Posts Tagged ‘food’

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Soybeans - Good or bad for your health?

Wednesday, July 28th, 2010

The soy controversy is alive and well in the West nowadays. The debate revolves around the phytoestrogens in soybeans.

When you eat a normal amount of these foods, it should have no affect on your health.

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Soy has come under heat about their phytoestrogens since 2006, when an American Heart Association review of a 10-year study found that soy protein may not reduce post-menopause hot flashes, may not be good for the heart, and may not prevent breast cancer, uteran cancer, or prostate cancer.

It is interesting to note that soy foods and beans don’t have the highest levels of phytoestrogens. In fact, the order goes like this… nuts and oil seeds, soy products, cereals and breads, legumes, meat products, and processed foods (from highest to lowest).

Basically, the soy controversy comes down to a general lack of solid data on the risks of soybeans. Some say that it is not good for the body, and others say that the data cannot be substantiated with solid evidence.

Also, many of the studies are using extremely high dosages in their treatments and are using concentrated phytoestrogens that are taken from soybeans. The studies are not done with actual soybeans, where the concentration is much lower.

mom-eating-healthy

Concentrated amounts of virtually any substance are likely to be bad for your health.

Estrogen is no different.

Again, to go back to the study down in 2006 by the American Heart Association, soy supplements and pills are not good for you. We know this about supplements already.

You cannot expect to extract all the good stuff from real food, eat that, and still be healthy.

You must instead eat the good stuff to be healthy.

So, the soy controversy lives on.

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Green Tips for Your Diet

Saturday, April 24th, 2010

The foods we buy and consume have an impact on our economy as well as our environment and there is a growing concern about how the way we live affects our global environment. Two words that are growing in popularity are green and sustainability. They both refer to the idea that products can be high quality and good for the environment, or at least not harmful.

The cost of putting food on our tables has gone down over the past few decades, mostly due to advances in agricultural techniques that allow farms to produce massive amounts of crops and animals in less time or in smaller spaces. But there are questions about how this food production is affecting our planet. Fisheries are being over-fished, rain-forests are being destroyed to make way for food production, and fertilizer and pesticide use is increasing as farmland erosion occurs worldwide. Large-scale farming also relies on massive amounts of fossil fuels and water. Plus even more fuel is used to transport foods to the marketthe cost of food

Some forms of agriculture are more sustainable. They pollute less, may be better for the environment and include more humane farming practices for food animals. You can support sustainable agriculture by following a few green tips for your diet. Here are some ways:

Support locally grown foods. Food grown close to home requires less fuel and other resources to get to your grocery store. Eating local is also a good way to support your local economy because you buy products produced by farmers who live in your area. You can also join a Community Supported Agriculture group in your area to make supporting nearby growers easy.

Eat less beef. Meat products require more resources to produce because the animals need to be fed until they are large enough for slaughter. It takes eight pounds of grain to produce one pound of beef. From this perspective, chicken is a more sustainable choice because it takes about two pounds of grain to produce one pound of chicken. Fish and seafood require even less - about a pound in a half to produce a pound of farm raised fish.

Choose fish carefully. When you buy fish, you can choose either wild-caught fish or farm-raised fish. The most sustainable choices include farm-raised plant-eating species such as catfish, tilapia, and trout, which are grown in farm ponds that take up relatively small amounts of space and are quite productive. Wild-caught salmon and pollack from the Pacific ocean are also fairly sustainable, but farm-raised salmon and other carnivorous species such as tuna and sea bass are not as sustainable when compared to their plant-eating counterparts. Also avoid predator species such as swordfish, marlin, bluefin and albacore tuna.fish-market

Go organic. Plants that have been raised organically have not been exposed to artificial fertilizers or pesticides. Organically produced animal products such as milk, milk, eggs, poultry and seafood are produced from animals that have not been raised with growth hormones or given antibiotics. Organic foods are becoming more common in most grocery stores, just be sure to look for the “100% Organic” label on the product.

Read labels carefully. Some labels, such as the 100% organic labels are regulated, but words like natural and healthy aren’t regulated to mean anything specific. Other labels have low standards, for example free range chickens only need to be outside for five minutes each day. They can spend the rest of the day confined in small cages and still be considered to be free range. When you read the claims on food packaging labels, look for some indication of a certification from an organization - they’re more likely to be sustainable.

Grow your own foods. Depending on the time you have and the amount of land you own, you can grow some of your own food in a vegetable garden or possibly raise a few chickens for poultry and eggs. But even if you don’t have much space, you can still grow a few greens or tomatoes in a small container garden on your deck or if space is even tighter you can have a little herb garden in your kitchen.working-in-garden

Buy shade-grown, fair-trade products. Many of the regions where coffee and cocoa for chocolate are grown are suffering from loss of biodiversity as the forests are destroyed to produce cropland. Shade-grown, fair-trade products may be better for the environment and buying them helps to support small farm families who grow them.

Reuse grocery bags and containers. Many stores offer inexpensive but durable grocery bags that you can reuse every time you shop. Some stores offer incentives such as giving you a few cents off your order when you bring a bag back in. Reusing grocery bags cuts down on the number of plastic or paper bags that need to produced, and since most of them end up in the garbage, reusing garbage bags cuts back on litter and landfill use.

Filter your own water. Those plastic bottles of water may be convenient but they take a lot of resources to produce. And while some bottles are recycled, most end up in the trash. You’ll save money and help the environment by filtering your own tap water and reusing your own water bottles

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A healthy varied diet

Tuesday, April 20th, 2010

Apart from breastmilk, no single food contains all the essential nutrients the body needs to be healthy and function efficiently. The nutritional value of a person’s diet depends on the overall balance of foods that is eaten over a period of time, as well as on the needs of the individual. A healthy diet is likely to include a large number or variety of foods, from each of the food groups, as this allows us to get all the nutrients that we need.

We need energy to live and this is provided by the carbohydrate, protein and fat in our diets. But the balance between these nutrients must be right for us to remain healthy. Getting the right amounts of vitamins, minerals, dietary fibre and water is also important for health.

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So what becomes as important as the type of foods we eat, is the amount and frequency that we include different foods in our diet. All foods can be part of a healthy diet, so you don’t have to give up the foods that are a real treat, as the key message is that it is the overall balance of foods that is important for health.

The food groups

We can think of all foods as belonging to one of five different food groups:

We will look at these food groups in more detail on the following pages, but let’s first think about the proportions of these food groups in our diet.

Our diets should be based on bread, rice, potatoes, pasta and other starchy foods and rich in fruit and vegetables. A variety of foods from these two groups should make up two-thirds of the food we eat. Most of the remaining third of the diet should be made up of milk and dairy foods, meat, fish, eggs, beans and other non-dairy sources of protein, with limited amounts of foods and drinks high in fat and/or sugar.pasta-alla-caruso

It might be helpful for you to think of your diet as a big plate, with sections representing the different food groups. This is the healthy eating model that we use in the UK to describe a healthy varied diet and it is called the eatwell plate.

You should aim to achieve this balance every day, although it is not necessary to achieve it at every meal.

This guide is appropriate for most people over the age of two years, including: vegetarians; people of all ethnic origins; people who are a healthy weight for their height as well as those who are overweight; and pregnant women. People under medical supervision or with special dietary requirements may want to check with their doctor if this general description of healthy eating applies to them.

Children under the age of two years have high energy needs compared to their size and capacity for food so some of the foods (especially those low in fat or high in fibre) included on the eatwell plate are not suitable for them. But between the ages of two and five years, children can make a gradual transition towards the type of diet depicted in the eatwell plate.

For most healthy people, eating a healthy varied diet will provide all the vitamins and minerals the body needs. There are certain times in our lives when we may benefit from taking supplements, e.g. when you are thinking about having a baby or when you get older and you need to take a vitamin D supplement. But you should remember that supplements cannot replace a healthy diet.

Here are two easy examples to help you see that by making very simple changes to your diet, you can easily achieve the right proportions of different food groups within a meal.

Pizza:

Pizza can contain ingredients from the four main food groups:pizza-alla-napoletana

  • A dough base – from the  bread, rice, potatoes, pasta and other starchy foods group
  • Tomato puree and other vegetables such as mushrooms, sweetcorn and peppers – from the fruit and vegetable group
  • A moderate amount of cheese, or low fat cheese - from the milk and dairy foods group
  • A moderate amount of ham or tuna - from the meat, fish, eggs, beans and other non-dairy sources of protein group.

Bacon sandwich:

A bacon sandwich can contain ingredients from three main food groups:

  • Two slices of thick cut wholemeal bread – from the  bread, rice, potatoes, pasta and other starchy foods group
  • Lean, grilled bacon – from the meat, fish, eggs, beans and other non-dairy sources of protein group
  • The sandwich can be filled with plenty of lettuce and tomato and served with a glass of pure fruit juice or a piece of fruit – from the fruit and vegetable group
  • If served with a glass of low fat milk, all four groups would be met.

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The industrialization of food: what do we know? Part II

Wednesday, March 3rd, 2010

Often the long nearness between various food and those that are consuming them creates complex communication systems along the food chain, so that the creatures come to know that certain elements are edible guided by taste, smell and color. Very often, even foods emit these signals, because it is in their interest to be eaten.

The fact that a fruit is ripe is signaled by a specific odor (a seductive aroma that reaches quite large distances), color (a shade that stands out from the green mass) or taste (usually sweet).

fruits

Usually, maturity, is when the plant seeds are ready to unwind and to germinate, is the period when the fruit has the highest concentration of nutrients and therefore the interests of plants (spreading the seeds) coincides with (the feeding) of the consumer. As a result of the previously received signals from various fruits and vegetables, our body has established that a fruit is edible, it occurs for enzymes and acids required for its decomposition. Health depends largely on the body’s ability to decode these biological signals: this fruit seems ripe, that there seems altered, that cow looks good.

This process is much easier when you know for a long time a particular food product and much more difficult if the food that you have to deal with was created just to fool your senses, using, for example, artificial flavors or synthetic  sweeteners. Food products that are fooling our senses are difficult issues of Western food to manage. It is important to note that the ecological relationships involve, at least in the first instance, those creatures that eat whole foods, not the nutrients or chemical elements contained in them.

Even if, eventually, once they have reached in our body, food is decomposed into simple chemical elements such as maize, for example, is mostly reduced to simple sugars, the whole food qualities are not unimportant. For example, the quantity and the structure of corn fiber will determine the speed with which will be released and absorbed the sugars that it contains, this is an essential aspect for the metabolism of insulin. A chemist will tell you that once in the blood the corn starch will turn into glucose, but such a reductionist view overlooks the complex and variable process that it assumes this transformation. Despite the nutritional labels, not all carbs are equal.

people-eating-corn

In other words, our body has an old and lasting relationship with maize, but not with the corn syrup with high fructose. Perhaps at some point humans will create this type of relationship with corn syrup with high fructose (as people will develop superhuman insulin systems to cope with the regular flow of pure fructose and glucose), but for now, this interaction make us sick because our body doesn’t know how to deal with all biological innovations.

In the same way, the human bodies that can handle chewing coca leaves - an old relationship met between indigenous and coca plant in some parts of South America -can not cope with cocaine or crack cocaine, even if those are three substances containing the same active elements. Maybe that reductionism, as a way of understanding, is a harmless vision or even required vision in terms of food and drugs, but the applied reductionism means to reduce food or narcotic plants to the chemical elements that they contain, and this can create problems.

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The industrialization of food: what do we know?

Wednesday, March 3rd, 2010

What would happen if we begin to consider food is less a thing and more a relationship? In nature, things have always been like this: eating meant in fact interacting whit species in the systems that we call food chains or tropic networks, which include everything up to the soils. Species co-evolved with the other species that eat them and very often, among them develops a relationship of interdependence: I’ll feed you, if you spread my genes.

Following an evolutionary process of mutual adaptation, the apple or the pumpkin turns into a nutritious and delicious food product for certain animals. Over time and through processes of trial and failure, the plant becomes tastier (and often more visible) to answer the needs and desires of the animal, and so that the animal can develop various digestive tools (eg, enzymes) needed to exploit the plant as good as possible.

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Thus, at first, the cow milk was not a nutritious product for people: in fact, it even harms them that until the people who lived around cows developed in adulthood the ability to digest milk. The gene responsible for producing lactase, the enzyme that make the digestion of milk possible, was disabled by humans shortly after medical ablation, but now five thousand years, people have suffered from a mutation where the gene which remains active throughout life, the mutation that quickly spread through a population of pastors in north-central Europe. Why? Because people which suffered this mutation have access to a new extreme nutritious food source and therefore they could multiply more easily than those who had not undergone the mutation that we are talking about. This adaptation was good for those who consume milk but also for cows that have multiplied and expanded their habitat (and have improved their health status) all because of this new symbiotic relationships.

woman-with-milk-glass

Among other things, health status is determined by the type of relationships within a food chain extreme varied relation in the human case which is an omnivorous. So, when a link from the food chain health is affected, this can be passed on to all other living creatures that make up that food chain. If the soil is sick or suffering from certain deficiencies so will be the gras growing on it and the cows grazing grass and the people who drink their milk. This is what Weston Price and Sir Howard was thinking when they were trying to establish a connection between these apparent distant spheres: soil and human health. We can not separate our own health from the entire health chain.

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Weston A. Price in the research of healthy food Part II

Friday, February 12th, 2010

Price didn’t found a singular ideal food, but met diverse population whose regime was based on fish and seafood, dairy, meat or fruit, vegetables and grains. The Masaya population from Africa consumed almost no plant, feeding meat, blood and milk. Sailors of the Hebrides did not consume milk at all; their diet was mostly based on fish, seafood and oat from which they were preparing porridge and cakes. Eskimos with whom he talked ate raw fish, hunted animals fish eggs, fat and rarely ate green plants. Along the Nile, near Ethiopia, Price met the healthiest population, according to their assessment: the tribes who ate milk, meat and blood from animals that were raised on pastures and animals from the Nile.

eskimo_fishing

Price found out that the groups that were eating flesh from wild animals were generally healthier than populations of farmers who were eating mainly cereals and other plants, the farmer populations, caries and teeth problems were more frequent (but compared to us this problems remained rare). Price noted that many of the encountered populations, consumed especially animal organs which were rich in fat soluble vitamins, minerals and “active X”, a term made up by him and probably designating vitamin K2.

Price also found out that almost all studied populations valued fish and seafood, that have been eaten even by highlander groups which were crossing the mountain for long distances to obtain them, buying from the tribes on the coast, dried fish eggs and other foods. But the common denominator of a sound health, as he was saying, is a food based on fresh foods of animal origin and plants grown in soils that are rich in nutrients.

Price examined with very much attention the relationship between the quality of the foods with an animal origin and the nourishment of these animals. Comparing the vitamin content of butter come from cows that were eating fresh grass, with the butter prepared from milk of animals fed with forage, Price found out that, besides the fact that the levels of vitamins A and D were significantly higher in the butter that was yellow from the animals which were grazing pastures, the people who ate the animals were much healthier. He was convinced that the key for health was the soil quality. In 1932 Price published a book entitled New Light on Some Relationships between Soil Mineral Deficiencies, Low Vitamin food, and some degenerative Diseases.

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By establishing these relationships between the quality of soil and the  of people which are on top of the food chain, Price promotes a critic against the industrialized agriculture that was just at the beginning in 1930. And was not alone: in the same period, Sir Albert Howard, an English agronomist, philosophical father of organic agriculture movement, he also claimed that the industrialization of the agriculture-especially the introduction of nitrogen synthetics as a fertilizer, which simplify the soil chemistry- will affect us eventually our health. Howard insists that “the health problems of soil, plants, animals and human must be treated together, being one and the same complex subject”. By the time as Howard’s note the above observations, they were merely a working assumption, Weston Price offered an empirical basis.

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Weston A. Price in the research of healthy food

Saturday, February 6th, 2010

One of the most active voices of the prewar period was Weston A. Price, a dentist of Canadian origin who leaned on one of those questions of common sense, which today can not even ask us. Now, like heart disease, chronic dental problems are a part of our lives.

But if you think about it, it is strange that everyone needs a dentist and that so many people need braces, channel interference, the wisdom tooth extraction and other routine procedures necessary to maintain modern oral hygiene. The need of many remedial interventions for just one body part that is involved in the feeding activity, activity that is essential for our survival, reflects a defect in our design, a kind of omission of the natural selection? It is unlikely.

people-smiling

But what did Price found out? First, he found out that populations that eat traditionally have no need for a dentist.(Well, almost: the teeth of the “strong highlanders” in Switzerland, which have never seen a toothbrush, were covered with a greenish-filing but Price found that, below this layer, the teeth were well formed and had no cavity). Whenever he discovered a primitive population that hasn’t yet contact with “alimentary substitutes of modern trade” - as refined flour, sugar, vegetable oil, canned or preserved food trough chemical ways- revealed very few or none signs of modern degeneration - like chronic diseases, dental caries and dental arches with malformations. These problems were caused either by a certain element of Western diet either a certain deficiency.

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Wherever Price went, he took pictures of the teeth of the populations that he met and took samples from their food and sends these to Cleveland for analysis so that he could determine the content of macro-nutrients and vitamins. He found out that the indigenous diets were much richer in vitamins A and D than the modern U.S. - in average about ten times higher. This was due in a large part to the fact that, as is it was noted in 1930, that by processing food, it loses nutrients, especially vitamins. Trade food are thought to be stored and transported over long distances and the only way that they can become more resilient and less vulnerable to pests is to remove some of the containing nutrients. In general, the calories are much easier to transport- in form of refined cereals or sugar-only nutrients that can alter or attract bacteria, insects and rodents, all extremely interested in these nutrients. (Even more than us, apparently.)

Price concluded that the modern civilization did sacrifice mostly the quality of the food in favor of the quantity and the length of the shelf-life.

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What is known, but is not told Part I

Saturday, January 30th, 2010

Eventually, even the largest, most ambitious and most cited study on nutrition and health like Nurses’ Health Study, Women’s Health Initiative and almost all the other, leave the main features of Western food unaffected: many food products and processed meats, many added sugars and fats, except fruit, vegetables and whole grains. According to the nutritionist paradigm and the limits of reductionist science, most researchers are playing with various nutrients individually analyzed, but the subjects with whom they are working are ordinary Americans which are behaving like any ordinary American:          tries to eat smaller amounts of X nutrient and greater quantities of the Y nutrient according to the latest points of view from the nutrition field. But the global nourishment pattern is regarded as a “but” more or less invariable. Therefore probably it should not surprise us the fact that the results of these researches are so modest, equivocal and confuse.

But what about the obvious truth which nobody wants to talk about and what is the food model called Western diet? In the middle of all the nutritional confusion which is getting bigger and bigger, maybe it would be useful to take one step back and fix our eyes on this model, to review all that we know about the Western nutrition and its effects on health. We know that populations that eat like us, Westerners, register much higher rates of cancer, cardiovascular disease, diabetes and obesity than those whit a traditionally diet. We also know that those who come to the Occident and behave and adopt our behavior food are quickly affected by these diseases and very often these diseases occur in an extremely virulent form, as happens in case of aboriginal and other indigenous peoples.

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The story so-called Western diseases and their links with Western diet starts in the first decades of the twentieth century. At that time, some brave doctors, Europeans and Americans, working with various indigenous populations around the world have started to notice the virtual absence of chronic disease among these individuals, diseases that in fact had become current in the West. Albert Schweitzer in Africa and Denis P. Burkitt, Robert McCarrison in India, Samuel Hutton among Eskimos of Labrador, anthropologist Ales Hrdlicka among Native Americans and dentist Weston A Price in the middle of 12 different groups from all around the world (among the Peruvian Indians, aborigines from Australia and highlander from Switzerland) are drawn, all similar reports.

Researchers have developed lists, most published in medical journals, whit diseases which haven’t  been discovered on  indigenous populations that have been treated or studied: very few cases or no cases of heart disease, diabetes, cancer, obesity, hypertension or heart attack: no case of appendicitis , diverticulitis, deformed dental arches or tooth decay, no case of varicose veins, ulcers or hemorrhoids.

Suddenly, the researchers began to look all these conditions in a new light, just as it is shown by the name of “Western diseases” proposed for the affections by the British doctor Denis Burkitt, who worked in Africa during the Second World War. The formula suggested that these different diseases were somehow related and that probably had a common cause.

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Be skeptical about nonconventional food

Tuesday, January 26th, 2010

Innovation is exciting, but when it comes to food, novelty should be approached with caution. If various types of diets or nourishments are the result of an evolutionary process, than this means that a culinary innovation is a kind of mutation: it could be a revolutionary breakthrough, but probably it is not. Abandoning the idea of pitched roofs was a great and interesting step for the modern architecture, but often trough horizontal roofs that replaced the pitched ones water could penetrate.girl-eating-tofu

Soy is an interesting case. Americans consume more than ever many soy products, especially because of the ingenuity of an industry whose purpose is to process and sell the immense amounts of so-called Western diseases- including obesity, diabetes, cardiovascular disease, hypertension and some types of cancer related to nourishment- which almost invariably begin to appear shortly after a population abandon their traditional diet and lifestyle. But what we did not know before O’Dea brought the aborigines in the Savanna (Her experiment was followed by a series of similar experiments that generated similar results achieved by Native Americans and indigenous subjects from Hawaii) is that some of the most harmful effects of Western diets are reversible in a very short time-interval. It seems that, at least to a certain extent, we can set back the change of diet and can eliminate some of the evil done. This has major implications for our health.

Kerin O’Dea’s experiment is remarkable in its simplicity and trough the refuse of the researcher to get lured and attracted into the scientific labyrinth of nourishment. She didn’t set her mind (before or after the experiment), to isolate a nutrient from all the food complexity, that could explain the results- no matter if the improved health condition of the group was because of the low-fat diets, lack of refined carbohydrates or reducing the total number calories. O’Dea was interested in ample food models even if this approach is limited (such a study does not tell us which element of the Western diet should be adjusted to temper the worst effects), it has the great accomplishment to avoid the chaos of conflicting theories regarding various individual nutrients and turn our attention again, on some fundamental issues on the relationship between diet and health. aboriginal_people_photo

For example: How much are we all aboriginal? If we think that two-thirds of Americans are overweight or obese, as one quarter of us suffer from metabolic syndrome, that 54 million of people have started to diabetes and the incidence of type 2 diabetes increases by 5% every year since 1990, Going up from 4% to 7.7% of the adult population (that means more than 20 million Americans), the question sounds not at all ridiculous

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Eat more in the French, Italian, Japanese, Indian or the Greek style

Monday, January 25th, 2010

Leaving aside the causes of confusion, populations that eat according to the rules of traditional food culture, are generally much healthier than populations that have adopted contemporary Western diet. This is valid for Japanese cuisine and for other Asian cuisines, as well as for traditional food from Mexico, India and the Mediterranean regions, including France Italy and Greece. Probably there are some exceptions to this rule-for example lets think about my ancestors Eastern European Jews nutrition.

But who knows? You may find that chicken fat and duck fat are much healthier than expected now at the present. (Weston Price would not be at all surprised) I tend to believe that all traditional nourishments are healthy, otherwise, nutrition and population in question would have disappeared long ago.italian_cooking_classes_reveal_local_traditions

Traditional nourishments have two dimensions- the consumed food and the way it is prepared- and it is possible that both can be equally important for our health. Let us talk first about the content of traditional food, regarding the form in the next section.

In some ways, traditional diets resemble other cultural autochthon creations, such as architecture. During a long process of trial and failure, cultures discover strategies that works- the best way to reconcile human needs with what nature can offer in a certain region.

Thus, as the inclination of a roof reflects the amount of rain or snow in that area, they are greater as a rainfall is more abundant, and the degree of seasoning in some kitchens reflects in another way the local climate. Spicy food helps people to face high temperature; also many spices have properties against germs, so essential in regions with a hot climate, where food can easily alter. According to research, the more the climate is warmer, the spicier are the local dishes.

Of course, traditional food concerns only health or biology, many of the culinary practices are arbitrary and possibly inappropriate, such as refined rice. Kitchens can have purely cultural functions, which is one of the ways by which a society expresses its identity and shows their differences in relation to other societies. (For example kashrus is a set of Jewish dietary laws that fulfill these functions for Jews respectively for Islam)

This would explain why traditional kitchens refuse changes; it is said that in an immigrant household, the last place you’ll find signs of assimilation is the storehouse. But as shown by food psychologist Paul Rozin, “aromatic principles” of a sustainable kitchen- Whether it is lemon and olive oil in Mediterranean, soy sauce and ginger in Asia or even the ketchup in America- allow that culture to assimilate new and useful food easier, which we might think they taste so completely foreign.latin_family_eating_dinner1

Yet, the act of eating is more than other cultural practices, deeply linked to nature-on one hand it is linked to the human biology, and on the other to the natural world. The specific food combinations of a certain kitchen and the food preparation methods are a source of knowledge stored in terms of diet, health and region. Many traditional culinary practices are the product of a biocultural evolution so the modern science is trying to decode its ingenuity.

In Latin America, corn is traditionally consumed in combination with beans; each of the two plants has a deficiency of a specific type of essential amino acid that is plenty contained in the other one; therefore, consumed together, corn and beans make up a balanced and no meat Menu. Also, in countries from Latin America, corn is milled or macerated with limestone to achieve to contain vitamin B, without which people will get sick of pellagra.

Often when a society adopted a new food, but without adopting the afferent culinary culture, as happened when the maize was brought to Europe, Africa and Asia, people got sick. The context in which a particular food is consumed can be as important as the food itself.

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