That's the first line of In Defense of Food by Michael Pollan & it sums up the content of the book nicely. I just finished reading it today & I've enjoyed it so much I kept the copy I checked out from the library for an extra few days even though I'll have to pay late fees AND I ordered a copy for myself to keep & reference later. The book is written in 3 parts, one for each of the short sentences above & delves into in depth discussions on how "nutritionism" affects how & what we eat, how the "Western Diet" encourages diseases such as diabetes & hypertension compared to other cultures' diets, and what we can do to eat more healthily. Here I will overview each of the sections. (If Mr. Pollan is out there & stumbles upon this, I really love your work & please don't sue me for plagiarism!) :)
EAT FOOD - So much of what we eat today is what Pollan calls "edible food-like substances". That is, they were conceived of by nutritional science, made in a laboratory & manufactured with the benefits of industry in mind, not necessarily the benefits or health of the consumers. He goes on to outline some helpful rules of thumb to help us identify & eat real food (these are all taken pretty much directly from the book with some paraphrasing on my part):
- Don't eat anything your great great grandmother wouldn't recognize as food - Think Go-gurt, Easy Cheez, Cheetos, etc.
- Don't eat anything incapable of rotting - Manufacturing removes much of the good stuff from our food in the interest of making it shelf stable. But the same things that mold & bacteria love to eat are the same things that we should be eating! In other words, don't eat anything that mold & bacteria refuse to eat :)
- Avoid food products containing ingredients that are A) unfamiliar, B) unpronounceable, C) more than 5 in number, or D) include high-fructose corn syrup - None of these items on it's own is necessarily harmful, but all of them are good markers of what makes a "food-like substance"
- Avoid food products that make health claims - (Snackwell's anyone?) The healthiest foods are the fruits, vegetables, meats, dairy, & baked goods sitting quietly in the grocery store without much ado. Which leads us to the next item...
- Shop the peripheries of the supermarket and stay out of the middle - i.e. Stay away from processed foods!
- Get out of the supermarket whenever possible - Farmer's Markets, CSAs, u-pick, etc. "You won't find any high-fructose corn syrup at the farmer' market."
MOSTLY PLANTS - Much research has been done into various cultures' diets & the comparative health of their societies. While scientists can't agree on what exactly the X factor is that makes a healthy diet healthy (despite all of the news-stand hoopla), they all agree that eating fruits & vegetables is good for you! Humans are amazingly flexible omnivores with the capacity to thrive & be healthy on a variety of diets: low-fat, high-fat, low-carb, high-carb, etc. The only diet that time & again proves to make people sick is the "Western Diet" with it's highly processed, calorie rich but nutritionally lacking "food-like substances".
- Eat mostly plants, especially leaves - Not to say that eating meat isn't healthy, but the healthiest people & cultures get most of their daily calories & nutrients from plants. "Flexitarians", people who eat a mostly vegetarian diet with some meat, are actually just as healthy as vegetarians. BOTH are much more healthy than people who get most of their daily calories from meat.
- You are what what you eat eats too - If the cow you eat was raised on an industrial farm, that means its diet consisted mainly of genetically modified commodity corn (that may or may not have been sitting outside in the rain for a year while waiting to be transported to the processing facility) plus fat additives (usually the rendered fat of other cows) plus a strong antibiotic cocktail to keep the cow alive long enough to fatten for slaughter while it is subsisting on a diet of corn when it evolved to eat grass. Then when you look further down the food chain to the commodity corn that was grown in an industrial farming monoculture with dead soils propped up by heavily applied petroleum-based fertilizers, you realize that you're essentially eating petroleum. YUCK!
- If you have the space, buy a freezer - I wish I did! You can significantly reduce the price of meat by buying in bulk.
- Eat well-grown food from healthy soils - All food ultimately comes from the earth and the sun. If the earth it comes from is a nutritional wasteland, the food is not going to be very nutritionally dense.
- Eat wild foods when you can - Wild flora tends to have higher concentrations of various nutrients than their domesticated relatives & wild game generally has less saturated fat & more omega-3 fatty acids.
- Be the kind of person who takes supplements - This item is particularly interesting because in controlled studies, many nutritional supplements don't appear to work. (Especially interesting to me as I take a daily multivitamin & a calcium + vitamin D supplement!) However, people who take supplements are healthier than people who don't. The prevailing theory is that people who take supplements are more health conscious overall. (Though Pollan notes that taking supplements won't hurt you & is probably still a good idea.)
- Eat more like the French, or the Italians, or the Japanese, or the Indians, or the Greeks - "Confounding factors aside, people who eat according to the rules of a traditional food culture are generally much healthier than people eating a contemporary Western diet." - These diets have stood the test of time for a reason.
- Regard nontraditional foods with skepticism - Again, eat food that stands the test of time
- Don't look for the magic bullet in the traditional diet - Foods are more than the sum of their nutritional parts. As a culture we love being told to just "eat Acai Berry!" or "say no to carbs!" because this reductionist approach is simple to understand and easily marketable (read: makes money for the diet industry & food manufacturers). However, nutritional science is not advanced enough to be able to take into account synergies between foods. When you take a food out of its evolutionary context it can lose its nutritional value. (Think of olive oil + tomato or beans + rice. Together they are more than the sum of their nutrient parts.)
- Have a glass of wine with dinner - Studies show that moderate alcohol intake appears to reduce the risk of heart disease & that red wine especially seems to have unique health benefits. Drinking a small amount of alcohol throughout the week with food is recommended (such as a glass of wine with dinner 4-6 nights a week). Cheers!
NOT TOO MUCH - The third and final section of the book discusses how to eat. As a culture, Americans are generally more concerned with quantity over quality when it comes to food. Think of the MASSIVE portion sizes that are standard in restaurants! I have experience working in the food service industry & have heard customers complain about portion size, correlating it to value. We snack all the time! We eat when we're tired, bored, angry, depressed, happy, grumpy, etc. We eat to reward ourselves for a job well done, as a guilty pleasure that we deserve, to soothe ourselves when we need love. We eat in the car, at our desks, at the movies, in class, and on the way too and from all of these things. In contrast, other cultures only eat when they are hungry! IMAGINE THAT!
- Pay more, eat less - Better food, in terms of taste and nutritional quality costs more. Them's-the-breaks. But would you rather pay more to the farmer for healthy, nutritionally rich food or pay more to the hospital later in life? Besides, eating more nutritionally dense foods is actually more filling, so you don't need to eat as much to feel full!
- Eat meals - Sit at the table. Turn off the TV. Think about how your food tastes, smells, feels, looks. Think about how your food makes your body feel. Enjoy the company of your loved ones! Savour the food & the experience. There's no rush! Honor the work of the farmer that makes this meal possible, the animal that gave its life so that you could live, the time and effort the cook spent in the kitchen to put it all together for you.
- Do all your eating at a table - This goes along with eating meals. No, a desk is not a table (I'm particularly bad about always eating my breakfast at my desk!) I've found that when I pay attention to my meal, I feel more full & don't need to eat as much.
- Don't get your fuel from the same place your car does - Convenience stores are stocked FULL of processed, shelf-stable food lacking in nutrients and full of saturated fat & sugar.
- Try not to eat alone - "For people prone to overeating, communal meals tend to limit consumption, if only because we're less likely to stuff ourselves when others are watching. This is precisely why so much food marketing is designed to encourage us to eat in front of the TV or in the car: When we eat mindlessly and alone, we eat more." Well said! I would add that it's also more fun to eat with others :)
- Consult your gut - As a society, we tend to base how much we eat on external cues. We eat until the plate is clean or the bag is empty. The larger the portion, the more we eat. In studies, when asked "How do you know when to stop eating?", the French replied "When I feel full." However, the Americans had responses like "When my plate is clean" or "When I run out". It takes our brains 20 minutes to get the message that our bellies our full. Slow down & pay attention to your body.
- Eat slowly - Eat deliberately, pay attention, think about your food & where it came from. This also helps with giving your body enough time to know when it is full.
- Cook and, if you can, plant a garden - The ultimate way to know just exactly what is in your food is to make it yourself. Plus the work you put into food magically makes it taste better :)
I'll leave you with one of my favorite passages from the book:
"...To reclaim this much control over one's food, to take it back from industry and science, is no small thing; indeed, in our time cooking from scratch and growing any of your own food qualify as subversive acts. And what these acts subvert is nutritionism: the belief that food is foremost about nutrition and nutrition is so complex that only experts and industry can possibly supply it. When you're cooking with food as alive as this -- these gorgeous and semigorgeous fruits and leaves and flesh -- you're in no danger of mistaking it for a commodity, or a fuel, or a collection of chemical nutrients. No, in the eye of the cook or the gardener or the farmer who grew it, this food reveals itself for what it is: no mere thing but a web of relationships among a great many living beings, some of them human, some not, but each of them dependent on the other, and all of them ultimately rooted in soil and nourished by sunlight. I'm thinking of the relationship between the plants and the soil, between the grower and the plants and animals he or she tends, between the cook and the growers who supply the ingredients, and between the cook and the people who will soon come to the table to enjoy the meal. It is a large community to nourish and be nourished by. The cook in the kitchen preparing a meal from plants and animals at the end of this shortest of food chains has a great many things to worry about, but "health" is simply not one of them, because it is given."
Checkout In Defense of Food by Michael Pollan- http://michaelpollan.com/books/in-defense-of-food/
No comments:
Post a Comment