5 Highlights from "In Defense of Food"

I recently read Michael Pollan's 2nd work on the subject of food, titled "In Defense of Food." Pollan is not a nutritionist or dietician - he is a journalist that set out to discover everything possible about food, how we eat and why Americans are so fat, even tho we obsess over food more than any other culture. He argues that food has been replaced by nutrients and common sense has been replaced by confusion. Most of what we eat today is not the product of nature, but the product of food science, resulting in what he calls "The American Paradox: The more we worry about nutrition, the less healthy we seem to become." Pollan goes on to issue three simple guidelines for what we should eat: Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.

Pollan's works have completely transformed the way I look at food and have laid the groundwork for the "common sense" nutrition principals I evangelize to my clients. Food should be a pleasurable experience, not a paranoid one and if we concentrate on these three principals, become more educated and aware of what we put in our mouth, there is no need to count calories, stress about ingredients or pack on pounds. Below are a few highlights from the book that i found to be most provocative. Read these golden nuggets and buy In Defense of Food, Omnivore's Dilemma and Food Rules if you want to win your body back from food science and industry.... ps, my favorite quotes are the last 3.

"...as was already understood by the 1930's, the processing of foods typically robs them of their nutrients, vitamins especially. Store food is food designed to be stored and transported over long distances, and the surest way to make food more stable and less vulnerable to pests is to remove the nutrients from it. In general, calories are much easier to transport - in the form of refined grain or sugar - than nutrients, which are liable to deteriorate or attract the attention of bacteria, insects, and rodents, all keenly interested in nutrients. (More so, apparently, than we are.) Price concluded that modern civilization had sacrificed much of the quality of its food in the interest of quantity and shelf life."

"In the natural world, fructose is a rare and precious thing, typically encountered seasonally in ripe fruit, when it comes packaged in a whole food full of fiber (which slows its absorption) and valuable micronutrients. It's no wonder we've been hardwired by natural selection to prize sweet foods: Sugar as it is ordinarily found in nature - in fruits and some vegetables - gives us a slow-release form of energy accompanies by minerals and all sorts of crucial micronutrients we can get nowhere else. One of the most momentous changes in the american diet since 1909 has been the increase in the percentage of calories coming from sugars, from 13% to 20%. Add to that the percentage of calories coming from carbohydrates (roughly 40%, or ten servings, nine of which are refined) and Americans are consuming a diet that is at least half sugars in one form or another - calories providing virtually nothing by energy. The energy density of these refined carbohydrates contributes to obesity in two ways. First, we consume many more calories per unit of food; the fiber that's been removed from these foods is precisely what would have made us feel full and stop eating. Also, the flash flood of glucose causes insulin levels to spike and then, once the cells have taken all that glucose out of circulation, drop precipitously, making us think we need to eat again."

"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. Indeed, many traditional diets are nutrient rich and, at least compared to ours, calorie poor. The Western diet has turned that relationship upside down. At a health clinic in Oakland, California, doctors report seeing overweight children suffering from old-time deficiency diseases such as rickets, long thought to have been consigned to history's dustheap in the developed world. But when children subsist on fast food rather than fresh fruits and vegetables and drink more soda than milk, the old deficiency diseases return - now even in the obese."

"Bruce Ames, the renowned Berkley biochemist, works with kids like this at Children's' Hospital in Oakland. He's convinced that our high-calorie, low-nutrient diet is responsible for many chronic diseases, including cancer. Ames has found that even subtle micronutrient deficiencies - far below the levels needed to produce acute deficiency diseases - can cause damage to DNA that may lead to cancer. Studying cultured human cells, he's found that "deficiency of vitamins C, E, B12, B6, niacin, folic acid, iron or zinc appears to mimic radiation by causing single - and double-strand DNA breaks, oxidative lesions, or both" - precursors to cancer."

"...a body starved of critical nutrients will keep eating in the hope of obtaining them. the absence of these nutrients from the diet may "counteract the normal feeling of satiety after sufficient calories are eaten" and that such an unrelenting hunger "may be a biological strategy for obtaining missing nutrients." ...A food system organized around quantity rather than quality has a destructive feedback loop built into it, such that the more low-quality food one eats, the more one wants to eat, in a futile - but highly profitable - quest for the absent nutrient."