In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto

Even though I had read Michael Pollan's lead-up article to this book in the New Yorker and his other books, I found this one a page turner--fun to read and truly informative.

Already oft-quoted, the first words of the book summarize his extensive research and beliefs about food: "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants." In other words, don't eat anything that has not traditionally been called food (recognizable by our grandmothers as food), which cuts out most processed concoctions in fast-food chains and much on grocery store shelves.

Eat plants because we need the complex interactions of the nutrients they contain. Pollan points out that there's no way to figure out which traces of what affect the whole nutritional value of what we need to eat. Singling out one vitamin, for example, and taking supplements of it is far, far inferior and may be quite deleterious to our health because we miss out on all the other interactions among minterals and vitamins in our food that we need to be healthy. Bottom-line: we just don't know enough yet so don't mess with the foods that have kept people healthy for centuries. I recognize this argument as one put forth by the scientists involved in the Washington Heights-Inwood-Columbia Aging project. After analyzing the diets of the participants, they concluded that those who had consumed a "Mediterranean Diet" (another way of saying "eat plants") had a dramatically lower risk of Alzheimer's. They hypothesized that one reason was because of the complex interactions of the many, many trace nutrients in plants

We've all been through the butter-margarine as engineered butter debate from the 50s on. And we finally now know that margarine is terrible for us, butter not so much (if we use it with a very light hand). There are many other examples of this kind of food engineering that moves beyond not making sense into really bad stuff.

I never really understood the arguments against genetically modified food until I read this book. I now realize that going for the most calories per acre cuts out the zillion varieties of fruits and vegetables that we have enjoyed--and all the complex mixture of nutients in that vast array. I now shop frequently at my local Farmers' Market and I have enjoyed the aesthetics and the taste of more variety. For example, have you seen those red and green cauliflowers sitting beside the omnipresent white ones? The green ones look like space helmets or part of an animation project. I'm discovering new tastes and new recipes and enjoying myself immensely in the process.

The "not too much" food is especially relevant to Americans who have a huge love of quantity. It's high time we copied the French on this one: quality trumps quantity every time.

I hope this book stays on the bestseller list forever. We all need to be aware of what we've done to our food supply and take steps to make meaningful and lasting changes.

Unhappy Meals from Michael Pollan

Everyone should read "Unhappy Meals" by Michael Pollan in today's NY Times Magazine. As Pollan summarizes in the very first line, "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants." Debunking the various "nutritionist" food fads that have appeared over the last 20+ years and including the high-carb, low-fat diets, the no-fat diet, the additive craze to highly processed foods, and the fiber and low-cholesterol approaches, Pollan makes an excellent argument for just food. He reiterates his earlier advice: if there are more than five ingredients, don't buy it. Also don't buy it if there are things in it you've never heard of or can't pronounce.

Pollan makes the case persuasively that we've been held hostage by the "you can eat more if..." crowd. The low-fat, high-carb craze made this country significantly more obese through the 80s and 90s, which then gave rise to the opposite extreme of high-protein and high-fat Atkins diets, no panacea either.

We should just be eating less. Look at all the studies that show that calorie restriction makes us live longer and reduces the probabilities of many diseases, including cancer. We should be eating more leaves and less seeds (grains), Pollan states. We should avoid additives like corn syrup and stick with the real thing: corn kernels. And we should use meat as a condiment to enhance all the vegetables we're consuming.

Pollan states that we know very little about nutrition. And the way we analyze it doesn't really work since we have to isolate vitamins, for example, instead of figuring out how they work together in our bodies for better health. It's an ensemble cast and solo analysis doesn't get us much. In fact, it's led us down the wrong paths time after time (oat bran in the 80s, for example, and margarine as a healthy alternative to butter).

To add insult to injury, medicine reactively deals with the problems of our new approach to eating with more and more palliatives for diabetes, heart disease, and cancer instead of educating folks about diet as a way to prevent these chronic and horrible diseases.

The first time I really thought about meat as a condiment and the dangers of processed food was in the early 80s when I started reading Jane Brody's columns in the NY Times. And then in 1985, I bought her cookbook, Good Food, and I read the entire, huge intro, which discusses all of these topics and more. But the best part are the recipes. I still use my now-tattered copy of Good Food. I love the recipes because they taste good. She never sacrificed taste for any fad but still paid attention to whole grains, low and unsaturated fat, and produced a vast variety of recipes, using an enormous spectrum of foods, mostly vegetables and whole grains. I probably have Ms. Brody to thank for my interest in food and nutrition as a path to wellness (and therefore prevention), my interest in organic foods (because of the additives in the growing process), and just plain good cooking and eating (although I'll admit to being enthusiastic about this part my whole life).