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Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC. What's the number one cause of poor health in the United States? Da, da, da, you're thinking, you're guessing, what is it? It's poor nutrition. According to a paper published by a panel of nutrition experts in 2020, poor nutrition can lead to all sorts of cardiovascular diseases, certain cancers, increasingly common conditions like diabetes as well. We all know how important it is to eat well, yes, but where we struggle is actually knowing how to eat well. Education on nutrition is notoriously confusing. There are all sorts of seemingly contradictory diet plans that verge on disordered eating, and all kinds of things, and pervasive myths about what foods are good and what to avoid.

All this week, we're going to focus on dispelling some of those nutritional myths that have permeated American culture at some point in our eleven o'clock hour. We're tackling two myths a day. Why two myths a day? Because we have Sophie Egan, author of the book How to Be a Conscious Eater: Making Food Choices That Are Good for You, Others, and the Planet.

A New York Times contributor, she recently penned the article that inspired the series called 10 Nutrition Myths Experts Wish Would Die. We will take two a day all this week from her article. Sophie, welcome back to WNYC. Thank you so much for doing this with us.

Sophie Egan: Thank you. It's great to be with you.

Brian Lehrer: Let's start with your first myth, fresh fruits, and vegetables are always healthier than canned, frozen, or dried varieties. What? That is sacrilege, isn't it, to say anything frozen or canned can be better than fresh, but fresh is always best is a myth?

Sophie Egan: Yes. We have a real cultural passé for fresh in the United States. It's warranted for several reasons, but not as much for nutritional value. Really, the research shows that frozen, canned, and dried fruits and vegetables can be just as nutritious as their fresh counterparts. I interviewed Sara Bleich, the outgoing Director of Nutrition Security and Health Equity at the USDA, the US Department of Agriculture, who's now a professor at Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health. She pointed out that there's a really important behavioral element, too, which is that, because these options tend to be cheaper, they are more likely to be at your home, and you're more likely to actually eat them.

There's the aspect also of just what are you going to end up consuming that can ultimately make sure those nutritional benefits of fruits and vegetables actually wind up in your body.

Brian Lehrer: Some of it is behavioral, but are there certain fruits and veggies for which fresh is best does apply if you have a choice and are willing to act on it and some for which it doesn't, nutritionally speaking?

Sophie Egan: It's not so much a difference by type of fruit or vegetable but really more of just keeping an eye on the packaging of canned, frozen, and dried varieties. Look out for sneaky ingredients like added sugars, saturated fats, and sodium. Just need to make sure you're checking nutrition labels, which fresh options don't even have, typically, and make sure you're opting for products that keep those less desirable ingredients to a minimum.

Brian Lehrer: That's the caveat, right? There can be-

Sophie Egan: Exactly.

Brian Lehrer: -bad stuff put in there by the manufacturers. Somebody told me there are instances when, I guess, frozen, in particular, versions of a fruit or vegetable might actually hold more nutrition than the fresh version once you cook it and it's transported to the supermarket and everything.

Sophie Egan: Yes. There is some research that shows that essentially what happens with frozen is you're locking in those nutrients the minute you pick them. Whereas there's a natural deterioration over time if something is just sitting on a shelf or sitting in a truck. There is that kind of aspect that the nutritional value gets essentially consolidated so to speak, but the reality is it's not really worth worrying too much about that. Yes, if that's one more reason for you to opt for those frozen options that are also money-savers, then great, but it's not as if we need to focus so much on optimizing this or that exact nutrient count.

It's really much more about just accessing enough fruits and vegetables in your overall diet in whatever ways work for you. One of the things I focused on most in my book was actually how few Americans eat-- It's about 1 in 10 Americans actually eats the recommended number of fruits and vegetables per day, that five servings a day.

Brian Lehrer: Wow.

Sophie Egan: If anything, this is much more about just broadening the menu, so to speak, for how to get those really valuable fruits and vegetables in whatever form you can.

Brian Lehrer: All right, so Myth Number 1 is busted largely on behavioral grounds. Myth Number 2, all fat is bad. Historically, if this is a myth, how did we as a society come to the conclusion?

Sophie Egan: In around the late 1940s, there were some studies published that did find correlations between high-fat diets and high levels of cholesterol. Experts came to the conclusion that if you reduced the amount of total fats in your diet, then your risk for heart disease would go down. By the 1980s, doctors and federal health experts, the food industry, news media, this had become all over the place, reporting that a low-fat diet could benefit everyone, despite there not actually being that solid evidence that doing so would prevent issues like heart disease, or overweight, or obesity. It's a correlation versus causation issue.

Brian Lehrer: What role do fats play in our diet?

Sophie Egan: The biggest point here in this myth is that not all fat is created equal. It's really better to be even using the plural, this is where grammar can be helpful, fats. There are different types of fats. The unhealthy types of fats are really the saturated and trans fats. The healthy types of fats are unsaturated, so, monounsaturated and polyunsaturated. Good fats are like, they really boost cell function, they help you absorb nutrients, to our previous conversation. Eating fruits and vegetables with olive oil, for example, can actually help you get the most out of those nutrients. They're also really helpful in supplying energy and producing important hormones. There is a really important role in our diets, in our daily lives for good fats.

Brian Lehrer: Is there a behavioral aspect here, too, like, in your article, you note that, by the 1980s, the general consensus was that we'd all be better off with a low-fat diet, but then what happens when we cut the fats from our diet?

Sophie Egan: Right, exactly. This happens across the board with eating behavior. This is really my area of expertise, which is that you always have to think about what are you replacing whatever you're taking out of your diet because, most often, you still have to eat something. What we found, historically, is that people actually ended up, and manufacturers as well, actually replacing the calories that were coming from fat with calories from refined carbohydrates, so, things like white flour, added sugar. Instead of actually helping the country stay slim, as Dr. Vijaya Surampudi from the University of California, Los Angeles, who I interviewed on this topic, she noted the rates of overweight and obesity actually went up significantly.

There is a behavioral element because it's what ended up filling the void of those fat-based ingredients or fat-based foods in our diets, and it was actually foods that, in some cases, had worse-off ingredients from the standpoint, again, of overweight obesity, and overall helping us reap the benefits of those good fats.

Brian Lehrer: You used as an example, in the article, something that you jogged my memory on but that I had forgotten about, SnackWell's, right? That was a kind of cookie that advertised no fats, but--

Sophie Egan: Yes, exactly, but full of, again, those refined carbohydrates. SnackWell's are the poster product for everything that's wrong with the low-fat diet answer, which is that we have this concept in human psychology, a health halo, that when we see a term on a product like fat-free or low-fat, this applies also to gluten-free and other kinds of products where you're taking something out, we assume it's healthier. Actually, we end up often eating more of it, feeling less satisfied, less satiated as well because, again, you don't have the positive ingredients that were in there.

SnackWell's definitely, I think, jogged a lot of people's memories for that same reason. There was the perception that it was really actually favorable, and instead, it was just replacing it with worse-off ingredients. Again, same thing actually we're seeing in modern times with products like gluten-free.

Brian Lehrer: When people read the nutrition labels, for those who actually read nutrition labels, and the top line might be grams of fat, and then the next line is grams of saturated fat, should we just ignore the first line?

Sophie Egan: Exactly, yes. I think that's a fair thought. It's looking at the actual nutrient facts panel. That's the really boring black-and-white part on the product, not all the snazzy, multicolored billboard type of product labeling like fat-free. If you zero in on that really boring black-and-white label, then it's exactly looking for where you're keeping sodium, added sugar, and the unhealthy fats like saturated fat to a minimum.

Brian Lehrer: All right, we will leave it there for today with Sophie Egan, author of How to Be a Conscious Eater: Making Food Choices That Are Good for You, Others, and the Planet, and her article that you may have seen in the New York Times just recently, 10 Nutrition Myths Experts Wish Would Die. We just did Myths 1 and 2, we will continue this myth-busting conversation with Sophie through the week. Tomorrow, it's onto her Myths Number 3 and 4. Sophie, thanks for today. Thanks a lot. Talk to you tomorrow.

Sophie Egan: Thank you so much. See you tomorrow.

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