Why do the Food Giants steal our fibre?

How does it help them get at our gold? And this week's recipe: Roast Cauliflower with Beluga Lentils and Tahini Dressing

Hello and welcome to this week’s Downsizing Diva, and another  chunk of My Bumper Book of Food-Giant-Slaying.

I am very pleased to say that I have been joined in my quest to rid the land of marauding Food Giants by the House of Lords (they might say it was the other way round..). Their comprehensive and hard hitting report starts with a chapter on ‘the shocking scale of the problem’.  Exactly.  I will write more about it shortly, but in the meantime, you can read the whole thing here.

I am keen to hear whether publishing this Food Giant book in small chunks works, or whether you would prefer longer chunks at a time.  And whether you are enjoying it regularly, or would prefer it a bit less frequently, with other things in between. Would be enormously pleased for any feedback.

And thank you for all the wonderful support you are giving me for this project – and for all the new subscribers, with especial thanks to the lovely (lovely lovely) readers who have upgraded to paid – and even upgraded to founding subscriber. The Diva says I’m being very blatant here, and she’s right, but I do want to thank you as well.

Last week was about the Food Giants stealing the fibre out of our food and why that’s such a very bad idea – for weight and health; if you need to catch up you can read about it here, and if you missed Chapter 1, you can read it here.

This week I am looking at why removing all the fibre plays such an important part in the Giants getting their hands on our gold… and why so many children need braces. Clue: it’s to do with chewing.

I also have a really good recipe for roast cauliflower and beluga lentils with a tahini dressing, which came out of one of those tragic conversations where you realise a friend has never, ever roasted a cauliflower. I will pause for a moment to let the full enormity of that to sink in.  If you are also one of those people, there are helplines. And the House of Lords is onto it.

But back to the Food Giants, and the all-important question:

Why do the Food Giants steal our fibre?

But first, an important note about structure and fibre:

Structure and fibre are like bricks and brick dust.

You can build house out of bricks, but you can’t build a house out of brick dust, even though bricks are made of brick dust.

A whole orange has everything: fibre, structure, juice. If you juice it, it has nothing but juice –  and it’s transformed from a whole, healthy food into a quick conduit for an immediate sugar hit like coca-cola (but with more vitamins and minerals than an actual coca-cola ).  But if you turn it into a smoothie it still has all the fibre, so you would expect it to behave in the body like the whole orange.   However, by breaking up the long strands of the fibre – the structure of it – as far as your body is concerned, it’s juice, so it goes straight into the bloodstream like coca-cola, so it’s as helpful for preventing sugar spikes as brick dust is for building a house.

So fibre is not only vital, it’s not to be messed with. And if you see, ‘With Added Fibre’ on a packet, have a good laugh, and then put it in the bin. And perhaps write to your MP about it.

What are the Giants up to?

So if stripping all the fibre is so bad for us why are the Giants doing  it – are they trying to kill us?

Well, no – obviously; killing the golden goose has well-known consequences.  And besides, they’re not allowed to kill us on purpose, there are laws about that.

But they’re a clever lot, these Giants, and they have their reasons.

Firstly, it increases shelf life –  the Giants want their wares to last for ever. Exactly why is a mystery – it would have been fantastically useful to our cave-dwelling ancestors, but at a time of excellent refrigeration and abundant food supply, it’s an odd priority given how bad it is for humans.

But the Giants don’t make things for us to eat, they make things for us to buy:  so long as they don’t get sued – and people don’t drop dead mid-mouthful – what happens to the stuff inside our bodies is none of their concern.  And if nobody bothers mandating minimum nutritional standards, there are no minimum nutritional standards.

Well, there might be something like, ‘don’t put any arsenic in’, and ‘try and keep e-coli to a bare minimum’. But beyond that, the nutritional health of the world’s humans is of no concern to the creatures that supply the world with nutrition.

And then there’s mouthfeel: to get as much of our gold as possible, the Giants have to make their wares ultra-tempting, and all aspects of mouthfeel are crucial – a hint of a crunch followed by pillowy, soft texture that lets nothing get in the way of the  overarching blissful baby-food vibe;  fibre is not good for this at all – think lentils.

And the Giants don’t just want us to long for it… crave it… be addicted to it:  they need us to eat a lot of  it, because their bottom line depends on our stuffing our faces.   And one of the best things for face-stuffing is speed: the quicker we eat, the more we eat, because we’ve wolfed it down before we realise we’re full.

Removing the fibre means we don’t have to bother with any of that time-consuming chewing nonsense, which makes eating far less exhausting for the feeble chewer, although unfortunate for the jaw development in children – chewing is what makes the  muscle and bone grow big enough to fit in all their teeth when they get older. N.b. If you’re living in Britain and at the stage of life where you’re deciding on a career, the hot money is on orthodontist.

But all this quick eating doesn’t just fatten up the Giants’ Christmas bonus, it drives up calorie consumption:  what is good for the fat-cats literally makes us fat.

And I ate this in action the other day: I returned to Italy on a late plane, and grabbed a focaccia panini from a bar. By no stretch of anything was this a health food, but it was real food and proper bread.

And it took much of the hour-and-a-half journey home to chew my way through it; by the time I had, I was full. As a contrast, I picked up a similar sized panini at a service station in Switzerland, which used UPF bread – surprisingly, because Swiss service stations are usually paragons of proper food – and after the initial, pleasing crunch to break through the crust, no further chewing was needed: the bread turned into a pappy mush, which I ate very quickly and was still starving at the end.

Had I not been driving through the Gotthard tunnel at the time,  I would have bought another; possibly two. Even though it was frankly rather disgusting.

The Great Experiment

If you are still doubtful that it really is UPF that’s driving the obesity crisis – and you’re right to be sceptical: it’s perfectly possible to get very, very fat and never go near the Giants’ bread: just stuff your face on homemade meringues and trifle; make your own fudge; deep-fry your homemade chips, or just generally eat too much (I am good at this) – this experiment casts all doubt into a vast vat of doughnuts.

Kevin Hall of America’s National institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases had the same misgivings, and set up the experiment to prove beyond doubt that it was just the high levels of sugar and fat, and low levels of fibre that were causing the problems.

He gathered a bunch of fit, normal-weight, thirty-somethings, incarcerated them for a month, and divided the group in two; each group were given two weeks on real food and two weeks on UPF. The real food was prepared by a team of fabulous chefs, who matched the sugar, fat, salt, and fibre gram for gram with the UPF (the UPF group got a fibre supplement), and did their utmost to make it as irresistible in taste and texture as the UPF.  The participants could eat as much or as little as they liked.

Both groups gained weight eating the UPF diet, and lost or stayed the same on the real food diet… because when they were eating UPF they ate, on average, 500 calories more per day. I think that needs saying again: people who were able to eat the right number of calories for their body when they were eating real food, lost that control when they were eating UPF.

I think it’s particularly interesting that they chose participants that didn’t have weight problems, so they got a real look at how a healthy body, without any make-you-fatter genes responded.  Had they picked people like me – cave-dweller super-survivors (oh, how I wished they had: a whole month where my job was to eat as much food as I felt like) – the results might have been different, and I’ll talk more about genes and their obesity-driving effects on hunger and willpower later.

It shouldn’t be surprising: in the days before UPF, people ate hearty meals (so long as they had money to put food on the table) with potatoes, chips fried in lard and puddings – to say nothing of cake for tea and biscuits for elevenses – but on the whole they didn’t achieve the stratospheric weights that are so common now, which would have been the case if the problem was being caused by ingredients that you’d find in anybody’s store cupboard.

It shouldn’t be necessary to prove it – it’s been in front of our eyes that everywhere the Food Giants  went, fatness surely followed – but having such a well-designed and well-funded experiment is a good counteract for all the well-funded experiments that the Giants do to prove that any ill-effects are nothing to do with them.

So to recap:

The Giants remove fibre because it makes them more money.

UPF is definitely responsible for the explosion in obesity.

Don’t mess with fibre or your microbiome will be cross.

Eat real food.

Roast Cauliflower with Beluga Lentils and Tahini Dressing

I met a friend at the market yesterday when I was piling cauliflowers into my basket.

What are you going to do with them, she said? Roast them, I replied.

How do you do that? she said.

I nearly called the emergency services.

How had she got through life with no roast cauliflower – I can barely manage a week without it.

And in case there are others suffering from this terrible deprivation, this is how you roast a cauliflower. I will not waste time with an ingredient list (cauliflower, olive oil, salt and pepper), anymore than an ambulance stops at red lights.

It's delicious on it's own, and also very good like this.

It's a really good main course or it goes well with things like roast chicken, salmon or cod.

Serves 4 people

• 200g  Beluga black lentils – or other very small variety

• A pinch of black peppercorns

• A teaspoon each of cardamom and coriander seeds

• 1 roast cauliflower

• 2 – 3 teaspoons olive oil

• Salt and pepper

For the dressing

• 1 tablespoon tahini

• 1 tablespoon yogurt

• 1 tablespoon balsamic vinegar

• 3 teaspoons olive oil

• Water – about 50 – 80ml

• Salt and pepper

To serve

• Parsley

• Pomegranate seeds

‍

For the cauliflower

Preheat oven to 200º / 400f° / fan 180º / gas mark 6

1. Take a cauliflower, cut it in half, and break or cut it into smallish florets.

2. Put it into a big bowl and add a good few grindings of salt and pepper; drizzle over 3 teaspoons of olive oil.  

3. Mix well with your hands to make sure that the cauliflower is well coated with the oil and salt and pepper.

4. Add some cumin seeds if you are in the mood.

5. Lay florets on a baking tray and roast for about 40 minutes – turning them over half way – until cauliflower is tender and golden.

For the rest

1. Cook the lentils in plenty of water with the whole spices and a teaspoon of salt until they are just done – about 20 – 30 minutes.  

2. Drain well, and put in a bowl to add the olive oil and more salt if necessary.

3. Whisk together the tahini, yogurt, and balsamic vinegar until smooth; add water until it is the consistency of single cream; season with salt and pepper.

4. Transfer the lentils to a shallow dish or platter.

5. Arrange the roast cauliflower on top, and drizzle the tahini dressing over it.

6. Sprinkle over a handful of pomegranate seeds and some chopped parsley if you feel like it.

7. Serve hot, warm, or room temperature.

Serve with a green salad and perhaps some roast red peppers. .

‍

Diva notes

Lentils

It is very important that the lentils are small – If you can't find Beluga, use Le Puy, Castelluccio, or any other small ones you can find.

I always cook lentils with whole spices – they provide little taste bombs when you bite into them, which is very delightful.

If you are short of time, use a tin.

Yogurt

The dressing is nicest if you use rich, creamy Greek yogurt.   This is not the ultra-downsizing choice – that would be fat-free yogurt.  But that is currently being tried at The Hague for crimes against taste buds. A compromise would be full-fat, but not full-fat Greek.

Roasting Cauliflowers

Cauliflowers shrink when you cook them; what looks a lot on the chopping board can look a bit paltry on the serving dish, so cook more than you think you need.

‍