What Happens When Americans Escape America’s Food Supply?

The science points to a disturbing difference between what Europeans call food and what America’s industrial food system puts on our plates.

The Wall Street Journal, in an article by Sumathi Reddy titled “You Gorged on Your European Vacation but Lost Weight. Why?” noted in their opening paragraphs:

“Shelly Wegman enjoyed all the good stuff on a two-week trip to Rome and Tuscany last year, indulging in pasta, wine, bread, fresh fruit and vegetables, and of course, gelato.

“The effect on her waistline wasn’t what she expected: She actually lost 2 pounds, says Wegman, a registered dietitian in Raleigh, N.C.

“Americans who eat their way through European vacations sometimes come home surprised to see a lower number on the scale. I had the same experience on a recent trip to Portugal’s Azores islands, where I indulged in specialty cheeses, breads, cakes and the sweetest pineapple I’ve ever tasted—without gaining a pound.”

So, what’s this all about? Is there science behind these claims?

When Louise and I lived in Germany years ago, the thing that surprised me most wasn’t the language or the trains: it was the bread. We had our own bakery at the Salem International complex in Stadsteinach, and the bread was like nothing I’d ever tasted. The same was true from the small, family-owned “commercial” bakeries in town.

You bought it in the morning from a bakery where somebody had been up since four and it had a lifespan — you had to eat it within a few days — the way living things do. Then we came back to the States in 1988 and I once watched a loaf of supermarket bread sit on the counter for two weeks, still soft, still springy, still perfectly cheerful.

I remember standing there thinking, “This can’t be good.” If a Twinkie can last over a month without refrigeration — or 44 years, as one apparently did — that suggests that the yeasts, molds, and even bugs that may otherwise like to make a meal of it simply can’t; it’s too toxic for them.

I’m reminded of our years living in Germany back in the 1980s because there’s been a wave of stories lately — beyond just the WSJ piece — about Americans who spend a few weeks in Italy, Spain, France or elsewhere in Europe, eat pasta at lunch and bread at dinner and gelato in between, drink wine every night, and come home a few pounds lighter.

The usual explanation is that they walked more, and sure, they probably did (although some dispute it), but actual science suggests there’s something fundamentally different between the diet most Americans eat and what most Europeans prefer.

Scientist Kevin Hall’s team at the National Institutes of Health admitted twenty volunteers to a metabolic ward for a month and fed them two diets, two weeks each: one was filled with ultra-processed foods that Americans typically eat, some every day, and the other made from whole, fresh ingredients.

The meals were matched for calories, sugar, fat, sodium, fiber, and macronutrients. Nobody was told to restrict anything, be it quantity, frequency of eating, or portion size.

They found that when people were on the ultra-processed weeks, they ate roughly 500 more calories a day, ate faster, and gained an average of two pounds over two weeks. On the whole-food-diet weeks, however, they lost that weight back.

The CDC reported last year that ultra-processed foods today make up 55 percent of all calories consumed by Americans over the age of one, and a stunning 61.9 percent of what our kids eat.

On the other hand, backing up these anecdotal reports from tourists, researchers across 22 European countries writing in the European Journal of Nutrition found the range of ultra-processed foods consumed by locals runs from 14 percent in Italy up to a high of 44 percent in the less-healthy UK.

In other words, an Italian child and an American child are not eating variations of the same food supply, even when it’s mostly pasta and pizza. The Italians are eating actual whole foods, while the majority of Americans — we, with our obesity and metabolic disorders problem — are eating stuff created in a laboratory.

As Julia Bellluz writes in her brilliant Substack newsletter:

France’s relatively low obesity rate and higher propensity for cooking and eating well are not accidents of history. They were carefully fostered by policy and regulation. When Americans visit Paris and marvel at how svelte people are, it’s not because the Parisians have superior willpower. They are objects of their environment, just as Americans are objects of theirs.

She notes that pretty much everybody is just a short walk away from a store where they can pick up fresh ingredients for dinner, and most shop multiple times a week to keep everything as fresh and new as possible. It’s built into European culture.

But it’s not just how freshly-picked or unprocessed a food in Europe may be; there are other dramatically real differences between the food you’ll find on that continent and what you can buy on ours.

Consider the additives. Europe approves somewhere in the neighborhood of three to four hundred in total across the entire European Union; we allow several thousand chemicals in our food.

And our government isn’t bothering to test them; instead of the European precautionary principle that says you must prove something is safe before putting it into the food supply, we wait for cancers and deaths to show up before investigating.

The Environmental Working Group found that of the 766 new food chemicals introduced into our food supply since 2000, 756 of them were declared safe by the companies selling them, not by the FDA. That’s the GRAS or “generally recognized as safe” loophole, written in 1958 for things like vinegar and baking soda, that’s how these lab-made industrial compounds end up in our groceries.

Pesticides tell the same story. Nathan Donley’s peer-reviewed analysis in Environmental Health found 72 pesticides approved for use here that are banned or being phased out in the EU because they cause cancer, neurological damage, or other illnesses, and over 322 million pounds a year of these poisons are sprayed on American crops.

Which brings us to wheat, and to the gluten intolerance that’s so endemic now in America (but still rare in Europe) that restaurants are now routinely putting gluten-free bread and bun options on their menus.

In the late 1990s, American farmers began to routinely spray glyphosate on wheat shortly before harvest to dry it out. This practice — that Italy has banned outright — kills the plants and thus makes the stalks more brittle so when the threshing machines harvest the crop they pick up a slightly higher percentage of the grain heads that they would have if the plants were still green. It’s done, in other words, to increase profits.

A careful review in Frontiers in Microbiology lays out the puzzle: double-blind trials show gluten doesn’t actually produce symptoms in healthy non-celiac people, yet millions of Americans have begun reporting over the past two decades that we feel better when we quit wheat.

It turns out that glyphosate blocks a metabolic pathway that both plants and bacteria use but animals don’t, which is why it was called “harmless to humans.” The problem, though, is that our gut bacteria (being closer to plants on the evolutionary tree) require that same plant-based pathway, and the beneficial bacteria in our guts appear to be even more vulnerable to it than the opportunistic ones.

On top of that, Bob Kennedy has been claiming for years that glyphosate causes cancer, and the World Health Organization has concluded that glyphosate is a “probable carcinogen.” Multiple families successfully sued Bayer for millions when family members who used Roundup died, at least until the corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court threw out their lawsuits. (Justice Jackson wrote that the ruling “departs from the near unanimous view of the many state and federal courts.”)

And our money-corrupted EPA now permits Americans to have a daily glyphosate intake that’s more than three times what European regulators allow. We may have spent twenty years blaming an ancient grain protein for what a modern herbicide is doing to us.

And then there’s the plastic. Researchers who bought 111 protein products in and around Portland, my own city, found microplastics in 88 percent of them, with significantly higher levels in the heavily processed items.

Chicken nuggets, for example, carry roughly thirty times more microplastic per gram than chicken breast. Every grinder, emulsifier, conveyor, and pouch in the ultra-processed system throws in a little more plastic detritus. The particles are even turning up in human brains, and now we’re finding them in higher concentrations in autopsies of people who died with dementia.

The difference between America and Europe isn’t culinary, it’s philosophical. Europe operates on the precautionary principle: prove it’s safe, then sell it. America operates on what I’d call the litigation principle: sell it, and if enough people get sick, their survivors can sue.

That’s the predictable result of a corrupt political system in which agribusiness “invested” a record $178 million in lobbying in a single year, and where, ever since Citizens United, the industries being regulated can now spend without limit to buy both politicians and threaten legal action against regulators.

This is why the answer isn’t the Mediterranean Diet, or keto, or any of the variations that are so popular right now here in America. Those are simply strategies for trying to lose weight or stay healthy in a system with a poisoned food supply.

Europeans, on the other hand, aren’t following a diet; they’re just eating “safe” food, because their governments still make their domestic food-processing industry prove safety before they can sell them.

We shouldn’t have to fly to Rome to feel healthy again, and a good start for those of us who must eat on this continent is to buy fresh, locally-grown, ideally organic food and make as many as possible of our meals at home.