In Defense of Food

By Michael Pollan

This is an extensively researched homage to eating for better health. I was left with many conflicting thoughts about it. First off, if you're reading a book that touts: Eat Food (real, not processed industrial food) Mostly Plants (organic or grown yourself in healthy soil) Not to Much, than you are already concerned about your health and/or interested in how food affects your well being. You probably can relate to the concerns the author has. I know I fit this bill.

Michel Pollan tells us how once scientists isolated proteins, carbohydrates, and fats they could advise people what to eat based of scientific principles. And so we began to look at food as it's chemical parts instead of as a whole. Pollan calls this nutritionism. Food is not just protein, carbohydrate, fat. But scientists can only measure what they know to look for. So diets were still lacking in something and people got sick. Vitamins were then found. Next it was that there were different types of fats, or that you need fiber or... Well you only have to look at the food aisle in your local market and look at the claims on the outside of the packages to see what the current nutritionism fad is these days. The more the scientists can measure the more (parts of food) they can tell you you need to eat.

Pollan takes us to the supermarket where he suggest that we eat at the perimeter of the store. But even with that are we eating real food? If the meat is raised in a feed lot, given hormones and antibiotics is it not a processed food? Hasn't milk and yogurt been adulterated with chemicals? (including added nutrients) Fruits/vegetables are picked green and ripened artificially; grown in soil with chemical fertilizers that lack the nuanced interaction between soil bacteria/fungi that may create micronutrients (we can't currently measure) thereby deoptimizing our health?

Feel overwhelmed yet? Not to fear. Micheal Pollan does give suggestions to eat healthier. In fact the 3rd part of the book is dedicated to this. He doesn't tell you what to eat but what to look for in the foods you do eat. I'll let you read his suggestions yourself. They all expand on the covers 3 suggestions: Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.

I think that he makes a good argument that most of us eat a fairly narrow range of foods (probably exacerbated by the narrow range of commercially grown crop species) and we would be healthier if we broadened our appetites. But I don't think everything that he proposes is realistic. Maybe I'm to close minded. Your climate might not allow you to grow your own food year round. Why do people dry/can/salt their food? So they can live through the winter. Are we not better off transporting food across the world so you can eat fresh (a loaded word, I know) food year round?

As for his claims that our great-great-great grandparents had a healthier diet, less cancer/heart disease? I would argue that just because they didn't know about nutrients and ate whole foods, they also didn't have/know about the medical care/advances we have now. Pollan talks about how maybe if we ate better food then there wouldn't be the need for all of the drugs and procedures to keep everyone alive but I think that misses the point. Life expectancies have increased (I know they may be dropping in the U.S. for certain populations currently) and while keeping people alive longer doesn't mean they are healthier, vaccines and plentiful food year round have made the early years safer and increased the quality of life for many.

Pollan also talks about a dentist, Weston A. Price, who in the early 20th century went to find non-industrial living populations around the world to see if they had better teeth health, less decay, formation problems, etc. He discovered that many of these groups had little decay and well formed teeth, even after finding one Swiss group whose teeth had never seen a toothbrush and were covered in green slime! But since the early 1900's we have done a lot with our dental care that has mitigated the effects of a high sugar/refined carbohydrate diet. I asked my dentist about this; if he saw more problems today than when he started 2 or 3 decades ago. He said just the opposite. Teeth are very health today. He told me about going to South America to treat isolated populations. On the older men and women that he saw he often couldn't determine if they had healthy teeth or not as their teeth had been worn down to their gums! Read another view on Weston Price here.

I think that Michael Pollan makes some interesting observations and arguments for eating less food produced by the industrial food machine. The fact that he's gotten me thinking about the subject will hopefully mean that I will start to make better food choices. And that probably was his goal.