Spurious Precision in the Dietary Realm

From our recent correspondence:

Yes, I am  dieting the good diet, and now I’m exercising the good exercise by using my Wii Fit Plus again (lapsed time: nearly 1 year).  But “come back in three months” from the doctor puts a time limit on the superb pleasure of just winging it, especially when (dietetically, at least) I was already doing well on a careful vegetarian diet with not too much sodium.  That makes it both the good and the bad news: the ‘well’ that I was doing, or anything like it, turns out to be not good enough — until it can be made to do so, with more stringent efforts; and we get to find out only at the end of the three months, and only if we put our quadriceps into it as well as our molars.

One of the things I like least about tracking those individual nutrients in grams and milligrams is the spurious precision of the results.  If the testers’ particular piece of kiwi — 1 medium —  fruit weighs 56.7g and is measured to contain 1.7 g of protein and 0.8 mg of fat and 2.3 g of fiber,  then that’s the value put in in the database.  When you track your foods by recording that you’ve eaten 1 kiwi fruit, those amounts — the standard amounts; the diet tracker is at heart a database-accessing tool, although the one I have does lots more than that — are what show up in your tracking list, to be added to others by the end of the day.

Unfortunately, there’s no way to tell whether the kiwi fruit you ate, even one judged to be 1 medium by size and weight description, weighs exactly the same amount as theirs.  Even if you are fanatical enough to weigh accurately in grams each item of food you eat before you prepare it, and calculate the exact differential in values from that ideal (I’m not willing to go that far; and I’d like a life outside the kitchen, thanks), even then you couldn’t be 100% sure of the accuracy, since fruits and all foods vary slightly in their makeup, while conforming to a general standard which makes them ‘them.’

So all those decimal places (there are often two or three of them in evidence, especially for scarcer nutrients) may be as accurate as possible for that one piece of originally weighed and measured fruit (no one’s disputing that) but, when you add up everything you eat all day long, all those decimals with their aggregate rounding off (nothing in life is ever really exact, least of all measurements of nutritional components; once you get past “1 kiwi fruit” it comes down to the degree of precision you choose and where you decide to round off) introduces a spurious precision into your totals.  People differ one to the other, and so do kiwi fruit or anything else you eat.  And, larger, smaller, how finely chopped or sliced, slightly more or slightly less in an individual piece plus your serving, cooking or preparation method, and more, all enter into the variation from the ideal that is represented in the database.

On the other hand, calling it ‘one fruit’ and leaving it at that for the day is not only more accurate (it actually matches 1-1) but more precise.  At the end of the day, I can’t trust that I’ve actually eaten (say) 1237.8 calories.  I’ve eaten probably something close to 1200, and probably a little over, but a diet in which I count servings of fruit, vegetables, grains and bread, protein foods, dairy foods, etc. is much more accurate and an awful lot easier to track and tally, once you get used to the sizes of servings in each group.  How do I know how I’m doing? By eating the ‘spread’ of food servings called for by my diet in each group.  So counting by servings and types of food seemed more sensible, lots easier,  and less spuriously precise than counting grams, mg., etc.

Or it was, until it became important to me to track sodium, since I don’t know the sodium content of most foods, and certainly not (without reading the labels, but that only gets you so far) of made foods.  I recently pulled a loaf of otherwise praiseworthy whole wheat bread (store-bought) from my freezer.  Only after I ate a sandwich and went to record it   (I wasn’t at the store trying to read labels, I grabbed it from my own freezer, which holds a lot of ‘prior’ foods) that I learned how much sodium was in each slice.  Way more than I wanted, I’ll tell you that.  I may have to go back to making my own bread. I use a lot less salt — and it’s a lot more work.

I guess that’s the other side of things: planning, cooking, eating, attendant cleanup, recording what I eat, buying more food, etc. can take up a huge amount of my life.  I don’t want to spend my life doing ONLY this.  I keep telling myself part of the difficulty is that I’m new to this particular effort (true) and that when I once get past the initial stage I’ll find it easier (a core repertoire of known recipes and meals, a familiar shopping basket of foods, etc.) and I’ll be able to spend less time at it.  But each aspect of the diet, at least the one I’m concocting for myself with the help of reliable nutritional information from trusted sources including about the DASH diet, and books from Harvard: this, and that), opens a vista of new ramifications of kitchen activities, at least so far, and doesn’t seem to close off or shorten any old ones.  There’s even a DASH diet online program (fee required).  Depending how my own Herculanean efforts pan out, I may try that.

For instance, I ordered varous grains, beans and seeds from a good seller, Bob’s Red Mill in Oregon.  The foods came, just as good and as well-packaged as I had hoped.  But then I found I needed a more permanent storage medium that I could open and close and reseal and stand up on my shelf, so I ordered a dozen quart-sized Mason jars.  Again, these came in fine shape.  I spent several hours in the kitchen filling jars and labelling them (we neophytes have to learn the visual differences between amaranth and quinoa, hence labels taped on the front and recipes, cooking instructions, and nutritional info taped to the back, “front” and “back” of a mason jar being arbitrarily assigned by moi).

Now I have to plunge into a forest of recipes and cookbooks — one of my favorites already in hand, and the ‘net being only one source of many — that use these grains and legumes, so that I can enjoy the many and varied nutritional benefits they contain, in delicious, flavorful dishes.  Thus, yet more vistas of action and research, and buying the other ingredients (non-grain and non-legume) called for by the recipes, once I locate the recipes I want to try.  Where the foodstuff hits the plate, that’s where I live, in the great state of spurious precision.

I’m eating well so I can have strength and health to live well to eat well so that… at least it seems so right now.  I won’t even mention the old foodstuffs tagline about how this too shall pass.

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