Their are many problems with this idea. First, from a governmental perspective, this is just outright wrong to have the government deciding what you can and cannot eat. Fast forward 20-30 years when socialized medicine is fully entrenched. What is to stop the government from not only taxing, but even banning foods it does not want you to eat. If they have to pay the medical bill to fix you, then they’ll definitely want to have a say as to what goes into your body. The outworkings of this are astonishing. But, this is a food site, and I digress.

The big food issue I saw here and wanted to highlight is the mentality that calories are bad, and less is better. Diet soda, in the government’s eyes, are OK to drink, but the ones with sugar are not. The only thing they are basing this on is numbers of calories. But, if you’re a regular reader of this site, you already know that calories aren’t the enemy. Our bodies need energy to live and to grow. The real problem is the foods (or should I say, food-like-substances) we put in our bodies.

So, when we look at a diet soda, and hear the government tell us that we should drink them instead of a can of full-sugar soda, we need to realize that the two choices really are like saying, “get cancer but don’t be fat.”  Both choices mimic real nutrition and the need that all humans have to seek out and consume calories.  However, neither is a healthy food, and both will cause long term damage. You’re just picking between two poisons.

The full-sugar can of soda does indeed have a super-abundance of processed sweetness. But the can of diet soda has an equal amount of chemicals that resembles sweetness. Your body really doesn’t want either of these things. We just need to realize that just because we abandon the white sugar in the soda, doesn’t mean the chemical substitutes that get put in are any better. They’ll just cause a different disease.

So, my encouragement is that when you finally get the conviction that white sugar is bad, don’t jump off the other cliff and start pouring the diet chemicals into your body. And likewise, whatever the government tells you about food…you can pretty much ignore.

Pollan writes, “A hallmark of the Western diet is food that is fast, cheap, and easy. Americans spend less than 10 percent of their income on food; they also spend less than a half hour a day preparing meals and a little more than an hour enjoying them.”

In the previous two sections, Pollan has described what is wrong with our eating in America, and now he makes the case on how to fix it. His solution, which adorns the cover of the book, is to “Eat Food, Mostly Plants, Not Too Much”.

Eat Food

Here, he brings up the point that most of what is sold today is really just foodlike products. After giving several examples of foods products that his great-grandmother wouldn’t recognize, he adds, “Don’t eat anything incapable of rotting.” Does a Twinkie or McDonalds french fry ring a bell? He also recommends avoiding food products which contain ingredients that are:

• unfamiliar
• unpronounceable
• more than 5 in number
• include high-fructose corn syrup

Next, he advises us to:

• avoid food products that make health claims
• shop the peripheries of the supermarket and stay out of the middle
• get out of the supermarket whenever possible

He offers excellent recommendations on how to actually put real food on your plate, as opposed to what the food industry has been pushing to us.

Mostly Plants

Here, Pollan makes the case we need to be eating more of the green stuff.  He rightly advocates eating more veggies, but his logic on meat is a bit flawed.  He does point out that industrial meat is no longer a whole food; so even a typical steak is still not ideal.  However, he doesn’t advocate eating goodly portions of pasture raised beef, for example.  Previously he had mentioned that there are almost no noticeable health problems in cultures which eat predominantly meat, as long as they avoid the Western diet.  On a positive note, though, he does say that if you do eat meat, you should eat meat that ate veggies (pasture raised beef, chicken, etc.).

Not Too Much

He notes that other cultures are often envied by Americans for their good physique while still eating high fat foods and other foods that nutritionists would not approve of.  So why can’t we eat like them?  His answer is that we eat much larger portions in much less time.  Instead of piling our plates full and scarfing the food down in under 20 minutes, we should focus on quality.

Additionally, with the preparation and cleanup times reduced due to modern techniques, we tend to eat more.  In 1999, 83% of people had microwaves, up from less than 10% in 1980.

Finally, he points out that meals are down while snacks are up.  All of these things are exactly what these other cultures do NOT do.  So how do we fix the problem?  He suggests:

• Do all your eating at a table
• Don’t get your fuel from the same place your car does
• Try not to eat alone
• Consult your gut
• Eat slowly
• Cook and, if you can, plant a garden

Summary

Overall, Pollan has accurately assessed the food problem in America today.  His suggestions are, for the most part, right on.  We would definitely advocate eating good, high quality, pasture-raised meats, but apart from that, we would recommend most of his other advice.  For a good primer on fixing your diet, this would be a good book to read.

In Defense of Food

Pollan’s premise here is that most of our health problems in society can be traced to how (and what) we are eating.  If we’d just fix the food, then our health and most diseases would go away on their own.  The previous section debunked the myth that “Nutritionism” could fix the food, and showed that it does, in fact, cause diseases to be more prevalent.  But do we really have a problem is the question?

Pollan begins by giving us a wonderful example highlighting that yes, we do in fact have a problem.  He describes an experiment done on some Australian aborigines who have been living in the city for quite some time.  In the experiment, all of them move from the city back to the bush country, and remarkably, their health began to improve…dramatically.  Junk science you might wonder?  Well, not really.

He spends the bulk of his second chapter bringing to light some of the research done by men like Weston A. Price and others.  Price, a dentist in search of the truth behind what was causing tooth problems, traveled the world and found that native populations which were not exposed to a Western diet also lacked one important thing…Western diseases.  Not only tooth decay, but cancer, heart disease, diabetes, and a host of other diseases were notably absent from these cultures which refrained from the refined foods of the West.  So why wasn’t he readily believed and accepted?  The answer was two-fold.

First, at the time of Weston A. Price, in the 1930′s, it was understood that “the processing of foods typically robs them of nutrients, vitamins especially.  Store food is food designed to be stored and transported over long distances, and the surest way to make food more stable and less vulnerable to pests is to remove the nutrients from it.  In general, calories are much easier to transport – in the form of refined grain or sugar – than nutrients, which are liable to deteriorate or attract the attention of bacteria, insects, and rodents, all keenly interested in nutrients.”  Price concluded that the key to good health was eating “a traditional diet consisting of fresh foods from animals and plants grown on soils that were themselves rich in nutrients.”  Those two ideas did not mix well together.

Second, with the industrialized society taking over (the WWII era), no one wanted to hear that they needed to eat locally grown, non-preserved foods.  The people wanted bigger, more industrialized cities, not more rural.  So, the nutritionists won out, and the supermarkets with the centrally located food were now entrenched.

In his third and final chapter for this section, Pollan again turns very evolutionistic.  Even though he does not credit God for designing food the way it is, he still accurately observes that foods do have unique traits that make them want to be eaten (smell, color, taste, etc.)  These unique traits often occur when the foods are ripe and ready to be eaten.  Amazingly, this also coincides to when the seeds are ready to be transported to the soil.  So what have we done in the West?  We’ve tricked our senses by adding artificial colors, artificial sweeteners, and the like.  Ironically, he concedes that humans may evolve and eventually be able to handle our refined Western diet.  So, as an evolutionist, I am not sure why Pollan is really making his argument that we need to fix our diet.  If we really will evolve into “superhumans” as he supposes, then we should keep eating what we are eating and hope for the best.

His point for the section, though, is that good foods look, smell, and taste good.  They grow that way naturally.  It is only when we break foods down and then try to reassemble them that we get into trouble.   A good example of this is how we mill flour today.  The old-fashioned way kept all the parts (and nutrients) together as the grain was ground by stone.  The modern milling process removes the nutrients and gives us white flour.  We then must go back and add B vitamins and folic acid.  We break it down and “try” to reassemble it.  Short term, we solve the nutrient deficiency, but long term, we’re still missing some things.  ”A whole food might be more than the sum of its nutrient parts.”    

The next issues he tackles are food diversity and quality.  Today, four crops account for 3/4 of our calories: corn, soy, wheat, and rice.  As omnivores, we no longer consume a wide variety of foods.  Now, combine this with the fact that the foods we are growing have less nutritional value in them due to the poor soils we’re maintaining.  ”We’ve been breeding crops for yield, not nutritional quality.”  We’ve swapped quality for quantity.

Finally, Pollan spends a good deal of time discussing omega-6 and omega-3 fatty acids.  The key, he believes, is the ratio more than the quantity, and in America, we’re at over 3 times the traditional ratio.  The omega-6 fatty acids are primarily found in seeds (i.e. – grains) while the omega-3 fatty acids are primarily in the leafy portions of the plant.  And this ecological shift is the underlying problem of our food woes.

So, overall, Pollan does a remarkable job bringing to light the problems in the diet we all (or most of us) are accustomed to.  Before we can fix the problem, we have to know that there is, indeed, a problem.  Though not a scientific treatise, it combines enough detailed information in the form of a light, quick read.  It has been enjoyable, and I highly recommend it (thus far).  Stay tuned for the next article, “Getting Over Nutritionism”, which will cover how we go about fixing the problem that Nutrition-ism has not only caused, but also has failed to fix.

In Defense of Food

Michael Pollan divides the book into three sections; the first of which is: “The Age of Nutritionism.”

The basic premise is that nutrition-ism rules in America, not nutrition. Scientists are taking good things, like omega-3 fatty acids (fish fat), and putting them in things never designed for them to be in (like hot dogs and hamburgers). They’re taking bad things (like saturated fats) out.  The goal is food with nothing but good things…and to have at least 200% of all the daily recommended values of those good things…all in a convenient wrapper…oh yeah, and it won’t spoil…ever.  How (and why) does this happen? Well, it all started with a little margarine.

Margarine came on the scene as a cheap alternative to butter, but the manufacturers realized that they could market it, with a little tinkering, as better than butter. The bad things could be removed and good things could be added…the best of both worlds, right? The problem was, legally they had to label it as “imitation”, and that didn’t sound all that good. No one wants to be the imitation food.  They want to be the “better than real” food. These food processors eventually helped rewrite the rules to allow for foods with “equivalent nutritional value” to be labeled the same as their real counterparts. People were being duped with the line that if it all has the same (or better/more) nutrients, then it must be as good (or better). Scientists were believed to be able to engineer better foods for us, completely disregarding the fact that God designed foods the way He did for a reason.

So, back to the fish fat in your hot dogs…if omega-3 fatty acids are good for you in fish, they must also be good for you in hot dogs, right?  We’ll, that’s where things are headed.  Go take a look at the breakfast cereal aisle.  Based on the nutritionists’ logic, it won’t be long before the antioxidants in chocolate bars are touted as the new health craze.

Next, Pollan attacks the myth that low fat equates to good health. It is (or should be) intuitive that the premise does not hold true. Look at the number of heart attacks in America. Look at the waistlines of Americans. Look at the number of people now on cholesterol medication.  The numbers aren’t going down. So why don’t the propagators of this lie just admit they are wrong? Most likely because, “we’ll come to the unavoidable conclusion that the emperors of nutrition have no clothes and never listen to them again.”  And who is the emperor?  That would be the government food agencies out there trying to save us from ourselves.

So, the government keeps the lie going. Just recently, “the FDA has just signed off on a new health claim for Frito-Lay chips on the grounds that eating chips fried in polyunsaturated fats can help you reduce your consumption of saturated fats, thereby conferring blessings on your cardiovascular system.”  Wow.

Because of the propaganda machine, people now think of fat as a toxin as opposed to an essential nutrient. All of these lies is based on bad science. Nutritionism isolates nutrients from the context of food, food from the context of diet, and the diet from the context of lifestyle.  They are all interrelated, so pulling them apart gives false results and conclusions.  For example, beta-carotene in plants is very good, but as a supplement, it has been suggested that it actually increases the risk of certain cancers.  The foods we eat are amazingly complex and we fool ourselves if we ever think we can get to the bottom of it.  Foods we eat with each other also affect things.

Though not a godly man, and most definitely an evolutionist, Pollan still brings to light many of the flaws in the way we view food today.  It is unfortunate that he does not give credit to The Creator for the marvelous way God has designed all of His food.  The complexity of even a carrot should cause us to stand back and marvel.  God didn’t design us to get the nutrients apart from the food.  In fact, God did not design us to eat the food apart from the enjoyment of the food.  We may spend another thousand years dissecting a carrot, but I still don’t think we’ll ever create something so perfect.

Stay tuned for the review of Part 2, “The Western Diet and the Diseases of Civilization.”

In Defense of Food

Food.  There’s plenty of it around, and we all love to eat it.  So why should anyone need to defend it?  Because most of what we’re consuming today is not food, and how we’re consuming it – in the car, in front of the TV, and increasingly alone – is not really eating.

Expect a full review shortly.