Dawn Jackson Blatner: Another Painfully Ignorant Dietitian
Well I was having a good time reading this CNN article, An inconvenient challenge: Eat ‘real food’ for a month. It’s decent reportage of food blogger Jennifer McGruther’s reader challenge at The Nourished Kitchen.
More than 900 people signed up for the challenge, and some were confident that it would not be difficult to avoid processed foods for 28 days.
But in the age of potato powders, cheese in a squirt can and microwaveable meals, eating only "real food" turned out to be much more difficult.
On Day One of the challenge, blogger Jennifer McGruther gave this instruction: Purge your pantry of processed foods.
This meant everything with refined oils, white flour, sugar, low- and skimmed-milk products, margarine, processed cheeses, refined salt and dried pastas had to go.
Looks to me like she’s a WAPF enthusiast, which is fine. Just understand it’s a lot harder and more involved than a more paleoesque way of doing things. Soaking, sprouting, grinding & fermenting grains has just got to be an awful chore, and for so little nutritional reward.
But hey, I’ll applaud anything that gets people thinking about better, wholesome food and getting the junk out of their lives. And it certainly is quite a shock for many.
"I thought we ate healthy," said Kassandra Mier, a challenge participant. "I didn’t think it’d be a problem. It was tougher than I thought. Trying to have a breakfast that didn’t have anything processed was time-consuming."
In the morning, she ground oats and buckwheat to make pancakes and waffles. She pan-fried eggs and made hash browns from scratch.
"The first week, I didn’t think I could continue it," said Mier, who lives in the suburbs of Toronto in Canada. "It made it extra work than it would’ve been otherwise. I felt like a slave in the kitchen."
The upside was her children had such hearty breakfasts, they rarely asked for snacks.
There’s the frustrating thing about the whole WAPF deal. Gotta have pancakes! ‘They’ll be fine if we just make ’em ourselves. Oh, and use honey for the syrup.’ Might as well serve your kids birthday cake or even candy bars. Literally.
Others got it exactly right (those closer to paleo).
Dawn Partlow of Lincoln Park, Michigan, said that throughout the challenge, she prepared simple items including steaks, baked potato and salad, or soup made with previously frozen stock.
Still others got perhaps the most valuable lesson of all, a wakeup call.
"I got rid of tons of stuff — enough stuff, that I had trouble figuring out what to feed my kids," said Maggie Towson of Bel Air, Maryland.
After the pantry purge, a trip to the grocery store stunned her.
"There’s little real food in them," she said. "That was kind of a shock to realize how limited the choices were."
There’s actually quite a bit of real food but, yes, I get the sentiment. Because unlike industrial food production were you take basically three ingredients (flour, sugar, seed oil), make thousands of derivatives and all you need are "artificial flavorings;" instead, we have to get creative.
As I was saying, I was generally enjoying and applauding all of this until this nitwit, Dawn Jackson Blatner had to open her pie hole to spew her conventional "wisdom" diarrhea.
Limiting processed foods can be rewarding because it encourages people to eat more fruits and vegetables, said Dawn Jackson Blatner, a registered dietitian and an American Dietetic Association representative. But she warned against villainizing all processed foods.
Processed food is defined as any food that has undergone a change of character. For example, edamame would be unprocessed, and tofu would be processed.
I like the idea of less processed foods, but you can find healthy stuff in a package, too.
Blatner said another example is milk that is pasteurized for safety reasons. Some traditional food loyalists recommend drinking raw, whole milk.
"I like the idea of less processed foods, but you can find healthy stuff in a package, too," she said, pointing to low-fat milk, sliced apples and unsalted canned vegetables as examples.
"You have to put everything into perspective. With any diet, you never want to follow it to such an extreme there’s something wrong with it."
More fruits & vegetables? Low-fat milk? Unsalted canned vegetables? And where’s the meat, fish, fowl, the most crucially important foods nutritionally? Oh, yea, she has a book now, doesn’t she: The Flexitarian Diet: The Mostly vegetarian Way to Lose Weight, Be Healthier, Prevent Disease, and Add Years to Your Life.
And oh, almost forgot; go have a look at the comments on the CNN piece and have your mind blown. That’s one whole lot of moron in one place.
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Most of those crazy comments could have been written by me a couple of years ago. Fruits? Veggies? Tofu? Yup. Those were my staples. I vilified saturated fat, and felt that eating meat was akin to murder. I really believed all of that, believed it with all of my heart. It was what I was told by a couple of doctors – drop the red meat. Eat a plants-based vegetarian diet.
It wasn’t until I became ill and couldn’t understand why I felt the way I felt that I started researching – really researching – the way humans were meant to eat. I’m grateful that I figured it out. But yeah, I was a bit of a sanctimonious vegetarian ass for a while there…
Far better to be a sanctimonious paleo ass for life… :)
One quick look at theose comments and I was out of there. It is scary!
You have to wonder what it would take to educate this horde…
It’s almost disillusioning…your eyes sweep the minefields of The Matrix all over again…watch the lemmings all follow each other off the high-sugars, grain stuff, carb-load White Cliffs of make-believe Dover…but they can’t see you like you can see them…sh*t! There goes another one, I can’t save him. Crap. I wish he could see me, hear me. I almost jumped myself once…more like, barely crawled to the edge and stared into the abyss.
Nutritionism is an ideology that doesn’t work when you try to overemphasize nutrients over real food. We see this over and over, and yet we still give too much credit to this failed theory. This is what these so called “experts” have been doing for the last decades, trying to make eating more scientific and “healthy”. This ideology is only helping food lobbies label their junk foods as healthy, and it is destroying food as a culture. The food industry loves nutritionists because they’re the only ones capable of promoting a junk food like margarine over butter, a real food. We should give much more credit to REAL FOOD and don’t focus as much on the useless discussions about low-carb, high-fat, lower-whatever. Let’s move ahead and start promoting traditional foods, paleodiets, unprocessed foods, slow-food movements, etc!
nytimes.com/2007/01/28/magazine/28nutritionism.t.html
thenewatlantis.com/docLib/20090921_TNA25Schwenkler.pdf
I think you’re onto something there, Ricardo.
more and more i’m coming to this conclusion too.
i eat whatever the hell i feel like eating, within a paleo context (if that’s even really possible in a neolithic setting), and don’t care about macronutrient ratios.
keep it simple; eat what you want.
I could not agree with you more. I am so tired of people taking food and changing it into something that is supposed to be healthy which really isn’t and making all kinds of concoctions instead of just eating and nourshing the body with geniune food and geniune flavors. I grew up in the 50’s and we were just healthier. We ate real food and we were active. All the food we ate wasn’t healthy but it was a helluva lot closer to real food than the concoctions the food/marketing/advertising conglomerates have come up with nowadays.
I had to stop reading the comments, they made me so mad!
I can’t go there. I’ve already had my blood pressure raised for the day trying to convince my friend about Paleo.
It’s mind-numbing after a while.
I can’t go check out the CNN article, I can’t handle any more morons today. This shit blows my mind. I bet she pushes the Taco Bell drive-thru diet in her book – as long as you opt for the vegetarian options, right.
Question: I’ve been wanting to go to school to become a nutritionist so that when I say something and some moron comes back with “what do you know, you’re not a nutritionist!” I can say, “actually, yes, I am you dumb fuck.” However, I don’t think I could handle 4 years of conventional wisdom bullshit shoved down my throat without being a) expelled, or b) committed. Is there anything you could recommend as a career path? I’m fairly passionate about being primal/paleo and about health and nutrition in general. AND, I’m looking for a new career. Any advice would be welcome.
Tara, Im in the process of getting a certificate for personal training right now, I also want a career I’m passionate about. I figure once I get some experience I can train people on my own and suggest….not tell people how to eat. I figure as a CPT more people will listen than not. We shall see.
Thanks Aaron! I’m actually in the process of signing up for a CPT course as well, but I’m having problems with the nutrition part of all the courses. They’re still advocating low fat, high carb, blah blah blah. How do I sit though classes without getting into a fight with the instructor!?!? I thought the same as you, once I’m certified I can give advice and help people. I’m just more interested in nutrition than fitness, and I thought there must be something I can do…
Know your basic biochemistry, and employ the strategy of being “as wise as serpents and harmless as doves”:
garynorth.com/public/6158.cfm
“Stage one involves asking questions. ‘Professor, I’m confused. You said….. Do I have thus right? I do? OK, here’s what I don’t understand….’ You bring up the counter view as if you have figured out on your own that something does not add up. To do this, you must master the assigned material and also the counter material.”
I just started the chapter on nutrition. The book is 7 years old and full of CW. The good thing is I am really familiar with old school nutrition because I used to believe all the crap like the majority of the public. I am home studying for my ACE so I won’t have to sit in a class and make smart ass remarks to an instructor, which is probably what I would do. ACE also offers a Lifestyle & Weight Management Consultant Certificate, which although I’m sure is full of CW would be a good certificate also, which I plan on getting.
Tara,
Get your certification with Charles Poliquin. He’s one of the top strength and conditioning coaches in the world… and he’s paleo!
I noticed Dawn Blatner went to my school. I took some of the core classes for the nutrition degree, but they were so bad that I switched back into ag economics, though looking back I probably should have switched to meat science, which is an excellent UIUC program. It’s funny because you have to take real science: chemistry, physics, and molecular bio…and then you get to these stupid nutrition classes and most of what they teach is dogma.
It’s CNN pretty much what I figured…
Well, just wasted 5 minutes reading those moronic comments. The best was real food is out of reach for most people because its so expensive. Whatever.
“American Dietetic Association representative”
That pretty much told me that I don’t need to pay attention to her. The only thing I think that could have shut me off quicker would be if she were an American Diabetes Association rep.
I’m a big fan of Weston A Price, but I’m also a big fan of Dr. Harris. Not all WAP’s are sprout lovin’, bread eating, pancake makin’ gluten lovers ;)
Agh. Things never change with ADA. Still exact same thing as 8 years ago. I took a nutrition class thinking maybe registered dietitian would be cool but after that class, I never went back to school. This person who taught the class was OVERWEIGHT! Hard to take someone like that seriously telling us how to eat healthy…
Real food challenge, huh? Three words: Meat, potatoes, butter.
The comment section is a good reminder of just what is going on in the world at large. We can get a little bit spoiled in our corner of the blogosphere no matter our particular interest, but the comment section is a reminder that we are not the majority report, despite some encouraging trends.
@Michael
I don’t know if I’d call them the majority opinion. I didn’t read the comments so I can’t say, but in general people who comment on news sites – be it CNN or your local paper’s site – are certified nutjobs. For some reason, news articles never draw sane, rational comments. It’s always the extremists (from both sides of whatever argument).
But you’re correct that we are not in the majority ourselves. I’m reminded of this every time I mention something that I personally take for granted about eating.
I didn’t even look at the comments on the CNN story; I know it will depress me too much.
I don’t have much else to add. I love your blog, Richard. I’m reading it every day. Every community needs a fiery, charismatic everyman, who wears his heart on his sleeve, to rally behind. And for the paleo community, I think that is you. Keep sticking it to all the ignorant fools.
Quite honestly, WAPF literature makes it clear that grains are completely unnecessary in the diet. As a WAPF follower with a child who has Crohn’s, we eat very little grain in our home. That which we do eat, we can buy sprouted. Of course I believe that sprouting and growing my own would be better- we’re just not there yet. WAPF encourages meat, and more importantly, animal fat in one’s diet. Thank goodness for WAPF, Free the Animal, the Nourished Kitchen, and everyone else working to support a garbage-free life.
[…] Free The Animal getting after another dietician […]
Hey, Richard, I get your sentiment, but what about pig brains in a can? Or paté. The point is, “procesed”, even industrial food CAN be fine IF it is UNHEALTHY by mainstream standars (oh lol…) and is solely based on real food, not additives, MSG, etc. And there’s also canned seafood so…
Of course, that’s not what the nutjobs would talk about. Probably if consumers weren’t so ignorant, and there was actually a fully functioning feedback to the industry, processed food wouldn’t be the terrible poison in a package it is. It could even be healthy! Human inventiveness needs not be a bad thing, except when it comes along with oppression, ignorance and sheer stupidity.
EL66K:
No disagreement. I use some canned food like fish livers, tuna, tomato sauce, etc. Yes, pate. Yum. My main point was the continual harping about “more fruits & vegetables.”
That being said, what do you think of Mark Sisson’s post today? He has there a modified food pyramid, with vegetables and fruits as the foundation.
Honestly? Probably a bit of marketing reality slipping in. However, it’s better than Cordain because Mark doesn’t dis SFAs.
I’ll give Mark a pass on this one. He’s doing big big things and it’s best to focus on the super-essentials.
De acuerdo con las investigaciones más recientes, los poor bastards, como los llamas equivocadamente, tienen serias deficiencias nutricionales. Por ser la más parecida a la humana, posee lipoproteinas muy utiles en la recuperacion del sindrome de kwashiorkor y la deficiencia lipidica tipo 3. Mentiras, simples quijotadas u homeradas
I love the whole “real food elitists pissing in our Cheerios” vibe going on in the comments.
I made an attempt at the 28-Day Real Food Challenge–it sounded like it might be fun (and blog fodder). I didn’t think beforehand about how grain-heavy it would be, though. It wasn’t long before I was skipping days about soaking and starters and pancakes and whatnot. By about halfway through the month I’d pretty much lost the thread altogether. I still have a pile of unread challenge emails. It would be nice to see a “real food” challenge aimed at people who want delicious, nutritious food without a lot of effort, time or skill. I can see it already: “Day 1: Ditch Grains.” “Day 2: Fat is for Flavor.” It could work.
Have you seen the NutriSystem commericals and the $250,000+ kickback they are giving the American Diabetic Association to use their “acceptance”. There is not a more processed pile of shit on earth than a NutriSystem meal. Again, follow the dollars.
I dare say that ultra-pasteurized, homogenized low fat milk is UNFIT for human consumption. And fruit is sensible junkfood. An apple or orange or some berries is a good dessert, but not a snack or meal replacement.
I agree. Pasteurization and homogenization turns it into a milk flavored beverage full of hormones and antibiotics. Raw goat milk rules because you don’t have to worry about the casein.
Maybe she comes a lot further than where she used to be…LOL! Maybe we should take up a donation and ship a bacon fat, coconut oil, butter, cream, and ribeye care package to her.
“Soaking, sprouting, grinding & fermenting grains has just got to be an awful chore, and for so little nutritional reward.”
Yeah, but sometimes you just want a cheeseburger on a bun.
I love sourdough so I take the time and the effort to keep up with the sourdough starter because I love making my own. Sorry but there’s nothing like topping that homemade french onion soup (made with homemade beef broth of course) with a thick slice of sourdough and grated Parmesan. I also love raw milk, raw cheese, and yogurt. I exercise common sense in food choice and eat whole, fresh and local as much as possible.
I say lets all get along Paleo, WAPF, and those who do a bit of both both. We are on the same team against CW. Right?
For the large most part of it, I agree, Rachel.
“In the morning, she ground oats and buckwheat to make pancakes and waffles. She pan-fried eggs and made hash browns from scratch.
“The first week, I didn’t think I could continue it,” said Mier, who lives in the suburbs of Toronto in Canada. “It made it extra work than it would’ve been otherwise. I felt like a slave in the kitchen.”
Sheer laziness! Even when my diet was filled with evil grains, I still cooked EVERYTHING from scratch. NO PACKAGED GOODS!
Funny thing is, so many of the preachy types who extol the virtue of eating grains, are effete liberal types who wouldn’t know how to do practical self reliant things when the going gets rough. Imagine what their reaction would be in a “workers paradise.”