| Title | : | In Defense of Food: An Eaters Manifesto |
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | |
| ISBN | : | 1594201455 |
| ISBN-10 | : | 9781594201455 |
| Language | : | English |
| Format Type | : | Hardcover |
| Number of Pages | : | 205 |
| Publication | : | First published January 1, 2008 |
In Defense of Food: An Eaters Manifesto Reviews
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Actually, there is enough good material in this book that it probably warrants another star or two. But I was so alarmed at the amount of misinformation here that one star is the best I can do.
Michael Pollan is right about some of the big stuff. Nutrition research is badly flawed. It has sometimes led us down the wrong road (although it has also provided life-saving findings). The government is far too slow to change its recommendations and has strong ties (to put it mildly) to the food industry. The same can be said of my own nutrition profession.
And obviously he is right that we should choose more whole foods and engage in practices that help us appreciate food—a useful perspective even if it isn’t a particularly cutting edge one.
But for the most part, Pollan’s reasoning about nutrition and research was pretty unsophisticated and uninformed. He carefully describes all of the reasons why nutrition research is flawed, and then employs some of the worst examples of research (animal studies and completely uncontrolled observational approaches) to support his own arguments. He quotes "nutrition professionals" whose credentials and opinions are questionable at best. Almost without exception, his observations on nutrition are wrong—sometimes subtly so, sometimes overtly so, and sometimes in ways that are actually dangerous.
Pollan defends his right to provide nutrition advice because he speaks on the authority of “tradition and common sense.” But, tradition and common sense will get you about 90% of the way to a healthy diet. The other 10% can have unfortunate and Pollan really has no sense of this.
The last part of the book has recommendations about how to eat and shop. “Shop the perimeter of the grocery store” is exactly the advice that was popular among nutritionists when I started in this field 30 years ago. It’s just as wrong now as it was then. Why would you shop the perimeter of the store if you are supposed to be eating mostly plant foods? Far better to shop the produce corner and then head to the interior for grains, beans, condiments, and spices.
Pollan doesn’t want us to eat anything with more than 5 ingredients on the label. So no prepared spaghetti sauce, salsa, fortified soymilk, or curry paste, all of which are perfectly healthful foods that play a central role in my diet.
Of course, I understand the spirit behind this and all of his recommendations—-he wants us to slow down, cook more from scratch, use more whole-food ingredients, fewer manufactured foods. He’s a big fan of the Slow Food Association, for whom he is a frequent speaker and which he admits can sometimes sound like an elitist club for foodies (I'm thinking this has something to do with the fact that it is an elitist club for foodies as a quick peek at their website shows). Slowing down to cook and eat and enjoy food are good things, but there has to be room for a little bit of compromise and a sense of reality. There is nothing wrong with eating pasta sauce from a jar or frozen vegetables or—-my favorite convenience food and I’ll defend it to my death—-butternut squash soup from a box. It’s the way many busy responsible people cook and it’s a perfectly healthful and acceptable way to eat.
I was disappointed that his entire discussion of the ethics of food choices fit into one single parenthetical sentence plus a footnote. This from the man who wrote The Omnivore’s Dilemma and who debated ethics with Peter Singer (and lost the debate). I realize this isn’t what this book is about, but Pollan knows, far better than most people, the true cost-- in terms of animal suffering and environmental destruction-- of animal food production. When he talks about how to eat, he is obligated to speak to that issue at least a little bit.
Pollan’s opening mantra—-eat food, not too much, mostly plants—-is good advice. There are other snippets of good advice in this book. For me, it was all greatly overwhelmed by faulty and uninformed reasoning , the unnecessarily restrictive requirements for food choices, and the great amount of misinformation.
All in all, a disappointing book. At least it was short (a little shorter than my review, I think! ) -
In the Buddhist tradition there is a level of hell whereby the dead, known as hungry ghosts, are trapped with enormous stomachs and tiny throats unable to swallow anything but the smallest bites of food. Their particular brand of torture is that they are always eating and yet their hunger is never satisfied. These hungry ghosts sound an awful lot like the modern American eater trapped in the unhealthy western diet demonized in Michael Pollan’s In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto.
You may be surprised that anyone felt they needed to defend food, since we all rely on it to survive. But Pollan makes a clear distinction between the processed food-like substances that fill our grocery aisles in glistening packages and real foods like fruits, vegetables, whole grains and unprocessed, natural foods. Pollan argues that we eat way too much of the fake stuff, ignoring the foods that our bodies actually need. Like the hungry ghosts, we just never feel satisfied. At a clipping pace, Pollan examines both the field of nutritional science and the industrialization of food to show the reader just how we got to our particular brand of hell. Then, thankfully, he offers us a way out.
Instead of being hungry ghosts, Pollan tells us we can practice thoughtful consumption. He argues that the onslaught of nutritional science has taken the expertise out of the kitchen and into the laboratory, and too often isolates nutritional elements from the whole food that bore it. Any of us who keep up on nutritional trends will be shaking our heads when he discusses the familiar irritation of being told this week to eat one thing and avoid another, only to be told later that we had it right the first time. Instead of offering us a new trend in dieting, his solutions are both revolutionary and literally as old as time. “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.” Pollan argues we should eat like our ancestors, before diabetes and heart disease reigned supreme and before high fructose corn syrup became more popular to the American consumer than television. Despite the dire evidence he presents in the book, his voice remains jocular and never dips into pessimism, though I did as a reader once or twice.
Even if you are not a health nut, Pollan makes a good argument for adopting his method of eating. The benefit of this thoughtful consumption is more than nutritional. The eater will be practicing a lifestyle of environmental stewardship, optimal health, and respect for the time required to grow and prepare the food necessary for life.
The book, addictive as those processed foods Pollan does such a powerful job of damning, is difficult to put down, in part because you don’t want to stop to eat anything until you know what you are supposed to eat after all. The only caveat is that In Defense of Food offers so little compromise between the western lifestyle and the lifestyle Pollan requires the eater to adopt, which just may be the reality of the current food paradigm. Maybe eating well is a revolutionary act in these times of microwavable meals and fast food paragons. When you buy food it is no longer a given that it is real food, and you may have to be willing to make some major changes in your lifestyle to get the real food back onto your table and into your stomach. -
Michael Pollan - image from his siteOne of the more pernicious aspects of nutritionism is that it encourages us to blame our health problems on lifestyle choices, implying that the individual bears ultimate responsibility for whatever illnesses befall him. It’s worth keeping in mind that a far more powerful predictor of heart disease than either diet or exercise is social class.
Pollan contends that Western society has replaced our relationship with food to a relationship with nutrition, to our great loss. Science has sought to figure out exactly what parts of foods do, and having figured out how this or that part functions, sought to replace the food itself with its nutritive parts. As Doctor Phil might say, “How’s that working out for you?” Not well. What Pollan calls “the Western diet” is a disaster, replacing actual nutrition with a manufactured diet that loses much of the actual benefit that real food provides. This is not a book that offers a prescriptive diet. He is not looking to sell a program, but to argue that the way we eat is out of whack. The nutrition business is not about feeding people but about pushing product. The results are raging epidemics of diabetes, heart disease and cancer. Not that a return to a more natural state would eliminate those entirely, but there is compelling research that indicates it would make a significant difference. One interesting thing Pollan notes is that in different parts of the world, people do quite well with various types of diets. There appears not to be a single best way to eat. It does appear that there is a single worst way to eat and we have found it.
Read - February 2008
Posted - October 29,2015
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I am conflicted about this book. On the one hand, I agree with Pollan's thesis: food science has not served us well over the past 100 years, and we really should "Eat Food. Not too much. Mostly plants." I believe that partially because of Pollan's arguments, and the revelatory reporting he did for
The Omnivore's Dilemma, but mostly because I've studied biology, and have at least a limited idea of how complex human bodies and human food can be, and how evolution may not have prepared us for Twinkies.
On the other hand, Pollan's rhetoric was definitely fast and loose in this book. He's an amazingly mellifluous, persuasive writer, but some portions were just bad reporting. One example: in attempting to demonstrate the ills of the Western diet, he cites a study of Aboriginal Australians who suffered from a suite of Western diseases, then decided to leave town and return to a hunter/gatherer life in the bush. Their diseases disappeared and they became more healthy, and lo, Pollan blames the Western diet. What? There are more than a few confounding factors there, including amount of exercise, sleep, sunlight, air quality, mental health, etc. And this was after several cases in which Pollan critiqued nutritionists for falling victim to the same basic fallacy: correlation is not necessarily causation.
There are several other similar examples, many of which cite studies that may very well prove his points, but for which he doesn't cite enough of the evidence to be bulletproof.
The other main problem with this book, to which Pollan readily admits but doesn't resolve, is his simultaneous critique and reliance upon reductionist science. If food is so complex that we should despair of science's ability to explain it to us, why does he spend so long discussing the latest research praising the benefits of omega-3 fats? I know he doesn't actually think science is intrinsically incapable of revealing truths about food, but his rhetoric definitely has an anti-scientific air that I can see fueling irrational zealotry.
Overall, I really did enjoy most of the book. Well, Part III, in which he gets proscriptive. Pollan's most salient point: if you actually read a book called In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto, then your food system is badly broken.
I think I'll look for an Orthorexics Anonymous group now... -
I hated reading this book. And that's sad because I agree with his basic premise. Just eat real food. Not too much. Mostly plants. And I would add, try and get off your ass once in awhile. But this book was excrutiating to read. I read the first 50 pages, gave up, and went to the last section on his very basic food rules, gave up again. His language was all black and white with blanket condemnations and blanket recommendations, ironic since that's what he condemns in scientific thinking and food marketing. Oddly, he comes off as so much more even-handed in his interviews.
That said, his message is important but what's really going on is more nuanced than presented. As a dietitian, I agree that people should be able to figure out what to eat on their own. I really should only have to meet with people with special medical conditions and dietary needs. Instead, many of my patients haven't a clue and they rely on supplements, protein powders, and various bars to meet their needs. It's crazy. A balanced and varied diet of mostly veggies, fruits, whole grains, and lean proteins will meet your nutritional needs.
I also agree with him about the nature of nutrition research. The food frequency questionnaire is a crazy tool. And don't even get me started on diet recalls. Patients lie. I used to think they lied to me but soon realized they're actually lying to themselves. They really don't register and/or are unwilling to own up to what they're eating. But that's another topic. Any research involving human beings is tough. Test tubes are easier to control.
I think that's what really bothered me about this book. It came across as a good-people-vs-bad-people polemic. Like all systems, however, there is usually some good and bad on all sides. Food marketers sell what people buy. If we wouldn't buy it, they wouldn't sell it. On the positive side, that's why there is more organic food available these days. There's a market for it and where there's a market, there's a marketer. That's not to say there aren't some sleazy marketing practices that pervert what the market wants. Just look at what's happening with organic food guidelines.
As consumers, we bear some responsibility. Food and diet have definately become fetishized. We project so much onto our eating habits, including comfort, status, shame, and ego gratification. Plus many people are looking for the quick, easy, and mindless route to healthy living so "special diets," "power foods," and "quickie solutions" sell. I sometimes joke with my dietitian friends that we could make some real money with a crazy diet book that only allows red foods to be eaten on Monday and orange foods on Tuesday.
Crazy gimmicks sell. They relieve us of the burden of decision making. When I first saw the Special K diet commercials, I thought there was no way that anyone who eat mostly Special K all day. I was shocked when I met patients actually on that diet. They liked it because they didn't have to think about what foods to eat. Gimmicks also create the illusion that you're buying some secret that will keep you thin and healthy forever. Eat less, exercise more just doesn't seem cutting edge enough for some people.
If what you're looking is more info on how crazy our food system is, try Marion Nestle's "Food Politics." If what you're looking for is more practical advice on a normal, balanced diet, try "Eat, Drink, and Be Healthy" or "Eat, Drink, and Weigh Less." And if you want to follow Michael Pollan's sage advice to cook more, start somewhere easy like "How to Cook Everything Vegetarian." Like Mollie Katzen very wisely said, regardless of your eating philosophy, we need to eat more veggies. Eat more plants. -
Books like this make me afraid to eat. Then they make me mad at the way I've been eating. Finally, they make me a better eater.
At the start, the idea seems simple: "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants." When I read that I thought, okay I can stop reading. I know that already, so I've got this shit down.
But what is food today? It may not be what you think it is. Most of what you find at the grocer's is not food. That complicates things just a little bit, doesn't it?
Pollan complicates that simple "eat food" mantra a lot. Which is not to say In Defense of Food is a complicated read. Indeed no, quite the opposite. He actually does an excellent job at explaining it all in layman terms (He even helped me figured out the glucose-to-triglicerides issue I have that two doctors failed to make me fully understand). It's not Pollan's fault eating has become difficult. The problem is that the seemingly simple act of eating these days is more difficult than it used to be for our grandparents due to the food engineering/fiddling that's been happening the last few decades.
There's oh-so much more info I could lay down here for you, but you wouldn't want to bite into a rotten apple, so why would you want me too spoil this for you? No, no, read In Defense of Food. It's enjoyable, it's quick and it's full of information. Ingesting this book will do your body good! -
Michael Pollan is absolutely on to something with his central thesis; namely, that the American diet has been taken over by "edible foodlike substances" (ie, hyper-processed foods) and the American approach to health as it relates to eating has been taken over by "nutritionism" (ie, the idea that food is nothing more than the sum of its nutrient parts). He makes an excellent case that the current epidemics of obesity, diabetes, heart disease, etc. are the inevitable result of this perverse relationship with food and eating. His proposed remedy is to "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants." In other words, eat whole, not processed foods; concentrate on the quality of the eating experience rather than the quantity of food consumed; and eat a wide variety of species, mainly fruits and vegetables. But as with his previous book, The Omnivore's Dilemma, he fails to explain how anyone other than smug, affluent foodies with an abundance of time on their hands could possibly follow his recommendations. He even laments the fact that Americans don't spend more of their annual income on food! He paints an admittedly appealing picture of long, leisurely meals made of fresh, local ingredients, enjoyed among friends over a glass or two of wine. Great, I'm sure that's no problem for his fellow professors at Berkeley, but how about for single-parent households, two-career families, families with lots of children, low-income families, families who don't happen to live next to a farmer's market, etc.? Pollan's refusal to address these very real issues made the book rather--ahem--hard to swallow (sorry!).
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4 🍎 🍇 🍷 🥑
Another informative, entertaining audio on my lake walks.
Included in his final recommendations of what to consume ➖ a glass of wine with dinner. 😁
I really like this guy. -
One of the most remarkable meals I’ve ever eaten was here -
http://www.royalmail.com.au/Pages/Foo.... Now, Dunkeld is a long way to go for a meal, even if you do live in Melbourne – and a ten course meal served over many hours with matching wines that costs an arm and three toes possibly isn’t something everyone would think of as value for money. However, unlike the said value for money meals I will never forget the evening I spent at this restaurant. Fantastic food, remarkable wines and delightful company – if that isn’t the definition of the good life, what possibly could be?
And that question is at the heart of this book. Every review of this book needs to quote Pollan’s eating maxim, so let’s get it over and done with now. ‘Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.’
Actually, the real advice is this book is eat what your Neolithic ancestors evolved to eat and do so in a way that makes eating it a culturally significant part of your life, and not just a way to stuff calories into your face. And that piece of advice can’t be said too often.
There was a time in human evolution when you could tell food was fit to eat because it smelt ripe and because it tasted sweet. Food also had this weird way of going off. I know you’ll find this hard to believe, but real food actually used to spoil. This was because the nutrients in real food were so appealing and appetising to other creatures (even bacteria) that the time window when it could be eaten by us was remarkably narrow.
I’m old enough to remember a time when bread would go stale. This is very hard to explain to young people, but bread used to go hard if left uneaten for a few days. Now bread can be covered in blue mould and still be soft and flexible. Whatever THEY have done to bread now (and they know who they are) it could not reasonably still be called bread. And this is a much of the point of the ‘eat food’ advice. Much of the food-like products sold to us to eat simply isn’t really food anymore.
The problem is that at some stage we decided that if you want to have a food industry you need to organise it in such a way that food doesn’t spoil. The best way to achieve this is to make it unappetising to other creatures and you do this by removing most of the nutrients in the ‘food’. But this ‘food’ is unappealing to vermin because it is unappealing full-stop. So then they need to add stuff to it to fool the eater that it is actually worth eating. Sugars and salts and oils and essences and foliate and azodicarbonamide. On page 151 of this book Pollan provides a list of the ingredients in a loaf of Sara Lee’s Soft & Smooth Whole Grain White Bread. Real bread, he points out, only requires four ingredients – this Frankenstein variety has 36.
A big part of our modern problem is that we are all Platonists when it comes to understanding food. We want food to be about things and not about relationships. I do need to quote this: “What would happen if we were to start thinking about food as less of a thing and more of a relationship? In nature, that is of course precisely what eating has always been: relationships among species in systems we call food chains, or food webs, that reach all the way down to the soil.” But we don’t talk about beef or carrots or wine anymore, but trans-fats and beta-carotene and anti-oxidants.
There is a wonderful bit where he talks about how Asian cultures turned an anti-nutritious plant (soy) into a highly important source of protein by making it into tofu. But our science thinks that it can isolate the soy proteins and these will be just as good for us when slapped into some hideous processed goo. His point being that food is often only good for us in a cultural context of relationships between real foods. I read an article once about how the carbohydrates in bread do interesting things with the proteins in beans and that this might be part of the reason why we quite like baked beans on toast.
A few years ago they did a test to see if giving supplements of anti-oxidants would help cancer patients. So, they started handing out tablets with isolated anti-oxidants in them and they found that they had to stop the trail because not only were the people on the treatment not doing any better than the people in the control group not receiving the anti-oxidants, but they were actually doing worse – much worse. See what has happened here? It is standard Western Science gone nuts. We want there to be a reductionist answer. Eating fruit makes you healthy, so what is it in the fruit that is so good? Well, as you grow old your body produces free radical oxygen molecules and these destroy your DNA. Fruit contains anti-oxidants. Therefore why don’t we just skip the fruit and pump in the anti-oxidants? Well, because we don’t know nearly enough about what we are doing is one answer.
The point is that biological systems are both easier and more complicated than that. Rather than obsessively looking for the thing that delivers the health benefit in fruit (and perhaps there is no ‘thing’), perhaps we would be better off looking at the fruit as a whole package, one which has evolved to both encourage us to eat it (as we can then transport the plant’s seeds) and to make us healthy in the process (so we will keep coming back to help transport more seeds). The lesson is to embrace complexity and diversity – and this is actually the lesson of this entire book.
What is the secret to French people eating lots of fats and still being slimmer than the average American or Australian or Brit? Variety of diet and a culture that loves food and prefers dining to merely eating. Is it any wonder that the slow food movement started in Italy and not in England? Jamie Oliver not withstanding, there is something incredibly sad about our Anglo-Saxon diet.
However, there was once a Starbucks on Lygon Street – nothing gives me more hope for Australia’s future than the fact that this is no longer the case.
His three rules are actually supplemented with a range of other valuable pieces of advice. Spend more money on food for smaller quantities is superb advice. Food is to be enjoyed, and eating cakes that never go off that have been filled with ‘cream’ that has never seen the inside of a cow simply can’t be a recipe for enjoyment. Especially not in a world where mangos are coming into season and female pigs are squealing to have their bellies roasted. Have you ever eaten pork and mango together? If you wanted to construct an argument to prove that God really doesn’t like Jews or Muslims I think you have it right there.
Eat at a table – now there is a novel idea. Did you know that one in five meals eaten by 18 to 50 year olds in the US are now eaten in a car? I could make some sort of snide remark about that fact, but do I really need to?
Regard non-traditional food with scepticism. Like I said, real food has evolved to meet our needs, we have evolved to have our needs met by real food – scientists (particularly nutrition scientists) only have the vaguest notions about how food works – that is why we were once told to eat monounsaturated fats rather than saturated fats and now are told that the monounsaturated fats were worse for us than saturated fats could ever have been – and next week? If you want to see healthy people you have to look to people who have a healthy cultural cuisine – the Italians, the Greeks, the French, the Japanese. It is not olive oil or red wine, it is a complex and varied diet.
Eat more leaves than seeds. I need to follow this advice – he makes a powerful argument for it. Seeds are easier to store and transport and so have taken over our culture which is obsessed with storing and transporting, but leaves have much more omega3 oils and our modern diet has meant a shift of the ratio of omega3 and omega6 in our bodies from about 1 to 3 a century ago to about 1 to 10 today.
This is a fascinating book – it might even change the way you eat – it might even save your life, if nothing else, it might make you enjoy food again. If you are still able to squeeze your bum out of your chair and walk unassisted I would suggest a trip to your local bookshop so you can buy it. I’ve loved the other two books I’ve read by Pollan on food, but this one was not just interesting – this was essential reading. -
I wanted to learn something and learn I did. The main focus of this book is what the author calls the western diet AKA what Americans eat. I enjoyed the history lesson of processed foods and the rise of nutrition-focused food. It also gave me a good perspective of what the food industry is all about and how we think of food drives their revenues up. Sadly it's a negative trend of higher profits and less healthy eating.
This has left me with plenty of food for thought on how I eat and what I should do to achieve better health. The author does state that this book is mainly an opinion piece. When the opinion makes so much sense on a basic level it's easy to follow and agree with. I wouldn't call it an essential read, but it's an enjoyable one that may have a positive effect on one's life.
Bon apetite! -
Michael Pollan's In Defense of Food might best be described as a book which fares best when judged by its cover. Below the title, a reader finds some dietary advice which is not a bad place to start: "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants." There are a few good ideas inside the book, too. It would be easy not to look much deeper, as Pollan's prose is so lively that most readers won't want to stop and give things a closer look. However, the reader who does bother to check the details sees that In Defense of Food is not a credible work of nonfiction. Pollan twists facts and misrepresents the way science works in the course of assembling exaggerated, false, and contradictory narratives.
Pollan's central thesis is that introducing science into our food system has done more harm than good and that the best thing for all of us would be to go back to eating a more traditional diet. It's fair to point out that nutritional science has led to some mistakes (such as recommendations to replace saturated fats with hydrogenated oils), but Pollan devotes too much of his effort to dismantling his own shallow caricature of science. Pollan's chief criticism of nutritional science is that it adheres to the ideology of nutritionism, which he defines as the belief that foods can be understood by studying their constituent nutrients. He explains that nutritionism is rooted in the idea that foods are "decidedly unscientific things" (19) and that studying individual nutrients is "the only thing [nutritional scientists] can do" (62). He even puts forth the idea that the goal of nutritional science is to find
an "X factor" (178) -- a single compound that is responsible for good health -- so that food processors can add more of it to their products.
But science -- to the people who study it -- isn't defined by the consideration of certain "scientific" things with hard-to-pronounce names. The scientific method is a general process for improving our understanding of the world. It entails using observations to form a hypothesis, testing the hypothesis experimentally, and refining that hypothesis based on the results of the experiment. As far as the scientific method is concerned, oranges are as good a subject to study as vitamin C. And nutritional scientists tend to be aware that human nutrition is too complicated to be explained by a single "X factor." After all, that's part of what makes their jobs challenging!
As proof of the malignancy of nutritionism, Pollan points to the various sets of nutritional guidelines which encouraged Americans to reduce their fat consumption. As Pollan explains, these recommendations gave rise to products like the SnackWell's cookie, which was presumed healthy on the basis of its being fat-free. He contrasts the low-fat guidelines with the theory (put forward by Gary Taubes and others) that weight gain results when the consumption of refined carbohydrates promotes fat storage and overeating. If that theory is correct, he explains, "there is no escaping the conclusion that the [official dietary advice] bears direct responsibility for creating the public health crisis that now confronts us" (59-60).
By the end of the book, he's moved on to blaming that same public health crisis on overconsumption of cheap sweeteners and added fats, pointing out that Americans have added 300 calories to their daily diets since 1980 and citing a group of Harvard economists who "concluded that the widespread availability of cheap convenience foods could explain most of the twelve-pound increase in the weight of the average American since the early 1960s" (186-187). If both the dietary guidelines and the cheap convenience foods are to blame, then it must be that the guidelines encouraged Americans to eat those convenience foods, right?
Not exactly, as it would happen. For all his insistence that Americans have "an unhealthy obsession with healthy eating" (9), Pollan gives us precious little evidence that we've actually been following the official dietary advice. Indeed, a reader of the various guidelines would see that falling prey to the food marketers often meant going against the science-based dietary advice. For instance, the second edition of the 1977 Dietary Goals for the United States, one of the main sets of guidelines which Pollan criticizes, included warnings against overeating and recommended a decrease in consumption of both fats and refined sugars. So while the sugary SnackWell's cookies might have helped to reduce fat intake, the dietary guidelines were hardly an invitation to eat them without restraint.
It should thus be no surprise that in his quest to fault science-based nutritional advice for our public health crisis, Pollan often misleads readers about what the dietary guidelines actually said. He tells us, for instance, that a literature review "found 'some evidence' that replacing fats in the diet with carbohydrates (as official dietary advice has urged us to do since the 1970s) will lead to weight gain" (45). It sounds pretty damning, at least until you look at
the actual paper, which, in fact, reported "some evidence" that replacing dietary fats with refined carbohydrates leads to weight gain. Pollan, of course, had a very good reason to leave out the extra word: that little bit in parentheses would have been false if he'd included it. The government recommendations never urged Americans to replace dietary fats with refined carbohydrates. Truth be told, the official dietary advice could have done better here, but a reader of the recommendations would see encouragements to decrease our consumption of a major class of refined carbohydrate (sugars) and to eat more unrefined carbohydrates in the form of fruits, vegetables, and whole grains.
But some falsehoods can't be made to look true just by neatly hiding the pesky details behind a missing adjective, and Pollan's book contains some of these ideas, too. Indeed, the notion that nutritional scientists study nutrients to the exclusion of foods is incorrect; the ideology of nutritionism that occupies so much of Pollan's attention is a straw man. A reader might get the sense that something isn't quite right when Pollan refers to a few nutritional studies that considered whole foods. On the other hand, the reader might suppose, perhaps those studies are outliers. After all, Pollan tells us that (since 1977) the official dietary recommendations have always been expressed in terms of nutrients rather than foods. As an example, he gives us the 1982 report, Diet, Nutrition, and Cancer, in which the National Academy of Sciences "was careful to frame its recommendations nutrient by nutrient rather than food by food, to avoid offending any powerful interests" (25). The only problem is that
it isn't true. The report contains six "Interim Dietary Guidelines," only one of which was expressed in terms of nutrients, and two of which were expressed in terms of foods. (Of the remaining three, two were encouragements to keep dangerous substances out of the food supply, and one was a reminder not to drink too much.)
The antidote to nutritionism, as Pollan explains, is "to entertain seriously the proposition that processed foods of any kind are a big part of the problem" (141) and "escape the Western diet" (142) for a more traditional diet. That's a bold declaration, considering that "processing" in the food system includes not just things like hydrogenating vegetable oils but also everything from chopping vegetables to slaughtering animals. Pollan reasons that science has made us unhealthy by encouraging us to eat in new ways, but a traditional diet must be healthy because "if it wasn’t a healthy regimen, the diet and the people who followed it wouldn’t still be around" (173). Unfortunately, he thereby misses the rather important point that a diet can be unhealthy without doing away with its eaters. Pollan's line of argument would, for example, vindicate
the diet of white rice that left so many with beriberi. And some day,
it may well exonerate the American diet, whose worst health effects tend to show up well beyond reproductive age.
For all that Pollan gets wrong, there is a grain of truth to his message. Though Pollan errs in faulting nutritional science for giving us a license to eat every high-carb, low-fat food that processors might concoct, it is true that it would be a bad idea to assume that a low-fat food is a healthy food. Pollan is probably even right that some people reached that conclusion based on their interpretations of the official dietary advice. However, the lesson to take away from this is not that we should ignore nutritional science but that when we oversimplify our decision-making processes, we leave ourselves particularly vulnerable to cheap marketing ploys. With that in mind, the solution he offers is regrettable. Rather than embracing critical thinking and careful attention to detail, Pollan gives us a few simple rules backed up by the same sort of lazy thinking that he claims to have seen in nutritional science. It should therefore be no surprise that food companies have begun to take advantage of his rules for eating, with Frito-Lay
advertising that its Lay's potato chips have only "three simple ingredients" (less than Pollan's recommended maximum of five ingredients) and manufacturers
reformulating products like Gatorade, Hunt's ketchup, and Wheat Thins to replace the taboo high-fructose corn syrup with other sugars.
To be fair, a few of Pollan's rules, such as "eat slowly...in the sense of deliberate and knowledgeable eating promoted by Slow Food" (194) and "plant a garden" (197), will probably prove difficult for food companies to use for their own ends. For the most part, however, these reflect a level of privilege which many people do not have. This isn't too surprising, as Pollan makes no secret of the fact that he writes for a well-to-do audience when he declares, "Not everyone can afford to eat high-quality food in America, and that is shameful; however, those of us who can, should" (184). That doesn't invalidate his perspective, but there is nonetheless something a bit distasteful about a bestselling author lamenting the eating habits of people whose lives are worlds away from his own. Absent any indication of a good-faith effort to understand why people might choose to microwave frozen dinners instead of preparing a family meal from home-grown ingredients, Pollan's work seems less likely to inspire positive social change than, as
Julie Guthman puts it, to appeal to "those who already are refined eaters and want to feel ethically good about it."
Michael Pollan remarks in the introduction of In Defense of Food that had he written the book forty years earlier, it would have been received as "the manifesto of a crackpot" (14). In light of the superficiality of the book's merits and its loose relationship to the facts, that wouldn't have been a particularly unfair appraisal. Alas, in the time since the work's publication in 2008, our collective judgment has proven decidedly less sound. Thanks to its engaging style and appealing commonsense message, In Defense of Food has become required reading for thousands of college students, and its author now stands at the helm of a respected social movement. With the alarming rise in diet-related disease, the time was indeed ripe for someone to fill that leading role. It's just too bad that it was somebody who mostly gives us the same kind of simplistic solutions and sloppy reasoning that helped to create the problem in the first place. -
I am deeply ashamed, depressed, and embarrassed by the fact that such a book as Michael Pollan’s In Defense of Food need be written, much less published, critically acclaimed, and enjoyed by someone such as myself. Pollan himself acknowledges the perverse state of affairs saying, “That one should feel the need to mount a defense of ‘the meal’ is sad, but then I never would have thought ‘food’ needed defending, either.”
We should be collectively mortified as a culture because though Pollan greets us on the back jacket with his cute bald head, dopey ears, nerdy glasses, and huge grin of unassuming innocence…
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…his sheer journalistic acuity packs a hard punch. When you are done with his book, you will feel the same way about food manufacturers, food marketers, nutritionists, and the government as you do about Scientologists, multi-level marketing schemes, and two-bit scam artists.
We’re not eating food anymore. We’re Orthorexics, people with an unhealthy obsession with healthy eating. And now that the ideology of “Nutritionism” has its cold, clammy hands firmly throttling our very throats and controlling what we mindlessly shovel into our mouths, food has been distilled into a convoluted linguistic labyrinth of nutrients, macro-nutrients, micro-nutrients, vitamins, minerals, protein, fat, carbohydrates, saturated fat, antioxidants, polyunsaturated fat, cholesterol, fiber, amino acids, etc, etc, et al. Good Grief!
Though Pollan does a very good job of taking the reader through nutritionism’s never-ending oscillations of advice (fat is evil, cholesterol is evil, carbs are evil), one specific fact illuminates all we need to know: “30 years of nutritional advice have left us fatter, sicker, and more poorly nourished.” Something must change. And Pollan does humbly offer a few suggestions.
A quarter of all Americans suffer from metabolic syndrome.
Two thirds of us are overweight or obese.
Diet-related diseases are already killing the majority of us.
“Much more so than the human body, capitalism is marvelously adaptive, able to turn the problems it creates into new business opportunities: diet pills, heart bypass operations, insulin pumps, bariatric surgery.” Hooray, Capitalism!
Even our modern dental maladies (braces, root canals, extractions of wisdom teeth, cavities, and routine cleanings and procedures) may be the result of poor diet and nutrition. A public debate between hygiene and nutrition was waged in the 1930s. Hygiene ultimately carried the day, hygiene being easier and far more profitable for the dental profession than restructuring the entire food system.
We are overfed and undernourished.
USDA figures show a decline in the nutrient content of the forty-three crops it has tracked since the 1950s.
The Food Industry releases 17,000 new food products every year and spends $32 billion a year marketing them. There are boxed breakfast cereals with bright labels proudly claiming their health benefits while fruits and vegetables in the produce section have no such marks. (Pollan advises to be wary of any product that has to advertise its health benefits. Shouldn’t anything you put in your body be good for you?)
Pollan eloquently and intelligently provides some rationale to this sick world of contemporary food consumption that is a nefarious web of collusion with straightforward advice:
“A whole food might be more than the sum of its nutrient parts.”
“There is now abundant scientific evidence for the health benefits of alcohol to go with a few centuries of traditional belief and anecdotal evidence. Mindful of the social and health effects of alcoholism, public health authorities are loath to recommend drinking, but the fact is that people who drink moderately and regularly live longer and suffer considerably less heart disease than teetotalers.” Thank god.
And Pollan spends the final third of his book offering sensible solutions to combat the Chicken Littles of “Nutritionism” and the fallacies of “Food Science” that expand upon his basic thesis to “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants,” that will leave you feeling more prepared to combat the hucksters and rubes of the contemporary food industry. Those bastards. -
I'm changing how I look at food and how I eat, so I was really inspired to read
In Defence Of Food: The Myth Of Nutrition And The Pleasures Of Eating after listening to
Fast. Feast. Repeat.: The Comprehensive Guide to Delay, Don't Deny® Intermittent Fasting--Including the 28-Day FAST Start (which I loved, by the way).
I think the overall message of In Defence of Food is great, but it's very just trust me on this kind of vibe. I'm sure my fact-lover husband would despise it, but it helped remind me of the many ways that food science has failed us. It offers minimal advise in the way of actual advice, but I think, paired with other books I've read, it offers some helpful ideas and reinforcements of things you instinctively know are good sense.
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Thoughts soon.
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Last night, I watched Pollan -- who looks just like one of my uncles -- on TV promoting this book. Something wonderful and empowering he said: the food industry pays very close attention to what consumers want.
In fact, they're terrified of us.
For instance, it only took a little over 100 concerned McDonald's customers writing to ask if it were true that the chain served genetically modified potatoes -- that was enough
to get the issue on the agenda at their shareholders' meeting.
Another example: in his popular book The Omnivore's Dilemma, Pollan was very critical of Whole Foods' support of gigantic organic farms , and in response, the CEO made a commitment to support small, local farmers by buying more of their produce and allowing them to sell their own produce outside the store.
Last week I put a note in the suggestion box at my grocery store: "I would be in HEAVEN if you had organic apples from local farms* . . . "
From now on, trips to the grocery store will be more fun as I walk the aisles, thinking of the kind of changes I'd like to see and writing them down.
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*I live in New England. If shoppers were willing to pay for organic, locally grown fruit, there would be no reason to fly in apples grown on another continent.
Pollan argues that about 80% of the population can afford to pay more for food. As a nation, we spend less than 10 % of our income on food -- which is less than any country in history. (The French currently spend about 15%.) It's a matter of priorties. Maybe to afford for food that is healthy for our bodies, communities, and earth, we will need to forgo things that aren't true necessities.
And Pollan argues that healthy food should be available for everyone. For the 20% of us who can't afford organic food, we need to reform our agricultural policies to stop subsidzing a toxic fast-food culture and begin building a health-focused culture.
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"Eat food. Not much. Mostly Plants."
This pretty much encapsulates the book. When Pollan speaks of "food" he refers to things that can be grown, not things that are manufactured. The "mostly plants" refers to mostly fruits and leaves not seeds. He also recommends this for your meat. In other words, try to consume animals that were raised on real food (grass fed cows). Pollan throws lots of interesting facts about the food we consume and its origins. He is not a fan of "nutritionism" or the nature of deconstructing foods down to their scientific components so that you can get the recommended doses of Vitamin C etc by choosing the right types of foods. Nor is he a fan of fat or calorie counting and contents. The "no fat" fad that ended up being detrimental because fat is important as are all "nutrients" in moderation. He also points out that the same food can have very different nutrients depending on the soil in which it was grown. One carrot can be more nutritious by "nutritionism" measures merely by being grown in a more nutrient rich soil. He had an interesting take on diets (aka calorie and nutrient counting) and how the notion of dieting has it's foundation in Puritanical roots.Nutrition science has usually put more of its energies into the idea that the problems it studies are the result of too much of a bad thing instead of too little of a good thing. Is this good science or nutritionist prejudice? The epidemiologist John Powles has suggested this predilection is little more than a Puritan bias: Bad things happen to people who eat bad things.
Hadn't thought about it that way but...yep! Anyone remember that old axiom "you are what you eat" which is true, but unless you have been very focused on the origins of the food that you eat, you really aren't much in control of that. He also says:A diet based on quantity rather than quality has ushered a new creature onto the world stage: the human being who manages to be both overfed and undernourished, two characteristics seldom found in the same body in the long natural history of our species. In most traditional diets, when calories are adequate, nutrient intake will usually be adequate as well.
Pollan reminds us that in nutrition science, much is still theory and most encouragements have agendas (even when agendas are well meaning, we can't always assume that the findings are inarguable).But while nutritionism has its roots in a scientific approach to food, it’s important to remember that it is not a science but an ideology, and that the food industry, journalism, and government bear just as much responsibility for its conquest of our minds and diets.
I don't know about you, but in this day and age, I'm not interested in following any ideology.
All in all this book was a good reminder that like all things, we need to be mindful of what we eat. Everything has nuance in our world. Everything is advertised and marketed and spun even the scientific approaches. Pollan makes a great case for just following your body. Eat until you are full. Of course even that takes a whole lot of self-awareness, education and money. The ability to understand yourself and recognizing the difference between hunger and boredom and anxiety etc and also the ability to identify what your body craves. The healthiest eaters are also wealthier and more educated. A good book with many interesting facts about food and theories. Worthwhile.
4 Stars
Listened to the Audio book. The narration was excellent. -
Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants. Certainly good advice, but unfortunately, Michael Pollan should have stopped there.
Ugh...what a huge disappointment. This is a perfect example of why journalists should not give nutritional advice or write these kinds of books.
Pollan starts out by stating the obvious, but then quickly learns what many nutritional professionals and public health advocates do, the obvious isn't sexy and it certainly doesn't make a bestseller. As a result the chapters that follow his iconic slogan are little more than poppy-cock for the masses.
I'm going to break this review down by sections, because in fairness, some were better than others.
Section I: The Age of Nutritionism - 1 star
I guess the first step in any straw man argument is to give it a name, in this case nutritionism.
The problem is like others before him, he argues against an opponent that never existed.
According to Pollan a bunch of questionable studies led some incompetent (if well-meaning) scientists to determine that saturated fat was bad. As a result the government developed anti-fat nutritional guidelines that the public embraced wholeheartedly, but that ultimately made them unhealthier.
He repeatedly points to these "nutritionists" (which he somehow lumps in with greedy capitalists and which almost feels like a derogatory label the way he uses it) that misled the public with their "junk science" and continue to do us all an injustice in their efforts to further our understanding of the nutritional sciences.
Interestingly, I happened to be a college student in the eighties studying, of all things, Nutritional Sciences (and while I usually avoid reading these types of books). As such I can tell you that his characterizations are incorrect and best and dishonest at worst. In the late seventies and early eighties there was a push toward limiting fats to 30 percent of total calories. It was further recommended that less than 10 percent of total calories should come from saturated fats based on the belief that it was related to CHD.
The merits of this recommendation have since come under fire and has spurred more research...because after all that is what science demands (that it constantly improves upon itself). But the important part of the discussion that is left out is that this was only one small part of the guidelines. The USDA also recommended that of the carbs ingested at least half those should be from complex carbs and not from processed sources. And they didn't stop there. They recommended eating one serving of fish at least two times a week. They recommended eating 2-3 servings each of fruits and veggies daily. They recommended limiting salt intake to under 2300 milligrams. They recommended eating a diversity of food. They recommended eating foods high in fiber. They recommended limiting sweets. Okay...so you get where I'm going with this.
However, as is so often the case, capitalists saw an opportunity and the food companies began a massive anti-fat campaign that would help to distort certain aspects of the USDA recommendations to the point that low-fat became the most important aspect of a healthy diet. Of course, even Pollan admits that people didn't cut out fat, they simply ate more low-fat foods in addition to the fat they were already consuming. Mostly ultra-processed foods whose fat had been replaced with sugar and salt.
Bottom line, people didn't get fat because they followed the USDA dietary guidelines of the eighties which by the way with the exception of a few tweaks based on additional research and changing needs of society (and saturated fat has still not been completely vindicated), the recommendations have not changed significantly. People got fat because they became ultra-consumers of the cheap and easy...just like they have become ultra-consumers of cheap and easy everything from clothes, to shoes, to electronics, to home décor. The West is a culture of excess everything.
Pollan further contends that "nutritionists," which by the way is a poorly defined and meaningless term then and now so I'm not exactly sure who he is referring to, were obsessed with isolating nutrients...again, totally not true. In fact, the food pyramid, despite its flaws, was designed to encourage consumption of a wide range of foods to ensure that Americans ingested a diversity of nutrients. Vitamin supplements were also discouraged and seen as inferior to eating real food as nutritional scientists and dieticians have always acknowledged and appreciated the symbiotic relationship of various nutrients within food as well as those that exist between various foods in the diet.
Pollan then blasts the science itself, pointing out all the shortcomings innate in nutritional research, shortcomings that those who actually study nutrition appreciated long before Pollan pointed it out. But just because something is difficult to study doesn't mean we shouldn't try. It also doesn't necessarily invalidate the research. Ironically, Pollan himself has no problem citing these flawed studies later on in support of points he is trying to make. And again, Pollan's misrepresentation is huge. Anyone who attempts to study nutrition understands the difficultly in isolating the effect of any one nutrient. And yet we somehow know more now than we did say 50 years ago. The fact that we aren't any healthier as a nation isn't necessarily a reflection of what we know or don't know. Using Pollan's own argument trying to tease out all the cofounding factors is futile. He seems to suggest that our anti-fat campaign, which led to an increase in the amount of highly processed carbs being eaten is responsible for the rise in obesity and diseases like diabetes...and he may be right...or partially right...or completely wrong. It is widely accepted that the obesity epidemic is probably the result of several cofounding factors.
Anyway, I cringed reading this first section. I expected so much more from Pollan. Ironically, despite disagreeing with his characterizations and the logic employed, I agree with a number of his conclusions. In short, I agree that we need to look at foods as greater than the sum of their parts. I also agree that science can have limitations and can be flawed. In that sense, a recommendation is just that a best guess based on what we think we know at any given point and people need to understand this.
Section II: The Western Diet and the Disease of - 3 stars
I felt this was the strongest of the three sections. Whatever the culprit, it does appear that the Western Diet contributes to poor health outcomes.
Pollan makes some good points about the food chain and our interconnectedness with our environment. Ironically, the most recent panel of experts that propose changes to the USDA guidelines for the first time ever suggested that the new revised guidelines should take into consideration not only the internal impact of our eating habits but also the external factors. To Pollan's credit, I think his efforts have played a crucial role in this type of thinking.
His argument for whole foods is sound. If the nutritional research to date seems to agree on anything it is that whole unprocessed foods are generally superior.
His argument from quality to quantity also has some merit, though I think there is still some debate about the significance. For example, there are several studies (probably flawed if you bought into section one of Pollan's book) that suggest industrially produced produce is lower in nutrition than its locally grown, organic counterpart. However, the relevance of this in a society where our food options are endless is debatable as it may be a non-factor. The reality is in the US we have access to superior nutrition. We might not always make the right choices, but given a little vigilance 99.5% of us should be able to meet our nutritional needs even if the products we are eating are nutritionally inferior, not organic, and purchased from the grocery store.
The whole omega-3 section is a little weak. He spends the entire first third of the book telling us why these nutritional studies are flawed and can't be trusted and why we should not be isolating nutrients and then seems to put the omega-3s on some sort of nutritional pedestal, repeatedly referencing the science to make his case.
Section III: Getting Over Nutritionism - 2 stars
While I applaud and agree with many of Pollan's recommendations, I have a feeling they were recommendations that could only be made by a man in his unique position.
Unfortunately, I think many of Pollan's ideas are shortsighted and impractical for the average family. They look good on paper but are too idealistic as to really make a difference.
Pollan's plan to buy local in season produce, to cook more and eat together paints a nostalgic picture that panders to our natural bias. But really...
Seriously. I see how the average American eats and it isn't pretty. And I know from talking to them that most of them want to do better. But they are struggling to meet the demands of their job and family. They need real world solutions for their world and while some of Pollan's suggestions may be helpful most don't even come close to reaching the people who need his help the most.
At one point Pollan claims that you wouldn't be reading this book if you already got it...but I would argue he's wrong. This book most certainly speaks to the people who already get "it," but offers little for the people who really, really need it. In fact, I would be willing to bet that the majority of people who bought this book are college educated, or at least educated, do not have diabetes, don't regularly eat at McDonalds, and aren't obese. And if you are, I'm not sure this book offers substantially more than the government's nutritional guidelines he was so quick to criticize.
So by all means...Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.
As far as the book...if you already get it and are interested in reinforcing your commitment to eating healthy, then maybe this is worth your time. If you're currently struggling and looking for real life strategies to overcome obstacles, go somewhere else.
I should add, despite not "loving" this book, I am a fan of Pollan and what he is trying to do. His common sense approach to diet is admirable and I think he has done a lot of good and reached a lot of people. -
I’m a huge fan of Michael Pollan’s Omnivore’s Dilemma, (see review here) but only a big fan of In Defense of Food. The first two sections of Defense, “The Age of Nutritionism,” and “The Western Diet and Diseases of Civilization” fit perfectly with Omnivore’s posture of investigative journalism. While Omnivore included Pollan as a character, it came across as a non-biased, or relatively low-biased, intro to the foodstuffs served across America. The first two sections of Defense adhere to this even-handed journalistic method, but the final section, “Getting Over Nutritionism,” slips into more assertion and weaker argument and investigation.
Pollan is upfront about the final third of this book. He refers to his suggestions as “eating algorithms.” He doesn’t recommend what you should eat, but what you should think about before you eat. Mostly I agree with him, but there are few people in the United States who can live, and eat, the way Michael Pollan does. Lesisurely dinners prepared from foods out of your home-grown garden sounds like a great way to live, but re-arranging one’s life to create space to eat well may be impossible for most.
That said, there’s still a bushel of great advice in this book. Even if you can’t afford the time to grow your own garden, or eat every lunch gathered with friends and family, you will at least come away with an understanding of why eating anything that says “low-carb,” “low-fat,” “enriched,” or “fortified” is probably a bad idea.
In Omnivore Pollan researched where our food comes from. In Defense his research starts with asking why we think about food the way we do. Why are Americans obsessed with cholestrol, trans-fat, omega-3, and omega-6? What do nutrients have to do with food?
Pollan pulls together several threads that brought us to the nutrient-obsessed culture we have today. Three of these threads are lobbyists, scientists, and nutritionists. Together this triumvirate has eradicated any common sense about food that might have once been found in this nation. That this is a particularly national problem is very much a part of Pollan’s argument. Other cultures have long histories that have allowed them to create food cultures promote health. The French paradox ceases to be a paradox when you consider the culture that surrounds eating, and the hundreds of generations that have contributed to creating foods, and ways of eating, that combine in healthful ways.
Not only is the United States, a melange of many cultures, lacking this kind of food tradition, but it also suffers from a technophilia that rose to dominance in the 20th century and made it seem like science could solve every problem. Chemists began analyzing food to see what made it tick, and nutritionists began promoting these ingredients/nutrients as ways of achieving health. If Wonder Bread can be enriched what does it matter that it’s made out of processed flour and a little extra sweetener? A lot, according to Pollan.
When early nutritionism didn’t really work as advertised nutritionists did more research and uncovered micronutrients. Once micro-nutrients were discovered, they argued that now food chemists could mix and match ingredients to promote perfect health. Unfortunately, it seems like everytime a nutrient was thought to help or hurt later research overturned these findings. Pollan argues that this rises out of the simplified way of doing research. While nutritional research may be correct for a single ingredient it couldn’t predict how the ingredients all worked together in the food, or in relation to a human body. Food, and our relationship with food, is far too complex to be reduced to a simple formula.
Pollan’s argument persuaded me. Especially reading the two books in conjunction.
One of the pleasant things about reading Pollan is that he doesn’t take the tone of a scolding moralist in his writing. There is no right answer or rigid formula you must follow to health, only some thoughtfully considered common sense which he sums up in the opening of the book. “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.” The rest of the book explains why the American diet is not really food, but food-like products, and why Americans continue to eat long after they’ve consumed more than enough to meet their nutritional needs.
Pollan’s perfect world of eating that he tries to conjure up in the last third of the book will probably never make it into most people’s daily lives. But, that shouldn’t stop anyone from striving. Even if you’re not eating green beans out of your own garden, you can still eat more fruit and vegetables and less meat. There are common-sense strategies for eating that seem to have been forgotten. In Defense of Food is a great reminder that food should lead to health, not type-2 diabetes. -
‘Eat food. Not too much. Mainly plants’
Australian filmmaker Damon Gameau made That Sugar Film, which follows his personal journey from an unhealthy sugar–filled diet to sugar freedom, better health and a less-bulky silhouette.
With some startling demonstrations Gameau showed just how much sugar is contained in various foods; obvious ones like soft drink, although the sheer amount of sugar is staggering, and the less obvious ones like almost any processed food you can name. My favourite miso soup sachets contain sugar. What to drink then? Michael Pollan says water. Oh well. But he also recommends some wine, which is encouraging. But I do drink tea and coffee without sugar, or milk for that matter (dairy is a separate issue, because milk, butter and cheese are pretty good for you, except for those of us with high cholesterol).
Michael Pollan is sensible, he talks plainly and entertainingly. He goes into nutrition and especially nutritionism where scientists identify, isolate and experiment with individual nutrients and make pronouncements upon their value- good or bad. There are two things wrong with this, Pollan tells us. First, isolating particular nutrients is over simplification and ignores the other goodies in the foodstuff. Secondly, this research tends to be subject to fashion and whim. I remember when eggs were held to be very bad and pork was just too fatty to countenance (anyone who likes to BBQ knows fat is where the flavour is).
Pollan provides a history of the food industry, especially since World War Two, including how food scientists discovered that sweetness made food products more appetising and so sugar, especially in the form of corn syrup has been added to processed food. It’s then a short journey to bad health and obesity. Apparently what is also perilous as a result is the proliferation of different diets which might enjoy their 15 minutes- low carb, high carb, protein, Paleo- but then fall out of favour. While it is possible to follow much of what Pollan says about nutritionism and the practice of processing foods, there is a great deal of information to take in. It is his simple solution that appeals to me most.
His dictum is: ‘Eat food. Not too much. Mainly plants.’ You might marry that up with: ‘Eat less. Move more’. A decade long battle to keep my weight down has worked best when I walk a lot, play gentlemen’s tennis (moving in a stately fashion) and refraining from seconds. Pollan observes that Americans regularly eat second helpings (as do Australians and both countries have an obesity problem), but the French and Italians are barely familiar with the concept. He further observes that Americans are more inclined to eat in front of the television than Europeans which brings him to consider the social aspect of food consumption and the positive impact of eating in a leisurely fashion in good company.
Pollan’s advice is to eat things as close as possible to their original states, follow a varied and balance diet and to distrust food produced with an arm’s-length lists of ingredients, especially those with more than three syllables which we do not know how to pronounce.
I thoroughly recommend In Defence of Food and I am looking forward to reading his earlier book
The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals, which I have just found. I’m off now to eat some nuts (unsalted), drink a glass of water and go for a brisk walk. -
"Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants."
Those are the first sentences of Michael Pollan's delightful little book In Defense of Food. In fact, as Pollan himself admits, there's not much more to it than that. So, how to fill up a whole book when those three first sentences tell it all?
Well, as simple as that advice seems, the first sentence is more complicated than it may appear. Eat food. Sure. Of course. What else would we eat? But as we all know and often try not to think too much about -- what is labeled as "food" these days isn't often really food. It is processed food stripped of everything that once made it food, and then "fortified" with the vitamins and minerals it was stripped of, and loaded with various non-food items such as high fructose corn syrup, hydrogenated oils, and a multitude of non-pronounceable mystery ingredients. As just one example, Pollan lists the ingredients of Sara Lee's "whole wheat white bread" which in and of it self seems to be an oxymoron. How can white bread be whole wheat? As Pollan rattles off the makings of this mystery bread, you can't help but laugh. Instead of the basics of any "real" bread (yeast, flour, water and salt), Sara Lee's version instead has over 32 ingredients, with only about 4 that one can recognize as actual food items.
Pollan points out that, though we may be the most evolved and intelligent of all the species on the planet, we are also the only species that require food charts, diagrams, pyramids and a panel of "experts" to tell us what to eat. He goes through the history of all these "expert" recommendations, much of which seems to change with each year. First margarine would save us all from heart disease. Then... oops... turns out margarine actually significantly increases our chances of getting heart disease. First low fat food will help you lose weight. Then... oops... looks like it's the carbs that might be making you fat. But hold on....some carbs are actually good, it's the simple ones that are bad. And about all those different fats....
What are we to do with all this conflicting and changing information?
Pollan suggests a diet of fruits and vegetables, meat that is 100% grass fed, and anything that is genuinely real food. As a guide, he recommends avoiding anything that has more than a handful of ingredients (especially if you can't pronounce any of those ingredients). Shopping at a farmer's markets is always a good idea as well. He also suggests that you pretend you are grocery shopping with your great grandmother. If you pick up something that Grandma would see and say "What the heck is THAT?" then it's probably not real food and should stay on the shelf. After all, it has a long shelf life anyway, and could stay there for years and years without going bad. So there's no real rush to put it in your cart anyway. :)
Did Pollan only cite research studies that support his biases? Probably. In fact, I'm sure he did. There's so much conflicting info out there, that you can find research to support virtually any nutritional leaning you want these days. But I happened to agree with many of the points Pollan makes, so I didn't mind the bias. :)
I found In Defense of Food to be informative, educational and surprisingly funny. I recommend it to anyone who has an interest in nutrition. Or anyone who eats.
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Short and poignant, but very powerful. This is going to not only change what/how I eat, but my whole relationship with food. Everyone should read this.
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I'm not sure I need to review Michael Pollan's In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto. Chances are the person who bought this book is looking to find out what about food needs defending. It appears everything. I came across this book because of my Sociology class in explaining how the economy and current food structures continue to lead to systematic oppression or maintain an the imbalance of wealth, inequality in this country.
Firstly, in reference to defending food, it is actual food that needs defending without a doubt. Our society has turned into one that has placed a greater emphasis on eating the right nutrients (see nutritionism science) rather than the right foods. Foods that haven't been refined or been made into food-like substances that are packaged with the fad labels of the time, tightly wrapped in sugar... or sugar-like substances.
What can be appreciated is the amount of insight that has gone into Pollan's case for food. He could have saved us 200 pages if he simply said eat food, real food, food that is grown on a farm, and not fed to us to support the capitalistic beast. These foods that were made to suppress the bodies natural defense in being full, rather cause us to have an insatiable appetite. Instead, Pollan goes into how the Western diet has changed over time and a few of the contributing factors such as the government thinking they know best what we should eat after having spoken with someone greasing their wheels.
Anyway, In Defense of Food is a firm 3-star rating for me simply because it gets a little repetitive and boring. Had I chose this to read on my own instead of as an assignment, there's a good chance I would not have finished it. Michael Pollan had already provided more than enough reason to trade my nutragrain bar for an apple or banana... which reminds me. Our current farming methods makes it so even those foods aren't half as good as they used to be. READ HIS BOOK TO FIND OUT WHY!!!
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This book really changed the way I look at food and will certainly lead to changes in my eating habits.
I didn't want to ruin life for my older self (as I found out, almost all most serious western diseases can be attributed to mostly nutrition) so I resolved to drill down into nutrition science over the last few weeks in an attempt to identify a healthy diet. I've skimmed several books, read a number of articles, a few papers, blogs and so on, but it was all a trip down the rabbit hole of complexity that is the human body and its interaction with digested food. I was exhausted and become more confused than certain about anything as I read about all the conflicting diets out there and all the evidence supporting or conflicting all of them. What a mess.
I was about to give up in confusion when a friend recommended this book to me. I come from a scientific background, so when I am faced with a problem (such as nutrition) I have a sudden impulse to right away try to drill down into details: of all components of a human body, the nutrients in foods, studies that show how they behave and interact in the body, etc. This book champions an approach that I ordinarily look down on, but it does a great job of convincing the reader that it is the best approach we have at the moment. Mainly, it argues that we should keep it simple, look at the few uncontroversial nutrition facts we have established, consider some history, and apply some common sense.
In short, this book is the most honest, balanced and frank attempt I've seen so far to exploring the problem of healthy nutrition and by the end the conclusions seem clear. Warmly recommended! -
**My full review is posted on my blog at:
http://citingthetext.blogspot.com
Michael Pollan summarizes his latest book, published January 2008, on the cover and in just seven words: "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants." He admits on the very first page that he has pretty much "given the game away" with that summary, but that he plans to complicate matters a bit in the interest of "keeping things going for a couple hundred more pages." Since I began the book at the start of a four hour bus ride, I chose to oblige him and see what could possibly so complicated about such simple commands.
I came to realize two things by the time I got about halfway through the book - which, ironically, was about the same time that the bus stopped at a Burger King. The first was that there was much more to the book than simple recommendations; the second was that those seven words were not so simple after all.
Take, for example, the first two words of Pollan's credo: Eat food. Not so hard, you say. False. By Pollan's definition, much of the offerings in an average grocery story are not in fact "food" but rather "edible food-like substances."
To understand this difference, Pollan sprinkles much of the first half of the book with discussions of the past hundred years of nutrition "science" and why it's really not so scientific. Anyone who pays attention to the constant and conflicting admonitions about the latest nutrients that are both good for you and could possibly kill you will already be convinced of many of Pollan's arguments here. He goes on to elaborate, however, citing the focus on individual nutrients as one major reason why these studies are so flawed. This is one area where reductionist science just seems to fail entirely. In many cases it is nearly impossible to separate the effects of a single nutrient on a person's well being from the rest of their diet and overall lifestyle.
Studies nevertheless attempt to drill down to this level, for two reasons: the prevalence of reductionist thinking in other academic fields and the fact that, politically, it's a lot easier to tell people to eat less or more of an individual nutrient or compound (trans fat, e.g) than it is to recommend that they eat less of a food, since the food has lobbyists on K Street in Washington. Nutrients, with the exception of sucrose, tend not to be so well represented.
Pollan then moves into his recommendations for what an average person can do to eat well without buying land and learning to farm for all of their needs. Many of these recommendations are easy to follow (I managed to resist the deep-fried mozzarella sticks at Burger King, but that wasn't just because Pollan would classify them as "food-like substances"), but some are a bit trickier. It takes some real discipline to devote more of your day to preparing and cleaning up after meals - I can almost guarantee that I won't be enacting this one, or doing much preparing of meals at all, as long as I am on this same project and without someone to cook with for three-four nights a week.
I will, however, be changing some choices when it comes to the meals that I do eat out - even eating out has a whole new feel to it after reading this book. My perspective now is that it's an opportunity to seize: here are people who are willing to prepare lots of delicious options for you, many of which contain loads and loads of fresh fruits and vegetables, all in a portion that is more or less perfectly suited to your needs without having to worry about buying too many veggies and watching them go bad.
The one negative that I identified in Pollan's recommendations was the fact that they seemed to be geared toward people who lived more or less inactive lifestyles. Many of the potential problems from diet go away if you just exercise a few times a week - if you're really concerned about your health but are not willing to take that simple next step - it seems as though you could pour endless hours into researching, purchasing, and preparing foods and are very healthful (Pollan mentions a word to describe this situation - "orthorexia," or an obsession with eating right, a disease still awaiting official confirmation) and only be fighting less than half of the battle. -
Michael Pollan wants us to consider food in a larger context than simply its nutritional content. He warns us that, to do otherwise, will affect both our health and our contentment. He points out many of the dangers of the "western diet" and supports his thesis with demography and specifics about food that is over processed to preserve it and send it around the world. He questions the need for (and effectiveness of) nutrient additives and the companies that tout them as better than the original. He makes a good case for the part food should daily play in conversation, celebration and relaxation. Not always easily read but a persuasive and, perhaps, life-changing call to action.
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I read this one in one day and I think if I had taken my time I may have gotten more out of it. I don't think there was much in it that I didn't already know or that was surprising to hear, but it was still interesting and made sense.
I know my current diet isn't my best and I can certainly feel a difference when I'm eating well versus eating whatever is available or quick. This book certainly made me think that it's time to get back to eating basics.
I think this book is worth a read. It's not groundbreaking, but it will reinforce what you already know (some of you deep down). I plan to read it again some time when I can take my time and process it as I go. -
Buy this book, learn it, live it, tell your loved ones.
Pollan summarizes his advice in 7 words: Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants. “Eat food” turns out to be more complicated than it seems. Most of the “food” eaten in the Western Diet is processed food, junk that Pollan deems unworthy of the moniker “food” and calls “edible food-like substances” instead.Real food would be recognized by your great-grandmother and can rot. Processed food is easy to spot because it is “loud” due to TV ads and screaming health claims like REDUCED FAT or LESS SODIUM.Pollan argues that quieter food is healthier and sums this up in his usual creative way: “If it came from a plant, eat it. If it was made in a plant, don’t.” This is one of his many Food Rules, a list of pithy recommendations that he reveals throughout the documentary. The narrative moves at a rapid clip, sliding from topic to topic, occasionally diving in political waters like when he advocates for a beverage tax as a means to reduce sugar intake. He also addresses psychological issues that lead to overeating and offers simple suggestions like using smaller plates, eating slower, and serving vegetables first.As in most health documentaries, he recommends a predominantly plant-based diet but doesn’t suggest that you stop eating meat entirely but rather consider meat a “flavoring or special occasion food.” The most inventive concept is his discussion of Nutritionism, which Pollan defines as nutrition complicated into an ideology. He explains that so-called food experts redefine food as a collection of nutrients and have historically made faulty assumptions that contradict previously held ideas. The consequences of this over complication of nutrition is contradicting health claims that have led to a decline in health, the opposite of what it was meant to do.
This may be his most controversial contention since he leaps to the opposite extreme by suggesting that nutrients are unimportant. Still, he makes a relevant point in calling out the preoccupations of nutrients over actual food endemic to the many ineffective fad diets (Atkins, South Beach, Ornish, Pritikin, etc.) Nutrients are important, they just shouldn’t be a substitute for eating real food.In his most effective segment, Pollan exposes how processing food takes out naturally occurring nutrients and vitamins. Food companies have reacted to pseudo-scientific Nutritionism by using marketing strategies that tweak nutrients. They enrich processed food with vitamins or artificially adjust nutrient content (hence the REDUCED FAT or LESS SODIUM above) to make unhealthy processed foods sound healthy.
This convoluted reasoning is why many people believe that sugary drinks like Gatorade or VitaminWater are actually good for you. The government, in turn, has subsidized processed food ingredients like high fructose corn syrup and hydrolyzed soy protein to create an inexpensive “calorie conveyor belt” that fuels the obesity epidemic.
Practically every health documentary has identified the same problem, but Pollen makes a compelling and quite sensible case as to how we got here. In my experience, many people think they are eating healthy foods when they are not and become frustrated when they continue to gain weight or find their blood sugar and cholesterol have worsened despite their efforts. I do what I can during a 15-minute office visit to challenge a lifetime of misinformation that has led to poor food choices, but this nearly 2-hour documentary does a more exhaustive job. I highly recommend it. No insurance or co-pay required.Pollen’s thesis is that we have been devaluing real food with disastrous results for our health and our happiness. His food rules offer reasonable suggestions for how to shift into a healthier diet. For individuals with obesity-related disease who are not ready to commit to a strict vegetarian or vegan diet, this documentary offers a moderate course towards healthier eating.
Biggest criticism: Pollen never bothers to match any of the health claims in this documentary with an actual source. I suspect the book version does cite sources, but the documentary just expects you to take his word for everything he says. That doesn’t work for me, even when I agree with him.
Best quote: “We’re eating fat on fat on fat on sugar on fat, sugar, and salt.” – Former FDA Commissioner Dr. David Kessler, describing Buffalo wings. The full quote is worth reading:
“Take Buffalo wings. What are they? You start off with the fatty part of the chicken, usually fried in the manufacturing plant first. That pushes a lot of fat into that chicken wing. Fried usually again in the restaurant – that pushes more fat into that wing. Then red sauce, what is it? Sugar and salt. Then white creamy sauce on the side. That’s sugar and salt. What are we eating? We’re eating fat on fat on fat on sugar on fat, sugar, and salt.”
Eew. I can feel my arteries clogging just thinking about it. -
A well-written book that was also perfectly narrated by Scott Brick. And, I can think of no more succinct summation than that which my sister-in-law typed to me "The Carrot> carotene." Pollan makes an excellent argument that food science is really in its infancy (and much more complex than *I* ever gave it credit for) but that what we need to focus on the whole food- a balanced, traditional meal, rather than worry about hitting our macro-nutrients each day
This book didn’t tell me anything that I didn’t expect to hear, and yet, it was still pretty disgusting to read all the ways in which food companies are actively trying to present you with anything other than actual food. It like in Neil Gaiman’s Good Omens when one of the four horsemen, Famine, is found to be doing VERY well for himself by managing a fast food chain and also a dieting cult in modern America. Nailed that one on the head.
What I found particularly refreshing about Pollan’s take is that he views food through a cultural lens to really display how Americans (and everyone catching up) have a really perverted relationship with the food that hinders us from moving beyond this sick yo-yo’ing we do with our health and our weight. The French were shown a picture of chocolate cake and asked to do word association, predominantly they said “celebration.” What did Americans say? “Guilt.” This relationship to a small indulgence just sets us up for failure- if you feel guilt you are going to lie to yourself, and probably over eat because “you are already being naughty.” Our food isn’t here to punish us, it’s the building blocks of our existence and its time to center more of our lives around it… and that also means we probably have to slow down elsewhere. It’s not easy, even Pollan says that, with two working parents, no one has time to make their own pasta noodles, or put up pounds of homegrown produce, but if we do agree to slow down, and maybe make time for those family-centered, traditional things, what would be the downside? Wouldn’t that be better?
In the end Pollan lays down 7 or so rules that expand on his initial rule of “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.” They talk about actually sitting down and eating with others, becoming in tune with your own body, and understanding on a cultural level what you are eating. Did you make it? Would grandma recognize it?
To that I want to add one additional, and I think it builds directly on what Pollan has said, and it’s a “dieting” rule that I have had for a long time even when I was trying to cut calories- ANY food made with love, is diet-friendly. I used to say “If Granny baked it, its lowcal” because we should express our gratitude for the things that others have invested their energy and care into. Eat these treats from our mothers and grandmothers while we are lucky enough to have them, and don’t groan over the calories while you are eating them. Savor each bite, chew 25 times, and if you are properly relishing something, and also taking the time to listen to your body, it will let you know when it’s time to be done.
