I’ve been reading Michael Pollan’s In Defense of Food, where by reading I mean listening to on my iPod (thanks, Alex), over the past week. It’s super-interesting, although I’m trying to take it with a grain of salt. I’m not going to review it, beyond saying that I totally recommend it (it’s short) and think it’s fascinating; I’m mostly going to summarize its main tenets. Which I figure will be interesting to more than just me. It’s pretty short, I think? Although honestly I have no clue. It’s in MP3s.
Pollan’s anthem is this: “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.” By which he essentially says that people should worry less about the [nutritional] contents of the food, and more about what they’re eating. He begins the book with a “how things got to be this way,” talking about what he calls “The Age of Nutritionism.” By nutritionism, he’s talking about reducing food — plants (fruits and vegetables and grains), meat — to the chemicals within them: proteins, fats (well, lipids; he says fats as though they’re synonymous, but he includes fatty acids here), carbohydrates, vitamins, as though this were a meaningful indicator of what we could gain from them. As he points out (with pretty strong evidence, I’d say), this reductionist approach means that we tend to eat based on “low-fat” or “low-cholesterol,” and miss that these chemicals act in concert, generally. In other words, high fat or low fat? So what — how much, with what other foods, and how often are questions that matter a lot more.
He presents evidence (and suggests that much exists suggesting this) that the Good Things in food are ineffective when distilled and added to another food, or when taken in pill form. Instead, he suggests that what’s important is not having high levels of omega-3 fatty acids, but rather eating a diet that includes the foods that contain omega-3s. (Thus, so what if you bread artificially inseminated with omega-3s — eat the foods they’re originally found in.)
A lot of his book talks about what you shouldn’t eat, which ends up being both a lot and not-so-much, depending on how you look at it. Evidence, according to him, points towards not caring about vitamins in tablet form, with the exception of multi-vitamins being perhaps useful for people from middle age on. (Although, he also notes that the type of person who takes supplements is generally healthier — there just isn’t much evidence that these people are healthier because of the supplements, but rather because of the fact that they eat well in general.) Most importantly, he says again and again that processed foods — which he calls “food-based products” sometimes — should be avoided as much as possible. All of the things we do to prolong shelf life, to make things sweeter, to change foods; all of these things, according to Pollan, result in diminishing the benefit of the foods. Polishing rice (turning brown to white)? Bad. Grinding grain further (from whole-wheat to white flour)? Bad. Eating lots of sugar or, worse, lots of corn syrup? Bad. Corn products and soy products (that are not tofu)? Not very good. And so forth.
A lot of these things aren’t surprising, although it’s interesting to hear them put together. Many of them I knew. I still think his book is interesting.
He has some advice as to what to eat: mostly vegetables and fruits (he refers to the leaves instead of seeds of plants; I can only assume he’s grouping fruits and flowers here as leaves?). A variety. When possible, from CSAs or from your own garden or from farmers’ markets — not from monoculture farms that have less-nutritious soil which really diminishes the number of nutrients. He talks a bunch about eating traditional diets, but doesn’t really elaborate on how to start. Or, for that matter, whether people who eat foods from many different cultures — I love cooking Indian food, Chinese food, and Italian food, often all within the same week — can be equally healthy isn’t really addressed, although he suggests the answer is yes. (Hope so.) He focuses, to be fair, on eating food within its original context — eating things the way people in some culture have eaten it for a long time. I don’t quite follow his argument that this must be a good way since these people were healthy — seems faulty logic to me; I can’t imagine that every food in every diet was unilaterally good for you — but I think the underlying logic: don’t have too much sugar or salt, eat a variety of foods in a meal, and cook them according to some recipe that utilizes them best, not using fake substances as substitutes.
Anyway, the point is that this book makes me feel quite good about my diet, and makes me worry less about the fact that I’ve started drinking whole milk more often, or that I don’t eat meat too often. The only thing he criticizes that I do is snacking, and he’s right. Then again, snacks for me tend to be a fourth small meal in the afternoon — not a bag of chips here, a bag of cookies there. He also argues for people eating meals in groups, at tables, without a TV, with conversation — essentially, he’s an advocate of the Slow Food movement (which he mentions). Eat small portions, he says. Have one portion. Eat it slowly. Enjoy it. And then don’t eat more.
I don’t really have a conclusion, other than that I think to the extent that he’s right we should be more conscious of the foods we eat, and worry less about the fats or proteins within them. And I’m curious what people think.
