Your Food Isn't As Nourishing As You Think: An Award-Winning Food Journalist Explains

When you hear the word "malnourished," you likely think of hunger—suffering from a lack of calories or nutrients. However, as award-winning food journalist Mark Bittman shares on this episode of the mindbodygreen podcast, malnutrition isn't only about the quantity of calories: It's about the quality as well.

We don't need to tell you that highly processed food is at an all-time high in the U.S. To which many people say: Make the right choices, and just don't eat the junk! "But there's a limited amount of right choice to be made," says Bittman. See, he says most of the farmland is used to produce corn and soybeans since it's so profitable (nearly all processed foods are made from either corn or soy, and both are pretty easy to grow). Since those big farms dominate such a large chunk of land, there's not a ton of room to grow other nutrient-dense crops. 

"Say 60% of the calories in our food system are junk food calories," says Bittman (meaning, produced from corn or soy). "They're calories that don't nourish you." Once the lesser 40% of healthy food is gone, someone has to eat that remaining 60%. "So you may not eat 60% of your calories from junk food, but to the extent that you eat less, it means someone else is eating more," Bittman notes.

It's a complex, loaded topic that doesn't have an overnight solution. But on a top-down level, says Bittman, here's what needs to happen: "We need to be growing more diverse crops. We need to be making real food affordable to more people. We need to regulate the amount of junk food that's produced and sold. We need to regulate how animals are raised or grown and processed and sold. We need to make sure that our children eat well and learn about food at a young age." 

"No country has it all together," Bittman notes, but we can learn from their public health initiatives and food regulations. For example, "Chile has the best labeling laws on the planet," says Bittman, where processed food is marked with red, yellow, green, or black labels1. "The black label means your food can't be advertised to children and so on." 

Bittman explains that in Japan, food is discussed and taught to kids at an early age—they serve themselves, they clean up after themselves, and they learn how their food was made. This lesson helps kids grow up valuing their food and where it comes from, which can help optimize their eating habits in the long run. 

"The most important thing is to recognize that this is a political issue," says Bittman. "And that means running for office or supporting the right people who are running for office—people who understand that food is an important issue and that changing food is going to help change everything that really matters."