Lovers of your typical health guru’s how-to-lose-20-kilos-by-only-eating-bratwurst treatises perhaps should look away (or, actually, please stay). Verburgh emphatically states that he does not believe in diets. Instead, he is after something bigger than numbers on a scale: He is after the fountain of youth. And you’ll be surprised to find out you already know where it is.
Verburgh is actually Dr Verburgh, a 26-year-old medical doctor who researches aging at the University of Antwerp and who had written three books by the time he was 25. In De voedselzandloper, he makes the link between the way we eat and the way we age.
Basically, staying young means avoiding the typical diseases of aging, which is anything from loss of eyesight to heart disease, type II diabetes, cancer or osteoporosis. What’s the best way to do this, according to Verburgh? Eat well and exercise, not just for a period of time, but always. “If you want to have the health benefits of healthy food, you have to do it your whole life,” he says.
OK, but what doctor doesn’t preach the benefits of a healthy diet? But Verburgh takes it a step further, acknowledging that with all the confusion, chaos and bad advice in the diet book world, people no longer actually know what eating healthily really is. So he created the “food hourglass”, a model to help his readers concretely understand how they should be eating.
This model takes the classic food pyramid and turns it on its head. The result is an hourglass: two pyramids facing each other, one pointing up with its hierarchical strata of foods we should eat more of, and one tapering downwards, also divided into levels, of foods that we should consume less of.
The food hourglass is about giving people alternatives, an idea Verburgh developed while working in a psychiatric institute, where diet plays a big role because of the effects psychotropic medications have on metabolism. These medications often cause weight gain and increase a patient’s risk for aging-related illnesses like type II diabetes, heart disease and Alzheimer’s.
“If you say to people that you should drastically reduce your carbohydrate intake, that you should eat less potatoes or rice or pasta, there are many people who would say that is difficult,” he explains. “But, for example, if you say that you can replace the potatoes with mushrooms or legumes or an extra portion of other vegetables, then people say, ‘OK, I can try that.’”
In the food hourglass, Verburgh tries to correct some of the main faults of the standard pyramid. Naturally, fruits and vegetables are among the stars of foods that Verburgh says we should eat more of, replacing things like bread and pasta as the main substance of our meals. He encourages eating fatty fish and white meats like chicken, but says to eat as little red meat as possible (the normal Belgian food pyramid does not distinguish between types of meat).
Cakes and sweets should be replaced by dark chocolate and nuts. He also differentiates between different kinds of fat, promoting healthy, omega-3-rich oils and recommending avoiding omega-6-rich oils, butter and margarine.
Most of the recommendations are pretty predictable; however, the food hourglass does include some surprises. For starters, milk and fruit juices from concentrate are included next to soda at the top and broadest level of items to eat less of, which has incited some commentary from the powerful dairy industry.
Also, food supplements are found in the top point of the “more” pyramid. For many people, this may go against logic – if you’re eating healthily, shouldn’t you have all the vitamins and minerals you need? Verburgh says no. “People think our bodies are intelligent enough to get all these nutrients if we eat healthily, but our bodies and our food live in a completely different environment to the environment in which our bodies evolved.”
Sitting at desks all day means we are not getting enough vitamin D from the sun, for instance. We are also not eating seaweed in large enough amounts for iodine. And even if we were snacking on seaweed all day, changes in the way we grow vegetables means that our foods are not as rich in vitamins and minerals as they were in the past. For example, there is 70% less copper in our tomatoes today than 50 years ago. Therefore, Verburgh recommends taking a daily food supplement.
In a way, there is not much revolutionary in De voedselzandloper. But in the Babel of the industry of nutrition, that in itself is revolutionary. Verburgh offers a sane voice that lays out to readers the myths and assumptions about eating and nutrition. In the end, you walk away feeling better prepared to make your own decisions about what is healthy for you.
Verburgh agrees: “The food hourglass is not some kind of command or order; it’s just a guideline for people to know what is good, what is not good, and how they can replace the bad foods with the good foods. So people can choose on their own how far they want to go with this.”
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