pizza, fast food and Asian food. Then there’s ham, cheese, bacon, lunch meat, and canned soup. All foods to avoid or cut back on.

The recommendation from so many sources that we eat more fresh fruits and veggies and less processed food holds true when it comes to sodium-potassium imbalance, as it does for so many other health issues.

We all know that processed foods aren’t good for us, but why do they taste so darn good? Morley Safer of 60 Minutes did a segment on the chemists who create the flavorings that make processed food palatable. Some say these flavorings are a cause of the obesity epidemic facing our country today. Click here to watch the segment and learn more about this post’s title.

Since it’s 2012 and I’m on my New Years Resolution Diet, I started rereading Gary Taubes’ 2007 book “Good Calories Bad Calories” in which he says that all calories are not equal, that carb calories, especially those from sugar, are, from a health standpoint, worse than those from fat.

Taubes starts the book with an account of what has become known as the ‘Eisenhower Paradox’—why former president Dwight Eisenhower, who after his 1955 heart attack eliminated virtually all saturated fat from his diet yet died of heart disease at age 78. This was at a time when sat fat was considered an unhealthy—maybe even deadly food. But when people took their doctors’ advice and switched to carbs as a source of calories, heart disease did not go away, and people got fat. Taubes details that story and includes a lot of basic science to counter what became the conventional wisdom about bad fat.

What is known as the ‘French Paradox’ asks the same question. Why is it that the French–who love their egg soufflés, gourmet cheeses, rare red meat, butter on bread, and for dessert their incomparable pastries–don’t have the amount of heart disease we have in the US?

Recently a Cochrane Review comments on the latest findings on the bad fat vs. bad carbs controversy. The source of the review, the Cochrane Library, is considered the most reliable source of medical research, and the authors of the review article, looking at all relevant research, found “no strong evidence” that saturated fat is unhealthy.

That takes us back to Taubes, whose book, by the way, is not a weight loss book. His purpose in writing is to inform the public about the poor science that led to the anti-fat movement and to warn the public that it’s carbs, not fat, that make us fat.