In Defense of Food

An Eater's Manifesto
by Michael Pollan | Penguin Books © 2009 · 256 pages

Michael Pollan is one of the world’s leading thinkers on nutrition. Time magazine voted him one of the 100 most influential people in the world. He’s also a Professor of Journalism at UC Berkeley. One of the things I most love about him and his work is that, as a journalist, he takes a much wider, more objective view of the nutritional landscape—which can often be dominated by (and muddled by) individuals with *very* strong, dogmatic, inflexible ideologies. Big Ideas we explore: Nutritionism (vs. food), the big experiment (that failed), the Aborigine in all of us, the 5 fundamental transformations of industrializing food and Lucky Charms, Cocoa Puff and Trix cereals as health foods as per the American Heart Association. (<— Can you believe that? Crazy. And true.)

Think about it: Most of us no longer eat what our mothers ate as children or, for that matter, what our mothers fed us as children. This is, historically speaking, an usual state of affairs.
Michael Pollan

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Big Ideas

“Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.

That, more or less, is the short answer to the supposedly incredibly complicated and confusing question of what we humans should eat in order to be maximally healthy.

I hate to give away the game right here at the beginning of a whole book devoted to the subject, and I’m tempted to complicate matters in the interest of keeping things going for a couple hundred more pages or so. I’ll try to resist, but will go ahead and add a few more details to flesh out the recommendations. Like, eating a little meat isn’t going to kill you, though it might be better to approach it as a side dish than as a main. And you’re better off eating whole fresh foods rather than processed food products. That’s what I mean by the recommendation to ‘eat food,’ which is not quite as simple as it sounds. For while it used to be that food was all you could eat, today there are thousands of other edible foodlike substances in the supermarket. These novel products of food science often come in packages elaborately festooned with health claims, which brings me to another, somewhat counterintuitive, piece of advice: If you’re concerned about your health, you should probably avoid products that make health claims. Why? Because a health claim on a food product is a strong indication it’s not really food, and food is what you want to eat.

You can see how quickly things become complicated.”

~ Michael Pollan from In Defense of Food

This is our second Note on Michael Pollan’s books. Check out our first on Food Rules—which is, essentially, a super-abbreviated distillation of the wisdom from this book.

Pollan is one of the world’s leading thinkers on nutrition. Time magazine voted him one of the 100 most influential people in the world. He’s also a Professor of Journalism at UC Berkeley.

One of the things I most love about him and his work is that, as a journalist, he takes a much wider, more objective view of the nutritional landscape—which can often be dominated by (and muddled by) individuals with *very* strong, dogmatic, inflexible ideologies.

I really enjoyed this book and highly recommend it. (Get a copy here.)

It’s packed with Big Ideas and expansive wisdom. I’m excited to share some of my favorite Ideas so let’s jump straight in!

Nutritionism Vs. Food

“The first thing to understand about nutritionism is that it is not the same thing as nutrition. As the ‘ism’ suggests, it is not a scientific subject but an ideology. Ideologies are ways of organizing large swaths of life and experience under a set of shared but unexamined assumptions. This quality makes an ideology particularly hard to see, at least while it’s still exerting its hold on your culture. A reigning ideology is a little like the weather—all pervasive and so virtually impossible to escape. Still, we can try.

In the case of nutritionism, the widely shared but unexamined assumption is that the key to understanding food is indeed the nutrient. Put another way: Foods are essentially the sum of their nutrient parts. From this basic premise flow several others.”

The book, of course, is called “In Defense of Food.”

Kinda begs the question: Against what are we defending food?

Nutritionism.

Nutritionism is the ideology that “Foods are essentially the sum of their nutrient parts.”

Seems to make sense right? It’s hard to even question that statement as our culture so strongly orients from this perspective/ideology.

But, as Pollan tells us, this is a REALLY new way of seeing the world. Before we talked about cholesterol, fiber, carbohydrates, amino acids, essential fatty acids, probiotics, antioxidants and phytochemicals a few decades ago, we used to talk about food—you know, stuff like fish, berries, meat and sweet potatoes.

And, when you stop seeing real, whole FOOD and, instead, start talking about nutrients, weird things can happen.

Food scientists can start to think they can do a better job than nature at stuff like baby formula or hydrogenated margarine. (And, we believe them.) But, alas, you can’t.

As Pollan says: “The entire history of baby formula has long been the history of one overlooked nutrient after another: Liebeg missed the vitamins and amino acids, and his successors missed the omega-3s, and still to this day babies fed on the most ‘nutritionally complete’ formula fail to do as well as babies fed human milk. Even more than margarine, infant formula stands as the ultimate test product of nutritionism and a fair index of its hubris.

This brings us to one of the most troubling features of nutritionism, though it is a feature certainly not troubling to all. When the emphasis is on quantifying the nutrients contained in foods (or, to be precise, the recognized nutrients in foods), any qualitative distinction between whole foods and processed foods is apt to disappear. ‘[If] foods are understood only in terms of the various quantities of nutrients they contain,’ Gyorgy Scrinis writes, then ‘even processed foods may be considered to be ‘healthier’ for you than whole foods if they contain the appropriate quantities of some nutrients.’

How convenient.”

How convenient for whom? For the food scientists and jumbo fake food factories. They can pretend that their pseudo-food—because it is enriched with X, Y, and Z nutrients—is now healthier than the real thing.

Nutritionism vs. real food. Let’s defend the food.

P.S. Did you know that as recently as 1938 we had laws that forced food manufacturers to put “imitation” on any foods that were not “real”? Yep. That was reversed in 1973 and since then processed food has exploded.

On that note: Did you that the modern American gets 58% of calories from “ultraprocessed” foods? FIFTY-EIGHT PERCENT of their diet is now made up of “imitation food” that basically DID NOT exist 100 years ago. Think about that for a moment as we wonder why we have the health epidemics we face. (And remember to defend real food! :)

The problem with nutrient-by-nutrient nutrition science,’ points out Marion Nestle, an NYU nutritionist, ‘is that it takes the nutrient out of the context of the food, the food out of the context of the diet, and the diet out of the context of the lifestyle.
Michael Pollan

The Big Experiment (That Failed)

“Never before had the government endeavored to change the diet of the whole population. In the past nutritional policies had targeted particular populations at risk for particular deficiencies. But as Taubes has documented, the attitude on the committee was that even if all the data weren’t hard as a rock quite yet, what would be the harm in getting Americans to cut down on dietary fats? At the press conference introducing theDietary Goals, Mark Hegsted, the Harvard School of Public Health nutritionist who helped to shape them, put it this way: ‘The question to be asked is not why we should change our diet, but why not?’

At least one good answer to that question was apparently overlooked. Perhaps because fat was in such bad repute in 1977, Dr. Hegsted and his colleagues must not have stopped to consider how a change in the levels or ratios of the various lipids, and the promotion of a biologically novel fat like trans fat, might affect human physiology. It bears remembering that the human brain is about 60 percent fat; every neuron is sheathed in a protective layer of the stuff. Fats make up the structure of our cell membranes, the ratios between the various kinds influencing the permeability of the cells to everything from glucose and hormones to microbes and toxins. Without adequate amounts of fat in the diet, fat-soluble vitamins like A and E can’t pass through the intestinal walls. All this was known in 1977. But the Hippocratic oath—’First do no harm’—evidently does not apply to official dietary advice, which at least in 1977 followed a very different principle: ‘Why not?’”

That’s from a chapter on “The Melting of the Lipid Hypothesis” in which Pollan dismantles our country’s misguided attempts to remove fat from the diet.

In recent Notes, we’ve been talking quite a bit about the fact that the low-fat experiment FAILED. Period.

Check out The Happiness Diet, Always Hungry?, and Eat Fat, Get Thin for more.

For now, a couple things to note:

First, let’s make a connection between this failed policy and our prior Idea on nutritionism. When you forget to look at whole foods and, instead, focus on individual nutrients, it’s easy to cast aside thousands (and millions) of years of evolutionary history and decide it’s best to get rid of one particular nutrient—in this case fat. (Not a good idea.)

Second, remember that our brains are 60% (!) fat and that our body depends on fat to assimilate vitamins and optimally perform countless other processes. So… Ditch the ultraprocessed foods and focus on real food with plenty of healthy fats.

And, check out the Note on Why We Get Fat by Gary Taubes, who Pollan references in the passage above. Recall Taubes puts it this way: “The simple answer to the question of why we get fat is that carbohydrates make us so; protein and fat do not.”

Plus: “Not that all foods that contain carbohydrates are equally fattening. This is a crucial point. The most fattening foods are the ones that have the greatest effect on our blood sugar and insulin levels. These are the concentrated sources of carbohydrates, and particularly those that we can digest quickly: anything made of refined flour (bread, cereals, and pasta), liquid carbohydrates (beers, fruit juices, and sodas), and starches (potatoes, rice, and corn). These foods flood the bloodstream quickly with glucose. Blood sugar shoots up; insulin shoots up. We get fatter. Not surprisingly, these foods have been considered uniquely fattening for nearly two hundred years.”

As hard as it may be to wrap your head around (if you’re like me!), it’s not the fat that makes us fat. It’s the ultraprocessed carbs.

Solution? Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.

The human animal is adapted to, and apparently can thrive on, an extraordinary range of different diets, but the Western diet, however you define it, does not seem to be one of them.
Michael Pollan

The Aborigine In all of Us

“We have known for a century now that there is a complex of so-called Western diseases—including obesity, diabetes, cardiovascular disease, hypertension, and a specific set of diet-related cancers—that begin almost invariably to appear soon after a people abandons its traditional diet and way of life. What we did not know before O’Dea took her Aborigines back to the bush (and since she did, a series of comparable experiments have produced similar results in Native Americans and native Hawaiians) was that some of the most deleterious effects of the Western diet could be so quickly reversed. It appears that, at least to an extent, we can rewind the tape of the nutrition transition and undo some of its damage. The implications for our own health are potentially significant.”

That’s from a chapter called “The Aborigine in All of Us.”

Pollan tells us about fascinating research done with Aborigines in Australia who had adapted to a Western diet (large amounts of refined carbs + sedentary lifestyle) and, as a result, experienced the health challenges that go with that diet (type 2 diabetes).

The researcher took them back out into the bush for seven weeks. They had to hunt and forage for their own food (they still had this knowledge). And… Voila! Their health returned.

Good news: We don’t need to leave civilization to optimize our health!

As Pollan says: “the worst effects of the Western diet can be avoided or reversed without leaving civilization. Or, as Willet writes, ‘the potential for disease prevention by modest dietary and lifestyle changes that are readily compatible with life in the 21st century is enormous.”

Here’s to tapping into the Aborigine within!

P.S. In Food Rules, Pollan tells us there are two basic facts *everyone* agrees on. In short, 1) Western diets create Western diseases; 2) Traditional diets do not. And, he tells us that those traditional diets vary a TON—from high fat to high protein to high carb. There’s no “single ideal human diet.” But there is one singularly bad human diet: the Western one packed with ultraprocessed edible foodlike substances!

Here’s how Taubes puts it, connecting the spread of Western diseases with the spread of white flour and sugar: “… when isolated populations start eating Western foods, sugar and white flour are inevitably first, because these foods could be transported around the world as items of trade without spoiling or being devoured on the way by rodents and insects. The Inuits, for example, living on seals, caribou, and whale meat, begin eating sugar and flour (crackers and bread). Western diseases follow. The agrarian Kikuyu, living in Kenya, start eating sugar and flour, and these diseases appear. The Maasai add sugar and flour to their diet or move into the cities and begin eating these foods, and the diseases appear. Even the vegetarian Hindus in India, to whom the fleshpot was an abomination, ate sugar and flour. Doesn’t it seem a good idea to consider sugar and flour likely causes of these diseases?”

How’s your sugar + flour intake? :)

What we know is that people who eat the way we do in the West today suffer substantially higher rates of cancer, cardiovascular diseases, diabetes, and obesity than people eating any number of different traditional diets.
Michael Pollan

Industrialized Eating 5: Fundamental Transformations

“Looking at eating, and food, through this ecological lens opens a whole new perspective on exactly what the Western diet is: a radical and, at least in evolutionary terms, abrupt set of changes over the course of the last 150 years, not just to our foodstuffs but also to our food relationships, all the way from the soil to the meal. The rise of the ideology of nutritionism is itself part of the change. When we think of a species’ ‘environment,’ we usually think in terms of things like geography, predators and prey, and the weather. But of course one of the most critical components of any creature’s environment is the nature of the food available to it and its relationships to the species it eats. Much is at stake when a creature’s food environment changes. For us, the first big change came ten thousand years ago with the advent of agriculture. (And it devastated our health, leading to a panoply of deficiencies and infectious diseases that we’ve only managed to get under control in the last century or so.) The biggest change in our food environment since then? The advent of the modern diet.

To get a better grip on the nature of these changes is to begin to understand how we might alter our relationship to food—for the better, for our health. These changes have been numerous and far reaching, but consider as a start these five fundamental transformations to our foods and ways of eating. All of them can be reversed, if not perhaps so easily in the food system as a whole, certainly in the life and diet of any individual eater, and without, I hasten to add, returning to the bush or taking up hunting and gathering.”

That’s from a chapter called “The Industrialization of Eating: What We Do Know” in which Pollan walks us through five fundamental transformations. Here’s a quick look:

1) From Whole Foods to Refined. Pollan shares the fascinating ecological and historical implications of introducing industrialization into food processing. Get this: Up until 1870, all grains were stone ground. When you stone grind wheat, you can separate the bran from the wheat kernel, but the germ was still there (which has oils rich in nutrients).

Long story short, when the germ was pressed it made the flour yellowish gray and shortened it’s shelf life. Then we figured out how to remove the germ and create beautiful white flour that lasted for months which would be awesome if it was good for the human body. But, “the finer that the flour is ground, the more surface area is exposed to digestive enzymes, so the quicker the starches turn to glucose.” Hence: “Refined flour is the first fast food.”(Then we figured out how to refine sugar and then we figured out how to refine vegetable oils and…)

One more thing here: Bread used to have a few simple ingredients: flour + yeast + water + a pinch of salt. Pick up a loaf of bread at your store today and count how many ingredients are in there (including ones you can’t even pronounce). And then put it back. (Food rule here? Don’t eat anything with more than five ingredients.)

2) From Complexity to Simplicity. Short story here: We’ve RADICALLY simplified everything—from the types of soils our foods grow in to the range of foods we consume. Today, these four crops account for two thirds of the calories we eat: corn + soy + wheat + rice. Four crops. 66% of our calories. Radically simplified. Yikes.

Fun pre-industrial fact: Did you know Thomas Jefferson grew more than 150 species of fruit and some 330 vegetables on his estate, Monticello? Yep. That’s what The Happiness Diet guys tell us as they touch on the same problems with a lack of variety in our modern diet!

3) From Quality to Quantity. With our rush to produce MORE food faster and cheaper, the quality has gone down. Reflecting on the diminution in the soil quality due to industrial farming practices, Pollan tells us “To put this in more concrete terms, you now have to eat three apples to get the same amount of iron as you would have gotten from a single 1940 apple.”

Lesson: Eat smaller quantities of higher quality, organic veggies + wild/grassfed animals.

4) From Leaves to Seeds. Short story here: We used to eat a LOT more leaves than seeds. Now, we eat a crazy amount of seeds. (Note: Grains (corn + soy + wheat + rice) are seeds.) This leads to a whole host of issues, including omega-3 and omega-6 imbalances which disrupt our bodies. Solution: Eat more leaves!! Huge salads are your friends.

5) From Food Culture to Food Science. We used to trust our culture for food wisdom (aka: Mom). Now it’s all about the food scientists. Pollan says: “The question we need to ask is, Are we better off with these new authorities telling us how to eat than we were with the traditional authorities they supplanted? The answer should be clear by now.”

A diet based on quantity rather than quality has ushered in 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.
Michael Pollan

Are Lucky Charms Health Food?

“When corn oils and chips and sugary breakfast cereals can all boast being good for your heart, health claims have become hopelessly corrupt. The American Heart Association currently bestows (for a fee) its heart-healthy seal of approval on Lucky Charms, Cocoa Puffs, and Trix cereals, Yoo-hoo lite chocolate drink, and Healthy Choice’s Premium Caramel Swirl Ice Cream Sandwich—this at a time when scientists are coming to recognize that dietary sugar probably plays a more important role in heart disease than dietary fat. Meanwhile, the genuinely heart-healthy whole foods in the produce section, lacking the financial and political clout of the packaged goods a few aisles over, are mute. But don’t take the silence of the yams as a sign that they have nothing valuable to say about health.”

That’s from the final section of the book in which Pollan walks us through some of the rules he dedicates an entire book to with Food Rules.

The rule that passage is from? “Avoid food products that make health claims.”

Why would we want to do that? Because if a claim is being made, it’s in a box and we’re in dangerous territory already if we want to eat real, whole food.

And, wow. If the American Heart Association sells its heart-healthy seal of approval on Lucky Charms, Cocoa Puffs and Trix cereals, it kinda makes you scratch your head and wonder how we got in this mess, eh?

Remember: Nutritionism is dangerous. Get off the Western diet.

People eating a Western diet are prone to a complex of chronic diseases that seldom strike people eating more traditional diets. Scientists can argue all they want about the biological mechanisms behind this phenomenon, but whichever it is, the solution to the problem would appear to remain very much the same: Stop eating a Western diet.
Michael Pollan

About the author

Authors

Michael Pollan

Author of a number of New York Times best-selling books on nutrition.
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