Michael Pollan's In Defense of Food - An Eater's Manifesto is the author's follow-up work to The Omnivore's Dilemma. If you read The Omnivore's Dilemma you might have been left with questions like I was, namely, "OK now I know all this about food what should I eat?" A lot of people asked the author the same question and his answer was this book, In Defense of Food. The Omnivore's Dilemma was reviewed here earlier this year and you can read the reviews here: Part I and Part II.
The author starts off with the bold statement that most of what we Westerner's are consuming isn't actually food. Starting with the refining of flour in the 1870's, we've moved as a society from eating foods to eating nutrients. Foods have been broken down into their nutrient components, and nutritionism at its heart ascribes to the tenant that foods are the sum of their nutrient parts; and some nutrients are good for us and others are bad. Pollan questions the validity of this position as dietary guidelines are framed in terms of nutrients and we are eating according to these guidelines, but we're getting fatter and sicker. We're told to eat less of the bad nutrients but more of good nutrients, and we do! But we're eating more than we are giving up, and according to Pollan, "a whole lot more, at least 300 more calories a day than we consumed in 1985."
In the second part of his book Pollan takes a hard look at the Western diet and questions the idea that dietary fat leads to chronic illness. In the 1970s when saturated fats were pointed to as the primary evil behind heart disease, Americans shifted the balance in their diets from fats to carbohydrates. But, while fat as a percentage of total calories declined, we never cut down on our total consumption of fat, we just ate more of other things. This led to an increase in the incidence of both obesity and diabetes in America. Two-thirds of Americans are overweight and a third of us are on the road to type 2 diabetes.
Nutritionism supports a convergence of interests among manufacturers of processed foods, marketers and nutritional scientists. Nutritionism gives food scientists a job, it allows manufacturers to ever further refine their products to include the latest in fashion nutrient (just look at Omega-3 fatty acid, it's everywhere!) and it allows marketers to then slap health claims on just about everything (Is that sugary cereal REALLY 'heart healthy?'). According to Pollan, a staggering thirty-two billion dollars a year is spent advertising the various "food" products that line the grocery store shelves. It's no wonder we don't know what to eat or how to eat it!
So again, what should we eat and how should we eat it? Pollan's answer is: Eat Food, Not Too Much, Mostly Plants. And he has a few tips on how to do so. I won't list them all here, but give you a few of the choice ones that resonated with me.
- Avoid products containing ingredients that are A) Unfamiliar, B) Unpronounceable, C) More than 5 in number or that include D) High-Fructose Corn Syrup.
- Avoid products that make health claims
- You are what you eat eats too
- Eat well grown foods from healthy soils
- Don't get your fuel from the same place your car does
- Eat meals, at a table, with other people
I really enjoyed this book. I found it a well researched and thoughtful follow-up to The Omnivore's Dilemma. It provided an in depth analysis of what Pollan sees as wrong with our current Western diet. It gives many tips on how to alter this diet, some easy, some of medium difficulty and some very difficult, but all ultimately achievable. Even if you can adopt a just few of these lifestyle changes, which I am trying to do, it will take you off the path of poor health that the Western diet has set us on.
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