Brad's Book Club: March Selection

MARCH’S BOOK SELECTION

In Defense of Food
Michael Pollan

“Eat Food. Not too much. Mostly plants.” This simple advice, by his own admission sums up Michael Pollan’s new book In Defense of Food. So why read it? Because although this is common-sense advice, it is important to understand the history of why such a self-evident statement need be made at all. In Defense of Food relates that history.

I first ran across Pollan’s previous book The Omnivore’s Dilemma at the Tattered Cover bookstore. I flipped through it, was mildly interested, got the point about where food literally comes from and how it gets to your table and then forgot about the author. Some time later Pollan wrote an excellent article for the New York Times magazine about the rise of “Nutritionism.” I enjoyed this article so much I emailed it to anyone I thought might learn from it. Pollan then expanded upon that article into his latest book In Defense of Food.

In Defense of Food is broken down into three sections: The Rise of Nutritionism, The Western Diet and the Diseases of Civilization, and Getting Over Nutritionism. First, a quick definition of “nutritionism.” Nutritionism is the reductionist ideology that food is just the sum of its nutrients, i.e. a banana isn’t a banana but just some potassium and other nutrients thrown together.

The Rise of Nutritionism is a history of how scientists began to break down food into its nutrient parts to find the active ingredients, and then synthesize them. Pollan uses margarine as a prime example of “imitation food” that was supposed to be better than the food, in this case butter, it replaced. People originally wanted margarine to be colored pink so it would not be mistaken for butter. They failed. As years went by lobbyists got the government to redefine food as the sum of its nutrients. This meant that as long as margarine could boast the same nutrient-content as butter it would not have to advertise itself as “imitation.” The same goes with any other imitation food or food-like ingestible. The margarine industry recently took out the trans fats in margarine that have been seen as contributing to heart disease so that it can continue to be marketed as a healthy butter substitute. I never did like margarine.

As far as imitation food goes, why not just eat the butter? For that matter why do people eat aspartame and sugar substitutes that are far worse than eating empty sugar calories or just eating raw sugar? Or how about Olestra? Would you suffer the possibility of “anal-leakage” just to eat a bag of chips? I have always been leery of “fake-food” and as more research is done into them the conclusions are the same. Eat the real thing, but in moderation, with other healthy food.

It was this history from food to food-like items and from whole food to the sum of its parts that hooked me in. I remember growing up being bombarded with nutritionist health-claims along with the idea that this one super-nutrient would make me healthy for the rest of my life. (It can never be one nutrient) Omega-3 fatty acids are the latest Nutritionism gambit. Everything you pick up says Omega-3’s on it, it used to be fiber. I can always tell what the Nutritionism industry is pushing next by what my sister calls me and says she is feeding my parents. Her kick seems to be “probiotics” right now. What’s next? Whatever they can get a health claim for. By the way stay away from any food-like item that has to make a health claim.

The bottom line in the Nutritionism ideology is that if you could create a fake-food with all the same nutrients (at least the ones we currently recognize) as real food, say an apple, than you have the same nutritional value as the actual apple. Taken one step further if you could put more nutrients in your fake apple then you would have a fake apple that is healthier than a real apple?! Or you could just take a whole bunch of pills with each nutrient; you could pop fish oil pills instead of eating an actual fish.

The middle section of In Defense of Food chronicles the Western Diet--lots of processed foods and meat, lots of added sugar and fat, lots of everything except fruits, vegetables, and whole grains—and the diseases it causes such as diabetes, heart disease and cancer. Pollan relates a story about aboriginal Australians who ate the Western Diet and were developing the above diseases. As part of an experiment they went back to their traditional lifestyle, back “into the bush.” Symptoms of these diseases vanished within weeks of abandoning their Western Diet. I saw the exact same story years ago about native Hawaiians. Same results as the Aborigines, including huge weight loss.

Pollan’s answer to nutritionism and the Western Diet is as simple as that first sentence. Eat a traditional diet. Pollan goes on to show the variety in traditional diets from around the world and how they all have withstood the test of time by keeping their communities nourished and healthy.

In the final section of In Defense of Food Pollan gives a simple list of suggestions on how to eat. Here they are.

• Avoid Food Products containing ingredients that are A) unfamiliar, b) Unpronounceable, c) more than 5 in number, or that include D) high-fructose corn syrup.
• Avoid food products that make health claims
• Shop the peripheries of the supermarket and stay out of the middle
• Get out of the supermarket whenever you can
• Eat mostly plants, especially leaves
• You are what you eat eats too
• If you have space buy a freezer
• Eat like an omnivore
• Eat well-grown food from healthy soils.
• Eat wild foods when you can.
• Be the kind of person who takes supplements
• Eat more like the French, the Italians, or the Japanese or the Indians, or the Greeks.
• Regard non-traditional foods with skepticism.
• Don’t look for the magic bullet in the traditional diet.
• Have a glass of wine with dinner

How not to eat too much..

• Pay More, Eat Less. Go for quality of food, especially meat, i.e. grass-fed.
• Eat Meals
• Do all your eating at a table
• Don’t get your fuel from the same place as your car does
• Try not to eat alone
• Consult your gut
• Eat Slowly
• Cook, and if you can, plant a garden

Each of these bullet-points is expanded upon and explained in the book.

In Defense of Food is currently top ten on the New York Times non-fiction bestseller list. One goal of Brad’s Book Club is to point you toward books that are worth reading that you may never have heard of, another goal is to point you toward books that are worth reading period. In Defense of Food is such a book that, along with Volumetrics by Barbara Rolls, I consider an essential textbook on how approach eating.